Welcome to The Interchange! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up here so you can receive it directly in the future. Every week, I’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. This will include everything from funding rounds to trends to an analysis of a particular space to hot takes on a particular company or phenomenon. There’s a lot of fintech news out there and it’s my job to stay on top of it — and make sense of it — so you can stay in the know. — Mary Ann

Hello! It’s my first full week back in some time, and I’m excited. Turns out having COVID helped me get more rest than I have had in a very long while. (Silver linings.)

The week of Thanksgiving turned out to be less boring than I expected — I reported that three of alternative financing startup Pipe’s co-founders were stepping down as the company searched for a “veteran” CEO to take the company to the next level.

For some context, I have been covering Pipe since it raised $6 million in a seed round led by Craft Ventures back in 2019. I have watched it grow over time, in various ways. All the while, I have been in contact with its CEO and co-founder Harry Hurst. So when I got the news that he was planning to leave the company, along with two of his co-founders, I was surprised. This is not a common thing. Co-founders don’t often step down so soon after a company was founded and achieved unicorn status. And it’s practically unheard of for three co-founders to leave at the same time.

After that article published, I was inundated with tweets, messages, and so on…with a number of allegations around “the real reasons” that Pipe’s co-founders were stepping down. Among those rumors were claims that Pipe made roughly $80 million in loans to one or several crypto mining companies. The outfit or outfits have since gone out of business and the $80 million is believed to have been completely written off, these individuals claimed (many of whom said they had “heard” about the events).

To be clear, if we reported on every rumor we heard here at TechCrunch, we’d turn into the “National Enquirer” of the startup world. At the same time, when a reporter is provided with the same information from multiple sources who they know and trust, it is then irresponsible to not follow up on those claims. So that’s what I did.

Ultimately, Pipe denied the claims against it but in that denial, a couple of interesting things came to light. First, the startup’s board — despite its long list of investors — consists of only the three co-founders who are stepping down and one independent director, Peter Ackerson, a general partner at Fin Capital who himself became a VC just three years ago. Second, I found out that once a new CEO is found, that individual will assume Hurst’s seat on the board.

Now, I am not here to “take sides.” I don’t know what truly has, or has not, gone down behind the scenes at Pipe. But regardless, this all struck me as odd. For one, how can a startup that has raised some $300 million and is valued at $2 billion not have a more independent board? Two, why would Hurst — who has been the very vocal frontman of Pipe since its inception — leave the board? Finally, it turns out there is a fourth co-founder, Michal Cieplinski, whose name was notably not mentioned at all when the other three founders’ departures were announced. Apparently, he remains in his role as chief business officer.

For now, I can only report on what I am told. As time goes on, we’ll see if more details surrounding this unusual development emerge.

X1

When pressed, Pipe declined to reveal details around its financials. So perhaps it felt even more refreshing when consumer fintech X1 happily shared details around its revenue in an interview last week. The company was founded in 2020 to offer a credit card to consumers based on their income, rather than their credit score. It launched that credit card to the general public in mid-September after amassing a waitlist of 600,000. While I don’t know how many cardholders the company currently has, I was impressed that it has seen its revenue triple over the past 6 months — from $1 million per month to $3 million per month, giving it an annual revenue run rate of $36 million. Not bad. Not bad at all.

X1 is one of the few fintechs I have covered that opted NOT to raise in 2021. That may have been a very wise decision. Its valuation was not inflated, so after raising $25 million earlier this year in a Series B round, investors clamored to offer it another $15 million earlier this month — at a 50% higher (undisclosed) valuation.

The startup feels low-key in a sector that has been full of hype and chest-beating in recent years. It recently lured away an Apple exec to serve as its chief risk officer, and according to CEO and co-founder Deepak Rao, it’s already conducting audits (others in the space should take note!).

The company is now taking on the likes of Robinhood as it gears up to launch its own investing platform, which will give its cardholders a way to buy stocks with the reward points they earn using its card. It’s a novel concept and we’ll see how it works out. On that topic, one thing I found interesting: FPV Ventures, a venture firm founded by Google Analytics founder Wesley Chan, led X1’s $25 million Series round. Well, Chan was also an early investor in Robinhood. X1 declined to comment on that fact, but it is just one other example of VCs backing startups that very closely resemble others that they have already backed. In a world where companies are constantly evolving and iterating, it shouldn’t be shocking. But it does feel a bit…awkward, to say the least.

Weekly News

Stripe announced it built a fiat-to-crypto onramp. The company described it as “a customizable widget that developers can embed directly into their DEX, NFT platform, wallet, or dApp. Stripe claims to handle all the KYC, payments, fraud, and compliance and that the on-ramp can be integrated “with just 10 lines of code.” Romain goes deeper on the topic here.

Eric Wu, co-founder of Opendoor, stepped down from his role as CEO of the real estate fintech. Carrie Wheeler, who has served as the company’s CFO for just over two years, is taking over the role of CEO. Wu will now serve as president of Opendoor’s new marketplace offering, Opendoor Exclusives. At the time of the launch last month, Wu said: “We’ve designed Opendoor Exclusives to be a new marketplace where you can directly buy and sell a home, without any of the hassle of the traditional real estate model.”

Finextra reported that “Klarna has launched a platform that connects retailers with creators and influencers that can help them reach their target markets. The Creator Platform promises to match retailers with the right influencers and then track performance metrics — including traffic, sales and conversion rates — in real time. Already live in the US, it is now available in all markets in which Klarna operates, providing an additional marketing channel for the firm’s 450,000 retail partners.”

News like this doesn’t exactly bolster the case for fintech. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, “since 2020, more than 3,500 complaints have been filed about San Francisco-based Chime Financial Inc. with the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau about closed accounts, unauthorized charges or other issues. Most are marked ‘closed with explanation,’ meaning the company resolved them privately with the customer…Some Chime customers who have complained about sudden account closures were shocked to hear that it could take up to a month to get their money back.”

As reported by the very talented Joanna Glasner, who writes for my former employer, Crunchbase News: “Last year, financial services was the leading sector for venture investment, with at least $131 billion globally going into startups in the space. This year, the industry still ranks among the largest recipients of venture capital funding. However, investment to startups in the space has been dropping every quarter this year, with Q4 likely to be the lowest yet.”

American Express is going deeper on B2B payments. On December 1, the credit card giant launched Amex Business Link. A spokesperson told me this will offer “a new B2B payments solution for network issuers and acquirers to offer to their business customers.” Its goal is to provide “more streamlined, efficient, and flexible ways for businesses to pay each other on the Amex network”

Seen on TechCrunch+

Is FTX’s failure a stress test for corporate credit card startups? As reported by Natasha Mascarenhas: “Ramp recently sent a message to crypto companies using its corporate card services saying that it is significantly lowering spending limits and adding new requirements. Some users were temporarily suspended from spending altogether…While Ramp somewhat backtracked on the changes, its move offers a window into how corporate credit card companies could be stress-tested in the current environment. Brex, Ramp’s biggest competitor, said that there have been no changes to crypto users’ spending limits.”

Of all the venture capital funding invested in 2021, around one in every five dollars went to fintech. But this boom now seems behind us, as global fintech funding activity returned to pre-2021 levels. Worse, fintech didn’t escape the recent waves of tech layoffs, with high-profile companies like Brex, Chime and Stripe making headlines for this disheartening reason over the last few weeks. And yet, fintech startups are still getting founded and funded this year. Of the 223 companies in Y Combinator’s summer 2022 batch, 79 fell more or less into the fintech category. Why are founders and investors still placing bets in fintech and where? To find out more, Anna Heim reached out to fintech-focused VC firm Fiat Ventures.

