Silicon Valley loses the next top-class manager

Longtime YouTube boss Susan Wojcicki wants to “start a new chapter”. Also: Other scandals in the crypto market and Doordash inspire the exchange with its quarterly figures.

Good morning! While you slept, work continued elsewhere in the digital scene.

The top topics:

The longtime YoutubeBoss Susan Wojcicki gives up the management of the video platform after nine years. In a note to Youtube staff, Wojcicki said she will be “starting a new chapter” focused on her family and personal projects. Wojcicki is one of the longest-serving Google-Employees have close family ties to the founders. In the early days, she rented out her garage to co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Shortly thereafter, in 1999, she joined Google as the 16th employee. Her sister Anne Wojcicki was married to Brin for eight years.

The resignation of the YouTube boss after nearly 25 years at Google is another example of a troubling trend in Silicon Valley: high-profile women all leaving their well-paid positions. Just this week, Marne Levine, Chief Business Officer of Meta Platforms, returning after 12 years at the social media company. Last year, Sheryl Sandberg resigned from her role as Meta’s chief operating officer. Under Wojcicki, YouTube had developed into an important source of advertising revenue. However, the world’s largest video streaming service has recently been hampered by declining advertising demand and competition from Tiktok put under pressure. Wojcicki’s successor is Neal Mohan, who was already one of the video platform’s top executives. [Mehr bei Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, The Information und Handelsblatt]

On Founder Scene: DHDL lion Carsten Maschmeyer also regularly invests in start-ups away from the Vox show. As founding scene exclusively learned, he participated together with other sponsors despite the currently difficult market situation Pliant. 26 million euros came together. Pliant is a Berlin startup that offers credit cards for companies. We also have the Berliners’ pitch deck for you, which helped collect the millions. [Mehr bei Gründerszene]

And here are the other headlines of the night:

Cryptocurrencies: The scandals in the crypto market continue. Now the US Securities and Exchange Commission is accusing crypto developer Dow Kwon and his company Terraform Labs fraud before. Investors are said to have been deceived – the market loss is said to amount to at least 40 billion US dollars. Do Kwon is the South Korean co-founder and boss of Terraform Labs. The company is based in Singapore and is the parent company of the crashed stablecoin Terra USD and the cryptocurrency Luna. Kwon is currently on the run, but authorities suspect he is in Serbia. [Mehr bei Handelsblatt und CNBC]

Die Doordash-Shares are up as much as six percent in extended trading on Thursday after the food delivery company reported better-than-expected fourth-quarter sales. The forecasts for the current period were also positive. The San Francisco-based company took in $1.82 billion, analysts had expected just $1.77 billion. At the same time, Doordash announced that it had approved a share buyback of up to $750 million. The total number of orders shipped in the fourth quarter rose 27 percent to 467 million. Despite the good numbers, the company made a loss and attributed this, among other things, to the takeover of the Finnish competitor Wolt return. [Mehr bei Bloomberg und CNBC]

Die Teslashares fell sharply on Thursday after it was announced that the US electric car maker had to update 362,000 cars. The recall affects Tesla’s assistance system and is thus another setback for the autopilot, which has often been criticized for the increased risk of accidents. The update is installed automatically, the vehicles do not have to go to the workshop for this. Tesla also reportedly laid off dozens of employees in the United States after they announced they wanted to organize themselves into unions. [Mehr bei Business Insider, Handelsblatt und Bloomberg]

Layoffs: Docusign plans to reduce its workforce by about ten percent, or around 700 employees. The San Francisco-based company that offers e-signatures had already announced a first round of cuts in September after operating costs rose. Now slowed growth leads to a second round. Also the Californian company Servicetitanwhich sells software for contractors and home service businesses, is set to shed eight percent of its workforce, or 221 employees. [Mehr bei Wall Street Journal, The Information und The Information]

More news from the crypto market: Reuters news agency reports that the global cryptocurrency exchange Binance secret access to a bank account of their supposedly independent US partner Binance.US had. Bincance reportedly transferred large sums of money from the account to a trading firm run by Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao Merit Peak have transferred. More than $400 million is said to have flowed in the first three months of 2021. Binance.US countered this by saying that the information from Reuters was “out of date”. [Mehr bei Reuters]

Our reading tip on Gründerszene: More and more business and government security systems are based on fingerprint verification. The startup IDloop from Jena is now making it contactless and safe. [Mehr bei Gründerszene+]

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Happy Friday!

Your Gründerszene editors