Gm. What would you do if you were given 5 dollars, 2 hours, and were told to get as much ROI as possible?

That's what a Stanford business professor tasked her class with in 2009.

The winner was a team that ignored the $5 dollars and instead sold their 3-minutes of presentation time as an ad slot to a local pizza joint for $650 resulting in a 12,900% return.

 Always remember to think outside the box. 

FRESH POWDER

Looking at three funds that recently topped up their coffers. 

HEALTHCARE 

From scrolling to scrubs

You know that feeling when two people start dating and it's an absolute head-scratcher as to what they see in each other? That’s what we’re experiencing after TikTok's parent company ByteDance purchased one of China’s largest private hospital chains for $1.5 billion.

According to Bloomberg, ByteDance has taken full ownership of Amcare Healthcare, a Chinese company that runs primarily women’s and children’s hospitals in cities across the country. As to why ByteDance made the purchase…

That’s a little less clear

For a company that specializes in making us scroll till our feet fall asleep while on the toilet, the leap into healthcare is definitely a curveball. But, the lack of synergy may be exactly what ByteDance liked about the deal.

• Regulators have been working to curb “disorderly capital expansion,” in China since the end of 2020 including shutting down similar-sized deals involving Tencent and Alibaba. 

• But Beijing may have more lenient about letting ByteDance’s deal slide considering how different its core business is from Amcare.  

Getting into healthcare has also been a popular move for big tech companies recently—less than a month ago Amazon acquired primary care provider One Medical for $3.9 billion. While it is also unclear exactly what Amazon plans to do with its acquisition, the prospect of updating old, analog services for the internet age represents a huge financial opportunity for whoever can pull it off. 

ByteDance could be the one: It already has a healthcare app called Xiaohe that offers services like online consultations and hospital appointments, similar to competitor Alibaba Health. But ByteDance also has a secret weapon in Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok that hit 600 million daily active users in 2020. If it does nothing more than insert a few promotional clips for its new healthcare business between videos, it could be a very fruitful partnership indeed.

CRYPTO

Tornados have feelings too

On Monday, the US Treasury Department added crypto transaction platform Tornado Cash to its naughty list banning all Americans from using it. Tornado was built to anonymize funds and identities of users who want to protect their privacy. If that sounds like the perfect money laundering system, you’d be right. 

• An estimated $1.5 billion in proceeds from crimes have been laundered through the site according to blockchain analytics firm Elliptic, enough to illicit the hardline response from the US. 

Retail investors are caught in the crossfire

Even though Uncle Sam is targeting criminals with the ban, the sanctions affect ordinary investors as well. It is now illegal for any person to transact on the platform and anyone who violates the Treasury’s orders could face fines up to $330,000 and even jail time. 

• To protest against the sanctions, someone has been trolling celebs by sending very small amounts of ETH from a recently sanctioned wallet to people like Logan Paul and Jimmy Fallon in an attempt to cause some issues for them. It ain’t much, but the goal is to show how harmful a blanket ban can be. 

Zoom out: Many crypto experts are concerned about the precedent this sets. Historically the US has been able to distinguish bad actors from neutral tools, but now it’s crossed a line in the eyes of the crypto community by going after a specific software platform that’s used by lots of regular folks. 

QUICK HITS

Seed Round

Stat: It’s not just Jack Ma who’s out of a job these days—Alibaba laid off nearly 10,000 employees in Q2 according to its latest filing. It’s another sizable blunder for the Chinese e-commerce giant, which has seen it stock price cut in half over the past year amid rising inflation, material costs, geopolitical tension, and Beijing’s crackdown on its private sector.

Story we’re watching: Businesses are already starting to leverage DALL-E 2’s scary-good text-to-image system to upgrade their creative chops. Stitch Fix is using it to come up with new designs for clothing pieces (pictured above) while editors at Cosmopolitan are tapping DALL-E 2 to whip up magazine covers. But the “artificial” in AI may be indicative of the product’s limitations: the system’s human models are often disproportionate and the AI doesn’t always listen to instructions. 

Rabbit hole: How the physics of nothing underlies everything (Quanta Magazine).

WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON

• Biden signed the bipartisan CHIPS bill which includes $52.7 billion to support domestic semiconductor production.

• Haus, a popular Californian aperitif startup, is up for sale after its CEO reported its Series A fell through. 

• Walmart is considering launching its own streaming service, Walmart+.

• Apple expects to ship 1.5 million VR headsets at $2,000 a pop in 2023.

• Coinbase badly whiffed on earnings reporting a 63% decline in revenue.

THREE LIES AND A HEADLINE

Three of these headlines come from the satirical news publication The Onion, while one is actually real. 

Can you pick out the truth among the fakes?

1. "Dua Lipa named the honorary Ambassador of Kosovo"

2. "Study finds fewer millennials choosing to become good parents"

3. "Kim Kardashian vows to never forget incredible publicity she shared with Pete" 

4. "Strong jobs report underscores just how much of a loser unemployed man is"

LAYOFFS TRACKER

Notable layoffs this week:

Groupon: 500 people (15%)

Linktree: 48 people (17%)

Loggi: 540 people (15%)

FOUNDERS CORNER

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♻️ Hacker News on “the next big thing that few people are talking about.” 

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THREE HEADLINES ANSWER

It’s 1. Congrats Dua.