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Helloooooooooo, midweek Crunchers! Today, we are pretty excited about life in general. Also, is your company still in stealth? Apply to Startup Battlefield 200 anyway — and announce your public debut at TechCrunch Disrupt!
See you at TechCrunch Early Stage in Boston tomorrow? — Christine and Haje
The TechCrunch Top 3
- More Meta layoffs: Reports suggest that Meta is planning to cut another 4,000 jobs this week, Rebecca writes. If you are keeping track at home, this is in addition to an announcement made in March to cut 10,000 jobs and 11,000 jobs that were cut in November.
- And the winner is…: Amazon tops LinkedIn’s list of best places to work, and Ingrid writes that jobseeker priorities have shifted to workplace culture, concluding that “the big question is whether or not factors like cultural values are a sign of our times, or if these parameters will remain permanent priorities among jobseekers, changing the bigger picture for how recruiters can capture the best talent — and indeed what ‘talent’ will look like — in the future.”
- Bay-be real, doo doo doo doo doo doo: The curtain is really coming down on the lives of BeReal users, who can now include what they are listening to on Spotify when they post, Aisha reports.
Startups and VC
Many apps today assume that data lives in only one location, typically a single cloud database. But the reality is more complex, Kyle reports. Thanks to the proliferation of mobile devices and cloud infrastructure — the latter of which accelerated during the pandemic — apps now need to store and process data in more places, from the edge to the public cloud. Ditto to the rescue so companies can keep it all in sync.
There was just one fintech unicorn birth in the entire quarter. This is the first time that has happened since the end of 2016. The only unicorn born in Q1 was Egypt-based MNT-Halan, which in early February raised $260 million in equity financing at a $1billion valuation, Mary Ann and Christine report in their look back at the first quarter of the year.
And we have five more for you:
Software investors must (re)learn these 3 ideas before getting into deep tech
Image Credits: Christian Sturzenegger (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Because VCs turned “software investing into a low-margin finance game,” it might be a net positive that so many are “unable to move forward and invest in the next big thing: deep tech,” says Champ Suthipongchai, co-founder and general partner at Creative Ventures.
A SaaS mindset just isn’t relevant for deep tech investment, which means traditional VCs must recalibrate their behavior (and expectations) before diving in.
“Software investors’ founder-first mantra is simply wrong in the world of deep tech,” writes Suthipongchai. “This type of magical thinking is exactly why their software playbook is doomed to fail.”
Three more alliterative articles from the TC+ team:
TechCrunch+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription!
Big Tech Inc.
Tesla is price-checking all over the place. The electric vehicle company cut prices again for the Model 3 and Model Y so that those popular models are now under $40,000, Rebecca reports. We’re now watching to see how well those margins did in affecting Tesla’s first-quarter earnings, which are scheduled to come out later today.
The consumer tech team covered the Snap Partner Summit today, and here are a few things they found out:
And we have five more for you:
