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The yeeeaaar is beautiful. We were skiving off work to explore the weird subgenre of holiday music. It's called trap Christmas. The album that Christopher Lee recorded is a heavy metal Christmas album. A holiday song was done by the band. We don't mind disco Christmas or the goats singing "We wish you a Merry Christmas".

What are your favorite out-of- left-field holiday songs? There are answers on an e-post card.

The TechCrunch Top 3

  • Extra, extra, read all about it: British newspaper The Guardian confirmed that it was hit by ransomware following some strange incidents the paper began noticing in its IT infrastructure. Carly has more.
  • Kids, get your parents’ permission: If you are a child of the ’80s, you might recall that we were constantly reminded to “ask your parents for permission to…” Well, Google has now instituted something similar for Google Play, letting children send purchase requests to their guardians, Ivan writes.
  • Some light reading for the new year: Anna and Alex collected them and now share some of the books startup founders and venture capitalists could not put down this year. Happy reading!

Startups and VC

Carl is returning to an operating role after he led a number of lucrative deals for the venture firm. As the new co-CEO of Workday, Eschenbach will co-lead the enterprise cloud applications giant with its co-CEO, and company chair Aneel Bhusri, until 2024, at which time he will take over as sole CEO.

You're aware of what? There are a few more.

How to make the most of your investor relationships in 2023

It is a good time for startup founders to take a closer look at their investor relationships.

For upcoming board meetings, a partner at Sorenson Venture wrote an article with do's and don'ts and gave his thoughts about which communication channels are best for different help requests, as well as specific data points to raise in your discussions.

He says to be ruthless with your investors.

How to make the most of your investor relationships in 2023

There are three more people from the team.

The membership program helps startup teams get ahead of the game. This is where you can sign up. You can get a 15% discount on an annual subscription.

Big Tech Inc.

Meta was sued by the FTC over its proposed acquisition of Within. Mark Zuckerberg was on the stand this week.

Darrell reports that there may be a new round of layoffs atTesla. That isn't the only problem the company is facing. There is a share price issue. Rebecca writes that the loss of China sales was one of the reasons that caused the stock price to plunge to its lowest point in two years.

Four more for you.