Welcome to Startups Weekly, a fresh human-first take on this week’s startup news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. Just as one company’s success shouldn’t cast a halo on its vertical’s brethren, one company’s layoffs don’t quite mean that its competitors are equally screwed. In…
Startup layoffs, the art of reinvention and a MasterClass in change
Changes within a particular startup can be used as benchmark questions for their larger market; in other words, we can use the micro to better understand the macro.
Startups keep laying off swaths of employees as the downturn continues
It’s nearly been two months since we started this accidental weekly column about layoffs happening within startups. Workforce reductions have impacted startup employees in every massive sector, from crypto to SaaS to edtech and mobility. And what felt at first like a trend that only impacted growth…
MasterClass cuts 20% of 600-person staff to ‘get to self sustainability faster’
MasterClass, an education platform that sells subscriptions to celebrity-taught classes, has cut 20% of its team to “adapt to the worsening macro environment and get to self sustainability faster,” CEO David Rogier tweeted on Wednesday afternoon. The layoff impacts roughly 120 people across all tea…
Learnerbly, a SaaS marketplace for L&D, secures $10M Series A led by Beringea
It was in 2017 that I covered the emergence and first funding of Learnerbly, a SaaS marketplace for professional development. Quite a lot has happened since then, not the least of which was the COVID-19 pandemic, which has meant pretty much meant all kinds of learning had to transition to virtual, …
Emile Learning bets it can make high school students study, not scroll
Edtech has realized it needs to build for the TikTok generation. It’s part of the reason we’re seeing a rise in supplemental, aspirational companies such as Outschool and MasterClass, which both lean on snappy editing, engaging content and, most of all, on-demand learning. But a nut that is yet to …
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. First and foremost, Equity was nominated for a Webby for “Best Technology Podcast”! Drop everything and go Vote for Equity! We’d appreciate it. A lot. And even if we los…