Hi again! Welcome back to Week in Review, our newsletter where we quickly recap the top stories on TechCrunch dot-com from the past seven days. Want it in your inbox? Get it here.
The Most read stories This week has been pretty wild: Bolt Mobility, an on-demand bike/scooter rental company co-founded by Usain Bolt, just…disappeared. “The passing was so sudden,” Rebecca writes, “leaving cities with abandoned equipment, unanswered calls and emails, and lots of questions.”
different things
Amazon buys iRobot: Bezos wants everything. Pure food! A medical! And now… Roomba? In the latest in a series of seemingly abrupt and somewhat unexpected acquisitions, Amazon is dropping $1.7 billion for the company best known for its robotic vacuum cleaners.
Facebook stops direct shopping: If you use Facebook’s “shopping directly” feature to sell through streams, it may be time to find a new platform. While the live streaming feature isn’t going away, the dedicated shopping-focused features will be live in October.
Starbucks is participating in web3: I want to roll my eyes, but how many people I know insist on buying a Starbucks from every major city they visit…
More Robinhood Fires: Oof. Just a few months back, Robinhood cut 9% of its full-time staff; This week, the company confirmed it will drop another 23%. Citing excessive hiring over the past few years, CEO Vlad Tenev writes, “I have approved and taken responsibility for our ambitious HR trajectory – this is on me.”
YC is smaller: It finally happened. Y Combinator is getting bigger with each class of accelerator, peaking at 414 companies in the last batch. They’re scaling things back a bit with the next cohort – but at around 250 companies, it’s still relatively large.
audio content
Podcasts! Get your podcast!
This week in the TechCrunch podcast world, Equity crew talk about YC’s smaller (but still quite large) cohort, Darrell and Becca talk about “Instagram is TikTok’s MySpaced” on Podcasts TCand Burnsy spoke to Convoy co-founder Dan Lewis about the freight company’s “secret growth secret” on TechCrunch Live.
Additional tools
Glubook’s $2.5 million seed deck: Glambook recently raised millions of dollars to build a so-called “Uber for the beauty industry”. How did they convince investors to join? In the latest issue of his Pitch Deck Teardown series, Haje talks through the deck and helps explain why certain things are cut.
What really happens when your startup is acquired?: There’s more to it than waiting for a bag of cash to appear on your table. Yair Snir, Vice President of Dell Technologies Capital, gives us a high-level overview of the entire process, “from NDA to LOI”.
to Sophie: “How long do I have to stay in my current job after I get my green card?” That’s a reasonable question! Immigration attorney Sophie Alcorn weighs in.
