When we gather ’round the proverbial fire and exchange our online dating war stories, we’re usually talking about the usual suspects: Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, Grindr, and sometimes more niche apps like Lex. But ever since Facebook Dating launched in 2019, I’m not sure I have ever heard a tale that began there — I know more people who met in Facebook meme groups than on the actual Facebook Dating product.

Turns out my anecdotal data may be wrong — because people actually do use Facebook Dating! Meta shared user metrics for the first time on Monday, revealing that Facebook Dating has 21.5 million daily active users (DAUs) across 52 countries.

Facebook Dating is a feature within Facebook, rather than a standalone app, and Facebook puts its dating product front and center in the main bottom navigation bar on the app. (Even if your relationship status is not set to single, Facebook Dating remains in its prominent spot.)

What’s most surprising, though, is how Facebook Dating seems to be slowly catching on among young people. The platform counts 1.77 million users between the ages of 18-29 in the U.S., which is still not quite up to par with the “usual suspects,” but it’s getting closer. App analytics firm Sensor Tower estimated that as of this summer in the U.S., Tinder had 7.3 million active users across all age groups; Hinge had 4.4 million; Bumble had 3.6 million; and Grindr had 2.2 million.

Facebook has publicly addressed the fact that it struggles to keep Gen Z and young millennials on the platform, yet the company said last year that daily conversations on Facebook Dating in the 18-29 demographic spiked 24%.

Facebook Dating’s best feature is not something it actively does, but rather, it’s what Facebook Dating doesn’t do. Unlike Hinge, you don’t have to pay to “unlock” your most desirable matches or buy other premium features that supposedly bring you closer to finding “the one.”

Hinge debuted its “Standouts” feature in December 2020, which has become symbolic of everything wrong with dating apps. Hinge’s algorithm finds the people whom it thinks you will be most interested in, then places them in their own elite tab of the app. The only way to swipe right on these people is to give them a “rose,” which users get for free once a week — unless you buy more roses for $4 a pop. Even if you buy roses, your maybe-possibly future husband will know you used a precious rose on him, which is kind of embarrassing. So, like a true star-crossed-lovers situation, some users have devised increasingly complex schemes to trick the Hinge algorithm into freeing these people from “rose jail.”

By comparison, Facebook Dating’s free model looks pretty good. It’s not that Mark Zuckerberg is a benevolent Silicon Valley cupid — Meta is already making bank off of you by relentlessly collecting your data, so it doesn’t need you to buy roses. But as users grow more aggrieved with their usual rotation of apps, Facebook Dating may not seem so cringe anymore.

Andreessen Horowitz is pausing its Talent x Opportunity (TxO) fund and program, according to four sources familiar with the matter, including more than one founder in the program. 

The firm announced TxO in 2020 to support founders who do not have access to traditional venture networks. Many of TxO’s participants were women and minorities who, overall, receive very slim amounts of venture capital dollars.

The announcement of the fund came during the wave of support that underrepresented founders received in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd. The fund launched with $2.2 million in initial commitments, TechCrunch previously reported, with a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz and his wife, Felicia, matching up to an additional $5 million.

TxO provided founders with access to tech networks, a 16-week-long training program, and a $175,000 investment through a donor-advised fund managed by the nonprofit Tides Foundation. The program went on to support more than 60 companies (like the media brand Brown Girl Magazine, food tech Myles Comfort Foods, and the maternity tech Villie). 

TxO garnered some criticism when it launched because it’s technically structured as more of a nonprofit, rather than a traditional investment fund. Those investing in the fund are considered donors, and the money given is regarded as charity donations, rather than traditional limited partner investments.

Still, founders who participated in the program and spoke to TechCrunch said it provided them with invaluable support and opportunities to which they otherwise would not have access. Last year, TxO expanded to launch a grant program, providing $50,000 to three tech nonprofits that support underserved founders. 

TxO announced its — as of now — last cohort of the program in early March 2025. Founders who partook in the program received an email on October 16 from Kofi Ampadu, the partner at a16z who led TxO, announcing the program would pause. 

“When we launched TxO, the mission was clear: support talented, determined builders who are creating culture-shaping companies but may not have access to typical Silicon Valley networks and resources,” Ampadu’s email read, as seen by TechCrunch. “While that purpose has not changed, we are pausing our existing program to refine how we deliver on it.”

The rest of the email read:  

Over the past five years, we’ve experimented with different models for best serving founders — from virtual and in-person programming to curriculum design and funding structure. As we rethink what’s next, we’ll be applying everything we’ve learned and evolving how we support founders by integrating with a16z’s broader early-stage investing and company building strategy.  

