by To receive a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories in your inbox each day at 3 PM PST, register here.
Happy V-day! What happens when you survey crypto traders to see if liking crypto is an “attractive asset”? Well, 4 out of 5 find it very sexy, and 70% said they would be more likely to date them if they were in the old ‘chains’. Our bet is that there might be some confirmation bias there, because if you swung your Ledger wallet at Christine or Haje on a first date, that would also be the last date. Yet, JacquelynThe timely Valentine’s Day report based on a Binance poll is good news for those who like to keep things the same.
Want a free pass to Disrupt? This can be arranged for people who choose to volunteer at our Early Stage event!
Today, we bring you a great book recommendation from our own Dominic-Midori: Long out of print since its original publication in the 1980s, Black Women Writers at Work is a vital contribution to Black literature in the 20th century, and it’s damn good. news that it is available again. The book features candid interviews with Maya Angelou, Toni Cade Bambara, Gwendolyn Brooks, Alexis De Veaux, and many others, highlighting the practices and critical links between the work and lived experiences of Black women writers whose work laid the groundwork for many who came after.
TechCrunch’s Top 3
- bye yammer: Not much complaining here, but Microsoft has confirmed that it is ditching Yammer to go all-in on Viva Engage, Paul he writes. Viva and Yammer Chief Vice President Murali Sitaram explains, “Over the past few months, we’ve heard your feedback that having two apps deliver similar experiences and the same services and content has created confusion and made it challenging to drive adoption and create clarity for the End Users.”
- Make a deposit, leave a deposit: Andreessen Horowitz led a $4.5 million initial round at ModernFi, which is developing a marketplace that helps banks that need deposits to make loans find what they’re looking for, while banks with lots of deposits can offload them. Christina have more.
- Hello, it’s more financing calling: In PhonePe’s quest to raise $1 billion, a group of investors including Tiger Global and Ribbit Capital invested another $100 million in “India’s most valuable fintech startup”, valued at $12 billion, manish he writes.
Startups and VC
It’s always good to have plenty of capital to invest, but running a large new fund can be even more advantageous now, as many late-stage companies that postponed fundraising last year are likely to be on the market, come rain or shine. 2023, connie reports. Acquisitions firm Bain Capital just closed its second $2.4 billion Tech Opportunities growth fund, up from the $1.3 billion the firm invested in the first vehicle of its kind in 2019.
Turning a great idea into a viable startup takes patience, perseverance and more than a little bit of luck. But when an idea originates in a lab – be it AI, biotechnology, robotics or another deep tech research project – things quickly become more difficult and much more expensive. Pae Wu, General Partner of SOSV and CTO of IndieBio, will join us onstage at the TechCrunch Early Stage on April 20 in Boston. Don’t miss out – get your tickets today!
And we have five more for you:
10 years of fintech duds: 5 innovations that didn’t live up to the hype
Image credits: Jeffrey Coolidge (opens in new window) / Getty Images
The tech industry (and the media that cover it) thrives on hype cycles.
Sometimes, relentless cheering can pay off: clunky personal digital assistants from the 1990s have evolved into sleek smartphones a decade later.
And other times, what appears to be a revolutionary idea turns out to be someone trying to start a fad. (Remember Google’s barge, Juicero, and iSmell?)
Looking back over the past decade, TC+ contributor Grant Easterbrook recaps five trends that failed and the underlying factors that prevented them from changing fintech “in the way the founders originally intended.”
Three more from the TC+ team, complete with a handful of retro tunes to keep you going:
TechCrunch+ is our membership program that helps startup founders and teams stand out. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription!
Big Tech Inc.
It’s easy to leave a meeting without understanding everything that was discussed. That’s where Otter.ai comes in with OtterPilot, its new AI meeting assistant. Aisha reports that this feature automatically sends an AI-generated summary of meeting topics to attendees with hyperlinks to key moments. It also captures slideshows and inserts them into the summary. Now you can safely get up and use the bathroom during your next virtual meeting and not miss a thing.
And we have five more for you:
