Here We Go Again: Another Woman To Accuse Herschel Of Funding An Abortion

You knew it was only a matter of time before another woman stepped forward to accuse Georgia GOP Senate nominee Herschel Walker of funding yet another abortion. Whoever amongst us has not had an abortion funded by Walker, let them cast the first stone.

Via The Daily Beast:

Attorney Gloria Allred announced that she is holding a press conference Wednesday with another woman who says she was in a relationship with Herschel Walker and that he helped her have an abortion.

The alert from Allred says that the woman will allege that the football legend, who is now running for Senate in Georgia, drove her to the clinic to terminate the pregnancy. The woman plans to remain anonymous and will provide evidence of her romance with Walker, the attorney said.

The development comes two weeks after The Daily Beast reported that Walker—who claims to be ferociously anti-abortion—paid for a different lover's abortion. That revelation came on the heels of Daily Beast reports that Walker, a loud critic of absentee dads, fathered several secret children out of wedlock.

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Square Peg Capital closes $550M fund for Southeast Asia, Australia and Israel

It’s a tough market for venture capital, but Square Peg Capital is plowing ahead with its focus on Australia (where it is based), Southeast Asia and Israel. The firm announced today that it has closed its fifth fund totaling $550 million. This brings its total raised across all funds to about $1.6 billion.

Square Peg has invested in more than 60 companies, and returned over $580 million to its investors across 11 exits at an IRR of 42%. Its counts Australian superannuation funds like Hostplus and AustralianSuper among its backers, and other LPs include new and returning investors from family offices, institutions and endowments.

Part of Square Peg’s new capital will be used for its core venture fund, which invests in seed to Series B startups. It will also invest in the later stages of its best-performing portfolio companies through its Opportunities Fund.

Square Peg Capital partners Tushar Roy and Piruze Sanbuncu

Square Peg has a growing footprint in Southeast Asia, where partners Tushar Roy and Piruze Sabuncu are based. Roy told TechCrunch in April that Southeast Asia is the firm’s fastest-growing geographical footprint. Half of its last $275 million fund, Fund 3, was invested in Southeast Asia. The firm is focused on five key areas in the region: consumer internet, fintech, edtech and the future of work, healthtech and SaaS.

Some of Square Peg’s investments so far from Southeast Asian include LottieFiles, Doctor Anywhere and FinAccel. It’s new fund has also invested in recruitment automation platform Kula and open source Firebase alternative Supabase.

Portfolio companies from other regions include Canva, Airwallex and ROKT in Australia, and Fiverr and AIDoc from Israel.

In a statement, Sabuncu said, “We already know the potential Southeast Asia presents when we look at the basic macro numbers, but the last few years have proven that you can build global businesses from this region, or create new business models that can disrupt the way people access various services—whether it be lending, education or healthcare.”

Square Peg Capital closes $550M fund for Southeast Asia, Australia and Israel by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

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Microsoft says GitHub now has a $1B ARR, 90M active users

As part of its earnings call, Microsoft today announced a number of new data points for GitHub, the massively popular code repository service it acquired for $7.5 billion in 2018. According to Microsoft, GitHub now has an annual recurring revenue of $1 billion, up from a reported $200 to $300 million at the time of the acquisition.

The company also announced that the service now has over 90 million active users on the platform, up from 28 million when the acquisition closed and 73 million last November, when Thomas Dohmke replaced Nat Friedman as the service’s CEO.

This marks the first time Microsoft has shared any financial data about the service the acquisition closed.

“Since our acquisition, GitHub is now at $1 billion annual recurring revenue and GitHub’s developer-first ethos has never been stronger,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in today’s earnings call. “More than 90 million people now use the service to build software for any cloud, on any platform — up three times.”

For the most part, Microsoft let GitHub be GitHub since the acquisition closed. Early on, a lot of developers — and especially open source advocates — worried that Microsoft would change the way the service operated and reduce its free offerings in order to squeeze more money out of it. But instead, GitHub expanded its free service and has continued to embrace open source and open source developers. Meanwhile, projects like GitHub Copilot probably wouldn’t have been possible without the help of Microsoft. And while some users defected to GitLab and other services, the new users numbers speak for themselves.

