Startups

Daily Crunch: Citing slow growth and desire to be ‘at the forefront of the AI era,’ Dropbox CEO lays off 500

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Cutting a rope with scissors, representing layoffs
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Thursday is here — how in the world did that happen? Those days, they just keep on coming. If you’re still on the fence about whether you want to come along to Disrupt, we’ve got you covered: There’s a Disrupt pass for every role and budget.

It also seems like Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes isn’t headed to jail today after all. She was scheduled to start her 11-year sentence, but then Things Happened. Connie has the full story.

Christine and Haje

The TechCrunch Top 3

  • More layoffs: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston broke the news today that the company will be laying off 500 employees, or 16% of its staff. Ingrid reports Houston said the cuts are due to slowing growth and “the era of AI.”
  • Get the popcorn ready: Warner Bros. is partnering with Viacom18 to bring “Succession” and other HBO content to India. Manish has more.
  • Legacy learns to embrace AI: Jagmeet takes a deep dive into how legacy financial software giant Intuit decided to put out the welcome mat for artificial intelligence instead of closing the door and turning the deadbolt.

Startups and VC

Posh is an event management and ticketing platform for all users to host events large or small, regardless of whether you’re an event organizer, promoter, or just want to charge your friends a cover for drinking all the expensive alcohol at your birthday party. Lauren reports that Posh announced its public launch today after being in beta since October 2020. Alongside the launch, the company also announced its $5 million seed round.

The concept of SaaS as a business model changed the game in tech by moving users away from buying software outright and toward paying for service availability based on time-based subscriptions, typically with per-month or annual pricing, Ingrid reports. Today, a startup out of London called M3ter that is building tools to take the next step in that evolution — more granular usage-based pricing — is announcing funding on the back of strong demand. The company has raised $14 million.

More? Okay, fine, here’s another handful for you:

Capital efficiency is the new VC filter for startups

analog clock and ball of US paper currency equally balanced on seesaw weight scale
Image Credits: PM Images (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

For some B2B SaaS startups, focusing solely on the LTV:CAC ratio is a great way to obscure weak customer metrics. Dividing Customer Lifetime Value by Customer Acquisition Cost can offer useful insights, but only if you have accurate retention data — and a lot of it.

“Today, investors zoom in on other efficiency metrics that paint a more reliable and comprehensive picture of the startup’s capital efficiency, and so should you,” says Igor Shaverskyi, a partner at VC firm Waveup.

In this TC+ column, he offers a formula and benchmarks for calculating CAC payback, which reveals to founders (and potential investors) “how long it will take for your customer acquisition costs to pay off.”

Capital efficiency is the new VC filter for startups

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.

Let’s talk about Meta today, shall we? Yesterday, the company reported that its earnings beat revenue expectations, as covered by Amanda. But that’s not all: Our colleagues grabbed on to a few tidbits, including that the company said 10% of its global ad revenue was at risk from European Union data flows order. Natasha L has more on that. Also, time spent on Instagram grew 24%, thanks to TikTok-style AI Reel recommendations, reports Darrell.

Meanwhile, Meta also had a win in court, with an appeal court ruling in the tech giant’s favor regarding an antitrust case brought by state attorneys general. Sarah writes that “the States alleged Meta had illegally maintained monopoly power in the social networking market through its acquisitions of photo-sharing app Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014, and that it gained further power through data policies that harmed app developers.”

Now here’s five more for you:

More TechCrunch

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing business, has confirmed further details of its European “sovereign cloud” which is designed to enable greater data residency across the region. The company…

AWS confirms European ‘sovereign cloud’ to launch in Germany by 2025, plans €7.8B investment over 15 years

Go Digit, an Indian insurance startup, has raised $141 million from investors including Goldman Sachs, ADIA, and Morgan Stanley as part of its IPO.

Indian insurance startup Go Digit raises $141M from anchor investors ahead of IPO

Peakbridge intends to invest in between 16 and 20 companies, investing around $10 million in each company. It has made eight investments so far.

Food VC Peakbridge has new $187M fund to transform future of food, like lab-made cocoa

For over six decades, the nonprofit has been active in the financial services sector.

