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Text Message Marketing Startup Emotive Lays Off 18% of Staff
Samson Amore
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.
Marketing startup Emotive laid off 30 people this week as the outlook on the economy continues to sour.
CEO Brian Zatulove said that 18% of the Sawtelle-based company’s roughly 167-strong workforce was cut, adding in an email statement that the layoffs are part of a larger plan to generate lasting revenue.
“Over the last three years, software investors have favored growth over profitability. Given the shift over the last 6 months amid the drawdown in public [software-as-a-service] valuations, we made the decision to get on a path to profitability,” Zatulove said. “Despite all of this, we think it’s critical for the business to have a clear path to becoming profitable, with infinite runway, given the uncertain economic climate & future [and] we are now on that path” following layoffs."
Zatulove didn’t immediately clarify which positions in the company had been cut.
Two former Emotive staffers posted about their job losses on LinkedIn, including a one-time, L.A.-based senior technical recruiter who’d started working there last January and an ex-customer onboarding specialist who’d worked there for roughly a year. The two didn’t return requests for comment.
Emotive is now at least the second SMS marketing company in Los Angeles to undergo layoffs in recent months. The other was Voyage, which laid off roughly 10% of its staff in June. Still, Zatulove pushed back on the idea that the layoffs at Emotive had anything to do with a larger market trends.
While he acknowledged software stocks are taking a beating, Zatulove said, “our decision to reduce actually has nothing to do with any broader ecommerce trends. Consumer spending is still healthy from what we're seeing.”
Emotive’s core product is a marketing platform that uses artificial intelligence and human analysis to reach out to customers who use Shopify and other ecommerce sites by text, encouraging them to buy products. The business is looking to expand into other areas as well. It launched a conversational advertising platform called Emotive Ads this year and is working on a tool that allows shoppers to make payments through SMS.
“In terms of where we are headed, nothing changes strategically,” Zatulove told dot.LA. “We’re going to keep investing there alongside the core SMS product,” adding that “the business has grown 3x over the last 24 months. We’re coming off a strong quarter.”
In February 2021, the company raised a $50 million Series B funding round. Zatulove said the company’s raised $103 million since its 2018 launch, which breaks down to $78 million in equity and $25 million in debt.
In announcing the raise last year, Emotive said its plans were to use part of that funding to triple its workforce and opened satellite offices in Boston and Atlanta.
“In our view, the best-positioned companies in any broader downturn are the profitable ones. The ones that own their destiny,” Zatulove said. “We’ve positioned ourselves financially to control our destiny and be secure throughout this uncertain time in history.”
This is a developing story. Have a tip? Contact Samson Amore at samsonamore@dot.LA or on Signal at (401).287.5543.
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Samson Amore
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.
https://twitter.com/samsonamore
samsonamore@dot.la
'We’re Running Out of Ore on Earth': Astroforge Targets April for Test Asteroid Refining Mission
02:00 AM | February 13, 2023
Photo: Astroforge
One of the most-used elements in industrial work on Earth is disappearing.
Popular for industrial use because of its resistance to corrosion and heat, platinum sells for over $1,000 an ounce and is in everything from wedding bands to medical devices to a number of auto parts.
And retrieving what little of the element does remain, will only exacerbate the ongoing climate crisis – resource extraction was the source of half the world’s carbon emissions and 80% of its biodiversity loss in 2019 and that number has likely only risen.
The problem’s been known for awhile; back in 2016 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology predicted demand would outpace supply of platinum and palladium. At that time, the college estimated we’d run out of platinum by 2050, a mere 27 years from now.
There’s also the issue that what platinum remains is in the hands of powers adversarial to the U.S.
Russia accounts for up to 30% of the world’s palladium supply, and up to 10% of its platinum, and its war in Ukraine has pushed export prices higher. MIT also estimated that China, another stockpiler of industrial metals, could stop selling its platinum stores to the greater globe as soon as 2034.
So what is there to do?
The answer could lie thousands of miles from our planet, in deep space, according to Astroforge CEO and former Virgin Orbit veteran Matt Gialich. Gialich is certain that in the near future, it’ll be commonplace for companies to operate refineries in space that can sort and send back elements crucial for construction on earth.
“We know that these concentrations are super high in space,” Gialich said. He said Astroforge is starting with platinum metals, but it does have “a future roadmap that’s much, much bigger than that,” but wouldn’t share more about what other materials the company hopes to mine in space. It’s reminiscent of the old California Gold Rush – the minute you tell someone there’s platinum in them there asteroids, others with means will want to rush in first.
Astroforge is developing technology to mine and refine minerals in deep space. The company will face a vital test in its mission to mine asteroids for minerals this April, when it tests its in-space refinery technology for the first time.
