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Fri-yay! Grab your calendar and mark November 17, 2022, on it, and then snag yourself an airline ticket to Miami, Florida. That’s right, TC Sessions continues, with a Crypto special event. It’s our first dedicated crypto event, so come along, get your NFTs, blockchains, and web3 on. Get yer tickets today and save a couple of hundred bucks! — Christine and Haje

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Exceptional assessments: That’s our play on Better Opinions, an Indian startup that claims to be building “a prediction market,” and just may be Meta’s next acquisition in the region, Manish writes.

• Rolling with the defaults: Microsoft users will want to set their calendars for July 27. That is when the tech giant will block Office macros by default to cut down on malware being introduced via email. This is something Carly reports had been paused by Microsoft earlier this year, but now is back in full swing.

• One company’s cutback is another company’s lesson: Big Tech taking a time-out on hiring may provide some leeway for startups to dive into that expertise talent pool and come back up with some, as Alex puts it, “human capital for their financial capital.”

Startups and VC

“Shark Tank,” America’s favorite television show, masquerading as "this is how investing works," made Mark Cuban a household name. It may come as a surprise, then, that overall, Cuban hasn’t made a profit off his Shark Tank portfolio, Amanda reports.

Ride-hailing services may be getting a quality upgrade: “We needed to employ our drivers so that we could not only select and vet, but importantly, train and performance-manage them to drive a consistent high-quality experience for our passengers,” Alto’s founder told Rebecca.

Oh, and Haje got very excited about interviewing the Sarcos Robotics and Boston Dynamic CEOs about how to take robots from the lab into the real world.