Week ending Jan. 10, 2020

🌀The Weekly Ridget Spinner🌀

Keeping it real in VC land with dispatches from Team Ridge.vc

Ridge Ventures

3 min readJan 17, 2020

You Da Real MVPs

👏 Congrats to Ainsley Braun & Team Tinfoil!

👏 Bill “Magnificent” Magnuson has the gift of foresight

Ready to Rock the Mic

Tom Chavez sees the opportunities amidst AdLand uncertainties

The extraordinary Heidi Zak is headlining Startup Grind Global 2020

#Truths

Don’t be sullen, meditate on the words of Fastly CTO Tyler McMullen

If workplace truths be told…

We believe in hire power

The Unicorn Courier

SoftBank (Blurry) Vision Fund

After a rough 2019, it seems SoftBank’s Vision Fund skipped one too many LensCrafters appointments. First, the Wag and WeWork debacles (among other gaffs); now, robotic pizza darling Zume is laying off 80% of its staff. Oh, and then there’s the bit about Vision Fund breaking term sheets. Yikes!

What is Portuguese for “Unicorn”?

The Brazilian startup scene has gone from Rio de Janeiro to Rio de Dinero. The country has already produced its 11th unicorn in Loft: a real estate platform for buying, selling, and renting properties. Brazilian gym and fitness studio startup Classpass also reached unicorn status this week, thanks to a $285 million Series E.

(For inquiring minds, “unicorn” in Portuguese is unicórnio.)

Don’t Sleep on Casper

Casper is going public — with a ticker name that sounds like GDPR’s younger cousin (“CSPR”). Given that 200+ other companies are vying for the online mattress crown, we’ll see how well Casper sleeps in the coming months. One encouraging sign is that Casper’s pre-IPO marketing spend is far less than IPO flame-outs like WeWork ($378M) and Peloton ($324M).

Scoots are Getting the Boot

Hold onto your handlebars. Lime has yanked its electric scooters from ~12 US markets and laid off more than 10% of its workforce. The reason? So the company can achieve “financial independence.” Crafty semantics.

In the meantime, be on the lookout for Clementine, Marta’s citrus-inspired electric rollerblade startup. Launching in 2020!