If the decisions made by corporate boards of directors can indicate where a company wants to be focusing, Amazon’s board just made an interesting move.
The company announced on Thursday that Andrew Ng, known for building AI at large tech companies, is joining its board of directors.
And given the AI whiplash that every big tech company is currently dealing with, it feels timely that McGrath is stepping away from the board now.
To stay at the forefront of the tech industry, Amazon will be looking for better thought leadership on the next steps in its artificial intelligence strategy.
It’s worth remembering that Amazon has been a leading player in AI for a long time.
Sei Labs, a startup co-founded by a former Robinhood engineer and a former VC from Coatue, has launched a new open sourced project that offers a novel, and exciting approach to make Ethereum faster and less expensive for developers.
On Wednesday, Sei launched The Parallel Stack, a public good project – meaning free for any crypto developers to use.
“The biggest limitation of the EVM is the lack of throughput,” Jay Jog, co-founder of Sei Labs, formerly of Robinhood, told TechCrunch.
The Parallel Stack can do around 5,000 TPS, but is aiming to hit 10,000 TPS by the end of the year, Jog said.
But they use different design philosophies and Sei’s focus is on higher throughput through parallel processing, said Jeff Feng, Sei Labs co-founder, previously an investor at Coatue.
Lapse has been been gaining some traction in the market — claiming millions of users, 100 million photos captured each month and a coveted, consistent top-10 ranking in the U.S. app store for photographic apps.
Now it’s announcing a new round of funding of $30 million to take its ambitions to the next level.
The company’s ethos may have an old school feel to it, but some of the mechanics of how the app operates are anything but.
Lapse has come under some scrutiny — see our story here — for how it has used growth-hacking and forced invites to expand the number of installs of its app.
(“Buh-bye, Lapse!” one of my more cranky and frustrated friends told me when I asked her to download the app to connect with me.)
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups.
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Most interesting startup stories this weekIt’s been a decade since Aileen Lee coined the term “unicorn” in a TechCrunch article to describe a startup valued at more than $1 billion.
If you’re only reading two things on TechCrunch this week, make it Startups Weekly — and Lee’s article.
Who knows, but that doesn’t stop a bunch of really interesting startups from raising absolutely buckets of cash.
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups.
Most interesting startup stories this weekCES 2024 was like a futuristic carnival for transportation geeks, flaunting an array of electric everything — from cars and bikes to scooters and aircraft.
Of course, AI was everywhere, and Cody wrote a round-up detailing how AI tech showed up in the good, the bad, and the weird.
Most interesting fundraises this weekIn the wake of a challenging 2023 and a significant downturn in public offerings, tech startups and high-growth companies are once again turning their sights toward initial public offerings (IPOs).
This trend is also visible in the field of artificial intelligence startups, which continue to attract attention in venture capital circles.
