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To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here . Friday, more like Fri-yay! It’s April 29, 2022, we’re here with the latest headlines, but honestly our brains are mostly focused on all the hardcore fun we’re going to have this weekend. Like doing laundry, napping, playing with our pets, reading a book for a while and sleeping in. I know, we’re old and boring, deal with it. — Christine and Haje The TechCrunch Top 3 Selling Tesla, getting a pretty tweet deal: Everyone’s favorite social media-acquiring billionaire is selling $4 billion worth of Tesla stock  and supposedly has a new Twitter CEO lined up. He also shared that he has the beginnings of a plan for how to monetize tweets. Wait, companies have to make money?  Robinhood’s stock price is going off a cliff  as competition gets stiff and its business model is more and more skew-whiff. Home is where the benefits are: Airbnb employees receive

Hey everyone, and welcome back to Chain Reaction In our Chain Reaction podcast this week, Anita and I chatted with Sequoia Capital’s Shaun Maguire on why gamers are skeptical of NFTs and where decentralization really matters. More details below. Last week was our inaugural newsletter and we chatted at length about the changes Twitter could make to expand its crypto business. At that point, I — like many others — was operating under the assumption that a Musk Twitter deal was ultimately doomed, but low and behold we’ve got a deal. Everything has been approved at this point, but I can’t shake a feeling that something is going to kill this deal in the eleventh hour. If that happens, Twitter’s board or Musk will be on the hook for a $1 billion penalty for walking away from the deal, but I suppose we’ll see … This week, I’m looking at a controversial Bitcoin mining ban working its way through New York regulators and what bills like it could mean for the political reputation of crypto’s #

Lotti Siniscalco is a partner at Emergence Capital , where she invests in early-stage enterprise software companies. During TechCrunch’s Early Stage event, she headlined a session dedicated to giving feedback on pitch decks. What follows is a small slice of Lotti’s input from the session. Constructing pitch decks is part art and part science. And they’re always a work in progress. Each week on TechCrunch Live , a founder and investor present an early pitch deck that won significant capital investment. The events are free to join, and after looking at the pitch deck, startup founders can practice their pitch with the investor and founder. TechCrunch is also kicking off a series of posts digging into real pitch decks that raised rounds that we’ve covered. The first entry diving into the Minut deck is here . Enjoy! On pitching the right investor: “The first thing is: Know your audience. Do a little bit of research, and try to tweak the email to make it personal,” Lotti said, adding t

Earlier this month at TechCrunch Early Stage, I talked to Frederique Dame, an investing partner at GV, about product-market fit . A standing-room-only crowd packed the venue as Dame spoke about her experience leading product and engineering efforts at Uber, Yahoo and Smugmug, sharing some of what she learned about gathering customer data, iterating quickly to validate ideas, and the challenges that come with scaling teams from a few dozen people to several thousand employees. Great day at @TechCrunch Early Stage talking with @YourProtagonist about how founders can find product-market fit! pic.twitter.com/ybbqwGX6Hm — Frederique Dame (@fffabulous) April 14, 2022 We also discussed several specific tactics and strategies that can help move organizations towards PMF, including effective ways to capture and share user data, and developing customer personas that will help everyone understand the company’s mission and purpose. Full TechCrunch+ articles are only available to memb

DoorDash announced today that it’s expanding its gas rewards program for delivery people on its platform. The program enables delivery people using their DasherDirect card to receive 10% cash back on their gas purchases, anywhere in the United States. The company announced the rewards program last month with the goal of offsetting rising gas prices. The program was originally supposed to last through April but has now been extended until the end of August. The company says that since the launch of the program, delivery people on the platform have saved an average of $0.42 per gallon on every visit. DoorDash also says that every hour, more than 8,600 delivery people are using their Dasher Direct cards to save with 10% cash back. In addition, DoorDash notes that delivery people have used the 10% cash back benefit through DasherDirect in over 8 million transactions   across gas stations. DoorDash says it will continue to monitor gas prices through the summer months and listen to feedba

Rocket Lab will take a shot a making history today with its attempt to catch a spent booster midair with a helicopter. This (mostly) unprecedented technique is apparently the safest and most efficient the company could come up with, and this will be the first full-scale operation, aiming to catch the first stage of the “There and Back Again” mission before it splashes down. You can watch it live below this afternoon. Don’t worry, it’s not just a helicopter-mounted catcher’s mitt for the first stage to crash into at terminal velocity; they have a little more sense than that. The booster will perform its work getting the upper stage and payload out of the lower atmosphere, then detach and fall along a generally predictable path, and at some point will deploy a parachute — not too high or it could drift too far. Once its location and velocity are confirmed, a nearby special-purpose helicopter will take off toward its location. Once it has the floating booster in its sights, it will mov

If you own a home, Sealed has a heat pump to sell you. The Manhattan-based startup, which helps homeowners replace their oil- and gas-gulping heating systems via an unusual financing model, has secured an additional $29.5 million in a new deal led by property-tech investor Fifth Wall . Other investors, including Robert Downey Jr.’s FootPrint Coalition and CityRock, also chipped in. Heat pumps work by moving heat around, directing it inside or outside your home depending on whether you’re trying to cool down or stay warm. They’re more efficient than their fossil-fueled counterparts, but costly to install, which is where Sealed’s model kicks in. The firm covers   installation and weatherization costs upfront, billing homeowners monthly based on the energy they save. That means Sealed only gets paid if it succeeds in cutting down energy waste. The startup’s big bet is on its machine learning algorithms, which “really accurately predict a home’s future energy usage,” CEO Lauren Salz cla

