Welcome, folks, to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter that highlights notable tech industry happenings over the past few days. Life moves pretty fast, as a young Matthew Broderick once said — we empathize. Fortunately, there’s WiR to get you caught up to speed.
In this edition of WiR, we cover a hacker leaking millions of 23andMe customer records, X’s crackdown on porn, Meta’s Ray-Ban sunglasses and Marc Andreessen’s tone-deaf manifesto. Also on the agenda is the IRS’ upcoming free direct tax filing service, Web Summit’s fight with Israel supporters, FTX execs blowing through billions of dollars and Disney’s Hotstar reaching new heights.
It’s a lot to get through, so let’s not dillydally. But first, a reminder to sign up here to receive WiR in your inbox every Saturday if you haven’t already done so.
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Hackers leak more 23andMe records: The same hacker who leaked a trove of user data stolen from the genetic testing company 23andMe two weeks ago has now published millions of new records on the dark web, Lorenzo reports. A 23andMe spokesperson tells TechCrunch that the company was made aware of the new leak this week and is “reviewing the data to determine if it is legitimate.”
Meta’s new smart glasses: Brian reviewed Meta’s new Ray-Ban sunglasses, which maintain a slim and light design while rendering their predecessor obsolete with Facebook and Instagram livestreaming. The verdict? One can see the future of head-worn computing in the $299 sunglasses, Brian writes, which sport a mic and virtual assistant in addition to livestreaming features — but it’s going to be a while before we get there.
X cracks down on porn: When X, formerly Twitter, launched paid subscription verification, some sex workers hoped that it would help them advertise to new clients. But paying for the service didn’t protect them from X’s crackdown on explicit content, which has come as a particularly hard blow for sex workers on X — who have few options to promote themselves elsewhere — as the social network’s traffic reportedly declines, Morgan writes.
Andreessen misses the point: Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen posted a manifesto on the a16z website this week, calling for “techno-optimism” in a frenzied, 5,000-word blog post that somehow manages to re-invent Reaganomics, propose the colonization of outer space and unironically answer a question with the phrase “QED.” In this post, TechCrunch issued a rebuttal of sorts to the more tone-deaf points.
Free, gov-sponsored tax filing comes to the U.S.: The IRS will test a free tax filing service in 2024 for a subset of lucky taxpayers in as many as 13 states, the agency announced earlier this week. Direct File, as the service is called, is a shot across the bows of TurboTax, H&R Block and other paid tax prep services, whose owners have resisted free and simple tax filing for decades.
Web Summit suffers for its founder’s politics: Web Summit, the Big Tech conference brand that runs events in several cities and whose 70,000 person flagship event in Lisbon is taking place next month, is running into a wall — of outrage. Ingrid writes that founders, investors and others from the tech community in Israel have gone ballistic over comments made by the founder and figurehead of Web Summit, Paddy Cosgrave, related to the fighting underway across Israel and Gaza — specifically his criticism of Israel’s retaliatory actions.
FTX founders burned through billions: Sam Bankman-Fried and other FTX executives spent $8 billion worth of customer funds on real estate, venture capital investments, campaign donations, endorsement deals and even a sports stadium, according to testimony from former senior FTX executive Nishad Singh. Singh’s testimony, which kicked off the third week of Bankman-Fried’s trial, provides fresh details of exactly where that money went.
Hotstar sets a global streaming record: A high-profile cricket match between neighbors India and Pakistan delivered a much-needed break for Disney’s Hotstar this past week, writes Manish, which has lost over 20 million subscribers in the past three quarters and whose executives are anticipated to soon intensify the hunt to find a buyer for its India operations. On Saturday, Hotstar drew 35 million concurrent viewers to the cricket match, surpassing the recent record of 32 million viewers set by Viacom18’s JioCinema.
Audio
Short a podcast for the morning commute? Look no further than TechCrunch’s lineup, which has plenty on tap from which to choose.
On Equity, Gené Teare from Crunchbase and Crunchbase News joined to discuss what we should think about the Q3 2023 venture capital market as a whole and which startups are seeing the most — and the least — capital. Teare is a well-known analyst of the global venture capital market and was instrumental to Crunchbase’s early life and remains one of its more tenured staffers.
Found featured a conversation with Hilary Mason from Hidden Door, an AI-driven narrative game engine. This mini-episode, which was recorded in person at TechCrunch Disrupt, demystifies how generative AI is changing online gaming, the process of building a team of creatives and what fundraising is like in the gaming space.
And Chain Reaction hosted Katherine Dowling, the general counsel and chief compliance officer at Bitwise Asset Management, a crypto asset manager known for creating the world’s largest crypto index fund. Katherine previously worked in compliance at True Capital Management and Luminate Capital Partners and, before that, as the assistant U.S. attorney.
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TC+ subscribers get access to in-depth commentary, analysis and surveys — which you know if you’re already a subscriber. If you’re not, consider signing up. Here are a few highlights from this week:
Is now the time to raise again?: Rebecca writes about how some early-stage founders are optimistic about raising VC capital again — but not all of them, drawing on data from a January Ventures survey of pre-seed and seed-stage founders.
A fair price for Loom: Last week, when Atlassian announced its intent to acquire video messaging app Loom for $975 million, it would have been easy to think that the former unicorn was undervalued. But comparing 2021 valuations to the reality of 2023 really isn’t a fair way of looking at the recent deal, Alex and Ron write.
Plaid inches toward an IPO: News that startup Plaid hired a CFO has kicked off a round of “When will it go public?” chatter. The answer is not soon, something that we can infer from the fact that it only just hired a CFO. Still, hiring C-suite financial talent is a known step on the well-trod path from private startup to public company, reports Alex.