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Hello and welcome to Extra Crunch on August 5th 2021. What goes up must go down. Mostly. That’s the lesson for Robinhood stocks this week. It went up yesterday. Today it has fallen sharply. Something is bad. Anyway, we have big news today from Apple, Facebook, numerous startups and even some drones.

A quick reminder that tomorrow is the last day to buy Disrupt tickets in advance. We’re also happy to announce that TechCrunch is launching another newsletter this Saturday morning, App of the Week by Sarah Perez, and it’s a great place to get all your app news. Be sure to register here.

Top three tech blogs

  • Apple will scan iphones for abusive content involving children. Apple’s privacy efforts are running afoul of its efforts to limit the sharing of known child sexual abuse material. Its plans, which have yet to be rolled out, would work at the device level to “identify if a user is uploading known child abuse images to iCloud, without decrypting the images until a threshold is reached, and through a series of checks to verify that the content has been purged”.
  • When should a startup leave a market? TechCrunch wanted to find out more about when a startup should leave a city or country to hand over to a competitor, following news that Deliveroo might leave the Spanish market. So we gathered some smart venture capitalists and started asking questions. The short answer is that to build a unicorn, you need gold and silver, not bronze.
  • Facebook has redesigned its privacy Settings. TechCrunch’s Devin Coldeway was unimpressed, writing that Facebook “mischievously scattered ‘privacy Settings’ into other categories.” If you’re a Facebook user, now is always a good time to check your privacy Settings on the social platform. It just might take longer now.

Start-up /VC

We have a strong set of startup stories, but to get things started, take a bite of Brian Heat’s latest drone story. It is quite delicious. Heater has deeply studied the field of _ warehouse _ uav. For this technology, it is a somewhat natural environment, because large storage buildings are not bothered by the buzz. Besides, boxes in these buildings usually have bar codes and are stacked vertically.

Now, let’s go through it as usual.

  • Quora has launched a subscription service to get some answers. For creators who like to answer questions, Quora wants you to pay attention. Long-time question-and-answer site Quora is launching Quora+– of course — which will cost $5 a month and allow access to content that creators decide should be paid to access.
  • When is a startup going to build a hub for all of our digital content subscriptions so we can stop using password managers for everything? Ask someone to set up the center.
  • Allocations raised $4 million to power small PE funds. It’s a cool project. Allocations established a technology that enables fund managers to quickly set up new PRIVATE equity funds and SPVS. The startup’s technology can handle boring things like paperwork and capital calls. The argument here is that there will be more small PE funds in the future. GP movements alone indicate that Allocations can be barking in the correct money tree.
  • The Astra of Astra. That’s according to space launch Vehicle company Astra, which is aiming for its first commercial launch on August 27. Of course, Boeing is struggling to get its rockets off the ground, but it’s good news to see Astra catch up with better-known launch systems. More competitors, more rockets in time. Then you and I can go to space.
  • OffLimits raised $2.3 million for healthy cereal. In America, we like our breakfast to be sweet. This means that our cereal is often loaded with sugar, which can kill us and make us smile at the same time. OffLimits is making healthy (alas) but delicious cereals, as well as “organic, vegetarian [and] gluten-free”. It doesn’t sound as interesting as Cap’n Crunch, but since I want to avoid ending up with amputations, maybe this startup has an idea.
  • In educational technology, Natasha Mascarenhas of TechCrunch published a big article today about two companies –Coderhouse and **Crehana–** working in the retraining field in Latin America. Retraining, or teaching new skills to workers already in the market, is a big market. And Latin America is becoming quite a key market for educational technology, so make sure you don’t miss this opportunity.
  • Cent Inc. raised 300 million cents to help understand NFTs. Remember when @Jack sold his first tweet as an NFT? The platform that made the deal happen just raised $3 million. Or as we pointed out earlier, 300 million cents. However you like to write the monetary amount –12,000,000 cents! — The latest Cent deal shows that venture capital firms are still more willing to bet on NFT, especially the broader crypto economy.

TechCrunch’s Ron Miller reports today on Bluecore’s massive $125 million Series E funding round. The new capital makes this e-commerce personalization platform the world’s newest unicorn. At least for a few hours. I asked Miller why he had covered the round. Here’s what he said.

Bluecore is part of the omnichannel personalization market. This is an area that has flourished during the pandemic, as more commercial activity moves online and the provision of more targeted information becomes more necessary. This round of funding shows that investors see value and are willing to place big bets on the long-term success of companies like Bluecore.

Here, we can see the story behind the scenes!

A blueprint for building a great startup founding team

Building a startup team is harder — and riskier — than building 10 Ikea dressers.

Assuming that 90% of startups fail and that the most successful take an average of six years to go public, founders must make careful decisions about who to invite to join the founding team.

Is a good engineer a great choice? Or is it a bad choice? Should your product people be assertive or team players? Are you even the best candidate for CEO?

Sudheesh Nair, CEO of ThoughtSpot, shared some of his thoughts on building a solid leadership team and drafted an exhaustive checklist for entrepreneurs who are building a team. What was his initial suggestion?

“Investors love founder-ceos, and founders are often great for that role. But not everyone can do it well and, more importantly, not everyone wants to.”

A blueprint for building a great startup founding team

(Extra Crunch is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can register here _). _

Big tech.

  • Co-hosting has been added to Twitter Spaces. Now you can enlist your friends to help you manage your next live audio conversation on Twitter. Yes, Spaces, Big Tweet’s chatroom tool, is expanding its feature set. You can now have a host, two co-hosts and up to 10 speakers all at once. Just don’t, because that would be more noise than signal.
  • ** Qualcomm wants to buy Veoneer. ** Qualcomm’s offer for Veoneer, a Swedish automotive technology company, is $800 million more than Magna International’s offer. The chip company is willing to pay $4.6 billion for the asset. Why is that? Because Veoneer has built “advanced driver assistance systems, decision-making vehicle hardware and software.” So consider that this is qualcomm’s long-term bet that autonomous driving technology will be everywhere. In the end.
  • ** Automakers want more government money. ** cars are going electric, and the U.S. government has big goals to increase its domestic market share and production. The automakers thought, hey, how about some help. To that end, some automakers are calling for the “timely deployment of the full electrification policy that the government promised in the Build Better Plan.” That means funding in the form of consumer incentives and charging networks.
  • Given that GM is making a lot of money right now, this feels odd. Sure, it can deploy some money? Besides, I hear money is cheap these days.
  • ** Google refreshed its Nest line of products. ** Last day, Google’s Nest division was ready to refresh its Nest line of cameras and doorbells. Nest is a dark horse inside Google because it is a hardware division that is almost entirely part of the software business. Still, the new hardware looks pretty good.

Tech bloggers. The growth of marketing

Photo source. SEAN GLADWELL (opens in a new window)/Getty Images

If you are a growth marketer, please forward this survey to your clients; We want to hear why they like working with you.

If you’re curious about how these surveys affect our reporting, check out Miranda Halpern’s interview with Ward Van Gasteren, founder of Grow With Ward, “Who should You Hire? Growth hacks or digital marketers?”

What kind of people should you hire? Growth hacker or digital marketer?