Aaaaand we’re back! With our Thanksgiving break over, it’s time for another installment of Week in Review – the newsletter where we quickly round up the most read TechCrunch stories of the last seven days. No matter how busy you are, it should give you a pretty good idea of what people have been talking about in Tech this week.
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mostly read
Instafest goes instaviral: You’ve probably been to a great music festival before. But have you ever been to one made just for you? Probably not. Instafest, a web app that went super viral this week, helps you dream about what this festival could be like. Sign in with your Spotify credentials and a pretend festival promo poster will be created based on your listening habits.
LastPass violated (again).: “Password manager LastPass is investigating a security incident after its systems were compromised for the second time this year,” writes Zack Whittaker. Investigations are still ongoing, which unfortunately means it’s not entirely clear what (and whose) data was accessed.
ChatGPT will open: This week, OpenAI has largely opened up access to ChatGPT, allowing you to interact with the new generation of languages AI through a simple chat-style interface. In other words, you can generate (sometimes shockingly well-written) snippets of text by chatting with a robot. Darrell used it to instantly write the Pokémon cheat sheet he had always wanted.
AWS re:Invents: This week, Amazon Web Services hosted its annual re:Invent conference, where the company unveiled the next steps for the cloud computing platform that powers much of the internet. This year’s highlights? A low-code tool for serverless applications, a promise to give AWS customers control over where in the world their data is stored (to make it easier to navigate increasingly complicated government policies), and a tool for running “simulations city-sized” in the cloud.
Twitter Suspends Kanye (Again): “Elon Musk suspended Kanye West (aka Ye)’s Twitter account after he posted anti-Semitic tweets and violated the rules of the platform,” writes Ivan Mehta.
Spotify wraps it up: Every December, Spotify ships Wrapped – an interactive feature that takes your Spotify listening data for the year and presents it in a super visual way. This year it’s got the simple things like how many minutes you’ve been streaming, but it also branches out with ideas like “Listening Personalities” — a Myers-Briggs-inspired system that categorizes each user into one of 16 camps, like “The Adventurer ‘ or ‘the replayer’.
DoorDash Layoffs: I was hoping to get through a week without a layoff story cracking the list. Unfortunately, DoorDash confirmed this week that 1,250 employees will be laid off, with CEO Tony Xu stating they were hiring too quickly during the pandemic.
Salesforce co-CEO resigns: “In a week last December [Bret Taylor] was named CEO at Twitter and co-CEO at Salesforce,” writes Ron Miller. “A year later, he’s gone from both jobs.” Taylor says he’s “decided to go back there [his] entrepreneurial roots.”
Audio Summary
I was expecting it to be a bit quiet in TC podcast land last week because of the holidays, but we kinda had a great show anyway! Ron Miller and Rita Liao joined Darrell Etherington The TechCrunch Podcast to discuss the departure of Salesforce’s co-CEO and China’s “Great Wall of Porn”; team chain reaction shared an interview with Nikil Viswanathan, CEO of web3 development platform Alchemy; and the eternally beautiful Equity capital The crew talked about everything from Sam Bankman-Fried’s wild interview at DealBook to why all three co-founders of financing startup Pipe resigned at the same time.
TechCrunch+
What is behind the paywall for TC+ members only? Here’s what TC+ members read the most this week:
Lessons on raising $10 million without giving up a board seat: Reclaim.ai has raised $10 million over the past two years, all “without giving up a single board seat.” As? Henry Shapiro, co-founder of Reclaim.ai, shares his insights.
Consultants are the new non-traditional VC: “Why are so many advisor-led venture capital funds starting up now?” asks Rebecca Szkutak.
Fundraising in times of greater VC testing: “Founders may be discouraged in this environment, but they must remember that they also have ‘currency,'” writes DocSend co-founder and former CEO Russ Heddleston.