Daily Crunch

To get a roundup of ZebethMedia’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Greetings from the ZebethMedia office! Yes, it turns out we have an office, even though we haven’t seen the inside of it for a good long stretch. We are here doing some stretches ahead of Disrupt kicking off tomorrow. Some of us have gotten to take a sneaky peek inside the venue, and it looks amazing. “Squeeeeee!” as (some of) the kids say these days.  — Christine and Haje The ZebethMedia Top 3 “That, that, that don’t kill me, can only make me stronger”: Two of our top stories for today centered on the same topic — Kanye West, who now goes by Ye, surprising us all by announcing he was going to buy the conservative social media site Parler. Manish has the basics on the deal. More on Ye: Meanwhile, Darrell takes a look at how similar the deal for Ye to buy Parler is to Elon Musk’s deal to buy Twitter. Hint: billionaire tantrums. Flipping over the metaverse: Manish had yet another chart-topper today. Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart unveiled Flipverse, its metaverse shopping experience that is even gamified so users can capture loyalty points called Supercoins. Startups and VC Can we just have a little moment and celebrate Mary Ann and her fantastic fintech newsletter, The Interchange? She puts the Daily Crunch team to shame with her deep analysis and summary of what’s moving and shaking in the world of finance, and it’s always an incredible read. This week’s edition (“Even decacorns have their challenge”) was particularly brilliant. Check it out, and if you want to see the whole backlog, there’s a clicky-link for that, too. We know we have a whole section for TC+ below, but we particularly wanted to highlight  Natasha M’s piece about a slew of CFOs at high-profile companies quitting, and what that says about the overall ecosystem. In Are CFOs OK? (Answer: Yes, but CEOs? That’s complicated), she breaks it down in classic Natasha style. Ugh, we love our co-workers. Can you tell? Let’s dig through the pile of news and see what else there is: 2023 VC predictions: Finding an exit from the ‘messy middle’   Image Credits: Artur Debat (opens in a new window) / Getty Images Eric Tarczynski, managing partner and founder of Contrary Capital, says we are entering a “messy middle” era for venture capital: “Companies can no longer raise $5 million to $10 million seed rounds with nothing but a deck and the assumption that revenue multiples will skyrocket beyond historical norms,” he writes in a TC+ guest post. Looking ahead to 2023, Tarczynski foresees an environment where “the VC landscape has started to bifurcate” as “slow M&A activity and no IPOs” and “good companies in ‘safe’ industries” temper investor expectations. Three more from the TC+ team: ZebethMedia+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription! Big Tech Inc. If you love shopping and love shopping with discounts, PayPal has some news for you. The payments giant replaces its Honey Gold rewards program with PayPal Rewards, which Sarah writes “allows customers to redeem their points for cash, gift cards or PayPal shopping credits. With the new PayPal Rewards, consumers will be able to track and redeem their points directly inside the PayPal app, and will have new ways to earn.” And we have five more for you:

To get a roundup of ZebethMedia’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Hot damn, it’s happening: A bunch of the ZebethMedia team are on airplanes, aeroplanes and other spellings of flying vessels to come join us in San Francisco for Disrupt. To say that we are excited would be using altogether too few syllables. Lauren S made us a user’s guide to ZebethMedia Disrupt along with a guide to all the receptions, parties and other cool extracurriculars. See you soon! — Christine and Haje The ZebethMedia Top 3 What’s another word for Synonym?: Ever heard of a “fermentation farm”? Well you have now. Christine covered Synonym Biotechnologies’ pre-seed round, with big backer Andreessen Horowitz, in which the company plans to build giant fermentation farms so nonpharmaceutical companies can mass-produce bioproducts like dairy proteins. A rose by any other name: “Ad,” “Sponsored,” whatever you want to call it, Google is making it so when you perform a mobile search, you will definitely know if it is some sponsored content or an organic search result. Ivan has more. Legless for a while longer: We were promised legs, but now Ivan writes that it could be another year for any Meta leg-equipped avatars to appear in Horizon Worlds. Startups and VC Even the largest landfills in Indonesia are at (or nearing) capacity, and the government has set an ambitious target of 30% waste reduction by 2025, reports Catherine.  