| YC looks for a cool $1 billion, Lyft wants to own more of the self-driving ride hail tech stack and more, all in The Daily Crunch for July 21, 2017. 1. Y Combinator raising $1 billion fund Y Combinator is looking to raise $1 billion for a new VC fund, which comes two years after it raised a $700 million fund. This money will be committed to startups of all sizes and stages, and will broaden investments in later stage companies beyond its own alumni. The fund will also reportedly be overseen by a trimmed down investment committee, which is being cut to just three people to keep things nimble. 
2. Lyft is building its own self-driving tech Lyft has been good on partnering with self-driving tech companies like GM's Cruise, but it's now also working on its own autonomous tech, which it will focus around an infrastructure for autonomous hide-hailing. This means it'll probably still leave the driving parts to partners like Nutonomy, but it's going to own a key ingredient with its own engineering. 3. Microsoft beats on strong cloud performance Microsoft's cloud transition has been painful in some ways, but it's bearing fruit for the company, with positive impact on its most recent earnings leading to a beat compared to Wall Street analyst expectations. 4. Shyp's not looking good It had been hailed as a breakout star at one point, but courier shipping company Shyp is now cutting staff and shutting down its operations beyond SF, which sounds a lot like an implosion to me. 5. Samsung to unpack the Galaxy Note 8 on August 23 Big phone, infinite display. Sounds like a winning combo. This one also almost definitely won't have an explosive battery. Because how can you make that mistake twice. 6. Musk says White House likes his underground Hyperloop plan Elon Musk has had promising talks at the national level regarding getting a green light to build a multi-city, cross-state underground Hyperloop network. Now, all he has to do is all of the incredibly hard work of getting state and local buy-in – not to mention creating the tech. 7. A personal and powerful account of VC industry harassment TC's own Catherine Shu bravely shares her own account of harassment, experienced in 2015 at the hands of a 500 Startups venture partner. The story is well worth your attention, as are the consequences Catherine describes two years on. Also, FYI the automated version of this newsletter is no longer going to be sending on the weekends, but if you still want TC news on the weekend you can sign up for the Week In Review or the Startups Weekly. | 
No comments:
Post a Comment