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Last week was one hell of a week in startup news, and Henry wrote a particularly good summary of everything that happened, including the Elon Musk Twitter buyout, Meta issues, and a moment of silence for self-driving cars. — Christina and haje
TechCrunch’s top 3
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Fly chonk go wheeeeee: While we were all distracted by Elon Musk’s other favorite project, SpaceX launched a Falcon Heavy rocket for the first time in three years. Aria see you.
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Swipe right for total mayhem: Glitch or not, Instagram has some explaining to do. A number of users woke up this morning with suspended accounts. We love Aisha‘s headline, “Instagram is giving Twitter a run for its money as the most chaotic social network today.” We agree.
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Circle of friends: Egyptian fintech Money Fellows raised $31 million in new funds for, what Tags described as “the digitization of money circles”, i.e. where people essentially save and borrow together as a group.
Startups and VCs
Politician-turned-venture capitalist Bradley Tusk recently spoke at a TechCrunch Live event about how startups should approach regulation, in a session titled “How to Launch a Startup in a Regulated Market.” Dibbs CEO and co-founder Evan Vandenberg joined Tusk in the conversation. The event is embedded here and is both free and definitely worth watching.
Invygo, a startup operating in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, has raised $10 million in its Series A funding as it strives to expand its car rental service in the region. The Middle East-based startup has raised $14.3 million to date, Ivan reports.
And, as always, there are a handful of additional stories. Just 4 this time – there were 5, but then a PR person decided to move the blackout for a story that had already been published, and Haje got all salty and grumpy about it.
6 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Join An Accelerator
Picture credits: Richard Drury (Opens in a new window) /Getty Pictures
As Techstars’ Startup Pipeline Director, Saba Karim spends much of his time extolling the many ways entrepreneurs can benefit by joining an accelerator.
But is it the right choice for every founder?
“Keep in mind that funding will solve your money problems, but it won’t solve everything else,” he says. “You’ll still need to figure out how to acquire customers, find top talent, create an amazing product, build a great advisory board, and fit the product market.”
Three others from the TC+ team:
Tech Crunch+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get a head start. You can register here. Use code “DC” to get 15% off an annual subscription!
Big Tech inc.
Darrell writing that Mark Zuckerberg should ditch all that metaverse nonsense and “create a new Twitter” makes us want to respond with “bite your tongue!” But really, as he says, “Clone rivals’ features” is something Meta is good at, plus it has the best chance of replicating user base and monetary value as well. Zuck is unlikely to take the bait, but never say never.
It is indeed a Twitter world, and we live in it. First, Devin writes that Elon Musk has just dissolved Twitter’s board of directors, making him now the sole owner; then Ron followed by what Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor can do now that he’s not on the board. Sarah reports the problems of Twitter Blue, namely that the subscription service feels blue that it does not bring more green. Meanwhile, Amanda wrote about what happens if Twitter starts charging that little blue tick, and Natasha L reports that Musk might try to bring Vine back. During the weekend, Rebecca wrote about layoffs at the company.
Don’t worry, there was plenty of other news:
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Clean the mind: To get all that Twitter out of your head, try Google’s new doodle game. Have you ever watched your child play Snake.io and wondered, “Am I going to like this?” Well, Google got into the Halloween spirit with today’s doodle, where you can be a ghost and collect spirit flames while playing with friends or random people, Aisha writing.
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The heat is on: Amazon to delist top seller Appario in Indian market after some retailers alleged sellers were getting preferential treatment, pot holder reports.
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We got a ticket to ride: WhatsApp users in Bangalore can now buy train tickets via QR code, Jagmeet reports.
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Bed, bath and breach: Bed, Bath & Beyond confirms a data breach that occurred when a hacker gained access to an employee’s hard drive, Carly writing.
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Query this data: Ron reports on Pinecone’s new vector database that can handle hybrid semantic keyword searches.
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