Category: business

Disney’s streaming business continued to bleed cash, losing more than $1 billion during the three months that ended in December. Nonetheless, Disney reported earnings and revenues that beat Wall Street estimates. The company generated sales of $23.5 billion, up 8% from the same quarter a year ago. Analysts on average had been expecting $23.4 billion in revenue. Disney’s profit was $1.28 billion, up 11%. The Burbank entertainment giant’s earnings of 99 cents a share exceeded projections of 78 cents. “After a solid first quarter, we are embarking on a significant transformation, one that will maximize the potential of our world-class creative teams and our unparalleled brands and franchises,” Iger said in a statement. “We believe the work we are doing to reshape our company around creativity, while reducing expenses, will lead to sustained growth and profitability for our streaming business, better position us to weather future disruption and global economic challenges, and deliver value for our shareholders.”
Last November, Disney reappointed Iger as CEO after Iger’s hand-picked successor as CEO, Bob Chapek, came under fire for his management of the entertainment giant.

HubSpot, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based software company, said it would cut 7% of its workforce by the end of the first quarter of 2023 in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing, as part of a restructuring plan, with CEO Yamini Rangan telling staff it follows a “downward trend” after the company “bloomed” in the Covid-19 pandemic, with HubSpot facing a “faster deceleration than we expected.” Yesterday, Philips said it would cut 3,000 jobs worldwide in 2023 and 6,000 total by 2025 after announcing $1.7 billion in losses for 2022. Spotify, IBM, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and a slew of other tech companies announced layoffs in recent days/weeks as well.

Further reading: PagerDuty CEO Quotes MLK Jr. In Worst Layoff Email Ever

While it’s clearly a CEO’s job to cheer on their company, Tejada makes things sound so good that it’s perplexing to think the company has to lay off any people to begin with. Alas, the PagerDuty CEO was not done sticking her foot in her mouth and ended her note with a reference a quote from King’s sermons published in The Measure of a Man in 1959. She used brackets to change the quote slightly to accommodate her message. “I am reminded in moments like this, of something Martin Luther King said, that ‘the ultimate measure of a [leader] is not where [they] stand in the moments of comfort and convenience, but where [they] stand in times of challenge and controversy,'” Tejada said. “It doesn’t seem to have been written with ill intent, but rather with the goal to save time (by announcing layoffs, promotions, and predictions for a solid year) and save face (by refusing to say the word layoffs),” adds Serrano. “In these difficult situations, though, it’s just better to be upfront.”

Fatmap, for its part, was founded a decade ago, with an initial focus on providing ski resorts with high-resolution digital maps. In the intervening years, the company has worked with various satellite and aerospace companies to bolster its platform with detailed maps incorporating summits, rivers, passes, paths, huts, and more, arming anyone venturing into mountainous terrain the information they need to know exactly what they’ll encounter before they arrive. With 1.6 million registered users, Fatmap’s mission, ultimately, is to be the Google Maps of the great outdoors, with a premium subscription ($30 / year) unlocking access to extra features such as downloadable maps and route planning in the mobile app.

The ultimate long-term goal for Strava is to integrate Fatmap’s core platform into Strava itself, but that will be a resource-intensive endeavor that won’t happen overnight. And that is why Strava is working to create a single sign-on (SSO) integration in the near-term, meaning that subscribers will be able to access the full Fatmap feature-set by logging into the Fatmap app with their Strava credentials. While Strava and Fatmap will remain separate products for now, Strava said that it will decide in the future whether Fatmap will live on as a standalone product once the technical integration has taken place. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. However, TechCrunch suggests the price of this deal “could comfortably be in the 9-digit range” given the $30 million Fatmap had raised in funding, “including a hitherto undisclosed $16.5 million round that it said it closed in early 2020.”

“It’s clear that the proprietary 3D mapping technology Fatmap had developed would have taken too much time and resources for Strava to replicate itself from scratch, which is why buying Fatmap outright likely made more sense in this instance,” the report added.

Then the pandemic hit, and with it came an accelerated adoption of technology, including the electronic signature, which helped us through forcibly distant transactions. Overnight, companies like Docusign and Adobe became vital lifelines as people shifted to relying on e-signatures. Docusign, for example, went from 585,000 customers in 2020 to 1.1 million as of January 2022 and revenue over the same period grew from $974 million to $2.1 billion, according to the company’s most recent annual report. “We believe that once businesses have shifted to digital agreement processes, they will not return to manual ones,” noted Docusign.

So even as life has returned to a semblance of normal, the now near ubiquitous option to just tap an electronic device doesn’t bode well for the signature as we know it…. During the pandemic, jurisdictions round the world, including Ontario, amended legislation or relaxed rules around contract activity to mitigate the challenges social distancing posed….

