Mode Designs launches the Sonnet, its new 75% custom mechanical keyboard
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It’s not rocket science: Why Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover could be bad for privacy
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It’s April 27, 2022, and here’s a thing we didn’t see coming: May. What the hell happened to this month, this year? As the summer equinox draws closer, the weather warms up and the days get longer, we long drinks with tiny rainbow umbrellas in them. If you’re reading this in the Southern Hemisphere: Sorry for our summery optimism. Please enjoy some hot chocolate and fuzzy socks as we take a dip in the pool. – Christine and Haje
It’s fundraising season for venture funds, apparently! MassMutual Ventures closed a $300 million fund to back Asian and European startups. Lightspeed India Partners announced a half-billion-dollar fund. Crypto-focused Dragonfly Capital officially announced its third fund, weighing in at $650 million.
A little less aspiration, a little more traction, please:
Image Credits: Third Eye Images (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Image Credits: Third Eye Images (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
In a conversation with Editor Greg Kumparak at TechCrunch Early Stage, YC managing director and group partner Dalton Caldwell spoke about the application process founders must navigate before they’re accepted to one of the world’s top accelerators.
“The first thing I look at when I read an application is the team. What I’m looking for is technical excellence on the team,” said Caldwell.
“Our teams that rely on trying to hire outsourced engineers or consultants or whatever to build their product tend to move much slower than folks with a technical founder,” he added. “They tend to get ripped off.”
(TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)
How to get into Y Combinator, according to YC’s Dalton Caldwell
Robinhood announced plans to lay off 9% of its staff just before the investing and trading service was poised to come out with its earnings. We’ll have to see what happens Thursday — and whether that sheds light on the situation.
In earnings talk, Spotify’s stats told us what we already assumed: that the controversy around having a Joe Rogan podcast did little to sway subscriber numbers, which grew 15%. Yesterday, we prepared you for the General Motors earnings, and today, we are able to share that GM has some big ambitions and some serious cash to put behind it. Stay tuned for Ford. Meanwhile, Alphabet’s earnings showed some mixed results — Google doing well, YouTube not so much, though the number of channels making $10,000 in revenue grew 40%. Not bad.
Salesforce updated its low-code workflow tool, Salesforce Flow, which Ron described as “a bold attempt to pull together all of the pieces in the Salesforce arsenal in a more coherent fashion, using a popular tool that has been around since 2019 to do the job.”
Twitter news continues, from what happened at the company’s all-hands meeting to Devin’s opinion piece to how much Elon Musk and Twitter will have to pay each other should the deal fizzle. Follower counts on high-profile accounts fluctuated all over the place, with Twitter saying the undulations were mostly organic. Alex and Amanda came together to chat about all things Elon Musk and Twitter for the latest Equity podcast. We also have the skinny on Musk’s attempt to end an SEC settlement regarding Tesla tweets.
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