Danny Crichton
I’m a contributing writer at TechCrunch, where I cover startups, finance, New York City, politics, infrastructure, and many more things. Get in touch if you have an interesting story. In addition, I am working on an open-source project called Reformat that will be released someday. Formerly, I was a venture capitalist at CRV and GC, a Harvard PhD dropout, and a graduate of Stanford in MCS.
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Latest from Danny Crichton
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Uber’s Frankenboard arrives
Today was a momentous day in Uber history. After much debate, rumors and strife over the past few weeks, it looks like the company and its shareholders have come to an agreement over a tender offer that will see SoftBank own nearly 15 percent of the company, while also injecting around $1 billion in fresh capital. That deal is expected to close in the new year. Read More
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Crypto prices suffer as Korean government announces new regs, potential ban
The South Korean government announced new legislation today that would put increasingly tough regulations on the country’s burgeoning cryptocurrency markets. Under the legislation, Korea, which is the third largest market for cryptocurrencies in the world after the U.S. and Japan, would ban anonymous accounts and continually monitor crypto exchanges. Perhaps more ominously, the Wall… Read More
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Apple’s Design Delirium
I watch with increasing trepidation at the direction Apple is taking its products. The most recent concern came yesterday from Bloomberg that Apple intends to offer its software developers new libraries that will allow apps to serve both touchscreen interfaces like the iPhone as well as traditional mouse and keyboard setups on desktop computers using a single unified set of APIs. Read More
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Thank Kim Jong Un for your crypto gains
Because of heavy sanctions placed on the country for its nuclear weapons testing, North Korea has long run a series of “side businesses” like drug trafficking, endangered species trading, money laundering and currency counterfeiting to provide hard cash to the Kim regime. Naturally, bitcoin trading came next. Read More
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The rich can breathe a sigh of relief
After weeks of back-and-forth negotiations between Republicans who represent rich people and Republicans who represent other rich people, Congress is in the final process of voting on a tax bill that will help all rich people at the same time, while benefitting working families that depend on rich people for their jobs and income. But hey, the standard deduction is going up so eat your… Read More
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Ultra-fast 5G wireless service declared national security priority by White House
Who would have thought that the president who writes in 140-character missives would suddenly be interested in 70 Gbps wireless internet access? The White House released its congressionally-mandated National Security Strategy report (warning: PDF) yesterday. Tucked away in a section on improving America’s infrastructure was this action item: “We will improve America’s… Read More
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Negativity and startups
2017 has not been a good year for good news in the startup world. VCs repeatedly sexually harassing founders, often over a period of years. Products that are dangerous, stupid or a mix of both. Company executives breaking the law in pursuit of delirious growth. Dumb product launches that insult whole ethnic groups. Hiring models for parties to disguise tech’s massive gender problem. Read More
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Do good companies ICO?
There has been a veritable explosion in the use of initial coin offerings (abbreviated ICO, sometimes also referred to as a token generating event or TGE, or a WTFLOL) to fund startups. Calculating the total investment in these offerings is complicated, but Coindesk puts the total right now at about $3.8 billion cumulatively, with the bulk invested in 2017. That total volume pales in comparison… Read More
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Clubhouse nets $10m Series A from Battery Ventures to make software development fun again
People often describe work as a rat race, but for a lot of engineers, that isn’t too far off. Take one Jira ticket off the queue, fix the bug or add the feature, mark the ticket as complete and move as quickly as possible to the next ticket. Engineering for many organizations — perhaps despite the intentions of management — ends up being more like a deli counter or an I Love… Read More
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Homeis, a culture network for immigrants, launches and nabs $4m seed round led by Spark Capital
Immigrating to a new country is one of the most challenging experiences any person can face. In a single instant, your social networks, your ability to communicate, and your knowledge of how a society functions disappears, and nearly everything has to be learned from scratch. That extraordinary dislocation is one reason why ethnic enclaves exist in large cities like New York City or San… Read More
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LiDAR autonomous sensor startup Ouster announces $27M Series A led by auto powerhouse Cox Enterprises
Angus Pacala has had a lifelong passion for autonomous cars going all the way back to high school. A little more than a decade ago, he followed the launch of the DARPA Grand Challenge, a Department of Defense competition that pitted research teams against each other over who could build the best autonomous car. Stanford won the challenge in 2005, which is “one of the reasons I went… Read More
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The 5-year bootstrapped odyssey of Sno-Go, a snow bike for the everyday ski mountain visitor
Skiing has always been something of a nightmare for me. I first “learned” how to ski in middle school, and still to this day don’t really understand how to stop. I once went to a “black diamond” mountain in Minnesota (read: gently sloping Midwest hill) and had to slam myself into the ground before skiing straight into the ski chalet. I’m hardly alone in my… Read More
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Spark Capital leads $3.3m round into Boston-based, on-demand life sciences marketplace Clora
On-demand labor marketplaces have been around for decades on the internet. Paying someone to identify a cat using Amazon Mechanical Turk or hiring someone to program a quick website on Upwork is easy — post a job, select someone, pay a few bucks and you’re done. While hiring individuals is reasonably straightforward, building teams to accomplish specialized projects is a far… Read More
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As Cook and Pichai leave China, Valley confronts rising internet tyranny in world’s second largest market
It’s been a bad few months for internet freedom in China (and really, a bad few decades, but who is counting?). The government brought into force a broad-ranging “cybersecurity law” earlier this year that empowers Beijing to take unilateral control over critical internet infrastructure, while also mandating that foreign companies keep all citizen data local inside China. Read More
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Intuit’s ‘rise of the rest’ M&A strategy means large paydays outside the Valley
This morning, Frederic reported that Intuit has acquired TSheets, a time-tracking service, for $340 million. That’s one of the highest prices that Intuit has ever paid for an acquisition, roughly equal to the cost of the company’s acquisition of Mint Bills / Check in 2014, and slightly smaller than the acquisition of Demandforce in 2012 for $423 million (which Intuit has since… Read More
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The loss of first check investors
Victor Basta hit a nerve with his article on TechCrunch last week describing the “implosion” of venture capital over the past 36 months. Using PitchBook data, he found that the total number of VC rounds committed to startups has declined, even while dollars invested has remained mostly static. Silicon Valley is no longer making it rain so much as it is making it trickle. Read More
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Crunch Network
Avoiding Apes By Building Equity Culture
Great companies don’t start with massive office leases and hundreds of thousands of dollars thrown at a party. They start by building a culture of maximizing value with the minimal capital required to sustain huge growth. Read More
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Republic Launches New Platform To Send GOP To White House
Software is eating the world, and it is continuing its monstrous diet in politics. The traditional shoe leather approach of political campaigning has been replaced by rooms of engineers, AWS instances, and data science APIs designed to maximize votes for the lowest cost. Your “gut” need not apply. The fight for tech supremacy in politics has not been an even fight, with Democrats… Read More
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Boston’s WTF/LOL Problem
Well, that was embarrassing. Following months of piss-poor communication and a chaotic planning process, Boston’s bid to be the U.S. entry for the 2024 Olympics finally died this week like Britain’s rule over the colonies. The city that once brought the Industrial Revolution to the people now finds itself unable to build a venue for beach volleyball, or you know, housing or… Read More
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Yes Your ******* Startup Can Cut A Little Free Speech
The internet’s ugliness has been revealed in so many different ways these past few months, it almost makes you want to pull the plug on all of it (I can’t of course, because Apple already removed my Ethernet port before I could get the satisfaction). Blow up(s) at Reddit over whether we can post pictures of fat people. Terrorists using Twitter and other social media to call for… Read More
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