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Rebecca Bellan is back this morning for an episode packed with M&A talk, how one YouTuber succeeded at the creator economy, why Twitch is still losing money and an autonomous vehicle company that is making a comeback.\n\nFirst up, Rebecca took a look at fintech giant Stripe\u2019s acquisition of four-year-old competitor Lemon Squeezy. The buy will allow Stripe to beef up its merchant of record selling \u201cin a big way,\u201d according to Stripe CEO Patrick Collison. Deal terms weren\u2019t disclosed, but Lemon Squeezy has a reputation for turning down other offers, including a $50 million Series A. The company\u2019s founder said he was holding out for the right partner to take the business to the next level, and apparently Stripe was it.\n\nThis comment led Rebecca to explore the idea of M&A as an exit strategy. Does this practice create perverse incentives in venture capital, where investors are becoming more risk-averse and looking for a surer path to regaining capital, at the long-term expense of competition? Other startups have turned down such opportunities so they can go it alone. Just look at Wiz\u2019s decision not to get acquired by Google for $23 billion, something we discussed on last Friday\u2019s episode. \n\nNext, Rebecca touched on MatPat, the first big YouTuber to successfully exit his company, Theorist Media. Matthew Patrick turned his successful video series, The Game Theorists, into a full-fledged media business called Theorist, with 40 million subscribers across channels. But he was getting tired of the ceaseless content uploading, and found a way to convince investors that the business could go on without him. Now, he\u2019s in Capitol Hill educating politicians about what creators need to succeed as small businesses. \n\nSpeaking of creators and acquisitions, Rebecca pulled up a Wall Street Journal report that found that after 10 years, Twitch is still losing Amazon money. Amazon bought Twitch for $1 billion in 2014, but the company still isn\u2019t profitable. And will it ever be? Twitch in 2023 generated about $667 million in ad revenue and $1.3 billion in commerce revenue, but that accounted for less than 0.5% of Amazon\u2019s total 2023 revenue. Amazon defended its buy, saying Twitch has a long-term path to profitability. But broader trends that seem to favor short-form videos over watching someone play an entire video game live say otherwise. \n\nFinally, while we\u2019re on the subject of comebacks, autonomous delivery startup Nuro is gearing up for one of its own. Nuro has been quiet for the past year or so after two big rounds of layoffs. Once the darling of the AV industry with over $2 billion in funding from high-profile investors, Nuro was burning money fast as it tried to scale and commercialize all at once. Now, Nuro is back with better AI and a new vehicle, the R3, which it will be testing later this year in the Bay Area and Houston.