Startups

TechCrunch Live events, but a podcast

Comment

TechCrunch Live event logo

TechCrunch Live had some amazing shows over the last few months. I know it’s hard to keep up. Every Wednesday, at 12:00 pm PDT, the live event features top founders and investors talking through issues facing their industries right now. The interviews are led by top TechCrunch editors (and me). If you can’t make the live shows, they’re available on YouTube for viewing and the podcasts embedded here.

I’d love to have you watch the events live. You can register for this week’s show here.

Identity and identifying a good deal


Today’s interview was led by TechCrunch Global Managing Editor Ingrid Lunden. Ingrid spoke to Rick Song, one of the co-founders of Persona, which built and offers a large suite of identity verification solutions to address the ever-growing issue of identity fraud. Joining Rick is Mark Goldberg of Index Ventures, a firm that made a prescient move to spot and back Persona early on.

Mark and Rick spoke to us about:

  • How Persona keeps pace with AI Verification and Online Trust
  • How Index Ventures is riding on the wave of the startup’s growth
  • And the unique and complex issues that come to the public’s mind with AI

How Cambrian BioPharma is reinventing drug — and drug company — development


Matt Burns spoke to James Peyer, the co-founder of Cambrian BioPharma, and Maryanna Saenko, co-founder and partner at Future Ventures. Cambrian BioPharma is a new pharmaceutical startup with a revolutionary approach to developing and managing drug development age-related diseases.

What we’re most interested in, though, is how Cambrian’s executive team attracts and retains top talent. (Spoiler: They give them an oversized amount of equity compared to traditional pharmaceutical companies.)

James and Maryanna spoke to us about:

  • Developing therapeutics for anti-aging in a way that works with the existing regulatory structure
  • How James and Maryanna solve the “venture capital math problem”
  • But first we spoke on moving research from academia to the real world and fighting misconception and buzzwords around longevity biotech

Who’s playing the long game in edtech?

Today’s interview was led by TechCrunch Senior Reporter and edtech expert Natasha Mascarenhas. Natasha spoke to Sam Chaudhary, the founder of ClassDojo, who spent eight years building the edtech consumer app that focuses on student classrooms, before introducing a formal revenue model. Joining Sam is his investor Chris Farmer, the founder and CEO of SignalFire, a seed-stage venture firm that recently raised $900 million across four new funds.

Sam and Chris spoke to us about:

  • How Sam played the long-game in edtech and what he’d do differently if he had to do it all over again
  • Why SignalFire chose to navigate the edtech space, specifically the connection between kids and consumers
  • How Chris sees investing in companies that aren’t rushing to monetize
  • The “outsider advantage” and its tension with insider knowledge

Managing uncertainty with Habi and Inspired Capital

Matt Burns spoke to Brynne McNulty Rojas, who’s the co-founder and CEO of Habi, the hot real estate startup out of Colombia which reached unicorn status last year. Brynne founded Habi to bring modern home buying tools to low- and middle-class home buyers in her home country of Colombia. Now, with a valuation above $1 billion USD, Habi is a serious player in the LatAm home buying market, where the majority of the homes for sale are not listed online. Joining Brynne in this conversation is Mark Batsiyan, a co-founder and partner at Inspired Capital.

Brynne and Mark spoke to us about:

  • Habi’s growth and what it was like to work with U.S.-based investors
  • How Brynne built her team’s confidence during a period of uncertainty
  • The value of transparency and sharing vulnerability
  • And advice to founders raising in today’s market

AI innovation for in vitro fertilization with Root Ventures and Oma Fertility

Today’s interview was led by Neesha Tambe, TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield editor who’s also largely responsible for the hundreds of startups pitching and exhibiting at TechCrunch Disrupt. But she’s here today because of her personal experience with I-V-F. Neesha spoke with Oma Robotics co-founder Kiran Joshi and Root Ventures partner Chrissy Meyer. Unlike many other fertility providers, Oma focuses on male infertility, and today we’re going to hear about a few things:

  • Oma Fertility’s experience building a company in healthcare during a global pandemic
  • How Root made the jump to virtual-first investments, which is now the new norm
  • And how founders can craft their story and stand out in a crowded market

More TechCrunch

Welcome to Startups Weekly! We’ve been drowning in AI news this week, with Google’s I/O setting the pace. And Elon Musk rages against the machine.

Startups Weekly: It’s the dawning of the age of AI — plus,  Musk is raging against the machine

IndieBio’s Bay Area incubator is about to debut its 15th cohort of biotech startups. We took special note of a few, which were making some major, bordering on ludicrous, claims…

IndieBio’s SF incubator lineup is making some wild biotech promises

YouTube TV has announced that its multiview feature for watching four streams at once is now available on Android phones and tablets. The Android launch comes two months after YouTube…

YouTube TV’s ‘multiview’ feature is now available on Android phones and tablets

Featured Article

Two Santa Cruz students uncover security bug that could let millions do their laundry for free

CSC ServiceWorks provides laundry machines to thousands of residential homes and universities, but the company ignored requests to fix a security bug.

