Daily Crunch: Tim Cook weighs in on standardized messaging features: ‘Buy your mom an iPhone’

Every day at 3 p.m., you'll get a rundown of the biggest and most important stories from the site. Don't forget to subscribe here.

Hello, I'm so happy! More than 70 stories have been added to the site since our last daily crunch. We will almost certainly miss a story you would have liked to read. Take a quick scroll to see what catches your eye.

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Tim Cook and green bubbles: Christine is an Android user and her iPhone-using friends talk about “green bubbles,” but until now she did not know this was a problem. Christine’s text bubbles come in all different colors and even tells her who is “speaking” when in a group. However, she’s now learned that her iPhone-using friends secretly hate her green bubbles. Tim Cook is on their side, Ivan writes.
• Ambient Mesh: That’s the name of Google and Solo.io’s new Istio service mesh. We’ll yield to Frederic to explain what all of that means.
• Electric vroom: Jeep has three, three new electric vehicles, ah ah ah!, poised to enter the market beginning in 2023, Jaclyn reports.

Startups and VC

We have buckets and buckets of news for you today. That is a conversation for another day.

Tage reports that YC cuts African startup presence by more than half, and Anna, Alex and Tage are curious about where Y Combinator is going in the future. 7 artificial intelligence companies that stood out among the YC hopefuls were explored by Kyle, as well as 11 favorite companies from the first and second days of the competition.

It wasWhew. We covered a lot of the Apple event yesterday. Christine has the scoop on that in the Big Tech section.

There are a few more for you.

5 metrics Series A investors look for at dev-tools startups

Rak Garg, a principal at Bain Capital, wrote that the median Series A for developer-tooling companies fell to $47.5 million in the third quarter of 2022.

Garg has met with hundreds of companies since the start of the downturn and has written a guide for seed-stage entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs who have raised successful Series A rounds are great at telling their companies' stories.

5 metrics Series A investors look for at dev-tools startups

Techcrunch+ is a membership program that helps startup teams. You can join here.

Big Tech Inc.

It was so much Apple. The second day of the event was dominated by Greg, who summed up everything from the event. The Apple fall event hub is where you can find everything you need to know.

Christine wrote a piece about the new virtual store that looks like it will make you jealous.