Waste4Change is one of the companies that wants to help by increasing rates of recycling and enabling better waste management. The startup, which currently manages more than 8,000 tons of waste every year, announced today that it has raised $5 million in Series A funding, co-led by AC Ventures and PT Barito Mitra Investama. And we have five more for you: DIY: 5 ways disruptive component startups can win over OEMs   Image Credits: Alan Rubio (opens in a new window) / Getty Images Ori Mor writes that hardware startup founders have a uniquely hard time. Only a small fraction of tech investors will even take meetings with them, and building product pipelines is often an irregular, even chaotic process. Instead of relying on sales and marketing teams to build a customer base for his hardware components startup, Mor’s company started building devices that used his company’s tech. “There’s no point rushing when building a hardware startup,” says Mor. “Instead, start by making just a single prototype that you can use to show OEMs.” Three more from the TC+ team: ZebethMedia+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription! Big Tech Inc. Rebecca got the scoop on Sono Motors’ new Sion solar electric vehicle and some face time with Whoopi Goldberg (pictures to prove it). Though the family-friendly vehicle comes in at $25,000, Rebecca points out that the interior is roomier than it looks from the outside, but also that no cup holders in the back might not go over with some American families. And we have five more for you: More layoffs: Jagmeet has more on Momentive Global’s layoff announcement of 11% of its workforce. If you’re thinking, “Who?” that would be SurveyMonkey’s parent company. Real estate valuation technology company Clear Capital is also reducing its staff by 27%, reports Andrew. Get the popcorn ready: Peacock is making the “Real Housewives” franchise its guinea pig as it tests out some new interactive features that will give viewers extended clips and interviews, Lauren reports. Don’t @me: Meanwhile, over at Twitter, the company is developing a way for users to control who can mention them, writes Aisha. It puts the lotion on its robotic skin: Brian reports that Touchlab, which won the TC Sessions: Robotics pitch-off event a few months ago, began piloting its robotic skin sensors in a hospital setting. Time, time, time, see what’s become of me: The owner of the Shein fashion e-commerce site was fined $1.9 million for not properly handling a 2018 data breach that compromised millions of users’ information, Rita writes.

To get a roundup of ZebethMedia’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. We just keep getting more excited about Disrupt, but it turns out there’s other stuff going on in the world. A lot of other stuff, in fact; it’s one of those days where keeping this newsletter to a manageable length was extra tricky. Here’s what we came up with. Enjoy! — Christine and Haje The ZebethMedia Top 3 You, only holographic: Never mind the metaverse, Google is planning to test out its 3D video calling booths in the real world, Sarah writes. Called Project Starline, the booths use a bunch of cameras, sensors and 3D imagery to create a lifelike calling experience without that pesky headset. Can I get a scoop?: Manish received confirmation that decentralized exchange company Uniswap Labs raised $165 million in funding to value the company at $1.66 billion. This is a follow-up to his scoop from last month. Tweet, tweet: Catherine reported on Redbird’s $7.6 million raise that has the analytics operating system soaring now that it can continue making data even more accessible to nontechnical users. Startups and VC Any robotic system worth its salt has the potential to effect change, but some of the most exciting robotics breakthroughs are happening in the exoskeleton space right now, Brian reports. A team out of Stanford’s Biomechatronics Laboratory just published the results of years-long research. The extent of the robot boot’s real-world testing has thus far been limited to treadmills. The researchers behind it, however, are readying it for life beyond the lab doors. There’s a new VC fund in town — at least if you live in Paris, Romain quips. Meet Resonance, a new $150 million single-LP fund backed by Otium Capital, which is Pierre-Edouard Stérin’s family office. A ton of awesome news on the site today, but here’s five that caught our eye: 6 tips for launching a blockchain startup Image Credits: Kinga Krzeminska (opens in a new window) It will take much more than a downturn in the public markets, record inflation and global instability to get between blockchain founders and their dreams. Unfortunately, “having a solid roadmap, real-world use cases and a war chest are only a small part of a blockchain startup’s survival strategy,” advises Wolfgang Rückerl, co-founder and CEO of Istari Vision and Entity. Although it’s true that many of the skills required to launch an early-stage startup also apply to web3 companies, “the road to achieving success in the blockchain industry is paved differently,” he writes. Three more from the TC+ team: ZebethMedia+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription! Big Tech Inc. Apple Card holders will get a side of Goldman Sachs as the two paired up to unveil a high-yield savings account, Sarah reported. She writes that this is “a big step” by both the consumer tech giant and investment bank to offer more traditional banking-like services to customers. You want thingamabobs? I got five for you:

To get a roundup of ZebethMedia’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. If you’re joining us at Disrupt next week, here’s an incentive for turning up early — we’re recording our podcasts live onstage, and you can be in the audience! Fun fun fun! — Christine and Haje The ZebethMedia Top 3 Automation nation: Jacob Bank knows what time it is. Paul writes that after selling his last startup to Google in 2015, Bank is back with Relay, a tool that wants to give people back some time by automating mundane tasks, particularly when it comes to the task we all love to hate — meetings. “Bring your ideas to life”: Microsoft’s Ignite conference was today (get the nitty-gritty in Big Tech Inc.), and Kyle has been following all things DALL-E, including Microsoft’s investment in the AI-powered system for its new Designer and Image Creator tools. Cuts run deep: Manish reports on the latest for Indian edtech giant Byju’s, which said today it would be eliminating another large chunk of jobs, this time 2,500, writing that the move was in efforts to “clear its debts and other balances in recent months.” Startups and VC Back in 2019, Microsoft launched Dapr, an open source project that aimed to make it easier for developers to build microservices on top of Kubernetes. Diagrid raised $24 million to launch a fully managed Dapr service, Frederic reports. DataGrail has always been focused on helping companies comply with the growing world of privacy regulation. Today, it’s building on that with a new automated risk monitoring solution that helps companies build third-party application risk assessments quickly. While they were at it, the startup also announced a $45 million Series C investment, Ron reports. And here’s a smattering of a few more for your enjoyment and delight: Dear Sophie: How can I protect my H-1B and green card if I am laid off? Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/ZebethMedia In our Dear Sophie column, our friendly immigration lawyer answers a question from Leap of Faith: “I am considering leaving my current, steady job for a job with a big name in tech. I’m excited, but nervous. I’ve been hearing that you can lose your H-1B status if you are laid off. Is there any way I can protect my immigration status while making a bold job move?” Three more from the TC+ team, with a sprinkling of lyrics for good luck: ZebethMedia+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription! Big Tech Inc. Check out what happened when Taylor’s virtual torso went to Meta Connect 2022, where Meta announces legs (as Lucas reported), and Amanda shows you what you might have missed. Meanwhile, as we noted above, Microsoft held its Ignite conference today, where Brian, Frederic and Kyle found lots to write on. For example, hybrid work setups, more Apple integrations, avatars for Teams, new Power Automate features, invite-only access to DALL-E 2 for select Azure OpenAI Service customers, automated document and data processing services, updates to Microsoft Edge, new cloud security services and upgrades to Microsoft’s suite of laptops and desktop computers. In other news:

To get a roundup of ZebethMedia’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Hello, humans, and the hundreds of AIs that are probably reading this as well. May your day be full of joy. If you can’t feel joy today, be kind to yourself. Perhaps tomorrow is the day for joy. That goes for both humans and AIs, come to think of it. — Christine and Haje The ZebethMedia Top 3 Hope you have a great Meta Day: That’s right, we had a team monitoring the comings-and-goings of today’s Meta Connect developer conference, where we are sure Mark Zuckerberg was passionately talking about how to make the metaverse “a real boy,” and its next big bets. See the Big Tech Inc. section for more. Help us help you: Human resources technology has gotten a lot of action in recent years as companies went into remote mode. Factorial is one of the companies reaping the benefits. Ingrid reports that the company brought in $120 million in new funding that doubles its valuation into unicorn territory as it builds out enterprise-quality HR for small businesses. And in this corner…: NocoDB is throwing its hat into the ring as a viable contender for Airtable, offering an open source, no-code platform that connects to production databases. Paul has more. Startups and VC NextView Ventures announced today that it has raised a $200 million venture fund, its largest to date, split between an early-stage vehicle, at $135 million, and an opportunity vehicle, at $65 million, Natasha M reports. The fund also brings on Stephanie Palmeri, a founding partner of All Raise and former partner at Uncork, as an equal partner. Indian startups raised $3 billion in the quarter that ended in September, down 57% from the previous quarter and 80% year over year. The figures are remarkable for many reasons, Manish reports. The most obvious being that startups are finding it difficult to raise capital at a time when most top-tier funds in India have raised record-large funds this year. And we have another handful of stories. I know I usually just do five, but our little writer-bees were particularly busy over the past 24 hours, so here’s five plus a few bonuses. Wishful thinking at best: Blue-chip VC firm Matrix Partners has long been an investor in software infrastructure Now, Connie reports, it has some questions about web3. She describes a lot of the projects as “wishful thinking.” Fitter, happier, more productive: Ron reports that Quantori is building an app development platform focused on life sciences. Money smarts, gamified: This company wants to improve your credit by gamifying financial