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Hello, Crunchers!

Our fave read today was Connie’s piece with advice for startups that have the government as their target customer.

In honor of Black history month, we want to share some good news for BIPOC founders, as more funding is becoming available: Dominic-Madori reports that Nex Cubed launched its HBCU (historically Black colleges and universities) Founders Fund, weighing in at $40 million. Meanwhile, Natasha M reports that Kapor Capital’s new crew is raising a $50 million opportunity fund earmarked for social impact ventures and founders of color.  — Christine and Haje

The TechCrunch Top 3

  • Young and vulnerable: Carly reports that hackers have been busy exploiting a two-year-old VMware flaw to launch a large-scale ransomware campaign that is targeting thousands of organizations around the world. Over 3,200 VMware servers have been compromised, she writes.
  • I’ve got the Magic in me: Hey, GitHub Copilot, code-generating platform Magic is hot on your tail. Kyle reports that Magic, which conjured up $23 million in new funding led by Alphabet’s CapitalG, is out to “dramatically reduce the time and financial cost of developing software,” said co-founder and CEO Eric Steinberger.
  • Nursing the health industry back to good labor supply: Labor marketplace ShiftMed says the high fees paid to travel nurses over the past three years have eaten into hospital budgets as burned out nurses leave the industry, Christine reports. It secured $200 million to close the gap in that shortage by taking care of nurses.

Startups and VC

Today is the return of the veteran founders day, it appears. Natasha L reports that Spotify founder Daniel Ek is back with Neko and another spin on preventative healthcare, while Sarah writes that Zenly co-founder Antoine Martin launches a new social app, Amo.

Good news for chickens and vegans alike: Rebellyous, a startup that’s striving to build “a better chicken,” has raised at least $20 million in fresh funding, Harri reports. Based in Seattle, the venture-backed company calls its production tech the “most advanced plant-based meat manufacturing system on the planet.”

Not enough? Well, let’s shake the story-trees and see what comes tumbling down:

To improve close rates for technical interviews, give applicants feedback (good or bad)

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Image Credits: We Are (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

“White coat syndrome” occurs when patients register artificially higher blood pressure because they’re anxious about visiting the doctor.

Technical interviews are similar: In a survey that crunched data from 1,000 people who conducted 100,000 interviews, a quarter of the candidates who received passing grades initially thought they’d failed.

“Our research shows that 43% of all candidates consistently underrate their technical interview performance,” said Aline Lerner, founder and CEO of interviewing.io.

In a comprehensive TC+ post, she offers a playbook for gathering and sharing “honest (and sometimes harsh) feedback” and asking postinterview questions that create objective benchmarks.

“Only about 25% of candidates perform consistently from interview to interview,” writes Lerner. “This means a candidate you reject today might be someone you want to hire in six months.”

To improve close rates for technical interviews, give applicants feedback (good or bad)

Three more from the TC+ team:

TechCrunch+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription!

Big Tech Inc.

In the ongoing battle between India’s IT ministry and apps, PayU’s LazyPay has become the latest casualty, Manish writes. But it’s for a good cause, if you think about it: The country is cracking down on the misuse of consumer data. Speaking of blocked apps, Manish also writes that India is blocking over 230 betting and loan apps, some with ties to China.

Meanwhile, it’s Dell’s turn to have bad news. The company said that it will lay off 5% of its worldwide workforce, Ron reports. And if you have this on your BINGO card, you can mark off “the move was an unfortunate outcome of the current economic climate.”

Lots of news follows, so grab a drink and a snack and let’s dive in:

More TechCrunch

OpenAI is removing one of the voices used by ChatGPT after users found that it sounded similar to Scarlett Johansson, the company announced on Monday. The voice, called Sky, is…

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CyberArk — one of the army of larger security companies founded out of Israel — is acquiring Venafi, a specialist in machine identity, for $1.54 billion. 

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Founder-market fit is one of the most crucial factors in a startup’s success, and operators (someone involved in the day-to-day operations of a startup) turned founders have an almost unfair advantage…

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A Singapore High Court has effectively approved Pine Labs’ request to shift its operations to India.

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The AI Safety Institute, a U.K. body that aims to assess and address risks in AI platforms, has said it will open a second location in San Francisco. 

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Creative Artists Agency (CAA), one of the top entertainment and sports talent agencies, is hoping to be at the forefront of AI protection services for celebrities in Hollywood. With many…

Hollywood agency CAA aims to help stars manage their own AI likenesses

Expedia says Rathi Murthy and Sreenivas Rachamadugu, respectively its CTO and senior vice president of core services product & engineering, are no longer employed at the travel booking company. In…

Expedia says two execs dismissed after ‘violation of company policy’

Welcome back to TechCrunch’s Week in Review. This week had two major events from OpenAI and Google. OpenAI’s spring update event saw the reveal of its new model, GPT-4o, which…

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When Jeffrey Wang posted to X asking if anyone wanted to go in on an order of fancy-but-affordable office nap pods, he didn’t expect the post to go viral.

With AI startups booming, nap pods and Silicon Valley hustle culture are back

OpenAI’s Superalignment team, responsible for developing ways to govern and steer “superintelligent” AI systems, was promised 20% of the company’s compute resources, according to a person from that team. But…

OpenAI created a team to control ‘superintelligent’ AI — then let it wither, source says

A new crop of early-stage startups — along with some recent VC investments — illustrates a niche emerging in the autonomous vehicle technology sector. Unlike the companies bringing robotaxis to…

VCs and the military are fueling self-driving startups that don’t need roads

When the founders of Sagetap, Sahil Khanna and Kevin Hughes, started working at early-stage enterprise software startups, they were surprised to find that the companies they worked at were trying…

Deal Dive: Sagetap looks to bring enterprise software sales into the 21st century

Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world…

This Week in AI: OpenAI moves away from safety

After Apple loosened its App Store guidelines to permit game emulators, the retro game emulator Delta — an app 10 years in the making — hit the top of the…

Adobe comes after indie game emulator Delta for copying its logo

Meta is once again taking on its competitors by developing a feature that borrows concepts from others — in this case, BeReal and Snapchat. The company is developing a feature…

Meta’s latest experiment borrows from BeReal’s and Snapchat’s core ideas

Welcome to Startups Weekly! We’ve been drowning in AI news this week, with Google’s I/O setting the pace. And Elon Musk rages against the machine.

Startups Weekly: It’s the dawning of the age of AI — plus,  Musk is raging against the machine

IndieBio’s Bay Area incubator is about to debut its 15th cohort of biotech startups. We took special note of a few, which were making some major, bordering on ludicrous, claims…

IndieBio’s SF incubator lineup is making some wild biotech promises

YouTube TV has announced that its multiview feature for watching four streams at once is now available on Android phones and tablets. The Android launch comes two months after YouTube…

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Two Santa Cruz students uncover security bug that could let millions do their laundry for free

CSC ServiceWorks provides laundry machines to thousands of residential homes and universities, but the company ignored requests to fix a security bug.

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Decks are all about telling a compelling story and Goodcarbon does a good job on that front. But there’s important information missing too.

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Slack is making it difficult for its customers if they want the company to stop using its data for model training.

Slack under attack over sneaky AI training policy

A Texas-based company that provides health insurance and benefit plans disclosed a data breach affecting almost 2.5 million people, some of whom had their Social Security number stolen. WebTPA said…

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