Accion’s new $152.5M fund will back financial institutions serving small businesses globally

Meta’s newest social network, Threads is starting its own fact-checking program after piggybacking on Instagram and Facebook’s network for a few months. Instagram head Adam Mosseri noted that the company…

Threads finally starts its own fact-checking program

Looking Glass makes trippy-looking mixed-reality screens that make things look 3D without the need of special glasses. Today, it launches a pair of new displays, including a 16-inch mode that…

Looking Glass launches new 3D displays

Replacing Sutskever is Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI’s director of research.

Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI co-founder and longtime chief scientist, departs

Intuitive Machines made history when it became the first private company to land a spacecraft on the moon, so it makes sense to adapt that tech for Mars.

Intuitive Machines wants to help NASA return samples from Mars

As Google revamps itself for the AI era, offering AI overviews within its search results, the company is introducing a new way to filter for just text-based links. With the…

Google adds ‘Web’ search filter for showing old-school text links as AI rolls out

Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket will take a crew to suborbital space for the first time in nearly two years later this month, the company announced on Tuesday.  The NS-25…

Blue Origin to resume crewed New Shepard launches on May 19

This will enable developers to use the on-device model to power their own AI features.

Google is building its Gemini Nano AI model into Chrome on the desktop

It ran 110 minutes, but Google managed to reference AI a whopping 121 times during Google I/O 2024 (by its own count). CEO Sundar Pichai referenced the figure to wrap…

Google mentioned ‘AI’ 120+ times during its I/O keynote

Firebase Genkit is an open source framework that enables developers to quickly build AI into new and existing applications.

Google launches Firebase Genkit, a new open source framework for building AI-powered apps

In the coming months, Google says it will open up the Gemini Nano model to more developers.

Patreon and Grammarly are already experimenting with Gemini Nano, says Google

As part of the update, Reddit also launched a dedicated AMA tab within the web post composer.

Reddit introduces new tools for ‘Ask Me Anything,’ its Q&A feature

Here are quick hits of the biggest news from the keynote as they are announced.

Google I/O 2024: Here’s everything Google just announced

LearnLM is already powering features across Google products, including in YouTube, Google’s Gemini apps, Google Search and Google Classroom.

LearnLM is Google’s new family of AI models for education

The official launch comes almost a year after YouTube began experimenting with AI-generated quizzes on its mobile app. 

Google is bringing AI-generated quizzes to academic videos on YouTube

Around 550 employees across autonomous vehicle company Motional have been laid off, according to information taken from WARN notice filings and sources at the company.  Earlier this week, TechCrunch reported…

Motional cut about 550 employees, around 40%, in recent restructuring, sources say

The keynote kicks off at 10 a.m. PT on Tuesday and will offer glimpses into the latest versions of Android, Wear OS and Android TV.

Google I/O 2024: Watch all of the AI, Android reveals

Google Play has a new discovery feature for apps, new ways to acquire users, updates to Play Points, and other enhancements to developer-facing tools.

Google Play preps a new full-screen app discovery feature and adds more developer tools

Soon, Android users will be able to drag and drop AI-generated images directly into their Gmail, Google Messages and other apps.

Gemini on Android becomes more capable and works with Gmail, Messages, YouTube and more

Veo can capture different visual and cinematic styles, including shots of landscapes and timelapses, and make edits and adjustments to already-generated footage.

Google Veo, a serious swing at AI-generated video, debuts at Google I/O 2024

In addition to the body of the emails themselves, the feature will also be able to analyze attachments, like PDFs.

Gemini comes to Gmail to summarize, draft emails, and more

The summaries are created based on Gemini’s analysis of insights from Google Maps’ community of more than 300 million contributors.

Google is bringing Gemini capabilities to Google Maps Platform

Google says that over 100,000 developers already tried the service.

Project IDX, Google’s next-gen IDE, is now in open beta

The system effectively listens for “conversation patterns commonly associated with scams” in-real time. 

Google will use Gemini to detect scams during calls

The standard Gemma models were only available in 2 billion and 7 billion parameter versions, making this quite a step up.

Google announces Gemma 2, a 27B-parameter version of its open model, launching in June

This is a great example of a company using generative AI to open its software to more users.

Google TalkBack will use Gemini to describe images for blind people