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Hellooooo, Crunchers! It’s Monday and it’s time for premature lovers to celebrate Valentine’s Day (it’s tomorrow, you eager lovebirds).
There’s a lot of fun coming up here at TC Towers: businessroundups.org Disrupt is back in September, so now’s the time to get your hands on the super-early-bird tickets at a ridiculous discount.
In connection with last year’s Disrupt, we’ve created a podcast documentary called Inside Battlefield, following some hopeful businessroundups.org Disrupt Battlefield fans as they make their way to the Finals. You might even hear a familiar voice or two there: Haje shared a ton of his pitching expertise for the podcast!
For our Black History Month today, we recommend The anti-racist decka pack of 100 cards of discussion points and things to think about, with ways for everyone to fight back against racism in all aspects of life in small and big ways – at work, among friends and in the world.
Okay, that was a lot for our usually pretty brief introduction, but what can we say, there’s a lot going on in the world of businessroundups.org!
Much love from your kind hosts, Christine And Hey
Table of Contents
The businessroundups.org Top 3
- Who asked for more ChatGPT?: Neeva brings its generative AI search engine to a wider audience, Paul writes. Unlike some of the other versions of ChatGPT we see that have some factual and some not-so-factual answers, Paul notes that “the responsibility is on NeevaAI to make sure it understands the question and provides an appropriate gives answer. Or no answer at all, which it will do with questions to which it is unsure of the answer.”
- “Premature Electrification”: Come on, you know you chuckled when you heard that line on last night’s Dodge Ram commercial. Mat reports that the electric Ram 1500 REV is packed with screens and, surprisingly, knobs and buttons, but sadly won’t be available until 2024.
- Another round of cuts: Five months after laying off 11% of its workforce, Twilio announced today that it will lay off an additional 17% of its employees as it wants to spend less, Roman writes. The strategic move comes when the company forms two business units in an effort to do just that.
Startups and VC
Highbeam, a startup that provides banking features, credit and cash flow insights to e-commerce customers, today announced it has raised $10 million in debt from TriplePoint to expand the reach of its digital product portfolio. Kyle reports.
Tesla was widely criticized when security advocacy group The Dawn Project campaigned to ban Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) system from the Super Bowl, Rebekah reports. The 30-second ad, which aired to millions of football fans, outlined several alleged critical safety flaws in Tesla’s FSD, the automaker’s advanced driver assistance system.
Here’s another handful:
A Black YC alum explains how he raised $107 million
Image Credits: Andrew T. Wit (Opens in a new window) /Getty Images
Black entrepreneurs face a unique set of challenges, but Captain founder Demetrius Gray raised $107 million after his Y Combinator experience.
“People see the headline: ‘$107 million raised.’ What they don’t really understand is that it was a progressive process of building relationships over time that made that possible,” says Gray.
In an interview for TC+, he laid out his fundraising strategy and shared several tactics for engaging with investors.
“You have to get social; you need to come out in front of people and start building relationships.
Three more from the TC+ team:
businessroundups.org+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams lead the way. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription!
Big Tech Inc.
Aisha reported today that more jobs are on the way for Meta. She notes that these new potential layoffs follow Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s earnings call with analysts earlier this month, where the company said it planned to continue to control costs and promised a “year of efficiency.” Zuckerberg noted that Meta would flatten its organizational structure and “remove some layers of middle management to make decisions faster.”
Whether you’re a Kansas City Chiefs fan (yay!) or a Philadelphia Eagles fan (sorry), there was a slew of new commercials from last night’s Super Bowl to talk about. Lauren has your look at all the cool movie trailers (spoiler: Michael Keaton returns as Batman), while Amanda takes us through the tech industry commercials where fewer crypto commercials were noticeable. Oh, and if you haven’t seen the Super Bowl Rakuten commercial where Alicia Silverstone reprises her role from ‘Clueless’, here it is.
It’s Monday, so here are five more for you:
