Daily Crunch: Shopify sells its logistics arm to Flexport, laying off 20% of employees.

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On TC+, came He is hard at work trying to create the perfect pitch deck. Oh, and Euro Startups: Here’s your chance to apply to Startup Battlefield 200!

– Christine And came

TechCrunch’s Top 3

• “Side missions are always a distraction.”Shopify CEO Tobias Luttke spoke today about why Shopify had to cut its workforce by 20%. He also talked about “core missions”, which is another video game analogy in case you’re wondering. Oh, and Shopify sold its logistics business to Flexport. Paul It has many deets. Meanwhile, Darrell He also has some ideas.
• AI knew this was coming.Microsoft is planning the next set of features for Bing, and no surprise here, they include AI. however, Kyle “They’re not reinventing the wheel when they build on what Microsoft has put into Bing over the last three months or so,” he wrote.
• Written in the stars: Kyle He also wrote about Hugging Face and the release of ServiceNow StarCoder, a free alternative to DeepMind’s Alphacode, Amazon’s CodeWhisperer, and OpenAI’s Codex code-generating models.

Startups and VCs

In a sign of strong investment in the supply chain sector, Pando, a developer of fulfillment management technologies, today announced it has raised $30 million in a Series B round, bringing its total funding to $45 million. Kyle Reports.

Tellus, the Andreessen Horowitz-backed fintech company, is under U.S. government scrutiny that says it can use the money to pay for some U.S. single-family mortgages to give people higher yields on their savings accounts. Senate Banking Chairman urges FDIC to look into company; Mary Ann Reports.

And we have five more for you:

Acquisition, Retention, Expansion: Why SaaS Founders Need to Understand GDR and NDR

Image Credits: Constantine (Opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Since the downturn began, investors have raised their hopes around SaaS profitability and growth. As a result, it’s even more important for founders to have a firm grip on the key metrics VCs are considering before saying yes or no.

In a recent TC+ article, Paris Heymann (Partner, Index Ventures) shared formulas for calculating Gross Dollar Retention and Net Dollar Retention, KPIs that provide deep insight into the health of your business.

Heyman writes: “Specific businesses are more sustainable, easier to manage, and typically command higher valuations than speculative ones.

Three more from the TC+ team:

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Big Tech Inc.

Ron He covered the Salesforce World Tour event this week and got more details about Slack’s plans to put AI at the center of the user experience. He wrote examples that include helping someone get the gist of a long thread without having to read every message and generate messages. We can’t wait for telepathy technology to improve so we can just think and Slack writes a message.

Dallas, Texas, confirmed that a ransomware attack forced the city to close courthouses and disrupt some 911 services. Carly It has more.

And we have five more for you: