Twitter’s Dorsey to keep job, for now
The CEO’s role appears safe, after his leadership drew scrutiny from one of Wall Street’s toughest activist investors.
Hello and welcome to The Download, The Australian’s technology blog for the latest tech news.
David Swan2.45pm Bookipi raises $1.6m
Accounting software provider Bookipi has landed a $1.6m seed investment co-led by Australian venture capital firm Our Innovation Fund (OIF) and investment syndicate TEN 13, as the company moves to become the go-to accounting suite for freelancers and micro small businesses.
Bookipi, which now has over 640,000 users despite no external sales or marketing team, is now in more than 150 countries and more than 40 per cent of its users are in the US.
Its founder Tim Lee said that within three years of launch, Bookipi’s invoicing app now generates over $12 billion of invoices per year, making it one of the fastest growing and highest ranked invoicing apps globally.
The company has also hired a new chief operating officer, former Uber executive Chad Hardy.
“Our products are loved by our users and we’ve experienced immense growth in our user base and activity on our products in recent years,” Mr Lee said.
“The partnership with TEN13 and OIF adds incredible strategic expertise and value to help us materially scale our team, expand our product and enable our vision to assist more small businesses globally. The funds will be used to further grow our team and development resources and continue to build out our product suite. We couldn’t be more excited about the journey ahead.”
TEN13 Partner Stew Glynn described Bookipi as among a rare breed of startups that have bootstrapped their business to global scale and built a widespread customer base.
“We attribute a lot of this success to Tim’s capability as a founder as well and the hunger from SME’s to have the tools to run their businesses through digitally enabled processes,” Mr Glynn said.
“ We raise funds deal by deal at TEN13, and the demand for this investment amongst our members is a big endorsement for Tim and his vision in creating a globally scalable suite of book-keeping tools.”
David Swan2.30pm Twitter’s Dorsey to keep job, for now
Jack Dorsey’s job as CEO of Twitter appears safe.
Twitter said in a securities filing on Monday that a board committee formed this spring recommended that the current management structure remain in place. The announcement gives Mr Dorsey a reprieve after his leadership of the company drew scrutiny earlier this year from Elliott Management, which is known as one of Wall Street’s toughest activist investors.
The filing said the committee is also suggesting changes to Twitter’s board structure, which would give investors more say, and that it would continue to evaluate management’s performance.
Twitter and Elliott reached an agreement in March in which the company agreed to appoint two board members and commit to $2 billion in share buybacks. The agreement also included the formation of the new committee to study Twitter’s leadership, which effectively created a probation period for Mr Dorsey to prove himself to the new investors.
The committee was led by Patrick Pichette, Google’s former chief financial officer who earlier this year was named Twitter’s lead independent director. Jesse Cohn, Elliott’s head of US equity activism, and Egon Durban, co-CEO and managing partner of Silver Lake, also served on the committee.
Silver Lake made a sizable investment in Twitter earlier this year.
Twitter had previously said the new board committee would announce its findings before the end of the year. Representatives for the company and Elliot declined to comment.
Mr. Dorsey splits his time between Twitter and Square Inc., a financial technology company he also co-founded and that he also serves as CEO. His split duties have raised questions about his ability to suitably focus on the issues facing Twitter, where he’s often been a more hands-off leader than some of his peers around Silicon Valley.
Since Elliott began scrutinizing Twitter in late February, the company’s stock has risen about 20%. Twitter has grown its userbase about 23% since the fourth quarter of 2019, outstripping its pledge earlier this year to increase the user base more than 20% this year and beyond.
Both of those figures were trending higher before last week, when Twitter posted its slowest user growth in years. Twitter shares dropped 21% the day after it reported earnings.
Mr Dorsey’s next major test is Twitter’s handling of the election.
David Swan12.30pm EFTPOS buys Beem It
After a chequered history and 1.4 million downloads, CBA has offloaded its digital payments app, Beem It, to EFTPOS.
Beem It began life as a joint project between CBA, NAB and Westpac back in 2017, and has faciliated over $1 billion in payments on its platform, with 34 per cent of those transactions made by users between 20 and 24 years old.
The app has been the subject of controversy however, with its CEO Angela Clarke dumped in February, who then launched Federal Court action for unfair dismissal.
The acquisition by EFTPOS, for an unknown sum, was a logical one according to EFTPOS chief executive Stephen Benton.
“We are very excited to complete this purchase as a key element to eftpos’ strategy to diversify and move further into the digital ecosystem,” Mr Benton said in a statement.
“Australians are rapidly moving much of their daily lives to mobile and Beem It is a great Australian-owned and operated option for them to embrace digital payments. It’s easy to use, secure and free to download.
“In many countries, mobile wallets are the main App for day to day life, particularly throughout Asia and the Nordics.These Apps make life easier and add value, seamlessly and securely.
“Eftpos the payment system will remain wallet agnostic and be the rails that support a variety of digital wallets.”
Read more: Battle lines drawn for Australia’s future payments systems
David Swan10am Apple to announce ‘one more thing’
Apple has sent out mysterious invitation sfor a ‘One more thing’ event Tuesday morning, with the company widely expected to announce a new line of ARM-processor based Mac computers, as well as the launch of macOS 11 Big Sur.
This will be the third significant Apple product launch event in less than two months. On September 15, Apple held a virtual event to launch Apple Watch Series 6, Apple Watch SE, new iPads and the Fitness+ service.
On October 13, the company unveiled the long-awaited iPhone 12 line-up, along with the HomePod Mini. Apple has given no indication of the topic of next week’s event, but Apple trade press widely expects that the event will focus on the Mac.
Apple first disclosed plans to switch from Intel processors to homegrown chips based on ARM designs at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in June. SoftBank Group is in the process of selling ARM to Nvidia.
The invitation for the event includes the line “One more thing,” an allusion to Apple events hosted by the late Steve Jobs in which he’d surprise the crowd in a final announcement with some surprise product launch or other unexpected event.
The last time Apple used the phrase was to announce its iPhone X in 2017.
Apple last week reported that Mac sales in the September quarter surged 29pc year over year to a record $US9 billion, driven by growth demand from a widespread shift to working from home as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Apple on Monday is off 0.9 per cent, to $US107.85
Additional reporting: Dow Jones
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