It’s not too late to join us for day three of Disrupt 2021

Comment

Ever been to a multi-day conference only to find the last day to be — how can we put this kindly — less than scintillating? Yeah, that’s not happening on the third and final day of TC Disrupt 2021. You’ll find plenty of exciting, thought-provoking panels, demos and breakout sessions along with actionable tips, advice and networking opportunities.

Whether you’re looking to improve your pitch deck, gain a deeper understanding of blockchain and SPACs or discover startups fighting climate change, Disrupt Day 3 is where you need to be. And that’s just for starters.

We’ve called out a few programming highlights below, and be sure to check the full day’s offerings in the Disrupt 2021 agenda — the times listed will automatically reflect your time zone.

It’s never too late to Disrupt: Grab a pass for instant access. If you’re looking for just a taste of Disrupt with access to pitch sessions, breakout sessions, roundtables and to check out the exhibitors in the expo – grab one of these free Expo Passes!

How Do You Select the Right Tech Stack?

From day zero, startups have to make dozens of trade-offs when it comes to the infinite variety of tech stacks available to today’s engineers. Choose the wrong combination or direction, and a startup could be left with years of refactoring to fix the legacy damage. What are the best practices for assessing potential stacks, and how can you minimize the risk of a painful mistake? Top technologists Tammarrian Rogers (Snap, Inc.), Preeti Somal (HashiCorp) and Jill Wetzler (Pilot) will discuss strategies for improving engineering right from the beginning and at every stage of a startup’s journey.

The Future of Venture

Chamath Palihapitiya, founder and CEO of Social Capital, is one of the world’s most well-regarded and respected investors and has been at the forefront of the recent SPAC craze. Hear Palihapitiya’s thoughts on the future of SPACs, which tech sectors are primed for a boom and what excites him most in terms of future investments.

How DAOs Could Shake Up VC

Investment in blockchain startups and tokens exploded in 2021, and some investors are blowing up the idea of a venture capital firm as they look to back more projects in the crypto world. DAOs, or Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, are starting to pop up more and more, turning traditional VC on its head by building investment organizations on the blockchain. With David Pakman (Venrock) and Manasi Vora (Skynet Labs).

Esri Hackathon Finalist Presentations

From August 23 to September 13, developers from around the world joined Esri and TechCrunch for Hack for a Sustainable Future — a hackathon to imagine and build new apps to take on global challenges like climate, equity and public health. With big ideas and market-leading location services from Esri, participants are creating some truly innovative solutions that highlight the power of mapping technology for purpose-driven problem solving. Tune in to this special session to see an exclusive showcase of the top three projects: the winning teams will take you through their process, share the tech behind their new solution and inspire you to make a difference with your work.

Pitch Deck Teardown

An articulate, alluring pitch presentation is a big part of successfully fundraising, and yet it’s relatively uncommon for founders to get candid feedback on how they communicated the problem, their solution and their path to success. During the Pitch Deck Teardown, VCs Maren Bannon (January Ventures), Vanessa Larco (NEA) and Benjamin Ling (Bling Capital) offer their live feedback on decks previously submitted by audience members.

The Startup Battlefield Finals

TechCrunch’s iconic startup competition is back, as entrepreneurs from around the world pitch expert judges and vie for the Startup Battlefield Cup and $100,000. Check out who the finalists are here.

Start strong, end strong — and make the most of your final day at TC Disrupt 2021.

More TechCrunch

The deck included some redacted numbers, but there was still enough data to get a good picture.

Pitch Deck Teardown: Cloudsmith’s $15M Series A deck

The company is describing the event as “a chance to demo some ChatGPT and GPT-4 updates.”

OpenAI’s ChatGPT announcement: What we know so far

Unlike ChatGPT, Claude did not become a new App Store hit.

Anthropic’s Claude sees tepid reception on iOS compared with ChatGPT’s debut

Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje‘s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Look,…

Startups Weekly: Trouble in EV land and Peloton is circling the drain

Scarcely five months after its founding, hard tech startup Layup Parts has landed a $9 million round of financing led by Founders Fund to transform composites manufacturing. Lux Capital and Haystack…

Founders Fund leads financing of composites startup Layup Parts

AI startup Anthropic is changing its policies to allow minors to use its generative AI systems — in certain circumstances, at least.  Announced in a post on the company’s official…

Anthropic now lets kids use its AI tech — within limits

Zeekr’s market hype is noteworthy and may indicate that investors see value in the high-quality, low-price offerings of Chinese automakers.

The buzziest EV IPO of the year is a Chinese automaker

Venture capital has been hit hard by souring macroeconomic conditions over the past few years and it’s not yet clear how the market downturn affected VC fund performance. But recent…

VC fund performance is down sharply — but it may have already hit its lowest point

The person who claims to have 49 million Dell customer records told TechCrunch that he brute-forced an online company portal and scraped customer data, including physical addresses, directly from Dell’s…

Threat actor says he scraped 49M Dell customer addresses before the company found out

The social network has announced an updated version of its app that lets you offer feedback about its algorithmic feed so you can better customize it.

Bluesky now lets you personalize main Discover feed using new controls

Microsoft will launch its own mobile game store in July, the company announced at the Bloomberg Technology Summit on Thursday. Xbox president Sarah Bond shared that the company plans to…

Microsoft is launching its mobile game store in July

Smart ring maker Oura is launching two new features focused on heart health, the company announced on Friday. The first claims to help users get an idea of their cardiovascular…

Oura launches two new heart health features

Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world…

This Week in AI: OpenAI considers allowing AI porn

Garena is quietly developing new India-themed games even though Free Fire, its biggest title, has still not made a comeback to the country.

Garena is quietly making India-themed games even as Free Fire’s relaunch remains doubtful

The U.S.’ NHTSA has opened a fourth investigation into the Fisker Ocean SUV, spurred by multiple claims of “inadvertent Automatic Emergency Braking.”

Fisker Ocean faces fourth federal safety probe

CoreWeave has formally opened an office in London that will serve as its European headquarters and home to two new data centers.

CoreWeave, a $19B AI compute provider, opens European HQ in London with plans for 2 UK data centers

The Series C funding, which brings its total raise to around $95 million, will go toward mass production of the startup’s inaugural products

AI chip startup DEEPX secures $80M Series C at a $529M valuation 

A dust-up between Evolve Bank & Trust, Mercury and Synapse has led TabaPay to abandon its acquisition plans of troubled banking-as-a-service startup Synapse.

Infighting among fintech players has caused TabaPay to ‘pull out’ from buying bankrupt Synapse

The problem is not the media, but the message.

Apple’s ‘Crush’ ad is disgusting

The Twitter for Android client was “a demo app that Google had created and gave to us,” says Particle co-founder and ex-Twitter employee Sara Beykpour.

Google built some of the first social apps for Android, including Twitter and others

WhatsApp is updating its mobile apps for a fresh and more streamlined look, while also introducing a new “darker dark mode,” the company announced on Thursday. The messaging app says…

WhatsApp’s latest update streamlines navigation and adds a ‘darker dark mode’

Plinky lets you solve the problem of saving and organizing links from anywhere with a focus on simplicity and customization.

Plinky is an app for you to collect and organize links easily

The keynote kicks off at 10 a.m. PT on Tuesday and will offer glimpses into the latest versions of Android, Wear OS and Android TV.

Google I/O 2024: How to watch

For cancer patients, medicines administered in clinical trials can help save or extend lives. But despite thousands of trials in the United States each year, only 3% to 5% of…

Triomics raises $15M Series A to automate cancer clinical trials matching

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! Tap, tap.…

Tesla drives Luminar lidar sales and Motional pauses robotaxi plans

The newly announced “Public Content Policy” will now join Reddit’s existing privacy policy and content policy to guide how Reddit’s data is being accessed and used by commercial entities and…

Reddit locks down its public data in new content policy, says use now requires a contract

Eva Ho plans to step away from her position as general partner at Fika Ventures, the Los Angeles-based seed firm she co-founded in 2016. Fika told LPs of Ho’s intention…

Fika Ventures co-founder Eva Ho will step back from the firm after its current fund is deployed

In a post on Werner Vogels’ personal blog, he details Distill, an open-source app he built to transcribe and summarize conference calls.

Amazon’s CTO built a meeting-summarizing app for some reason

Paris-based Mistral AI, a startup working on open source large language models — the building block for generative AI services — has been raising money at a $6 billion valuation,…

Sources: Mistral AI raising at a $6B valuation, SoftBank ‘not in’ but DST is

You can expect plenty of AI, but probably not a lot of hardware.

Google I/O 2024: What to expect