Palantir and the great revenue mystery

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. You can subscribe to the newsletter here if you haven’t yet. Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors. Palantir and the great revenue mystery As I write to you on Friday afternoon, the Palantir S-1 has yet to drop, but TechCrunch did break some news regarding the impending filing and just how big the company actually...

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Startups Weekly: Will future unicorns go public sooner?

The public markets are staying receptive to tech IPOs, and tech unicorns are trying to recover from pandemic damage, polish up their financials, and head back towards the starting gates. This week, it’s Airbnb and Palantir, finally. Both have been startup icons of the past decade, and literally helped define the term “unicorn.” Now, both are illustrating the challenges that can come from sticking to private funding for years when going public was feasible. First up, the travel rental company filed confidentially on Wednesday for a public offering,...

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Five proven ways to attract and hire more diverse talent

Mikaela Kiner Contributor Share on Twitter Mikaela Kiner is an executive coach and author of "Female Firebrands: Stories and Techniques to Ignite Change, Take Control, and Succeed in the Workplace." A few years ago, I came to the realization that my company, an HR consulting firm, was not as diverse as I wanted it to be. I value diversity because I know it makes teams better — more creative, more productive and more nimble. It helps my firm represent our community and serve our clients. Though I tried to be inclusive in the language and...

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Five VCs discuss how no-code is going horizontal across the world’s industries

Few topics garner cheers and groans quite as quickly as the no-code software explosion. While investors seem uniformly bullish on toolsets that streamline and automate processes that once required a decent amount of technical know-how, not everyone seems to think that the product class is much of a new phenomenon. On one hand, basic tools like Microsoft Excel have long given non-technical users a path toward carrying out complex tasks. (There’s historical precedent for the perspective.) On the other, a recent bout of low-code/no-code startups reaching...

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Almost everything you need to know about SPACs

Feeling as if you should better understand special purpose acquisition vehicles – or SPACs — than you do? You aren’t alone. Like most casual observers, you’re probably already aware that Paul Ryan now has a SPAC, as does baseball executive Billy Beane and Silicon Valley stalwart Kevin Hartz. You probably know, too, that brash entrepreneur Chamath Palihapitiya seemed to kick off the craze around SPACs — blank-check companies that are formed for the purpose of merging or acquiring other companies — in 2017 when he raised $600 million for a SPAC....

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Submit your pitch deck to Disrupt 2020’s Pitch Deck Teardown

Disrupt 2020 is a few weeks away and we’re looking for founders to submit their pitch decks. In the Pitch Deck Teardown, top venture capitalists and entrepreneurs will evaluate and suggest fixes for Disrupt 2020 attendees’ pitch decks. First impressions are everything, and pitch decks are often the first glimpse of companies by investors and business partners. It’s critical that these decks accurately present and illustrate the company’s goals and potential, concisely and effectively. We’ve enlisted the help of some of the best venture capitalists....

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OpenUnit aims to be Shopify for self-storage facilities

So you’re looking for a storage unit to put some stuff in for a few months. Maybe you’re moving and your new place isn’t ready yet — or maybe you’re just looking to declutter and want to tuck some stuff away for a while and see if you’re really ready to part with it. As you may find, the process of finding a storage unit can be… not great. While there are a few big storage chains in the market, a huge chunk of the self-storage industry is made up of independent/mom-and-pop shops that don’t necessarily have the time/budget to keep up as tech has...

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Apple contends Epic’s ban was a ‘self-inflicted’ prelude to gaming the App Store

{rss:content:encoded} Apple contends Epic’s ban was a ‘self-inflicted’ prelude to gaming the App Store https://ift.tt/2QaxEDQ https://ift.tt/32i0KqB August 21, 2020 at 09:31PM Apple has filed legal documents opposing Epic’s attempt to have itself reinstated in the iOS App Store, after having been kicked out last week for flouting its rules. Apple characterizes the entire thing as a “carefully orchestrated, multi-faceted campaign” aimed at circumventing — perhaps permanently — the 30 percent cut it demands for the privilege of doing business on...

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How to raise your first VC fund

Charles Yu Contributor Share on Twitter Charles is a principal at Bling Capital and manages his own angel investment vehicle. Prior, he was an investor at TI Platform Management and Manhattan Venture Partners. He has quarterbacked investments in nine unicorns over the course of his career. As a founding member of TI Platform Management, I have quarterbacked more than $200 million in investments into first-time fund managers around the world. That portfolio includes being one of the first institutional checks into Atomic Labs ($170+ million,...

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This subscription social network is happy to be an Albatross in a pandemic

In discussions of ethically dubious social networks Facebook is the usual reference choice. But spare a thought for subscribers of InterNations, a Munich-based social networking community for expats, who have found themselves unable to obtain refunds for full-year payments charged in the middle of the coronavirus crisis. InterNations has operated an expat networking experience since 2007, offering a free ‘Basic’ tier of membership that gives users some access to site content and community-organized events (if they pay an entry fee); or a premium...

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