We’re back from Disrupt NY, where we stayed up all night for the Hackathon, conducted numerous on-stage interviews with tech figures and heard from hundreds of startups on the products they’re building. We congratulate the Hackathon winner, Witness, and the Startup Battlefield winner, Liquidity, for taking home the grand prizes. While we were in the Big Apple, the news cycle did not stop turning. Here are our best stories from this past week (5/2-5/8).
1. Ingrid Lunden wrote an obituary for Dave Goldberg, the Survey Monkey CEO with a large presence in the tech industry who recently passed away.
2. Zenefits announced it raised $500 million in a round led by Fidelity and TPG at a $4.5 billion valuation.
3. Fitbit filed an S-1 declaring its plans for a $100 million IPO.
4. Facebook turned Internet.org, its project to provide free internet to new users, into a platform open to all developers in response to net neutrality concerns.
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Netflix, Box, a16z, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Hugging Face, Elad Gil, Vinod Khosla — just some of the 250+ heavy hitters leading 200+ sessions designed to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don’t miss a chance to learn from the top voices in tech. Grab your ticket before doors open to save up to $444.
5. Presidential candidate Carly Fiorina spoke in an on stage interview at Disrupt NY during which she highlighted the unique skills a female candidate could bring to the Oval Office. Cat Zakrzewski points out the moment when her speech took a disappointing turn.
6. We talked to Oculus’ VP of Product Nate Mitchell, who confirmed that the Gear VR headset is on track for consumer launch this year.
7. Ron Miller wrote about the ways in which APIs can drive the rapid creation of software in “APIs Fuel The Software That’s Eating The World.”
8. Mike Butcher wrote about the iPhone 6 case from Nikola Labs that pulls battery power from the air.
9. Guest columnist Jon Evans urges developers to try Rust rather than C/C++, arguing that there is no longer any good reason for today’s software to be as insecure as it is in “Death to C.”
10. The zero-fee stock trading app Robinhood raised $50 million from NEA to go global.
11. Romain Dillet wrote about Case, a startup that created a secure hardware bitcoin wallet and launched on stage at Disrupt NY.
12. Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss spoke on stage at Disrupt NY, updating us on their recent bitcoin projects.
13. We broke down the 10 rules that all successful startups should follow.
