Daily Crunch: Shopify Lays Off 20% of Staff, Sells Logistics Division to Flexport

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Hello Crunchers! We are excited to tell you that today is Thursday! How fabulously exciting.

In TC+, Haha has been working hard trying to create the perfect presentation. oh and European Startups: Here’s Your Chance to Apply for Startup Battlefield 200!

— christina and Haha

TechCrunch Top 3

• “Side missions are always distracting”: That’s what Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke had to say today when talking about why Shopify had to cut its workforce by 20%. He also talked about “main quests,” which is another video game analogy in case you were wondering. Oh, and Shopify also sold its logistics business to Flexport. Pablo has more details. Meanwhile, darrell also have some thoughts.
• AI knew this was coming: Microsoft is planning its next set of features for Bing and, not surprisingly, they involve AI. However, Kyle writes that, “they don’t so much reinvent the wheel, but rather build on what Microsoft has injected into the Bing experience over the last three months or so.”
• Written in the stars: Kyle he also wrote about Hugging Face and ServiceNow launching StarCoder, a free alternative to DeepMind’s AlphaCode, Amazon’s CodeWhisperer, and OpenAI’s Codex code generation models.

Startups and VCs

Noting that investments in the supply chain sector remain strong, Pando, a start-up developing compliance management technologies, announced today that it has raised $30 million in a Series B roundbringing his total gross to $45 million, Kyle reports.

Tellus, an Andreessen Horowitz-backed fintech company that claims it can offer people higher returns on their savings balances by using that money to fund certain US single-family home loans, is under scrutiny from the U.S. government. USA The Senate Banking Chairman Urges FDIC to Investigate Company, maria anna reports.

And we have five more for you:

Acquisition, retention, expansion: why SaaS founders need to understand GDR and NDR

Investors have raised their expectations for SaaS profitability and growth since the recession began. As a result, it’s even more important that founders have a firm grip on the key metrics that VCs consider before saying yes or no.

In her latest TC+ article, Paris Heymann (Partner at Index Ventures) shares formulas for calculating Gross Retention Dollars and Net Retention Dollars, KPIs that provide insight into the health of your business.

“Predictable businesses are more durable, easier to manage, and are generally rewarded with higher valuations than unpredictable ones,” Heymann writes.

Three more from the TC+ team:

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big tech inc

Ron covered the Salesforce World Tour event this week and found out more about Slack’s plan put AI at the center of the user experience. He writes that examples include helping someone get the gist of a long thread without having to read every post and generate posts. We can’t wait until telepathy technology improves so we can think and Slack write a message.

Dallas, Texas, found himself in a bind, confirming that a ransomware attack forced the city to close courthouses and disrupt some 911 services while the problem was fixed. carly has more.

And we have five more for you: