“In order to become a better writer, read your written words out loud.” That’s one of the first, and best, writing tips I ever received. I always found the advice ironic because it required me to change the medium of my writing to become a better writer. Still, all these years later, it’s true: vocalizing […]
A California judge just struck down Prop 22: Now what?
California is not going to resolve this issue. Congress is not going to resolve this issue because it almost never resolves anything. So the game comes down to individual states.
Airbnb to provide free temporary housing for 20,000 Afghan refugees
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said on Tuesday the company plans to offer free temporary housing to 20,000 Afghan refugees around the world amid the Taliban’s rise to power in Afghanistan. Chesky said the company will cover the costs for the housing, using funds from contributions to its nonprofit Airbnb.org and a specific Refugee Fund established […]
Waymo launches robotaxi service in San Francisco
Waymo, the self-driving vehicle company under Alphabet, has launched a robotaxi service that will be open to certain vetted riders in San Francisco. On Tuesday, the company officially kicked off its Waymo One Trusted Tester program in the city with a fleet of all-electric Jaguar I-PACEs equipped with the company’s fifth generation of its autonomous […]
NBA All-Star Chris Paul joins digital media startup Greenfly’s growth round
Greenfly is building a workflow to provide sourcing, creation and automated distribution of short-form photos and videos created for social media.
Stewart Butterfield and Bret Taylor are coming to Disrupt
When Salesforce acquired Slack at the end of last year for almost $28 billion, the deal seemed on its face to make sense, given that the coronavirus pandemic accelerated already growing demand for tools that enable people to work remotely and that roughly 90% of Slack’s enterprise customers already used Salesforce. Today, the question is: How well are things going? […]
It’s time for the VC community to stop overlooking the childcare industry
The revitalization of the childcare sector would benefit from an ambitious and galvanizing “moonshot” goal, like providing universal, free childcare for all Americans.
Substack acqui-hires team behind subscription social app Cocoon
Subscription newsletter platform kingpin Substack shared today that they’ve acqui-hired the team behind Cocoon, a subscription social media app built for close friends. We covered the Y Combinator-backed startup’s initial $3 million seed raise led by Lerer Hippeau back in November 2019, shortly before the pandemic dramatically reconfigured how people used social media to communicate […]
testRigor scores $4M seed to turn a list of actions into a QA testing script
Imagine typing out a series of steps in plain English that would reflect a list of actions a human QA tester would undertake to test an app, then turning that list into an automated testing script. That’s exactly what testRigor, a member of the Y Combinator Summer 2021 cohort, has done. Today the early-stage startup […]
Trym adds crop steering to its cannabis seed-to-sale platform
Crop steering turns growing carrots or cannabis from an art into a science. Indoor growers have long turned to this practice to improve yields, which involves precisely controlling and manipulating three variables: light, climate and irrigation. If tweaked properly, growers can force taller plants, larger flowers and quicker grow times. Today Trym is announcing it’s […]