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Well, NOW it’s Friday. Do you have fun plans for the long weekend? Haje is moving house (ugh), and Christine is looking at puppy GIFs until her battery dies. Probably.
Most people aren’t directly racist, but it turns out that unconscious biases creep into our brains in all sorts of nasty, sneaky little ways. Stereotypes and prejudices exist, and being aware of your own is a good place to start working. The Cornerstone Foundation has a free 30-minute course you can take to discover and work on them.
We hope you have a good Monday and don’t miss us too much while we’re on vacation. Look for our return on Tuesday. — christina and The wine
TechCrunch Top 3
- It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a drone: Dronamics raised $40 million in a pre-Series A round (or a really big seed round if you prefer to look at it that way) to start an autonomous cargo drone airline in Europe, Miguel He writes, he also has some ambitious goals: The CEO says he’ll be able to deliver to the whole of Europe on the same day from a single warehouse.
- advanced: Some Disney+ Hotstar customers weren’t too happy when the broadcast cut out in the middle of a popular cricket match. manish has more, including details that this kind of thing is not an isolated incident.
- fingers pointing: carly and Zack report that a data breach has Atlassian and Envoy briefly blaming each other for what happened and that it led to thousands of Atlassian employees having their data exposed.
Startups and VCs
With so many fintechs laying off staff, it may be easy to assume that the entire industry is in jeopardy, but that is not the case. In fact, some companies are finding opportunities in the layoff masses, maria anna find out Here’s who’s hiring. Meanwhile, natasha m. and alyssa compiled a comprehensive list of the tech layoffs of 2023.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission accused collapsed blockchain firm and stablecoin operator Terraform Labs and its founder Do Kwon of defrauding US investors who bought digital assets Terra USD and Luna. Kate reports.
And we have five more for you:
So that founder you supported turned out to be troublesome. Now what?
Image Credits: retrorocket (Opens in a new window) / Fake Images
Early-stage investors don’t closely manage the entrepreneurs they shower with cash, even when things go off the rails. And in some cases, they may not be able to wield much authority.
Assuming a VC makes an investment via a SAFE note, “if that stake hasn’t been converted into equity, they don’t have much say if things start to go wrong,” reports Rebecca Szkutak.
To learn more about how investors handle troublesome CEOs, he spoke with:
- Cameron Newton, Founder and General Partner, Relevance Ventures
- Eric Bahn, Co-Founder and General Partner, Hustle Fund
- Angela Lee, Venture Partner, Professor, Columbia Business School
We also have a few more for the weekend:
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big tech inc
The pandemic has forced us to find new ways to collaborate in a remote workplace, and some companies have been able to take advantage of that need. rita reports that ByteDance’s Slack-like tool Feishu was one of them, generating $100 million by 2022. She writes, “ByteDance’s heavy investment in Feishu speaks to the state of enterprise software in China. At a time when Silicon Valley investors herald growth driven by products, services that convert users through their products, as exemplified by Calendly, software in China is still heavily dependent on sales, marketing and services to recruit users”.
Now here are five more for you:
