Daily Crunch: T-Mobile to buy Mint Mobile’s parent company in a deal worth up to $1.35 billion

Subscribe here to receive a roundup of Zoo House News’s Biggest, Most Important Stories, delivered to your inbox daily at 3pm PDT.

Hellooooo, and welcome to the Wednesday Crunch!

New SVB boss Tim Mayopoulos has had plenty to say in the 24 hours since joining the bank on Monday. In a private Zoom meeting hosted by SVB for a select number of LPs and investors, he asked clients to return deposits to the institution, Natasha M reports.

With much love from Christine And hey

The Zoo House News Top 3

Acquisition of Mint-y: The big news for today is that T-Mobile is acquiring the parent company of Mint Mobile — you know, the company that Ryan Reynolds owns — in a deal for $1.35 billion. aisha notes that this “move indicates that T-Mobile is looking to expand its prepaid offerings”. I know you are, but what am I?: Well, if you ask OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, GPT-4 isn’t perfect, but neither are you, kyle writes. Ouch. Talk about timing: On the back cover of OpenAI announcing its new GPT-4 model, Quora announces Poe, its own chatbot offering, which will launch subscriptions so you can chat with a GPT-4 powered bot. Ivan reports.

Startups and VCs

There’s no shortage of startups trying to make drones work. However, there have long been doubts about the effectiveness of such plans. Drones – especially the smaller variety – are impressive technologies, but their functionality is relatively limited. A small quadcopter probably won’t trim your trees or walk your dog as quickly, brian writes. However, one thing they are exceptionally good at is imaging. Verity raises $32 million when Ikea stores deploy its inventory drones

To celebrate Wednesday, here are some seductive alliteration:

Zero-Based Budgeting: A Proven Framework for Runway Extension

Photo credit: Getty Images

It’s important to extend the runway in this environment, but pulling back too far in the wrong places can sap momentum across your entire organization.

Rather than just snip a little at the top, more startups are turning to zero-based budgeting, an aggressive tactic that sees founders “return to Square One each budget period to verify that all line items are relevant and cost-effective,” writes FP&A analyst Healy Jones.

“The best founders look for a framework to strategically reduce burnout while keeping their startup’s value drivers running.”

Three more from the TC+ team:

Zoo House News+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams stay ahead of the competition. Here you can sign up. Use code “DC” for 15% off an annual subscription!

Big Tech Inc.

Today’s big tech topic seems to be “ways to make something simpler”. First up is GitHub, which has created its own guidelines for setting up open source program offices. Paul writes that companies trying to keep track of open source compliance, security, etc. will soon find this to be a challenge, which is why the open source program office is “becoming an integral part of the modern enterprise and formalizes what once could have been a loose collective of employees spanning myriad departments and roles.”

Next we go to Waze. If you have an electric vehicle, you will want to get closer. Ivan reports that Waze has a new feature that tells EV owners where compatible charging points are located along their route.

And we have five more for you: