Alexia Tsotsis is the co-editor of TechCrunch. She attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA, majoring in Writing and Art, and moved to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the Media industry.
After four years of living in New York and attending courses at New York University, she returned to Los Angeles in order to continue her career in new media, first as LA Weekly’s Internet culture reporter, and then as SF Weekly’s web editor. Before she joined TechCrunch, Alexia ran the SFweekly.com website while staying on top of memes, the tech scene, and human behavior in the digital age.
At TechCrunch, Tsotsis covers early stage startups, and has had the opportunity to interview everyone from Groupon’s Andrew Mason to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. Most recently Tsotsis made the Forbes “30 Under 30: Rising Stars of Media List.” Her Twitter bio reads, “Breaks news, hearts.”
Here we go again: Facebook is apparently trying for the third time to get its phone project off the ground — snatching up iOS design and engineering talent left and right Nick Bilton is hearing.
We’re hearing (and seeing) similar regarding iOS talent, but with one caveat: Word on the street is that few mobile design wizzes actually want to work at Facebook, but everyone has their price, and post-IPO Mark Zuckerberg is willing to pay that price, whatever it is.
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It’s been a whirlwind couple of days here in New York, as our expert judges watched earnest startups pitch their hearts out onstage at the third annual TechCrunch Disrupt NY. Thirty startups presented in the first two days, to be whittled down to six after much judge deliberation and founder bated breath: gTar, OpenGarden, UberConference, Ark, Babelverse and Sunglass. → Read More
When you’re stuck for three days in a big warehouse with the same group of smart people talking about the future of tech innovation over and over and over again (+beer), you start getting really silly. And some of the unique circumstances of year’s TechCrunch Disrupt New York have given us plenty to be silly about.
For instance, there are birds, live birds (!) in the conference hall, and in fact I can hear them right now chirping LOUDLY while one of the demo companies presents onstage. The birds are so prevalent that they’ve spawned jokes from some of the speakers, like, “It’s so hip of you guys to hold a conference in a bird sanctuary” in addition to a fake Twitter account, @TechCrunchBird, which tweets stuff like, “*Frightened fluttering from music,* “”Disappointed chirp.,” “*quiet listening*,” and my personal favorite, 啁啾 (‘Chirp’ in Chinese). → Read More
Silicon Valley is full of unsung heroes: Mike Krieger, Arash Ferdowsi, interns, the TechCrunch sales team, Heather Harde and the countless engineers that keep the products we love from failing to be the products we love. One of these unsung heroes is SV Angel’s David Lee, who has served as a mentor and sounding board for almost every smart person in the Valley as far as I can tell.
But as of today Lee is a little more “sung”; In a discussion with Michael Arrington on stage at TC Disrupt New York, investor Ron Conway made it even more clear that SV Angel is actually managing partner David Lee’s fund. → Read More
As we covered earlier today, the fashion vertical in tech has exploded, with myriad unique companies clamoring to take a bite out of Amazon’s lunch, and a chunk out of the trillion dollar apparel industry. One of the most unique premises I’ve seen thus far is StyleSaint, a startup which at first glance seems like a Pinterest for fashion, but with a unique real-life twist.
To use StyleSaint in its current form, log in with Facebook or Twitter and create an account, once logged on, you can chose from over 55K “tear sheet” images from which to create your own Stylebook, once you’ve got more than ten tear sheets loaded, you can hit the “Create Stylebooks” link in the top right and StyleSaint will automatically import, then publish, the last ten sheets you’ve torn. Alternatively you can drag-and-drop the tears to create a custom stylebook. Click on “Create” to publish to the site. → Read More
Earlier today we spoke to Fab.com CEO Jason Goldberg at TechCrunch Disrupt, on the anniversary of his company’s pivot from gay social network to design-focused flash sales site, and a week after its mini-pivot to curated social shopping site.
In addition to expounding on the past, Goldberg spoke about his expanding vision for the new eCommerce, and how he saw Fab as essentially competing with retail giant IKEA, rather than other eCommerce sites like One Kings Lane and “some companies that recently went public.” → Read More
Speaking at Peter Thiel’s class at Stanford last week, investor and entrepreneur Mark Andreessen called out retail as a “particularly promising” vertical for tech innovation.
We’re seeing and will continue to get e-commerce 2.0, that is, e-commerce that’s not just for nerds. The 1.0 was search driven. You go to Amazon or eBay, search for a thing, and buy it. That works great if you’re shopping for particular stuff.
The 2.0 model involves a deeper understanding of consumer behavior. These are companies like Warby Parker and Airbnb. It’s happening vertical by vertical. And it’s likely to keep happening throughout the retail world because retail is really bad to start with. There are very high fixed costs of having stores and inventory. Margins are very small to begin with. If you take away just 5 or 10%, things collapse.”
There’s been a lot of armchair valuation punditry across the Valley this week. As the Facebook IPO looms, our intricately entwined ecosystem of startups and investors seeks to benefit from the domino effect of a population feeling flush with cash. This is the picture that the WSJ painted in its Quora funding announcement yesterday, headline: “Former Facebook Hands Capitalize on Buzz.” Okay, sure, smart people will always adapt to a favorable environment — but the WSJ missed a deeper and more long-term dynamic at play. → Read More
Q&A site Quora has raised $50 million at a $400 million pre-money valuation according to a report by the Wall Street Journal and confirmed to me by the founders themselves. We had reported that Quora was raising in this range back in April and it looks like Facebook board member Peter Thiel has beat out many other investors including a much-rumored KPCB to lead the round. Also investing is Matrix’s Josh Hannah and Northbridge’s Jonathan Heiliger.
According to our own sources, Quora co-founder Adam D’Angelo put $20 million of his own money into the Series B financing. Thiel is leading personally and not through Founders Fund, breaking up the remaining $30 million between Matrix and Northbridge. → Read More
The people behind college flirting network Likealittle have launched a new app in the App Store, Circle, an app that attempts to be more granular and thoughtful about the burgeoning ambient location space, which includes startups like Highlight, Banjo, Meetup and recent Facebook acquisition Glancee. While Likealittle will continue to run its course, the company will be shifting most of its focus to Circle.
Before Highlight launched at SXSW, I wrote that it needed to allow you to drill down into who could see you on the app, who could message you, and who you could see — Because some people were cool with people being alerted to their whereabouts, but wanted control levels, like being able to limit the functionality to only their friends. While Highlight has yet to add these granular settings,Circle operates exactly on this premise, allowing you to see the people around you if you and they are part of limited shared networks. → Read More
In a world where Instagram is worth more than the New York Times, old media is no longer dying, it’s dead. Instead, in its wake, we’ve got the Wild West: A chaotic morass of never-ending slideshows, puny WordPress blogs breaking big time news (and selling for tens of millions) and the merger of lolcats and politics on a site which focuses just as much on content sharing as content.
Although we all agree that new media is just media now, there are many perspectives battling it out for the future of the medium and whatever form it will take — Aggregation vs. Original content, etc, etc and so on and so forth — “The medium is the message” is at its most poignant in online media.
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Good morning everybody! It’s beginning to look a lot like NYC Disrupt time (seriously, Disrupt is a force of nature in more ways than one). For those of you wondering why we haven’t been returning email/phone calls/telegrams/carrier pigeons, TechCrunch Disrupt NYC is happening in two weeks, starting May 21st and going through the 23rd, preceded by our Red Bull-ified Hackathon.
We promised you a great show and that is exactly what we are going to give you; First and foremost we’re bringing (some of) the band back together, with our illustrious founder Michael Arrington and former colleagues MG Siegler and Jason Kincaid also taking the stage. → Read More
We’re sitting in a conference at Sequoia Capital in Menlo Park watching Disrupt companies rehearse and it’s reminding me, Disrupt NYC is almost here! (Also, I think I just stole somebody’s food.)
