Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week was a lot of fun. Connie Lozios took the captain’s chair in San Francisco while I manned the sails, and we had Female Founders Fund’s founder Anu Duggal in the studio to round out our crew.…
Aura Vision, which is part of the current batch of startups at Y Combinator, helps retailers understand who’s visiting their stores and what they’re doing there. In other words, if you want to see the demographics of who’s visiting the store, or which displays and products are actually prompting customers to linger, or how long…
Pi Day is apparently New Job day for tech execs and VCs these days. Leaving: Lee Fixel It’s not every day that one of the top VC investors heads out from their shop. TechCrunch’s @cookie aka Connie Loizos has the story: Lee Fixel, the low-flying head of Tiger Global’s private equity business, is leaving at…
Does a patent application mean a company is particularly serious about a technology? No. Is every company that makes a phones at least toying around with a folding model? Yes, probably. It’s tough to know from a series a crude drawings and technical details filed with the USPTO how seriously an individual company is taking…
Earlier this week, Spotify filed an antitrust complaint with the European Commission against Apple, claiming that the company – which runs the App Store for iOS software – treats rivals to its own services unfairly, with a range of restrictions and demands. Naturally, with more than 200 million users worldwide, Spotify was able to get…
Various cyber criminal groups and individual hackers are still exploiting a recently patched critical code execution vulnerability in WinRAR, a popular Windows file compression application with 500 million users worldwide. Why? Because the WinRAR software doesn’t have an auto-update feature, which, unfortunately, leaves millions of its users vulnerable to cyber attacks. The critical vulnerability (CVE-2018-20250) that…
Electric scooter startup Bird has laid off between four to five percent of its workforce, The Information first reported. That comes out to about 40 people of its ~900-employee workforce. This comes shortly after Lyft laid off up to 50 employees in its bikes and scooters division. “As we establish local service centers and deeper…
There was a nice surprise morsel for those following Turtle Beach’s financials this week. In addition to a “record fourth quarter,” the headset maker announced that it has agreed to purchase fellow gaming peripheral company Roccat for $14.8 million in cash. Turtle Beach is best known for creating gaming headsets for a wide range of…
Patricia Nakache Contributor More posts by this contributor Defensible strategies for food tech entrepreneurs facing the Amazon juggernaut How Startups Are Making Real Estate Businesses More Efficient John Lin is an associate partner at Trinity Ventures supporting investments in developer tools, artificial intelligence and real estate. From entertainment to transportation, technology has upended nearly every…
At first glance, it appeared that Tesla Model 3 had a doppelganger. After years of teasers and hints, Tesla CEO Elon Musk finally unveiled the Model Y, a mid-sized all-electric vehicle that will start at $39,000 and is slated to hit the marketplace in fall 2020. The Model Y bears a striking resemblance to Model…
