Venture

TechCrunch+ roundup: Finding product-market fit, pitch deck teardown, getting into YC

Comment

San Francisco Skyline and Ferry Building Aerial View at Night, California, USA
Image Credits: heyengel (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Earlier this month at TechCrunch Early Stage, I talked to Frederique Dame, an investing partner at GV, about product-market fit.

A standing-room-only crowd packed the venue as Dame spoke about her experience leading product and engineering efforts at Uber, Yahoo and Smugmug, sharing some of what she learned about gathering customer data, iterating quickly to validate ideas, and the challenges that come with scaling teams from a few dozen people to several thousand employees.

We also discussed several specific tactics and strategies that can help move organizations towards PMF, including effective ways to capture and share user data, and developing customer personas that will help everyone understand the company’s mission and purpose.


Full TechCrunch+ articles are only available to members
Use discount code TCPLUSROUNDUP to save 20% off a one- or two-year subscription


Distilling our 40-minute conversation into a single article was beyond my abilities, so I’ll share a follow-up next week with additional takeaways from our chat and the audience Q&A that followed.

Dame shared one piece of advice that I’d never heard from an investor: more founders should learn to make themselves vulnerable.

“Trust me with what you don’t know or what’s not working, because once we invest, we’re going to have to work on this stuff anyway,” she said. “I’d rather start working on this stuff early on.”

Thanks very much for reading! I hope you have a fantastic weekend.

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch+
@yourprotagonist

GV’s Frederique Dame on product-market fit: ‘You have one chance at a good experience’

Charged with billions in capital, meet the 9 startups developing tomorrow’s batteries today

Image of a power supply connected to an electric vehicle.
Power supply connect to electric vehicle for charge to the battery. Charging technology industry transport which are the futuristic of the Automobile. EV fuel Plug in hybrid car.

In his first TechCrunch+ article, Senior Climate Writer Tim De Chant examined nine startups optimizing EV battery technology that have collectively raised just over $4 billion in the last 18 months.

Improving tech like solid-state batteries, replacing specific chemical components and using hybrid chemistries are just a few of the techniques startups are deploying to unlock benefits like reducing weight while increasing range and safety.

“But cars and trucks won’t be the only thing touched by the battery revolution that’ll occur over the next few years,” he writes.

“Like many advances, better, lighter, and longer-lasting batteries will drive changes in our lives that are both unexpected and welcome.”

Charged with billions in capital, meet the 9 startups developing tomorrow’s batteries today

How to get into Y Combinator, according to YC’s Dalton Caldwell

Image of closed doors with one cracked open.
Image Credits: Third Eye Images (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

In a conversation with Editor Greg Kumparak at TechCrunch Early Stage, YC managing director and group partner Dalton Caldwell spoke about the application process founders must navigate before they’re accepted to one of the world’s top accelerators.

“The first thing I look at when I read an application is the team. What I’m looking for is technical excellence on the team,” said Caldwell.

“Our teams that rely on trying to hire outsourced engineers or consultants or whatever to build their product tend to move much slower than folks with a technical founder,” he added.

“They tend to get ripped off.”

How to get into Y Combinator, according to YC’s Dalton Caldwell

Dear Sophie: When should I sponsor engineers for green cards?

lone figure at entrance to maze hedge that has an American flag at the center
Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

Dear Sophie,

The engineers that we’re trying to recruit are increasingly requesting that we sponsor them for green cards. I don’t have an HR background, but I’ve been assigned HR duties at our startup.

Can you give me a rundown of the green cards that are available?

Is it possible to sponsor someone for a green card without them getting an H-1B or other visa first? Which green card is the fastest?

— Targeting Talent

Dear Sophie: When should I sponsor engineers for green cards?

Early-stage fundraising is a tale of two planets

Two planet in the space with nebula and bright star.
Image Credits: Arndt Vladimir (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Startup valuations swelled in recent years, but investors continue to favor “founders who are experienced, pedigreed, smooth or well-connected,” writes Leslie Feinzaig, CEO and founder of Graham & Walker, a fund/accelerator that promotes women in business.

Founders on Planet Flush “live in a planet of big, buzzy, competitive early rounds,” but residents of Planet Scrappy inhabit a world “where fundraising is extremely difficult and unlikely,” she writes.

Funding isn’t the only disparity, says Feinzaig: founders with strong networks are unlikely to face real scrutiny until seeking a Series B, but “meanwhile in Planet Scrappy, Series A level diligence happens at the pre-seed stage.”

Early-stage fundraising is a tale of two planets

Pitch deck teardown: Minut

Image Credits: Minut (opens in a new window)

Minut, which manufactures wireless sensors for monitoring short-term rental properties, closed a $14 million Series B last month.

Reporter Haje Jan Kamps deconstructed the 21-slide pitch deck to show how Minut used data visualizations and storytelling to give investors a clear vision of the market opportunity, the competitive landscape, and where the company is gaining traction.

If you’d like to see your pitch deck featured on TechCrunch+, click through for details.

Pitch Deck Teardown: Minut’s $15M Series B pitch deck

More TechCrunch

Welcome back to TechCrunch’s Week in Review — TechCrunch’s newsletter recapping the week’s biggest news. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. Over the past eight years,…

Fisker collapsed under the weight of its founder’s promises

What is AI? We’ve put together this non-technical guide to give anyone a fighting chance to understand how and why today’s AI works.

WTF is AI?

President Joe Biden has vetoed H.J.Res. 109, a congressional resolution that would have overturned the Securities and Exchange Commission’s current approach to banks and crypto. Specifically, the resolution targeted the…

President Biden vetoes crypto custody bill

Featured Article

Industries may be ready for humanoid robots, but are the robots ready for them?

How large a role humanoids will play in that ecosystem is, perhaps, the biggest question on everyone’s mind at the moment.

12 hours ago
Industries may be ready for humanoid robots, but are the robots ready for them?

VCs are clamoring to invest in hot AI companies, willing to pay exorbitant share prices for coveted spots on their cap tables. Even so, most aren’t able to get into…

VCs are selling shares of hot AI companies like Anthropic and xAI to small investors in a wild SPV market

The fashion industry has a huge problem: Despite many returned items being unworn or undamaged, a lot, if not the majority, end up in the trash. An estimated 9.5 billion…

Deal Dive: How (Re)vive grew 10x last year by helping retailers recycle and sell returned items

Tumblr officially shut down “Tips,” an opt-in feature where creators could receive one-time payments from their followers.  As of today, the tipping icon has automatically disappeared from all posts and…

You can no longer use Tumblr’s tipping feature 

Generative AI improvements are increasingly being made through data curation and collection — not architectural — improvements. Big Tech has an advantage.

AI training data has a price tag that only Big Tech can afford

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: Can we (and could we ever) trust OpenAI?

Jasper Health, a cancer care platform startup, laid off a substantial part of its workforce, TechCrunch has learned.

General Catalyst-backed Jasper Health lays off staff

Featured Article

Live Nation confirms Ticketmaster was hacked, says personal information stolen in data breach

Live Nation says its Ticketmaster subsidiary was hacked. A hacker claims to be selling 560 million customer records.

1 day ago
Live Nation confirms Ticketmaster was hacked, says personal information stolen in data breach

Featured Article

Inside EV startup Fisker’s collapse: how the company crumbled under its founders’ whims

An autonomous pod. A solid-state battery-powered sports car. An electric pickup truck. A convertible grand tourer EV with up to 600 miles of range. A “fully connected mobility device” for young urban innovators to be built by Foxconn and priced under $30,000. The next Popemobile. Over the past eight years, famed vehicle designer Henrik Fisker…

1 day ago
Inside EV startup Fisker’s collapse: how the company crumbled under its founders’ whims

Late Friday afternoon, a time window companies usually reserve for unflattering disclosures, AI startup Hugging Face said that its security team earlier this week detected “unauthorized access” to Spaces, Hugging…

Hugging Face says it detected ‘unauthorized access’ to its AI model hosting platform

Featured Article

Hacked, leaked, exposed: Why you should never use stalkerware apps

Using stalkerware is creepy, unethical, potentially illegal, and puts your data and that of your loved ones in danger.

