Author: TechBrunch

There comes a time in every startup’s life when the leaders and stakeholders have to seriously start thinking about the endgame: What to do when you’ve raised $150 million in VC cash over 15 years en route to building a 100 million-plus community? And how do you go about executing that next step to ensure that you not only survive, but also thrive? This is the predicament that Strava, the social fitness app and community, finds itself in. At a crossroads, of sorts, where it has reached meaningful scale driven by the grit typical of many founder-led businesses, but where…

It's been an eventful week for Silicon Valley heavyweights who have pledged their support for Donald Trump's reelection bid. Given where tech and Trump are headed, when Leda Health founder Madison Campbell asked me if I could buy her another ticket to the Republican National Convention, I agreed. During the four days I attended the event in Milwaukee, Silicon Valley’s presence was palpable everywhere. Jacob Helberg, husband of venture capitalist Keith Rabois and evangelist for former President Donald Trump, watched the Republican National Convention from a private box overlooking the floor, wearing a red yarmulke with “Trump” emblazoned on the…

The outages caused by cybersecurity giant CrowdStrike have brought travel and business to a standstill around the world, but as much of the world slowly comes back online, malicious actors are also looking to exploit the situation for their own profit. The U.S. cybersecurity agency CISA said in a statement on Friday that while the CrowdStrike outage was not linked to a cyberattack or malicious activity, “we have observed threat actors leveraging the incident for phishing and other malicious activity.” CISA warned people to “avoid clicking on phishing emails or suspicious links” that could lead to email compromise or other…

Windows users around the world woke up to “Blue Screen of Death” (BSOD) on Friday morning due to a glitch in a CrowdStrike software update. The bug caused outages around the world, bringing airlines, ships, hospitals and banks to a halt. But some are seeing opportunity in the rubble. The global blackout is a perfect reminder of how dependent the world is on technological infrastructure. In the midst of the disaster, some venture capitalists are seeing an opportunity for new technologies to prevent something like this from ever happening again. In 2024, we probably won't be allowed to take down…

Twitch has reinstated former President Donald Trump's account ahead of the 2024 presidential election after “indefinitely” banning it in 2021. The Amazon-owned company told TechCrunch on Friday that it reinstated Trump's channel because it believes “there is value in hearing directly from presidential candidates when possible.” Prior to the ban, Trump's team had been using his channel to air parts of his election campaign, and now that the ban has been lifted, his channel can resume doing so. Twitch joined many other tech companies in banning President Trump's account following the January 6 riots at the US Capitol, including Twitter…

The CrowdStrike outage, which occurred early on Friday morning, took down computers running Microsoft Windows and caused flight cancellations around the world. Major US airlines, including United Airlines, American Airlines and Delta Air Lines, have suspended operations around the world. Seven percent of United's flights, 8% of American Airlines' flights and 12% of Delta's flights have been cancelled, according to FlightAware, which tracks cancellations in real time. By comparison, each airline canceled 3%, 4% and 1% of its flights, respectively, on Thursday. As of 11 a.m. ET, nearly 3,000 flights had been canceled today, bringing the total number of delayed…

Welcome to Startups Weekly, your weekly roundup of must-see stories from the startup world. This week's most interesting startup stories Shortly after Google parent Alphabet reportedly abandoned plans to acquire online marketing software company HubSpot, the tech giant has decided to pursue another big acquisition. This time, Google is in talks to pay $23 billion for Wiz, a cloud security startup that's experiencing phenomenal growth. Just four years old, Wiz has already hit $500 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), TechCrunch learned exclusively this week. Google's offer exceeds Wiz's previous market cap of $12 billion, but would the giant agree…

The CrowdStrike disaster was a catastrophic one, as a bug in the company's Windows software rendered PCs unusable, disrupting flights, canceling elective medical procedures and leaving many office workers waiting in daze for hours. Not surprisingly, CrowdStrike's stock price plummeted, even as the company's CEO, George Kurtz, promised a fix and systems were slowly starting to come back online. Rivals stand to benefit. While it's hard to predict just how much of an impact this will have on businesses from what's being called the worst IT outage in history, investors seem to sense an opportunity: Shares of CrowdStrike competitors SentinelOne…

The CrowdStrike disaster was a catastrophic one, as a bug in the company's Windows software rendered PCs unusable, disrupting flights, canceling elective medical procedures and leaving many office workers waiting in daze for hours. Not surprisingly, CrowdStrike's stock price plummeted, even as the company's CEO, George Kurtz, promised a fix and systems were slowly starting to come back online. Rivals stand to benefit. While it's hard to predict just how much of an impact this will have on businesses from what's being called the worst IT outage in history, investors seem to sense an opportunity: Shares of CrowdStrike competitors SentinelOne…

There's a man in Florida who wants to propose to his girlfriend while they're on a beach vacation. He can't get the engagement ring before they fly in from New England, but that doesn't seem like a big deal: His girlfriend's daughter, Nicole, is coming to Florida to celebrate her mother's birthday, so he asked her to get the ring before the flight. In an ideal world, Nicole — who didn't want to reveal her last name lest her mother find out about the surprise proposal — would fly to Florida on Friday to deliver the ring, and then her…