Happy Saturday, friends. Welcome back to Week in Review, the newsletter where we quickly list the most read gotechbusiness.com stories from the past week. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Get it here.
There were two major events that ran in parallel this week: an Apple hardware announcement and Y Combinator demo day. Either one on its own would generally lead our traffic for the week – crashing them into each other the same day was interesting. And maybe a little tiring.
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The Apple stuff: Apple’s event, as their events usually do, mostly dominated the tech news cycle this week. Instead of turning this entire newsletter into one big list of Apple stuff, I’m just saying: new iPhones, new AirPods, and a beefy new Apple Watch. Want more words than that? Here’s our summary of the news.
Y Combinator Moonshots: Startups are hard. But every YC batch has at least a handful of companies that look a bit additional hard – the moonshots, if you will. From fake fishing to teams looking to reinvent flying, the Demo Day team gathered some of the wildest pitches.
Musk/Twitter drama continues: Elon Musk is still striving to undo his billion-dollar bid on Twitter, and Twitter still wants to hold him to it. This week, a judge in Delaware made two decisions in the ordeal: The trial will not be delayed by a month, as Musk’s legal team had requested, but Musk shall Permission to “modify his counterclaim with details” disclosed earlier this month by Twitter security whistleblower Peiter “Mudge” Zatko.
LG wants you to buy NFTs on your TV: NFT Sales Reportedly Fall the past months. Will the ability to buy/sell/trade NFTs on LG smart TVs be what turns that around? No, no, it won’t.
Kim Kardashian’s New Performance“America’s favorite reality star is leveling up her repertoire,” writes Anita, with another job title: private equity investor. Kardashian has teamed up with Jay Sammons, formerly the head of Consumer/Media/Retail at the Carlyle Group, to launch a new private equity firm called SKKY Partners.
Jeep’s EVs: Another legendary car brand is diving deep into electric vehicles — this time it’s Jeep, which this week unveiled plans to roll out three different EVs (the Recon, Wagoneer S, and Avenger) by 2025. The company, notes Jaclyn, expects “EVs to assemble half of its sales in North America — and all of its sales in Europe — by 2030.”
Patreon fired: Patreon, a company that helps creators build paid membership offers, laid off employees this week. The layoffs reportedly leave Patreon without much of a security team, which seems… not ideal?
Image Credits: Bryce Durbin
audio overview
What’s happening in TC podcastland this week? “Selling Sunset” star Christine Quinn stopped by Found it to tell them about her new startup, the chain reaction cryptocrew talked about the latest drama at Binance, and Burnsy took a virtual trip to Minnesota to spotlight the Minneapolis startup scene for gotechbusiness.com Live.
gotechbusiness.com+
Want 15% off an annual gotechbusiness.com+ subscription? Use promo code “WIR” when signing up. Just want to know what TC+ readers read the most this week? Here’s the breakdown:
YC Demo Day Favorites: Nearly 230 pitches later, which Y Combinator S22 companies stood out to the Demo Day team? Here are their favorite pitches from day 1 and day 2.
The most important slides in your pitch deck: Reporter/Former VC/Resident Pitch Deck Expert Haje shares his insights on which of the arguably too many slides in your deck are most crucial.
The freemium bar shifts: In products from Slack to Google Meet to Heroku, many companies are shifting their free tiers to offer less. Why now? Anita explores the trend.
