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The editorial board is debating whether people are willing to pay anywhere from $8 to $20 a month for their blue checks on Twitter. Alex’s opinion was particularly sharp… “Not in the mood to fund your vanity project,” indeed. — Christine and hey
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Startups and VCs
TouchBistro, an iPad-based restaurant management platform, secured $110 million in growth funding from Francisco Partners to accelerate its growth, expand its product pipeline and make some strategic acquisitions. Christine reports.
How’s that for some dodgy rhymes:
Prepare for the payback: Inflation can wreck R&D tax bills
Photo credit: Fancy/Veer/Corbis (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
The US federal government has provided tax credits for R&D for decades, but a big change set to happen this year will impact all startups.
Previously, R&D expenditure could be accounted for in advance, but now “that expenditure has to be amortized over 5 years for domestic research and 15 years for foreign research,” according to tax attorney Andrew Leahey.
Because so many startups “cover the majority of their R&D expenses in their first year of operation,” many could wait “the equivalent of a lifetime” to recoup those expenses.
High inflation has stalled efforts to lift the amortization rule, so Leahey shares several tactics companies can use “to prepare for the possibility of the rule taking effect.”
Three more from the TC+ team:
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BigTech Inc.
As always, we have all Twitter news ready to be posted. We promise to keep it to a minimum today because there’s more fantastic news to share. However, we would like to point out that Elon Musk now likes to flesh out his train of thought in tweet form, so the news changes when the wind blows.
Here’s what you need to know today: Musk continues to talk about his plans for Twitter Blue and ad-free news articles (both from Ivan), while amanda reports on the company’s Chief Customer Officer, Sarah Personette, who resigned today. The move is quite surprising given that she tweeted positively about a conversation with Musk last week. Meanwhile, things are happening at Mastodon Sarah writes.
And we have five more for you: