The Merge is upon us (and other TC news)

This week on The TechCrunch Podcast we talked with Natasha about the Y Combinator Demo Day for the Summer 2022 cohort; the highs, the lows, the new management and whether the accelerator moving to be more in-person-focused is a help or a hindrance to its further-flung participants. Then, ever a crypto-sceptic at heart, I was delighted to get the chance to talk with Anita about the upcoming Ethereum chain merge.

First, the YC Demo Day. “The things that have stood out to me so far is that it’s a more Bay Area-based program. YC announced that about 30% of the cohort moved to the Bay Area during the accelerator and about 23% were already in the Bay Area, when they applied,” Natasha said. “We see a bifurcation being created between the people who could (or already did) live in the Bay Area and YC’s international focus. To me, that’s an interesting tension we’re seeing play out a little bit in the batch metrics.”

On the blockchain side of things, I was curious if the proverbial wheels were going to come off. Anita didn’t seem too worried. “All of the engineers I’ve talked to don’t seem to be too concerned. This has been a point of discussion since 2016; it’s been discussed, debated and tested a bunch of times. Someone compared it to the moon landing,” said Anita (and explains the analogy in the podcast episode). “It is this huge, risky thing. It seems like a really big deal. But so much practice and preparation has gone into this process that I personally wouldn’t expect anything significant to go wrong in the process itself.”

Articles mentioned in this episode:

We covered a whole bunch of Apple news. Greg helpfully put together a full overview of everything we covered, but in particular we talked about:

• iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Pro are launched, which includes SOS calling for emergencies
• Series 8 Apple Watch
• Apple Watch Ultra (Brian checked it out up close. It has a dive mode, which I got super excited about, and wrote that I’d happily trust Apple with my underwater existence)
• There was no iPhone Mini (Boo!)
• We didn’t get USB-C plugs yet (Boo!)

Non-Apple news

• Juul agrees to pay $438.5M in a record settlement, while a newer vape maker gains steam
• Elon Musk can lean on the Twitter whistleblower but he can’t push the trial date back

Stories mentioned in our interviews with the TechCrunch writers

• Garry Tan’s return is a full circle moment for Y Combinator
• Y Creator, Y Competition
• Y Combinator is doubling down on crypto founders despite market volatility
• Delving into YC’s diversity data following a category shakeup
• And of course, we had our collection of moonshots, Day 1 and Day 2 favorites from the cohort
• I also made reference to my 1,000 startups per batch? RIP Y Combinator story from December last year
• How the upcoming Ethereum Merge could change crypto’s rewards, costs and reputation

The Merge is upon us (and other TC news) by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

source