ICYMI

As reported by Manish Singh: “Shares of Paytm in November slid to an all-time low of 477 Indian rupees ($5.8), a week after the lockup period for early backers of the Indian financial services firm ended last week and mounting concerns of growing competition.”

Sarah Perez reported: “In November, PayPal-owned Venmo rolled out two changes to its peer-to-peer payments app, including the ability to donate to charities through Venmo as well as a redesigned money-sending experience. The latter aims to make it easier to see how much you’re sending and who you’re sending to, while also improving the ability to either pay or request multiple payments at once.”

And here’s some news that inadvertently got left out of the November 20 edition of our newsletter…my apologies (I blame COVID brain!)! Thanks again to Kyle Wiggers for drafting the write-ups.

Block’s Square wants to get into the credit card game — but it’s going the partnership route to get there. The company announced that it’s teaming up with American Express to launch a new credit card targeted at Square sellers on the Amex network. Details were tough to come by at publish time — Square says it’ll reveal more about the card early next year — but the press release suggests that the card, soon available to all “eligible” Square sellers in the U.S., will integrate with Square’s existing services to let cardholders organize their finances and manage cash flow from a single pane of glass.

Fintech startups — startups dabbling in banking, investing, budgeting and payments — remained red-hot this year, with 18% of global venture dollars going to fintechs in Q2 2022. That’s not surprising in light of recent findings from digital analytics company Amplitude, which show that fintech apps and services continued to add new users over the last year, hitting a peak in June and July at 22% higher growth compared to August 2021. The stats align with the results of a 2021 Plaid survey showing that nearly nine in ten Americans now use some kind of fintech app to manage their financial lives. Clearly, the economic downturn aside, fintech is here to stay — and going strong.

With the “buy now, pay later” (BNPL) market on less firm ground than it once was, some of the largest vendors are on the hunt for alternative lines of revenue. Enter Klarna’s price comparison tool, which the BNPL startup is positioning against shopping services like Google Shopping and Shopping.com. Built on top of tech acquired through Klarna’s $1 billion acquisition of PriceRunner earlier this year, the new tool allows users to filter product searches by criteria such as size, color, ratings, availability and shipping options and view historical pricing data, which shows how the cost of the product has fluctuated over time. Klarna earns money by driving traffic and sales for its retail customers.

Speaking of Klarna, CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski says that the collapse of crypto exchange FTX may encourage financial sector regulation that’ll make it harder for fintech firms to compete against traditional lenders. Speaking to Bloomberg, he said: “I’m a little bit concerned that these debacles that we’ve seen will again inhibit that and continuously prolong the overly large profitability that we’ve seen in the banking industry.” There’s not a ton of evidence to support this, but it’s undeniably true that regulators are preparing to take a long, hard look at crypto specifically after years of legislative inaction. The Washington Post reports that the Treasury Department has placed calls to large crypto exchanges to assess the risks of a broader contagion and congressional committees have readied reviews, including a House inquiry that could see FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried testify under oath next month.

Fundings and M&A

Seen on TechCrunch

Consumer finance app Djamo eyes Francophone Africa expansion, backed by new $14M round

CRED acquires CreditVidya

Taktile raises $20M to help fintech companies test and deploy decision-making models

Bank engagement startup Flourish Fi leans into concept of ‘banks aren’t going anywhere’

Southeast Asia insurtech Igloo increases its Series B to $46M

AirTree and Greycroft return to lead Australian regtech FrankieOne’s Series A+

India’s KreditBee raises $80 million from Azim Premji’s Premji Invest, Motilal Oswal Alternates, among others

Seen elsewhere

Neobank for Native Americans raises pre-seed funding

Peter Thiel’s VC fund backs TreeCard, a fintech that plants trees when you spend

Cross-border payments startup Buckzy raises $14.5 million in Series A financing

Intuit to acquire financial health startup SeedFi

Brazilian unicorn Loft denies receiving down round

Tweet of the Week

Former journalist turned VC Chrissy Farr had a notable tweet this week, in which she said: “Companies that are announcing funding in this market should do it in a way that’s constructive for other founders. What did you get right? How long did it take? What were the metrics that you needed? How many convo’s? Otherwise not helpful as others are really struggling.”

I feel compelled to bring this up because the way I cover funding rounds has fundamentally changed from 2021. Let’s be honest — the people usually most interested in reading about a company’s raise are those that either work at, or have invested in, the company itself. In fact, you may be surprised to know that funding-focused articles are rarely among the most read on the TC site. I realized that to continue covering 10 funding rounds a week was not really doing our readers a favor. So these days, I try to focus on companies that (a) are doing something that appears to be really unique or novel and different from existing tech; (b) are willing to share revenue figures or specifics around their financials; (c) have a compelling origin story — say, founders with nontraditional backgrounds or hailed from other high-profile companies or startups; (d) can share specifics and context around their raise and how it came together; and (e) run counter to existing narratives or trends….among a few other things.

Bottom line is we get inundated with pitches. Seriously, you could not even imagine. We have to be super selective about what we choose to cover. Not to mention the fact that by committing to a ton of funding stories, we are leaving less room and time to cover breaking news and write profiles, features or trends and analytical pieces. So, when I say thanks, but no thanks I’m not able to cover your funding round outside of including a mention in my newsletter, please don’t follow up another 10 times. It’s not personal.

Podcasting

Did you know that I record the Equity podcast every week with my wonderful co-hosts and dear friends Alex Wilhelm and Natasha Mascarenhas? You can listen to our latest episode here. Oh, and I’m SO proud to report that Equity was ranked among the top 5% shared podcasts globally on Spotify!

Also, back in September (I don’t think I ever shared this), I was honored to be a guest on Miguel Armaza’s Fintech Leaders podcast. Among the topics we discussed: why I love covering the startup world and some tips on how to pitch your story to tech reporters, the future of tech media, my idea of what good journalism really means…and a lot more! Listen in here.

With that, I will close. Thanks once again for reading/sharing/subscribing. See you next week! Until then, take good care. xoxoxo — Mary Ann

Got a news tip or inside information about a topic we covered? We’d love to hear from you. You can reach me at maryann@techcrunch.com. Or you can drop us a note at tips@techcrunch.com. If you prefer to remain anonymous, click here to contact us, which includes SecureDrop (instructions here) and various encrypted messaging apps.

When a startup’s founders are pretty much its board by Mary Ann Azevedo originally published on TechCrunch

Carson Brown, co-founder and head of product at electric scooter startup Taur, spent four years riding a self-balancing electric unicycle to work. Today, he rides a scooter multiple times a week.

As a micromobility user, Brown has thought a lot about the design of light electric vehicles. What elements do they need to have to make people see them as valid forms of transportation, rather than toys? How might the design of a scooter incentivize a rider to replace public transit rides or car rides with the vehicle, instead of just using it for fun in the park?

Brown has a deep background in product development, which is to say, he’s obsessed with how a customer will use his product. He thinks this mentality will help Taur be the company that separates owned scooters from shared scooters, that shows people how to integrate scooters into their daily lives, that makes scooters cool.

Taur has stood out in the oversaturated but largely meh scooter market by daring to design a vehicle that’s front-facing. The company is currently gearing up for its first launch in Los Angeles, which will test the mettle of this bold idea.

The startup is still very new — Taur was founded in 2019 when it launched a preorder campaign for its sleek white flagship vehicle. It’s raised about $5.2 million so far, including its recent $3.3 million seed round from Trucks VC.

We sat down with Brown to discuss why scooters should be designed to handle roads that exist today, how good design can help people adapt to use scooters in their daily lives and why Taur could be the brand ambassador that the scooter market needs to flourish.

Editor’s note: The following interview, part of an ongoing series with founders who are building transportation companies, has been edited for length and clarity.

You worked at Uniwheel for four years. What did you learn there that you’ve brought to Taur?

Carson Brown: My time at Uniwheel was very early in the electric unicycle space. Our team came from all over — some automotive, some Formula One. I had a product background. We were all designing something from the ground up that we hadn’t really seen before. In building that product completely from scratch, you learned loads of stuff about the fundamentals of electric vehicles, batteries, motors, drivetrains. But you also learn what it’s like to be a user. The most valuable thing I learned was what it’s like to commute on a micromobility vehicle every day for four years. That was how I got to work, how I did errands. It was very much an all-in attempt at understanding what the product needed to be and how the benefits of it were completely different from anything that you could experience.

When I was at Uniwheel, electric scooters barely even existed, so we were building that for essentially a niche audience. Electric scooters today represent something that both my co-founder and I have really high confidence people could learn immediately and could deliver all the benefits of any small micromobility vehicle. You get the portability aspects, the ease of use, the really low cost of operation. They’re a much better fit for a mass audience.

What has stood out to you as a micromobility commuter that you’ve brought to Taur?

The main thing was making riders feel confident on the road. It’s getting better in a lot of cities with bike lanes, but there’s typically this awful experience of feeling somewhat like a second-class citizen, whereby you’re occupying a part of the road where you’re not expected to be, and it can be quite intimidating if you’re not prepared. So from a design standpoint, there are things you can do about that. Obviously, there’s the lighting of the vehicle. There’s how it handles both in terms of stability and control. The visibility of it to other road users, which is why we designed a white scooter. All of these things can increase your confidence to ride regularly. What we don’t want is for people who love it, but don’t feel safe riding it in the back streets or for leisure on the weekend at a park but not using it every day. At the forefront of our minds was, how do we build something that people would feel confident to use every day?

Also, the Uniwheel delivered extremely well on portability. So the whole concept of being able to take a product inside instead of the default of locking it up outside. That reduces the chance of theft and opens up that extra mobility. Like if I’m at home, it’s with me. If I’m at work, it’s with me. I just need to decide to want to go somewhere, and that accessibility is a game changer.

Taur is still at the beginning of its journey. What’s the long-term vision? Are you sticking with scooters?

We’re pretty focused on two-wheeled transportation. I don’t know how broad we will get, but there is a lot of scope for innovation. The latest national numbers we’ve looked at show scooters have outdone e-bikes both in terms of unit sales and growth. So we see a lot of dry powder in this space.

Taur’s Carson Brown on why owned scooters > shared scooters by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch

In the climate tech world, Dan Goldman has seen just about everything: From the clean tech boom that led to the clean tech bust, the dark years that followed, and today’s bull market that’s transformed climate tech into one of the hottest sectors in the venture world.

TechCrunch caught up with Goldman this week to hear what he thinks about today’s market and what he’s telling his portfolio companies about how to prepare for next year.

“We do want them to be extremely cautious about cash all the time, but especially now,” he said. Though the reasons why that’s the case today aren’t necessarily the same as they were a decade or so ago when the last cycle went bust.

Goldman has been investing for over 20 years. He comes from a more traditional energy background consulting on energy projects in Asia and financing large-scale energy and power generation projects. He moved to clean energy in the early 2000s, and in 2006 helped co-found the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Clean Energy Venture Group, a collection of angel investors who focus on energy-related climate tech. Later, in 2017, he co-founded Clean Energy Ventures to make early-stage investments. Since the firm’s inception, it’s made over 100.

Clean Energy Ventures invests in early-stage companies that have already received some grant money or angel investments but have yet to raise a venture round. The firm likes to lead the first institutional round of investing, helping guide its investments in things like team development, intellectual property strategy and marketing strategy. It also makes introductions to partners for follow-on financing, which it often participates in as well.

As climate tech investors go, the firm is relatively focused. While it invests in everything from materials recycling to hydrogen production and software, there’s usually an energy component involved. Goldman said Clean Energy Ventures does extensive lifecycle analysis for each of its investments to help ensure that they fit the firm’s “mandate”: Prospective portfolio companies have to reduce greenhouse gasses by a cumulative 2.5 gigatons from when the firm invests to 2050.

“If they can do that, we think that aligns with financial objectives of returns because we see the potential for them to grow to really large businesses.” His optimism is at least partially predicated on recent data. “When you look at the statistics of the general venture markets, they’re down over 20% in the first nine months. And climate tech is up 50%,” Goldman said.

Advice to founders

Getting there isn’t easy, of course, and Goldman has some cautionary advice to share with founders. It’s based not on concerns over whether climate tech is headed in the right direction, but rather on how much money has been flowing to companies from investors not traditionally involved at earlier stages.

Climate tech is not doomed, despite climate doom by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch

Aaaaand we’re back! With our Thanksgiving mini-hiatus behind us, it’s time for another edition of Week in Review — the newsletter where we quickly wrap up the most read TechCrunch stories from the past seven(ish) days. No matter how busy you are, it should give you a pretty good idea of what people were talking about in tech this week.

Want it in your inbox every Saturday morning? Sign up here.

most read

Instafest goes instaviral: You’ve probably been to a great music festival before. But have you been to one made just for you? Probably not. Instafest, a web app that went super viral this week, helps you daydream about what that festival might look like. Sign in with your Spotify credentials and it’ll generate a promo poster for a pretend festival based on your listening habits.

LastPass breached (again): “Password manager LastPass said it’s investigating a security incident after its systems were compromised for the second time this year,” writes Zack Whittaker. Investigations are still underway, which unfortunately means it’s not super clear what (and whose) data might’ve been accessed.

ChatGPT opens up: This week, OpenAI widely opened up access to ChatGPT, which lets you interact with their new language-generation AI through a simple chat-style interface. In other words, it lets you generate (sometimes scarily well-written) passages of text by chatting with a robot. Darrell used it to instantly write the Pokémon cheat sheet he’s always wanted.

AWS re:Invents: This week, Amazon Web Services hosted its annual re:Invent conference, where the company shows off what’s next for the cloud computing platform that powers a massive chunk of the internet. This year’s highlights? A low-code tool for serverless apps, a pledge to give AWS customers control over where in the world their data is stored (to help navigate increasingly complicated government policies), and a tool to run “city-sized simulations” in the cloud.

Twitter suspends Kanye (again): “Elon Musk has suspended Kanye West’s (aka Ye) Twitter account after the latter posted antisemitic tweets and violated the platform’s rules,” writes Ivan Mehta.

Spotify Wraps it up: Each year in December, Spotify ships “Wrapped” — an interactive feature that takes your Spotify listening data for the year and presents it in a super visual way. This year it’s got the straightforward stuff like how many minutes you streamed, but it’s also branching out with ideas like “listening personalities” — a Myers-Briggs-inspired system that puts each user into one of 16 camps, like “the Adventurer” or “the Replayer.”

DoorDash layoffs: I was hoping to go a week without a layoffs story cracking the list. Alas, DoorDash confirmed this week that it’s laying off 1,250 people, with CEO Tony Xu explaining that they hired too quickly during the pandemic.

Salesforce co-CEO steps down: “In one week last December, [Bret Taylor] was named board chair at Twitter and co-CEO at Salesforce,” writes Ron Miller. “One year later, he doesn’t have either job.” Taylor says he has “decided to return to [his] entrepreneurial roots.”

audio roundup

I expected things to be a littlequiet in TC Podcast land last week because of the holiday, but we somehow still had great shows! Ron Miller and Rita Liao joined Darrell Etherington on The TechCrunch Podcast to talk about the departure of Salesforce’s co-CEO and China’s “great wall of porn”; Team Chain Reaction shared an interview with Nikil Viswanathan, CEO of web3 development platform Alchemy; and the ever-lovely Equity crew talked about everything from Sam Bankman-Fried’s wild interview at DealBook to why all three of the co-founders at financing startup Pipe stepped down simultaneously.

TechCrunch+

What lies behind the TC+ members-only paywall? Here’s what TC+ members were reading most this week:

Lessons for raising $10M without giving up a board seat: Reclaim.ai has raised $10 million over the last two years, all “without giving up a single board seat.” How? Reclaim.ai co-founder Henry Shapiro shares his insights.

Consultants are the new nontraditional VC: “Why are so many consultant-led venture capital funds launching now?” asks Rebecca Szkutak.

Fundraising in times of greater VC scrutiny: “Founders may be discouraged in this environment, but they need to remember that they have ‘currency,’ too,” writes DocSend co-founder and former CEO Russ Heddleston.

LastPass hacked, OpenAI opens access to ChatGPT, and Kanye gets suspended from Twitter (again) by Greg Kumparak originally published on TechCrunch

Welcome to Startups Weekly, a nuanced take on this week’s startup news and trends by Senior Reporter and Equity co-host Natasha Mascarenhas. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here.

To end the year, let’s continue to return to columns that I wrote that have aged, well, interestingly. In July, I wrote about how Y Combinator is building a Product Hunt, Product Hunt is building an Andreessen Horowitz and Andreessen Horowitz is building a Y Combinator. It was a not-so-subtle nod to how top institutions are trying to be accelerators, discovery engines, content marketers and check-writers all in one.

Enter the latest. Future, Andreessen Horowitz’s formal foray into tech media, is shutting down less than two years after first launching, according to Business Insider. To me, the shutdown is less about a venture firm failing to jump into the editorial space — the firm is still very much creating content and even building a new podcast on tech and culture as we speak — and more about how the medium is truly the message.

The whole allure of going direct as a founder and venture capitalist is built around assumptions. First, that you have something important to say. Second, you have to believe that you can package that content in a compelling way, consistently. And third, perhaps most importantly of them all, your important, well-packaged content needs to find an audience that trusts it.

It’s one of the many reasons that media is a hard business, and one of the reasons I’m not surprised to see Future shut down (despite the fact that the venture firm could, presumably, keep funding a version of it). Some think that there was an obvious advantage to the firm having a home to house smart content on its portfolio companies, but just because something makes sense doesn’t mean that it has the impact that an institution would hope for.

A16z has built a reputation around being a services-oriented firm. To me, the story is less that a venture firm with billions in assets under management failed at a plucky experiment. It’s more that, in the pursuit to be an accelerator, discovery engine, content marketer and check-writer, organizations are teaching us in real time what translates and what doesn’t.

We often think about the webs of venture capital in a conflict of interest type aperture — and there’s more to come on that angle in the weeks to come. But this week has me thinking about how the intertwinement of different trends, themes and products shifts as priorities do, too.

You can find me on Twitter, Substack and Instagram, where I publish more of my words and work. In the rest of this newsletter, we’ll talk about executive turnover, red flags and good news.

Executive turnover and the art of conflict

Tech’s labor market has certainly raised many questions around the stability of certain industries and roles — and if growth can protect a company from having layoffs. The big news of this week was that Bret Taylor stepped down from his co-chair and CEO position at Salesforce, a month after losing his job as Twitter’s board chair after Elon Musk bought the social media platform.

But that’s not the only kerfuffle in town this week.

This week, DoorDash and Kraken cut portions of their workforce. BloomTech, formerly known as Lambda School, cut half of staff in its third layoff since the beginning of the pandemic. And on Friday, Opendoor CEO Eric Wu stepped down, to be succeeded by CFO Carrie Wheeler. Turnover is everywhere, both voluntary and involuntary, which makes me think a lot about the second-order consequences.

Here’s why this is important, via Brava Leaders CEO Karla Monterroso:

We are at the beginning of creating what multicultural institutions look like and how they will operate. I do think a lot of the turnovers that we’re seeing, whether it is the layoffs or the new management, means that people are coming in to create homogeneity in their companies yet again.

So, they do a layoff, and they take all the complexity out. They slice off the parts of the organization that created friction. And that friction is essentially what makes multicultural institutions more effective because they’re asking different kinds of questions. But a lot of the leaders that are coming in do not have the range to manage a multicultural organization or company. And because they don’t have the range for it, they just cut it out. Then that creates homogeneity because that is what makes a band of leaders comfortable right now. And we’re going to need leadership that is actually much more comfortable with complexity.

No one seemed to see Bret Taylor stepping away from Salesforce (even Marc Benioff)
Frequent conflict is a new requirement for startup leaders
This secondary markets expert says we haven’t hit bottom yet

Are red flags really that hard to spot?

Equity also unpacked the latest blog post written by famed venture capitalist Bill Gurley — in which he lists out the red flags that investors should look out for when investing in startups. As you may be able to tell by our title of the episode, we certainly had thoughts.

Here’s why this is important: While I’m all for highlighting explicit mistakes that budding investors should avoid, Gurley’s post missed a key point — which is that many investors do know how to identify red flags, they just choose to ignore them in pursuit of “the outlier.” What will actually stop investors from backing the next FTX is to create an environment where conflict is prioritized over groupthink.

VCs and red flags
Pitch Deck Teardown: Hour One’s $20M Series A deck

[Insert good news here]

We’re officially at the time of year, and part of the news cycle, when I’m desperately searching for good news to highlight.

Here’s what made me smile this week:

IIT > MIT
Luna the cat
Ed Zitron’s cats
This piece of art
A love story
A literal good news thread from Alex
And this very thoughtful gift guide for frequent travelers

A few notes

We’re going to space. Well, kind of. We’re going to Los Angeles to talk about space. Come hang with the brightest in the space on Dec 6. Here’s a link to buy tickets. We also have a special discount for students who want to attend, so check out this link if you are still in school.
Speaking of events, we want to meet your startup at CES this year! The team is already gathering the startups they want to cover — so fill out this form so we can get some early eyes on your innovation.
General shout out to Alyssa Stringer, TC’s audience development manager, for being one of the hardest working people I know. Follow her on Twitter for the latest and greatest.
Big thank you to Equity listeners who shared how we ranked in their Spotify Unwrapped. It’s always a good boost to remember that people are listening — and a lot of them!

Seen on TechCrunch

San Francisco police can now use robots to kill

Elon Musk suspends Kanye West’s account for breaking Twitter rules

LastPass says it was breached — again

Instafest app lets you create your own festival lineup from Spotify

Here’s everything AWS announced in its re:Invent data keynote

Seen on TechCrunch+

Box reaches $1B run rate in spite of a quarter dogged by currency challenges

ChatGPT isn’t putting me out of a job yet, but it’s very good fun

Startup valuations are declining — but not consistently

Proptech in Review: 3 investors explain why they’re bullish on tech that makes buildings greener

As BlockFi files for bankruptcy, how contagious will FTX’s downfall become?

If you like this newsletter, do me a quick favor? Forward it to a friend, tell me what you think on Twitter, and follow my personal blog for more content. We only have a few more issues of Startups Weekly until next year, some come back next week — OK?

Stay warm,

N

Copycats can drown by Natasha Mascarenhas originally published on TechCrunch

W

elcome to the TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.

With most startups getting repriced behind closed doors, we love getting data that gives us a glimpse of what’s going on. This week, our new information comes from EquityZen, which shared insights on secondary stock sales. EquityZen also put up a few IPO predictions that gave us food for thought. Let’s explore. — Anna

A glimpse of repricing

How do you know when a unicorn has lost its billion-dollar valuation? Usually you only find out long after the fact, when — and if — the company raises a down round that makes it clear that its equity valuation is no longer in the unicorn realm.

The thing is, not many founders want to advertise that they have raised capital at a lower valuation than their previous round; in most cases, they just won’t disclose their new valuation.

As market observers, this leaves us with little data on a topic that our readers do care about: What kind of repricing they could expect. This is why we were grateful for Instacart, which made it public that it reduced its valuation through a 409A price change. This wasn’t good news, but it was a helpful data point for everyone involved. However, that was back in March.

It’s foie gras season in unicorn land by Anna Heim originally published on TechCrunch

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy.

Global app spending reached $65 billion in the first half of 2022, up only slightly from the $64.4 billion during the same period in 2021, as hypergrowth fueled by the pandemic has slowed down. But overall, the app economy is continuing to grow, having produced a record number of downloads and consumer spending across both the iOS and Google Play stores combined in 2021, according to the latest year-end reports. Global spending across iOS and Google Play last year was $133 billion, and consumers downloaded 143.6 billion apps.

This Week in Apps offers a way to keep up with this fast-moving industry in one place with the latest from the world of apps, including news, updates, startup fundings, mergers and acquisitions, and much more.

Do you want This Week in Apps in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here: techcrunch.com/newsletters

Top Stories

Twitter, Spotify, Meta and Coinbase all bash Apple’s App Store

Elon Musk wasn’t happy with Apple this week. The new Twitter exec claimed Apple threatened to remove the app from the App Store — which was not likely true. Instead of taking on the claims directly and starting a Twitter fight, Apple CEO Tim Cook invited Musk to Apple’s campus, where they took a walk and resolved their differences. Or at least that’s how Musk put it, referring to the potential Twitter ban as a “misunderstanding.”

“Tim was clear that Apple never considered doing so,” said Musk regarding Twitter’s potential App Store removal.

That’s not to say Apple wouldn’t ever ban Twitter one day if it found itself so unmoderated that it was allowing unchecked hate speech or stoking violence. It once took action against Parler, and Twitter could see App Store policy enforcement if it devolved as well.

The Musk-Apple drama stirred others to tweet their App Store issues, too.

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, for example, tweeted a long thread referencing Spotify’s anti-competitive complaints against the company, pointing also to Musk’s recent tweet railing against the 30% Apple tax.

Another longtime Apple critic, Coinbase, also posted a Twitter thread this week where the company claimed that users could no longer “send NFTs” in Coinbase Wallet on iOS because Apple decided to block the app’s last release until the feature was disabled. “Apple’s claim is that the gas fees required to send NFTs need to be paid through their In-App Purchase system, so that they can collect 30% of the gas fee,” the company’s official Twitter account stated. “For anyone who understands how NFTs and blockchains work, this is clearly not possible,” it said. “Apple’s proprietary In-App Purchase system does not support crypto so we couldn’t comply even if we tried.”

Gas fees are part of making transactions on a blockchain, but not a part that Coinbase profits from. Although some NFT marketplaces allow consumers to purchase NFTs using dollars instead of cryptocurrencies, that’s not the case here. Today, if a Coinbase user is trying to transfer an NFT to another person for free, they’d still have to pay a gas fee to complete the transaction — in cryptocurrency, not U.S. dollars. This fee goes to the blockchain’s validators, not Coinbase. And it fluctuates constantly based on a variety of factors, including how many transactions are taking place on that blockchain at the time.

Still, Apple’s new rules around NFTs require the use of in-app purchases for things like “minting, listing, and transferring,” they say. What’s not clear here is if an App Reviewer made a mistake in trying to apply Apple’s tax on what’s already sort of a tax or if Coinbase was intentionally trying to stoke consumer outrage. If the latter, it may have worked — the tweets made headlines, and prompted Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, whose company is currently suing Apple and Google over monopolistic practices, to chime in.

“If they can lawfully add a 30% Apple Tax to all NFT transactions, then they can lawfully add a 30% Apple Tax to all online banking and stock trading transactions,” Sweeney said.

Apple, in response to the Coinbase situation, said it would continue to work with Coinbase, as it does with all developers, to “explore viable solutions in this evolving space.” Hmm.

Meanwhile, speaking at The NYT’s Dealbook conference this week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had some sharp comments for Apple as well, with regard to its control of the app ecosystem.

“Apple has sort of singled themselves out as the only company that is trying to control unilaterally what apps get on a device,” Zuckerberg said. “I don’t think that’s a sustainable or good place to be.” The exec also noted that Google at least allowed users to sideload apps, which is what Meta plans to do with its VR ecosystem and AR headsets.

Hive’s security was so bad, it had to shut down

The team at thenewly popular Twitter alternativeHive is in over its head. The company this week took the fairly radical step of fully shutting down its servers for a couple of days in response to concerns raised by security researcherswho discovered a number of critical vulnerabilities on Hive, several of which they say remain unfixed. The issues they found would allow attackers access to all data, including private posts and messages, shared media and even deleted direct messages, as well as the ability to edit other people’s Hive posts.

The researchers, a part of a German collective calledZerforschung, claimed they confidentially reported the security vulnerabilities to Hive’s team, noting it was initially difficult to reach a point of contact at the company. Several days later, Hive replied, claiming the issues to be fixed,a Zerforschung blog postexplains. However, the researchers found this was not the case, so they took their concerns to the public, warning people against using Hive’s app.

Shortly after, Hiveannouncedit was temporarily shutting down its servers to address these problems. It alsoclaimed,acrossseveraltweets, that they never told the researchers the issues were “fixed” but that they were “fixing” them,eventually deciding to go offline until problems were addressed.

It’s an unusual way to patch bugs, to say the least, and one that raises questions about the development workflow at the company. Is there not a dev environment where code is fixed, then staged for a release? How bad was the code that it requires a full stop of company operations to rework it?

Hive said the app will come back online after the issues are fixed and hinted it was raising funds that would allow it to implement more protections in the future. The company claims to have 2 million users, but data.ai only sees around 1.7 million total downloads.

Kanye West won’t buy Parler

In October, Kanye West, who now goes by Ye, announced alongside Parler’s owner that he would be purchasing the conservative-leaning social network for an unknown sum. But that deal is now off. The news followed West’s antisemitic statements during an interview with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, where the rapper praised Hitler and Nazis. In a statement, Parler’s owner Parlement Technologies confirmed the two have parted ways, saying the company “has mutually agreed with Ye to terminate the intent of sale of Parler.”

“This decision was made in the interest of both parties in mid-November. Parler will continue to pursue future opportunities for growth and the evolution of the platform for our vibrant community,” the statement read.

Apple & Google pick the Best Apps of the Year, and BeReal scores

It’s time for the annual app store awards. This year, relative newcomer BeReal — which hasn’t managed to ship a new feature all year — made it to the top of both stores’ “best of 2022” lists. Apple dubbed the photo-based social network its “App of the Year” while Google Play gave it the User’s Choice award. The app is a curious pick for a winner. Though BeReal has clearly gained a following, especially among younger Gen Z users, the company has yet to find a business model. That means Apple and Google make no money off the app’s promotion. Call me cynical, but it’s surprising the app platforms would tout an app that doesn’t directly benefit their bottom line in some way or one that at least makes clever use of some newer technology they’re trying to promote, like AR or GameKit. Instead, BeReal is a fairly basic app — you take photos and post them. They later disappear.

Perhaps Apple wanted to make a point by promoting an app that had no in-app purchases or one that would allow it to remind consumers (and developers!) that the App Store still produces relevant hits.

Other Apple winners included GoodNotes 5 for iPad, MacFamilyTree 10 for Mac, Vix for Apple TV and Gentler Streak for Apple Watch.

Apex Legends Mobile was iPhone game of the year and Google’s best game winner, while Moncage was the winner for iPad.

Google picked Dream by WOMBO as this year’s Best App in the U.S., and released variations of its top list across its global markets.

Weekly News

Platforms: Apple

Apple announced it would once again keep its App Store open during the holiday season, though with slower review speeds. Typically, Apple says 90% of apps are reviewed in less than 24 hours, but times may lag during December 23 through December 27. Apple, in the past, would close the App Store to submissions over the holidays, but ended that practice last year.
Apple is making digital car keys shareable in its iOS 16.1 software.The new functionality will allow iPhone users to share car keys in their Wallet with non-iPhone users, starting with Google Pixel devices, and later expanding to other Android phones. Keys can be shared via email, text message and WhatsApp.
Apple released iOS 16.1.2, which included various security updates, improved compatibility with wireless carriers and crash detection optimizations for iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Pro models.
Apple introduced a new “Today at Apple” session for kids in celebration of Computer Science Education Week. The session, “Coding Lab for Kids: Code Your First App,” is for kids 10+ and aims to introduce app development concepts.

Platforms: Google

Google rolled out its latest Android update which introduced features like an accessible reader mode, a new YouTube Search widget, shareable digital car keys, new action tiles for WearOS and other special holiday features, like new designs for photo collages in Google Photos, among other things.
As part of the update, Google launched a new Reading Mode app that helps people with visual imparities and dyslexia read content on the screen,especially articles.
Google detailed CameraViewfinder, a new artifact from the Jetpack library that allows developers to quickly implement camera previews with minimal effort. The component “internally uses either a TextureView or SurfaceView to display the camera feed, and applies the required transformations on them to correctly display the viewfinder,” Google says.

E-commerce & Food Delivery

Temu, a shopping app operated by China’s Pinduoduo, moved into the No. 1 spot on the U.S. App Store on November 12, after topping more than 5 million installs in the U.S.
Food delivery app JOKR confirmed it’s closing down its operations in Santiago, Chile and Medellin, Colombia,which will see it letting go of 22 employees and 19 employees, respectively.
Livestream shopping startup Firework, which built tech to enable live shopping, laid off 10% of staff just months after its SoftBank-led $150 million Series B.

Augmented Reality

Snapchat partnered with Disney and rolled out an AR Lens to promote Disney’s release of “Avatar: The Way of Water” which turns the end user into a Na’vi. The film releases in theaters on December 16 in the U.S.
Epic Games’ RealityScan app, which lets you scan real-world objects and turn them into 3D models for video games or other AR projects, launched to the public on iOS. The app had been a in limited beta release since April.

Fintech

Venmo added support for in-app charitable donations, allowing users to give to the tens of thousands of certified charities available through the PayPal Giving Fund. The app also revamped its “send money” screen to make it easier to see who you’re sending funds to and the amount.

Social

Pinterest is shutting down its Creator Rewards program that had allowed creators to earn money by creating content for the social network. The program will end on November 30, 2022, it said.
TikTok began testing a research API, which provides access to public and anonymized data about the content and activity on its app. Members of TikTok’s Content and Safety Advisory Council will test an early version of the API to offer feedback on its usability.
Meta rolled out new privacy updates for teens on Facebook and Instagram that will set all new users under the age of 16 (or 18 in some countries) to “private” accounts by default when they sign up. The company will also push teens already signed up on Facebook to choose more private settings in terms of who can see their friends’ list, posts they’re tagged in, who can comment on public posts and more.

The Indian social network Koo has been gaining popularity in Brazil but has been struggling with moderation and security issues. In one case, hackers took control of a popular influencer Felipe Neto’s Koo account for a time, warning users about Koo’s lack of security.
Twitter hired hacker George Hotz, who recently left Comma.ai, the driver assistance system startup he founded. Hotz is “interning” at Twitter, which actually means he’s taking a paid position for 12 weeks to fix issues with Twitter’s search engine which have been left unaddressed for years.
Twitter also declared “general amnesty” for banned users, and is now working to reinstate 62,000 accounts with 10,000K+ followers. It had earlier allowed Kanye West back on the service after a suspension but had to ban him again for posting antisemitic tweets in violation of its rules. “FAFO,” Elon Musk tweeted, about his decision to ban Ye.
Twitter said it will start showing users more algorithmic recommendations in the timeline,which it said would help users see more of the best content on the platform — something that could help newcomers get better situated and find interesting people to follow, as Twitter tries to grow.
Snap CEO Evan Spiegel told employees they have to be in the office 80% of the time, 3-4 days per week, as of February 2023.
Community reviews app Yelp introduced Spotlight Ads that allow businesses to reach consumers using video through the app’s homescreen.
Discord opened up paid Server Subscriptions, a feature that began piloting last year, to allow more servers to offer premium memberships in exchange for server-specific perks. Subscriptions range in price from $2.99-$199.99 and subscribers choose their own perks. Discord takes a 10% cut.

Messaging

WhatsApp launched a company directory on its Business Platform in Brazil, the U.K., Indonesia, Mexico and Columbia after initially testing the feature last year in São Paulo. The service helps users browse and discover local small businesses in their neighborhoods. The company also introduced the ability to find larger businesses from within the app through a Business Search feature.
WhatsApp also launched a “Message Yourself” feature that allows users to send notes, reminders and shopping lists to themselves in the messaging app.
Google will begin testing end-to-end encryption for RCS-based group chats on its Messages app.The feature will roll out to select users that are part of the app’s open beta program in the coming weeks.
Substack’s Chat feature, which allows writers and creators to have discussions in a chat-like environment inside the Substack app, has expanded from iOS to Android.
In response to a court order in India, Telegram disclosed the names of administrators, their phone numbers and IP addresses of channels that were accused of copyright infringement. Unrelated, the company also said it plans to build a decentralized crypto exchange and noncustodial wallets.
LinkedIn rolled out a focused inbox and messaging safety tools in order to get a better grip on spam and scammers.

Dating

Dating app Grindr closed its NYSE debut up 213.84% at $36.50 per share, CNBC reported. The app is trading under the ticker GRND after a SPAC merger to go public.
Bumble launched a message-before-match feature,“Compliments,” allowing users to send a note to another person before connecting in the app. Tinder offers a similar option through its “Fast Chat” feature.

Streaming & Entertainment

SpotifyWrapped 2022officially arrived. Though other music services, includingApple MusicandYouTube Music, also put together their own year-end retrospectives, Spotify’s personalized and interactive Wrapped experience remains the one to beat. The feature saw 30 million users accessing Wrapped in 2017, which grew to 120 million last year. This year’s big addition was something called “My Listening Personality,” which translates users’ listening behavior into one of the 16 personality types.
Wattpad Webtoon Studios, the entertainment and publishing arm of the user-gen storytelling apps, announced an expansion of its exec ranks, bringing on Jason Goldberg as Director of Film, North America and Danni Xin as a Television Development Executive. Goldberg previously was VP of Scripted Film & TV at Gunpowder & Sky and Xin worked in original series development at Topic Studios.
Google announced that Google TV and Android TV will be requiring Android App Bundles that are archivable starting in May 2023.The change is meant to help save storage for users.
Spotify expanded its new audiobooks service across more English-speaking markets, including he U.K., Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. Users will have access to over 300,000 titles which have to first be purchased through Spotify’s website instead of in-app as the company is trying to avoid app store fees.
After the Instafest web app blew up, allowing Spotify users to make festival posters from their listening history, the originator of a similar trend is doing the same. LineupSupply — an app that lets you make playlists from real-world concert posters — added a new Rewind function that creates a poster based on your listening history over a select period of time.
YouTube experienced an hours-long outage,which saw the iOS app crashing when users tried to watch videos.

Gaming

Netflix launched 9 more mobile games, including Gameloft’s Farmville clone,Country Friends. Others include Reigns Three Kingdoms, a card-swiping strategy game; Skies of Chaos, an arcade-style shoot-em-up game; Flutter Butterflies, a game for butterfly collectors and Cats & Soups, a relaxing cooking game; Hello Kitty Happiness Parade; Immortality; a new Stranger Things: Puzzle Tales; and a TV-only game, Triviaverse.
In Epic Games’ court case against Google, the Fortnite maker was said to have allegedly paid around $360 million over three years to keep Activision Blizzard from launching its own app store to compete with Google Play.
Indian social network ShareChat, backed by Twitter, Tiger Global and Temasek, is closing its fantasy sports app Jeet11 and has laid off 5% of staff.
Norwegian artist Aurora is hosting an in-game concert, but it’s not in Fortnite, Roblox or Minecraft. Rather, the artist’s December 8 performance will be within the popular game Sky: Children of the Light, which has more than 160 million downloads across iOS, Android and Switch.

Government & Policy

The U.K.’s antitrust watchdog is looking into the iOS-Android mobile duopoly, with a focus on mobile browsers and cloud gaming. The government is concerned the companies are restricting competition and harming consumers.
The U.K. government also said it’s expanding the scope of online safety legislation by criminalizing the encouragement of self-harm on online platforms following a teen’s suicide. The teen had viewed thousands of pieces of online content about self-harm and suicide on Instagram and Pinterest.

Security & Privacy

1Password said passkey support for secure user logins to apps, including iOS and Android apps, will launch in early 2023.
TikTok and Bumble said they plan to use StopNCII.org’s database of hashtags of nude images and videos in order to block revenge porn on their apps. Meta has been using it since 2021.

Funding and M&A

Mark Cuban-backed streaming app Fireside, which offers podcasters and other creators a way to host interactive, live shows with audience engagement, acquired the open streaming TV platform Stremium.The deal, for an undisclosed sum, will allow Fireside’s shows to become available to a range of connected TV devices, including Amazon Fire TV, Roku, smart TVs and others.

Cobee, a Madrid-based app offering employee benefits, raised €40 million in Series B funding, co-led by Octopus Ventures and Notion Capital. The app helps employees browse and activate the benefits their employer offers, including programs for meals, transportation, day care, training, gift cards, rent, life and health insurance and soon, more.

Fizz, a social media app for college students, raised $12 million in Series A funding led by NEA. The app co-founded by Stanford dropouts Teddy Solomon and Ashton Cofer is now led by seed investor Rakesh Mathur and is now live on 25 college campuses and is only available to college students. Students can publish text posts, polls and photos anonymously — a formula for fast growth that typically comes with serious repercussions at scale.

Daylight, an LGBTQIA+-friendly digital bank, raised $15 million in Series A funding led by Anthemis Group.The fintech differentiates itself by offering debit cards with customers’ chosen names, which don’t always match their ID, and it offers 10% cash back when they support queer and allied business partners, in addition to more standard mobile banking features.

Digital photo frame maker Aura raised $26 million in a mix of debt and equity led by Lago Innovation Fund. The company’s app, which now nears 3 million users after selling 1 million photo frames, helps connect family members connect and share their photos across devices.

Feature phone platform startup KaiOS raised $3.4 million in the form of a convertible note from Finnfund, an impact investor out of Finland. The company previously raised $50 million from Cathay Innovation, Google and TCL in 2019. The company says over 170 million KaiOS devices have shipped.

New Delhi-based diabetes management app BeatO raised $33 million in Series B funding led by Lightrock India.Flipkart and others participated in the round. The startup wants to reach over 10 million people by 2025.

Ivory Coast finance app Djamo raised $14 million in funding from YC, alongside three lead investors — Enza Capital, Oikocredit and Partech Africa — for its app providing financial services to the underbanked and unbanked population.

Zoe, the maker of a COVID-reporting app, shifted back to its original mission and raised $30 million in new funding to refocus on nutrition and health.

The Truth Social SPAC was put on hold.Digital World Acquisition Corp. said investors voted to extend the deadline to merge with Truth Social — in a SPAC that would take the company public. The merger has been pushed back to September 2023, as regulators are investigating the deal.

Downloads

Lensa AI

An older app called Lensa AI is having a moment. The photo and video editing app first launched in 2018, but a new feature that allows users to create “magic avatars” has driven the app to the No. 1 spot on the App Store’s competitive Photo & Video chart following the feature’s late November launch. Using a selection of 10-20 photos, the app uses Stable Diffusion to generate avatars of you that look like they were created by a digital artist — perfect for sharing across social media. The free version of the app doesn’t include the magic avatars. Instead, users will need to pay either $3.99 for 50 (five variations of 10 styles) or subscribe to the unlimited plan ($39.99/year). You can read more about the feature and how it works here.

Indie App Santa

It’s the most wonderful time of the year… for free and discounted iPhone apps, that is. Indie App Santa is back! The initiative started to help smaller app developers reach new audiences without having to pay for expensive App Store ads. The event, which began in 2020, is now entering its third year, offering botha Twitter feed of dealsas well as an Advent calendar-styleapp of its own where iPhone users can unlock one premium app either for free or for a sizable discount every day. The deals started December 1, 2022 and will run through January 10, 2023. It’s sort of like a month-long Black Friday event, but only for indie apps. This year, there will be 40 deals, half of which include free apps. Read more about Indie App Santa here.

This Week in Apps: The year’s best apps, Twitter rival Hive’s security woes, App Store backlash grows by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

When Vijay Chattha was building a startup, his competitor was what some would call a media darling. The competition had a good story, which created investor interest. In turn, that interest helped land key customers. And so the cycle repeated. Chattha eventually sold that company in a lukewarm exit and took with him an important lesson: Earned media has the power to be a kingmaker.

Chattha is now the founder and CEO of VSC, a public relations firm that has helped launch over 600 companies. The firm works with startups across all stages and recently introduced a $21 million venture firm to back the companies that it advises. (Or, as Chattha puts it, to put some skin in the game).

Now, 20 years in, Chattha has thoughts regarding how tech’s cyclical nature has impacted its relationship with media, the power of sharing real numbers and whether founders should prepare to fall on their sword in the name of transparency.

My entire conversation with the entrepreneur can be found wherever you listen to podcasts, so take a listen if you prefer audio over words (in that case, what are you doing here‽).

Below, we extracted several key excerpts from the interview for your reading pleasure.

What’s your temperature reading on how vulnerable founders are right now when it comes to sharing hardships publicly?

Vijay Chattha: It depends on the founder. Is it their first startup, their second or their third? Generally what I find is the more successful and the more wisdom you have, the more transparent you are over time, and possibly even cynical, right? But the first-time founders, they’re under a lot of pressure [to do] whatever the VCs or hired people around them are telling them to do. They’ve got to do it. They’re very concerned that the competitors are reading this stuff.

Tech’s growth story shifted this year. How has that impacted transparency? by Natasha Mascarenhas originally published on TechCrunch

Elon Musk reminded his followers on Friday that owning Twitter now means he controls every aspect of the company — including what its employees said behind closed doors before he took over.

Earlier this week, Musk teased the release of what he called “The Twitter Files,” declaring that the public “deserves to know what really happened” behind the scenes during Twitter’s decision to stifle a story about Hunter Biden back in 2020.

On Friday evening, Musk delivered, sort of. Twitter’s new owner shared a thread from author and Substack writer Matt Taibbi who is apparently now in possession of the trove of internal documents, which he opted to painstakingly share one tweet at a time, in narrative form.

Taibbi noted on his Substack that he had to “agree to certain conditions” in order to land the story, though he declined to elaborate about what the conditions were. (We’d suspect that sharing the documents in tweet form to boost the platform’s engagement must have been on the list.)

Taibbi’s decision to reveal a selection of the documents one tweet at a time was apparently not painstaking enough. One screenshot, now deleted, published Jack Dorsey’s private personal email address. Another shared an unredacted personal email belonging to Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), who expressed concerns about Twitter’s action at the time. Both incidents appear to run afoul of Twitter’s anti-doxing policy.

The documents, which are mostly internal Twitter emails, depict the chaotic situation that led Twitter to censor a New York Post story about Hunter Biden two years ago. In October 2020, The New York Post published a story that cited materials purportedly obtained from a laptop that the younger Biden left at a repair shop. With a presidential election around the corner and 2016’s hacked DNC emails and other Russian election meddling fresh in mind, Twitter decided to limit the story’s reach.

In conversation with members of Twitter’s comms and policy teams, Twitter’s former Head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth cited the company’s rules about hacked materials and noted the “severe risks and lessons of 2016” that influenced the decision making.

One member of Twitter’s legal team wrote that it was “reasonable” for Twitter to assume that the documents came from a hack, adding that “caution is warranted.” “We simply need more information,” he wrote.

In his Twitter thread, Taibbi characterized the situation to make such a consequential enforcement decision without consulting the company’s CEO as unusual. In reality, then-CEO Jack Dorsey was well known for being hands-off at the company, at times working remotely from a private island in the South Pacific and delegating even high profile decisions to his policy team.

After Twitter acted, the response from outside the company was swift — and included one Democrat, apparently. “… In the heat of a Presidential campaign, restricting dissemination of newspaper articles (even if NY Post is far right) seems like it will invite more backlash than it will do good,” Khanna wrote to a member of Twitter’s policy team.

At the time, Facebook took similar measures. But Twitter was alone in its unprecedented decision to block links to the story, ultimately inciting a firestorm of criticism that the website was putting a thumb on the scale for Democrats. The company, its former CEO and some policy executives have since described the incident as a mistake made out of an over-abundance of caution — a story that checks out in light of the newly published emails.

Musk hyped the release of the emails as a smoking gun, but they mostly tell us what we already knew: that Twitter, fearful of a repeat of 2016, took an unusual moderation step when it probably should have provided context and let the story circulate. Musk has apparently stewed over the issue since at least April when he called the decision to suspend the Post’s account “incredibly inappropriate.”

Files from the laptop would later be verified by other news outlets, but in the story’s early days no one was able to corroborate that the documents were real and not manipulated, including social platforms. “Most of the data obtained by The Post lacks cryptographic features that would help experts make a reliable determination of authenticity, especially in a case where the original computer and its hard drive are not available for forensic examination,” the Washington Post wrote in its own story verifying the emails. The decision inspired Twitter to change its rules around sharing hacked materials.

Twitter’s former Head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth shared more insight about the decision in an interview earlier this week, noting that the story set off “alarm bells” signaling that it might be a hack and leak campaign by Russian group APT28, also known as Fancy Bear. “Ultimately for me, it didn’t reach a place where I was comfortable removing this content from Twitter,” Roth said.

Dorsey admitted fault at the time in a roundabout way. “Straight blocking of URLs was wrong, and we updated our policy and enforcement to fix,” Dorsey tweeted. “Our goal is to attempt to add context,” he said, adding that now the company could do that by labeling hacked materials.

Musk has been preoccupied with a handful of specific content moderation decisions since before deciding to buy the company. His frustration that Twitter suspended the conservative satire site The Babylon Bee over a transphobic tweet appears to be the reason he even decided to buy Twitter to begin with.

Now two years after it happened, the Hunter Biden social media controversy is still a sore spot for conservatives, right wing media and Twitter’s new ownership. The platform’s past policy controversies are mostly irrelevant now with Musk at the wheel, but he apparently still has an axe to grind with the Twitter of yore — and we’re seeing that unfold in real(ish) time.

Elon Musk vicariously publishes internal emails from Twitter’s Hunter Biden laptop drama by Taylor Hatmaker originally published on TechCrunch

Lora DiCarlo, a sex tech startup that made headlines in 2019 after being blacklisted from the Consumer Electronics Show, seems to have shut down. The company’s website is offline and reportedly orders have gone unfulfilled for months.

TechCrunch has reached out to the eponymous founder for confirmation, but it sure looks like the end of the line for a briefly promising high-tech sex toy enterprise.

Founded in 2017, Lora DiCarlo was one of a new wave of tech-forward sexual health companies headed up by women. It won an innovation award at CES 2019 for, as our writer put it at the time, “a hands-free device that uses biomimicry and robotics to help women achieve a blended orgasm by simultaneously stimulating the G-spot and the clitoris.”

But then the Consumer Technology Association, which runs CES, withdrew the award and banned the company from exhibiting at the show. Their explanation at the time was that neither the company nor its devices “fit a product category.”

Predictably, this attracted immediate blowback and allegations of sexism, prudery and generally bad judgment. Everyone was on Lora DiCarlo’s side, and the publicity was invaluable, she later told TechCrunch at Disrupt: “I think they actually did us a pretty big favor.” The company raised $2 million around that time, and about $9 million total over its five years of operation.

But despite a big return to the show in 2020 (and a coveted TC+ feature, of course), the company seems to have faltered during the pandemic — perhaps falling victim to the same chip shortages and manufacturing problems even established hardware makers encountered.

As chronicled by Women’s Health, the last few months seem to have been Lora DiCarlo’s last, as various aspects of a functioning commercial enterprise began to fail: orders weren’t going out, stock was gone at retail partners and personnel have left. The site went down earlier this month and is down still. Although there has not been any official announcement, it certainly does seem that the company is kaput.

It’s too bad, but finding success as a hardware startup is hard enough without a pandemic and the stigma on sex toys adding drag. We’ll update this article if we hear back from DiCarlo.

Looks like sex tech startup Lora DiCarlo is done for by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch