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Startup Watch: Airbnb is making money, Rocket Internet might make money, Giphy hopes to make money

Startup Watch: Airbnb is making money, Rocket Internet might make money, Giphy hopes to make money

The world of entrepreneurship news is a complex one, with people ever ready to give their two cents on how you should be running your business, pitching your business and what’s trending.

Here’s what we read on hiring board members with a good knowledge of what your startup does, how to be happy at work and how Airbnb is doing really very well.

Giphy gone get paid, finally. Since 2013 Giphy.com has gone from a webcrawler for finding GIFs to serving 150 million daily users. So far, they have raised $150 million but still don’t have a business plan. CEO and cofounder Alex Chung tells Business Insider in this article that they’re working on that. And there’s potential. According to the site, 50 percent of site visitors are coming to just browse and watch GIFs - more than four million hours of GIFs through Giphy every day. So while you might be wasting time there is money to be made.

Profits for Rocket Internet? Apparently the German ecommerce investor is going to see some profits on some of its startups before the end of the year. With their fingers in multiple pies around the world, we guess that would be nice for them. We’re wondering over here whether or not one of those (they’re not saying which you see) will be based in the Middle East.

Wamda of the week: how to get a happy workforce. Apparently trading secrets on the first day of work is a good ice-breaker… also swapping out formal language to describe staff and making clients dress up for photos. If you’ve got some ideas on what makes a happy company do leave them in the comments section.

If you’re on the board, get a clue. Newly released documents have revealed that board members of the much hyped Theranos healthcare startup, that looked to revolutionize how we test blood, who were without medical knowledge, didn’t question founder Elizabeth Holmes when accusations about the startup starting piling up. As the company potentially heads towards demise, we think we all know the lesson here.
"How much do I really know about blood testing?"

Another way to retail. Here’s a nice approach to getting your name, and product out there, without spending every last penny - designers rent space within a store. It’s a chance for new businesses to sell in a cool area (in this case New York’s Soho), and not have only the big-name retailers as options.

That other unicorn. Some days it’s Uber-this, Uber-that, and one can easily forget there is another highly valued company in the US that keeps making waves. Airbnb! They want to evolve into a fully blown travel company and they’ll have the money to do so. Get this - this Economist article says they “raised $3bn and spent only around $300m of it (Uber is said to have lost $2.8bn in 2016 alone).” Bravo.

Wedded to Snapchat. She may not be a teenage girl looking to share endless selfies with friends, or a Kardashian sitting in the back of an SUV, but Miranda Kerr is now married to Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel. Yeah, yeah it’s not technically tech news (wink) but we can’t resist any kind of celebrity/tech story. It makes life so much more special.

Feature image, 'cos please no more money, via Pixabay.

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