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Natalie Gordon founded Babylist in 2011, and today it’s a leading marketplace for baby gift registries. But it didn’t take off at first. It took several years for Gordon to spin the startup into its current trajectory and several more for users to follow. This is normal! And we’re excited to have Jesse Draper join the conversation. She invested in Babylist as a General Partner at Halogen Ventures. This TechCrunch Live event opens on November 2 at 11:30 a.m. PDT/2:30 p.m. EDT with networking. The interview begins at 12:00 p.m. PDT followed by the TCL Pitch Practice at 12:30 p.m. PDT. Apply for TCL Pitch Practice by completing this application . If you haven’t joined us before on Grip — our TCL online platform —   click here to register for free and gain access to all TechCrunch Live events, including TechCrunch Live, City Spotlight, Startup Pitch Practice, Networking and other TechCrunch community events, with just one registration. Already part of th...

Over the past few years, community has been a buzzword for tech startups looking to sell a product or service based on their definition of a useful network. The pandemic stress-tested these business models, with some companies seeing that consumers weren’t willing to pay fees in exchange for advice they could find on Twitter, while others realized that focusing on a target user was more important than finding the biggest total addressable market possible. It’s part of the reason I had so much fun interviewing founders from Clubhouse and Chief last week at TechCrunch Disrupt. I spoke to the founders of these companies to understand how they’ve evolved to deal with a bewildering new normal, and while a social audio app and a private membership community for women in leadership are quite different in strategy, they shared the same vibe: Less is more. Clubhouse’s product-market fit Paul Davison, Clubhouse co-founder and CEO, was fast to address what others described as Clubhouse’s fall...

If you’ve been closely following the progress of Open AI , the company run by Sam Altman whose neural nets can now write original text and create original pictures with astonishing ease and speed, you might just skip this piece. If, on the other hand, you’ve only been vaguely paying attention to the company’s progress and the increasing traction that other so-called “generative” AI companies are suddenly gaining and want to better understand why, you might benefit from this interview with James Currier, a five-time founder and now venture investor who cofounded the firm NFX five years ago with several of his serial founder friends. Currier falls into the camp of people following the progress closely — so closely that NFX has made numerous related investments in “generative tech” as he describes it, and it’s garnering more of the team’s attention every month. In fact, Currier doesn’t think the buzz about this new wrinkle on AI isn’t hype so much as a realization that the broader star...

General Motors has temporarily paused paid advertising on Twitter, one day after billionaire and Tesla CEO Elon Musk finalized a $44 billion acquisition of the social media platform. CNBC was the first to report GM’s decision. TechCrunch confirmed the U.S. automaker’s decision. “We are engaging with Twitter to understand the direction of the platform under their new ownership,” the company said in an emailed statement to TechCrunch. “As is normal course of business with a significant change in a media platform, we have temporarily paused our paid advertising. Our customer care interactions on Twitter will continue.” It’s unclear what percentage of GM’s total advertising budget is dedicated to Twitter. Most, if not all, automakers have a presence on Twitter. Although not all of them opt for paid advertising. Ford, GM, Stellantis, Porsche, VW and Volvo are just a handful of the established automakers along with newer companies like Rivian that have social media accounts on the pla...

NASA said Friday that its Psyche mission (named after the asteroid the mission is targeting) has been rescheduled to October next year. The news comes just a few months after the agency announced that it would definitively miss its planned 2022 launch attempt. The delayed schedule is due to late delivery of key components of the spacecraft, including the flight software and testing equipment. The launch window for this year concluded on October 11. NASA conducted an internal review to determine whether the mission could launch next year, in addition to a separate independent review commissioned by the agency to examine the failures that led to missing the launch window. It appears that the review determined that next year’s launch is a go. While the launch window has changed, NASA said the flight profile will be similar: The spacecraft will use Martian gravity in 2026 to propel the spacecraft toward the asteroid Psyche. If the mission does move forward next year, the spacecraft is ta...

Lo, the day is upon us: Elon Musk owns the bird app and all that comes with it. Musk’s $44 billion Twitter acquisition has closed, and he fired most of the top people in charge and is now busy learning about this thing he sort of wanted, then didn’t want at all, and now has been at least in part forced to spend a large fortune on. This week I talk with Taylor Hatmaker about the Twitter’s new owner and what it means. I also talk to Amanda Silberling about YouTuber MrBeast’s business, and why a billion-dollar-plus valuation for it makes us nervous. Plus, Kirsten Korosec comes on to talk about the scoop of the week after she broke the news that Argo is shutting down. Be sure to find us and subscribe on Apple Podcasts , Spotify or your podcast app of choice, leave us a rating and a review. The TwitterMusking and other news by Darrell Etherington originally published on TechCrunch

If you’re a regular reader of this publication, chances are you know that it hasn’t been a great year for many tech company stocks — one in which giants like Meta , Amazon, and Alphabet have been mauled by the markets after less than stellar earnings reports. Even an enterprise stalwart like Salesforce is behind hounded by activist investors . The fact is that few have been spared, whether startups or established public companies. We’ve seen a litany of stories on hiring freezes, layoff announcements , and tech stocks taking bigger hits than an NFL quarterback behind a bad offensive line — in other words, getting crushed. SaaS stocks in particular are having a rough year, so when a SaaS stock does well, well, that’s news. And that’s what happened to ServiceNow this week when it reported Q32022 earnings . It bucked the odds with a mostly positive earnings report — good revenue, good guidance, the whole nine yards — and believe it or not, Wall Street rewarded the company, with ...