Founders should seek sector alignment when looking for a family office investor

Family offices invest a substantial amount of capital in startups each year. In the first half of 2023, 27% of overall startup deal value came from deals that included a family office investor, according to a recent report from PwC. Despite their prevalence in startup deals, family offices can be a mysterious class of investors […]
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‘If you actually are solving a problem, you don’t talk about any of the hype,’ investor says

The hype is palpable: As tech folks from near and far converge for TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 in San Fransisco — one of the only places where Waymo is available to the public — there’s ample chatter about the autonomous vehicle service. “If you think about AI hype and all, everyone gets excited about what 10 […]
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Wesley Chan on what he looks for as he’s shopping for potential unicorns

Investor Wesley Chan has shown a knack for making very early investments into multi-billion-dollar unicorns, such as Plaid, Gusto, Flexport, and, most recently, Canva. Chan comes from an unconventional background — he grew up in an immigrant family and had only middling grades in high school. But he landed a job washing test tubes in […]
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Women in AI: Sophia Velastegui believes AI is moving too fast

As a part of TechCrunch’s ongoing Women in AI series, which seeks to give AI-focused women academics and others their well-deserved (and overdue) time in the spotlight, TechCrunch interviewed Sophia Velastegui. Velastegui is a member of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) national AI advisory committee and the former chief AI officer at Microsoft’s business software division. Velastegui didn’t […]
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GenAI suffers from data overload, so companies should focus on smaller, specific goals

“There is no AI without data, there is no AI without unstructured data, and there is no AI without unstructured data at scale,” said Chet Kapoor, chairman and CEO of data management company DataStax. Kapoor was kicking off a conversation at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 about “new data pipelines” in the context of modern AI applications, […]
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Hunt for Bitcoin’s elusive creator Satoshi Nakamoto hits another dead-end

Why are still no closer to unmasking the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto?

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Why Wiz really turned down Google’s $23B offer

Welcome back to Week in Review. This week, we’re coming at you right off the heels of TechCrunch Disrupt! If you missed it, we’re highlighting conversations from Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, and Disney star turned space CEO Bridgit Mendler. Of course, we’ve got news from the rest of the tech world […]
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Quantum Machines and Nvidia use machine learning to get closer to an error-corrected quantum computer

About a year and a half ago, quantum control startup Quantum Machines and Nvidia announced a deep partnership that would bring together Nvidia’s DGX Quantum computing platform and Quantum Machine’s advanced quantum control hardware. We didn’t hear much about the results of this partnership for a while, but it’s now starting to bear fruit and […]
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MIT debuts a large language model-inspired method for teaching robots new skills

MIT this week showcased a new model for training robots. Rather than the standard set of focused data used to teach robots new tasks, the method goes big, mimicking the massive troves of information used to train large language models (LLMs). The researchers note that imitation learning — in which the agent learns by following […]
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Can you build a startup without sacrificing your mental health? Bonobos founder Andy Dunn thinks so

Bonobos founder Andy Dunn is back in the builder’s seat, working on an in-person social media platform called Pie. But the biggest lessons he learned from his $310 million Bonobos exit don’t have as much to do with entrepreneurship as they do with staying sane. When Dunn was in college, he was diagnosed with bipolar […]
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