Dear reader,
From now on, every Friday we will be bringing together our latest inside reports and research on the start-up scene and the tech industry, and you can also read exclusive analyzes from some of the most renowned tech investors.
Our new manager magazine columnist Philipp Klöckner also starts with this issue.
Subscribe to us here so you don't miss any future issues.
Let's start with our
top topics of the week
:
How the insurance start-up
Wefox
was massively deceived
Why it was overdue for
Microsoft
to depend on Apple
Why
Tier
CEO
Leuschner
is giving up his job
in the e-scooter merger with
Dott
Exclusive research: Massive manipulation at Wefox
The insurance start-up
Wefox
(valued at $4.5 billion) celebrates its focus on the insured.
But there were bad reviews on Google.
Internal documents now reveal the methods a Wefox company used to try to defuse the reputation problem.
They prove: Google reviews were manipulated systematically and on a large scale.
The inside report by my colleagues Jonas Rest and Dietmar Palan also deals with supposedly diverted funds and disputed settlements in the double-digit million range.
Heads: Soheil Mirpour ++ Gülsah Wilke ++ Alexander Kudlich ++ Elmar Broscheit ++ Lawrence Leuschner ++ Sheryl Sandberg
Creating a diverse start-up scene and making money at the same time: That's roughly the plan of
Gülsah Wilke (36), investor and founding member of the
2hearts
initiative
.
Together with 80 well-known start-up minds such as ex-Rocket board member
Soheil Mirpour
(34) or founder
Sophie Chung
(40; Qunomedical), she is now starting her own investment collective to specifically invest in founders with a migration background.
It was just whispered to us: Ex-Gorillas CFO
Elmar Broscheit
(46) is heading back to old territory.
As manager magazin has learned, Broscheit will become a partner at the Australian investment firm
Macquarie
, where he worked for 13 years before Gorillas.
With him, the last of the Gorillas management team has now
left the fast delivery service after it was taken over by competitor
Getir .
The previous Tier Mobility boss
Lawrence Leuschner
(41) is giving up his leadership position as part of the emergency merger with Dott.
And this despite the fact that Tier is by far the larger e-scooter company.
My colleague Christina Kyriasoglou knows what is behind this decision and what the employees now have to prepare for.
Digital knowledge urgently needed:
Ex-Rocket board member
Alexander Kudlich
(43), general partner of investor
468 Capital
, joins
Burda
's board of directors .
My colleague Henning Hinze explains why Kudlich could be in good use at Burda right now.
Final farewell: Facebook icon
Sheryl Sandberg
(54) turns her back on
Meta
.
She gave up her position as COO in 2022 and was most recently a member of the supervisory board.
Now she will no longer stand for re-election to the Meta Board.
Column: How Microsoft depends on Apple
For our manager magazine columnist
Philipp Klöckner
, it was only a matter of time before
Microsoft
overtook Apple as the most valuable company in the world.
In his first column for manager magazin, he analyzes how sustainable Microsoft's rise is and why
Apple
is not as bad in the age of AI as many people think.
The number of the week: 800 million euros
The vitamin start-up
Sunday Natural
is said to have been valued at this sum
when it was sold to the financial investor
CVC .
The price is at the upper end of what investment bankers would have considered realistic when looking for investors.
CVC confirmed the contract for the Berlin company this week.
Roundup: Everphone ++ Apple ++ Samsung ++ Google
The company smartphone rental company
Everphone
, founded by ex-Check24 manager
Jan Dzulko
(47), is receiving a total of 270 million euros in a current financing round.
In the manager magazine tech update there are the numbers behind the deal: 21 million euros of this are equity capital, the remaining 250 million flow as debt capital.
The company's valuation is now said to be more than 200 million euros - hardly more than in the previous round.
High pulse at
Apple
: The company argued with a competitor in court over its smartwatches, which concerned a function for measuring blood oxygen levels.
Apple lost in the patent case and is now switching off the function completely in order to be able to continue selling its watches.
But things are running smoothly with the iPhones.
In 2023 , Apple
sold
more smartphones than its weakening competitor
Samsung
for the first time in more than ten years .
The iPhone group is increasing its sales contrary to the trend in the overall market.
Which manufacturer is growing even faster than the new industry leader.
South Koreans' reaction to this degradation?
An AI offensive:
Samsung
boss
TM Roh
(55) presents the new Galaxy-S24 smartphone series in Silicon Valley – according to him, “the first AI phone”.
At
Google,
on the other hand, the AI offensive initially consists of massive job cuts: Google boss
Sundar Pichai
(51) wants to cut jobs again.
Managers in particular have to worry about their jobs.
Spotlight:
Compared to the record year of 2021, investments in German start-ups shrank by almost two thirds (65 percent).
A study by the auditor EY calculated: In 2023 there were only six billion, significantly less than in 2021 (17.4 billion euros).
At the European level, according to the analysis platform Pitchbook, venture capital financing fell by 45.6 percent in 2023 compared to the previous year (PDF).
Skilling me softly
How can I use the
potential of artificial intelligence
– for my company and my team?
Andrew McAfee
,
Daniel Rock
and
Erik Brynjolfsson
, three leading scientists from MIT and Silicon Valley, have created a definitive guide to AI.
Error 404 – this was still missing:
Elon Musk is practicing puppeteer tricks: At the beginning of the week, the tech billionaire posted a video in which Tesla's Optimus robot appeared to fold a T-shirt all by itself.
However, Musk later had to admit that the supposed miracle bot did not fold the T-shirt autonomously, but was apparently simply controlled by remote control.
A robot from a three-person team at Stanford University can do more - for example, fry shrimp, without any puppeteers.
And that's it for the very first edition of the Tech Update for this week, we'll read it again next Friday.
We welcome any questions, comments or criticism: tech-update@manager-magazin.de.
And one request: please forward the newsletter to other people interested in tech!
Many greetings from
Sarah Heuberger and the whole team behind the Tech Update:
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