Financiers also appeared taken aback, and heartened, by Mr. Biden’s strong showing. “People think we’ve turned a corner,” Tracy Maitland, the president of Advent Capital and a Biden supporter, told the NYT’s Kate Kelly.
The number of guests swelled at an L.A. fund-raiser last night, hosted by Sherry Lansing, former chief of Paramount Pictures, following Mr. Biden’s delegate haul. The former vice president regaled the crowd with a joke about his wife, Jill, acting as “my Secret Service,” after she shoved away animal rights protesters at a rally the day before.
What closing up shop might have looked like
Even the most lavishly funded start-ups sometimes don’t make it. Turns out that Mike Bloomberg’s billions couldn’t save his presidential bid, either. After his dropout, we imagined what an internal email from his campaign might look like, channeling a formerly high-flying corporate unicorn that has fallen on hard times:
To: ALL STAFF
Subject: The next chapter
Team,
It’s been an amazing journey over the past 100 days.
We had a differentiated customer value proposition and got buy-in from a deep-pocketed investor (😉). We had what looked like a perfect product-market fit, but it just couldn’t scale. Our solution resonated in American Samoa, but we weren’t able to get the traction nationwide that we needed to meet our goals.
The critics said nobody could deploy capital as aggressively as SoftBank in such a highly speculative venture, but we proved them wrong. We took on Mark Zuckerberg’s rules for promoting our product on Facebook, and won. You should be proud of how we changed the game — shoutout to the meme team! — and fought entrenched interests defending the status quo.
When the market suddenly changed and put a premium on sustainability, our blitzscaling strategy proved untenable. The responsible thing to do now is deploy our capital in other ways.
We will join forces with a Delaware organization for the next few months, and then pivot to the full-stack financial data solution that has served us well in the past — and made this adventure possible in the first place.