Startups

What’s on deck today at TC Early Stage 2021

Comment

Image Credits: TechCrunch

Who’s ready for bootcamp? Today’s the day new founders get down to the business of, well, building a better business. TechCrunch Early Stage 2021: Operations & Fundraising provides early-stage founders with access to top founders, investors and subject-matter experts across the startup realm. The goal? Learn and develop the skills essential for startup success, avoid common mistakes, expand your network and discover new opportunities.

Procrastination Station: You can still get your founder bootcamp on. Buy a pass right here, right now.

Ready to roll up your sleeves, get to work and have some fun? We’re highlighting just a few of today’s sessions you won’t want to miss. You’ll find descriptions of all the presentations in the program-packed agenda.

Don’t miss our special partner sessions. These eight interactive presentations, scheduled throughout the day, cover a range of hot topics.

  • Creating and Protecting IP Value in Connection with VC Financings (Perkins Coie)
  • Scientist Entrepreneurs – Scaling Breakout Engineering Biology Companies (Mayfield)
  • Using Fast Feedback to Make Higher-Confidence Decisions and Accelerate the Dev Process (UserTesting)
  • An M&A Playbook for Startup Founders: Lessons from Google and Microsoft (Merus Capital)
  • How to Scale a Remote-First Startup (Remote)
  • Why Founders Should Adopt OKRs Now (Dell for Entrepreneurs)
  • Naming & Protecting Your Company’s Intellectual Property with Brainbase (Brainbase)
  • Nailing the Little Things: How Startups Can Achieve Operational Excellence from Day One (B Capital Group)

Wondering how to pitch effectively in these virtual times? Melissa Bradley, co-founder of Ureeka, shows how to bring the heat in How to Nail Your Virtual Pitch Meeting. The rules of the pitch meeting have changed. Instead of traveling across the country, wasting time in planes, trains and automobiles, founders can take upwards of 30 meetings in a day from the comfort of their home. Entrepreneur and VC Melissa Bradley will outline how to make the most of that half hour on Zoom and lock in the next one.

If you build it, who will sell it? Learn everything you need to know about Building and Leading a Sales Team. Contrary to popular opinion, even the very best products don’t sell themselves. Salespeople do. Hear from Zoom’s chief revenue officer, at the helm of the company’s sales team during the biggest period of growth of any software company ever, lay out how to build a stellar sales team.

Thanks to video on demand, you won’t miss a minute of TC Early Stage. Watch your favorites again to catch nuance you may have missed or check out topics you couldn’t fit into your schedule. All videos will be available after the conference ends and you can access them with the free Extra Crunch membership that you get with your ticket!

That’s a sweet peek at just some of the presentations happening today at TechCrunch Early Stage 2021: Operations & Fundraising. Are you ready? It’s time for bootcamp!

More TechCrunch

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

Google’s Circle to Search feature will now be able to solve more complex problems across psychics and math word problems. 

Circle to Search is now a better homework helper

People can now search using a video they upload combined with a text query to get an AI overview of the answers they need.

Google experiments with using video to search, thanks to Gemini AI

A search results page based on generative AI as its ranking mechanism will have wide-reaching consequences for online publishers.

Google will soon start using GenAI to organize some search results pages

Google has built a custom Gemini model for search to combine real-time information, Google’s ranking, long context and multimodal features.

Google is adding more AI to its search results

At its Google I/O developer conference, Google on Tuesday announced the next generation of its Tensor Processing Units (TPU) AI chips.

Google’s next-gen TPUs promise a 4.7x performance boost

Google is upgrading Gemini, its AI-powered chatbot, with features aimed at making the experience more ambient and contextually useful.

Google’s Gemini updates: How Project Astra is powering some of I/O’s big reveals