Latest from Danny Crichton
Startups
With more cash and a launch, Vannevar Labs is reconnecting Silicon Valley to its defense industry roots
Silicon Valley was once one of the most productive regions in the country for the defense industry, churning out chips and technologies that helped the United States overtake the Soviet…
In a late Friday night blow to Uber, Lyft and other gig worker-centered companies, a superior court judge ruled that California’s Proposition 22, which was passed in 2020 and designed…
Disinformation, misinformation, infotainment, algowars — if the debates over the future of media the past few decades have meant anything, they’ve at least left a pungent imprint on the English…
Emergency response is a time-sensitive business. When fires burn or a driver crashes their car, seconds can mean the difference between saving lives and watching a situation spiral rapidly out…
Floods are devastating. They rip asunder communities, wipe out neighborhoods, force the evacuation of thousands of people every year and recovering from them can take years — assuming recovery is…
Startups
informed., you want to be? Trio of European media veterans take on the problem of news economics
News is vital to society, but it’s also incredibly expensive to produce. As ad rates have suffered across the industry (minus a positive blip this summer), publishers have increasingly turned…
This week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its major sixth assessment report on the physical science of climate change. The details are grim, if getting more precise, as…
Featured Article
The RapidSOS EC-1
Numbers can take on profound cultural significance, but few numbers have quite the resonance as 911, the emergency number for the United States. Few want to dial it, but when they must, it works.
Featured Article
Smoking pizza ovens and pilfered dollar bills, or the early story of RapidSOS
RapidSOS’ story is one of a mission, a community, a team and a dream that every emergency should have the best chance to be resolved as positively as possible.
Featured Article
RapidSOS learned that the best product design is sometimes no product design
For the founders of RapidSOS, improving the quality of emergency response by adding useful data, like location, to 911 calls was an inspiring objective, and one that garnered widespread support.
Featured Article
How RapidSOS used creative tactics to build partnerships and a BD engine at scale
One of the most challenging aspects of leading a startup is the seeming impossibility of building partnerships and executing business development. Large companies are sclerotic and bureaucratic, taking eons in terms of startup years to make decisions that for them are small, but for a new company, can be life…
Featured Article
After a decade, Congress might finally bring 911 into the internet age
When it comes to user-interface design, 911 is about as good as it gets. It’s the “most recognized number in the United States,” Steve Souder, a prominent 911 leader, points out.
Bubble enables anyone — coder or not — to begin building modern web applications using a click-and-drag interface that can connect data sources and other software together in one fluid…
Database technology can change the world, but the world in these parts changes very, very slowly. That’s made building a startup in the sector a tough equation.
It’s so critical to frame the problem from your perspective. And I also think that this is a really great opportunity to introduce emotion to really build a more compelling…
Off the Grid is a mainstay of the San Francisco culinary scene. The event company, founded by Matt Cohen in 2010, created neighborhood pop-up festivals centered around entrepreneurial food trucks.…
When it comes to tough environments to build new technology, firefighting has to be among the most difficult. Smoke and heat can quickly damage hardware, and interference from fires will…
One of the great things about editing all of our deep-dive EC-1 startup profiles is that you start to notice patterns across successful companies. While origin stories and trajectories can…
It’s been almost exactly a year since we launched The TechCrunch List, a curated directory of venture capitalists designed to guide founders to the VCs most relevant to their startups.…
Featured Article
The NS1 EC-1
There are excruciatingly high stakes for software today. Trillions of dollars of market cap, billions of consumers, hundreds of billions of revenue, and limitless hours of usage are dependent on software working in real time, all the time, without downtime. As the sophistication of software delivery has increased, every layer…
When it comes to detecting events transpiring anywhere in the world, few companies hold a candle to Dataminr. Founded in 2009, the company has raised more than $1 billion over…
It’s been quite the year for crypto capital, what with Coinbase’s blockbuster debut earlier this year in a direct listing and A16Z raising $2.2 billion for its third crypto-focused fund.…
The increasingly intense heats bearing down feverishly across the globe are accelerating the number, scale, and complexity of disasters worldwide. Just in the past few weeks, we have seen record…
As firework volleys launched out of New York City harbor last night, a very different celebration was likely taking place just a few blocks down the street at Verizon’s official…
It’s a sweltering day here in New York City, and that means Wall Street is on fire, and so is Robinhood, apparently. The popular stock…
Featured Article
Startup leaders need to learn how to build companies ready for crisis
It’s been a tough year for business. From ransomware attacks and power outages to cloud downtime and supply-chain disruptions, it’s never been more important to communicate to customers and stakeholders about what’s going wrong and why. Yet, with partial data and misinformation often spreading faster than official word, it’s also…
Venture
Can the military academies compete with Stanford and Harvard in venture? Two veterans are raising $50M to find out
Soldier-entrepreneurs are unfortunately still a rare breed in Silicon Valley, despite the region’s origins in Cold War defense spending. While the courage and perseverance required to fight in an overseas…
Free money from the government sounds like winning the lottery, but the reality is that most tech startups and even local retail businesses and restaurants can potentially qualify for tax…
Databases run the world, but database products are often some of the most mature and venerable software in the modern tech stack. Designers will pixel push, frontend engineers will add…
TechCrunch Disrupt 2021
Mar Hershenson joins us at TechCrunch Disrupt on how to craft your pitch deck
Pitching is the single most important skill a founder needs to refine to be successful in building a startup. You can’t attract a co-founder, teammates, customers or investors without a…
