Morning Builders,
Jack left Twitter, the Giphy deal got blocked and omicron headlines were on every smartphone this week. If you weren't happy w/ your Spotify Wrapped album, be grateful your brand name isn't the same as the new variant.
We're into the last month of the year, which means if you haven't hit your fitness goals by now, you should probably be building NFTs or joining Mr. Beast live squid games. How else are we gonna pay for gifts this year? π
Today's Menu:
Ready to rumble? π₯
If you haven't been knee-deep in season 2 of Tiger King this week, you probably heard about Jack's move. He resigned from CEO with an on-brand Twitter announcement and handed the baton to Parag Agrawal. Here's some things you probably don't know about the news:
Wanna know the bigger question we have about Jack leaving Twitter? What if he secretly just wants to go and build one of our top-ranked startup ideas that mention "Twitter"? We wouldn't hold it against him... π
We're 99% sure he'll run with this new startup idea called "Block", but you never know. Here are some of our favourites startup ideas Jack would've picked if he wasn't busy:
View more startup ideas that mention Twitter or post one of your own.
A roundup of the top signals and stories that are worth a scroll this week:
π Signal from Julia: "The number of active DAOs has increased by 132% since September 2020, and their combined assets under management have ballooned from $290M to over $14B today. Read more here
β¨ Story from MFM: Whether you like Mickey Mouse or not, Disneyland is now a $3.8B/yr empire. Here's how Walt did it.
π Signal from Jakob: Kernaler, Jakob Greenfeld, shipped VC Watcher - a tool that lets "keeps you in the loop on what top VCs are investing in."
β¨ Story on Jack Dorsey: Zuck and Dorsey may not have the same amount of facial hair, but they definitely do the same name change dance. Read more about why Square changed its name to Block here.
π Signal on VC Activity: "Nearly all of Sequoia Capital Chinaβs deals (92%) in Q3 unsurprisingly went to China-based companies, and the majority (60%) were early-stage (seed or Series A) deals." - Anand Sanwal
β¨ Story on Meta's M&A Ambitions: Wondering why the British antitrust regulator forced Meta to divest Giphy? Find the reason here.
π© Wanna check out Kernal for more startup ideas and founder tips? Login here or use this invite code: https://kern.al/register?invitecode=INDIEHACKER
Have a great weekend,
Joel
P.S. Wanna jam on Twitter? Send me a DM.