Category: Tech news

Google has selected 30 startups to receive a share of its $2 million Black Founders Fund in Europe, providing these companies with a spot of cash, some valuable cloud services and a bit of good old-fashioned networking among the Google crew.

The fund was announced last fall as part of a company-wide effort toward “building a more equitable future for everyone,” alongside grants and new sponsorships. More than 800 companies applied and Google interviewed 100 of them, ultimately winnowing that down to the 30 announced today.

Each company will receive “up to” $100,000 in non-dilutive funding, and up to $120,000 in Ads grants and $100,000 in Cloud credits. (I’ve asked Google for more details on how the fund was divided, and if any company received this full amount. I’ll update if I hear back.)

They’ll also get access to Google’s entrepreneurial network, tech support and some other assets that don’t have hard numbers associated with them.

All the startups are led by Black founders, and 40% by women of color. One of the latter is Nancy de Fays, co-founder of LINE, which makes these cool battery-hub combos for the MacBook “Pro” that add a ton of ports and battery life and look sweet to boot. I’ve learned a lot chatting with her at trade shows, and regret that I do most of my work at a desktop so I don’t have an excuse to use one of the company’s gadgets.

In response to being selected for Google funding, de Fays penned a blog post exhorting corporations to throw their weight around in favor of social change, and for startups to lead the way in diversity and equity:

We buy values and standards more than we buy the product itself. We buy ideals of life more than the actual features. Putting the these two parameters in the equation – the capability of big corps to shout loud, and consumers’ receptiveness to brands values and messages – it does make sense to me that to drive such a society change, big companies should voice and convey strong messages.

Founders need to build diverse teams without falling into compassion fatigue. They must show empathy and respect and bring onboard the best talents. Period. They need to be outspoken about their values, convey a strong, global mindset and build their organisation around them. And if they find themselves scoring low on diversity along the way, they should question themselves on the why and act on it without doing charity.

It’s something of a counterpoint to the idea, also commonly expressed these days, that companies should be mission-focused and objective.

Here are the other 29 companies that Google will be giving a boost to (descriptions taken from the blog post):

• Afrocenchix – Afrocenchix formulate, manufacture, and sell safe, effective products for afro and curly hair.
• AudioMob – AudioMob provides non-intrusive audio ads within mobile games.
• Augmize – Augmize builds risk models for property and casualty insurers using interpretable machine learning.
• Axela Innovation – Axela Innovations created a smart platform that joins up care services and puts the person receiving care at the center of the process.
• Bosque – Bosque is the first tech-enabled, direct-to-consumer plant brand in Europe with digitized inventory, AR tech, and on-demand access to vetted plant experts.
• Circuit Mind Limited – Circuit Mind is building intelligent software that fully automates the design of electronic circuit systems.
• Clustdoc – Clustdoc is client onboarding automation software used by organizations and teams around the world.
• Contingent – Contingent is an AI platform that proactively predicts, monitors, and manages supplier risk.
• Define – Define is a legal technology company that optimizes the contract drafting and reviewing process for lawyers, serving the world’s largest banks and consulting companies.
• Freyda – Freyda is digitizing the asset management industry by helping funds and service providers to become hyper-efficient in how they approach their data capture from documents.
• Heex Technologies – Heex Technologies provides AI-powered software and web services to development teams in data-intensive fields such as autonomous driving.
• HomeHero – HomeHero is an operating system for the house, making running a home simple and easy.
• Hutch Logistics – Hutch Logistics is a fulfilment and operating system for e-commerce brands.
• iknowa – iknowa is an end-to-end building and renovation platform for property owners and tradespeople.
• Kami – Kami empowers parents during family planning, pregnancy and childhood, allowing them to adapt and thrive through even the most difficult transitions.
• Kwara – Kwara makes building wealth together frictionless, by turning analog credit unions in emerging markets into modern digital banks.
• Lalaland – Lalaland uses AI to create synthetic humans for fashion eCommerce brands to increase diversity in retail.
• Modularity Grid – Modularity Grid is an AI platform that makes energy systems more efficient and resilient.
• Movemeback – Movemeback (often referred to as “the Linkedin of Africa”) is a global social professional platform, connecting people to opportunities, insights, and people they don’t have access to.
• Playbrush – Playbrush is the innovation leader in oral care, growing smart toothbrush subscriptions to foster better mouth and body health.
• Remote Coach – Remote Coach is a platform providing technology for personal trainers and fitness influencers to digitize and grow their businesses.
• Robin AI – Robin AI uses a combination of human and artificial intelligence to read and edit contracts.
• Scoodle – Scoodle is a platform for education influencers. Everyone has something they want to learn and something they can teach—we bring both sides together.
• Suvera – Suvera delivers a virtual care clinic for patients with long-term conditions in the UK.
• Syrona Health – Syrona is a digital health Company providing tracking, treatment, and management solutions for people with chronic gynecological conditions.
• Tradein – Tradein is a real-time scoring and prediction of business payment behavior and solvency.
• Vanilla Steel – Vanilla Steel offers a digital auctions platform for excess steel that provides sellers a simple inventory management process for excess material.
• Wild Radish – Wild Radish enables people who love food and cooking to engage in Michelin-quality, unique, cooking and dining experiences at home.
• Xtramile – Xtramile is a data-driven platform that delivers the right job to the right candidate anywhere online.

Feels like we’ll be hearing from most of these folks again. You can find out more about Google’s startup programs here.

Waymo One, the ride-hailing service that uses driverless vehicles in the suburbs of Phoenix, can now be accessed and booked through Google Maps.

This will be the first fully autonomous ride-hailing option available in the app, which will roll out first to Android users, Waymo said Thursday. The team-up not only brings together two Alphabet companies, it signals Waymo’s push to become more visible and accessible to the public.

Waymo has abut 600 vehicles in its U.S. fleet. About 300 to 400 of those are in the Phoenix area, but not all of those are used in the driverless Waymo One fleet. The Waymo One service only uses driverless vehicles, which means that a safety operator is not physically behind the wheel. It also means that if it pops up on Google Maps, users can be assured that it will indeed be driverless. Some vehicles in the Phoenix area are used for testing. Waymo doesn’t share exact numbers of how many driverless vehicles it operates as part of the service.

The process still requires a bit of app hopping. There isn’t a direct way to access, book and pay for the Waymo One rides in Google Maps. Instead, the user is brought over to the Waymo app to complete the booking. Users first have to input directions to or from a location in Waymo’s Metro Phoenix territory, which includes parts of Chandler, Mesa and Tempe, from an Android device. Once the user taps on the ridesharing or transit tab, they will see the estimated price and ETA of their trip with Waymo.

Existing Waymo One riders will be directed to the Waymo app to book the ride, while newcomers will be taken to the PlayStore to download it.

 

SpaceX’s Dragon capsule is once again heading to the International Space Station.

The company launched its 22nd Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) mission for NASA on Thursday. This is the fifth capsule SpaceX has sent to ISS in the last 12 months, SpaceX director of Dragon mission management Sarah Walker noted in a media briefing Tuesday. It’s also the first launch of the year on a new Falcon 9 rocket booster.

The rocket took off from Cape Canaveral in Florida at 1:29 PM eastern time, right on schedule despite the threat of storm clouds from the south and east. The first stage separated as planned and touched down on the “Of Course I Still Love You” droneship in the Atlantic Ocean eight minutes after launch. The second stage, which takes the capsule to orbit, separated 12 minutes after launch, also right on schedule.

The Falcon 9 Rocket launch vehicle is sending more than 7,300 pounds of research materials, supplies and hardware, including new solar arrays, to the ISS crew. It’s the second mission under SpaceX’s new CRS contract with NASA; the first took place last December.

Dragon is carrying a number of research experiments to be conducted on the ISS, including oral bacteria to test germ growth with Colgate toothpaste; a number of tardigrades (also affectionately called water bears), primordial organisms that will attempt to fare and reproduce in space environments; and an investigation that will study the effects of microgravity on the formation of kidney stones — an ailment that many crew members display an increased susceptibility to during spaceflight.

The capsule is also delivering fresh food, including apples, navel oranges, lemons and avocados.

Of the over 7,300 pounds of cargo, around 3,000 pounds will be taken up by a new roll-out, “flex blanket” solar array developed by space infrastructure company Redwire. As opposed to more traditional rigid paneled solar arrays, flex blanket technology provides more mass and performance benefits, Redwire technical director Matt LaPointe told TechCrunch.

The arrays were placed in the Dragon’s unpressurized trunk. It’s the first of three missions to send iROSA solar arrays to the station, with each mission carrying two arrays, LaPointe said. Once installed, the six iROSA arrays will collectively produce over 120KW of power. Redwire, which announced in March that it would go public via a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, says the new iROSA arrays will improve the ISS’s power generation by 20-30%.

The Dragon capsule is set to arrive at the space station at around 5 AM on June 5, where it will autonomously dock on a port of the Harmony module of the ISS. It will spend more than a month with the station before splashing down in the Atlantic with research and return cargo.

The Supreme Court has ruled that a police officer who searched a license plate database for an acquaintance in exchange for cash did not violate U.S. hacking laws.

The landmark ruling concludes a long-running case that clarifies the controversial Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or CFAA, by putting limits on what kind of conduct can be prosecuted.

The court ruled 6-3 in favor of Nathan Van Buren, a former Georgia police sergeant who brought the case. Van Buren was prosecuted on two counts, one for accepting a kickback for accessing the database as a serving police officer, and another for violating the CFAA. His first conviction was overturned, but the CFAA conviction was upheld — until today.

Although Van Buren was allowed to access the license plate database, the legal question became whether or not he had exceeded his authorized access.

In the ruling, the Supreme Court said that the CFAA “covers those who obtain information from particular areas in the computer — such as files, folders, or databases — to which their computer access does not extend,” and that while Van Buren “plainly flouted” the police department’s rules for law enforcement purposes, he did not violate the CFAA, wrote Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who wrote the majority opinion.

The CFAA was signed into law in 1986 to prosecute hackers who gain “unauthorized” access to a computer or network. But courts have been split on what “unauthorized” means. Legal experts have argued that a broad reading of the law could criminalize violating a site’s terms of service, such as lying on a dating profile or sharing a password to a streaming service. The court said that the government’s interpretation of the law “would attach criminal penalties to a breathtaking amount of commonplace computer activity.”

Not all the justices agreed. “Without valid law enforcement purposes, he was forbidden to use the computer to obtain that information,” wrote Justice Thomas, who filed a dissenting opinion along with Justice Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts.

Civil liberties experts said Congress should act to amend the CFAA following the court’s ruling.

“This is an important and welcome decision that will help protect digital research and journalism that is urgently necessary. But more is needed,” said Alex Abdo, litigation director of the Knight First Amendment Institute. “Congress should amend the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to eliminate any remaining uncertainty about the scope of the statute. It should also create a safe harbor for researchers and journalists who are working to study disinformation and discrimination online. Major technology companies should not have a veto over research and journalism that are manifestly in the public interest.”

It’s been a busy week for private equity, with Cloudera, Stack Overflow and FireEye coming off the board on Tuesday and Wednesday. Today Blackstone bought media and data company IDG for $1.3 billion. The company had been owned by Oriental Rainbow, LLC, a subsidiary of China Oceanwide Holdings Group, Co. Ltd.

With IDG, Blackstone gets tech analyst firm IDC along with a collection of tech publications that includes CIO, Computerworld, InfoWorld, Macworld, Network World, PCWorld and Tech Hive. The media publishing arm was once a powerhouse in the 1990s tech publishing world, although its shine has faded in recent years as the publishing industry in general has come under intense pressure.

The company has also been making some additions to the platform more recently with a stronger focus on data and analytics. Last year it bought Triblio, a marketing data platform to help companies deliver more personalized customer experiences. Last month it acquired Metri, an IT pricing service, which can help with IT budgeting and procurement. The latter could dovetail nicely with IDC’s consulting services.

Company CEO Mohamad Ali is hoping that Blackstone can infuse more capital into the company to keep building on its software services with a data focus. “Additional capital investment from Blackstone will allow us to cultivate our rich history of innovation and accelerate our product roadmaps to bring our customers the deeper insights and data they need to succeed in today’s rapidly evolving digital economy,” Ali said in a statement.

That sounds like he wants to increase his data bet. It seems that the data side of the business was particularly attractive to Blackstone as well. “The high-quality data, analytics and insights IDG delivers to technology leaders are only becoming more critical as the pace of growth and innovation accelerates,” Peter Wallace, Global Head of Core Private Equity at Blackstone said in a statement.

The company launched in 1964 with the consulting side of the business, but founder Pat McGovern had a broader vision and began the publishing side of the company in 1967 with the launch of Computerworld. The publishing business actually grew to become an integral part of the rise of the PC and the technology shift that occurred at a personal and business level in the 80s and 90s. It’s unclear what this deal will mean for the publishing side of the house or where that would even fit as it continues the push to focus on data and analytics.

It’s worth noting that Verizon Media, which owns this publication along with Engadget, was also recently sold to a private equity firm, Apollo Global, as the private equity push into all parts of the technology ecosystem continues.

Hart InterCivic will be the first private vendor to partner with the company on using its open-source ElectionGuard system.

Gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse, but Elizabeth Ruzzo says she experienced it firsthand after telling a doctor that she suffered from suicidal ideation after taking birth control pills.

Ruzzo’s doctor told her there was no connection between birth control and self-harm, but she decided to stop taking the pill to see if her mental health improved. When it did, Ruzzo grasped the disconnect between women’s unique hormonal makeup and blanket-statement practices from medicine today.

Her realization led her to found Adyn Health, a startup that proactively helps women make health decisions that complement their hormonal state and background. The company started with, of course, helping people pick more personalized birth control.

Ruzzo is part of a group of growing entrepreneurs who are betting that hormonal health is the key wedge into the digital health boom. Hormones are fluctuating, ever-evolving and diverse — but these founders say they’re also key to solving many health conditions that disproportionately impact women, from diabetes to infertility to mental health challenges.

Many believe it’s that complexity that underscores the opportunity. Hormonal health sits at the center of conversations around personalized medicine and women’s health: By 2025, women’s health could be a $50 billion industry, and by 2026, digital health more broadly is estimated to hit $221 billion.

Still, as funding for women’s health startups drops and stigma continues to impact where venture dollars go, it’s unclear whether the sector will remain in its infancy or hit a true inflection point.

The future is proactive

Ruzzo views Adyn as a precision medicine startup. Its main product is an at-home test that tracks hormone levels, assesses genetic risk for specific side effects, and then gives recommendations for which birth control methods best suits the customer with the fewest side effects.

By Ruzzo’s estimates, 98% of sexually active women use birth control for 30 years of their life. That sort of lifetime value proposition made the company look like a sweet deal to founders, and Adyn raised a $2.5 million seed in April 2021 in a round co-led by Lux Capital and M13.

The moonshot, though, is using that as a way to become a trusted partner in a woman’s life, helping understand baseline hormone levels throughout those 30 years.

“My hope is that we can use precision medicine approaches, including looking at genetic markers to identify reliable diagnostic criteria, that can remove that uncertainty and pain and diagnostic odyssey that people have to go through,” Ruzzo said.

If Adyn becomes a trusted partner with teenage women, it could reach a point where it can detect changes in hormone levels over time.

“The hormone reference ranges that are used [in labs] are too broad to be personalized, let alone prescriptive,” she said. “And so what we’re hoping to do is correct for things that we know affect hormone levels like age, weight, ethnicity and compare you to your own expectations.”

If the first wave of digital health was a company like Ro, which answers consumers when they have a condition such as erectile dysfunction or hair loss, the second wave will look more like Adyn, which helps consumers navigate their health before getting diagnosed with a condition or experiencing issues.

The industry standard is still to wait for consumers to realize they have a condition, and then go to the doctor to manage their symptoms or look for a cure. A new startup that recently graduated from Y Combinator is finding its way into hormonal health through that angle.

One-tenth of all women are impacted by a hormonal condition

Veera Health is a startup that wants to help women in India manage polycystic ovary syndrome, or PCOS. The hormonal condition can cause irregular periods, infertility or gestational diabetes in women, as well as acne, weight gain and excessive hair growth. Plus, PCOS is far from rare, impacting one in 10 women.

Disrupt 2020 was an absolute banger of a conference, but we’re not ones to rest on our laurels. We have an incredible Disrupt in store for you this September 21-23, with an amazing lineup of speakers across the hottest of topics, like crypto, health/biotech, SPACs, the creator economy and the usual spread of startup how-to content and fundraising strategies and tactics.

And we’re ahead of schedule, which means we’re ready to share with you some of the speakers who will be gracing the Extra Crunch stage. As former Disrupt attendees know, the conference features two different stages: the Disrupt Stage and the Extra Crunch Stage.

The Extra Crunch Stage is all about giving founders and operators as much strategic insight as possible, across a wide variety of startup core competencies, such as fundraising, product iteration, tech stack development, growth marketing and more.

As with past years, CrunchMatch (our system for matching investors with entrepreneurs and connecting all attendees) will be running throughout the whole show.

Today, we’d like to share with you a first look at the Disrupt 2021 agenda for the Extra Crunch Stage. More speakers will be added to this agenda, but we couldn’t resist giving you a peek under the hood.

Take a look and then grab your pass to join in on the action for $99!

 

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Tuesday, September 21

How to Raise Your First Dollars with Luciana Lixandru (Sequoia) and Rebecca Lynn (Canvas Ventures)

Deciding how to go about getting your initial funding is always a tricky subject, as the wrong move could adversely impact your young company. In this session we’ll hear from experts who’ve shepherded multiple companies from the earliest to the latest fundraises.

How to Cultivate a Community for your Company that Actually Lasts with Alex Angel (Commsor), Katelin Holloway (776 Ventures) and Lolita Taub (The Community Fund)

There’s no doubt about it: The word of the year in startupland is “community.” In this panel, Community Fund’s Lolita Taub, Commsor’s Alex Angel and 776 Ventures’ Katelin Holloway will extract buzz from reality and help founders understand the growing importance of chief community officers in startup culture, and ultimately financial success, today.

Sponsored: The Inaugural Connection I.T. Superheroes Awards Category Winners, Announced live by Jamal Khan, Chief Innovation & Growth Officer of Connection

Connection and TechCrunch have teamed up to celebrate and recognize those IT people who have gone the extra mile, with the inaugural Connection I.T. Superhero Awards. Winners of the five category awards will be announced live, presented by Connection’s Chief Innovation & Growth Officer, Jamal Khan. These awards are about people, not products, for the many out there deserving recognition for their daily efforts. We think some well-earned awards are a great place to start.

The Subtle Challenges of Assessing Product-Market Fit with Heather Hartnett (Human Ventures), David Thacker (Greylock) and Victoria Treyger (Felicis Ventures)

Product-market fit is the Holy Grail for founders, and the key to unlocking the next phase of a startup’s growth. Behind “product” and “market” though, there are dozens of considerations, from types of users and product offerings to marketing and pricing that determine just how strong a fit a startup has found. Join early-stage investors David Thacker of Greylock, Heather Hartnett of Human Ventures and Victoria Treyger of Felicis as they discuss the subtler challenges in finding and assessing fit.

How to Accelerate Everything with Nik Sharma (Sharma Brands) and speakers to be announced

In the past year, growth marketing exploded as companies doubled down on what’s worked in the past and found new runway inside an increasingly competitive landscape. We brought together some of the best growth marketing minds across verticals to tell you how they conquered growth in 2021.

How to Ditch Traditional Fundraising with Arun Mathew (Accel), Nicholas Tommarello (Wefunder) and Michele Romanow (Clearco)

In 2021, venture capital has never been more plentiful, but some founders still can’t break into networks or have found that traditional fundraising isn’t the best route for their business. Fortunately, alternative fundraising techniques are gathering steam as founders find paths to raise cash that diverge from the startup success stories of the past.

The Pros and Cons (but mostly pros) of a Distributed Workforce with Wendy Nice Barnes (GitLab) and speakers to be announced

Coronavirus has changed so much, but perhaps nothing about our everyday lives has changed quite as much as the way we work. Corporations and small businesses the world over have moved to remote work, and as per usual in a time of change, startups have the advantage. Hear from founders who have cultivated fast-moving, highly productive (yet still culture-conscious) distributed workforces and how they’ve managed to do so.

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Wednesday, September 22

The Path for Underrepresented Entrepreneurs with Hana Mohan (MagicBell), Leslie Feinzaig (Female Founders Alliance) and Stephen Bailey (ExecOnline)

Being a founder comes with a wide array of challenges, but underrepresented founders unfortunately face an extra layer of bias, both conscious and unconscious. At Disrupt, we’ll sit down with founders who will share their journey through fundraising and scaling, as well as advocates who can offer tactical insights and advice.

How to Sign Your First Three B2B Customers with Kate Taylor (Notion) and Abi Williams (Udemy)

The secret to revenue growth is great sales, but the definition of “great” and “sales” has changed dramatically post-COVID. Virtual meetings, simple onboarding, product-led growth and more have upended the traditional approach to sales for enterprise companies, requiring new tactics for founders to get the kind of skyrocketing growth they desire and lock in those first customers. Join Abi Williams of Udemy and Kate Taylor of Notion as we discuss the best practices for handling sales in a re-energized 2021 economy.

So, You Want to Go Public. What’s Next? with Hope Cochran (Madrona Venture Group) and Deena Shakir (Lux Capital)

The path to your startup’s exit has grown increasingly complex in the last year. Acquisition? SPAC? Traditional IPO. Hear from seasoned tech experts about how to think about your company’s path to going public and weigh the pros and cons of the various routes.

Sponsored: Powering the Small Business Economy with Cloud Technology by Steve Vamos, CEO of Xero 

Small business is a critical engine of job creation, economic growth, innovation and a driver in our efforts to recover from a global pandemic. Fifteen years ago a startup company from New Zealand called Xero was founded with the purpose of making life better for people in small business and their advisors. Xero achieved this by shifting accounting practices to the cloud and providing an open set of APIs which has enabled more than 1,000 application partners to build affordable tech solutions connected to the Xero platform. Steve Vamos, CEO will discuss how Xero is revolutionizing the way small businesses do business by using cloud and its platform to connect real-time data with bespoke business solutions that help small business owners be more successful. Steve will speak to a number of key initiatives that will change the game for startups and entrepreneurs who want to innovate and collaborate on the Xero platform, and he will explain how Xero’s vision extends beyond just technology to galvanizing a global community of support and purpose to help small businesses everywhere.

Why You Probably Have Been Screwing Up Your Hiring Process with Jaime Bott (Sequoia Capital), Tawni Cranz (SignalFire) and Doris Tong (EQ Talent Group)

Distributed workforces have rapidly become the new normal — but chances are that your hiring processes haven’t been re-invented at the same clip. In this panel, a host of experts — including EQ Talent Group’s Doris Tong, SignalFire’s Tawni Cranz and Sequoia’s Jaime Bott — will discuss how to hire with culture and competence at the core of each decision. And, more importantly, what within your process needs to be scrapped and rewritten for the post-pandemic world.

Where to Cut and Where to Spend in First-Check Fundraising with Nisha Dua (BBG Ventures), Richard Kerby (Equal Ventures) and Henri Pierre-Jacques (Harlem Capital)

Every time a founder raises financing, they usually have one goal: growth. But what does that actually mean? And how do you begin divvying up your new capital between the various goals your startup is barreling toward? In this panel, which includes Harlem Capital’s Henri Pierre-Jacques, Equal Ventures’ Richard Kerby and BBG Ventures’ Nisha Dua, you will learn about how to spend your investment the best way, balancing runway with classic startup rigor.

Crafting a Pitch Deck that Can’t Be Ignored with Mercedes Bent (Lightspeed Ventures), Mar Hershenson (Pear VC) and Saba Karim (Techstars)

Investors may be chasing after the hottest deals, but for founders selling their startup’s vision, it’s never been more important to communicate it in the clearest way possible. Our panelists of pitch deck experts are digging into what’s essential, what’s unnecessary and what could just make all the difference in your next deck.

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Thursday, September 23

How Do You Select the Right Tech Stack with Jill Wetzler (Pilot) and speakers to be announced 

From day zero, startups have to make dozens of trade-offs when it comes to the infinite variety of tech stacks available to today’s engineers. Choose the wrong combination or direction and a startup could be left with years of refactoring to fix the legacy damage. What are the best practices for assessing potential stacks, and how can you minimize the risk of a painful mistake? Top technologists will discuss strategies for improving engineering right from the beginning and at every stage of a startup’s journey.

How to Build Brand Buzz and Generate Influence in the Creator Economy with Rachel Drori (Daily Harvest) and Julia Munslow (Yahoo News)

Brands are the lifeblood of startups. The name, the design, the feel and the emotional connection between customers and company can determine the entire trajectory of a business. It’s a well-trodden field that’s been upended in recent years thanks to the skyrocketing growth of the influencer and creator economies. What does it mean to build a brand in today’s competitive marketplace and how can you assess success? Julia Munslow of Yahoo News and Rachel Drori of Daily Harvest will discuss how they built and reshaped brands for 2021, and what tools founders should consider today in designing a compelling brand.

How to Use Customer Feedback and Data Analysis to Iterate Your Product with Eleanor Morgan (InVision) and Jean-Denis Greze (Plaid)

Everyone has an opinion on product changes. Customers complain, NPS scores are calculated and internal leaders have their own vision on what comes next. Then there are all the people who are silent — including future customers who may not even know a startup exists yet. How do you find signal from all the noise and build a compelling product roadmap that properly calibrates every trade-off? Jean-Denis Greze of Plaid and Eleanor Morgan of InVision offer their perspectives as product leaders on how to keep a bold perspective in product while getting the details right.

Pitch Deck Teardown with Maren Bannon (January Ventures), Melody Koh (NextView Ventures) and Benjamin Ling (Bling Capital)

An articulate, alluring pitch presentation is a big part of successful fundraising, and yet it’s relatively uncommon for founders to get candid feedback on how they communicated the problem, their solution and their path to success. During the Pitch Deck Teardown, VCs will offer their live feedback on decks submitted by audience members.

How DAOs Could Shake Up VC with David Pakman (Venrock) and speakers to be announced

Investment in blockchain startups and tokens exploded in 2021, and some investors are blowing up the idea of a venture capital firm as they look to back more projects in the crypto world. DAOs, or Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, are starting to pop up more and more, turning traditional VC on its head by building investment organizations on the blockchain.

Pass prices for Disrupt are just $99 for a limited time – so if you want to get in on this action, get yours today and save up to $300.

The new version of the smart display can now track your sleep without a camera—and it gave me fresh insight into some of my sleep habits.

A list of incidents that caused, or nearly caused, harm aims to prompt developers to think more carefully about the tech they create.

We tried blow dryers, brushes, diffusers, and one reverse air-dryer that sucks your hair up like a vacuum. These are our favorite hair drying tools.

Flexispot’s 55-inch adjustable desk has three height presets and is well made. It’s now $100 off.

Multiplayer gaming was something we thought my son would never be able to do, but a special Xbox controller changed everything.

After Covid, being open with patients about uncertainty may be the surest way to build trust in medicine.

Aristolochia microstoma finds love by smelling like death. Coffin flies can’t resist.