Other than the fact that I love and miss New York, I am really psyched about this the third annual NYC Disrupt; We’ve already announced many amazing speakers and judges, and today we are announcing a few more rockstars on our speaker lineup.
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Oh the “where do I find hot startups?” problem … VCs have been grappling with this for ages, resorting to such avenues as rampant gossiping, reading TechCrunch, informally tapping into early stage investor networks for intros to later stage deals and apparently, according to PandoDaily’s Sarah Lacy, setting up formal programs where entrepreneurs who are “network rich and cash poor” serve as deal scouts. Makes sense.
Thus becoming the platform for startup discovery presents a huge opportunity for anyone who comes up with a grand solution: And, because which hot startup isn’t mobile these days, Apple itself is rumored to be trying to solve the problem with its own app discovery and promotion platform, aiming to go beyond its Featured section and expand into more intensive forms of app publicity. Its recent acquisition of Chomp harkens to this ambition and project, though as far as I can tell it still has a long way to go. → Read More
Sometimes people ask me why we’re still here even though we’re owned by poopy pants Aol , and I’m all like, “Huh what? Oh I’m sorry I’m drunk, who are you again?”
Lolz.
Okay so the real reason that I and the rest of the TC team are here, despite the fact that we’re all so incredibly and obviously employable, is that we get to work with a bunch of geniuses all day every day. Seriously, it is awesome just getting to set a record/ be a part of this crazy time while also inadvertently creating jobs and keeping our own. → Read More
I know we’ve been taking the piss out of Aol* all day, but someone in Aol PR must be drunk, because this bizarre “BREAKING: Board Has Presided over Improvement of AOL’s Operating Results and Financial Strength and Unlocked over $1.7 Billion in Value in Two Years” press release happened.
We figure that this must be some sort of Zodiac Killer-like word puzzle, where if you take out every three letters it’s an actually a crazy rambling essay about how much whoever wrote this hates their life. → Read More
For a social network that’s, for lack of a better term, monogamous, social network for couples Pair has just raised funding from so many high-profile investors I’m having trouble picking who to include in this headline, and seriously running out of room.
Investors in the company’s recent $4.2 million seed round include Ashton Kutcher’s A-Grade Ventures, Dave Morin, Paul Buchheit, Founder Collective, SV Angel, Lerer Ventures, Michael Birch, Sam Altman, CrunchFund, Tencent, Yuri Milner, Betaworks, Alexis Ohanian, Garry Tan, Harjeet Taggar, Gary Vaynerchuk, Brandee Barker, Brian Pokorny, Elad Gil, and Susan Wu.
Brit Morin, the Martha Stewart of tech, is today announcing a $1.25 million seed round for her technology and content company Brit. The list of investors is actually pretty sympatico with “the next generation of lifestyle” branding of Brit & Co, with fashion-heavy Index Ventures, tech fashionista Marissa Mayer, KCPB’s Aileen Lee, Tina Sharkey and Seth Goldstein, Kevin Colleran, Annabel Teal, General Catalyst Partners, Founders Fund Angel and DMGT all going in.
In addition to the funding, the company is also launching its first app, Weduary, which lets tech-savvy couples build their own attractive and dynamic wedding websites. The Facebook app, which users can try for free, lets prospective brides and grooms build a custom wedding website in four steps, leveraging the Facebook social graph to make it easy to import photos from Facebook, invite guests, coordinate registry details and other event RSVPs. → Read More
SimpleGeo’s Matt Galligan and Icanhascheezburger’s Ben Huh have teamed up to change the way people consume news via mobile. Their startup Circa, which boasts a newsworthy list of advisors like former Digg CEO Jay Adelson, has just raised 750K in seed funding from eonCapital, Quotidian Ventures, Techstars’ David Cohen and David Tisch, Tumblr’s David Karp, Eric Norlin, Manesh Arora, Pedro Torres-Picon, Rick Webb, Scott Belsky and Soraya Darabi.
“40% of our current funding is provided by Davids,” Galligan jokes. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
