Leaders of Israel and Turkey hold first in-person talks since 2008
Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan held talks on the sidelines of the ongoing UN General Assembly. …read more
Georgia: Popular with Russian tourists, despite political tensions
More and more countries are closing their borders to Russians, allowing neither entry nor transit. Georgia still allows both, but the decades of political tension are palpable in the country, reports Benjamin Restle. …read more
Fly DeSantis Airways, America’s No. 1 airline for exploited migrants!
A pitch Ron DeSantis can use to lure more migrants onto flights: Please allow me to take advantage of your fear by enticing you with false promises.
Ledgy, a Carta for European startups to manage equity and cap tables, raises $22M from NEA, Sequoia and more
Managing cap tables and equity at high-growth companies can be a complicated (and sometimes messy) business, a fact that founders and employees often discover too late. That’s given rise to a wave of companies building software to help, and today a European leader in that pack is announcing some funding to fuel its own growth. Ledgy, a startup out of Zurich that builds cap table management software specifically for companies and their employees working across multiple countries, has raised $22 million, a Series B that it is using for hiring, further product developments, and to bring on more users.
Ledgy’s platform today covers tools for finance, HR, legal and VC teams as well as employees themselves, and is used both to provide a snapshot of the state of a company’s equity at a given moment, and to help employees and companies manage what they may choose to do with that over time. The company today has some 2,500 companies as customers, up from 1,500 a year ago, and revenues have tripled, CEO and co-founder Yoko Spirig said in an interview.
Significantly, its rise dovetails with an interesting moment for European tech. We are starting to see a lot more European startups opting to remain in Europe to raise funding and scale rather than transplant to the U.S. as they would have been expected to do in the past, and with that the issue of equity awards for those companies’ employees is only growing. Ledgy counts some of the bigger startups in the European ecosystem among its customers, including Peak, Getir, Kry, Monese, Selina Finance, Gorillas, Choco, Alan, Pennylane and Scalapay.
Ledgy itself has some impressive names on its own cap table. This round is being led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), with Sequoia Capital, Speedinvest, btov, Visionaries Club, and unnamed angels also participating. Sequoia (as part of its much bigger move into Europe) led Ledgy’s Series A of $10 million a year ago, and with this latest round NEA partner Jonathan Golden is joining Sequioa’s Luciana Lixandru on the board. It has now raised $33.5 million to date.
Ledgy’s sweet spot is working with companies that have employees situated in different jurisdictions, and building a product for them that acts both both as a finance and HR tool.
While a number of companies like Carta, and more recently AngelList and Pulley (respectively valued at $6.8 billion, $4 billion, and up to $300 million for the younger Pulley) continue to make waves in the U.S. market, Ledgy has spotted an opportunity to build for scenarios where companies want to provide international employees with equity and need to balance the differences in regulations and culture when doing so.
“We started in fragmented Europe, which was a curse and blessing,” Spirig said. “It forced us to serve customers with international teams.”
Ledgy stumbled on this almost by accident, Spirig said.
She and her co-founders (CTO Timo Horstschaefer and CPO Ben Brandt) were working on a different startup in Zurich, in the area …read more
Google is integrating Assistant and Calendar reminders with Tasks
In its latest step of the app cleanup drive, Google is folding in Assistant and Calendar reminders in its Tasks app. The company wants to make it easier to manage your tasks and reminders from any of these three apps by unifying its to-do systems.
Currently, Google Tasks — which was first launched as a standalone app in 2018— works in its own silo. You can create tasks, subtasks, and set reminders in the iOS and Android apps or through a side panel in Gmail or Google Drive on the web. However, those don’t really show up on your Assistant reminders. Plus, Calendar has two separate options to create tasks and reminders, which might confuse users.
Google is trying to change this with an update that will roll out in the coming months. Once it’s available, when users set a reminder with Google Assistant, it will show up in both Tasks and Calendar lists. They will also get a notification for the task completion reminder at the set time.
Assistant reminders will be automatically synced to Tasks Image Credits: Google
“Soon, we’ll be simplifying our task management solutions by migrating Assistant and Calendar Reminders to Google Tasks. This means you will now have an easy way to view and manage all your to-dos in one place through Google Tasks, regardless of whether you create them using Assistant or Calendar,” the company said in a blog post.
