Every day at 3 p.m., you'll get a rundown of the biggest and most important stories from TechCrunch. You can subscribe here.

Happy Star Wars Day. These are not the 4th of May. We have an awesome newsletter for you today.

If you're a student, you can get a free ticket to Disrupt with our events team putting together a deal for you. If you are a current student or recent graduate, you will be eligible to participate in the student pitch competition if you book any of the student passes. If you are into clean air and water, you should check out our Climate Tech sessions.

The TechCrunch Top 3

  • Here’s a customizable CRM. No, really, it is: eFounders went live with its Folk customer relationship management platform today. Its strategy of making it easy to customize the product for your needs aims to make you forget the name of that other really big CRM company. Its waitlist is 10,000 deep, but Romain speeds you to the head of the line with an inside look.
  • Did Stripe just launch a Plaid competitor?: While that’s being debated on Twitter for now, the news is that Stripe launched Financial Connections, a product that enables its customers to connect to their customers’ bank accounts. That will, in turn, provide access to financial data to speed up or run certain kinds of transactions, essentially a faster way to get this information. However, to the point where customers have to input their bank account information when prompted, Ingrid notes “it will be interesting to see whether U.S. consumers will be happy with sharing that information in situations where it hasn’t been previously.”
  • Wordle turned out to be a good buy for The New York Times: The newspaper giant reported “tens of millions” of people to the NYT site in the first quarter. Hopefully, they stuck around for some news, but we think it was just for the game.

Startups and VC

Eric Ries has contributed a lot to the startup world, being a pioneer in the Lean Startup movement, but he has a couple of things to answer for. Minimum viable product is a term. Haje raves about howMVPs aren't viable, aren't products, and aren't necessarily all that minimal either. We really like this story, and Haje is a little weirded out by tooting his own vuvuzela, talking about himself in the third person singular and the first person, and he is writing this section. We are wrestling with language and doing our best.

Everyone wants to invest in earlier and earlier stage companies. We are excited to see Afore capital raising a $150 million fund to start nibbling at Y Combinator's lunch, with a brand new standard deal model for pre-seed investments.

Alex dug into the severity of the startup valuation in the first quarter.

Moar Newz.

Psychedelics startups are on a long journey to consumer markets, but these 5 VCs are taking the ride

For years, consumers have used substances like cannabis and microdoses of LSD to elevate their mood and sharpen their mental focus. The mind-expanding market has to offer now that regulators and clinicians are reexamining these drugs.

MDMA, also known as ecstasy, is on the verge of FDA approval, and more than 400 clinics in the US offer it. magic mushrooms have been decriminalized for adult use in Oakland and Denver.

The reporter interviewed five people who are active in the sector to learn more about the applications that attract VCs.

  • Tim Schlidt, co-founder and partner, Palo Santo
  • Ryan Zurrer, founder, Vine Ventures
  • Dina Burkitbayeva, founder, PsyMed Ventures
  • Clara Burtenshaw, partner, Neo Kuma Ventures
  • Sa’ad Shah, managing partner, Noetic Fund

Techcrunch+ helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.

Psychedelics startups are on a long journey to consumer markets, but these 5 VCs are taking the ride

Big Tech Inc.

Today, Amazon said it will export Indian goods worth $20 billion by 2025, up from the $10 billion in goods it previously pledged to export.

Soon you will be able to get an NFT with a tall coffee. Starbucks is entering the world of web3 with a collection of NFTs, and we report that the idea behind it is not only to help Starbucks better connect with younger people, but also to provide.

Control, limit, and monitor transfers of data to and from the EU are some of the controls that will be added to the Workspace by the end of the year. It seems that this is a continued effort by Google to be in better compliance with regulatory privacy laws.

We think you will like these stories.