Executive coaching for employees is complicated and emotional - TechCrunch

Welcome to Startups Weekly, a fresh human-first take on this week’s startup news and trends.

BetterUp, a reskilling and coaching platform for employees before and beyond the C-suite, is getting in touch with its emotions.

This week, the richly funded unicorn startup announced a pair of acquisitions in the emotional artificial intelligence and people management space: Motive and Impraise.

BetterUp announced its acquisitions after a busy stint, which included passing $100 million in annual recurring revenue, expanding to Europe, and hitting 1 million individual coaching sessions on its platform. ?

It’s par for the course to see a growth-stage startup use milestones to inorganically expand through acquisitions.

BetterUp claims that it pioneered the category of coaching by focusing on employees, not just C-suite executives.

With these acquisitions, it’s shifting how that coaching looks and lives.

Like Motive, Impraise is a step outside of the traditional boundaries of what coaching looks like. .

“It doesn’t actually happen in coaching sessions; change happens after.”.

In some ways, these acquisitions are BetterUp admitting that coaching for all employees has to be an end-to-end solution that requires everyone in the company – from HR to managers – to be involved.

“If you don’t have the data platform, if you don’t have the outcomes.

Intuit confirms $12B deal to buy Mailchimp.

Here’s what to know: Part of Mailchimp’s strategy as an untraditional tech company included not giving Mailchimp employees equity, and prioritizing profit-sharing as well as higher salaries.

It sounds good, until your startup exits for $12 billion and you realize you don’t have any equity in the business that you helped build.

My scoop this week uncovered that Casper, the direct-to-consumer mattress company, had another round of layoffs that impacted two dozen employees, as well as its CMO, CTO and COO.

Here’s what to know: One founder in the direct-to-consumer space, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to her lack of direct knowledge with the company said that Casper’s layoffs could also be a response to Apple’s iOS 14.5 update, which will crack down on apps that track users’ data without permission.