ceo
GitHub gets a new CEO
GitHub CEO Nat Friedman is stepping down from his role on November 15 to become the Chairman Emeritus of the Microsoft-owned service. Thomas Dohmke, who only recently became GitHub’s chief…
Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, Niantic’s follow-up to Pokémon GO, is shutting down
Niantic’s augmented reality game about the boy who lived is about to die. The company that brought us Pokémon GO debuted Harry Potter: Wizards Unite two years ago, following a…
Microsoft’s new Azure OpenAI Service brings GPT-3 to (a few) more developers
Microsoft today announced the launch of the Azure OpenAI Service, which, as the name implies, makes OpenAI’s machine learning models available on the Azure platform. Specifically, that means GPT-3, OpenAI’s…
Fiverr acquires Stoke Talent for $95M, adding freelance management tools for employers to its platform
On the heels of LinkedIn last week launching Service Marketplace, a competitor to freelance platforms like Fiverr and Upwork, today Fiverr announced an acquisition that speaks to how it plans…
Yugabyte stores up $188M more for its open-source distributed SQL database model, now valued at $1.3B+
Today’s world is run on data, and the amount of it that is being produced, managed and used to power services is growing by the minute — to the tune…
Vistaprint acquires Crello and Depositphotos, rebrands as Vista, to better take on Canva and others in online creative design for businesses
Vistaprint has built a name for itself in providing printing and marketing services for consumers, sole traders and small businesses. Now it is making a pair of acquisitions as it…
Check out what’s happening tomorrow at TC Sessions: SaaS 2021
It’s officially TC Sessions: SaaS 2021 eve, and tomorrow is a big, busy day for everyone involved with or interested in building the next generation of SaaS startups. Top-line industry…
Storing great pools of data is an increasingly figured-out challenge. Between public clouds, and data lakes more specifically, you can stick oceans of corporate data in any number of places.…
ViacomCBS CEO Bob Bakish downplays idea of a merger to get scale in streaming
ViacomCBS CEO Bob Bakish this morning downplayed his company’s interest in a potential merger — like one with its partner Comcast. At the WSJ Tech Live conference today, the media…
Hubilo picks up $125M to double down on building a more engaging platform for virtual and live events
Virtual became the norm for physical gatherings at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, and now, as many jet back into in-person meetings, some believe that the online version, at…
Seven years after raising $542M at a $2B valuation, Magic Leap raises $500M at a $2B valuation
Magic Leap has had one hell of a journey, and to their credit, it seems investors are still addicted to giving them money. The augmented reality startup announced today that…
In hopes of App Store changes, Paddle develops an alternative to Apple’s payments system
Paddle, a solutions provider for subscription-based businesses, is betting on a future where App Store developers are able to use third-party payment systems — and it wants to be among…
Announcing the final agenda for TechCrunch Sessions: SaaS 2021
TechCrunch Sessions is back! On October 27, we’re taking on the ferociously competitive field of software as a service (SaaS), and we’re thrilled to announce our final packed agenda, overflowing…
Al Gore puts $600M into UK Green energy-tech startup Octopus Energy Group
Former Vice President Al Gore has invested $600 million of equity into U.K. energy startup Octopus Energy Group via his Generation Investment Management vehicle, taking a stake of approximately 13%…
All good things must come to an end, and this proverb totally applies to our early-bird price on passes to TC Sessions: SaaS 2021. Today’s the final day you can…
PSPDFkit raises $116M, its first outside money; now nearly 1B people use apps powered by its collaboration, signing and markup tools
An under-the-radar, bootstrapped startup from Vienna, Austria — a hit with developers for technology that underpins user experience for some of the world’s most popular apps — is doubling down…
Sinch acquires Pathwire, the company behind Mailgun and Mailjet, for $1.9B to add email into its API-based communications platform
Sinch, the Swedish company that competes with Twilio and others in the world of messaging and other communication APIs is making another big M&A play to build out its platform.…
Russian authorities arrest cybersecurity giant Group-IB’s CEO on treason charges
Russian authorities have arrested and detained Ilya Sachkov, the co-founder and chief executive of Group-IB — one of the biggest cybersecurity companies in the country — on charges of treason.…
Facebook’s CTO to step down after 13 years at the company
Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer just announced that he will stepping down from the role next year and transition to a part-time position as a “Senior Fellow” at the…
Lounge’s new app aims to reimagine the office for the remote work era
A startup called Lounge wants to reimagine work for the fully remote era where tools like Slack, Zoom, and Teams have fallen short in terms of helping companies build culture…
TrueLayer nabs $130M at a $1B+ valuation as open banking rises as a viable option to card networks
Open banking — a disruptive technology that seeks to bypass the dominance of card networks and other traditional financial rails by letting banks open their systems directly to developers (and…
OpenSea admits incident as top exec is accused of trading NFTs on insider information
The “eBay of NFTs” is running into a scandal as it admits one of its employees traded the crypto digital assets using insider information from the platform. Yesterday, a top…
Glassdoor acquires Fishbowl, a semi-anonymous social network and job board, to square up to LinkedIn
While LinkedIn doubles down on creators to bring a more human, less manicured element to its networking platform for professionals, a company that has built a reputation for publishing primarily…
Epic Games appeals last week’s ruling in antitrust battle with Apple
Fortnite maker Epic Games is appealing last week’s ruling in its court battle with Apple, where a federal judge said Apple would no longer be allowed to block developers from…
GrubMarket gobbles up $120M at a $1B+ pre-money valuation to take on the food supply chain
When people talk about “online food delivery” services, chances are that they’ll think of the Uber Eats, Instacarts and Getirs of this world. But today a startup that’s tackling a…
Being a CEO is more than building on a vision, a product or an idea. It’s about leading your people with values to accomplish mutual goals in a way that…
CryptoPunks blasts past $1 billion in lifetime sales as NFT speculation surges
Hello friends, and welcome back to Week in Review! Last week we dove into Bezos’s Blue Origin suing NASA. This week, I’m writing about the unlikely and triumphant resurgence of…
Facebook’s journey toward making virtual reality a thing has been long and circuitous, but despite mixed success in finding a wide audience for VR, they have managed to build some…
Creators can now monetize their expertise on Quora
In May, Yahoo! Answers shut down after helping the internet answer its most burning questions since 2005. But now, Quora, which began as a question-and-answer site but expanded to incorporate…
Featured Article
A blueprint for building a great startup founding team
Putting the right people in the right roles early on can be the difference between success and failure — and that starts at the top.
