Instagram eliminates 60 jobs

Welcome to your Friday Daily Crunch. Today is the last “Daily Crunch” that will hit your inbox. TechCrunch is refreshing its newsletter offerings to bring you even more news on startups, venture capital and Big Tech.

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Daily Crunch Top 3

Mark Zuckerberg’s “Year of Efficiency” in 2023 is creeping into 2024. In today’s top story, Aisha writes about 60 jobs cut over at Instagram, which involves the elimination of a layer of management. There is some good news, if you can call it that: Those employees are being given a chance to secure other roles within the company. Learn what the changes mean for Instagram.

Meanwhile, Carly reports that Framework, a U.S. repairable laptop maker, confirmed that hackers accessed customer data after successfully phishing an employee at its accounting service provider. Get the scoop.

And Aria has an update on Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander. It’s still operating on orbit and “defying all odds.” Earlier this week, after what seemed like a successful launch, the lunar lander suffered a fuel leak. Read more.

More top reads

Prometeo raises $13M from PayPal, Samsung: Uruguayan startup Prometeo is building channels to enable open banking across Latin America. While some open banking is focused on national rollouts, Prometeo’s approach is to tackle Latin America’s extensive fragmentation as a single market.

Threads pulls at a Mastodon relationship: Threads’ roadmap for integrations with Twitter/X rival Mastodon and others will happen soon, according to Meta. In particular, replies posted on Mastodon servers will become visible in the Threads application. Later in the year, users will be able to follow Mastodon accounts within Threads and then reply to them and like their posts.

Coast Runner will have its own desktop CNC mill soon: If it’s not evident from Haje Jan Kamps’ stories from CES, Haje likes gadgets. And he went in pursuit of the coolest ones and landed in the area of CNC (computer numerical control) mills. He already reported on Rownd. Now see what he thinks of Coast Runner’s version.

Hertz shows how not to launch a product: Hertz surprised us this week by saying it would sell off some of its electric vehicle fleet. This is after the global pandemic pummeled the travel industry, after all the commercials (featuring Tom Brady!) that touted the EVs and the plan to buy 100,000 Tesla models. Over on TechCrunch+, Tim De Chant discusses how Hertz got here and recalls his own experience of renting an EV. (TC)+

Nasdaq CEO’s comments about IPOs: The IPO drought could disappear sooner rather than later if what Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman says comes true. This week, Friedman told investing publication Barron’s that more than 100 companies were poised to list on Nasdaq after filing confidentially with the SEC. After pushing their eyes back into their head, Anna Heim and Alex Wilhelm write about what this could mean. (TC+)

Consumer tech continues to fill its shopping bag with venture capital: Today, I put on my own TechCrunch+ hat and wrote about how many consumer tech and companies focused on consumer packaged goods (CPG) have gobbled up venture capital in the past year. And why investors are so interested in consumer tech and CPG as an opportunity now. (TC+)

CES 2024: Meanwhile, CES 2024 is sadly coming to an end, but our team isn’t finished unpacking all of what they saw. Keep checking back as we continue to update everything that was revealed.

On the pods

This week on Equity, we discuss Shimmer raising fresh capital to offer 1:1 personalized ADHD coaching and vacation rental startup Overmoon showing impressive growth. We also took a deeper look at how the IPO window is reopening in 2024. We grabbed our friends Kirsten Korosec and Haje Jan Kamps to close out the show and bring us the latest from CES. Listen here.

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