TxO has backed more than 60 companies and nearly 100 founders. You have collectively raised tens of millions in follow-on capital and reached customers across culture and lifestyle. Founders from earlier cohorts now advise newer ones, and that peer support has strengthened the entire community.  

Thank you for being at the center of this community. Your progress is proof of what is possible. Stay tuned for what comes next. In the meantime, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out directly.

Best regards,

Kofi

A16z confirmed to TechCrunch that the program was shutting down and that Ampadu alerted participants via email.

Members of the TxO staff team, which had at least three people, excluding Ampadu, were also let go, according to two sources, with the end of October being their last week. 

The fund’s application documents did not specifically call for founder diversity, except in terms of “cultural authenticity,” and also emphasized classic startup investment criteria like size of the market and ability to execute.  But the announcement of the fund back in 2020 made clear it was “for entrepreneurs who did not have access to the fast track in life but who have great potential. Their products can be non-tech or tech; they should be from underserved communities (all backgrounds welcome).”

Still, many in the startup world perceived TxO as an accelerator for diverse talent, and several people who spoke to TechCrunch pointed out that its hiatus comes as top names in tech eliminate, cut, reframe, or completely walk back on prior public commitments related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. The Trump administration has threatened legal and political ramifications for businesses supporting anything that could be seen as DEI. 

Others, however, noted that a16z is still interested in accelerator-type startup programs. Earlier this year, it launched Speedrun, a program that promises cohort grads up to $1 million of investment.

How much power is enough for AI? Nobody knows, not even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman or Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

That has put software-first businesses like OpenAI and Microsoft in a bind. Much of the tech world has been focused on compute as a major barrier to AI deployment. And while tech companies have been racing to secure power, those efforts have lagged GPU purchases to the point where Microsoft has apparently ordered too many chips for the amount of power it has contracted.

“The cycles of demand and supply in this particular case you can’t really predict,” Nadella said on the BG2 podcast. “The biggest issue we are now having is not a compute glut, but it’s a power and it’s sort of the ability to get the [data center] builds done fast enough close to power.”

“If you can’t do that, you may actually have a bunch of chips sitting in inventory that I can’t plug in. In fact, that is my problem today. It’s not a supply issue of chips, it’s the fact that I don’t have warm shells to plug into,” Nadella added, referring to the commercial real estate term for buildings ready for tenants.

In some ways, we’re seeing what happens when companies accustomed to dealing with silicon and code, two technologies that scale and deploy quickly compared with massive power plants, need to ramp up their efforts in the energy world.

For more than a decade, electricity demand in the U.S. was flat. But over the last five years, demand from data centers has begun to ramp up, outpacing utilities’ plans for new generating capacity. That has led data center developers to add power in so-called behind-the-meter arrangements, where electricity is fed directly to the data center, skipping the grid.

Altman, who was also on the podcast, thinks that trouble could be brewing: “If a very cheap form of energy comes online soon at mass scale, then a lot of people are going to be extremely burned with existing contracts they’ve signed.”

“If we can continue this unbelievable reduction in cost per unit of intelligence — let’s say it’s been averaging like 40x for a given level per year — you know, that’s like a very scary exponent from an infrastructure buildout standpoint,” he said.

Altman has invested in nuclear energy, including fission startup Oklo and fusion startup Helion, along with Exowatt, a solar startup that concentrates the Sun’s heat and stores it for later use.

None of those are ready for widespread deployment today, though, and fossil-based technologies like natural gas power plants take years to build. Plus, orders placed today for new gas turbine likely won’t get fulfilled until later this decade.

That’s partially why tech companies have been adding solar at a rapid clip, drawn to the technology’s inexpensive cost, emissions-free power, and ability to deploy rapidly.

There might be subconscious factors at play, too. Photovoltaic solar is in many ways a parallel technology to semiconductors, and one that has been derisked and commoditized. Both PV solar and semiconductors are built on silicon substrates, and both roll off production lines as modular components that can be packaged together and tied into parallel arrays that make the completed part more powerful than any individual module.

Because of solar’s modularity and speed of deployment, the pace of construction is much closer to that of a data center.

But both still take time to build, and demand can change much more quickly than either a data center or solar project can be completed. Altman admitted that if AI gets more efficient or if demand doesn’t grow as he expects, some companies might be saddled with idled power plants. 

But from his other comments, he doesn’t seem to think that’s likely. Instead, he appears to be a firm believer in Jevons Paradox, which says that more efficient use of a resource will lead to greater use, increasing overall demand.

“If the price of compute per like unit of intelligence or whatever — however you want to think about it — fell by a factor of a 100 tomorrow, you would see usage go up by much more than 100 and there’d be a lot of things that people would love to do with that compute that just make no economic sense at the current cost,” Altman said.