Thursday May 19, 2022, and it’s the last day of our in-person Mobility event. Tomorrow we take the journey to the mean streets of the world wide web, and you can still join us virtually! — Haje and Christine

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Tl;dr: We know you don’t have 32 minutes to read Meta global affairs president’s new manifesto, so Natasha skim-read it for you. In short, the future of the metaverse, excuse us, “metaverse spaces,” is uncertain, complicated and needs a truckload of developers to do it. We also still don’t have the 411 on how Meta plans to make money in the metaverse, particularly, as Natasha points out, since the company does a lot of tracking and profiling. That may come in Nick Clegg’s next manifesto. We’re here for it.

• What happens when a vertical farming company cracks the code?: Spoiler alert, it’s delicious! Oishii started out selling strawberries from its New Jersey facility at $50 for eight to 11 berries, and with a new facility up and running, the company is now able to reduce that to $20. Not on par yet with what we get at the grocery store, but if food prices keep rising, they may eventually meet in the middle.

• Turn the beat around: Could tech valuations be lower than they need to be? That’s certainly the argument Alex is making, with one chart showing how Okta’s shares are now selling even below early 2019 — before the pandemic and before all of the revenue multiples went sky-high. He lays out some examples of why the tech sell-off may have gone too far.

Startups and VC

The team at Y Combinator just waded in and told its founders to strap in and prepare for the worst. “If your plan is to raise money in the next 6–12 months, you might be raising at the peak of the downturn. We recommend you change your plan,” Manish reports.

We’ve spent the last couple of days immersing ourselves in the world of mobility at TC Sessions. Here’s the top three takeaways from Nuro’s awesome session, as distilled by Rebecca.

For TechCrunch Plus, Haje did a teardown of BoxedUp’s $2.3 million seed round pitch deck. It has some really elegant storytelling and some fixable quirks; we think you’ll pick up a tip or two from this story for your own fundraising efforts, so come check it out!