In particular, Astroforge is looking at retrieving palladium and platinum from asteroids. The shrinking store of these metals makes it easier to understand why going to space to mine more might not be such a far-fetched plan.
Gialich pointed out the emissions problem and noted, “part of that is platinum group mining… not all, but a big part of it. When it comes to mining metals, there’s just no way to solve that; you can do things to reduce it, but we’re running out of ore on the earth as we continuously mine.”
He noted that a while ago, it wasn’t feasible to undertake these sorts of missions, but said that mission price continues to drop as more companies enter the private space race and offer rideshare missions for lower and lower costs.
“As we continue to run out of ore and as access to space becomes cheaper, we think we're actually past the inflection point of when this makes more economic sense to do,” Gialich said.
But, it’ll take a lot of cash and crafty partnerships – NASA spent $800 million to retrieve only 60 grams during a similar project. Two other space mining firms, Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, were bought out before reaching their goals. This is why Astroforge raised $13 million in May, but it’ll likely need much more than that for future missions and anticipates future fundraises. Gialich wouldn’t disclose if Astroforge has any customers signed up for future missions or to buy space ore yet.
This upcoming mission in April will see Astroforge’s small in-orbit refinery hitch a ride to space on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, in partnership with British small satellite launcher OrbAstro. The plan is to test the refinery capabilities in space first by supplying the refinery with an “asteroid-like material” (so, a rock, but not an asteroid) that the tech will then vaporize and sort into its elemental components while in orbit. It’s a vital test of if the refinery can function in space, and if all succeeds, a critical part towards Gialich’s overall mission – becoming the first company to successfully mine asteroids.
“We have gone to asteroids before,” Gialich said. “We've landed on them, we've taken samples from them, we’ve done every step of the way, scientifically, multiple times. We just haven’t added that refining piece in, but that is actually very simple. You can prove that out on Earth, there’s not a big difference [in space].”
And Gialich really, really wants to be first. After all, whoever is,will have their pick of lucrative contracts as other private and public players rush in to gather up their share of the valuable asteroid minerals. NASA is leading a mission to explore an asteroid that some have joked could be worth $10 quintillion.
“We’re going to be the first commercial company to explore that frontier,” he promised. “There’s enough space out there for a ton of companies to exist and be successful. We’re still going to do it first.”
That, of course, remains to be seen. The SpaceX launch doesn’t yet have a window open. But when it does, it’ll be a crucial test of Astroforge’s system. And, it could eventually lead to an overhaul of our centuries-old mining system that might very well one day help the planet. At least, that’s Gialich’s overall goal.
“We’re going to save the planet, and to save the planet we need to have big, audacious ideas that really solve a critical problem we have on Earth, and we have a resource problem on Earth,” Gialich said. “Now that we’re a globalized world, there’s nowhere else to grow. There’s not an option here, this has to be done.”
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Samson Amore
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.
https://twitter.com/samsonamore
samsonamore@dot.la
There's a Seven-Story Tall Statue of Elon Musk in Tulsa (Really)
08:23 AM | May 22, 2020
twitter.com
Elon Musk is back in the news cycle, but this time it wasn't because of his tweets.
Tulsa has transformed its iconic 75-foot-tall Golden Driller statue into a likeness of the billionaire entrepreneur in an almost superhero-style pose with the Tesla emblem emblazoned across his chest. The city gave the statue, built in the 1960s as a tribute to the oil industry, a makeover to entice Musk to build a new factory in the Oklahoma metropolis.
Musk is reportedly considering both Tulsa and Austin as locations to build the upcoming "Cybertruck" utility vehicle. The factory could produce as many as 10,000 jobs, and become the largest employer in Tulsa, reported the Tulsa World. And, given that Musk is a frequent user of Twitter, the city's politicians have taken to social media to call attention to the statue as a way to entice Musk into building a plant there.
The Golden Driller got a #tesla facelift today complete with an #ElonMusk mask #tulsa more at… https://t.co/hlsFwuVx7J— Mike Simons (@Mike Simons) 1589929202
Tulsa is a city that doesn’t stifle entrepreneurs - we revere them! Golden @elonmusk is now the 6th-tallest statue… https://t.co/WL7PO9WK7t— G.T. Bynum (@G.T. Bynum) 1589979171
If @Tesla and #Tulsa team up to change the world, it would only be right to #BuyLocal. #cybertruck @elonmusk https://t.co/cQJ5baF1iN— G.T. Bynum (@G.T. Bynum) 1589739123
No word on if Musk has seen the publicity campaign.
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Joe Bel Bruno
Joe Bel Bruno is dot.LA's editor in chief, overseeing newsroom operations and the organization's editorial team. He joins after serving as managing editor of Variety magazine and as senior leadership in spots at the Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal and Associated Press. He's a veteran journalist that loves breaking big stories, living back in L.A., a good burrito and his dog Gladys — not necessarily in that order.
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