4 hours ago
Two Santa Cruz students uncover security bug that could let millions do their laundry for free

OpenAI’s Superalignment team, responsible for developing ways to govern and steer “superintelligent” AI systems, was promised 20% of the company’s compute resources, according to a person from that team. But…

OpenAI created a team to control ‘superintelligent’ AI — then let it wither, source says

TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 is just around the corner, and the buzz is palpable. But what if we told you there’s a chance for you to not just attend, but also…

Harness the TechCrunch Effect: Host a Side Event at Disrupt 2024

Decks are all about telling a compelling story and Goodcarbon does a good job on that front. But there’s important information missing too.

Pitch Deck Teardown: Goodcarbon’s $5.5M seed deck

Slack is making it difficult for its customers if they want the company to stop using its data for model training.

Slack under attack over sneaky AI training policy

A Texas-based company that provides health insurance and benefit plans disclosed a data breach affecting almost 2.5 million people, some of whom had their Social Security number stolen. WebTPA said…

Healthcare company WebTPA discloses breach affecting 2.5 million people

Featured Article

Microsoft dodges UK antitrust scrutiny over its Mistral AI stake

Microsoft won’t be facing antitrust scrutiny in the U.K. over its recent investment into French AI startup Mistral AI.

6 hours ago
Microsoft dodges UK antitrust scrutiny over its Mistral AI stake

Ember has partnered with HSBC in the U.K. so that the bank’s business customers can access Ember’s services from their online accounts.

Embedded finance is still trendy as accounting automation startup Ember partners with HSBC UK

Kudos uses AI to figure out consumer spending habits so it can then provide more personalized financial advice, like maximizing rewards and utilizing credit effectively.

Kudos lands $10M for an AI smart wallet that picks the best credit card for purchases

The EU’s warning comes after Microsoft failed to respond to a legally binding request for information that focused on its generative AI tools.

EU warns Microsoft it could be fined billions over missing GenAI risk info

The prospects for troubled banking-as-a-service startup Synapse have gone from bad to worse this week after a United States Trustee filed an emergency motion on Wednesday.  The trustee is asking…

A US Trustee wants troubled fintech Synapse to be liquidated via Chapter 7 bankruptcy, cites ‘gross mismanagement’

U.K.-based Seraphim Space is spinning up its 13th accelerator program, with nine participating companies working on a range of tech from propulsion to in-space manufacturing and space situational awareness. The…

Seraphim’s latest space accelerator welcomes nine companies

OpenAI has reached a deal with Reddit to use the social news site’s data for training AI models. In a blog post on OpenAI’s press relations site, the company said…

OpenAI inks deal to train AI on Reddit data

X users will now be able to discover posts from new Communities that are trending directly from an Explore tab within the section.

X pushes more users to Communities

For Mark Zuckerberg’s 40th birthday, his wife got him a photoshoot. Zuckerberg gives the camera a sly smile as he sits amid a carefully crafted re-creation of his childhood bedroom.…

Mark Zuckerberg’s makeover: Midlife crisis or carefully crafted rebrand?

Strava announced a slew of features, including AI to weed out leaderboard cheats, a new ‘family’ subscription plan, dark mode and more.

Strava taps AI to weed out leaderboard cheats, unveils ‘family’ plan, dark mode and more

We all fall down sometimes. Astronauts are no exception. You need to be in peak physical condition for space travel, but bulky space suits and lower gravity levels can be…

Astronauts fall over. Robotic limbs can help them back up.

Microsoft will launch its custom Cobalt 100 chips to customers as a public preview at its Build conference next week, TechCrunch has learned. In an analyst briefing ahead of Build,…

Microsoft’s custom Cobalt chips will come to Azure next week

What a wild week for transportation news! It was a smorgasbord of news that seemed to touch every sector and theme in transportation.

Tesla keeps cutting jobs and the feds probe Waymo

Sony Music Group has sent letters to more than 700 tech companies and music streaming services to warn them not to use its music to train AI without explicit permission.…

Sony Music warns tech companies over ‘unauthorized’ use of its content to train AI

Winston Chi, Butter’s founder and CEO, told TechCrunch that “most parties, including our investors and us, are making money” from the exit.

GrubMarket buys Butter to give its food distribution tech an AI boost

The investor lawsuit is related to Bolt securing a $30 million personal loan to Ryan Breslow, which was later defaulted on.

Bolt founder Ryan Breslow wants to settle an investor lawsuit by returning $37 million worth of shares

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, launched an enterprise version of the prominent social network in 2015. It always seemed like a stretch for a company built on a consumer…

With the end of Workplace, it’s fair to wonder if Meta was ever serious about the enterprise

X, formerly Twitter, turned TweetDeck into X Pro and pushed it behind a paywall. But there is a new column-based social media tool in town, and it’s from Instagram Threads.…

Meta Threads is testing pinned columns on the web, similar to the old TweetDeck

As part of 2024’s Accessibility Awareness Day, Google is showing off some updates to Android that should be useful to folks with mobility or vision impairments. Project Gameface allows gamers…

Google expands hands-free and eyes-free interfaces on Android

A hacker listed the data allegedly breached from Samco on a known cybercrime forum.

Hacker claims theft of India’s Samco account data

A top European privacy watchdog is investigating following the recent breaches of Dell customers’ personal information, TechCrunch has learned.  Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) deputy commissioner Graham Doyle confirmed to…

Ireland privacy watchdog confirms Dell data breach investigation