Exciting news this week - we announced our Series A investment in Kapwing! Kapwing is an online platform for editing video, GIFs, memes, and more in an intuitive and efficient way. It’s entirely browser-based (no downloads) and free. More than 1M creators, from teens making memes to professional marketers, use Kapwing every month. Check out our blog post on Kapwing here, and the company’s feature in TechCrunch here. 

Our team also announced Series A investments this week in Mercury (banking for startups) and Gatsby (modern web development platform)!

We talked to the Wall Street Journal about Gen Z social apps, sharing our thoughts on a new class of companies that are building tools on top of existing platforms like Instagram. The article includes a shoutout to our awesome group of Accelerated ambassadors, who test products for us and share product intel - you can apply to join here! 

news 📣

🚴‍♀️ Peloton goes public.  Home exercise startup Peloton IPOed this week at an initial market cap of $8.1B. Unfortunately, the stock dipped over the next two days, closing the week down 12%. What went wrong? It's a tough time for unprofitable companies to IPO, and some investors are questioning whether Peloton, which sells hardware and media, should be valued as a tech company (we were quoted in a Washington Post article about this debate!). 

👋 CEO shake-ups. It was a rough week for tech company CEOs, with three high profile departures. WeWork's Adam Neumann is officially out, replaced by two co-CEOs from within the company. Juul CEO Kevin Burns stepped down, and the company has pledged to stop most of its advertising in the U.S. Perhaps most surprisingly, eBay CEO Devin Wenig also resigned, tweeting that he was "not on the same page" as eBay's new board of directors.

🥡 DoorDash suffers data breach. DoorDash announced this week that a "third-party service provider" stole data from 4.9M users this May. Hackers took contact info (emails,  addresses, and phone numbers), passwords, and order histories, as well as the last four digits of some users' credit cards. They also accessed driver's license numbers for 100,000 drivers. 

🧠 Facebook's brainy acquisition. Facebook announced that it's paying $500M-1B to acquire CTRL-Labs, a neural interface startup. The company's first product is a wristband that lets you control computers with your mind by reading electrical signals from your brain. CTRL-Labs had raised $67M in VC funding, but has not yet released its product publicly.

🎤Amazon hosts Alexa event. It was a big week for the Alexa ecosystem, with Amazon announcing a slew of new hardware. Alongside the standard Echo updates, Amazon unveiled a bunch of new devices, including  wireless headphones, a connected dog tag, and even smart glasses. Alexa is getting increasingly interactive, and will now feature multilingual mode, celebrity voices, on-demand cooking classes, and some new security features. 

Troubling news in the world of dating apps this week - the FTC is suing Match Group, which owns apps like Match, Tinder, and Hinge. Match has a serious problem with scammers (they reportedly comprise 25-30% of new users!), and allegedly used messages from these scammers to lure other users into paying for accounts.

Match emails users when another member expresses interest in their profile, prompting them to subscribe to see the message. Unfortunately, nearly 500,000 people paid for a subscription after getting an email about a fake love interest. We'd recommend reading this detailed TechCrunch article if you're interested in learning more!

what we're following 👀

Inside the executive issues plaguing Wag after the company's massive round from SoftBank. 

Snap announces its new and returning slate of Originals, as the platform becomes a real contender for video ad budgets. 

Why Rent the Runway has stopped accepting new subscribers. 

The disappearance (and reappearance) of YouTube's biggest beauty star, Michelle Phan. 

The New Yorker looks at how "meme factory" TikTok holds our attention. 

Point is a YC-backed startup building a new mobile bank account that rewards you for spending on the products and services you love. The company is now looking for campus ambassadors - you'll get marketing and business strategy experience, earn money, and host fun events on campus. Point will also help you score an awesome internship for summer 2020! For more info reach out to patrick@point.app or check out the application here.

We're Point users & fans - this isn't an ad, and we aren't Point investors. 👍

puppy of the week 🐶