A major bitcoin bust, a killer VR headset, and what is it with these food company execs?!

Just catching up around here today . . .

The U.S. Department of Justice announced this morning that it seized about $3.36 billion in stolen bitcoin during a previously unannounced 2021 raid on the residence of James Zhong, a then-22-year-old hacker who stole the bitcoin a decade ago from the illegal Silk Road marketplace. Zhong pleaded guilty Friday to one count of wire fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, notes CNBC. It is the DOJ’s second-largest financial seizure to date, following its seizure of $3.6 billion in allegedly stolen cryptocurrency linked to the 2016 hack of the crypto exchange Bitfinex, which the DOJ announced in February.

After laying off roughly half the company on Friday, Twitter is now reaching out to dozens of employees who lost their jobs and asking them to return, Bloomberg reported earlier today. Some of those were evidently laid off by mistake; others were let go before management realized that their work and experience may be necessary to build the new features Musk envisions, said Bloomberg.

Also, in the WSJ: "Elon Musk is cracking down on people who impersonate others on Twitter, tightening policies and banning celebrities including Kathy Griffin who had posed as him. The move is one of the first by Musk, a self-described free-speech absolutist, to tighten Twitter free-speech policies. He said Sunday that impersonating accounts will be permanently suspended unless they are specified as parody." (After being banned, Griffin signed on to Twitter using her dead mother's account to call Musk an "asshole" and a "hack.")

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Last week at Web Summit, we were asked to interview outgoing Y Combinator President Geoff Ralston about the past, present, and future of the popular accelerator program. We covered a lot of ground during our 20-minute-long chat, including why Ralston — long a partner at YC — decided to leave after assuming the role of president just three years ago (Garry Tan assumes the role in January). We also discussed where YC’s investing capital comes from and whether, given the market slowdown, YC will be changing its terms to reflect that slowdown.

Here is much of that conversation, edited lightly for length and clarity. You can watch the longer conversation here, or just listen in.

Let’s start with the news [that] you are leaving Y Combinator. You were there for three years. It was a little bit of a surprise [that you are stepping away]. Why now?

I actually count my tenure at YC from just after 2006, when I left Yahoo [and] started hanging out with Paul [Graham] and company, so really, almost 16 years. And I’ve been an employee at YC since 2011. So it’s been over a decade. And, you know, I felt inside me an urgency that it was time for a change. And I think you have to do that justice, when you feel that, even though I love YC. I love what I do. I think it’s important work. I think it matters. We’re very mission driven. We think entrepreneurship is important and makes a real positive difference in the world. And I love working with founders. It’s weird. I love it. But it was just time to do something different. So I’m moving on.

YC went from cohorts of 12 or 18 to roughly 400 founders last winter, before downsizing a bit. Tell me about this idea that launching startups is infinitely scalable.

I’ve made what some people consider outlandish claims for how many companies we could possibly fund. It’s never been infinite. It scales a lot. There is extraordinary opportunity for entrepreneurship and for founders to find success across the United States and across the world, in every demographic. In the beginning, we were just scratching the surface.

One of the things that I think YC did that was really special was to democratize the idea of entrepreneurship, to open it up to different folks. Originally, the idea was to open it up to technologists, to hackers. That was really an opening of entrepreneurship to folks who really didn’t quite have the access. And we’ve continued that to this day. For that reason our batches have continued to grow. It’s supply and demand. There’s a demand for entrepreneurship.

Sam Altman, your predecessor as president, once said there are five ways that YC really innovated, including letting anybody in the world apply to the program, whereas with VCs, you had to get a warm introduction.

Yeah, totally, and to be fair, PG, Paul Graham, the founder of YC, started opening up the ideas behind entrepreneurship with his essays, which I’m sure a number of people in the audience have read. They were really a turning point for how people thought about entrepreneurship.

How is YC is structured at this point? You have the Continuity Fund [for later-stage investments]. Where is the money [for these new cohorts] coming from? Is YC a holding company where investors have stakes in a holding company? Or does it raise funds very, very quietly?

We raise funds, and we do it rather quietly. It’s sort of our internal sausage making, and it’s not so relevant to talk about . . .

More here.

Amber Group, a Singapore-based digital-asset trading platform, is reportedly in the process of raising a little over $100 million in fresh funding at a $3 billion valuation, according to Bloomberg. The startup had the same valuation in its most recent $200 million fundraise in February, which included Temasek Holdings and Tiger Global Management. More here.

Hopper, a 15-year-old, Montreal-based travel booking company that now runs one of the largest travel apps in North America, today announced that it has closed a $96 million follow-on investment from Capital One, bringing the company’s total raised to $740 million. TechCrunch has more here.

Yassir, a five-year-old Algiers startup whose super app platform offers on-demand services such as ride-hailing, food and grocery delivery, and payments to North African consumers, raised a $150 million Series B round led by Mary Meeker's BOND, with additional investors including DN Capital, Dorsal Capital, Quiet Capital, Stanford Alumni Ventures, and Y Combinator. The company has raised a total of $193.25 million. TechCrunch has more here.

