Startups

Daily Crunch: First Republic Bank stock reaches record low as feds discuss rescue plan

Comment

Life Rings flying out beneath storm clouds are a metaphor for rescue, help and aid.
Image Credits: John Lund (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here.

On today’s episode of our Equity podcast, the team dives in to ponder whether First Republic’s share tumble is a victim of SVB’s collapse, or whether there’s something else in the water. It’s well worth a listen — as ever!

Another not-to-miss today is Jacquelyn’s Chain Reaction newsletter, where she picks apart what’s coming down the pike now that Binance.US sailed away from its $1.3 billion deal with Voyager.

Happy weekend, kids. Don’t do anything we wouldn’t do. Although we’re pretty weird, so that leaves you with quite a few options, to be fair. And actually, you should do tons of things we wouldn’t do. Like, er, go parasailing, listen to the world’s most annoying sound, or spend all day baking a cake. Or maybe create a new bluegrass/funk/j-pop fusion band, written by ChatGPT.

Christine and Haje

The TechCrunch Top 3

  • The beginning of the end?: Alex caught wind of First Republic Bank’s share woes earlier today, writing that shares were down 40% on reports that the government may step in. He writes, “That’s not so good for the bank, or its customers. While during SVB’s time in the barrel the U.S. government ensured that all of its deposits would be secure and accessible, there is no clear indication yet that that is new de facto policy, or that First Republic customers will enjoy similar protections.”
  • Missing: Manish took a look at Amazon’s earnings and saw a glaring omission: the absence of its India business, which he notes is a first in years.
  • All grown up: Brave Search doesn’t use Bing’s index for its search engine anymore, reports Ivan.

Startups and VC

Dramaaaaaaaa. It isn’t often that startup rivals battle in plain view of others, but such is the case with the mobile messaging services provider Postscript, which took to the Twitterverse earlier this month after receiving a cease-and-desist letter from competitor Attentive, Christine reports. Attentive’s letter was in response to a client case study that Postscript had authored and posted on its website about nutrition company BUBS Naturals, which said BUBS Naturals left Attentive for Postscript after finding its list actually shrinking instead of growing, then battling with the company to move its list off its platform.

To make services shariah-compliant, a new wave of fintechs doesn’t charge interest, embraces profit sharing and avoids alcohol and tobacco transactions, Catherine reports.

And here’s a nice little tail wind to take you into the weekend:

How we used data-driven personas to radically improve the customer experience

People avatar set. Diverse people avatar profile icons. User avatar. Male and female faces different nationalities. Men and women portraits. Characters collection. Vector illustration.
Image Credits: Hanna Plonsak (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Instead of drawing information from user interactions to create avatars representing actual customers, many teams will substitute their own judgment and guesses about what people like and dislike.

Impartner VP of product Gary Sabin says his company “dove into the numbers” and “looked at 250 data points” to develop “persona-based services in implementation, customer support and customer success.”

After a year, the company generated higher customer satisfaction ratings and NPS scores. “These personas work for us,” says Sabin. “Your customer data can lead you to create the personas that matter most in your customer base.”

How we used data-driven personas to radically improve the customer experience

Three more 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.

Tired of just reading through endless posts on Reddit? Ready to get more involved? You’re in luck: Reddit is testing Discord-like channels for community chat. And no, these will not be the same kind of community chat rooms that Reddit discontinued in 2020. Ivan writes that these new channels will “give more control to moderators and will have a dedicated channel for moderators to chat about managing the subreddit. Plus, they will be able to decide if they want to enable this feature for the community in the first place.”

Before you head off for the weekend, have five more:

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.

10 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