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Today is Thursday, May 12, so happy Friday. Kudos to the “GoogleCrunch” team, who wrote something like 28 stories yesterday to cover Google I/O. You can catch all the Googliness here. haje enjoy a few days off, and I’m afraid by now you know who the funny one is. Until tomorrow! – Christina

TechCrunch’s top 3

• Twitter executives leave: The Twitter saga entered a new chapter today, though that’s hardly surprising given what’s going on: some of its top executives, including Consumer General Manager Kayvon Beykpour and Revenue Product Manager Bruce Falck, were informed by current CEO Parag Agrawal that their services were no longer needed. We’re keeping an eye on that — there will likely be more.
• SoftBank slowdown: Just as we saw with Tiger Global yesterday, as one commentator put it, “The pandemic really forces us to re-evaluate every decision.” For example, SoftBank said it could more than halve investments in startups in its next fiscal year.
• Terra back on track: Jacqueline continues to follow the latest news on TerraUSD, reporting that Terraform Labs has resumed blockchain production after a bit of a hiatus. This follows “the collapse of the Terra ecosystem this week” which destroyed its stablecoin, UST, and the rest of the cryptocurrency market. Meanwhile, alexander dipped in the quality of venture capital investments in crypto startups in the first quarter, before “everything went to hell,” as he put it. Indeed, “crypto winter is coming,” and if you want to learn more, check out today’s Chain Reaction podcast.

Startups and VCs

• Let’s start with some M&A news, shall we? After outsourcing its digital identity verification, Checkout.com decided to internalize this function with the acquisition of Ubble. Although terms of the deal were not disclosed, Checkout.com can certainly afford it after securing $1 billion in funding in January. Meanwhile, desktop 3D printing companies MakerBot and Ultimaker have decided to make it official, marrying in a merger that will separate MakerBot from parent company Stratasys. And across the pond, Nexi has picked up Orderbird, a startup providing point-of-sale services to restaurants and other hospitality businesses — a big market right now.
• show me the money: While offering financial services is hot in Latin America, payments are proving to be where they are in Africa. Interswitch have been on a grand tour today as they seek to expand across the continent.
• Calling all customers: Customer service inquiries have come in fast and furiously, as most purchases have been made online over the past two years. Implementing help tools was not something small businesses could do due to the complexity of adding a technology layer. This is where Tidio comes in. Its automated customer service offering can help businesses get started quickly, take on repetitive tasks, and track high-calling customers.
• Brazilian fintech is now valued at $1.5 billion: Helping companies offer their own financial services continues to be hot, hot, hot in Latin America. Dock is the latest company to see the fruits of its labor, raising $110 million. It now manages over 65 million active accounts.

When and how to hire your startup’s first growth marketer

Picture credits: Eonen (Opens in a new window) /Getty Pictures

Emotion and intuition are often the driving force behind many early-stage startup hires, but when a company achieves product-market fit and finds its target audience, “it indicates that hiring a growth marketer will allow your efforts to scale much faster than without one,” says Jonathan Martinez, who has helped scale companies like Chime, Uber and Postmates.

In a TC+ article, Martinez explains how to identify the right kind of growth hire, what traits to look for, and how to set clear expectations and milestones once they’re on board.

“The priority tasks should be to build a technology stack for growth, create a testing roadmap to find the most effective growth levers, and conduct robust creative and copy testing in the first 90 days. “

(TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams grow. You can join here.)

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