Startups Weekly: The TechCrunch List reveals investors who founders love to work with

Editor’s note: Get this free weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use by email every Saturday morning (7am PT). Subscribe here. We’re pleased to kick off this week’s newsletter by sharing an important new project: The TechCrunch List. It’s a database of investors who have shown a commitment to first checks and leading rounds from seed through growth, based on founder recommendations we’ve received as well as learnings from our own research. Our goal is to quickly help founders talk to the investors who are serious about...

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The Exchange: Which VCs are the most popular, why enterprise startups are hot, and how patient are public investors?

Welcome to The Exchange, an upcoming weekly newsletter featuring TechCrunch and Extra Crunch reporting on startups, money and markets. You can sign up for it here to receive it regularly when it launches on July 25th, and catch up on prior editions of the column and newsletter here.  It’s Saturday, July 18, and this is The Exchange. Today we’re wrapping our look at second-quarter VC, capping off the recent IPOs of some venture-backed startups, and digging into the hottest VCs while peeking at a new startup trend. Venture capital activity...

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Investing in the hidden generation

Ilse Calderon Contributor Ilse Calderon is an investor at OVO Fund where she specializes in pre-seed investments across capital-efficient markets. Prior to OVO, Ilse spent a year at Silicon Valley Bank rotating across consumer and software teams. While it’s no secret Hispanics represent unparalleled growth opportunities for the U.S. economy, most startups don’t realize Hispanic youth means an abundance of prime spending years (translation: dollars for businesses). The average age of a Hispanic living in the U.S. is 28. Meanwhile, the average...

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‘Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ and the limits of today’s game economies

Kaiser Hwang Contributor Share on Twitter Kaiser Hwang is a longtime member of the games community and a vice president at Forte, an organization building an open economic platform for games. “Animal Crossing: New Horizons” is a bonafide wonder. The game has been setting new records for Nintendo, is adored by players and critics alike and provides millions of players a peaceful escape during these unprecedented times. But there’s been something even more extraordinary happening on the fringe: Players are finding ways to augment the game...

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Daily Crunch: More details emerge in Twitter hack

Fallout continues from this week’s big Twitter hack, podcaster Harry Stebbings launches a small VC fund and robots help with sorting the mail. Here’s your Daily Crunch for July 17, 2020. The big story: More details emerge in Twitter hack As we recapped in yesterday’s newsletter, a number of high-profile Twitter accounts were hacked earlier this week as part of what appeared to be a cryptocurrency scam. So how bad was it? “We have no evidence that attackers accessed passwords,” the company said. “Currently, we don’t believe resetting your password...

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Autonomous vehicle startup AutoX lands driverless testing permit in California

AutoX, the autonomous vehicle startup backed by Alibaba, has been granted a permit in California to begin driverless testing on public roads in a limited area in San Jose. The permit will allow AutoX to test its autonomous vehicles without a human safety driver behind the wheel. This is the third company to receive a driverless testing permit. Waymo and Nuro also have driverless testing permits. Unlike the other two companies, AutoX’s permit is limited to one vehicle and restricted to surface streets within a designated part of San Jose near is...

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Extension rounds help some startups play offense during COVID-19

The venture capital world is constantly changing, and its evolution can sometimes flip pieces of conventional wisdom on their heads. For example, a recent flurry of extension rounds from Silicon Valley’s hottest startups like Stripe and Robinhood seem to signal that the investment type has suddenly become cool. Extensions evolving from unloved to hot is not the first time that a type of VC deal has gained, or lost luster. In past times, for example, raising consecutive rounds from the same lead investor was often perceived as a negative signal;...

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Marketing, PR and brand building, oh my! TechCrunch Early Stage goes down July 21 and 22

Your product may solve problems. It may cost less and do more. It may very well change the world. But unless you can get the word out, ensuring the right group of people know about it and are willing to use it, pay for it, and evangelize it, then your hard work is in vain. At TechCrunch Early Stage, we’ll hear from some of the world’s top minds in the fields of marketing and brand building. They’ll talk through different growth marketing tactics, from creating growth assets for paid channels to capitalizing on podcasts to SEO to email. They’ll...

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Ready, set, network! CrunchMatch is now open for Early Stage 2020

Call it what you will — startup bootcamp, founders’ masterclass or the mother of all how-to events — we’re just days away from TC Early Stage 2020. But you don’t have to wait another minute to start making essential connections. CrunchMatch, our AI-powered networking platform, is now open for business. Wait up. You don’t have a pass yet? Crikey! Buy your Early Stage pass here, start networking now and get a head start on driving your business forward. Then on July 21-22, tune in to your choice of more than 50 expert-led sessions designed to help...

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An unsurprising wave of video-focused startups is trying to make video calls better

As Zoom and Microsoft and Google hammer it out for video-chat hegemony, startups are developing apps and services that either add on or compete with the major players. There hasn’t been enough activity — yet — to call it a boom, but there’s enough going on to warrant our attention. Call it a boomlet, if you will, of startups looking to ride the wave of demand that video-conferencing has seen during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. You can read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or receive it for free in...

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Give us your seed round and we will send back double

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week was full of news of all sorts, but as we recorded both Danny and Natasha “not Tash” Mascarenhas were still locked out of their Twitter accounts after a proletariat revolution on the social platform saw the ruling Blue Checkmark Class forced into silence. That’s not really what happened, but it sounds better than actually went down at Big Social. Anyway, Twitter accounts or not, the three of us gathered...

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Federal court rules WhatsApp and Facebook’s malware exploit case against NSO Group can proceed

A U.S. federal court judge ruled on Thursday that WhatsApp and parent company Facebook’s lawsuit against Israeli mobile surveillance software company NSO Group can go forward. Phyllis Hamilton, Chief Judge of the United Stated District Court of the Northern District of California, denied most of the arguments NSO Group made when it filed a motion to dismiss the suit in April (a copy of her decision is embedded below). Last October, WhatsApp and Facebook filed a complaint alleging that NSO Group exploited an audio-calling vulnerability in the messaging...

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