Startups Weekly: The US is finally getting serious about 5G

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. There are few things that US political leaders can agree on these days, but one of them thankfully appears to be 5G. Manufacturing, transportation, agriculture, health care and many other industries are beginning to incorporate the fast, device-to-device connectivity provided by the fifth-generation wireless standard. But the key 3.5 GHz band of spectrum had been reserved for military and government...

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Extra Crunch Live: Join Anu Duggal for a live Q&A on August 20 at 11am PT/2pm ET

Rent the Runway and Glossier became unicorns within the same week in June 2019. That same year, only 2.7% of venture capital dollars went toward female-founded companies. Silicon Valley’s disconnect between the monetary success of female-founded companies and funding them in the first place is disheartening. The conversation is there, but the dollar sign momentum remains missing. Anu Duggal founded the Female Founders Fund before both were even a tangible reality. In 2014, the entrepreneur launched her first fund to invest in female-led startups....

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Facebook’s former PR chief explains why no one is paying attention to your startup

At TechCrunch Early Stage, I spoke with Coatue Management GP Caryn Marooney about startup branding and how founders can get people to pay attention to what they’re building. Marooney recently made the jump into venture capital; previously she was co-founder and CEO of The Outcast Agency, one of Silicon Valley’s best-regarded public relations firms, which she left to become VP of Global Communications at Facebook, where she led comms for eight years. While founders often may think of PR as a way to get messaging across to reporters, Marooney says...

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Sequoia Capital has internal crash courses for its founders — here’s how they work

No matter what you think of Sequoia Capital, the firm doesn’t rest on its laurels. Though it’s now managing ungodly amounts of money and has for decades been considered among the top venture firms in the world, it routinely finds new ways to stay relevant and to ensure that it gets a first look at the most promising founders. It was the first firm to employ scouts, for example. Recently, to create more room between itself and its ever-growing number of competitors, the firm has also begun fine-tuning a curriculum for the founders of both the pre-seed...

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Thoughts on ‘self-driving money,’ day trading and product development from Wealthfront’s Andy Rachleff

Andy Rachleff founded Wealthfront a decade ago to give investors a better and smarter way to manage their wealth, building on core academic research showing that a carefully balanced portfolio of low-fee ETFs outperformed more aggressive strategies. Since then, the company has taken in billions of dollars of invested capital under management and expanded into new banking services, including high-interest checking accounts. Rachleff and I talked on Extra Crunch Live about where Wealthfront is heading as it speeds toward its second decade, how he...

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Facebook pushes back against Apple’s App Store fees

Facebook joined the growing ranks of companies publicly complaining about the 30% fee that Apple collects on payments made through its App Store. Those complaints came midway through a blog post about the social network’s new feature supporting paid online events. Facebook said that to support struggling businesses, it won’t be collecting any fees on those events, at least for the next year, which means that those businesses keep 100% of payments on the web and on Android. But Facebook said that won’t be the case on iOS, due to App Store fees,...

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Facebook pushes back against Apple’s App Store fees

{rss:content:encoded} Facebook pushes back against Apple’s App Store fees https://ift.tt/2FpRA3s https://ift.tt/2E8zbY0 August 14, 2020 at 10:08PM Facebook joined the growing ranks of companies publicly complaining about the 30% fee that Apple collects on payments made through its App Store. Those complaints came midway through a blog post about the social network’s new feature supporting paid online events. Facebook said that to support struggling businesses, it won’t be collecting any fees on those events, at least for the next year, which...

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Facebook launches support for paid online events

Businesses will now be able to monetize online events on Facebook, thanks to a new feature that the social network is launching in the United States and 19 other countries today. In a call with reporters, Head of Facebook App Fidji Sumo said that Facebook’s Events feature was designed for in-person events, but with the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting social distancing orders, the company “really quickly pivoted” to supporting online events. In fact, Sumo said that in June of this year, live broadcasts on Facebook Pages doubled compared to the same...

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Facebook launches support for paid online events

{rss:content:encoded} Facebook launches support for paid online events https://ift.tt/2E1y7oX https://ift.tt/2E8zbY0 August 14, 2020 at 09:42PM Businesses will now be able to monetize online events on Facebook, thanks to a new feature that the social network is launching in the United States and 19 other countries today. In a call with reporters, Head of Facebook App Fidji Sumo said that Facebook’s Events feature was designed for in-person events, but with the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting social distancing orders, the company “really quickly...

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Travel startups cry foul over what Google’s doing with their data

As the antitrust drumbeat continues to pound on tech giants, with Reuters reporting comments today from the U.S. Justice Department that it’s moving “full-tilt” on an investigation of platform giants including Google parent Alphabet, startups in Europe’s travel sector are dialing up their allegations of anti-competitive behavior against the search giant. Google has near complete grip on the search market in Europe, with a regional market share in excess of 90%, according to Statcounter. Unsurprisingly, industry sources say a majority of travel...

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Warner Music acquires IMGN, a social media publishing platform, for under $100M

It’s a whole new playing field these days for music labels and publishers, and today one of the biggies made an acquisition to help it sharpen up its strategy to better understand what people want to see and hear online today. Warner Music — with a market cap of $15.4 billion, one of the big three recording giants alongside Universal and Sony and which owns labels like Atlantic, Elektra and others and has a huge roster of artists that includes the likes of Madonna, Ed Sheeran and Linkin Park — is acquiring IMGN Media, a Tel Aviv and New York-based...

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