The story of how blood testing company Theranos rose to prominence, then collapsed following accusations of fraud, is getting told and retold in many forms: There’s reporter John Carreyrou’s book “Bad Blood,” plus an upcoming feature film adaptation starring Jennifer Lawrence, plus a podcast from Nightline called “The Dropout” — and “The Inventor,” a new HBO […]

Defy, the early stage venture investment firm founded by Neil Sequeira and Trae Vassallo, is putting a new twist on the venture partner model as it brings Brian Lee and Sujal Patel on board to help out with investing and guiding companies in the firm’s portfolio. Just don’t call them venture partners. Vassallo and Sequeira […]

Bragi was a promising early contender in the bluetooth earbud space. The company came to prominence in 2014 with a massively success $3.3 million Kickstarter. And to its credit, it actually brought products like the Dash and Dash Pro to market, offering a compelling “smart” alternative to other devices. Last month, however, the German company […]

A new biography of Apple chief executive Tim Cook out this month describes the moment — and the deliberations — after the FBI issued an unprecedented legal order demanding Apple undermines the security of its flagship product. The new book, Tim Cook: The Genius Who Took Apple to the Next Level by Leander Kahney, offers […]

Since its launch on our stage way back in 2010, Cloudflare has focused on making the internet faster and more modern — but the mobile internet has until recently been beyond its reach. Today the company introduced a new service called Warp described as “the VPN for people who don’t know what VPN stands for.” […]

Radio ads broadcast a message to listeners, but Pandora’s new voice ads will allow listeners to respond by speaking aloud – either to get more information about the product being advertised, or to skip the ad if it’s not of interest. The company confirmed it has an agreement to test interactive voice ads where listeners […]

In the six weeks since we launched Extra Crunch, we’ve seen that readers and subscribers really want the latest practical tips and warnings about building a company — from the people on the cutting edge. So we want to feature subject-matter experts, writing about what they learn from working with startup clients.   You may remember, […]

It’s the morning of March 31st, 2014, and the Google Maps team is about to release its April Fools’ Day gag to the world. It wasn’t the first time this team had goofed around with an April Fools’ day joke. Google, as a whole, goes wild on April 1st. Maybe it’s for the resulting publicity. […]

Soaring college tuition prices have left Americans drowning in debt without a correspondingly enhanced set of professional skills to show for it. In the past 11 years, US student debt has increased by 157% and 1 in 10 borrowers are over 90 days delinquent. Universities are incentivized to be unaffordable and don’t have a direct […]

Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce and Jetpack, is launching a new suite of products focused on the future of work — Happy Tools. Automattic is a remote company with over 850 employees working from 68 countries. And the company has built a bunch of products over the years to communicate, collaborate and work. With […]