Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a single topic, think about a question and unpack the rest. This week, Natasha and Alex asked: How do founders hold two ideas in their heads:
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Sophie Alcorn Contributor Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneur Immigration Services.” She connects people with the businesses and opportunities that expand their lives. More posts by this contributor Dear Sophie: Questions about green cards
Fresh off a $17.4 million fundraise in May, GetHenry announced it is changing its name to Cycle, reflecting both the fact that the company makes bicycles and tricycles, and highlighting the company’s green sustainability ambitions. “The new name and strong brand identity fit with our mission to decarbonise the commercial transportation sector. We are focusing
Meatable, a Dutch biotech company developing cultivated “lab-grown” meat products, has revealed images of its inaugural pork sausage for the first time. Founded in 2018, Meatable is one of several companies developing cell-cultured meat products, one of several solutions touted to help combat climate change. Countless cultivated meat companies have entered the fray and attracted venture
Today during an event focused on Alexa developer and partner news, Amazon announced new features and integrations, including a collection of APIs and software development kits (SDKs) aimed at making Alexa more versatile. They come a month after the company demoed forthcoming and experimental Alexa features at its annual re:Mars conference in Las Vegas, including
Ford Motor Co. will not be selling its $8 billion stake in electric truck maker Rivian right now, CEO Jim Farley told Bloomberg’s Emily Chang in an exclusive interview. The Ford chief did leave the option open for the near future, however, saying everything is “on the table.” ——– Like this video? Subscribe to Bloomberg
Everyone loves an underdog, which is why investors and tech journalists are so fond of discussing startups that launched during the Great Recession of 2008, like Airbnb, Uber, WhatsApp, Mailchimp, Square and Venmo. It’s possible that your pre-seed, pre-revenue startup could similarly defy gravity, but in July 2022, it’s going to be difficult to find
Increasingly, absent a federal framework, U.S. states are passing privacy and security laws aimed at protecting people’s data. The California Consumer Privacy Act is perhaps the best known, followed by the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, the New York Privacy Act and the Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act. While the laws are a step in
Google is expanding its photo and canvas prints service to Europe and Canada. Google has offered printed photo books in the U.S. since 2017, a service that started rolling out in Europe the following year. And then in 2019, Google started offering photo prints and canvas prints in the U.S. Starting today, these two additional
Xiaomi said on Wednesday it has shipped over 200 million smartphones in India to date, demonstrating just how large of a presence it has marked in the world’s second largest phone market in just eight years. The Chinese giant, which began selling smartphones in India in 2014, revealed the figure at a media conference on
Conversational commerce isn’t exactly a new phenomenon, with countless companies using live chats, messaging apps, chatbots, voice assistants and more to encourage consumers to part with their cash. As part of that broader movement, the mighty WhatsApp, a dominant force in the messaging world, has been pushing deeper into the business arena with myriad tools
Platforms, not point solutions, might lead the way Kyle Wiggers 14 hours The market for HR tech, which runs the gamut from workforce management to applicant recruitment and tracking systems, has proven remarkably resilient in the face of both pandemic and economic headwinds. In fact, some would argue that it’s precisely because of these headwinds
The process for retailers and brands to liquidate excess inventory hasn’t changed very much, if at all, and while some retailers were able to build operational infrastructure to service the off-price channels, it continues to be a constant pain point. Brands overproduce more than $500 billion of goods annually, and all of that excess inventory
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. It’s hot all over the world, and even hotter in today’s newsletter. We’ve procured a steaming pile of TechCrunch deliciousness for you to devour. If you can believe it, it is only
Crop One Holdings and Emirates Flight Catering announced this week they opened Emirates Crop One, what they say is “the world’s largest vertical farm.” The over 330,000-square-foot facility is located in Dubai, United Arab Emirates near Al Maktoum International Airport at Dubai World Central. It has the capacity to produce over 2 million pounds of
