Techcrunch blog!: How ex-Uber exec Joe Sullivan went from breach finder to breach hider

Friday, December 08, 2023

In today's top story, Carly writes about Joe Sullivan, a former Uber executive who was convicted in 2022 after the government alleged he was part of a cover-up of a breach of Uber's systems in 2016. Speaking at the cybersecurity conference Black Hat Europe, Sullivan describes the ordeal and how he "had to get over" the shock of the conviction in order to move on. Get the scoop.

Meanwhile, Romain reports that Amo wants to arm its users with an easy way to take and share a photo. That's right, even easier than the way we all do it now with our smartphone's camera app. With Amo's second app, called Capture, users take a photo and it is instantly shared with Amo friends. See how it works.

And Manish writes that the venture capital investment downturn has reached India. Top VCs from the region face fresh obstacles, such as spotting fund-returning opportunities. More here.

Image Credits: Courtesy of Joe Sullivan

More top reads

Hashtags without the hashtags: That's what Threads is rolling out globally. Not so fast, though. You can only make one tag per post.

Now you know what VTuber is: The animated VTuber Ironmouse won Content Creator of the Year at the Game Awards. Meet the virtual YouTuber.

And the beat goes on: The U.K.'s competition agency is looking at whether the Microsoft and OpenAI tie-up is a "relevant merger." Can't wait to see how this develops.

We're fine, nothing to see here: Startups are doing fine, but scale-ups and unicorns are in deep water. Read why an early path to IPO was a good strategy for some. (TC+)

Oh, Snap: Snapchat+ keeps growing and growing as net revenue tops $20 million for the first time. Get the scoop.

Take note: Google's AI-assisted NotebookLM note-taking app is now open to users in the U.S. Here's what it does.

X marks the Grok: X's AI chatbot Grok is now "rolled out to all" U.S. Premium+ subscribers, according to Elon Musk. English language users are next.

New job alert: OpenAI taps the former Twitter India head to set up a local team in the country. See what Rishi Jaitly will be up to.

Dirty dog: Mulch memes and the enduring appeal of internet absurdism. Read on.

Even more for your Friday:

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Image Credits: Threads

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On the pods

This week on Equity, Simply Homes raised $22 million for an interesting property play, SoftBank bought a majority share of connected-vehicles company Cubic Telecom, and OurSky raised $9.2 million for its space-viewing software system.

The crew also parsed through troubles in fintech, from ZestMoney to Navan, and discussed how tech earnings are sending mixed signals to startups and VCs. Listen here.