Why CEOs are Turning to Fractional Chiefs of Staff | China’s shoppers are gloomy and picky | Inside Chipper Cash’s Grueling Battle To Survive The Fintech Winter | Inside the Israeli Crackdown on Speech

View online | Unsubscribe (one-click). For inquiries/unsubscribe issues, Contact Us

� � � � � � Why CEOs are Turning to Fractional Chiefs of Staff - Inc.com    Most CEOs have a list of one-time projects they'd love to tackle at some point, but never seem to find time for. Projects like updating your employee handbook, migrating to a new finance platform, or creating a long-term fundraising strategy will often keep getting moved to the backburner in favor of the everyday duties of running the business until a crisis pushes them to the top of the priority list. Maybe you've had a major growth spurt, and your hacked-together system for managing clients can't keep up. Or maybe you've lost a major funder and need to find a new source of revenue. Many companies try to manage these short-term initiatives with internal task forces containing a few key employees or temporarily reassigning a staff member to lead the project. But this approach has some significant downsides: Continued here � � � � � � Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium China's shoppers are gloomy and picky - The Economist    Five years ago Jack Ma, the founder of e-commerce giant Alibaba, briefly tried his hand at selling lipstick. To promote China’s largest online shopping festival, called “Singles’ Day”, Mr Ma attempted to sell more lipstick in five minutes than Li Jiaqi, a live-streaming salesman known as the “Lipstick King”. The king won. Five years on, Mr Li’s crown has slipped a little. In September he lost his cool with an online commenter who questioned the price of an eyebrow pencil he was showcasing. “How is it expensive? It has been this price for years,” Mr Li asked incredulously. “Maybe you should look at yourself. Has your pay risen? Have you been working hard in these years?” Mr Li, who later apologised, had touched a nerve. He had also touched on one of China’s deeper economic difficulties. It is hard for firms to increase prices when wage growth is weak. Continued here � � � � � � Inside Chipper Cash's Grueling Battle To Survive The Fintech Winter - Forbes    The layoffs at Chipper Cash, a five-year-old fintech startup that lets African consumers send money to each other, started slowly. In July 2022, four recruiters were dismissed. Seven quality assurance engineers came next, two months later. On a Sunday night in early December at 12:01 AM, about 50 employees, or slightly more than 10% of the company, received emails in their personal accounts telling them they no longer had jobs, and access to their work computers had been terminated. Staffers were stunned by the abrupt execution of the layoff. "There was shock and disgust," a former employee says. Then, after another two months, even deeper cuts came: Chipper slashed about 30% of its staff. It was a dramatic turnabout for a company that included "lead with empathy" as one of its four corporate values and had been featured in Forbes as one of the most promising startups in fintech just eight months before. In February 2023, Zepz, a U.K.-based international money-transfer company formerly known as WorldRemit, smelled blood and approached Chipper with a take-out offer. Zepz sent a letter of intent saying it would pay between 5% and 10% of its own stock to buy the startup, pending more due diligence. Zepz had been valued at $5 billion in an August 2021 fundraise, but market values for fintech stocks had since dropped by 50%. Even if you thought Zepz was still worth $5 billion, which was doubtful at best, the deal would have valued Chipper at between $250 million and $500 million-a brutal discount to the $2.2 billion valuation it fetched in late 2021. Continued here � � � � � � Inside the Israeli Crackdown on Speech - The New Yorker    A week after the October 7th Hamas attack in the south of Israel, Israel Frey, a thirty-six-year-old Haredi journalist who focusses on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, had just returned to his apartment on the outskirts of Bnei Brak, a predominantly ultra-Orthodox town east of Tel Aviv, when he began to hear noise outside. It was after 10 P.M., a few hours past the end of Shabbat. Someone—he doesn’t remember who—messaged him to say that his address was circulating online, along with calls to join La Familia, a far-right group that started as a fan club for Jerusalem’s largest premier-league soccer team, in an attack on Frey’s home. When Frey tried to check if there was anyone outside his apartment door, he discovered that someone had blocked the viewfinder. The sounds in the street were getting louder. He could hear people shouting “traitor.” They seemed to be hurling firecrackers at the building. He rushed his wife and two children, aged eight and thirteen, out of the living room, which has a large window, and frantically texted friends: “People are attacking my house. Please come and do something.” A neighbor approached the crowd to negotiate safe passage for Frey’s family. Before the children left the apartment, Frey covered their faces with scarves so the crowd could not see them. He stayed inside, listening to the sounds of the gathering grow more frantic and rowdy, until the police approached his door at around three in the morning and told him he needed to leave. A firecracker hit the window of Frey’s downstairs neighbor, shattering the glass. As three policemen escorted Frey out, one of them grabbed Frey’s arm and spat at him. Frey was driven out of Bnei Brak in a police vehicle, then continued on in his own car, which another officer had driven. But, Frey soon realized, two other cars were still trailing him. He drove to Ichilov, a large hospital in Tel Aviv, and took cover. Eventually he was able to go to a friend’s apartment, where he was still staying when we spoke by video a couple of weeks later, with an acquaintance acting as an interpreter. As far as Frey knew, no arrests had been made in the attack on his building. “The police protected my life only in the sense that they prevented people from entering the building, and escorted me out,” he said. “I don’t know when I’ll be able to go home, if I can go home at all.” Continued here

�

�

�

� � �

You are receiving this mailer as a TradeBriefs subscriber. We fight fake/biased news through human curation & independent editorials. Your support of ads like these makes it possible. Alternatively, get TradeBriefs Premium (ad-free) for only $2/month If you still wish to unsubscribe, you can unsubscribe from all our emails here Our address is 309 Town Center 1, Andheri Kurla Road, Andheri East, Mumbai 400059 - 433006120