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Hellooooo, and welcome to the Wednesday Crunch!
SVB’s new CEO, Tim Mayopoulos, has had a lot to say in the 24 hours since joining the bank on Monday. In a private Zoom meeting organized by SVB for a select number of LPs and investors, he asked clients to return deposits to the institution, Natasha M reports.
With much love from Christina And haje
TechCrunch’s top 3
- mint acquisition: The big news for today is that T-Mobile is acquiring the parent company of Mint Mobile – you know, the company Ryan Reynolds owns a stake in – in a deal valued at $1.35 billion. Aisha notes that this “decision indicates that T-Mobile is looking to strengthen its prepaid offers”.
- I know you are, but what am I?: Well, if you ask Greg Brockman from OpenAI, GPT-4 isn’t perfect, but neither are you, Kyle writing. Ouch.
- Talk about the moment: Following OpenAI’s announcement of its new GPT-4 model, Quora announces Poe, its own chatbot offering, which is launching subscriptions to let you chat with a GPT-4-powered bot, Ivan reports.
Startups and VCs
There is no shortage of startups trying to put drones to work. There is, however, a long-standing question around the effectiveness of such plans. Drones, especially smaller ones, are impressive technologies, but their functionality is relatively limited. A small quadcopter probably isn’t going to be trimming your trees or walking your dog anytime soon, brian writing. One thing they can do exceptionally well, however, is imagery. Verity raises $32 million as Ikea stores roll out their inventory drones.
To celebrate Wednesday, here are some seductive alliterations:
Zero-Based Budgeting: A Proven Framework for Extending the Track
Picture credits: Getty Images
Extending the track in this environment is essential, but stepping back too far in the wrong place can reduce your entire organization’s momentum.
Instead of just cutting the top down a bit, more and more startups are turning to zero-based budgeting, an aggressive tactic where founders come back to Square One “every budget period to verify that all line items are relevant and profitable,” writes FP&A analyst Healy Jones.
“The best founders are looking for a framework to strategically reduce consumption while keeping their startup’s value drivers running.”
Three others from the TC+ team:
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Big Tech inc.
Today’s Big Tech theme seems to be “ways to make something easier”. The first is GitHub, which has created its own set of guidelines for setting up open source program desktops. Paul writes that companies trying to stay on top of open source compliance, security, etc., will soon find it a challenge, hence the open source program office “emerging as a critical part of the business modern, formalizing what might previously have been a loose collective of employees spanning a myriad of departments and roles.
Next, we move on to Waze. If you have an electric vehicle, you’re going to want to get closer. Ivan reports that Waze has a new feature that shows EV owners where compatible charging stations are along their route.
And we have five more for you:
