The tech layoff wave is still going strong in 2024. Following significant workforce reductions in 2022 and 2023, this year has already seen 60,000 job cuts across 254 companies, according to independent layoffs tracker Layoffs.fyi. Companies like Tesla, Amazon, Google, TikTok, Snap and Microsoft have conducted sizable layoffs in the first months of 2024. Smaller-sized […]
A comprehensive list of 2024 tech layoffs Read More »
StepStone raised the largest fund dedicated to investing in venture secondaries ever, the firm announced last week. This fundraise doesn’t just say a lot about StepStone’s venture secondaries investing prowess, but also about how LPs are thinking about the current venture market. The fund, StepStone VC Secondaries Fund VI, raised $3.3 billion. This marks a
When Jordan Nathan launched his DTC nontoxic cookware company, Caraway, in 2019, he knew he was not the only founder trying to sell a new brand of pots and pans to millennials scrolling through Instagram. But he found that launching after his peers ended up being a blessing in disguise in all areas but one.
Why being the last company to launch in a category can pay off Read More »
Small VC firms require deep trust, mutual support, and long-term commitment among the partners —a kinship that, in many ways, resembles a family dynamic. Colin Anderson (Palantir’s ex-CFO and former research VP at Peter Thiel’s Clarium Capital) and John Fogelsong (the son of IVP co-founder Norm Fogelsong) didn’t need to cultivate a family-like relationship before
Crunchbase is expanding the scope of its tagging options in Europe to start tracking how much venture capital funding goes to minority founders on the continent. Diversity Spotlight is a feature on Crunchbase that lets companies add tags to their profiles to label themselves. For example, a company can opt-in to label itself as Black-owned
Crunchbase expands its diversity tracking feature to Europe Read More »
While funding for Italian startups has been growing, the country still ranks eighth in Europe by VC investment, according to Dealroom. Newly created Italian Founders Fund (IFF) hopes to help with the catching up, both in quantity and in quality. With €50 million to invest into 25 companies, it also positions itself as a sector
Dogs are the most popular pet in the U.S.: 65.1 million households have one, according to the American Pet Products Association. But while cats are not far off, with 46.5 million households with one, a lot of innovation in the pet category has focused exclusively on dogs. And even if the service serves both species,
Investor demand has been so strong for shares of hot HR startup Rippling – over $2 billion worth of term sheets, it says – that it is allowing former employees to also participate in its giant, tender offer sale, the company told TechCrunch. But there is one big exception: it has banned former employees who
When Bowery Capital general partner Loren Straub started talking to a startup from the latest Y Combinator accelerator batch a few months ago, she thought it was strange that the company didn’t have a lead investor for the round it was raising. Even stranger, the founders didn’t seem to be looking for one. She thought
In 2024, many Y Combinator startups only want tiny seed rounds — but there’s a catch Read More »
Carlo Kobe and Scott Smith believed so strongly in the need for a debit card product designed specifically for Gen Zers that they dropped out of Harvard and Cornell at ages 19 and 21, respectively, in 2021 to build a startup called Fizz. The pair wanted to go beyond creating a debit card for the
