For Your Information Blog: 22/11/21

Monday, November 22, 2021

How a 6-month-old fintech startup sponsored Nigeria's biggest reality show

Monday, November 22, 2021 • By Alex Wilhelm

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for November 22, 2021! I am happy to report that this is a holiday week in the United States, so expect the news to be busy until Wednesday at around midday, at which point the Americans in your life are going to switch off the internet and start eating. Don't call; we're on the couch! — Alex

Image Credits: Abeg

The TechCrunch Top 3

NFTs + music = Royal? Today news broke that Royal, a startup that is bringing NFTs, fractional ownership and music rights together in a single package, announced a $55 million raise. This after it raised some $16 million the other month. That's a lot of money! A good question at this juncture is this: Why do crypto startups appear to require so very much capital to do regular startuppy things?
League of Legends is still ultra-popular: TechCrunch has an interesting dig into the world of LoL today parsing its recent Worlds tournament — sadly Team Liquid struggled — viewership numbers and its work with the NBA. Frankly it's a good reminder of just how big the world of esports remains, even if we've heard a little less from startups in the domain of late.
What happened to Paytm's IPO? In the wake of a huge public debut, Indian fintech giant Paytm struggled to hold onto its market value. It fell during its first day of trading, and it fell again today after a market break in its home country last Friday. Our read, after going back through its numbers, is that the company's IPO was simply mispriced.

Bring your product, we'll handle the data

5 must-have board slides for SaaS sales and revenue leaders

Before he became a partner at Battery Ventures, Bill Binch was chief revenue officer at Pendo, a product analytics app.

In his former role, he was responsible for providing his company’s board with quarterly updates on growth and revenue.

“As a wise mentor once told me, no one ever gets a promotion from a board meeting, but people sure do get fired afterward,” he writes in an article about the five slides sales and revenue teams must get right:

Headline reel.
Detailed, five-quarter view.
Segments, geographies and verticals.
Pipeline.
Sales team health.

(TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

5 must-have board slides for SaaS sales and revenue leaders image

Image Credits: Aramyan / Getty Images

Big Tech Inc.

Live shopping coming to Twitter: And Walmart is its first retail partner? I don't really want to shop on Twitter. I want to read tweets. But I am merely one single, religious DAU and thus only get so much sway on Twitter's product choices (none). Regardless, Twitter is getting into live shopping, a category popular in some Asian markets and, perhaps, soon, maybe, here as well with folks under the age of 80.
Astra's rocket doesn't go boom, does reach orbit, allows for more tests: Most startups don't have binary outcomes. Things tend to fall along a shading line, grayer or not depending on the circumstance. Rocket tests are not like that. They either make it to orbit or not, as was the case with Astra. After one of its rockets did not, the next one did. Now the company is marching forward with more work.
And to close us out, another deal, this time with Ericsson (international networking) buying Vonage (cloud communications) in a deal worth $6.2 billion. Both are names that I once heard rather often but have not in some time. Perhaps as a pair they can make a bit more noise. And by noise we mean money.

TechCrunch Experts

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