Welcome back to Found , the TechCrunch podcasts that get the stories behind the startups. This week we’re joined by Chris Webb from Chow Now. ChowNow started as a way for founder and CEO, Chris Webb and his friends to easily order from smaller local restaurants but eight years later when COVID hit ChowNow became known as a restaurant-friendly alternative to some of the larger players in the space. They began ranking in the app store organically and getting a boost in users and customers. Chris talks with Darrell and Jordan about the ”fast and steady” approach to building a lasting company and how to seize a moment when growth occurs. They also get into: Balancing having an app or product that puts promotion of their customers (in this case, the restaurants) rather than the app itself. Learning from working at Leeman during their infamous bankruptcy and never wanting to get too far over his skis as a founder so that they will fail too quickly aka being “fast and steady.” The diff

If you wanted to be a fly on the wall during the first Twitter all-hands meeting after the platform accepted Elon Musk’s $44 billion bid , you’re in luck. Audio from Twitter’s companywide call about its drastic change from being a publicly traded company to a billionaire-owned, private entity was leaked by the conservative activist group, Project Veritas, on YouTube. The group, of course, has a bone to pick with Twitter, as its right-wing founder James O’Keefe  was booted from Twitter last year for platform manipulation and spam. The group also has a history of deceptive reporting practices, including the use of misleading video edits. While Twitter declined to comment on the leak, the dialogue appears to be consistent with prior reports about the call. And while Twitter CMO Leslie Berland tweeted that an audio clip from the meeting has been “leaked, edited and misrepresented as [hers] (and the company’s) views,” it appears she may have been responding to a tweet that showed an

Luisa Rubio Arribas Contributor Share on Twitter Luisa Rubio Arribas is the head of Wayra X , Telefónica’s digital innovation hub offering funding, connections and expertise to mass-market-ready B2C startups. Corporate venture capital investments (CVCs) now represent more than a fifth of global venture. The bigger slice of the funding pie comes as founders have to navigate a more uncertain capital landscape . Amid the Ukrainian conflict and rising inflation — with many investors being more cautious with their dollars — startups are welcoming the longer-term stability that corporates can offer. Corporate knowledge, R&D resources, M&A opportunities and networks are invaluable for early-stage companies. But many traditional investors have strong opinions about corporate venture capital projects, claiming that corporates’ role is to buy, not back, other companies. This approach, however, overlooks the benefits of corporate investment, especially in times of dwindli

While working as the head of treasury at Braintree, Boris de Souza once discovered a $90 million payment that went “missing” for over two weeks because of poor payments infrastructure. “It was my first week on the job, and I received an email from a client saying ‘I think you shorted us $90 million,’” he recalls. “I looked into it, and they were right. I figured out there was a bug in the system, fixed it and wired the money. But it was incredible to me that it took them 2 ½ weeks to know they were missing $90 million.” For de Souza, who was also a founding engineer at digital bank Chime and a product manager at Slack, the whole business payments space “has not really evolved” over the past several decades. “Most business payments are still very much done in paper check and unintelligible ACH payments,” he said. To set about helping solve that problem, he left Braintree in 2019 and teamed up with fellow former Chime software engineer Zhuo Huang to found Streamlined , an Oakland-b

Motherboard/Vice had an explosive report on Facebook’s business yesterday that’s sure to raise fresh questions over the lack of enforcement of European privacy laws against the adtech giant. The report is based on a leaked internal document written last year by privacy engineers on its Ad and Business product team. The document , which is entitled “ABP Privacy Infra, Long Range Investments [A/C Priv],” appears to show engineers at the tech giant now known as Meta scratching their heads at the nightmarish task they’re facing: Trying to make Facebook’s data-ingesting ads business compliant with a “tsunami” of global privacy regulations that need it to know how user data flows through its systems so the company can apply policies that control what’s done with people’s information and perform basic stuff like reflect people’s privacy choices. So next time Sheryl Sandberg talks about Meta’s “ regulatory headwinds ” this is the contextual meat to graft on those euphemistic bones. Meta’s

Have you heard about this fantastic opportunity for university-level, student-led mobility startups determined to transform transportation and redefine what it means to be mobile? Buy a student pass to TC Sessions: Mobility 2022 — on May 18-20 in San Mateo, California — and you’re eligible to apply to the TechCrunch Student Pitch Competition. TechCrunch wants to invite the best student-led mobility startups to TC Disrupt 2022, our three-day flagship event on October 18-20. To that end, the pitch competition winners — we’ll select two — will each receive a free pass to Disrupt and a three-night stay in a San Francisco hotel. The application process is simple, but it’s time-sensitive. TC Sessions: Mobility is coming up fast, and this is no time to procrastinate. Here’s what you need to know to apply. Buy a student pass to TC Sessions: Mobility 2022. Moments later, you’ll receive a confirmation email with a link to the student pitch competition application. Record a 60-second vide