Only Products and Other Stuff

Welcome to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here .  Hello and happy Saturday! Today we’re taking on two topics. The first fits neatly into our usual coverage area. The second not so much. Let’s go! Not all SPACs are garbage In the 2021 SPAC rush I missed the public debut of Alight Solutions. Based outside of Chicago, the company is a business process outsourcing shop that supports tens of millions of employees in the United States. It combined with Foley Trasimene, a blank-check company, last July after announcing its intentions to list via the SPAC earlier in 2021 . It also reported earnings this week, and I chatted with its CEO Stephan Scholl after the fact. There are three things that matter from the Alight report that I want to noodle on with you. In order: Not all SPACs are a mess:  Today Alight Solutions is worth ...

Jamie Beaton Contributor Share on Twitter Jamie Beaton is the author of “Accepted! Secrets to Gaining Admission to the World’s Topic Universities,” and is CEO of Crimson Education , a university admissions consulting company. Silicon Valley loves to celebrate the cult of the dropout — the inspired entrepreneur who decides that traditional education isn’t for her because it teaches her nothing of relevance, slows her down, and, in a world of readily available information, no longer gates learning resources like it once did. Legendary advocates of the dropout cult range from Peter Thiel, whose Thiel Fellows program pays students to take a year out of college, to informal mascots like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, who never completed their college degrees but actually vigorously advocate for higher education. My perspective on college admissions is informed by supporting thousands of ambitious students globally aiming to get into the world’s best universities and then see...

Day One Ventures — which, among other things, invested in Superhuman, Truebill, DuckDuckGo and others — is bringing on ClassPass co-founder Sanjiv Sanghavi as a partner focusing exclusively on climate tech. Sanghavi represents a goal for the fund to deploy 20% of its $50 million fund into early-stage companies focusing on solving climate issues. The firm has already invested in some climate-focused companies (including BluumBio and Living Carbon ). Day One invests at the earliest stages of companies — pre-seed, seed and Series A — and the “smart money” part of the equation is that the firm has deep PR experience, and helps the companies it invests in by supercharging their communications. “I think a part of my career has always been just when I’ve seen the next opportunity for personal growth, I’ve been a bit selfish. And I think I’ve taken that opportunity. And I’ve been really, really well rewarded for that in terms of just my own personal growth. The last stop I had was as the C...

The Russian government announced Friday that it will begin to “partially restrict” access to Facebook, according to an announcement from its internet regulatory agency Roskomnadzor. Russia claimed that it would implement the measures, which were not specified, after Facebook put its own restrictions on four Russian state-linked media outlets, the television network Zvezda, news agency RIA Novosti, and the websites Lenta.ru and Gazeta.ru. “On February 24, Roskomnadzor sent requests to the administration of Meta Platforms, Inc. remove the restrictions imposed by the social network Facebook on Russian media and explain the reason for their introduction,” Roskomnadzor wrote, adding that Facebook “ignored” its requests. Meta Global Affairs VP Nick Clegg elaborated on the situation on Twitter, indicating that the Russian request came in response to either Facebook’s fact-checking practices or its policy of labeling of state-run media accounts. “Ordinary Russians are using @Meta’s apps t...

I’m not sure precisely when the change occurred, but at some point Mobile World Congress became the smartphone show. It’s a fine thing to be in the world of tech trade shows — and certainly has a kind of outward-facing excitement that’s largely lacking in the world of cellular infrastructure. Big booths and flashy press conferences from mobile giants are precisely the kind of news-generating content that bring the eyes of the world onto what might otherwise be a trade-only event. Hardware companies got locked into an announcement cycle tied to these shows. CES is where you get the home electronics, the wearables, the dishwashers and, eventually, the cars. But MWC is all about the phones. But the last several years have had a profoundly cooling effect on the smartphone. Beyond the inevitable shift from novelty to necessity, smartphone sales were already on a downward trajectory before the global pandemic. Buying habits slowed as users grew less attached to the carrier upgrade cycle. A...

The investors behind virtual hack.summit() , the world’s largest blockchain programmer event, have launched a $200 million crypto seed fund under the Hack VC umbrella, fund partner Alex Pack told TechCrunch in an interview. Ed Roman, formerly a solo GP, invested in early-stage tech and crypto companies for over 10 years through Hack VC before partnering with Pack, who previously co-founded global crypto fund Dragonfly Capital and led Bain Capital Ventures’ foray into digital assets. Pack and Roman have each invested in several early-stage crypto companies prior to launching this fund, including DeFi platforms Compound Finance and Terra, Pack said. Hack VC wrapped up fundraising last fall and has been quite active since — the fund has made “at least” 15 investments worth tens of millions of dollars to date, according to Pack. Its recent investments span a variety of areas within crypto — from NFT emoji startup Yat , to DeFi lending platform Goldfinch Finance , to metaverse gaming co...

The GSMA, which puts on the world’s largest annual mobile connectivity show (aka Mobile World Congress ) has confirmed it will ban some Russian companies from exhibiting at the Barcelona-based conference which is due to kick off on Monday. However, at the time of writing, the telco industry body is still intending to allow Russian presence at the show. Russia’s participation at MWC is being partially restricted by the GSMA following the country’s invasion of Ukraine early yesterday morning. At the time of writing, Russian tanks and armed forces are reported to be closing in on Ukraine’s capital Kiev — following earlier artillery bombardments hammering the country from air, land and sea. A spokesman for the GSMA declined to specify whether all Russian companies, including carriers, would be banned from attending MWC — pointing to a statement reported earlier by Reuters in which it says there would be no Russian pavilion at this year’s event. “The GSMA will continue to cooperate w...