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Substack targets Twitter with launch of discussions feature, Substack Chat | Sarah Perez | 2,022 | 11 | 3 | Another company hoping to capitalize on Twitter’s upheaval in the wake of Elon Musk’s takeover is the newsletter platform Substack. The company has over the past few days and has now thrown its hat into the ring as a more direct competitor with the . The new feature allows Substack writers to communicate directly with their most avid and loyal readers right in the Substack mobile app. With Chat, Substack is not only taking on Twitter, where many back-and-forth threaded discussions between writers and readers already take place, but also other online communities where writers have been building out networks of their own, like Discord, Slack and Telegram. The company says the new Chat feature will eliminate the need for its writers to “frankenstein together different software tools and cross-reference subscriber lists,” it explains in its announcement. Substack Chat is not a Twitter clone by any means — though there is overlap with how writers have used Twitter in the past. For starters, the Chat feature will be opt-in, meaning not every newsletter may have chats enabled at this time. on their Settings page or by simply starting a new thread in the Substack app. Already, Substack says writers, including sports journalist , pop culture writer , and comics writers , have launched chats on the service. In some cases, these chats have been used to discuss live events — like Game 3 of the World Series — or they’ve been used in place of email or other ways writers may have chosen to interact with their readers in the past. Readers can react to posts using emojis and add their own comments in the chat threads. The feature could benefit those who spend a lot of time reading on Substack or those who want to more closely network with fellow creators or readers. However, it isn’t really a direct replacement for tweeting more publicly as it lacks Twitter’s reach. Plus, the user interface is designed more like a traditional chat app — not a timeline you scroll. Still, the launch could relocate some of the discussions that would have normally taken place on Twitter to a more private networking space. Combined with the ongoing exodus to and later perhaps, , Twitter may lose access to some of the conversations that it would have otherwise hosted. Substack Chat’s launch isn’t the only way Substack has attempted to capitalize on the Twitter chaos in recent days. It also took a more direct shot at Twitter, when it on October 31 that “Twitter is changing, and it’s tough to predict what might be next.” The post had encouraged creators of all sorts to port their Twitter follower base to Substack, given the current uncertainty around Twitter’s future. The launch of Chat arrives at a time when there’s been a broader shift to more personal and private social networks, which we’ve seen with the rise of as well as the launch of . Substack Chat also reflects Substack’s larger goal of becoming a more private social network itself. The company alludes to its plan, writing in its post that “these are just the early days for Chat and all of Substack’s social features,” and adding there’s “more to come” in the future. Given the company’s propensity to host writers and the otherwise , however, this direction could see it wading even deeper surrounding what constitutes free speech — an area Musk’s Twitter is also to with. The more Substack associates its brand with the more extreme personal brands of divisive media personalities, the less it will be able to attract the larger (and typically more moderate) readers that constitute the of any network’s user base. That could limit Substack’s ability to go mainstream, no matter how clever its social features may be. Substack Chat is only available in the Substack iOS app at launch but will come to Android soon, the company says. [Update: the Android version went live after publication, but isn’t yet allowing users to sign up.]. |
Less than 24 hours until early-bird prices vanish for TC Sessions: Space | Lauren Simonds | 2,022 | 11 | 3 | “Space … the final frontier.” Those familiar words have likely fueled the imaginations of the very people currently forging the future of humanity in space. Don’t miss your opportunity to meet, learn from and connect with them at , which blasts off on December 6 in Los Angeles. Building space startups is serious business, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have a little pun fun along the way. Here’s another opportunity you don’t want to miss, and the countdown clock is ticking on this one. Our special early-bird price — $149 — remains in play for less than T-minus 24 hours. before the early bird leaves orbit on , and you’ll save more than $300. In a classic “but wait, there’s more” moment, you can take advantage of early-bird pricing on an , too. It’s the perfect way to place your space-related startup in front of the industry’s leading movers, shakers and decision-makers — and save $200. Quantities are limited and the same November 4 deadline applies. Space may be the final frontier, but advances in manned space travel and colonization, communications, earth observation data, manufacturing — and even war — are expanding its boundaries further by the day. TC Sessions: Space will help you keep your fingers on the pulse of those advances and help you drive your business forward. What can you expect? In a word, plenty. Plenty of top experts — spanning public, private and defense sectors — speaking from the main stage. Interviews with founders and CEOs like Rocket Labs’ Peter Beck, The Aerospace Corporation’s Steve Isakowitz and Slingshot Aerospace’s Melanie Stricklan. Conversations with investors like Playground Global’s Jory Bell and Root Ventures’ Emily Henriksson. And, of course, plenty of startup exhibits. You won’t find a better atmosphere for networking with hundreds of engineers, founders, students, investors, executives, military and government officials in the house. Use our event app to find people you want to connect with, schedule 1:1 meetings and explore potential opportunities for collaboration, partnerships, investment and more. takes place on December 6 in Los Angeles, but your chance to disappears into the Neutral Zone on . We can’t wait to see you in LA!
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TikTok privacy update in Europe confirms China staff access to data as GDPR probe continues | Natasha Lomas | 2,022 | 11 | 3 | An incoming privacy policy change by TikTok yesterday for users in Europe — which, for the first time, names China as one of where user data can be remotely accessed by “certain” company employees to perform what it claims are “important” functions — has landed months ahead of expected movement on a year+ long investigation into the platform’s data exports to China under the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The GDPR probe into the legality of the video sharing platform’s data transfers to China is being led by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC), TikTok’s lead privacy regulator in the region, which opened the inquiry . The DPC told TechCrunch today that it expects its TikTok data transfers inquiry to progress to the next stage in the coming months — with a draft decision slated to be sent to other EU DPAs for review in the first quarter of next year. This ‘Article 60’ review process could lead either to an affirming of Ireland’s draft decision — which would then, in relatively short order, allow for a final decision to be issued (potentially before the middle of next year, judging by past inquiry timelines). However if other EU regulators raise objections to Ireland’s draft decision the inquiry would have to move to an ‘Article 65’ dispute resolution process — which could add many more months to the process before a final decision could be issued as the bloc’s regulators seek consensus. It’s not clear whether TikTok’s announcement of the privacy policy tweak relates to this overarching GDPR investigation. The incoming changes — which are due to apply from December 2 — do also include an update on how the platform collects users location information so they are not wholly focused on data transfers. But the disclosure of China staffers accessing European user data could also be a not-very-subtle attempt to preempt regulatory enforcement over its data transfers — and try to soften a future blow by being able to point to steps already taken to improve its transparency with European users. (Not that that is the only potential issue of regulatory concern vis-a-vis data exports, though.) A spokesman for TikTok declined to comment on whether its updated privacy policy is in any way linked to the GDPR inquiry — saying it could not do so as the inquiry remains ongoing. However in a announcing the update, the company claimed the changes “include greater transparency into how we share user information outside of Europe”. That’s notable because transparency is a key principle of the GDPR — while infringements of the transparency principle can lead to stiff penalties (such as the , after an Ireland-led inquiry found a string of transparency breaches). Claiming you’re being transparent and transparent are not necessarily the same thing, of course. So it’s worth noting that TikTok’s updated privacy policy appears to atomize key bits of information — such as the full list of countries where employees may remotely access European users’ data and for what specific reasons — across a number of collapsable menus and hyperlinks spread throughout the policy, thereby requiring a user to click around, follow multiple links and basically hunt for relevant intel amid a larger morass of data in order to piece together a comprehensive view of what’s happening with their data (rather than clearly articulating and collating everything into a single, easy to digest view). So, if it’s transparency TikTok is really shooting for here it still looks like it has work to do. Also still a work in progress for TikTok: — which, earlier this year, it announced had been delayed again (until 2023). Thing is, if TikTok intends to continue to allow employees located in countries with no EU adequacy agreement affirming they have essentially equivalent data protection standards as the bloc to have remote access to European users’ information then questions over the legality of its international data transfers are likely to persist. As well as China, TikTok’s privacy policy names Brazil, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and the U.S. (which has only a for a fresh data transfer agreement at the moment) as countries where employees have remote access to European user data without the cover of an adequacy agreement — saying it’s relying on standard contractual clauses (SCCs) for these transfers. But, as the points out, each transfer to a third country must be individually assessed and some may not be possible legally, even with supplementary measures applied. So every single one of these transfers will need to stand up to regulatory scrutiny. Given so many third country transfers, TikTok’s European data localization project can only — at least for now — be considered a PR exercise. And/or an attempt to curry favor with local regulators in the hopes they take a kinder view of ongoing data exports. Unless or until it ceases data exports to third countries and finds a way to fully firewall its parent entity in China from being able to access any European users’ data in the clear. TikTok’s spokesman declined to comment on any future plans it may have to further adapt its data transfers in light of these challenges but he pointed back to its — which describes its approach to data governance in Europe as being “centred on limiting the number of employees with access to European user data, minimising data flows outside of the region, and storing European user data locally.” TikTok’s wider problem is that it’s facing dialed up regulatory scrutiny across the Western world more generally as a result of security concerns attached to the Chinese state’s ability to gain access to data commercial platforms/services hold on their users — with national security laws in its home country overriding the usual standard contractual protections. Its platform also collects an awful lot of user data — which only fuels concerns about its capacity to be repurposed as a data honeypot for state surveillance or even for ‘soft power’ foreign influence ops. While its tracking and profiling of users invites further specific regulatory headaches in Europe — on the and — which are applying some limits on how it can operate. For example, TikTok a controversial change to the legal basis it relies upon to run targeting advertising after a formal warning from the Italian DPA — and some follow-up “engagement” from the DPC — over a plan to remove consent (and claim a legitimate interest to run targeted ads). So its profiling and ad targeting model is facing challenges on a number of fronts, even as it tries to defend its business against wider, geopolitical-related security concerns. |
Now anyone can build apps that use DALL-E 2 to generate images | Kyle Wiggers | 2,022 | 11 | 3 | At long last, , OpenAI’s image-generating AI system, is available as an API, meaning developers can build the system into their apps, websites and services. In a blog post today, OpenAI announced that any developer can start tapping the power of DALL-E 2 — which more than three million people are now using to produce over four million images a day — once they create an OpenAI API account as part of the public beta. Pricing for the DALL-E 2 API varies by resolution. For 1024×1024 images, the cost is $0.02 per image; 512×512 images are $0.018 per image; and 256×256 images are $0.016 per image. Volume discounts are available to companies working with OpenAI’s enterprise team. As with the DALL-E 2 beta, the API will allow users to generate new images from text prompts (e.g. “a fluffy bunny hopping through a field of flowers”) or edit existing images. Microsoft, a close OpenAI partner, is leveraging it in Bing and Microsoft Edge with its tool, which lets users create images if web results don’t return what they’re looking for. Fashion design app CALA is using the DALL-E 2 API for a tool that allows customers to refine design ideas from text descriptions or images, while photo startup Mixtiles is bringing it to an artwork-creating flow for its users. Not much in terms of policy is changing with the API launch, which is likely to disappoint those who fear that generative AI systems like DALL-E 2 are being released without sufficient consideration for the ethical and legal issues that they pose. As before, users are bound by OpenAI’s terms of service, which prohibits using DALL-E 2 to generate overtly violent, sexual or hateful content. OpenAI is also continuing to block users from uploading pictures of people without their consent or images that they don’t have the rights to, employing a mix of automated and human monitoring systems to enforce this. One slight tweak is that images generated with the API won’t be required to contain a watermark. OpenAI introduced watermarking during the DALL-E 2 beta as a way to indicate which images originated from the system, but has chosen to make it optional with the launch of the API. “We encourage developers to disclose that images are AI-generated, but do not require that they include the DALL-E 2 signature,” Luke Miller, the product manager at OpenAI overseeing DALL-E 2’s development, told TechCrunch via email. Microsoft’s Designer tool, powered by the DALL-E 2 API. Microsoft OpenAI also employs prompt- and image-level filters with DALL-E 2, albeit filters that some customers have complained are and . And the company has focused a portion of its research efforts on diversifying the types of images that DALL-E 2 generates, aiming to combat the biases to which text-to-image AI systems are known to fall victim (e.g. generating mostly images of white men when prompted with text like “examples of CEOs”). But these steps haven’t allayed every critic. In August, Getty Images the upload and sale of illustrations generated using DALL-E 2 and other such tools, following similar decisions by sites including Newgrounds, PurplePort and FurAffinity. Getty Images CEO Craig Peters told The Verge that the ban was prompted by concerns about “unaddressed right issues,” as the training data sets for systems like DALL-E 2 contain scraped from the web. Attempting to find a middle ground, Getty Images rival Shutterstock recently that it would begin using DALL-E 2 to generate content but simultaneously launch a “contributor fund” to reimburse creators when the company sells work to train text-to-image AI systems. It’s also banning AI art uploaded by third parties to minimize the potential that copyrighted work makes its way onto the platform. Technologists Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon are spearheading an effort called to allow people to disallow their work or likeness to be used for AI training purposes. But it’s voluntary. OpenAI hasn’t said whether it’ll participate — or indeed, whether it’ll ever introduce a self-service tool to allow rightsholders to exclude their work from training or content generation. Mixtiles is among the early adopters of the DALL-E 2 API. Mixtiles In an interview, Miller revealed little in the way of specifics regarding new mitigatory measures, save that OpenAI has been improving its techniques to prevent the system from generating biased, toxic and otherwise offensive content customers might find objectionable. He described the open API beta as an “iterative” process, one that’ll involve work with “users and artists” over the next few months as OpenAI scales the infrastructure powering DALL-E 2. Certainly, if the DALL-E 2 beta is any indication, the API program will . Early on, OpenAI disabled the ability to edit people’s faces with DALL-E 2, but later the capability after making improvements to its safety system. “We’ve done a lot of work on that side of things — both through the images that you upload and the prompts that you send as far as aligning that with our content policy and baking in different mitigations to filter at the prompt level and at the image level to make sure that aligns with our content policy. So, for example, if somebody were to upload an image that contains hate symbols or gore — like very, very, very violent content — that would be rejected,” Miller said. “We’re always thinking about how we can improve the system.” But while OpenAI appears eager to avoid the controversy that surrounds Stable Diffusion, the open source equivalent of DALL-E 2 that’s been used to create , and , it’s leaving it up to API users to choose exactly how and where to deploy its technology. Some, like Microsoft, will no doubt take a measured approach, rolling out DALL-E 2-powered products slowly to gather feedback. Others will dive headfirst, embracing both the technology and the that come along with it. If there’s one thing for certain, it’s that there’s pent-up demand for generative AI — consequences be damned. Even before the API was officially available, developers were publishing workarounds to integrate DALL-E 2 into apps, services, websites and even . With the public beta launch, fueled by OpenAI’s formidable marketing muscle, synthetic images are poised to truly enter the mainstream. |
Tips for e-commerce brands that want to win market share this holiday season | Guru Hariharan | 2,022 | 11 | 3 | holiday season means indulging in gifts, family traditions and festive celebrations. But for retail businesses, it’s the most critical time of the year. We’re seeing a gathering storm of economic conditions — inflation, inventory and supply chain issues, and an elongated holiday season — that has companies scrambling to determine the right e-commerce strategy for the holiday season. Retail e-commerce channels such as Amazon, Walmart and Instacart, where a majority of all e-commerce happens, will be the real holiday battlefront. The key to succeed this year will be flexibility, responsiveness and endurance: Companies will have to be ready to respond to the market and the consumer throughout the season. Following two years when e-commerce enjoyed pandemic tailwinds, consumers are now living with inflation and an unofficial recession, and we can expect more selective and price-conscious shopping behavior. While prices across major retail e-commerce marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart and Target have mostly kept pace with inflation, consumers are feeling the squeeze on their everyday essential purchases. According to data based on thousands of products across 450+ online retailers, grocery and home and kitchen prices have risen about 20% on average over last year, far outpacing inflation. The average shopper has to focus more of their budget on essentials, leaving them less to spend on gifts and other discretionary purchases. However, unemployment has remained low so far, and consumer spending has been resilient, which we can see in the continued strength of online shopping. For instance, in Q2 2022, e-commerce growth has already rebounded to 9% at Target, 12% at Walmart and 10% at Amazon in North America. On top of this shift in value, the holiday shopping season is kicking off earlier this year, spurred by the second Amazon Prime Day in October. Other retailers will follow suit in an attempt to capture the spending of price-conscious consumers as they plan ahead for the holidays. What does this mean for brands? The focus must be on endurance and companies will need to be ready to shift their strategy for discounting, inventory planning and ad and marketing spend as the environment changes, all while fending off potential consumer fatigue. Discounting has taken a back seat over the past couple of years, largely thanks to consumers’ lockdown savings and stimulus checks, but that is set to change this year. Promotions and discounts have been on the rise throughout 2022, and Amazon Prime Day was a great indicator of what could come in the holiday season. According to CommerceIQ data, during Prime Day 2022, discount levels for items on sale rose 10% to 12% compared to Prime Day 2021. The trend will likely continue at other major retailers as we head into the holidays. While companies and retailers will look to increase promotions and discounts throughout the season, the majority of promotions will still occur during specific sales like Black Friday and Cyber Monday rather than broadly across the season as consumers hold out for the best deals. There is an opportunity to further eventize promotional events like Cyber Week to capture greater volume, but getting discount levels wrong could lead to big hits to profitability. Companies that go into the season with excess inventory could face a perfect storm that eats into the bottom line. Prices continue to rise leading into 2022 holidays, but discounts have yet to pick up. CommerceIQ Here are some principles companies should keep in mind when planning e-commerce promotional strategies for the holiday season: |
Starlink adds a 1TB monthly soft cap for residential users | Darrell Etherington | 2,022 | 11 | 4 | SpaceX’s Starlink internet has included unlimited bandwidth since launch, and while the service will technically continue to provide that to customers, users who exceed 1TB of data use in a single month will now be throttled once they reach that threshold. Starlink sent out an email to users across the U.S. and Canada on Friday outlining the new so-called “Fair Use” policy, which describes how residential users will start out each month with “Priority Access,” and then continue to receive coverage with “Basic Access” for the remainder of the monthly billing period if they cross that 1TB threshold. Basic Access means that they’ll get “deprioritized” in terms of use, meaning they’ll get slower speeds than Priority Access customers when there’s heavy use on the network. Starlink also notes that data used between off-peak times, specifically between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m., won’t be counted toward that 1TB monthly Priority bucket. The company is also introducing data use monitoring via user account pages so people can track how close they are to the soft cap. Third-party network analytics firm . Ookla cites user growth and the primary reason behind the overall decline. Starlink is clearly looking to improve the situation by limiting high-volume users, which it says represents less than 10% of its current subscriber base. |
Daily Crunch: Twitter layoffs violated federal worker protections, class action lawsuit alleges | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 11 | 4 | Friday, and all eyes are on the vast number of Twitter employees who were given the boot, unceremoniously, with many of ’em finding out they’d lost their job because they were unable to log in to their email accounts as they showed up for work in the morning. Yikes. — and If you’re running a company that’s shipping hundreds of thousands of boxes of frozen meat around, you probably don’t want to run every detail of your supply chain yourself. That’s what outsourcing is for — so ? It turns out it was a combination of removing risk and making the most of financial incentives, reports. Commercial electric vehicle company because its stock price is trading too low, reports. The company issued a press release saying it received a notification that it was not in compliance with the Nasdaq’s requirement to trade ordinary shares above $1.00 per share for 30 consecutive business days preceding the date of notification. And in other cheerful news… Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch Are you ready to launch a bajillion-dollar startup? Before you start: Are you planning to build a centaur, a unicorn, or perhaps a decacorn? Startup pitching has become an existential drama, in part because so many founders exaggerate the size of the total addressable market (TAM) in which they hope to compete. “The way it’s calculated and the way the founder is thinking about it tells us not necessarily about the business or its future, but about how the founder thinks about company creation,” said Deena Shakir, a partner at Lux Capital. Three more from the TC+ team: Sorry, we have to have another Twitter day, but we promise to include some other really cool articles, too. First, wonders if porn is a way for the social media giant to and make more money. Meanwhile, reached out to a lot of Twitter’s advertisers to see what their plans are in light of the Elon Musk takeover. Spoiler, . And we have five more for you: |
Lyft lays off 13% of workforce as it tries to slash operating expenses | Kirsten Korosec | 2,022 | 11 | 3 | Lyft said Thursday it is laying off 13% of its workforce as it tries to reduce operating expenses, according to a . The ride-hailing company described the cuts as proactive step to ensure it “is set up to accelerate execution and deliver strong business results in Q4 of 2022 and in 2023.” Lyft also reiterated Thursday it is sticking with its previously stated guidance on third quarter 2022 revenues, contribution margin and adjusted EBITDA. It has targeted $1 billion in adjusted EBITDA with more than $700 million in free cash flow for 2024. Lyft said terminating these 683 employees will cost between $27 million to $32 million in severance and benefits. The company said it expects to record a stock-based compensation charge and payroll tax expense related to restructuring in the fourth quarter and the first quarter of 2023. The notice comes a few months after Lyft established a hiring freeze, and dropped its in-house car rental service. The , which went into effect in August, affects all departments in the U.S. and is expected to last into next year as the ride-hail giant continues to face economic unpredictability. Lyft is slow hiring in May in order to bring down costs and drive profitability as its stock continues to take a hit. Lyft’s share price has sunk more than 73% since the start of the year at the time of this writing. Lyft is scheduled to report its third quarter 2022 financial results November 7. |
Benitago Group exec confirms it didn’t close, but did lay off some employees | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 11 | 4 | ’s website no longer working this week set off an alarm bell for some folks, those who regularly follow the comings-and-goings of active fulfillment-by-Amazon aggregators. They believed it might spell the end for the e-commerce aggregator, which raised $380 million in equity and debt financing last year. Co-founder Benedict Dohmen confirmed to TechCrunch via a LinkedIn message that “Benitago (or any related entity) is not shutting down its operations. We have not sold or disposed of any assets.” Though the company did make a few acquisitions this year, it shifted gears toward brand incubation and operations, or essentially developing their own brands. And unfortunately, this decision led the company to cut staff. One former colleague, who wished to remain anonymous, told me they were with the company for only about three months before his department was let go. Dohmen confirmed the layoffs. “We unfortunately had to reduce the size of our teams by 14%, primarily in the M&A and talent acquisition departments,” he said. “We underestimated the probability and impact of an e-commerce market downtrend. As the world has changed and market pressure for probability rose, we shifted focus towards incubation and operations.” The company was started by Benedict Dohmen and Santiago Nestares (Benitago, get it?) back when they were at Dartmouth College seven years ago. We when it raised $55 million in both equity and debt to go about funding acquisitions of brands built to sell on Amazon’s marketplace. Benitago leaning into brand development was more of a return to its roots than anything, Dohmen said. The company began as an incubator and operator. It wasn’t until later in 2021, around the time the company raised a whopping , that it developed “an acquisitive M&A arm,” he added. E-commerce aggregators buy up brands from marketplaces, like Amazon and Shopify. As we’ve reported, , these kinds of businesses have seen their sector go from very hot two years ago to cool. , even grabbing the now random venture capital deal, while others found the . Dohmen, too, noted that the shift in strategy to focus on brand incubation and operations was “due to the increasing cost of debt.” The new focus seems to be paying off for the company now. The incubation effort accounts for 20% of Benitago’s business and is growing 88% quarter over quarter, Dohmen said. Consolidated revenue in the third quarter was up 308% from last year, and this quarter “was Benitago’s most profitable and cash-flowing quarter yet,” he added. The company has since developed five international brands, operates over 10 brands and has more than 300 new products in the pipeline. Dohmen doesn’t believe Benitago is done with M&A, but does admit that future acquisitions will be “more targeted,” and instead of casting a wide net on Amazon, it “will only seek brands that fit with our current brands’ strategic direction.” “We regret being overly optimistic and not foreseeing the e-commerce downtrend and the rising cost of capital,” Dohmen said. “We take full responsibility and are sad about the reduction in team. But we’re excited about the brands and products we have in the pipeline, and we’re excited to come out of this recession much stronger.” |
YouTube will soon roll out a ‘Go Live Together’ co-streaming feature to select creators | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 11 | 4 | YouTube is gearing up to roll out a new feature that will allow select creators to invite a guest to go live with them, the company announced on its and in a . At launch, creators will only be able to co-stream via a phone, as the feature won’t be available on the desktop version of YouTube. The new feature will initially only be available to a select group of creators, but YouTube plans to expand co-streaming to more creators in the future. Creators can schedule a livestream with a guest from their computer and then go live from a mobile phone. Or, they can go live immediately from their mobile phone. Although you can rotate guests on your livestream, you can only have one guest appear at a time. Once you invite a guest, your stream feed will show above your guest’s. In the next few weeks, some creators will be able to select the new “Go Live Together” button on their accounts. Creators need to start by entering their stream details, including the title, description, monetization settings, thumbnails and visibility settings. After selecting the “Invite a co-streamer” option, creators will be able to choose a guest to invite to their livestream. After the guest clicks the invite, they will be sent to a waiting room. When both people are ready, the host can tap the “Go Live” button. YouTube’s guest streams can run advertisements, but revenue will solely go to the host. It’s worth noting that the stream won’t appear on the guest’s channel, but YouTube says it’s aware that visibility on guest channels is important, which indicates that the company could potentially ship the feature in the future. The launch of the new feature comes as TikTok and Twitch recently launched their own co-streaming features. A few weeks ago, called “Multi-Guest” that lets hosts go live with up to five other people using a grid or panel layout. Last week, called Guest, which lets streamers easily pull other creators and fans into their streams for talk show-like experience. Guest Star makes it possible for anyone to pull up to five speakers into a stream at once. Unlike with YouTube’s co-streaming feature, TikTok and Twitch both allow you go live with more than one person. Given that YouTube’s co-streaming is still in the early stages, it’s possible that it may expand the limit to allow creators to go live with multiple people. |
Elon Musk just axed key Twitter teams like human rights, accessibility, AI ethics and curation | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,022 | 11 | 4 | Elon Musk is wasting no time making at Twitter, calving off many teams doing essential work at the company in the process. News of layoffs swept the platform on Friday, showing that Twitter’s billionaire owner is painting in broad strokes when it comes to trimming down the team by half. The same day that Musk complained about supposed activists impacting Twitter’s ad revenue, he cut some departments outright — actions that are sure to make advertisers all the more skittish about Musk’s ability to steer a ship with a skeleton crew. As he’s only owned the company for a single week, it’s impossible to imagine that such sweeping layoffs won’t lead to dysfunction at Twitter, from the content moderation policies sure to prove crucial for Tuesday’s U.S. midterm elections to product teams keeping the platform humming. Former Twitter employees affected by the layoffs describe a chaotic situation with little official communication beyond abruptly receiving a termination letter or seeing their access to internal tools like Slack or databases suddenly revoked. In the information vacuum created by Musk’s disorganized and sudden approach to the layoffs, some employees aren’t sure if their colleagues are still employed or if their teams continue to exist at all. The cuts appear to be as broad as they were deep, affecting everything from Twitter’s trust and safety teams that handle content moderation to its marketing department. Here are some of the teams either eliminated outright or hit hard by the layoffs, and what the new incarnation of Twitter will be losing in the process. Former Twitter Human Rights Counsel Shannon Raj Singh shared news that the company’s human rights team was eliminated Friday. The team worked to protect users facing human rights violations around the globe, including activists, journalists and people affected by conflicts like the war in Ukraine. Yesterday was my last day at Twitter: the entire Human Rights team has been cut from the company. I am enormously proud of the work we did to implement the UN Guiding Principles on Business & Human Rights, to protect those at-risk in global conflicts & crises including Ethiopia, — Shannon Raj Singh (@ShannonRSingh) Twitter’s now former head of accessibility confirmed that the company cut the accessibility experience team, which improved the product for people with disabilities. The team appears to have had a lot still in the works before it was disbanded. So, the Accessibility Experience Team at Twitter is no longer. We had so much more to do, but we worked hard! There aren't very many people that have had the opportunity to make such an important global platform like Twitter accessible, but we understood the mission. — Gerard K. Cohen (@gerardkcohen) November Launched: – Image description reminder In progress: – ALT badge copy/paste for mobile – Improved image description education Next: – Setting to disable keyboard shortcuts on Web Exploring: – Closed captions toggle – Anniversary images missing alt text — Twitter Accessibility (@TwitterA11y) It’s not yet clear what parts of Twitter’s communications team have been cut outright, but the cuts are deep enough that many prominent comms employees at the company, including many contacts that TechCrunch has spoken with over the years, were affected. Musk signaled his distaste for internal communications immediately after taking over the company, conveying little information to Twitter employees about the changes, so it’s no surprise that the internal communications team is affected as well, including the head of internal comms. Twitter is so special. After 4 yrs, I’m leaving with the fullest 💙, experiences I never imagined, and unbreakable bonds with so many Tweeps. My head is held high, knowing I gave it my absolute all. : We have so much to be proud of. Time to fly even higher! — Julie Steele (@juliezsteele) Many don’t know all the details that went into internal comms this year, but I do. I also know that the people at Twitter embody . No one goes harder than . Ultimately, I get to leave with the best people alongside me. Cheers — Colette Zakarian (@colzakarian) Musk dissolved a team known internally as META, which was well-respected for its exploratory work in ethical AI and algorithmic transparency. Rumman Chowdhury, the team’s director, was , along with the team’s engineers and other members. 🫡 Yep, the team is gone. The team that was researching and pushing for algorithmic transparency and algorithmic choice. The team that was studying algorithmic amplification. The team that was inventing and building ethical AI tooling and methodologies. All that is gone. — Joan Deitchman (@JoanDeitchman) Some of the layoffs make sense, given the things Musk apparently has little regard for (human rights and accessibility, alarming!), but Twitter’s new owner apparently also made cuts to teams that seemed poised to help him extract more value from the company. The curated the moments tab, programmed the trending topics section, provided context on those topics and also handled live events — many of the things Twitter does best. The team also worked to fight misinformation on the platform — a serious and consequential concerns that Musk has in less than seven days on the job. So Twitter’s Curation team is no more. This site 👇 was recently launched to tell the world about our work. Give it a look for two reasons: 1) to see how it will impact your experience 2) if you want to hire the people behind it, get in touch via DM — Andrew Haigh (@AndrewHaigh) Looks like Elon Musk fired the entire curation team. These were the folks who tackled misinfo, contextualized conversations via the 'Explore' page, and helped make Twitter an unmatched source for breaking news. This will make Twitter noisier, more dangerous & less interesting — Richie Assaly (@rdassaly) Politico that half of the company’s public policy team was let go, including Michele Austin, the former director of public policy and elections in Canada and the U.S. who was actively working on the U.S. midterms. Those cuts reportedly also included Twitter team members who work to verify the accounts of political figures. I helped lead the 2022 US midterms on platform. Same with in Canada. I was responsible for social impact work in both countries. Twitter gave me amazing opportunities. — Michele Austin (@_MicheleAustin) |
How to land investors who fund game-changing companies | Tim De Chant | 2,022 | 11 | 4 | worth solving aren’t ones that you can solve in a year or two or even 10. For founders and investors alike, such long timelines can seem daunting. But for Gene Berdichevsky, co-founder and CEO of battery tech startup Sila, hard tech problems are also some of the most tantalizing. “It’s always a good time to be a hard tech startup,” Berdichevsky said at TechCrunch Disrupt. “One of the reasons is that the world doesn’t change just because it should. It changes because someone goes after something insanely hard and actually succeeds at it.” Such hard.tech startups run the gamut from advanced batteries like those made by Sila to nuclear fusion, quantum computing, automation and robotics. Any tech that has the potential for such broad impact also has a massive potential market, and that means a certain class of investors are willing to be in it for the long haul. “We look for real step-change, game-changing technologies that are going to benefit everyone and we think that will drive a huge [total addressable market],” said Milo Werner, a general partner at The Engine. When Berdichevsky founded Sila, he believed his company’s technology, a silicon-based anode that promises to improve lithium-ion battery energy density by 20%–40%, would be a significant enough advance that it would have no problem finding a market. What he didn’t expect was how long it would take. When Sila’s first product debuted inside the Whoop 4.0 wearable last year, the path to market had been twice as long as Berdichevsky had expected. |
Stability AI backs effort to bring machine learning to biomed | Kyle Wiggers | 2,022 | 11 | 4 | , the venture-backed startup behind the text-to-image AI system Stable Diffusion, is funding a wide-ranging effort to apply AI to the frontiers of biotech. Called , the endeavor’s first projects will focus on machine learning-based approaches to DNA sequencing, protein folding and computational biochemistry. The company’s founders describe OpenBioML as an “open research laboratory” — and aims to explore the intersection of AI and biology in a setting where students, professionals and researchers can participate and collaborate, according to Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque. “OpenBioML is one of the independent research communities that Stability supports,” Mostaque told TechCrunch in an email interview. “ Given the surrounding Stable Diffusion — Stability AI’s AI system that generates art from text descriptions, similar to OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 — one might be understandably wary of Stability AI’s first venture into healthcare. The startup has taken a laissez-faire approach to governance, allowing developers to use the system however they wish, including for and . Stability AI’s ethically questionable decisions to date aside, machine learning in medicine is a minefield. While the tech has been successfully applied to diagnose conditions like skin and eye diseases, among others, research has shown that algorithms can develop biases leading to worse care for some patients. An April 2021 , for example, found that statistical models used to predict suicide risk in mental health patients performed well for white and Asian patients but poorly for Black patients. Each project is led by independent researchers, but Stability AI is providing support in the form of access to its AWS-hosted cluster of over 5,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs to train the AI systems. According to Niccolò Zanichelli, a computer science undergraduate at the University of Parma and one of the lead researchers at “A lot of computational biology research already leads to open-source releases. However, much of it happens at the level of a single lab and is therefore usually constrained by insufficient computational resources,” Zanichelli told TechCrunch via email. “We want to change this by encouraging large-scale collaborations and, thanks to the support of Stability AI, back those collaborations with resources that only the largest industrial laboratories have access to.” Of DNA-Diffusion — led by pathology professor Luca Pinello’s lab at the Massachusetts General Hospital & Harvard Medical School — is perhaps the most ambitious. The goal is to use generative AI systems to learn and apply the rules of “regulatory” sequences of DNA, or segments of nucleic acid molecules that influence the expression of specific genes within an organism. Many diseases and disorders are the result of misregulated genes, but science has yet to discover a reliable process for identifying — much less changing — these regulatory sequences. DNA-Diffusion proposes using a type of AI system known as a diffusion model to generate cell-type-specific regulatory DNA sequences. Diffusion models — which underpin image generators like Stable Diffusion and OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 — create new data (e.g. DNA sequences) by learning how to destroy and recover many existing samples of data. As they’re fed the samples, the models get better at recovering all the data they had previously destroyed to generate new works. “Diffusion has seen widespread success in multimodal generative models, and it is now starting to be applied to computational biology, for example for the generation of novel protein structures,” Zanichelli said. “With DNA-Diffusion, we’re now exploring its application to genomic sequences.” If all goes according to plan, the DNA-Diffusion project will produce a diffusion model that can generate regulatory DNA sequences from text instructions like “A sequence that will activate a gene to its maximum expression level in cell type X” and “A sequence that activates a gene in liver and heart, but not in brain.” Such a model could also help interpret the components of regulatory sequences, Zanichelli says — improving the scientific community’s understanding of the role of regulatory sequences in different diseases. It’s worth noting that this is largely theoretical. While preliminary research on applying diffusion to protein folding seems , it’s very early days, Zanichelli admits — hence the push to involve the wider AI community. As my colleague Devin Coldewey in his piece about DeepMind’s work on AlphaFold 2, AI systems that accurately predict protein shape are relatively new on the scene but transformative in terms of their potential. Proteins comprise sequences of amino acids that fold into shapes to accomplish different tasks within living organisms. The process of determining what shape an acids sequence will create was once an arduous, error-prone undertaking. AI systems like AlphaFold 2 changed that; thanks to them, over 98% of protein structures in the human body are known to science today, as well as hundreds of thousands of other structures in organisms like E. coli and yeast. Few groups have the engineering expertise and resources necessary to develop this kind of AI, though. DeepMind spent days training AlphaFold 2 on (TPUs), Google’s costly AI accelerator hardware. And acid sequence training data sets are often proprietary or released under non-commercial licenses. Proteins folding into their three-dimensional structure. Christoph Burgstedt/Science Photo Library / Getty Images “This is a pity, because if you look at what the community has been able to build on top of the AlphaFold 2 checkpoint released by DeepMind, it’s simply incredible,” Zanichelli said, referring to the trained AlphaFold 2 model that DeepMind released last year. “ Building on the work of and OpenFold, two ongoing community efforts to replicate AlphaFold 2, “LibreFold is at its heart a project for the community, by the community. The same holds for the release of both model checkpoints and data sets, as it could take just one or two months for us to start releasing the first deliverables or it could take significantly longer,” he said. “That said, my intuition is that the former is more likely.” On a longer time horizon is BioLM project, which has the vaguer mission of “applying language modeling techniques derived from NLP to biochemical sequences.” In collaboration with EleutherAI, a research group that’s released several open source text-generating models, BioLM hopes to train and publish new “biochemical language models” for a range of tasks, including generating protein sequences. Nvidia earlier this year released a language model, , that was trained on a dataset of millions of molecules to search for potential drug targets and forecast chemical reactions. Meta also recently an NLP called ESM-2 on sequences of proteins, an approach the company claims allowed it to predict sequences for more than 600 million proteins in just two weeks. Protein structures predicted by Meta’s system. Meta While OpenBioML’s interests are broad (and expanding), Mostaque says that they’re unified by a desire to “maximize the positive potential of machine learning and AI in biology,” following in the tradition of open research in science and medicine. “We are looking to enable researchers to gain more control over their experimental pipeline for active learning or model validation purposes,” Mostaque continued. “We’re also looking to push the state of the art with increasingly general biotech models, in contrast to the specialized architectures and learning objectives that currently characterize most of computational biology.” But — as might be expected from a VC-backed startup that recently over $100 million — Stability AI doesn’t see OpenBioML as a purely philanthropic effort. Mostaque says that the company is open to exploring commercializing tech from OpenBioML “when it’s advanced enough and safe enough and when the time is right.” |
Ledger, Tezos and Chainalysis talk web3 security at TC Sessions: Crypto | Jacquelyn Melinek | 2,022 | 11 | 4 | The crypto ecosystem may be experiencing , but they’re still occurring as bad actors take hundreds of millions of dollars from users in the space. According to Immunefi’s Crypto Losses Q3 2022 , crypto losses have declined for the past three quarters in a row, but it’s not clear whether that trend will continue for the rest of the year. And as more people become crypto-curious or continue to build in this space, they might be susceptible to fraud or hacks. So how can people protect themselves? And how can startups, projects and protocols protect their users? Answers to those questions and more are up for discussion during a panel with guests Pascal Gauthier, CEO of Ledger; Kathleen Breitman, CEO and co-founder of Tezos; and Pratima Arora, chief product officer at Chainalysis at on November 17 in Miami. During the conversation called “Securing Web3,” we’ll dive into how these executives navigate safety and security in the Wild, Wild West — aka crypto. Whether it’s through holding your own crypto wallet keys to making codes open source, we’ll find out what the panelists think are the best ways to keep users safe. Too often, security is not at the forefront of crypto startup founders’ minds and might only be addressed in dire moments (like when they’re hacked for millions of dollars). So how can the industry encourage founders and developers to prioritize safety from an early stage? We’re curious to learn more about how the current crypto market affects web3 security and what sectors need more work when it comes to protecting users. We’re also interested in hearing their thoughts on which blockchains, decentralized applications and projects are role models for security — and which ones they think need improvement. Ledger has more than 4 million customers and is primarily known for its hardware wallets that let people secure, trade and hold their digital assets (NFTs included) on an external physical ledger. In June, Ledger partnered with VC firm Cathay Innovation to launch a dedicated to a broad range of segments across the crypto landscape, including DeFi, security and infrastructure. Gauthier joined Ledger almost eight years ago and became president in 2019. Prior to that, Gauthier was a venture partner at Mosaic Ventures and focused on Series A companies. He also founded and is a non-executive chairman of Kaiko, a Bitcoin-focused data provider. Tezos, a proof-of-stake blockchain, focuses on smart contracts and is seen as a potential competitor to the Ethereum blockchain. It had the after raising $232 million in 2017. Husband-and-wife team Arthur and Kathleen Breitman created the blockchain, which initially launched under the pseudonym “L.M. Goodman,” in 2014. Lastly, Chainalysis is a blockchain data platform that provides data, software, services and research to any entity, ranging from government agencies to financial institutions. Its investors include Accel, Addition, Benchmark, Coatue, GIC, Paradigm and Ribbit. Arora joined the Chainalysis team in June 2021 to lead its research and development. Prior to that, she was the general manager and vice president of Confluence — a revenue-generating product for Atlassian — and she also spent more than nine years at Salesforce in a variety of roles. takes place on November 17 in Miami. today, save $150, and then join the web3, DeFi and NFT communities to keep up with the ever-evolving and always exciting crypto world.
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Buying your own identity on Elon’s Twitter and other news | Darrell Etherington | 2,022 | 11 | 4 | This week and I went live on LinkedIn and Twitter Spaces to talk about Elon Musk’s questionable plans for blue checks on Twitter. Then, I talk with about a new startup, Rewind, that wants to help humans have perfect memory. And as always, we break down the biggest stories in tech. Articles from the episode: Other news from the week: |
TechCrunch+ roundup: TAM tough love, ‘building in public,’ 6 key SaaS metrics | Walter Thompson | 2,022 | 11 | 4 | Are you ready to launch a bajillion-dollar startup? Before you start: Are you planning to build a centaur, a unicorn or perhaps a decacorn? Startup pitching has become an existential drama, in part because so many founders exaggerate the size of the total addressable market (TAM) in which they hope to compete. At TechCrunch Disrupt, I spoke to three investors about . Everyone agreed that the number itself is far less important than the process that produced it. “The way it’s calculated and the way the founder is thinking about it tells us not necessarily about the business or its future, but about how the founder thinks about company creation,” said Deena Shakir, a partner at Lux Capital. “It is almost guaranteed you’re going to be wrong,” said Aydin Senkut, the founder and managing partner of Felicis Ventures. “It’s either going to be too large or too small.” Kara Nortman, a managing partner at Upfront Ventures, said the TAM numbers given in a pitch do not control whether she’s likely to invest. “I would say [it is] more important to be able to articulate how big something can become and to show that you have a thought process around TAM, if it’s early,” she said. Choosing a mythical TAM won’t put dollar signs in investors’ eyes, as unrealistic numbers reflect unrealistic expectations, a red flag for any VC. As Senkut said, “the plan doesn’t have to be accurate — the plan has to be directionally correct.” Thanks very much for reading TC+ this week! Walter Thompson
Editorial Manager, TechCrunch+
/ Getty Images How are finance-oriented property tech investors reacting to the ongoing downturn in public markets? Senior reporter Mary Ann Azevedo interviewed three VCs to learn more about how they’re counseling the companies in their portfolios, which types of startups are best positioned to weather the downturn and how they’re managing risk: Kelly Sullivan / Getty Images At TechCrunch Disrupt, Josh Fabian, CEO of video game coaching platform Metafy, explained why he’s committed to “building in public,” or sharing aspects of his founder’s journey with an audience. “Consumers don’t trust corporations; I don’t trust corporations,” he said. “I don’t think any of you do, even if you’re running your own.” Katelin Holloway, a founding partner at 776 (an investor in Metafy), said Fabian’s approach was a breath of fresh air. “We were able to just engage and talk like humans, and Josh told us his story in a very different way,” she said. “Not only was it incredibly compelling from a business perspective, it was incredibly compelling from a human perspective,” she said. / Getty Images Before Ashish Kakran became a principal at Thomvest Ventures, he was a data engineer who transformed disparate consumer data points into optimized offers for consumer telecoms. “Part of my job involved unpacking encrypted data feeds, removing rows or columns that had missing data and mapping the fields to our internal data models,” he writes in a TC+ guest post. “Our statistics team then used the clean, updated data to model the best offer for each household.” Because today’s datasets contain exponentially more information, “the rules are being rewritten on how data will be used for competitive advantage, and it won’t be long before the winners emerge,” he asserts. In a deep dive, he compares modern and legacy data stacks to identify key trends for enterprises and opportunities for founders and investors. “Practitioners are spoilt for choices when building enterprise data pipelines,” says Kakran. Kelly Sullivan / Getty Images Fewer investors are writing checks these days, but what kind of advice have they been giving their portfolio companies in recent months? Mary Ann Azevedo spoke to three executives at TechCrunch Disrupt to learn more about the strategies they’re promoting to preserve runway and their peace of mind. “It behooves everybody to be really lucid about the macro environment that we’re entering,” said Blader. “It’s likely to be long-lived, and it’s very important to be judicious but not lose sight of your goals and the reason you founded the business in the first place.” / Getty Images The most successful companies I’ve worked at fostered parasocial relationships with customers in much the same way many of us invest emotional energy while following the lives of celebrities. During a downturn, “the goal is to pick up on warning signs early and course-correct as you go, and those signs are often hidden in the breadcrumbs,” writes Sudheesh Nair, CEO of ThoughtSpot. “Not all industries are affected equally, so don’t assume your customers will cut spending this year just because the headlines are bleak.” / Getty Images Santa Claus makes a list and checks it twice before each holiday season. Can your e-commerce startup make the same claim? “Consumers are now living with inflation and an unofficial recession, and we can expect more selective and price-conscious shopping behavior,” writes Guru Hariharan, CEO and founder of CommerceIQ. Now that people “are feeling the squeeze on their everyday essential purchases” and the holiday shopping season is starting earlier, “companies will need to be ready to shift their strategy for discounting, inventory planning and ad marketing spend as the environment changes.” Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch |
Combined HBO Max/Discovery+ service gets an earlier launch date, price hike is to be expected | Lauren Forristal | 2,022 | 11 | 4 | After Warner Bros. Discovery reported its yesterday, the company told investors and analysts in a call that the forthcoming combined HBO Max/Discovery+ streaming service will now launch in the U.S. earlier than . CEO David Zaslav said the yet-to-be-named service is now getting a spring 2023 launch instead of in the summer. Following its debut in the United States, the service will roll out in Latin America and then in Europe in 2024. While the company has yet to announce how much the service will cost or what it’ll be called, it will get an ad-free and ad-lite plan. Also, HBO Max’s ad-free plan might get a price hike next year, the company noted during yesterday’s call. “By 2023, HBO Max will not have raised prices since its launch. So, it will have been three years since pricing has moved. Which we think is an opportunity, particularly in this environment,” JB Perrette, president and CEO of Global Streaming and Games, said. The $14.99/month price of HBO Max’s ad-free plan has not budged since its . As more streaming services increase its prices for subscribers, HBO Max will likely join in on the trend. And while many subscribers won’t be happy with a price hike, it also makes sense for the streamer. Once HBO Max merges with Discovery+, the higher cost seems justifiable because subscribers will get double the amount of content. Another reason for the potential price hike is that not enough subscribers are choosing HBO Max’s $9.99/month ad-supported tier, which . “We were frankly a little surprised in the HBO Max ad-lite offering that more people have not moved to that offering… We believe there’s actually some pricing advantage for us on the ad-free service, and we can probably move north of where the prices are today,” Perrette added. Separately, Zaslav mentioned that the company is still “aggressively attacking the AVOD market with our own FAST offering in 2023.” WBD that it was exploring a free ad-supported streaming TV service (FAST). “As a company with the largest film and TV library in the industry, we have a unique opportunity to increase our addressable market and drive real value, and we plan to move quickly,” he said yesterday. WBD’s future FAST offering will join other media company-owned FAST services like NBCUniversal’s Peacock, Paramount’s Pluto TV, Fox’s Tubi and Comcast’s Xumo. The company reported a net add of 2.8 million global subscribers across HBO, HBO Max and Discovery+ in the third quarter, bringing the total to 94.9 million. Only 500,000 domestic subs were added. |
It’s no surprise HBO canceled ‘Westworld’ after four seasons | Lauren Forristal | 2,022 | 11 | 4 | In a series of , HBO has managed to disappoint many viewers as of late. Now, “Westworld” fans will be among them. The network announced today that it is canceling the sci-fi drama after four seasons. The show just aired its season four finale in August. HBO, in a prepared statement, said, “Over the past four seasons, Lisa and Jonah have taken viewers on a mind-bending odyssey, raising the bar at every step. We are tremendously grateful to them, along with their immensely talented cast, producers and crew, and all of our partners at Kilter Films, Bad Robot and Warner Bros. Television. It’s been a thrill to join them on this journey.” “Westworld,” created by Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, had the potential to be the network’s next “Game of Thrones.” . The series earned nine Emmys and starred Evan Rachel Wood, Ed Harris, Jeffrey Wright, Tessa Thompson, Thandiwe Newton, Luke Hemsworth and Aaron Paul. But, sadly, “Westworld” will never get the fifth season hoped for. It’s likely the network made the decision after watching viewership ratings for “Westworld” continue to drop and drop. For instance, the third season finale only drew in 1.8 million viewers across multiple platforms, a 18% decline from the season 2 finale, according to . Westworld's absolutely abysmal cratering in the ratings wasn't completely surprising but it's still pretty shocking how steep it is — Sage Hyden → "Just Write" on Youtube (@sagehyden) Fans and critics alike anticipated the failure. One Twitter user “I won’t pretend like I didn’t see this coming.” Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav has been on a cost-cutting spree for months, shelving the highly anticipated DC movie “Batgirl” and canceling multiple shows that were deemed unsuccessful. “We are being deliberate about measuring how are the shows doing,” Zaslav said in yesterday’s earnings call. “Let me be very clear, we did not get rid of any show that is helping us … It’s a business of failure, but we’d rather take that money and spend it again and have a chance of having a show that will engage and delight.” Zaslav also noted that the company would focus on popular franchises, including “Superman,” “Harry Potter” and “Game of Thrones.” He’s been particularly vocal about improving the DC slate. The company even brought on Marvel filmmaker James Gunn and producer Peter Safran as the new co-chairmen and chief executive officers of DC Studios. After Warner Bros. Discovery yesterday, the company is probably feeling the pressure to deliver better content as it gets ready to launch its next year. |
VCs decipher the recent fintech layoffs — and why they’re happening now | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 11 | 4 | in the fintech world cut jobs in the past month. And yet still made a splash, proving that unicorns and decacorns are not immune to the challenging economic and fundraising conditions. The Stripe news closely follows Chime would be laid off and that it was cutting 11% of its workforce. So what the heck is going on here? Well, according to , a fintech venture capitalist and founder of Margaris Ventures, the current layoffs by some of these larger fintech companies were “caused by the challenging geopolitical market environment and inflationary pressures. It affects the whole fintech startup industry — and globally all industries — since the prominent players have a strategic ripple effect on the smaller players.” , a partner at Restive Ventures who recently invested in AiPrise, concurred, noting via email that much of what we are seeing today “were the dynamics we saw play out last year,” including all of the “large funding rounds, sunny market projections and a belief that companies needed more people to fuel their growth.” What resulted was “a lack of discipline around company fundamentals,” she added. While the frenzy was dissipating, it was then that companies “realized they were not only ahead of their skis but that they needed to cut back in order to focus more on profitability,” she said. |
Hear NASA’s science and tech ambitions from Carolyn Mercer at TC Sessions: Space | Devin Coldewey | 2,022 | 11 | 4 | returns on December 6, and among our distinguished guests is , chief technologist for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, who will share the agency’s tech and science ambitions and priorities in the Artemis era. Mercer is a NASA veteran and started as a research engineer at Glenn before ascending through the ranks to her current role. As the “focal point” for new tech and capabilities in all the forms of science and research that the agency uses and funds, she has a powerful bird’s-eye (or orbital) view of its operations. Of course with a new focus on lunar exploration and habitation, as well as increased reliance on commercial partners, NASA is in the middle of a complex evolution. How do government projects and commercial enterprises safely and securely share knowledge? What is the role of an expert agency in the growing private space economy? And how does it all serve humankind’s knowledge of the cosmos? With experience in scientific, engineering, and leadership roles, Mercer can speak to the power of NASA-led technological advancement in both space exploration and everyday life. Join us December 6 to hear where the agency is placing its bets and investing its considerable resources. You won’t find a better atmosphere for networking with hundreds of engineers, founders, students, investors, executives, and military and government officials in the house. Use our event app to find people you want to connect with, schedule 1:1 meetings, and explore potential opportunities for collaboration, partnerships, investment and more. takes place on December 6 in Los Angeles, but your chance to disappears end of day today . We can’t wait to see you in LA!
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Emerge Career’s pre-release job training lands $3.2M seed and new state contracts | Devin Coldewey | 2,022 | 11 | 4 | Education options during and after incarceration have never been particularly extensive, despite the best intentions of educators. is working on changing that, and its early success in putting formerly incarcerated folks to work is attracting investment from both VCs and government programs. It was only August when Emerge first appeared as it came out of Y Combinator’s latest batch, and I . The team previously worked on , which upended years of bad and exploitative video calling services in prisons, but also made the problem of education clear to them. Security and limited budgets at vocational and community colleges limit the amount of help they can actually offer people in the system, and courses from GEDs to trades often take a very “study by mail” approach during incarceration, or traditional brick and mortar one on release. Emerge changes that with modern video lectures and regular video call office hours with educators who specialize in the subject matter. At first the subject was strictly getting a commercial driver’s license, and that has helped numerous former inmates find jobs soon after release in a sector hurting for labor. Now Emerge is also planning to offer nursing assistant and welding courses — two other areas where a shortage of workers means employers may not think twice about hiring someone recently out of prison. “Besides the clear labor shortage and high compensations, these are two professions that the justice-involved people we met in prisons and reentry centers across the country showed a lot of interest in,” said Emerge’s Gabe Saruhashi. “Trucking has been an exciting starting point, but we know many people cannot be away from home for prolonged periods of time, be it for personal reasons or reentry obligations. Ultimately, we want to offer training programs for individuals from all walks of life.” Co-founder Uzoma Orchingwa said the feedback from their first students has been very positive, highlighting the self-paced training (since it can be accessed piece by piece whenever is convenient), its speed (the aim is to go from zero to job in about two months) and the hands-on support they get from Emerge’s career coaches. Emerge reports that graduates from its program, who once averaged $13 an hour if they had a stable job, are pulling in an average of $78,000 now. It’s hoped the new programs will broaden the appeal and let the company support more students and locations. The company’s pitch pulled in local officials, a good step if you’re hoping to get into state-funded institutions, and now Emerge has landed a two-year, $845,000 contract (using American Rescue Plan funds) with the Connecticut Department of Labor. They also have several letters of intent, perhaps waiting on outcomes from the other programs. This early success has also brought in investment: a $3.2 million seed round led by Alexis Ohanian’s 776, with participation from the SoftBank Opportunity Fund, Y Combinator, Lenny Rachitsky and Michael Seibel. The money will be used to hire engineers and start up the new welding and nursing programs, as well as expand to three more states. Saruhashi said their ambition is to make Emerge Career the first choice for anyone in the country who has a disadvantaged background to get a second chance in the modern workforce. |
Why Robinhood and Coinbase gained ground after reporting earnings | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 11 | 4 | for expecting public fintech companies that facilitate consumer trading to be under pressure this week. And yet, after reporting earnings, the share prices of two pandemic-era highfliers gained ground. Coinbase and Robinhood up? In this economy? Yes. Of the out-of-fashion tech sectors, consumer trading has to be among the out of favor. And yet. TechCrunch wanted to better understand investor response to results from both Coinbase (crypto-focused) and Robinhood (equities-focused) to figure out what drove each company’s shares higher in the wake of their reports. The answers, it turns out, are partially related. In an ironic twist, some of the forces that have made consumer trading less attractive are the very same impulses helping the two companies derive more revenue from a previously less-critical part of their business. The Federal Reserve taketh away, and the Fed also giveth some back. |
What investors really think about the TAM slide in your pitch deck | Walter Thompson | 2,022 | 11 | 4 | of pitch meetings as a trial by fire: If an entrepreneur can negotiate deadly traps and slay the doubt monsters that bedevil tech investors, they’ll be rewarded with a golden SAFE note at the end of their quest. Particularly for first-timers, the pitch has become an existential drama, which can lead to poor decisions like overlong slide decks, failing to prepare investors before a meeting, and fatally, exaggerating the size of the total addressable market (TAM) in which they hope to compete. “With TAM, it is almost guaranteed you’re going to be wrong,” Aydin Senkut, the founder and managing partner of Felicis Ventures, said at TechCrunch Disrupt. “It’s either going to be too large or too small.” Kara Nortman, a managing partner at Upfront Ventures, said the TAM numbers given in a pitch do not control whether she’s likely to invest. “I would say [it is] more important to be able to articulate how big something can become and to show that you have a thought process around TAM, if it’s early.” According to Deena Shakir, a partner at Lux Capital, TAM, along with the associated metrics serviceable addressable market (SAM) and serviceable obtainable market (SOM), aren’t meant to be carved in stone. They’re simple planning tools that help founders show investors their company’s upside potential, while SOM and SAM help them offset risk. Some photos from last week's Disrupt panel where , of , & of talked to all about TAM and how it's one part of a company's story. — Felicis (@felicis) “If we’re taking the meeting, we all sensibly think there’s something there that’s interesting enough to be potentially venture-bankable,” she said. “The way it’s calculated and the way the founder is thinking about it tells us not necessarily about the business or its future, but about how the founder thinks about company creation. And that’s much more important at the earliest stage.” All three panelists said TAM, SAM and SOM numbers offer a window into a founder’s mindset, but they’re not determinative factors, since they already have a general understanding of the sectors in which founders hope to compete. |
Should Twitter embrace porn and compete with OnlyFans? | Amanda Silberling | 2,022 | 11 | 4 | So let’s say hypothetically, you’re an extremely online billionaire who just for $44 billion, a purchase you presumably regret given the fact that you spent months in trying and failing to get out of the deal. You’re probably wondering how you can turn a company that operated at a last quarter into a business that is actually worth your vanity purchase. What sells faster on the internet than porn? Twitter is working on a feature that would allow creators to monetize paywalled videos, the Washington Post . Reverse engineer and app researcher also that Twitter is working on a paid DMs feature. The mockups of these paid features look similar to OnlyFans, and Twitter has already demonstrated that it’s keeping an eye on OnlyFans’ business. Before Twitter implemented the Super Follows feature, Wong posted a showing that the feature was being built with adult content in mind. Twitter already allows users to post adult content, but they haven’t been allowed to monetize it — what if with these new features, that became possible? That plan might seem like it comes out of left field, but it’s arguably a better idea than . “Pre-Musk acquisition, I would have said it’s impossible,” said Ashley, a sex worker and peer organizer who works on cases involving content moderation. Many creator platforms don’t even try to monetize adult content since it’s such a legal and regulatory minefield. But the wealthiest man in the world is going to get more leeway than your average tech founder, and we know that Musk doesn’t play by the same rules as everyone else. To secure his Twitter takeover, Musk leveraged relationships with banks like Morgan Stanley and Bank of America — banks that are now also on the hook if he can’t squeeze value out of Twitter. “He’s in this social in-group that includes all the usual suspects that pressure companies to dump adult content,” Ashley explained. But she thinks that because he’s part of their world, they might be more willing to cooperate with him. “He’s entrenched in this entire ecosystem of venture. He’s their guy.” Still, figuring out how to safely and securely monetize adult content is one of the trickiest questions on the internet, not to mention one that requires a lot of nuance, empathy and understanding for particularly vulnerable people — something Musk has . But if he can hire the right team to build out a product with safety and security at the forefront, adult content could be Musk’s best bet to recoup his investment. . Twitter is the only major social media site that allows users to post porn. So, for online sex workers, Twitter has historically functioned as an advertising tool for their OnlyFans accounts. But what if those creators could just monetize on-platform and bypass the friction of sending fans elsewhere? “Sex sells” isn’t a cliche for nothing, and OnlyFans’ financials prove it. In 2021, the company earned in pre-tax profit, up from $61 million in 2020. The company makes its money by taking a 20% cut of all payments to creators — since 2016, the company has paid out $8 billion to creators, with $4 billion of that paid out in 2021 alone. The market for online sex work is large enough that it could compensate for the fallout from advertisers. For comparison, the more mainstream creator monetization platform Patreon has paid out to creators since it was founded in 2013. Put it this way: OnlyFans paid more money to creators in 2021 than Patreon has paid out in its existence. That’s because there’s a fundamental difference between the two companies’ business models: One figured out how to monetize porn despite pressure from credit card companies, and one of the adult realm altogether. This isn’t the first time Twitter has considered pivoting to porn. According to a report from , Twitter worked on an adult content monetization project this past spring, which would have built upon its creator products like Super Follows. But when a security team pressure-tested the product, they wrote in a report that “Twitter cannot accurately detect child sexual exploitation and non-consensual nudity at scale.” When Musk proposed his buyout weeks later and threw the entire company into disarray, the project was put on . Twitter shouldn’t expand its adult offerings if it can’t adequately protect users from abusive material — plus, it will need to match the same security checks that OnlyFans has. Here’s where the plan gets murky. Do we trust an Elon Musk-run Twitter — or any iteration of Twitter, really — to sell adult content in an ethical way? Is it possible for Twitter to moderate content well enough to make sure that only opted-in adults are seeing porn on the platform, and that the platform doesn’t inadvertently end up hosting or even monetizing child sexual abuse material (CSAM)? “Twitter has so much work to do to ensure that it is following the same best practices to moderate their content that we hold women-owned adult platforms to,” said a team member at , a women’s digital security platform. “ U.S. federal law that internet companies report each instance of CSAM they encounter on their platforms to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC). In 2020, showed that But if he wants to pay back his investors and make his $44 billion nightmare a dream, he might have no choice. “The humor is not lost on me that the richest man in the world needs money fast and has turned to sex work, just like I have,” Ashley told TechCrunch. “If I were OnlyFans, I’d be terrified.” |
