For Your Information Blog: 12/11/21

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for November 12, 2021! It is Friday, my friends, the end of yet another week. The TechCrunch team hopes that you are healthy and ready for a rest. If you still have energy in the tank, Equity has an episode that digs into how Tiger is putting capital to work, while the Found team has an interview with Megan O'Connor from Nth Cycle that is worth checking out. Now, the news! — Alex

Image Credits: TechCrunch

The TechCrunch Top 3

The African startup market's growing pains: With record capital flowing into African startups, you might imagine that all things are great in the continent's venture capital scene. Things are good, yes, but not perfect. TechCrunch learned from a few investors that while many deals are getting done, ills like lackluster due diligence that are impacting other markets are also at play in Africa. And African startups may need more late-stage capital, which took us by surprise, given how active big checks have proven elsewhere this year.
MoviePass may live again: Few startups truly earn the moniker Icarus. MoviePass is perhaps one, given how high it flew and how it burned through cash into the grave. But perhaps Lazarus is a better analogy, as the brand could be coming back to market.
Neobanks keep on raising: While the world waits for Nubank's IPO to price and start trading, investors are not pausing on making wagers into the challenger banking fintech segment. Oxygen, for example, a neobank that targets freelancers and SMBs, is in talks to raise at a half-billion valuation, TechCrunch reports.

Ransomware in the healthcare industry is skyrocketing

Whether to sell your company is always going to be a huge decision for founders

To better understand what goes through a founder's mind when considering a sale, Ron Miller hosted a panel at TC Sessions: SaaS with:

Jyoti Bansal, who sold his previous startup AppDynamics to Cisco for $3.7 billion.
Monica Sarbu, who sold her startup Packetbeat to Elastic.
Nick Mehta, who sold his email archiving startup LiveOffice to Symantec.

"It was four days of long board meetings and discussions and debates and fights and getting to the decision. So it wasn't an easy decision,” said Bansal.

“Even though, at $3.7 billion, everyone thought it should probably be a no-brainer; it wasn't.”

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

Whether to sell your company is always going to be a huge decision for founders image

Image Credits: temmuzcan / Getty Images

Big Tech Inc.

How Microsoft moved to the cloud: Based on an interview with Jared Spataro, corporate vice president for Microsoft 365, our own Ron Miller sketches out how the well-known software giant had to lead its customers into the cloud, despite having a simply huge legacy software business.
Instagram updates its TikTok clone: The drumbeat of product news from major social networks working to slow TikTok's roll — scroll? — continued today, with Instagram adding both text-to-speech and voice effects to Reels, its competing service.
Facebook to become a live shopping hub: Elsewhere from Meta, Facebook is "rolling out new shopping features" today, including a group shopping experience and "a test of Live Shopping for Creators." How well live shopping will fare in, say, the United States remains to be seen, but Meta is not the only company working on the product type. Startup Talkshoplive is in the business as well, and Pinterest has also shown interest.

Image Credits: Weflow

TechCrunch Experts

TechCrunch wants to help startups find the right expert for their needs. To do this, we're building a shortlist of the top growth marketers. We've received great recommendations for growth marketers in the startup industry since we launched our survey.

We're excited to read more responses as they come in! Fill out the survey here.