Natasha Mascarenhas

Stop trying to make Polywork happen. It’s already happening. You may even be polyworking as you read this. Polywork is a venture-backed startup that is building a professional network to help people express their multihyphenated work lives. In other words, if you’re a reporter, who also podcasts, wants to...

When Fortune reported that Dorm Room Fund, a student-powered investing group, had spun out from First Round Capital with $12.5 million in capital for its newest fund, it was almost an easy feel-good story. Here was a venture capital vehicle bent on providing experience to the next generation...

Welcome to Startups Weekly, a fresh human-first take on this week’s startup news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. In some ways, Y Combinator’s biannual Demo Day is somewhat predictable: There will be Stanford dropouts, last-minute pivots, and, as always, promises of near-term profitability. We...

Welcome to Startups Weekly, a fresh human-first take on this week’s startup news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. YC had its biggest news in years this week: Garry Tan will be the new president and CEO of the organization, starting January 2023. Tan co-founded...

Nate Tepper first went to Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), an international program dedicated to helping people recover from alcoholism with a 12-step program, in the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic. He didn’t show his face or share his story, but says that being in the presence of vulnerability was...

Welcome to Startups Weekly, a fresh human-first take on this week’s startup news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. It’s been a week of people trying to make sense of what’s happening in tech. If you’ve been compartmentalizing: Cheers! Now let me walk you through...

Welcome to Startups Weekly, a fresh human-first take on this week’s startup news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. Bootstrapped startups, or companies that use their own revenue or existing cash flow to fund growth instead of relying on external capital sources, sit in a...

Welcome to Startups Weekly, a fresh human-first take on this week’s startup news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. We love a counternarrative angle these days, and this week’s choice is a look into why lower valuations may actually be a good thing for startups...

Welcome to Startups Weekly, a fresh human-first take on this week’s startup news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. At this point, it’s clear that no one agrees on anything. Half my sources say that early-stage venture completely is uncorrelated to the public stock market,...

As venture capital grew around the world, tracking the fintech market was a fine way to understand the general health of the VC world; when venture was getting bigger, so too was fintech fundraising. Worth around a fifth of all venture dollars invested last year, fintech startups raised nearly...