Check out these Breakout Sessions at Disrupt 2020

We’re on the brink of the biggest Disrupt in TechCrunch history. It’s five days of education, exhibition, competition and connection that spans the globe. As you plan your schedule, keep this in mind: You’ll find some of the most insightful and downright interesting programming at Disrupt 2020 in our Breakout Sessions. And that, given our powerhouse agenda, is saying something. Every Disrupt attendee can take part in the breakout sessions — they’re open to every pass level. Breakouts cover a range of topics and formats. You might watch startups...

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Is the vaunted cloud acceleration falling flat?

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.  Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors. Is the vaunted cloud acceleration falling flat? This week we’re taking a look at the bad side of the cloud software market. In case you were avoiding the news over the last week, tech and software stocks are struggling. Not much compared to their 2020 gains, mind, but after months of only going...

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Snowflake, Unity, JFrog move towards IPOs despite public market turmoil

Editor’s note: Get this free weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use by email every Saturday morning (7 a.m. PT). Subscribe here. Warren Buffet is eager to invest in a money-burning SaaS unicorn that is about to IPO. Despite recent tech stock declines and growing fears of US election turbulence, this is one reason that Snowflake is on track to be one of the biggest offerings of the year. And it is not the only company defying the pandemic and newer problems in order to get out of the gate soon. First, here’s Alex Wilhelm...

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Disrupt 2020 kicks off tomorrow — are you ready?

Happy Disrupt 2020 Eve, startup fans! It’s been a crazy mad dash to transform our annual flagship San Francisco event at Moscone Center into the first all-virtual Disrupt (thanks, COVID-19). Then again, going global seems an appropriate way to celebrate 10 years of Disruption. It all starts tomorrow with a pre-show session to explain how to access the different platforms we’ll use during the event — are you ready? Wait, what? Did you just say you don’t have your Disrupt 2020 pass yet? Talk about a vinyl record scratch moment. Okay, don’t panic....

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Rocket startup Astra’s first orbital launch attempt ends early due to first-stage burn failure

Alameda-based rocket launch startup Astra finally got the chance to launch its first orbital test mission from its Alaska-based facility on Saturday, after the attempt had been delayed multiple times due to weather and other issues. The 8:19 PM PT lift-off of Astra’s ‘Rocket 3.1’ test vehicle went well – but the flight ended relatively shortly after that, during the first-stage engine burn and long before reaching orbit. Astra wasn’t expecting to actually reach orbit on this particular flight – it has always said that its goal is to reach orbit...

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DCM has already made nearly $1 billion off its $26 million bet on Bill.com

David Chao, the cofounder of the cross-border venture firm DCM, speaks English, Japanese, and Mandarin. But he also knows how to talk to founders. It’s worth a lot. Consider that DCM should see more than $1 billion from the $26.4 million it invested across 14 years in the cloud-based business-to-business payments company Bill.com, starting with its A round. Indeed, by the time Bill.com went public last December, when its shares priced at $22 apiece, DCM’s stake — which was 16% sailing into the IPO — was worth a not-so-small fortune. Since then,...

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Extra Crunch Friday roundup: Edtech funding surges, Poland VC survey, inside Shift’s SPAC plan, more

I live in San Francisco, but I work an East Coast schedule to get a jump on the news day. So I’d already been at my desk for a couple of hours on Wednesday morning when I looked up and saw this: What color is the sky this morning pic.twitter.com/nt5dZp5wWc — Walter Thompson (@YourProtagonist) September 9, 2020 As unsettling as it was to see the natural environment so transformed, I still got my work done. This is not to boast: I have a desk job and a working air filter. (People who make deliveries in the toxic air or are homeschooling their...

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Unicorn layoffs prompt more startups to consider acqui-hiring

Alex Zajaczkowski was just months into her role at Toast, a restaurant point-of-sale software company, when she was let go during COVID-19 layoffs. Toast, last valued at $5 billion, cut 50% of its staff through layoffs and furloughs. Zajaczkowski said she started applying for jobs within a week. “I think I got on the boat a little bit quicker than others because I wanted that security a little bit faster,” she said. She and former Toast colleagues formed a Slack to communicate about layoffs, their job searches and what lay ahead. Toast created...

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China may kill TikTok’s US operations rather than see them sold

The controversial push to force Chinese tech unicorn ByteDance to divest part or all of its smash-hit TikTok social media service to a U.S.-based company could be in doubt after a report today indicated that China’s government may oppose the transaction. According to reporting by Reuters, the Chinese government may prefer TikTok to simply shutter its U.S. operations instead of allowing it to be sold to an American company. The potential divestment of TikTok is not a regular business transaction. Instead, the deal is being demanded by the U.S. government,...

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