Aaaaand we’re again! With our Thanksgiving mini-hiatus behind us, it’s time for one more version of Week in Review — the publication the place we shortly wrap up probably the most learn TechCrunch tales from the previous seven(ish) days. No matter how busy you might be, it ought to provide you with a fairly good thought of what individuals had been speaking about in tech this week.
Want it in your inbox each Saturday morning? Sign up right here.
most learn
Instafest goes instaviral: You’ve in all probability been to an important music pageant earlier than. But have you ever been to at least one made only for you? Probably not. Instafest, an online app that went tremendous viral this week, helps you daydream about what that pageant may appear to be. Sign in together with your Spotify credentials and it’ll generate a promo poster for a fake pageant primarily based in your listening habits.
LastPass breached (once more): “Password manager LastPass said it’s investigating a security incident after its systems were compromised for the second time this year,” writes Zack Whittaker. Investigations are nonetheless underway, which sadly means it’s not tremendous clear what (and whose) information may’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 permits you to generate (typically scarily well-written) passages of textual content by chatting with a robotic. Darrell used it to immediately write the Pokémon cheat sheet he’s all the time wished.
AWS re:Invents: This week, Amazon Web Services hosted its annual re:Invent convention, the place the corporate reveals 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 offer AWS clients management over the place on the earth their information is saved (to assist navigate more and more sophisticated 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 rules,” writes Ivan Mehta.
Spotify Wraps it up: Each yr in December, Spotify ships “Wrapped” — an interactive function that takes your Spotify listening information for the yr and presents it in a brilliant visible approach. This yr it’s acquired the easy stuff like what number of minutes you streamed, however it’s additionally branching out with concepts like “listening personalities” — a Myers-Briggs-inspired system that places every person into one in every of 16 camps, like “the Adventurer” or “the Replayer.”
DoorDash layoffs: I hoped to go per week and not using a layoffs story cracking the record. Alas, DoorDash confirmed this week that it’s shedding 1,250 individuals, with CEO Tony Xu explaining that they employed too shortly throughout the pandemic.
Salesforce co-CEO steps down: “In one week last December, [Bret Taylor] was named board chair at Twitter and co-CEO at Salesforce,” writes Ron Miller. “One year later, he doesn’t have either job.” Taylor says he has “decided 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 one way or the other nonetheless had nice reveals! Ron Miller and Rita Liao joined Darrell Etherington on The TechCrunch Podcast to speak in regards to the departure of Salesforce’s co-CEO and China’s “great wall of porn”; Team Chain Reaction shared an interview with Nikil Viswanathan, CEO of web3 improvement platform Alchemy; and the ever-lovely Equity crew talked about all the things 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? Here’s what TC+ members had been studying most this week:
Lessons for elevating $10M with out giving up a board seat: Reclaim.ai has raised $10 million over the past two years, all “without 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 venture capital funds launching now?” asks Rebecca Szkutak.
Fundraising in instances of higher VC scrutiny: “Founders may be discouraged in this environment, but they need to remember that they have ‘currency,’ too,” writes DocSend co-founder and former CEO Russ Heddleston.