Biofire, a six-year-old startup based in Broomfield, Co., whose biometric gun technology locks out unauthorized users, raised a $14 million round led by Founders Fund, with additional participation from 10X Capital, Gaingels, and Will Manidis as well as previous investors Draper Associates, Structure Capital, Service Provider Capital, and Gavin de Becker & Associates. The company has raised a total of $31 million.  Biometric Update has more here.

EdgeDB, a San Francisco startup founded this year that is building a next-generation relational database, raised a $15 million Series A round. Nava Ventures and Accel co-led the deal. The company has raised a total of $19 million. TechCrunch has more here.

Ernesta, a months-old, New York-based direct-to-consumer, custom-cut rug company that was founded by Peloton founder John Foley, has raised $25 million in Series A funding led by Addition, with participation from True Ventures. Addition's Lee Fixel first backed Foley at Peloton when he was an investor with Tiger Global; True Ventures was also an early investor in Peloton. Two other former Peloton cofounders are also involved in Ernesta Forbes has more here.

PhotoRoom, a three-year-old Paris startup whose photo editing app for e-commerce vendors and small businesses helps consumers remove the background behind objects they intend to sell, raised a $19 million Series A. Balderton Capital led the round, with previous investor Adjacent also participating. The company has raised a total of $19.1 million. TechCrunch has more here.

Worldr, a three-year-old London startup that enables employees to continue using apps such as WhatsApp to communicate with customers, teams and stakeholders while meeting SEC, GDPR, and FINRA compliance standards, raised an $11 million seed round led by Molten Ventures, with IQ Capital, Playfair Capital, MD One Ventures, Navigate VC, and Pretiosum Ventures also participating. Fintech Finance News has more here.

5Mins, a one-year-old London startup that adds adds gamification, social features, and personalization to corporate training videos, raised a $5.7 million seed round led by AlbionVC, with Chalfen Ventures, Edenred Capital, Portfolio Ventures, and Blue Lion Global also pitching in. The company has raised a total of $6.98 million. TechCrunch has more here.

Atlar, a months-old, Stockholm-based startup that's been developing an application programming interface (API) to facilitate bank-to-bank payments for European businesses, has raised $5 million (€5 million) in seed funding led by Index Ventures. Other backers in the round include La Famiglia VC, Cocoa and various business angels. TechCrunch has more here.

Augmedit, a four-year-old Dutch startup that develops augmented reality software for surgeons, has closed a seed investment round of more than €1 million from a consortium of Dutch and Swiss informal investors and the U.S.-based venture outfit Revere Partners. More here.

Carteav, a two-year-old Israeli startup that develops self-driving, low-speed vehicles along with software and services to manage them, raised a $6.5 million round from investors including company chairman Zohar Zisapel and Mobilion Ventures. More here.

WorkTorch, a 2.5-year-old, Wichita, K.S.-based service industry jobs platform, has raised $2.2 million in seed funding led by the regional firm Tenzing Capital. More here.

Allied Advisers closed 4 transactions in the last 5 months having advised a client in the DevOps space to Marlin Equity ($10B AUM); a client in Stockholm focused on AI on their exit to the biggest game network in the world, Activision Blizzard King; another rapidly growing client focused on last-mile delivery software to Walmart, a Fortune 1 company; and another transaction in sales enablement sector that will be announced shortly. “Navigating M&A in Uncertain Markets” serves as a guide for founders, management and executives when they consider M&A.

Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey  -- who today runs the military tech startup Anduril -- has made a VR headset that can literally kill you.

Elon Musk (yes, him again!) is headed to court next week to defend his $56 billion Tesla pay package. Richard Tornetta, a Tesla shareholder who filed suit in 2019 to rescind Musk’s 2018 pay deal, claims the package — “the largest compensation grant in human history” — is unjustly paid to Musk without demanding he focus entirely on the carmaker. TechCrunch has more here.

Masayoshi Son, the billionaire boss of SoftBan, has long presided over a quarterly earnings ritual of zany slide presentations, including a goose laying multibillion-dollar golden eggs. But according to the WSJ, when the giant technology investor delivers its earnings Friday, Son will speak only briefly before handing the baton to his CFO, according to a SoftBank agenda for the event. The outlet says that Son isn’t planning on taking questions from the media, either.

Meta Platforms is reportedly planning to begin large-scale layoffs this week in what could be the largest round in a recent spate of tech job cuts after the industry’s rapid growth during the pandemic. The layoffs are expected to affect many thousands of employees and an announcement is planned to come as soon as Wednesday, according to the people. Meta reported more than 87,000 employees at the end of September, up 28% from a year ago, reports the WSJ.

NFT marketplace OpenSea joined the ongoing NFT royalty debate this weekend with a blog post announcing its first royalty enforcement tool. The goal of the tool is to make creator fees, also known as royalties, enforceable on-chain, and will apply to new collections listed on the platform starting tomorrow (Tuesday).

Understanding the Binance and FTX fiasco. 

Signal introduces stories.

Democratic fundraising email states James Carville is wearing suicide vest on recipient’s doorstep.

Another high-profile incident involving a protein company executive.

Watching election night coverage or preparing for a colonoscopy?

For sale: former SoftBank operating chief Marcelo Claure's undeveloped Miami Beach property. Cost: $39.9 million.

Also: $1,200 sneakers -- for horses.

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