Since 2006, the Ontario language curriculum lists cursive only as an option beginning in Grade 3. A plan by the Toronto Catholic District School Board in 2019 to reintroduce it as part of a pilot project was shuttered by the pandemic. And so you get stories of parents shocked to discover their child has to resort to block letters on a passport because they don’t know how to “sign” their name.

Digital signatures may be poised for even more growth. Market research firm P&S Intelligence estimates that just the U.S. digital signature market alone “stood at $921.3 million in 2021,” and “will propel at a mammoth compound annual growth rate of 31.2% in the years to come, reaching $10.6 billion by 2030.”

Of course, there’s always the question of whether or not handwritten signatures ever worked in the first place.

When JP Morgan asked for proof during due diligence, Javice allegedly created an enormous roster of “fake customers — a list of names, addresses, dates of birth, and other personal information for 4.265 million ‘students’ who did not actually exist.” In reality, according to the suit, Frank had fewer than 300,000 customer accounts at that time. […] Frank’s chief growth officer Olivier Amar is also named in the JP Morgan complaint. It alleges that Javice and Amar first asked a top engineer at Frank to create the fake customer list; when he refused, Javice approached “a data science professor at a New York City area college” to help. Using data from some individuals who’d already started using Frank, he created 4.265 million fake customer accounts — for which Javice paid him $18,000 — and had it validated by a third-party vendor at her direction, JP Morgan alleges. Amar, meanwhile, spent $105,000 buying a separate data set of 4.5 million students from the firm ASL Marketing, per the complaint.

Acquisitions fueled the company’s headcount growth. Tableau, then Salesforce’s most expensive deal when it was bought in 2019, came with 4,200 employees while Slack, purchased in 2021, and Mulesoft, acquired in 2018, together brought another 3,700, according to company filings. The three deals combined cost almost $50 billion with the estimated $27.7 billion for Slack leading the way. Workers across these acquired divisions were pummeled by the job reductions, particularly in recruiting and customer success roles, according to company employees. Tableau is increasingly being treated as a visualization tool for data contained in Salesforce’s other services rather than a standalone program — co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff highlighted the new integrations in a December keynote speech. The division has trailed the rest of the company in sales growth since the acquisition.

Salesforce also plans to pare back its office footprint. The company currently has four offices in the Seattle area, more than any other city, according to the company website. Three were inherited in the Tableau deal. Salesforce declined to comment on whether it would be reducing space in the Seattle area. Asked about the effect of Wednesday’s job cuts on Tableau, a Salesforce spokesperson said the unit “is a vital part of our product strategy.” Tableau contributes to a product that “processes over 100 billion customer records, and helps our customers understand and act on their data,” the spokesperson said.

Jassy said that he was hoping to notify all impacted employees prior to his statement, but was forced to comment due to a report in the Wall Street Journal regarding the staff reductions. “We typically wait to communicate about these outcomes until we can speak with the people who are directly impacted. However, because one of our teammates leaked this information externally, we decided it was better to share this news earlier so you can hear the details directly from me,” he said. “We intend on communicating with impacted employees (or where applicable in Europe, with employee representative bodies) starting on January 18.”

The failure of coal and gas highlights how even the power sources that have long served as the backbone of the US electrical grid can still falter, especially as the South sees its population increase and relies more on electric heat. TVA saw power generation from coal plants drop about 68% from more than 4 gigawatts early Dec. 23 to a low of about 1.5 gigawatts on Dec. 24, according to federal data. While gas generation increased Dec. 23, on Dec. 24 it fell roughly 25% from about 11.5 gigawatts to less than 9 gigawatts as the utility ordered outages for almost six hours. High winds damaged several of the protective structures at the Cumberland Fossil Plant, the biggest TVA coal plant, as well as multiple gas-fired combustion turbines used during peak power periods, a TVA representative said in an email.

It’s catching on in the tech world. Uber boss Dara Khosrowshahi and his team invoked (PDF) the term seven times during the ride-hailing firm’s investor day. At a similar event in June executives from music streaming service Spotify mentioned (PDF) it 14 times, with another 47 references to the abbreviation LTV. Earnings transcripts for 4,800 U.S.-listed companies analyzed by Bedrock AI show executives and analysts mentioned “lifetime value” over 500 times between October and mid-December, up from just 47 times in three months to March 2019.

The problem is that everyone seems to have a different definition of lifetime value. Food delivery firm DoorDash looks at it as a metric to measure “customer retention, order frequency, and gross profit per order” over a fixed payback period. Uber and its Southeast Asian peer Grab treat it as the ability to bring in one customer and then cross-sell different services at a lower cost. The $49 billion e-commerce firm Shopify defines lifetime value as the total amount of money a customer is expected to spend with the business over the course of an “average business relationship.” But lifetime value isn’t a silver bullet, as Gurley noted a decade ago. As capital becomes more scarce, generating free cash flow remains the most important target. As with previous buzzwords, investors may find that references to lifetime value do more to confound than clarify.