Musk blames ‘activist groups’ for major advertisers pausing spending on Twitter | Kyle Wiggers | 2,022 | 11 | 4 | As mass layoffs begin at Twitter, major advertisers are pausing their campaigns on the social network — a move that’s gotten the attention of newly minted CEO Elon Musk. In a tweet this morning, Musk blamed a “massive drop” in Twitter revenue on “activist groups pressuring advertisers,” likely referring to an sent Tuesday by civil society organizations urging Twitter advertisers to suspend their ads if Musk didn’t commit to enforcing safety standards and community guidelines. Musk bemoaned the activist efforts, claiming that “nothing has changed with content moderation” on Twitter. But recent developments tell a different story. Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists. Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) Sarah Personette, Twitter’s chief customer officer, who managed the company’s relationships with advertisers, resigned from the company late last Friday. to Bloomberg, Twitter shut off employee access to certain content moderation and policy enforcement tools, prompting workers to cite concerns about misinformation ahead of the U.S. midterm elections. (Musk later to restore access to the tools.) And as a part of the layoffs today, Twitter eliminated its curation team, which was responsible for providing factual context — and corrections, if necessary — to trending terms and conversations on the platform. The Wall Street Journal on Thursday that General Mills, Audi and Pfizer have joined the growing list of companies temporarily pausing their Twitter ads. (Automaker GM last week became the first major brand to a pause.) Oreo maker Mondelez and Volkswagen are also reevaluating their ad spend with the network, reportedly spooked by the departure of top executives over the past week, including chief marketing officer Leslie Berland and VP of global client solutions Jean-Philippe Maheu. It points to a larger existential problem: new MediaRadar research, advertisers have been fleeing Twitter ever since Musk announced his intentions to buy the company. The average number of advertisers on the platform dropped from 3,350 between January and April to 3,100 between May and September. Before July, Twitter saw more than 1,000 new advertisers monthly, a number that dipped to 200 between July and August, according to the survey. Mondelez, whose brands also include Ritz, Chips Ahoy!, Trident and Tate’s Bake Shop, is among the top 20 advertisers on Twitter in terms of ad spend. Given that ad sales accounted for more than 90% of Twitter’s revenue in Q2 2022, its pullback alone is likely to have a substantial impact on the platform’s bottom line. On Tuesday, a New York Times revealed that IPG — one of the world’s largest advertising companies, with customers such as Coca-Cola, American Express, Johnson & Johnson, Mattel and Spotify — issued a recommendation for clients to temporarily pause their spending on Twitter because of moderation concerns. According to the piece, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), a coalition of platforms, advertisers and industry groups fighting harmful content on social media, also said it was monitoring how Twitter planned to to deal with content moderation. Musk has made increasing efforts to reassure advertisers that Twitter remains “brand safe,” publishing an open letter to advertisers saying that Twitter wouldn’t become a “free-for-all hellscape” and announcing plans to form a council to advise on content moderation. In recent days, Musk has also participated in video calls with ad companies including WPP PLC, according to the Wall Street Journal, during which he’s promised to rid Twitter of bots, add community management tools and introduce new ways to give advertisers the ability to choose which content to be near. Musk has little choice but to make good with Twitter’s sponsors. His deal to buy the company from banks, which means the social network will owe about . |
Elon guts Twitter, Google shutters Hangouts, and the tech layoffs continue | Greg Kumparak | 2,022 | 11 | 5 | Hey, all — welcome back to , the newsletter where we sum up the most read TechCrunch stories from the past week. And oof, what a week it was. Want this newsletter in your inbox every Saturday? . Signed up? Let’s just dive right in. : It was Elon’s first full week as the boss of Twitter post-$44 billion acquisition. Sweeping layoffs were said to be on the way — and, well, they’ve begun. After a painfully impersonal heads-up email went out Thursday evening, are waking up to find their access suddenly revoked. With reports suggesting layoffs could impact up to half the company, Twitter employees have reportedly taken to referring to the whole thing as “ ” (à la Thanos). A has already been filed alleging that Twitter isn’t following the proper legal processes here. : Meanwhile, news of tech industry layoffs continues to pour in. Lyft let go of , , , , and more. Meanwhile, both Apple and Amazon have reportedly . : We knew it was coming, but this week Google put the final nail in Hangouts’ coffin, shutting down the chat-focused web app (the Hangouts Android/iOS apps were shuttered last year) in favor of Google Chat. Of course, given Google’s history with chat apps, I expect at least two more to be launched and/or shuttered by the time I finish this newsletter. : This week SpaceX launched its Falcon Heavy rocket for the first time since 2019, finally moving forward on a mission that had been delayed (“due to payload readiness issues”) since late 2020. : “The company said it will now offer Prime subscribers a full music catalog with 100 million songs, instead of the previously more limited selection of just 2 million songs,” writes Sarah, “and will make most of the top podcasts on its service available without ads.” Whats up in TC podcast land this week? Here’s some of the highlights: Not a part of TechCrunch+ yet? Here’s what TC+ members were reading most behind the paywall: : Published in early 2021, this one blew up for some reason this week! Just a few weeks after raising a big Series C, Pilot CEO Waseem Daher sat down with Lucas Matney to break down what worked about their pitch deck. : Speaking of pitch decks, TC’s resident pitch expert, Haje Jan Kamps, has a list of the mistakes he’s tired of seeing in decks, having reviewed of them. |
Twitter begins rolling out $7.99 Twitter Blue plan with verification, fewer ads | Kyle Wiggers | 2,022 | 11 | 5 | Just days after newly minted Twitter CEO Elon Musk changes to Twitter’s system for verifying user accounts, including charging $8 per month for the privilege, Twitter appears to have begun rolling out a new tier of Twitter Blue, its premium subscription service, that reflects some of the changes that Musk has proposed. The new Blue isn’t live yet — the sprint to our launch continues but some folks may see us making updates because we are testing and pushing changes in real-time. The Twitter team is legendary. 🫡 New Blue… coming soon! — Esther Crawford ✨ (@esthercrawford) According to an in-app iOS notification viewed by TechCrunch, the upgraded Twitter Blue, starting at $7.99 per month, will add the blue verification checkmark previously reserved for accounts that applied through Twitter’s (although the New York Times that verification might be delayed until after Tuesday’s midterm elections). Other benefits listed as “coming soon” include “half the ads” seen by non-paying Twitter users as well as ostensibly “twice as relevant” ads (Blue removed ads entirely) and the ability to post longer videos to Twitter. It’s not clear just how long those videos can be, by the way. The language about the new Twitter Blue doesn’t specify. But in a this afternoon, Musk said that the current cap is 42 minutes for 1080p video, a technical limit that he expects will be increased sometime this month. TechCrunch What’s unresolved is whether currently verified Twitter users will lose their blue checkmark if they don’t fork over $7.99 per month. The language in the notification suggests this won’t be the case, but by The Verge indicated that Twitter was considering stripping verification badges from accounts that don’t pay for Twitter Blue within 90 days of the new plan launching. As for the new pay-to-play verification scheme, it’s no holds barred judging by early appearances; Twitter doesn’t seem to be checking who controls an account once they pay for the new Blue. Comedians Kathy Griffin and Sarah Silverman quickly created parody Elon Musk handles to demonstrate the systems’ flaws. Their accounts were later suspended, however, following Musk’s decision to begin permanently banning users who don’t make obvious that their accounts are satirical. Musk in a follow-up tweet that this would be highlighted as a rule for signing up for Twitter Blue. In any case, the new, costlier Twitter Blue will also offer priority ranking for “quality content,” promising to boost Blue subscribers’ visibility in replies, mentions and search. A revamped notifications screen in the Twitter app defaults to displaying tweets from verified users in the first tab. Twitter’s making the claim that this will help “lower the visibility of scams, spam and bots,” but time will tell whether that’s truly the case. TechCrunch Musk earlier claimed that Twitter, which recently ended support for , would create a new program for bypassing paywalls for publishers willing to work with the company. But if Musk intends to follow through with the proposal, the program doesn’t appear to have made it into the new Blue — at least not at launch. Available in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the U.K. on iOS to start, the new Twitter Blue arrives after at Twitter affecting roughly half of the company’s staff, including employees on human rights, accessibility, AI ethics and curation teams. Musk has claimed that the cuts — along with the introduction of new paid features — are necessary to bring Twitter to profitability, as the company faces an estimated $1 billion a year in interest payments on $13 billion in debt. It’s likely to be an uphill battle. Data from analytics firm Sensor Tower suggests that Twitter’s app has generated only . And a by investor Jason Calacanis — while hardly scientific — had a majority of respondents saying no to paying any amount for verification. Musk’s management of Twitter doesn’t appear to have instilled much confidence in major advertisers, either, as have paused campaigns on the platform. In a tweet on Friday, Musk blamed a “massive drop” in Twitter revenue on “activist groups pressuring advertisers,” likely referring to an sent Tuesday by civil society organizations urging Twitter advertisers to suspend their ads if Musk didn’t commit to enforcing safety standards and community guidelines. |
Tweep’s Twitter | Natasha Mascarenhas | 2,022 | 11 | 5 | We’ve been living through a lot of tech history over the past two years, but the brutal Twitter feel especially sad, complex and exhausting to anyone who follows the industry. We knew it was coming, then we were told it wasn’t, then it most certainly was, then it did. Reports I don’t have a hot take, or a Musk-related quip about this moment. I just have empathy for the people who lost, or might lose, their jobs after investing time, energy and care in building Twitter. Twitter employees are turning to the hashtag , a riff on the internal hashtag #LoveWhereYouWork, to thank each other, say goodbye and share the personal news. As one former employee put it, the new hashtag is a “bittersweet phrase — not because I’m gone, but because it’s gone.” I’ve covered dozens and dozens of layoff stories over the past year, all with a different shade of the same statement: “the macroeconomic environment has caused us to adjust expectations, impacting a percent of our workforce.” One thing that strikes me about Twitter’s layoffs is how the way they were conducted was devoid of emotion and acknowledgment. Even Better.com, which conducted one of the worst layoffs of the year, did better. On Thursday evening, all Twitter employees received an email stating that they would be informed of their employment status at 9 a.m. PDT on Friday. Each email was to be sent with the subject line “Your Role at Twitter.” If an employee is keeping their job, they were to be notified via their work email — if they are let go, they would be notified on a personal address. “To help ensure the safety of each employee as well as Twitter systems and customer data, our offices will be temporarily closed and all badge access will be suspended,” Thursday’s email read. “If you are in an office or on your way to an office, please return home.” The email was impersonally signed: “Twitter.” TechCrunch put together , which will continue to be updated. While I joked that some high-ranking members may join Andreessen Horowitz next, I’m honestly curious how we’ll see the alumni network pick up their next jobs. Will it be in startups? Or venture? Or will they seek refuge in roles that feel less risky than tech roles? Or perhaps start a career entirely outside of the tech industry? I can only imagine this experience feels nothing like whiplash; instead, maybe it feels like an excruciatingly warm spotlight finally letting up, only to find yourself looking around, not really recognizing the audience and stage that you were once in charge of entertaining. I’m just as lost as the rest of us when it comes to predicting what’s next, but it’s clear that today marks an inflection point in tech history. What Twitter and its alumni will make of the moment is another question altogether. As someone who loves to nerd out about networks and how they start and stop people, In the rest of this newsletter, we’ll talk about Gen Z turnover, fintech trends and Twitter again. As always, you can on Twitter for my thoughts every day of the week. announced this week that she is leaving venture firm Lerer Hippeau to go full time on a community she’s been building for years: In a Twitter thread announcing the news, Loyst said she’s teaching a VC 101 course, starting a newsletter, working on content creation and working with firms to demystify the Gen Z generation. The news comes around a month after GV’s Terri Burns announced she was leaving the firm where she became its youngest and first Black female individual to gain the partner title. As Burns shared with TechCrunch in 2020, While we don’t yet know what Burns is doing next, her and Loyst’s departure from institutional firms during a volatile moment in tech is a good reminder of how cyclical ventures can be. We recently recorded an Equity podcast about the job of a venture capitalist and how that’s expanding and rewriting itself as time goes on: / Getty Images and this week, in a back-to-back reminder that fintech is still experiencing volatility despite its ability to attract venture dollars. Companies don’t only cut staff when they have to. In a memo announcing the layoff, Stripe CEO Patrick Collision snuck in that the company “signed a remarkable 75% more new customers in Q3 2022 than Q3 2021” and that they recently set a record for total daily transaction volume processed on the platform. Brex, which cut 11% of staff last month, So it feels a bit confusing that the same startups that are growing are the same startups reducing staff. All I can say for now is that the weeks ahead of the holiday season may bring more cuts . ersinkisacik / Getty Images My brilliant colleague popped off this week in her column about She reminds us that before it can help adult content creators safely and securely monetize on the platform — but, at the same time, it may be Musk’s best bet on trying to make his $44 billion purchase make some sense. Twitter is the only major social media site that allows users to post porn. So, for online sex workers, Twitter has historically functioned as an advertising tool for their OnlyFans accounts. But what if those creators could just monetize on-platform and bypass the friction of sending fans elsewhere? “Sex sells” isn’t a cliche for nothing, and OnlyFans’ financials prove it. In 2021, the company earned $433 million in pre-tax profit, up from $61 million in 2020. The company makes its money by taking a 20% cut of all payments to creators — since 2016, the company has paid out $8 billion to creators, with $4 billion of that paid out in 2021 alone. The market for online sex work is large enough that it could compensate for the fallout from advertisers. , and tell me what you think! Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch If you like this newsletter, do me a quick favor? Forward it to a friend, and follow Chat soon! |
Hulu set to raise the cost of the Hulu Live TV bundle in December | Lauren Forristal | 2,022 | 11 | 4 | A month after Hulu of its on-demand streaming service, it is now targeting the subscribers of its live TV streaming bundle. Parent company Disney in August that it would increase the cost of the Hulu Live TV bundle later in the year. Starting on December 8, Hulu Live TV subscribers will have to pay $74.99 per month for the bundle with Hulu Live TV (Ads), ESPN+ (Ads) and Disney+ (No Ads)– which was previously the basic $69.99/month plan. Since Disney+’s is launching on December 8, subscribers can opt for a Hulu Live TV plan with ads for $69.99 per month. The plan will include the new Disney+ tier with ads, “Disney+ Basic,” as well as Hulu Live TV (Ads) and ESPN+ (Ads). The premium plan with Hulu Live TV (No Ads), ESPN+ (Ads) and Disney+ (No Ads) will increase to $82.99 per month, up from $75.99/month. Those who only want live TV content and not Hulu streaming content or Disney+ and ESPN+ content can pay $68.99 per month. It’s, unfortunately, very standard for streaming services to hike up their prices, especially Hulu Live TV, which has increased its plan every year since 2019. In 2021, the company increased the Hulu Live TV bundle from to , up from $54.99/month in 2019. At launch, Hulu Live TV was only before it offered the . Disney+, , among other streaming services like , and Sling TV, have announced price hikes this year. also raised its prices in , 10 months before launching its cheaper . Hulu Live TV subscription prices start rising today. . |
Connecting the dots: SaaS and alts | Anna Heim | 2,022 | 11 | 5 | TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the where it gets its name. and I spent quite a bit of time this week Battery Ventures’ report. It brought some forward-looking data to our attention — for instance, on cloud adoption — but also confirmed something impossible to ignore: That SaaS multiples — enterprise value compared to revenue projections — are shrinking. “The median forward multiple for SaaS companies has fallen from about 16x forward revenues to roughly 6x today,” Battery general partner Dharmesh Thakker told us. Multiples haven’t only shrunk, but they have also range-compressed, with fewer rewards for the fastest-growing companies compared to slower-growing ones. There are many factors at play, but the gist of it is that profitability seems to matter again to the markets. As a result of that, we’re seeing the revenge of some old rules. “Adjusted for growth,” Thakker said, “companies today that show efficient growth as implied by the Rule of 40 (i.e., companies with a growth rate + free cash flow margin greater than or equal to 40) are trading at a premium to those that are growing without regard to profitability.” Note that it’s not either growth or profitability: It has to be both, and the bar to please investors seems to be getting higher and higher. A more demanding market is a worrying picture for , as well as for their peers who already went public but struggle to maintain their market cap. Let’s also spare a thought for Alex, who may not get his hands on another juicy S-1 . |
This Week in Apps: Twitter chaos, Mastodon grows and WhatsApp launches Communities | Sarah Perez | 2,022 | 11 | 5 | Welcome back to This Week in Apps, that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. Global in the first half of 2022, up only slightly from the $64.4 billion during the same period in 2021, as hypergrowth fueled by the pandemic has decreased. But overall, the app economy is continuing to grow, having produced number of downloads and consumer spending across both the iOS and Google Play stores combined in 2021, according to the year-end . Global spending across iOS and Google Play last year was $133 billion, and consumers downloaded 143.6 billion apps. This Week in Apps offers a way to keep up with this fast-moving industry in one place, with the latest from the world of apps, including news, updates, startup fundings, mergers and acquisitions, and much more. Has it really only been a week since ? It seems like a lifetime. The Tesla and SpaceX exec has wasted no time making the bird app his own, beginning with the almost immediate layoffs of the Twitter executive team, including CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, General Counsel Sean Edgett and Head of Legal Policy, Trust and Safety Vijaya Gadde, before moving on to cut upper management, and then the (Which he’s in fact, as the required 60 days legal notice wasn’t given.) Twitter is expected to cut 50% of its staff, or some 3,700 jobs. The roles being cut , from the mission-critical , and teams — just ahead of a major election, worryingly — as well as those working on more experimental features, like , and in all sorts of business and tech areas like marketing, sales, policy, research, partnerships, accessibility, data science, machine learning, social good, communications and more, including core engineering. Twitter’s Developer Platform lead is out and the . Advertisers are growing worried about what the significant job cuts in key areas mean for brand safety and began putting their campaigns on pause until they know how this all shakes out. Twitter’s chief customer officer, Sarah Personette, who managed the company’s relationships with advertisers, also departed last Friday as a result of the takeover. Musk, of course, for the advertiser situation and not his own actions. The Twitter product is also rapidly undergoing a change, as Musk plans to cut new features , and revamp the Twitter Blue subscription to make the blue check now a paid feature. He’s also been . To say the changes are coming at a chaotic pace is an understatement. Employees were let go via emails and often still working when suddenly their access to Twitter’s internal resources was cut. (Not being able to log in was a clue to go check their personal email to find out if their job was eliminated.) Musk never communicated with staff before the , reports said. But his message, nonetheless was clear: Twitter is being reformed and it’s not going to be the same place it was ever again. The question now is, will users stay for it? As it turns out, some people decided they won’t be sticking around for whatever Twitter is turning into. The open source, decentralized social network is one platform that has benefitted from the . In addition to seeing for the Mastodon mobile app this past weekend, the company a new milestone. In a post on Twitter — where Mastodon has been successfully marketing its app to those now considering leaving the service — it noted that 230,000 people have joined Mastodon during the last week alone. Thanks to these new sign-ups, as well as people returning to old accounts they had set up previously, the network now has 655,000 active users, the post said. This is the highest number of users Mastodon has seen to date and follows on news that the network had gained on Friday, October 28 — the day after Musk’s deal to acquire Twitter had closed. From Friday through Sunday, the Mastodon mobile app also , third-party data from Sensor Tower indicated — a 658% increase from the 12,000 installs it saw the three days prior. This rapid growth had some downsides as the largest service mastodon.social experienced lags and outages due to the sudden influx of new users. Plus, some users came to Mastodon without a full understanding of how a decentralized social network works and have found the process confusing or overly technical. They may have already given up and moved on to another platform, despite how this week was the prime opportunity to convince them of decentralization’s perks — like how Mastodon can’t be sold to a person like Musk. Soon, another decentralized social app will come for Twitter’s user base. Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey is launching , a decentralized social protocol and that intends to build a Twitter-like product in a different way. But the open source community with the Silicon Valley exec’s decision to go his own way with Bluesky, instead of using established protocols like ActivityPub, and others. Then there’s the fact that @Jack sold Twitter to Musk to begin with, so would anyone ever trust him again? With Chat, , where many back-and-forth threaded discussions between writers and readers already take place, but also other online communities where writers have been building out networks of their own, like Discord, Slack and Telegram. The company says the new Chat feature will eliminate the need for its writers to “frankenstein together different software tools and cross-reference subscriber lists,” its announcement read. Chat is not a Twitter clone by any means — though there is overlap with how writers have used Twitter in the past. For starters, the Chat feature will be opt-in, meaning not every newsletter may have chats enabled at this time. on their Settings page or by simply starting a new thread in the Substack app. The user interface is also not a timeline to scroll, but resembles a traditional chat app. However, the launch could relocate some of the discussions that would have normally taken place on Twitter to a more private networking space going forward. WhatsApp this week , the that first entered into testing Designed to help organizations, clubs, schools and other private groups better communicate and stay organized, Communities bring a number of new features to the messaging platform, including admin controls, support for sub-groups and announcement groups, 32-person voice and video calls, larger-file sharing, emoji reactions and polls. Communities themselves can support groups of up to 1,024 users and offer end-to-end encryption. Some of the features developed for Communities, , ( ) and the ability for , had already made their way to the WhatsApp platform ahead of today’s launch. Now, the company says polls, 32-person video calls and larger group sizes will also be supported on WhatsApp more broadly outside of Communities. At launch, group admins will have the option to move their group to a Community if they choose. The feature will reach the wider WhatsApp user base worldwide over the next few months, on both Android and iOS. Meta Snap/Amazon Meta Amazon The company helped creators and brands express their virtual identities. Does Google have Memoji ambitions? Alter began its life as Facemoji, a platform offering tech that allowed game and app developers to put avatar systems into their apps. as part of its mobile gaming push. This is now the company’s sixth in-house studio, after earlier acquisitions, which have included Next Games, Night School Studio and Boss Fight Entertainment. The game developer, founded in 2010, is known for popular titles like “Triple Town,” “Alphabear” and “Cozy Grove.” led by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s VC firm, Seven Seven Six. The app offers e-cards and e-gifts than can be shared on email, text and social media, and is also integrated with Snapchat as of 2020. |
Making DAOs accessible for normals on TechCrunch Live | Matt Burns | 2,022 | 11 | 5 | Want to start a DAO? It’s not that hard. Want to join a DAO? It’s even easier, but there are several steps to get connected. Some of those steps are daunting. That’s why Alex Taub started Upstream, which attempts to make starting and onboarding for a DAO much easier. Tune in to the next TechCrunch Live to hear from Alex and investor Karin Klein (Bloomberg Beta) on Upstream’s novel approach to decentralized autonomous organizations. This event opens on with networking. The interview begins at 12:00 p.m. PST followed by the TCL Pitch Practice at 12:30 p.m. PST. by completing and gain access to all TechCrunch Live events, including TechCrunch Live, City Spotlight, Startup Pitch Practice, Networking and other TechCrunch community events, with just one registration. |
Laid off? Climate tech is looking for talent and founders | Tim De Chant | 2,022 | 11 | 5 | that the U.S. Federal Reserve would hike rates once more — and when it followed through earlier this week — another round of layoffs hit the tech sector. , , , , , , and of course , , have already cut or are about to eliminate thousands of jobs. That’s bad news for employees today, but it might be good news for the climate in the near future. Before we get too far, let me say up front that getting laid off is terrible and not something I wish to happen to anyone. Not knowing where your paychecks will come from or what benefits you’ll receive is difficult in the best of times, and it’s far worse when economic signs are mixed or are looming. I am not at all trying to minimize what people go through when they’ve been laid off. It’s happened to me, and it sucks. But layoffs also offer a chance at a new beginning. Even before the recent waves of layoffs started washing over the tech industry, people were leaving their old jobs for new opportunities in climate tech. “One thing we’re seeing is really, really strong talent leaving larger companies,” Erin Price-Wright, a partner at Index Ventures, , “because some of the financial upside for public tech companies or maybe even late-stage tech companies has sort of vaporized in the last few months. And people are like, ‘Well, I had these golden handcuffs, and that was preventing me from working on what I really care about. And I don’t have that anymore. So I’m going to take a risk and I’m going to do something.’” Climate tech has been booming relative to the rest of the market, with startups in the sector raising $5.6 billion in the first half of this year, short of 2021’s crazy hauls but still well ahead of 2020, the next previous record, according to PitchBook. Five years from now, PitchBook expects the climate tech market , a compound annual growth rate of 8.8%. All those companies are in desperate need of talent. Nearly every early-stage founder in the climate tech space I’ve spoken with in recent months went out of their way to mention that they’re hiring. Climatebase has listed right now, and that’s just a portion of the climate tech companies with active listings. Shaun Abrahamson, co-founder of climate-focused Third Sphere, pointed out that his firm’s portfolio companies are for over 400 positions. Breakthrough Energy Ventures’ portfolio companies are hiring for . Elsewhere, around 100 companies are using the climate career platform to directly connect with applicants, chief business officer Nishant Mani told TechCrunch. The startup frequently runs virtual job fairs to match employees with employers, and business is booming. The platform’s user base is growing 50% month on month, and Mani is aiming to get 1,000 companies actively using the platform in the next six months. |
Jack Dorsey breaks his silence, owns ‘responsibility for why everyone is in this situation’ at Twitter | Natasha Mascarenhas | 2,022 | 11 | 5 | , who stepped down as Twitter CEO , finally addressed that impacted approximately 50% of the company he co-founded in 2006. The workforce reduction, led by Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk, impacted thousands of people — and . “Folks at Twitter past and present are strong and resilient,” Dorsey said on Twitter on Saturday morning. “They will always find a way no matter how difficult the moment. I realize many are angry with me. I own the responsibility for why everyone is in this situation: I grew the company size too quickly. I apologize for that.” Dorsey, who also stepped down from , added that he’s “grateful for, and love, everyone who has ever worked at Twitter. I don’t expect that to be mutual in this moment … or ever … and I understand.” Folks at Twitter past and present are strong and resilient. They will always find a way no matter how difficult the moment. I realize many are angry with me. I own the responsibility for why everyone is in this situation: I grew the company size too quickly. I apologize for that. — jack (@jack) This is Dorsey’s first public comment since Musk took . In the past, Dorsey said that give some insight into how Dorsey was thinking about the future of the social media company. Dorsey texted Musk that he left because Twitter needed to become a new platform — one that isn’t a company. “I believe it must be an open source protocol, funded by a foundation of sorts that doesn’t own the protocol, only advances it. A bit like what Signal has done. It can’t have an advertising model,” Dorsey texted Musk. Yesterday, impacted Twitter employees used the hashtag , a riff on the internal hashtag #LoveWhereYouWork, to thank each other, say goodbye and share personal news. the new hashtag is a “bittersweet phrase — not because I’m gone, but because it’s gone.” Despite Dorsey’s departure from his official roles at Twitter, his silence was noticed. Musk, meanwhile, addressed the layoffs on Friday evening. “Regarding Twitter’s reduction in force, unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over [$4 million a day],” “Everyone exited was offered 3 months of severance, which is 50% more than legally required.” |
Sacca’s Lowercarbon doubles down on startup bringing solar modules to Indian rooftops | Manish Singh | 2,022 | 11 | 2 | Chris Sacca’s Lowercarbon is doubling down on a startup that is . SolarSquare said on Thursday it has raised $13 million in a Series A funding round led by Lowercarbon and Elevation Capital, just months after securing its seed financing. Existing backers Good Capital, Rainmatter, Better Capital and social commerce Meesho founders Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal also participated in the round. Even as India is increasingly adding generation capacity from solar power, there’s a large population of the South Asian nation — the individuals — that has yet to join the clean energy bandwagon. Less than 0.5% of Indian homes have rooftop solar systems. Such slow adoption could dampen Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ambitious renewables goal. SolarSquare, which sells, installs and helps individuals finance solar modules, has an ambitious plan to change that. The startup also provides its solar solutions to housing societies and commercial establishments. says it has solarized close to 5,000 homes in India in the last two years, helping them save about $480 yearly on their electricity bills and offset four metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions. SolarSquare, which pivoted to serving the customer segment two years ago after running a profitable business selling rooftop solar to corporates for years, is currently generating revenue at a runrate of $12 million a year, said Shreya Mishra, co-founder and chief executive of SolarSquare, in an interview with TechCrunch. “We are on a path of being a full-stack rooftop solutions provider. The market opportunity is so large, you can imagine the trust a middle class homeowner has to have to make a purchase of that size. We are innovating on every aspect of solar installation to serve our customers,” she said, adding that she estimates that solar modules worth more than $50 billion will be purchased by residences in India in this decade. The average ticket size of a purchase of the solar module is about 2 lakh Indian rupees, or $2,410. SolarSquare also helps customers with financing options through a network of partners. Mishra said she sees the startup getting a license to operate its own nonbanking financial institution to provide better options to its customers in a year. Nikhil Nahar (left) and wife-husband duo Shreya Mishra and Neeraj Jain founded SolarSquare. SolarSquare “Solar as a product purchase pays for itself. It’s unlike a product like, say, your refrigerator, which is an expense. Once you have put solar modules on your rooftop, you start saving each month. A 2 lakh investment will result in savings of 12 lakh to 14 lakh in 25 years. But there’s a high upfront investment, so once we realized that, it’s clear that we need to bring more financing options to customers,” she said. SolarSquare — which currently has presence in Bengaluru, Delhi, Gujarat, Hyderabad, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra — installs its solar panels within hours, compared to some legacy firms that take up to five days. In some homes, based on customers’ requests, it builds elevated structures for mounting panels. The startup plans to expand across India with the fresh funding. “Solar is now much cheaper and cleaner than digging up and burning old dinosaur bones, so putting it on your roof just makes sense, especially in a part of the world with as much sun as India,” said Sacca in a statement. “But getting panels installed wasn’t always easy. We backed Shreya, Neeraj, and Nikhil because they’ve cracked the code on hassle-free rooftop solar.” Indian firms making inroads with Indian residences will help the South Asian nation’s renewables goal. Coal currently powers 70% of India’s electricity generation, but Modi has pledged that India will produce more energy through solar and other renewables than its entire grid now by 2030. It has taken steps to help startups such as SolarSquare. New Delhi offers subsidies to homeowners who are powered by rooftop solar, allowing them to distribute the excess power they generate to grids throughout the day and use the grid power at night. Mishra praised New Delhi’s efforts on climate change, saying: “India is the first country in the world to make net-metering, this exchange of electricity, a consumer right that makes economics more viable as you’re able to freely trade electricity with the grid. More than 80% of our homes meet 100% of their electricity requirements this way.” “Net-metering is a policy in many parts of the world. In India, it’s a right. A policy is something that can be revised every few years, but a right is a right that is going to stick. This is one of the reasons why we became so bullish on serving the residential solar market in India. As long as net-metering is a consumer right, there is nothing else that is needed.” |
Meet Seoul-based accelerator SparkLabs’ 19th batch of startups | Kate Park | 2,022 | 11 | 2 | South Korea, — about $6.45 billion annually — following China and India, currently has 16 unicorns to date. |
Twitter cancels its Chirp conference for developers amid management transition | Ivan Mehta | 2,022 | 11 | 2 | Twitter is canceling its developer-focused Chirp conference amid management transition, the company late Thursday. The conference was scheduled to take place in San Francisco on November 16. After Elon Musk took over the company last month, there have been several executive exits and directional changes in the company’s product strategy. So it is not surprising the social network is abandoning its plan for the conference’s return after more than a decade of hiatus. In a tweet, Twitter’s official account for developer-related announcements said that the company is “hard at work to make Twitter better for everyone, including developers” and it might soon share some news about the topic. We’re currently hard at work to make Twitter better for everyone, including developers! We’ve decided to cancel the developer conference while we build some things that we’re excited to share with you soon. — Twitter Dev (@TwitterDev) The company’s head of developer products, Amir Shevat, reacted to the news with a cryptic message, stating: “Winds of change.” Winds of change. — Amir Shevat (@ashevat) In June, Parag Agrawal-led Twitter announced that . The company also kickstarted to show creative use cases of its new v2 API with prices like $10,000 for winners of different categories and free access to the enterprise tier of the API for a year. It said while the conference will no longer take place, the social network will still announce . We’ll still celebrate the soon-to-be-announced winners of our Chirp Developer Challenge – stay tuned for more details! — Twitter Dev (@TwitterDev) Twitter first but abandoned the event the next year. While the platform has had with developers in the last decade, it has been trying to win the community back with and in recent years. What’s more, the company opened up . Earlier this year, it , which highlighted some third-party apps. At that time, Shevat said the company was open to exploring models like . Last week, Twitter opened up that enables third-party apps to provide a better DM experience to users. It’s unclear what Twitter for developers will look like in the Musk era. The Tesla CEO has given indications that the firm will prioritize engineering, so developers can hope that they will get better access to the company’s tools. But until then, there will be questions surrounding the future outlook of some products such as TweetDeck, which is popular among power users of the social network. The company with the hope to make it a paid product. Earlier this year, findings by suggested that to its subscription umbrella Twitter Blue. But since Musk is in a massive way, there is no way to be sure whether TweetDeck still has a place in it. |
Tiger Global-backed SaaS startup Chargebee cuts 10% of jobs | Jagmeet Singh | 2,022 | 11 | 2 | Chargebee, backed by marquee investors including Tiger Global and Sequoia Capital India, has laid off about 10% of its staff in a “reorganization” effort due to ongoing global macroeconomic challenges and growing operational debt. The Chennai and San Francisco-headquartered startup, which offers billing, subscription, revenue and compliance management solutions, confirmed to TechCrunch that the update impacted 142 employees. “This decision was a difficult one, and we want to first acknowledge and thank the team members who helped us get where we are today. Chargebee has grown exponentially over the last few years, and amid changing market conditions, we have decided to proactively refocus resources to set a strong foundation on which to continue our growth,” said Penny Desatnik, director of corporate communications at Chargebee, in a statement emailed to TechCrunch. “We will continue to build and strengthen key relationships, and by focusing on efficient growth, we expect to sharpen our go-to-market strategy and operations to meet the rising market demand for subscription services across B2C and B2B businesses. We wish success to our former colleagues and remain committed to the success of our customers and partners around the globe,” Desatnik added. On Wednesday, Chargebee co-founder and CEO Krish Subramanian that the startup had changed its hiring plan to align with priorities owing to the macroeconomic factors and started reducing its expenses across various areas, including tools, consulting and contractors due to a growing gap between revenue and spending. “While the scaling decisions were under our control and responsibility, the economic situation and lack of visibility into the future has made it harder for everyone,” the note said. The affected employees will receive three months of pay and extended medical benefits while they look for new opportunities, he added. The startup will also offer outplacement career services and an extension of time to exercise stock options granted under its stock incentive plan. Chargebee raised $250 million in a Series H round in February — over nine months after following the $125 million Series G funding in April last year. The startup counts Insight Venture Partners, Sapphire Ventures, Steadview Capital, Tiger Global and Sequoia Capital India among its key backers. Unfavorable economic conditions have impacted several startups and tech companies around the world. In the last few months, Indian startups including Unacademy, and have cut their workforces amid a significant dip in the funding. U.S. companies including digital bank , online real estate marketplace and lending giant also recently made similar decisions. |
Bitwise, Paradigm and Perkins Coie talk regs at TC Sessions: Crypto | Lucas Matney | 2,022 | 11 | 5 | Crypto entities ranging from major exchanges to small projects are on the road to stateside regulation. Whether it comes through the Securities and Exchange Commission or the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, many actors in the space are looking for concrete future guidance on how to build compliant businesses in an emerging sector while navigating rules built for traditional finance. And, while crypto founders and investors know regulation is inevitable, they’re also looking to find the sweetest deal possible as they try to influence policymakers. It’s a challenging balance — enough regulation to protect retail investors from a hostile environment but not so much that it stifles the crypto sector’s growth and future innovation in the space. This regulatory tug-of-war is just one reason why we’re thrilled that Katherine Dowling, general counsel and chief compliance officer at Bitwise Asset Management; Sarah Shtylman, partner at Perkins Coie; and Justin Slaughter, policy director at Paradigm, will join us for a session called, “Is Crypto Regulation Ready” at in Miami on November 17. We’ll discuss whether or not there’s been an increase in institutional adoption and how the regulatory framework might impact adoption going forward. Given the in regulatory guidance, we’ll ask Dowling, Shtylman and Slaughter how legal crypto firms and counsels advise clients to navigate the present landscape while still operating in a compliant way. Dowling brings a unique perspective to the table, having experience working both in private equity firms and as a federal prosecutor in the Economic Crimes Unit of the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Shtylman brings deep knowledge of fintech and blockchain and Slaughter brings legal and advisory experience in both the public and private sectors. We’ll dive into the latest insights on how emerging regulatory frameworks will affect the digital asset industry and get their take on whether we can expect to see clarity on this in the U.S. by the end of the year. Prior to joining Bitwise, Dowling served in general counsel, CCO and COO roles at several financial and private equity firms. She also co-founded Luminate Capital Partners, where she held positions as GP, managing director and COO. A Harvard Law graduate, Dowling spent more than a decade as a federal prosecutor, most recently in the Economic Crimes Unit of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California, where she worked with the FBI, SEC, IRS and other agencies to prosecute insider trading, fraud and money laundering cases, among others. She also serves on the boards of two nonprofit organizations. As a partner at Perkins Coie, Sarah Shtylman focuses on the fintech and blockchain industries. The clients she advises range from entrepreneurs and startups to big tech and regulated financial institutions. Shtylman counsels on a variety of regulatory, commercial, compliance and product development projects — including NFTs, regulated digital asset platforms, in-game currencies and payment services integrations. Shtylman has advised clients through the application and compliance processes for state and federal trust charters, money transmission licensing and registration and lending licenses. She has engaged directly with state and federal regulators to discuss the applicability of various financial services regulatory regimes to emerging blockchain technology platforms and protocols that her clients are developing. Prior to Perkins Coie, Shtylman served as in-house regulatory counsel at Coinbase and has experience with cryptocurrency network development and launches, asset-backed digital tokens (including stablecoins), peer-to-peer lending, corporate governance, Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) compliance, Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) arbitration and financial services litigation. Prior to joining Paradigm, Justin Slaughter was director of the office of Legislative and Intergovernmental Affairs and senior advisor to Acting Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Allison Herren Lee. He has also served as chief policy advisor and special counsel to former Commissioner Sharon Bowen at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and general counsel to Senator Edward J. Markey. Slaughter has also served as a consultant in private practice focusing on fintech and smaller technology companies, and he began his career as a law clerk to Judge Jerome Farris on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Justin has a B.A. from Columbia University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. Take advantage of our early bird pricing and save $150 on General Admission passes. today, and then join the blockchain, crypto, DeFi, NFT and web3 communities at on November 17 in Miami.
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India metro smart cards vulnerable to ‘free top-up’ bug | Jagmeet Singh | 2,022 | 11 | 2 | transit systems — or metro, as it’s known locally — rely on commuter smart cards that are vulnerable to exploitation and allow anyone to effectively travel for free. Security researcher discovered a bug impacting Delhi Metro’s smart card system. The researcher told TechCrunch that the bug exploits the top-up process that allows anyone to recharge the metro train’s smart card as many times as they want. Singh told TechCrunch he discovered the bug after inadvertently getting a free top-up on his metro smart card using an add-value machine at a Delhi Metro station. The bug exists, Singh says, because the metro recharge system does not properly verify payments when a traveler credits their metro smart card using a station add-value machine. He said that the lack of checks means a smart card can be tricked into thinking it was topped up even when the add-value machine says that the purchase failed. A payment in this case is marked as pending, and subsequently refunded, allowing the person to effectively ride the metro for free. “I tried it on Delhi Metro’s system and was able to get a free recharge,” Singh told TechCrunch. “I still have to initiate a recharge by paying for it using PhonePe or Paytm, but because the recharge still remains pending, it will be refunded after 30 days. That is why it is technically free,” he said. Singh shared with TechCrunch a proof-of-concept video he recorded in February showing how a smart card can be duped into adding value to a Delhi Metro card. After better understanding the bug, the researcher to the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) a day later. In response, the DMRC asked Singh to share the details of the bug over email, which he did, along with a technical report and a log file demonstrating the bug in action, which TechCrunch has seen. On March 16, Singh received a boilerplate reply, acknowledging the receipt of his email, but did not receive any further responses. Singh told TechCrunch that the issue, which has not been fixed, exists in the smart cards themselves. Delhi Metro relies on MiFare DESFire EV1 smart cards manufactured by Dutch chipmaker NXP Semiconductors. Other metro systems, including Bengaluru, also use . “If the technical infrastructure is the same in other state metro trains, then this bug will work there too,” Singh told TechCrunch. It’s not the first time security researchers have found issues with the same brand of smart cards. Past research similar vulnerabilities affecting the same DESFire EV1 smart cards that Delhi Metro uses, as well as other . In 2020, MiFare the DESFire EV3 as its contactless solution with better security. Singh suggested that the smart card bug could be fixed if the metro systems migrate to DESFire EV3 cards. Three DMRC spokespeople did not answer multiple emails seeking comment. When reached, a spokesperson for NXP (via agency) was unable to provide comment by the time of publication. Bengaluru Metro Rail Corporation, the body responsible for the city’s metro service, also did not comment. |
Aurora says it has enough cash to commercialize autonomous trucks in 2024 | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 11 | 2 | Aurora Innovation said Wednesday it will have enough money to continue to develop its autonomous vehicle technology until its commercial launch in mid-2024 — an effort to assuage shareholders amid a tightening capital market and a week after competitor Argo AI suddenly shut down. The company said it closed the third quarter with about $1.2 billion in cash and short-term investments and plans to launch a commercial self-driving truck operation in late 2024. Wall Street responded favorably to Aurora’s attempts to calm investors. The company’s stock was up 5.85% after market close. The statements come at time of shifting priorities and economic uncertainty. Argo AI, an autonomous vehicle developer backed by Ford and VW, after the two automakers decided to no longer fund the effort. Instead, the automakers are putting more resources to advanced driver assistance systems, technology that promises to deliver revenue in the near term. A consolidating AV industry and a shift towards ADAS has been underway for nearly two years. Inflation and looming tightening credit as well as could accelerate that trend. Automakers once willing to invest billions into the development of AV tech — a frontier tech years away from revenue — are aiming for what is considered a safer bet. Even with its cash on hand, Aurora will have to raise more funds, CFO Richard Tame said during the investor call. It’s unclear if that capital raise will occur prior to that mid-2024 deadline. The company wouldn’t clarify timing to TechCrunch. However, in a in September, CEO Chris Urmson wrote to Aurora’s board that there was value in finding a “path to raise $300 million in the next year to add around six months to our runway.” Given the current economic situation and Aurora’s cash burn history, the company might be able to make it to 2024 with the funds it currently has, but only just — and only if it keeps costs in line. During the third quarter, Aurora’s loss from operations totaled $200 million, which is up from the $128 million reported during the same quarter of last year, but down from the nearly $1.2 billion in losses from the second quarter of 2022. If the startup were able to maintain a $200 million net loss starting in the fourth quarter until the first quarter of 2024, it wouldn’t need to raise more cash before commercial launch. But as a pre-revenue startup working on frontier technology, Aurora will incur tremendous costs in R&D to scale and bring its product to market. In addition, Aurora would need to somehow avoid being impacted by inflation and supply chain constraints. The upshot? Aurora will need to find efficiencies across the board. The leaked memo also outlined an array of cost-cutting and cash-generating options to Aurora’s board, including a hiring freeze, potential layoffs, spinning out assets, going private and even selling itself to high-profile tech companies. Aurora didn’t mention any of these potential realities during its earnings call, but that doesn’t mean they’re off the table. Aurora has prioritized commercializing autonomous freight through a series of pilot partnerships with , Paccar, Schneider, and Xpress. But the company is also working with Toyota to eventually launch a subscription service for the ride-hailing market. Earlier this year, the company unveiled its that were custom built for robotaxi operations. In the third quarter, Aurora recognized about $3 million in collaboration revenue from Toyota. |
Fisker bumps up production for all-electric Ocean SUV | Jaclyn Trop | 2,022 | 11 | 2 | Fisker is raising its manufacturing forecast two weeks before its first electric vehicle, the Ocean SUV, enters production. The automaker plans to produce 42,400 Ocean SUVs by the end of 2023, up from an initial forecast of 40,000, due to strong demand in the U.S. and Europe. The company said it has received 62,000 reservations for the $37,499 Ocean and expects 80,000 orders by the end of the year, compared with an initial target of 50,000. That means that not everyone who has reserved an Ocean will receive one in 2023. “For us, I don’t see it as a bad thing because that means we’re fully booked out, which is great,” CEO Henrik Fisker told TechCrunch Many of those reservations came in August, shortly ahead of the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which eliminates the $7,500 federal tax credit for EVs built abroad. “It was a Friday when it looked like Congress would pass the bill, and I immediately got together with three executives and we said, ‘Hey, what can we do?’” Fisker said. The company scrambled to launch a redesigned website by Monday afternoon and put out a press release notifying customers they had a week to reserve the Ocean before losing eligibility for the tax credit. “We potentially retain eligibility for the old federal EV tax credit,” Fisker said. “In The Ocean will enter production in Graz, Austria, on November 17, the same day slated for the launch of its 3D configurator as well as updates to its mobile phone app and website. Fisker will deliver a fleet of 15 SUVs to partner Magna in December. Fisker said it is in discussions with potential partners to boost capacity mid-2024 by adding a U.S. production site. The automaker, which went in 2020, reported a widening net loss of $149.3 million, or a .49 loss per share, for the quarter ended September 30. That compares with a net loss of $109.8 million, or a .37 loss per share, for the same quarter a year ago. Revenue for the third quarter was $14,000, versus the $15,000 it posted for the same period last year. During its quarterly earnings call on Wednesday, the automaker outlined its quarterly production plan for 2023. Fisker plans to build “more than 300” Ocean units by the end of the first quarter, 8,000 units in the second quarter, 15,000 in the third, and the balance of the remaining 42,400 units in the fourth. Fisker also said it is on track to start production of its second vehicle, the Fisker PEAR crossover, in 2024 with partner Foxconn at the former Lordstown Motors plant in Ohio. Foxconn , originally a General Motors factory, from struggling EV startup Lordstown Motors in May. The company said it has received more than 5,000 reservations for the sub-$30,000 PEAR, an acronym for “Personal Electric Automotive Revolution.” A third model, known internally as Project Ronin, is still in development, Fisker said. |
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Revere is creating a ratings system for the venture capital industry | Natasha Mascarenhas | 2,022 | 11 | 2 | industry is built on signals. Lead investors help close rounds, pro rata rights show promise of a company, and the partner title gives validity to folks within firms looking to close deals. , a new bet being built by former AngelList executive and family office operator , is playing upon these characteristics. The startup, launching publicly today, is building a rating system for the venture capital industry. The goal is to create a more standardized way to track information about emerging fund managers so that institutional investors know how to navigate the shifting landscape. “There’s just too much influence in a small number of people, where if Keith Rabois or Elon Musk just tweet something, everyone just jumps on the bandwagon,” Woo said. “In the space of emerging managers, typically that signal comes from big anchor LPs.” ’s pitch is that a wider audience wants to participate in backing venture capitalists; they just need the signal on where to go and how to gauge (since proof of consistent returns isn’t necessarily a reality thanks to the whole 10-year horizon thing). Using data provided by an emerging venture firm, Revere uses 20 categories to verify, aggregate and research into the quality of the firm across 5 areas: sourcing, team, value add, track record and firm management. It then creates a heat map, using the same provided dataset, that shows, at a quick glance, a firm’s strengths and weaknesses in said categories. Research reports include everything from fund formation details, management structure, strategy and service providers, when evaluating the firm. It’s doing due diligence, and to date, Revere has written over 80 reports. The strategy is reminiscent of what Cambridge Associates has been doing for years, but the startup claims to do it cheaper, faster and with emerging fund managers as a key focus. For example, Revere doesn’t charge fund managers for reports; instead it charges LPs on a per-rating basis, or a monthly subscription fee for access to all reports. The 11-person startup currently takes around two weeks to whip up a report. Over time, if demand increases, it will get harder to turn around reports in that same timeframe. As Revere gathers more data, it sees an opportunity to create more performance benchmarks for the asset class, something that PitchBook and Cambridge Associates hasn’t done well, per Woo. “The moment we’re able to stand up and say here are the benchmarks, and we’re showing you why funds that are smaller, at an earlier stage are outperforming, then we think that’s going to be literally a sea change in terms of perception of risk,” from the LP side. The startup currently has over 100 funds on its platform. Revere declined to share any customer names but said that one of its first customers was a sizable investment consultant. The company doesn’t see itself becoming a marketplace that helps conduct transactions between verified firms and interested LPs; however, it did confirm that millions have been invested in funds as a result of its reports. While Revere is not able to widely disseminate a report with actual fund manager data, the format, tone, and structure of the sample data in the template report below gives a good sense of what subscribers see. by Ratings is a sensitive topic in venture, only reinforced by some of the reactions I got by investors when telling them about this ratings platform. VC ratings sites have popped up in the past, largely led by and for founders, but have always struggled with negative bias selection and the difficulty of verifying individual accounts. currently accepting beta users on its Testflight, wants to be a private subreddit for founders and LPs. Revere will need to convince investors that this isn’t a ranking of who’s hot and who’s not, but instead research-based recommendations meant for LPs (not tech twitter). Still, Revere could find itself falling into the same trap that others have. Subjectivity in some of the qualitative reporting of new venture firms could raise questions. The company doesn’t use hard science or artificial intelligence to make conclusions about a firm, meaning that bias could easily sneak in. Would Woo feel stronger about a former AngelList exec raising a new fund, or would Shen look especially for people who understand the depths of the family office world? The difficulty is getting people to lean on data, instead of brands, when it comes to backing new ventures. Woo and Shen believe that Revere’s job isn’t necessarily to give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down on whether a certain venture fund or person is a good idea, but instead offer a whole picture on what one entity is offering in a current moment in time. That said, in a mock-up of a report, Revere showed that it rates firms using categories like “excellent” and “best in class,” a nomenclature reserved for “all-around performers who rate well across multiple categories.” Every year, the company ranks a few firms as either best in class, rising stars, or verified. “Part of the reason people love investing in venture capital is for the intangibles, right? If they just purely wanted returns, and sort of good risk-adjusted returns, there’s other asset classes,” Woo said. So far, Revere has raised $5.62 million since launching, including a May 2021 pre-seed round of $1.35 million from investors such as AngelList, Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin and Blue Future Partners. It also raised a $4.27 million round from Cherubic Ventures, Overlay Capital, Benhamou Global Ventures, Oyster Ventures, MDSV, and others. Instead of trying to get rid of investors’ need to pattern match and check specific boxes, Revere wants to disrupt the industry through standardization. Let’s see if the market is ready to ask for help and if the standard is tired enough to be disrupted, PDF style. |