Microsoft has acquired GitHub for $7.5B in stock

Microsoft says GitHub now has a $1B ARR, 90M active users by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

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Who’s most likely to buy Nutanix?

Last Friday, The Wall Street Journal quoted sources as saying that Nutanix was looking for a buyer. Some may not find that surprising given Nutanix’s recent financial performance, but the question is if the company were to sell, who would be the most likely to buy it, and would it be a better fit for a large public company or a private equity firm?

(At this point we cannot resist noting that, well, we expected this.)

Nutanix helps virtualize nearly every piece of hardware required to run a data center, which it calls hyperconverged infrastructure. It actually even sells its own hardware appliance loaded with the company’s set of services as one of its delivery methods. That puts it at the center of the hybrid cloud market. I know, that’s a lot of buzz words there, but the bottom line is that it can help companies bridge the gap between their data centers and public cloud offerings from companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

That makes Nutanix a pretty valuable commodity these days. In spite of the massive growth of these public cloud companies, much of the world’s workloads still live in private data centers, and finding ways to manage and connect these two worlds is a huge challenge for companies. You would assume a company like Nutanix would be in demand. In fact, it reports that more than 1,800 customers have spent over $1 million on its services.

Nutanix execs discuss how they built their 2016 IPO roadshow deck

But growth at the company has stalled lately. In Q4 fiscal 2022, revenue declined 1% to $385.5 million from $390.7 million a year earlier. The top line was also lower than the preceding quarter, when the company reported $403 million.

The good news is that despite the revenue dip, Nutanix’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) continues to rise — climbing 37% in Q4 2022 from a year earlier. Annual contract value (ACV) was also up 10% in the same period.

Who’s most likely to buy Nutanix? by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

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Marge's Phone-In Show Goes Sideways After Woman Calls Her Out

Controversial Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is a huge part of the problem with our government. She thrives on being the recipient of attention, then claims always to be the victim. Every single time. A woman called into her show to express her concern about Republicans wanting to take away a woman's right to choose. Marge went completely ageist on the woman. Apparently, to Greene, once you're over the age of being able to get pregnant, you need to sit down and shut the f*ck up.

"You're blaming this all on the women," the woman told Greene. "My body is my body, and I want — I don't want the government telling me what I can do with my body."

"Ma'am, are you having children anytime soon?" Greene said as if that is any of her f*cking business. "That's my question. I'm asking a legitimate question. And you're right, it's your body, but a baby inside a woman's womb is another person's body, not your body and not my body. And abortion is murder of another human being, whether that body is inside your uterus or not. But that is murder. I do not support the murder of another human being."

"But I don't think you're having children anytime soon," she said again as if we didn't hear her ageist comment the first time. "So I appreciate your interest in women's rights, but killing an unborn baby is not a woman's right, and that's not health care."

The woman brought up the 10-year-old that her rapist impregnated.

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Yes, This Is Great News For Democrats

Rachel Maddow won't say so directly, but this is great news for Democrats:

RACHEL MADDOW: Today is the day that early in-person voting starts in Florida. Also, early voting today starts in Texas.

And there is something going on with early voting this year.

Let's look first at Georgia. By this point in the last mid-term elections (2018 was the last mid-term) the number of people who had voted early in Georgia was huge. It was a record beating number in 2018: 434,000 people. That was seen at the time as being unfathomably large for early voting. That was 2018. If you compare that to four years earlier, 2014, the 2018 numbers tripled what they had done in 2014. 430,000 votes by this point in 2018? Three times the early votes that had been cast by that point in the mid-terms. Just huge. 2018, just over 430,000 people had voted. That was unimaginably large in terms of Georgia's records. Well, now, it is the next mid-term after 2018.

What is early voting in Georgia look like today?