literacy, reports Christine. On the sunny side of the street (yeah): Solestial promises solar panels in space for a tenth of the cost and lines up $10 million seed funding, Devin reports. Moar data, moar funds: Nigerian data and intelligence company Stears raises $3.3 million, reports Tage. Look, you just can’t do that: Haje face-palms pretty hard at OG App, wondering what the fledgling startup’s endgame was. Last chance saloon: Wanna come to Disrupt? Well, Lauren S wants to remind you it’s your last week to save on passes to ZebethMedia Disrupt. How to go from popular to profitable during a downturn Image Credits: Patrik Giardino (opens in a new window) / Getty Images Product-led growth startups are like a car with a manual transmission that needs a push to get going: one driver just can’t do it all on their own. According to Nick Mills, whose sales experience includes stints at Stripe, Facebook and CircleCI, “all companies eventually face a similar challenge: To keep growing, sales teams must be hired and a pipeline must be built.” After explaining how to calculate your serviceable addressable market, aka “the piece of that pie you can win right now,” Mills shows how to define product-qualified leads that will get sales engines firing on all cylinders. “Telling investors about your viral user growth is no longer enough,” says Mills. “They want to know how it translates to revenue, resilience and runway.” Three more from the TC+ team: ZebethMedia+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription! Big Tech Inc. We hope you are having a Meta and Google day so far, but if not, we think the following stories will get you in the mood. These are just a few of the gems you will find in our event hub: Not to be outdone, Google announced a bunch of news that the team was here for as well: For those of you ready for some other company news, we are here to deliver: And just like that…: General Motors has gotten into the energy business, Kirsten writes. The car maker’s new business unit is offering a line of energy products targeted at residential, commercial and charging. Why take a cab when you can take a helicopter?: Joby Aviation, an electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft startup (whew!), is partnering with Delta Air Lines to offer home-to-airport transportation for airline customers, beginning in New York and Los Angeles. Rebecca has more.  I’m in a buying mood: Thoma Bravo also continues to be in a buying mood this year, and Ron has kept up with all of the action. This time, Thoma Bravo acquired its third identity company this year with a $2.3 billion ForgeRock deal. We are pleased to meta you — now have a Google day.

To get a roundup of ZebethMedia’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Beep boop, here we go again with another exciting week in tech. Next week is Disrupt, so the ZebethMedia Slack watercooler is full of sartorial advice, much to our surprise and confusion. Oh, and Haje has written more than 20 Pitch Deck Teardowns over on TC+ — and he’s running low on decks to review. Surely he hasn’t scared everyone away quite yet? Here’s a bit more info about what he’s looking for, and instructions for how you can submit your pitch deck for review! See you tomorrow, dear friends! — Christine and Haje The ZebethMedia Top 3 Following suit: Today we have another installment of The OG App news. This time Ivan reports that Google also removed it from the Play Store. You might recall that The OG was promising an ad-free Instagram experience. After Meta said an app like that violated its policies, Apple made the first move and removed it a few weeks ago. The day has finally come: Hulu raised its subscription prices today, reports Lauren. It’s a trap!: “If risks to the software supply chain aren’t a boardroom priority yet, they soon will be,” Endor Labs’ co-founder Varun Badhwar told Kyle. The software supply chain startup emerged from stealth today with $25 million to continue developing its graph analysis tech for learning how dependencies are being used within an organization and creating the appropriate risk indicators. Startups and VC “The crude analogy I’ve been using internally is last year was the party and this year is the hangover. That’s really how it feels to me — that we’re starting to understand the excesses of last year,” says Mark Goldberg of Index Ventures in an interview, featured in Mary Ann’s The Interchange newsletter. “We’ve seen now the retrenchment period after the fact. At Index, we’re probably more aggressively investing in what we think the next generation of fintech companies is going to be right now.” Cloud kitchens became popular during the global pandemic as a way for restaurants to reach their communities when people were not going out as much. One of those was Foodology, a Colombia-based cloud kitchen and virtual restaurant company, which just raised $50 million, Christine reports. And we have five more for you: Growth hacking is really just growth testing Image Credits: Guido Mieth (opens in a new window) / Getty Images “Growth hacking” may not be the best phrase to describe the work required to fine-tune marketing campaigns and systems. In truth, successful marketers iterate constantly, measuring and testing efforts to minimize waste and maximize ROI. “If each test can result in a 