Uber's CEO resigns under pressure, Tesla has some Autopilot musical chairs at the top, and Mobike eyes the whole world. All that and more in The Daily Crunch for June 21, 2017. 1. Uber's Travis Kalanick resigns What used to be a temporary leave of absence is now permanent – Uber founder Travis Kalanick has resigned as CEO of the company, after being encouraged to do so by a group of Uber's top investors. Kalanick said in a letter obtained by the New York Times that his decision is about making sure Uber can move forward without distracting fights. This leaves Uber without any real C-suite, which is interesting - even more so because it's increasingly revealing that despite its massive organizational and cultural issues, its lead is such that main rival Lyft is only now starting to win significant share as a result of the problems. 2. Tesla's Autopilot lead departs, and a deep learning expert steps in Tesla lost Swift creator and former Apple employee Chris Lattner just six months after he joined the company. Lattner tweeted that "Tesla isn't a good fit" before basically saying he's looking for work. Meanwhile, Tesla hired OpenAI's Andrej Karpathy to head AI at the company, which is a big get, and probably more in line with Tesla's ambitions. 3. Mobike eyes big international expansion China's Mobike, the dockless bike sharing startup that raised $600 million last week, wants to grow to a lot of international cities by the end of the year, with manufacturing in China and easy deployment in the UK, the US and beyond. Also, the company is looking to add services to its portfolio of offerings, which could include delivery and more. 4. Uber adds tipping in the U.S. Uber's CEO is gone and the company has added tipping to its app in select markets, with the goal of rolling the feature out around the U.S. That's two seismic shifts in how it does business within 24 hours. But can the ship ultimately be righted, even with drastic measures? 5. OnePlus 5 gets a bit better, a fair amount more expensive The latest OnePlus smartphone is still a better deal than most expansive flagship phones, but it's a bit closer in price to its big name rivals. Still, the iPhone-esque design and quality specs make it a good buy for Android fans. 6. Tesla said to be near deal to build in China A Chinese Gigafactory could give Tesla a big leg up in addressing the market, which is one of the company's fastest growing. There would be a lot involved in making this happen, including partnering with a local automaker to comply with Chinese requirements, but likely worth it long-term for the automaker. 7. A16Z's new partner focuses on healthcare IT and genomics Andreessen Horowitz has a new partner, one Jorge Conde, who has previously worked in the genomics industry. It remains an area rife with investment opportunity, but now firms are more eager to bring in folks with traditional experience and expertise to make sure they don't run into another Theranos situation. |
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