In today’s earnings call, Netflix confirmed the reports that have been circulating since last week that it is renegotiating deals to allow the streamer to put content on its cheaper advertising-supported plan, the arrival of which on the platform has been moved to early 2023. “The vast majority of what people watch on Netflix we
Opendoor opened the door, so to speak, to the idea of applying technology to the concept of house flipping to both scale the opportunity and make it considerably more efficient. While its share price is being hammered at the moment in a wider downturn for tech stocks overall, it’s a strong enough concept that it’s
From Project Ara to Wave, Google has a rich history of bailing on neat ideas when the going gets tough. Yet unlike those forgone experiments, augmented-reality glasses apparently aren’t doomed to rest in Google’s metaphorical graveyard. Instead, the advertising company is tip-toeing its spiritual successor to Glass back into the wild. After teasing the smart
The days of the Galaxy Note Unpacked events are sadly gone, but Samsung’s foldables are more than happy to fill a phablet-sized hole in the company’s annual release schedule. Over the last couple of years, the company has made good on its promise to fully commit to the form factor, and we expect to see
Lori Cashman Contributor Lori Cashman is a managing partner of Victress Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in high-growth companies meeting the needs of the evolving consumer market. In the world of venture capital, we’re always talking about cash. You hear phrases like “cash burn,” “cash runway” and “cash on hand” every day
An investor in Instacart, Capital Group, has repriced its shares in the company, lowering its estimation of the value of the online grocery delivery service. The news follows other, similar repricings by companies like Fidelity, which also own a stake in the decacorn. It’s really not surprising that one more investor agrees Instacart’s 2021 valuation
As the crypto industry continues to grow, regulators across the world are looking for operational and legal frameworks to guide their actions to more effectively monitor the industry. The U.S. government in particular, which has been criticized for moving slowly on crypto rule-making in the past, has been looking at the sector with a renewed
While the venture capital world slows, climate tech is bucking the trend as startups in the space continue to ink deals at a record pace. In the process, the sector is climbing the ranks. In the first quarter of this year, five climate tech deals made it into CB Insight’s top 10 lists covering seed
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced today that the company is introducing a new searchable and dynamic map experience on Instagram. The updated map experience will allow users to explore popular tagged locations around them and filter location results by specific categories including restaurants, cafes and beauty salons. Prior to this update, the map experience on
Russia fined Google 21.1 billion rubles ($374 million) on Monday for repeatedly failing to “remove prohibited information” — content related to the country’s invasion and subsequent war in Ukraine. The country’s telecommunication watchdog Roskomnadzor cited a court order and said Google (particularly YouTube) didn’t take down content that discredited “the Armed Forces of the Russian
BlockFi Founder & CEO Zac Prince joins Emily Chang on the news that the crypto platform agreed to pay $100 million to the Securities and Exchange Commission and state regulators over allegations it illegally offered a product that pays customers high interest rates to lend out their digital tokens.
Some of digital health’s best-capitalized startups are struggling. A string of healthcare unicorns have announced layoffs over the past few weeks, including Ro, Cerebral, Forward and Calibrate. While these companies are all targeting different corners of the healthcare world — from direct-to-consumer healthcare to virtual mental health support — the layoffs show a similar response
The pandemic has triggered more demand for online shopping and fueled many smaller retailers to establish their own online offerings. Japanese commerce enabler AnyMind, which helps brands and influencers’ online operations, has closed a ¥5 billion (approximately $36 million) Series D round on the back of that boost to make additional acquisitions in Japan and
Bloom, a Sudan-based fintech that offers a high-yield savings account and adjacent digital banking services, has raised a $6.5 million seed round. This investment is coming after the startup’s undisclosed pre-seed round last year. This financing welcomed participation from fintech giant Visa, Y Combinator, U.S.-based VCs Global Founders Capital (GFC) and Goodwater Capital and UAE-based
Microsoft has confirmed that it won’t be introducing a previously announced new policy that would effectively ban developers from selling open source software on the Windows app store. Section 10.8.7 of its Microsoft Store Policies document, which was updated in mid-June and had been due to come into effect on Saturday (July 16), had said