1% improvement, you’re well on your way to 100% improvement after running 100 tests,” writes Jonathan Martinez, a self-described “marketing nerd” who has driven growth at Uber, Postmates and Chime. The best way to uncover marketing hacks is by using “stringent experimentation frameworks to run countless A/B tests,” advises Martinez, who shares a RICE (reach, impact, confidence and effort) scoring spreadsheet, along with his thoughts on acquisition and activation growth hacking. “It’s important to remember there’s no such thing as hacking growth. Instead, you should be thinking about how you can run 100 tests to move the needle forward.” Three more from the TC+ team: ZebethMedia+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription! Big Tech Inc. When one Florida company demanded its employee turn on a webcam during the workday so said company could monitor their work, it learned the hard way that hiring someone from overseas and performing video surveillance was in violation of European human rights policies. Haje has more on what happened. ICYMI over the weekend, Twitter locked Kanye West’s account following an antisemitic tweet, Taylor reported. And this was apparently after Elon Musk tweeted a welcome to Ye, who tweeted that he had been removed from Instagram. And we have five more for you:

To get a roundup of ZebethMedia’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Friday! How’s that for brevity in newsletter introductions? Let’s get to it so we can crack open a Liquid Death and let the week sag off into the murky distance of memory sooner rather than later. — Christine and Haje The ZebethMedia Top 3 Uh-oh: Binance, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, confirmed that it found a blockchain bridge breach where hackers made off with $100 million. Carly has more. Evolving elephants to unicorns: Annie reports that Kenya’s tourism-focused startup studio Purple Elephant Ventures raises $1 million pre-seed funding to bring some modernization to the industry. What until you see the picture: Amazon’s Scout makes you just want to go up to it and give it a pat. Unfortunately, you might not get a chance to. After three years unveiling the robot, the delivery giant said that it is cutting back the program, Brian reports. Startups and VC Wildfires have become an ever-increasing threat as houses are built closer together and the growing impacts of climate change wreak havoc on natural landscapes. Entrepreneurs, in response, have started to develop tech meant to minimize the scale and damage of these natural disasters. Convective Capital is a new VC firm looking to back them, and it raised $35 million to do so, Becca reports. Haje got really bored of startups taking liberties with its market sizing, complaining that if you are a car dealership, your total serviceable market isn’t the value of the cars you sell (that’s the SOM for the car manufacturer). Your SOM is the total value of the sales commissions, service plans, aftermarket goods and services and everything else you can actually make money on. And we have five more for you: 7 investors discuss how agtech can solve agriculture’s biggest problems Image Credits: The Creative Drone (opens in a new window) / Getty Images Of all global industries, perhaps none is more susceptible to the dangers of climate change than agriculture. There’s a consensus among reputable scientists that the amount of CO2 we’re putting in the atmosphere is aggravating extreme weather events. How is that impacting the way agtech VCs operate during a downturn? To learn more, we surveyed: Brett Brohl, managing director of Techstars Farm to Fork, and managing partner at Bread and Butter Ventures Monica Varman, partner at G2 Venture Partners Jinesh Shah, managing partner at Omnivore Adam Anders, managing partner at Anterra Capital Ting Ting Liu, investor, and Ashutosh Sharma, India head at Prosus Ventures Camila Petignat, partner at The Yield Lab Three more from the TC+ team: ZebethMedia+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription! Big Tech Inc. Google plans to open its first data center in Japan by 2023, Ivan writes. The center is part of a $730 million infrastructure fund and will be the search engine giant’s third one in the region. Meanwhile, Kyle and Amanda looked at artificial intelligence–powered music generators and its place in an industry where it generally pays to be able to use your natural, human abilities. And another five more for you: Sharing is caring: A new Twitter feature encourages users to share the tweet versus taking a screenshot of it and then posting to other social media, Ivan writes. Press pause: A judge ruled that the Musk vs. Twitter trial can be put on hold temporarily while the two parties work out a deal, Amanda reports. It’s Marioooooo: Amanda gives you an inside look at the new “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” where she writes, “So far, Chris Pratt’s Mario seems more like Andy Dwyer than Star-Lord, and we love that for him.” Making tweaks: Shopify has agreed to add some consumer safety features to its app in Europe that includes a faster and easier way for national consumer authorities to report problems, Natasha L reports. Crack open a cold one: Pepsi is at the front of the line to get some of the first Tesla Semi deliveries, Kirsten writes.