Daily Crunch: After 16 months on the job, Better.com CTO Diane Yu steps down – TechCrunch

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Welcome to the Daily Crunch for Friday, April 8, 2022! Today, Haje has mostly been reading the most recent IPCC report and gobbling anti-anxiety meds by the fistful, while Christine was talking and writing all day.

If it turns out that saving the planet is the wrong thing to do, we can always choose to burn it to cinders at a later date. Until then, can we just agree to try and help out, collectively?

On that cheerful note, may your weekend contain the appropriate amount of the right kind of surprises. Christine and Haje

Tesla is lovely and all, but the company cannot be accused of making EVs financially accessible. Great news for EV lovers, then: Vietnamese EV company Vinfast is leaning on the accelerator into its IPO process, promising a new generation of affordable electric vehicles alongside offerings from GM, Hyundai and Kia. I, for one, cant wait until gas-guzzlers are a thing of the past.

Ive lived on four different continents, and Im infuriated that in 2022, sending money internationally is still an industry full of solutions that make you wonder whos in charge around here. SwooshTransfer raised a multimillion-dollar angel round to solve this problem once and for all, making transactions simple. Nobody tell them about Wise, Xe, Western Union, WorldRemit, HiFX, Remitly, OFX, MoneyGram, Xoom, or any of the other dozens of well-funded companies already out there.

Lets do a quick lap to see what else you may have missed:

If your early-stage startup doesnt have enough cash on hand to last until the fall of 2023, you might have a problem.

As a general rule, seed-stage and Series A-stage companies should plan to have at least 12 to 18 months of runway, says angel investor Marjorie Radlo-Zandi.

In a follow-up to her last column about calculating TAM, she shares her burn rate calculator and five tips for managing cash on hand.

Projections are useful, she says, but you cant account for unexpected problems or opportunities.

(TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Put a tally in the Microsoft column. Six years into a broader investigation of Russian state-sponsored hacking group APT28, Microsoft announced this week that it successfully seized domains the group, operated by Russian military intelligence, used to target institutions in Ukraine.

Spotify gives us some TikTok vibes today. The streaming service is on a roll with yet another new discovery feature that it is testing. We report that this time it is a personalized feed on the apps home screen, which introduces users to new music through a feed of canvas loops (aka those GIFs that appear when youre listening to certain songs Olivia Rodrigos Brutal is accompanied by loop of a cake being smashed, for example). This follows last weeks test of an audio news feed for podcasts.

Twitter, Twitter, Twitter! We know Jan would be rolling her eyes at Marcia right now for discussing the social media giant yet again this week, but there is just too much going on to not mention it. Twitter offered up new additions to its alt text feature (images with alt text will contain an ALT badge in the corner of the image) and you can now untag yourself from tweets (well have to learn not to take that one personally).

Here are some other stories to put on your reading list for today:

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Daily Crunch: After 16 months on the job, Better.com CTO Diane Yu steps down - TechCrunch