1 day ago
Hacked, leaked, exposed: Why you should never use stalkerware apps

The design brief was simple: each grind and dry cycle had to be completed before breakfast. Here’s how Mill made it happen.

Mill’s redesigned food waste bin really is faster and quieter than before

Google is embarrassed about its AI Overviews, too. After a deluge of dunks and memes over the past week, which cracked on the poor quality and outright misinformation that arose…

Google admits its AI Overviews need work, but we’re all helping it beta test

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. In…

Startups Weekly: Musk raises $6B for AI and the fintech dominoes are falling

The product, which ZeroMark calls a “fire control system,” has two components: a small computer that has sensors, like lidar and electro-optical, and a motorized buttstock.

a16z-backed ZeroMark wants to give soldiers guns that don’t miss against drones

The RAW Dating App aims to shake up the dating scheme by shedding the fake, TikTok-ified, heavily filtered photos and replacing them with a more genuine, unvarnished experience. The app…

Pitch Deck Teardown: RAW Dating App’s $3M angel deck

Yes, we’re calling it “ThreadsDeck” now. At least that’s the tag many are using to describe the new user interface for Instagram’s X competitor, Threads, which resembles the column-based format…

‘ThreadsDeck’ arrived just in time for the Trump verdict

Japanese crypto exchange DMM Bitcoin confirmed on Friday that it had been the victim of a hack resulting in the theft of 4,502.9 bitcoin, or about $305 million.  According to…

Hackers steal $305M from DMM Bitcoin crypto exchange

This is not a drill! Today marks the final day to secure your early-bird tickets for TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 at a significantly reduced rate. At midnight tonight, May 31, ticket…

Disrupt 2024 early-bird prices end at midnight

Instagram is testing a way for creators to experiment with reels without committing to having them displayed on their profiles, giving the social network a possible edge over TikTok and…

Instagram tests ‘trial reels’ that don’t display to a creator’s followers

U.S. federal regulators have requested more information from Zoox, Amazon’s self-driving unit, as part of an investigation into rear-end crash risks posed by unexpected braking. The National Highway Traffic Safety…

Feds tell Zoox to send more info about autonomous vehicles suddenly braking

You thought the hottest rap battle of the summer was between Kendrick Lamar and Drake. You were wrong. It’s between Canva and an enterprise CIO. At its Canva Create event…

Canva’s rap battle is part of a long legacy of Silicon Valley cringe

Voice cloning startup ElevenLabs introduced a new tool for users to generate sound effects through prompts today after announcing the project back in February.

ElevenLabs debuts AI-powered tool to generate sound effects

We caught up with Antler founder and CEO Magnus Grimeland about the startup scene in Asia, the current tech startup trends in the region and investment approaches during the rise…

VC firm Antler’s CEO says Asia presents ‘biggest opportunity’ in the world for growth

Temu is to face Europe’s strictest rules after being designated as a “very large online platform” under the Digital Services Act (DSA).

Chinese e-commerce marketplace Temu faces stricter EU rules as a ‘very large online platform’

Meta has been banned from launching features on Facebook and Instagram that would have collected data on voters in Spain using the social networks ahead of next month’s European Elections.…

Spain bans Meta from launching election features on Facebook, Instagram over privacy fears

Stripe, the world’s most valuable fintech startup, said on Friday that it will temporarily move to an invite-only model for new account sign-ups in India, calling the move “a tough…

Stripe curbs its India ambitions over regulatory situation