Well, that’s one way to hire a new CEO.

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Welcome to Startups Weekly, with your brilliant and newly minted host, yours truly. If you’ve seen my name on TechCrunch, it’s probably because of my popular series Pitch Deck Teardown, where I take a startup pitch deck and celebrate the good, critique the bad, and use both to learn more about what the world of VC pitching is like. This week I posted the 50th installment in the series (yay!) with a deep dive into the platform Danish company Ageras used to raise a $36 million round of private equity investors. If you feel brave I would also love to take a loving educational hack-and-slash on your presentation deck.. Come on, it’ll be fun. Maybe.

ok that’s it quite Enough navel gazing, let’s move on to what happened in the world of startups.

Startups are mostly bought for their staff all the time. Investors typically don’t love it when that happens, it’s usually not a great outcome for them, but it can be a great way for startup founders to get a soft landing when a company is spinning around. dr… I mean… when an opportunity presents itself.

That, it seems, isn’t exactly what happened with Ring founder Jamie Siminoff. Brian reports that Siminoff was stealthily working at another start-up called Honest Day’s Work. The company was acquired by Latch (best known for its smart locks), who promptly invited Siminoff to take over as CEO. The lesson here seems to be that if his recruiting efforts fail at first, buy out the entire company your desired CEO works for.

Speaking of recruiting: If you have the budget to spend, there are a ton of amazing team members available right now; we have summarized all tech layoffs so far this year.

Generative AI goes mainstream

First time I covered generative AI on TechCrunch in depth in 2021, it was an older version of ChatGPT-3. The novelty of asking an AI to co-write an article with me seemed exciting. How far we have come!

Since then I’ve been experimenting a lot with ChatGPT and I keep coming to the conclusion that it can’t replace me as a writer. quite yet, but we are getting awfully close to that point. I also had a bit of an existential crisis where I co-founded an avocado-oriented octopus cult called Octo-guacamolians and wondered if maybe, deep down, I was an AI myself.

Fast forward to this week, when Kyle reports that no one really knows what an AI writes anymoreand Frederic points out that Google announced PaLM 2, its next-generation large language model. Annoyingly (and perhaps suspiciously), the search giant didn’t share many details about how he trained his model. “What we found in our work is that it’s not really the kind of model size, that bigger isn’t always better,” DeepMind vice president Zoubin Ghahramani said at a press conference, leaving more questions than answers about table.

Meta, in turn, is also heavily investing in AI. Kyle reports that the the company is developing custom chips for AI trainingand Iván added that the company launched AI generative functions… for advertisers.

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

Climate technology continues to have its time in the sun

You know what scares the shit out of me? The fact that VCs are finally starting to get serious about climate change means they think they can make big profits in the 7-10 year time horizon of a venture fund (that’s right). how VC works, after all). To make that make financial sense, they know something many of us have known for a long time: Climate change is about to change everything.

The silver lining is that where there is huge change, something predictable, there are opportunities.

I reported that Pale Blue Dot announced a new $100 million fundand soon announced who backed Amini, an African climate tech startup solving the environmental data shortage with an investment of 2 million dollars, according to Tage.

Perhaps that investment in a company run by a woman of color was prescient, because Tim and Dominic-Midori published a couple of articles on TC+ this week, concluding that without black representation in climate tech, “the planet will burn” and that the VC funding of female climate tech founders is abysmal: the pair investigated how the VC community could improve that.

Image Credits: I study atlas / we come [composite] / Fake Images

Tough Times for Emerging Criminals

In a truly baffling story, Kate reports that Terraform’s Do Kwon pleads “not guilty” to charges of traveling with false documents. The disgraced founder was arrested in March and reportedly held both Belgian and Costa Rican passports. The founder was released on bail, which seems like terrific nonsense for a person arrested for allegedly having a couple of fake passports. He yells “flight risk” at me, but what do I know?

Meanwhile, Amanda reports that time is up for elizabeth holmes, after the court decided that he had had enough of the former Theranos founder’s antics. Holmes will report to jail at the end of the month to begin serving an 11-year sentence and pay nearly $500 million in restitution to victims of his fraud.

Criminals are going to criminalize, but it’s kind of reassuring that the legal system is trying to keep everyone to roughly the same set of rules. (LOL, who are we kidding, but at least there’s startups also working on criminal justice reform.)

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

Speaking of crime and data shenanigans, our security reporting team is taking you out of the game with a bunch of amazing stories. Here are a handful:

My favorite top reads at TechCrunch this week

The best startup tips from TechCrunch+ this week

Our TechCrunch+ subscription service is one of the best resources for startups to get inside information. Yes, yes, I am very biased, but… judge for yourself:

Calling all early stage startups! Apply to join the Startup Battlefield 200 cohort at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023. All finalists get expert training, venture capital networking, a booth at Disrupt, and the chance to compete for $100,000 in non-equity funding. Applications close on May 31. apply today.