Google said in the coming months, users will see a prompt to try out the new integrated Task experience when they are using Calendar or Assistant. What’s more, the company will remove the Calendar Reminder options once the migration is complete.
Image Credits: Google
But before you forget, Google Keep also lets you set reminders for different tasks. But there’s no integration with Google’s note-taking app with this update, so we’ll just have to keep waiting for a mega to-do integration from the company.
Google is integrating Assistant and Calendar reminders with Tasks by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/21/google-is-integrating-assistant-and-calendar-reminders-with-tasks/
Russia-Ukraine updates: Putin announces partial mobilization
President Putin has ordered a partial mobilization of Russia’s armed forces set to begin later on Wednesday. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s Zelenskyy is scheduled to appear before the UN General Assembly. DW has the latest. …read more
Myanmar: Burnt villages and rebel patrols in battle-scarred north
Villages in Myanmar’s northwest Sagaing Region have been turned into smouldering ruins in what locals say are reprisal attacks by troops of the governing military junta. The area has been a hotbed of resistance since last year’s coup, with local “People’s Defence Force” (PDF) and militia members, often using homemade weapons, clashing with junta troops and local populations frequently suffering the consequences. …read more
Actor Tom Hardy secretly enters — and wins — Jiu-Jitsu competition
Competitors were stunned to see the Oscar-nominated actor take part in the event. …read more
https://nypost.com/2022/09/21/tom-hardy-secretly-enters-and-wins-jiu-jitsu-competition-in-england/
Pirate who gave up 60th HR to Aaron Judge is related to teammate of Babe Ruth
Pirates reliever Wil Crowe — who gave up Judge’s 60th homer which tied Babe Ruth — is related to a former Yankee who played with “the Bambino.” …read more
https://nypost.com/2022/09/21/pirate-who-gave-up-60th-hr-to-judge-has-past-yankees-tie/
The Fed is declaring war on inflation. It could lead straight to recession.
The Federal Reserve is poised to deploy another supersized interest rate hike to fight the sharpest price surge in 40 years, a move that has drawn remarkably little political pushback despite rising market anxiety just weeks before an election.
That could change, with more and more voices from Washington to Wall Street warning that the central bank might end up doing serious damage to the economy.
The World Bank last week raised the specter of a global recession, driven by higher rates in the U.S. and abroad. Investors are increasingly worried that disruption in the U.S. government debt market could worsen as the Fed raises borrowing costs. The housing and stock markets are reeling. And some executives like Tesla CEO Elon Musk even say the economy is in danger of entering a period of deflation.
Fed Chair Jerome Powell has pledged to do whatever it takes to curb inflation, a point that he’ll punctuate on Wednesday when the central bank raises interest rates for the fifth time this year. The job seems nowhere near done, with the costs of everything from health care to rents soaring even as gas prices fall. But the Fed’s policies take time to feed through the economy, meaning the central bank could end up depressing economic activity more than necessary before realizing it, given the sheer speed at which it’s jacking up rates — the fastest pace in three decades.
“There’s the old expression that sometimes they’ll tighten until something breaks,” said Liz Ann Sonders, chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab. “It’s a legitimate concern at this point.”
The predicament creates an exceptional level of economic uncertainty for the country, for President Joe Biden’s administration, and for the next election cycle leading into 2024.
Economists say the range of outcomes for the second half of Biden’s presidency is astoundingly broad — it could see a severe economic downturn or simply a period of sluggish growth. Prices might continue to rise at a painfully rapid clip, or they could begin to drop.
Also at stake is the central bank’s own credibility as the nation’s chief inflation-fighting authority. Powell has stressed the dangers of backing off too early, fearing that doing so could make inflation even harder to fight long-term as consumers and businesses build ever-rising prices into their budgeting. So far, he has gotten strong political support, including from Biden and most Republicans.
But many Fed watchers say some of the root causes of inflation lie outside the central bank’s control, like the U.S. labor shortage, global supply chain snags and Russia’s war on Ukraine. They’re raising concern that higher rates could crimp growth without leading to much relief on prices — a point that Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has hammered away at Powell for months.
“We just don’t know if the Fed rate hikes are going to be successful,” said Nancy Davis, founder of hedge fund Quadratic Capital Management. She argued that markets are “really complacent” in …read more
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/09/21/federal-reserve-rate-hike-inflation-00057885