Aaaaand we’re again! With our Thanksgiving mini-hiatus behind us, it’s time for an additional version of Week in Evaluation — the publication the place we rapidly wrap up probably the most learn TechCrunch tales from the previous seven(ish) days. Irrespective of how busy you might be, it ought to offer you a fairly good thought of what folks have been speaking about in tech this week.
Need it in your inbox each Saturday morning? Join right here.
most learn
Instafest goes instaviral: You’ve in all probability been to an awesome music competition earlier than. However have you ever been to 1 made only for you? Most likely not. Instafest, an online app that went tremendous viral this week, helps you daydream about what that competition would possibly seem like. Register along with your Spotify credentials and it’ll generate a promo poster for a fake competition based mostly in your listening habits.
LastPass breached (once more): “Password supervisor LastPass stated it’s investigating a safety incident after its methods have been compromised for the second time this yr,” writes Zack Whittaker. Investigations are nonetheless underway, which sadly means it’s not tremendous clear what (and whose) information would possibly’ve been accessed.
ChatGPT opens up: This week, OpenAI broadly opened up entry to ChatGPT, which helps you to work together with their new language-generation AI by a easy chat-style interface. In different phrases, it enables you to generate (generally scarily well-written) passages of textual content by chatting with a robotic. Darrell used it to immediately write the Pokémon cheat sheet he’s at all times needed.
AWS re:Invents: This week, Amazon Internet Companies hosted its annual re:Invent convention, the place the corporate exhibits off what’s subsequent for the cloud computing platform that powers a large chunk of the web. This yr’s highlights? A low-code device for serverless apps, a pledge to provide AWS clients management over the place on the earth their information is saved (to assist navigate more and more difficult authorities insurance policies), and a device to run “city-sized simulations” within the cloud.
Twitter suspends Kanye (once more): “Elon Musk has suspended Kanye West’s (aka Ye) Twitter account after the latter posted antisemitic tweets and violated the platform’s guidelines,” writes Ivan Mehta.
Spotify Wraps it up: Annually in December, Spotify ships “Wrapped” — an interactive function that takes your Spotify listening information for the yr and presents it in an excellent visible method. This yr it’s acquired the simple stuff like what number of minutes you streamed, nevertheless it’s additionally branching out with concepts like “listening personalities” — a Myers-Briggs-inspired system that places every consumer into one in every of 16 camps, like “the Adventurer” or “the Replayer.”
DoorDash layoffs: I hoped to go every week and not using a layoffs story cracking the listing. Alas, DoorDash confirmed this week that it’s shedding 1,250 folks, with CEO Tony Xu explaining that they employed too rapidly in the course of the pandemic.
Salesforce co-CEO steps down: “In a single week final December, [Bret Taylor] was named board chair at Twitter and co-CEO at Salesforce,” writes Ron Miller. “One yr later, he doesn’t have both job.” Taylor says he has “determined to return to [his] entrepreneurial roots.”
audio roundup
I anticipated issues to be a little quiet in TC Podcast land final week due to the vacation, however we by some means nonetheless had nice exhibits! Ron Miller and Rita Liao joined Darrell Etherington on The TechCrunch Podcast to speak concerning the departure of Salesforce’s co-CEO and China’s “nice wall of porn”; Crew Chain Response shared an interview with Nikil Viswanathan, CEO of web3 improvement platform Alchemy; and the ever-lovely Fairness crew talked about the whole lot from Sam Bankman-Fried’s wild interview at DealBook to why all three of the co-founders at financing startup Pipe stepped down concurrently.
TechCrunch+
What lies behind the TC+ members-only paywall? Right here’s what TC+ members have been studying most this week:
Classes for elevating $10M with out giving up a board seat: Reclaim.ai has raised $10 million during the last two years, all “with out giving up a single board seat.” How? Reclaim.ai co-founder Henry Shapiro shares his insights.
Consultants are the brand new nontraditional VC: “Why are so many consultant-led enterprise capital funds launching now?” asks Rebecca Szkutak.
Fundraising in occasions of larger VC scrutiny: “Founders could also be discouraged on this atmosphere, however they should keep in mind that they’ve ‘forex,’ too,” writes DocSend co-founder and former CEO Russ Heddleston.