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Is MrBeast actually worth $1.5 billion?

Whenever YouTube superstar MrBeast crops up in business or tech headlines, you’re guaranteed to find a slew of bewildered comments: Who is this guy, and why is a YouTuber such a big deal? Am I old if I don’t know who this is? Why is he younger than me, yet makes so much more money? Is this dude actually giving people free islands, or is he full of it?

If you don’t know who MrBeast is, that’s fine. That just means you probably aren’t on YouTube that often, or that you’ve never wondered what happens if you put 100 million Orbeez in your friend’s backyard. But let me ask you this: Have you heard of Cribl, Snapdocs, Sayo Bank or fabric? I haven’t either, those are just some names of companies worth more than $1 billion that I pulled off Crunchbase.

According to Axios‘ sources, MrBeast — the 24-year-old whose name is Jimmy Donaldson — is trying to raise $150 million for his business, valuing it at $1.5 billion. It might seem hard to imagine how a content creator’s business can be worth that much, but the North Carolina resident has built an impressive empire. With 109 million YouTube subscribers, MrBeast runs the fifth most subscribed channel on the platform, and he’s the top earner among U.S. YouTubers. Across his five other channels, he’s amassed another 82 million subscribers — and that’s not even counting his three Spanish language channels, which have about 33 million subscribers combined.

YouTube is one of the most profitable platforms for creators, because you can earn 55% of ad revenue as a member of YouTube’s partner program. But MrBeast has expanded his business beyond the realm of social media — he has leveraged his brand to open up MrBeast Burger, a ghost kitchen food chain, and a snack company called Feastables, which raised $5 million this year at a $50 million valuation from 776, Shrug Capital and Sugar Capital.

But MrBeast’s business model isn’t as straightforward as making videos and raking in ad revenue. His uploads, which center on extreme stunts and competitions for cash prizes, cost an obscene amount of money to make. Last year, his 25-minute “Real Life Squid Game” video required a whopping $3.5 million to produce, including more than $456,000 in prize money. For comparison, the nine-episode “Squid Game” series cost Netflix a total of $21.4 million, averaging out to about $2.4 million per hour-long installment.

A few weeks ago, MrBeast said that he spends $8 million per month on his businesses. Just last September, MrBeast told the creator-focused YouTube channel Colin and Samir that he spent $4 million every month. That’s a big jump.

Some companies reach unicorn status (a valuation above $1 billion) before even turning a profit. Yet Forbes estimates that MrBeast made $54 million in 2021, so he’s already proven to VCs that they can bet on him to return their investment.

“The videos get views even if I don’t upload, so if I really wanted to, I could just live off of the money that the views made,” MrBeast told Insider. But if the 24-year-old wants to grow even more quickly and turn a larger profit, then venture capital funding might actually make sense.

MrBeast has already taken funding on a smaller scale from companies like Jellysmack and Spotter. Jellysmack uses AI to maximize top creators’ cross-platform growth in exchange for a revenue cut; Spotter gives YouTubers large sums of upfront capital in exchange for revenue from their back catalog. But as one of the most successful content creators in the world, MrBeast can go even bigger with venture capital.

But is going bigger always better? MrBeast’s business model is like a snake eating its own tail — no one is making money like he is, but no one is spending it like him either. He described his margins as “razor-thin” in a conversation with Logan Paul, since he reinvests most of his profits back into his content. His viewers expect that each video will be more impressive than the last, and from the outside looking in, it seems like it’s only a matter of time before MrBeast can no longer up the ante (and for other creators, this has led to disaster). So, if MrBeast’s business really is a unicorn — I’d wager it is — then he has two choices. Will he use the cushion of $150 million to make his business more sustainable, so he doesn’t have to keep burying himself alive? Or will he keep pushing for more until nothing is left?

MrBeast explains YouTube’s algorithm

MrBeast’s ‘Real Life Squid Game’ and the price of viral stunts

Is MrBeast actually worth $1.5 billion? by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch

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