Technology

This is it, the absolute last chance for the professional-grade procrastinators out there. Itdo-or-die time. If you&re an early-stage founder who dreams of launching your business to the world, you have 24 hours left to stop dreaming and take action. Get your keister in gear and apply to Startup Battlefield right now.

Startup Battlefield, the premier startup-pitch competition and the best platform for launching your company to the world, takes place at Disrupt San Francisco 2018 onSeptember 5-7. This year we&re producing our biggest, boldest, most ambitious Disrupt ever, with three times the floor space, more than 10,000 attendees and more than 400 accredited media outlets.

Yeah, thata big deal, and we&ve doubled the Startup Battlefield prize to match this super-sized event: $100,000 (we&re talking equity-free cash, folks). Don&t pass up this opportunity to compete with the very best. Yes, ita competitive vetting process. TechCrunch editors will review all applications and select between 15-30 of the top early-stage startups. Our acceptance rate ranges from three to six percent. But hey, if you&ve got the stuff, it won&t matter. We&ll see it.

It won&t cost you a thing to compete or to participate, and every team gets free pitch coaching from our Startup Battlefield-tested TechCrunch editors. Each team gets six minutes on the Disrupt Main Stage to pitch their company to a panel of judges — consisting of well-known investors, entrepreneurs and technologists — and then answer any questions they may ask. The judges will choose five teams to enter a second and final round of pitching to a fresh team of judges.

That panel of judges determines the overall winner, who will claim the largest Startup Battlefield prize in TechCrunch history — along with the Disrupt Cup, bragging rights and an enormous amount of investor and media interest.

Every moment of Startup Battlefield takes place in front of a live audience numbering in the thousands, and italso live-streamed around the world (and available later on demand) on TechCrunch.com, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Every competing team receives an inordinate amount of exposure.

You&ll get even more exposure exhibiting in Startup Alley — our exhibition hall will showcase more than 1,200 early-stage startups — for all three days of the conference. Itfree for Startup Battlefield competitors, and ita huge networking opportunity.

And, of course, you can take advantage of Disruptthree content-packed days of exciting and inspiring tech programming, world-class speakers, Q-A Sessions, the Virtual Hackathon and world-class founder-to-investor networking made easy with the CrunchMatch platform.

So much potential. So many benefits. So little time left to apply. Disrupt San Francisco 2018takes place onSeptember 5-7 at Moscone Center West. You have just 24 hours left.Apply to Startup Battlefield right here.

Instagram shoppable tags are about to pop up in Stories. The company started testing the feature back in 2016 with a limited set of 20 partners. Since then itbeen a hit, expanding broadly to regular brand posts in the feed. Starting today, hitting a little shopping bag sticker in a Story will lead you to more details on the cute and/or dope thing that caught your eye and how to score it.

Ita simple addition, but given the success of Stories ita potent one for brands that drive sales on the platform.

&With 300M using Instagram Stories everyday, people are increasingly finding new products from brands they love,& Instagram said in a press release.

&In a recent survey, Instagrammers said they often watch stories to stay in the-know with brands they&re interested in, get an insider view of products they like, and find out about new products that are relevant to them.&

As a longtime daily Instagram user, I used to be skeptical that people really engaged with brands like this and not just their friends or dogs they know. Now, after seeing my fiancéeconsiderable #engagement around makeup brands running wildly popular accounts, Stories and all, I get it. Well, I don&t get it, but I get that some people get it and that the often vast and expertly crafted brand Stories are a logical evolution for a platform trying to get more users buying more stuff in the product categories that call to them.

Primary Venture Partners, a seed firm that invests exclusively in New York City startups, has raised a second fund of $100 million.

That focus is unusual — even Lerer Hippeau, a firm thatclosely associated with New York, makes some investments outside the region.

PrimaryBen Sun (pictured above with his co-founder Brad Svrluga) said hebetting, in part, on the New York workforce, particularly &the talent that came into the tech ecosystem post-financial crisis& — a shift that gave the city more talented entrepreneurs, plus a talent pool that they could draw from to build their companies.

After all, Sun noted that employment in New Yorktech sector grew by 57 percent between 2010 and 2016.

He also said that Primary (formerly known as High Peaks Venture Partners) offers more support and services than many seed firms — for example, Cat Hernandez, Primarypartner focused on &human capital,& has been directly involved in hiring nearly 200 employees at the firmportfolio companies. Primary is able to offer that level of support with a team of 13 people, Sun said, by leveraging local connections and expertise.

The investment team has also grown, with the addition of Steve Schlafman as venture partner last month — Sun described him as &a super highly networked guy who has a really good nose for talent.& (When we talked to Schlafman prior to todayannouncement, he managed to dodge a question about the firmfundraising.)

&With a singular focus on this market, we were able to build an operating and portfolio impact model that provides concentrated, on-site support to our portfolio companies in a way that wouldn&t be possible across geographies,& Svrluga said in an emailed statement. &Raising this second fund not only gives us the capital to continue to be a high-conviction seed round leader, but to continue to expand our Portfolio Impact team so that we can be an even better partner to our founders on their journey from Seed to Series A.&

Primaryapproach has resulted in some big successes already, like Jet.com (acquired by Walmart for $3.3 billion) and Coupang (valued at $5 billion). Even beyond the most attention-grabbing deals, Sun pointed to the fact that of the 15 companies in the Primary portfolio that have tried to raise Series A rounds, 13 of them have succeeded.

As part of this announcement, VCs that Primary has worked with in the past also offered their praise, with Spark CapitalKevin Thau describing the firm as a team that &knows the New York Seed market better than anyone,& and Kleiner Perkins Caufield - Byers& Eric Feng saying it&one of the top partners to startups in the city, providing true value guiding their portfolio companies from seed to Series A.&

While the firm raised significantly more this time around (Primaryfirst fund was $60 million), Sun said it will remain focused on seed deals — with the occasional incubated startup, likedog food company Ollie. It will, however, be able to write slightly larger checks, say in the $1.5 million to $2 million range, with additional funding reserved for follow-on rounds.

&What we&re going to do with this $100 million is follow the same strategy,& Sun said.