Natasha Mascarenhas

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. The Great Resignation, the economic trend of people quitting their jobs in pursuit of other opportunities, has been greeted by a harsh reality: the Great Reset. This...

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. When Andreessen Horowitz unveiled its new early-stage startup accelerator, which has been in the works for over a year, my eyes searched for two things: check...

Months after cutting half its staff, edtech startup Flockjay has landed on a new vision for how to disrupt tech sales: start from the inside, out. The startup is building Flockjay Elevate, a platform for sales teams to use within their companies to get better at their jobs. The...

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. I’ve been thinking a lot about silos, or the lack thereof, within startupland. There’s sometimes an artificial wall that is put up between companies at different...

Entrepreneur Amanda Peyton has always been “the friend that’s good with money,” whether as the treasurer of her high school at age 16 or today as the founder of Braid, a company that wants to make shared wallets more mainstream among consumers. “People are terrified by money, so I...

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. I’ve noticed that the long-awaited re-correction of private tech startup valuations and fundraising expectations has a web3-sized asterisk next to it. While many funds are returning to...

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 YC week, and while I love to question how the accelerator’s impact is evolving in today’s climate, there’s always a lot to learn about hundreds...

The TechCrunch team spent today covering the first day of Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 Demo Day, which featured half of the 394 companies that plan to virtually present. Since the overall batch is bigger than ever before – with 414 companies in total – we decided to divide,...

Since inception, Y Combinator has invested in thousands of startups, and more recently, even hundreds within a single batch. Given the accelerator’s growth, competitive tensions feel nearly inevitable. Still, one has to wonder if there is a fundamental shift afoot. Whereas YC always backed companies that might at some...

Yet again, India is the most represented country, outside of the United States, within the latest Y Combinator accelerator batch: the Winter 2022 cohort sports 32 startups hailing from Gurugram, Bengaluru, Delhi, New Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Chennai. For what it’s worth, more than 191 companies in India...