Roku drops ~19% as it braces for a bumpy fourth quarter | Lauren Forristal | 2,022 | 11 | 2 | As advertisers pull back on spending and supply chain disruptions persist, investors have braced themselves for an unpleasant quarter for Roku. And investors are probably right to be worried. Roku released its on Wednesday, revealing that it is still experiencing slow growth in revenue in a continuously challenging environment. The company also warned investors of a weak fourth quarter, telling shareholders it expects total net revenue of about $800 million, or a 7.5% decline year over year. Roku shares dropped nearly 19% in after-hours trading once investors saw the fourth-quarter guidance. “As we enter the holiday season, we expect the macro environment to further pressure consumer discretionary spend and degrade advertising budgets, especially in the TV scatter market. We expect these conditions to be temporary, but it is difficult to predict when they will stabilize or rebound. We, therefore, anticipate Q4 Player revenue and Platform revenue to be lower year over year,” the company And while Roku reported a total net revenue that beat expectations, the results are still much lower than in the past. Roku noted that its total revenue grew 12% year over year to $761 million, above its own expectation of . Analysts Roku’s total revenue to reach $696 million this quarter. “Platform revenue grew 15% year over year, which was lower than our historical growth rates but positive given the difficult macro environment. Advertising spend on our platform continues to grow more slowly than our beginning-of-year forecast due to current weakness in the overall TV ad market, and the ad scatter market in particular,” the company said. Roku missed revenue expectations last quarter and reported a total net revenue of $764 million, which was $41 million less than Wall Street’s expectations. The company blamed the slowdown in TV ad spending for missing the mark. Meanwhile, the company also reported a net addition of 2.3 million incremental active accounts in Q3, bringing the total to 65.4 million, up from 61.3 million active accounts in the . Roku also had total streaming hours of 21.9 billion, up 1.1 billion from last quarter. Its free streaming service, The Roku Channel, saw a jump in streaming hours of 90% year-over-year. Roku continues to invest in The Roku Channel. Just this past month, the company launched the streaming service in , which marked a significant move for the service. Previously, The Roku Channel was only available in the U.S., the U.K. and Canada. The Roku Channel also launched through its Live TV Guide and added as a new premium subscription option. Roku made a bold move last month by stepping into the connected home space with the launch of various . The Roku Smart Home lineup includes security cameras, video doorbells, smart lights and voice-enabled smart plugs. With Google and Amazon already in the smart home market, it’s likely Roku doesn’t anticipate becoming the first choice for consumers. Still, it makes sense for the company to monetize the smart home experience to the many consumers that already have Roku smart TVs in their homes. During a conference call with reporters, Roku chief financial officer Steve Louden said: “Expanding into the smart home ecosystem is a natural extension for Roku. Obviously, we’re a leading TV streaming platform, and smart TV is usually at the center of someone’s smart household. It’s a good extension to leverage our existing 65 million active accounts.” The company added in its letter that it’s still “early days,” but Roku has the “necessary technology and expertise in hardware, software, and connectivity to deliver a smart home ecosystem that is simple, powerful, and delightful.” Roku also recently the 2022 version of the Roku Express streaming player, a Roku Wireless Bass, as well as its , Roku OS 11.5, which includes new features like a universal watch list, a “continue watching” feature and a discovery hub that features short-form content. |
Instagram will soon allow select creators to make and sell NFTs directly in its app | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 11 | 2 | Meta announced today that it is introducing a number of new creator updates across Instagram and Facebook. Most notably, the company revealed that creators on Instagram will soon be able to create their own NFTs and sell them directly to fans, both on and off Instagram. With this update, creators will have access to a toolkit that will help them create, showcase and sell NFTs. Polygon is the first partner that Meta has chosen for this feature. People on Instagram will be able to buy the NFTs directly within the app. Meta says the process will take place via traditional in-app purchases across iOS and Android. And for now, Instagram is not taking a cut of the creators’ revenues. Meta is testing this new feature with a small group of creators in the U.S. and plans to expand it to more countries in the future. Instagram is also adding support for the Solana blockchain and Phantom wallet, which join the that it already supports, including Rainbow, MetaMask, Trust Wallet, Coinbase Wallet, Dapper Wallet, Ethereum, Polygon and Flow. In addition, information for select collections where the metadata has been enriched by OpenSea, such as collection name and descriptions, will now be available on Instagram. In addition to the NFT updates, Instagram is also expanding access to subscriptions to all eligible creators in the U.S. The social network with a small group of creators. The feature lets creators offer their followers paid access to exclusive Instagram Live videos and Stories. Subscribers also receive a special badge that helps them stand out in the comments section and creators’ inboxes. Meta also announced that Facebook is increasing access to , which let creators earn money directly from followers on Reels, live and video on demand. Facebook is also going to start testing automatic onboarding for creators, which means that the ability to send stars will automatically appear on their content. Facebook is also bringing Stars to non-video content, such as photos and text posts. For creators who are already using Stars, Facebook is bringing Stars Party to reels. A Stars Party is a Stars community challenge that ends in a celebration if the creator reaches their goal, Meta says. The social network is also giving creators on Facebook more tools to engage with people who send Stars. For example, creators will be able to add a filter in Comments Manager that displays all of a creator’s Stars comments in one place, which will give creators the option to reply to multiple comments at once. Meta also announced that it’s introducing gifts on Instagram, starting with reels, to give creators a new way to earn money from their fans. The new feature lets fans send gifts on reels by purchasing Stars within Instagram. Meta is testing this feature with a small group of creators in the U.S. first, and plans to expand it to more creators soon. In addition, Meta is on Facebook to all creators. Professional mode is designed to be used by creators looking to monetize their followings on the social network. Facebook professional mode with select creators in December 2021 and is now offering it to anyone on its platform. The new changes come at a time when Meta is investing in its creator user base, as it sees the potential in a new revenue stream that comes from things like creator subscriptions. With these new updates, Instagram is trying to shore up its platform against the threat of competition, namely from TikTok, which has attracted a growing number of creators. And as Meta continues to build the metaverse, it’ll need the support of creators, so it’s not surprising that it’s looking to broaden its offerings for creators. |
Daily Crunch: Former Googlers raise more than $90M to scale alternative asset fintech startup | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 11 | 2 | Hellooooo, guess what? It’s November! We guess it was actually November yesterday, too, but we failed to notice, because LOL what even is time, amirite. Anyway, put away your Halloween costumes and start the game of How Long Can You Avoid “Little Drummer Boy”? If you want to play that game, , although that’s a particularly tolerable version of the song, to be fair. Onward! — and New data from more than 200 startups show that . Mostly, co-founders make the same, but where there is a difference, the balance typically tips in the favor of the technical co-founder, reports. Also, we’ve got an eclectic mix of additional news for ya: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch Dear Sophie, I’m studying bioinformatics at a university in the U.S. What options do I have to work before and after graduation on my student visa? Do any of these options allow me to launch my own startup? — Wanting to Work Three more from the TC+ team: Elon Musk , and has all the details on what went down. Many of the leaders were concerned with content moderation, particularly dealing with increases in hate speech and undue influence on the midterm elections. Meanwhile, writes that flying the coop. Meanwhile, continues to follow the Byju’s saga. The latest is that India’s edtech giant is looking at a for Aakash, its physical tutor chain. And we have five more for you: |
Proptech in Review: 3 investors explain how finance-focused proptech startups can survive the downturn | Mary Ann Azevedo | 2,022 | 11 | 2 | days of the COVID-19 pandemic, interest rates for mortgages dropped to historic lows. Predictably, home buyers made hay, taking full advantage of the favorable financial environment to pick up new homes and refinancing mortgages on their existing homes. Startups operating in the financial side of the real estate tech market suddenly faced a surge in demand, and many departed on hiring sprees to keep up. But as those interest rates, housing prices and inflation began to climb back up, demand slowed dramatically. This meant that the once high-flying startups were suddenly dealing with the opposite problem — too many employees and not enough transactions to make money. Layoffs became widespread. Shutdowns were a thing again. As interest rates soared even higher, the once frothy market morphed into an environment where only the fittest could survive. To get a sense of how investors who have backed proptech startups with a financial focus are dealing with the market shift, we reached out to three active investors. The trio shared their thoughts on everything from what types of startups in the home buying and lending space have the best shot at survival to the advice they are giving startups in their portfolios. Pete Flint, general partner of NFX, noted that the chances of survival are higher for proptech startups that let consumers fractionally invest in properties and increase access for those seeking a rent-to-own approach. “The best thing founders can do during a downturn is move quickly and efficiently, and evolve their offering to match the new needs of the market. This will help them capture more market share, which will give them the highest chance of survival,” he said. Nima Wedlake, principal at Thomvest Ventures, agreed, noting that agility is a critical trait. “Startups that survive this period will adapt their product offerings to meet the needs of today’s homeowners and buyers,” he said. In such a climate, companies that help others navigate tough times seem to be in special demand. “Companies that sell software that enables cost-cutting or additional lead-generation opportunities are seeing accelerating adoption as incumbent mortgage companies realize they need an edge to drive demand,” Zach Aarons, co-founder and general partner of MetaProp, pointed out. “If a startup can prove its users see significant savings, then they shouldn’t have a hard time being successful in this market,” he said. We spoke with: Resilient proptech companies have to be able to navigate the cyclicality of the industry. It is embedded in the category, and with the long housing and tech boom, many founders have underestimated this. In my view, it is less about the “type” of startup that is more likely to survive now and more about what the startups to respond to this moment. The best thing is move quickly and efficiently, and evolve their offering to match the new needs of the market. This will help them capture more market share, which will give them the highest chance of survival. The verticals that we think will be more resilient during this economy are: |
Web3 infrastructure startup Tenderly takes on Infura, Alchemy with new node offering | Anita Ramaswamy | 2,022 | 11 | 2 | Web3 developer tooling startup Tenderly with a new product it announced today called Web3 Gateway. The product will help web3 developers read, stream and analyze blockchain data, according to the company. The offering builds on the company’s observability stack, which it says indexes over nine billion transactions across more than 20 blockchain networks. While many blockchain and crypto companies have struggled to grow amid unfavorable market conditions, infrastructure providers such as Tenderly , buoyed by the trend of steady developer interest in building web3 products. The new offering is a sign of competition between web3 infrastructure providers heating up, as it puts the startup in direct competition with ConsenSys, the company that owns popular node-as-a-service provider Infura, and Alchemy, another widely used node provider in the industry. Prior to this, Tenderly was focused solely on the smart contract space with its dashboard and API that helped engineers develop, test and monitor the health of decentralized applications. “Unlike other nodes, Tenderly Web3 Gateway is tightly integrated with the rest of the Tenderly development platform, eliminating development, test and infrastructure silos from your dapp building process and helping smart contract developers save time and costs,” Tenderly CEO Node providers, are often compared to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for web3 companies because they provide a critical layer of blockchain infrastructure. One aspect of Tenderly’s offering that differentiates it from other node providers is its transaction simulation platform, which The Belgrade, Serbia-based startup last raised a $40 million Series B announced in March this year, just before crypto prices started a substantial descent. The financing came just months after the startup’s Series A round and it was announced in the same month as Alchemy’s , which valued the latter company at $10.2 billion. The company says its platform is used by tens of thousands of developers from apps such as Uniswap, Yearn Finance and OpenSea and that it works with the majority of the top 100 Ethereum projects, . Yasmin Razavi, a growth investor at Spark Capital who helped lead the firm’s investment in Tenderly, told TechCrunch that the startup’s new offering came as a result of its developers finding they could not rely on existing node providers for their purposes and deciding to instead build out that capability themselves. “The issues you hear with Alchemy and Infura are mostly around their inability to scale,” Razavi said. According to Razavi, customers report that Tenderly’s offering is three times as performant as Alchemy’s based on beta testing the company has conducted. While its performance has yet to be validated in the public realm, it’s clear that this offering brings Tenderly closer to being a full-suite provider of web3 infrastructure services and therefore a more formidable force in the subsector. “With this latest release, we complete our end-to-end promise to our developers, supporting them from the very first steps of writing and debugging Smart Contracts all the way to providing full infrastructural support for dapps once they hit the mainnet,” |
George Hotz, aka ‘geohot,’ is leaving Comma.ai for a lofty AI project | Kirsten Korosec | 2,022 | 11 | 2 | Four years ago, Comma.ai founder George Hotz turned to his board — of which he is the only member — and . At the time, the goal for the famed iPhone and PlayStation 3 hacker, known as geohot, was to build out a new research division to focus on behavioral models that can drive cars. Now, Hotz says he is taking from the driver assistance system startup that promises to bring Tesla Autopilot-like functionality to your car. Although, he will remain its sole board member and president. Hotz hasn’t been involved in the much of the day-to-day leaderships task for some time, he told TechCrunch. That has fallen to COO Alex Matzner and CTO Harald Schäfer. The company hasn’t had a CEO since 2019 when Riccardo Biasini held that role. (Biasini left the CEO post in 2019 and remained at Comma to work on its open pilot software until February 2020.) Hotz has been what Matzner described an observer and occasional hard problem solver. Comma.ai, which developed and now sells a $1,999 driver assistance system devkit that is compatible on more than 200 vehicles, isn’t going anywhere, Hotz told TechCrunch. The focus now is turning the devkit, which runs on Comma’s open source software called openpilot, into a productized consumer product. “I’m good at things when it’s wartime,” Hotz told TechCrunch in a recent interview. “I’m not so good at hands-on, ok, let’s patiently scale this up. ‘Do you want to deal with a supply chain that’s capable of making 100,000 devices a year?’ Like, not really.” And that’s one of the goals: annual sales of 100,000 Comma 3 units. The startup quietly raised $10 million from individuals last year and moved into a 20,000-square-foot facility in San Diego. (Comma’s first $8.1 million in funding was taken in two rounds from Silicon Valley VC a16z.) It is now “aggressively hiring” and on track to launch some major end-to-end machine learning updates to later this month, Matzner told TechCrunch in a recent email. Comma.ai initially launched with a plan to sell a $999 aftermarket self-driving car kit that would give certain vehicle models highway-driving assistance abilities similar to Tesla’s Autopilot feature. Hotz in October 2016 after receiving a letter from the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration. Five weeks later, Comma.ai released its self-driving software to the world. All of the code, as well as plans for the hardware, was posted on . The company continued to develop an ecosystem of hardware products all aimed at bringing semi-autonomous driving capabilities to cars. Those efforts have culminated into the , which is priced between $1,999 and $2,499 depending on the storage size. The car harness, which connects the devkit to the vehicle, is another $200. The Comma 3 is far easier to use than its earlier iterations. It requires some patience to install and set up, but no longer requires any technical expertise anymore, Hotz said. Now, it’s up to the company to take the Comma 3 and make into a “productized” and scalable consumer product, he added. Hotz is already deep into his next project, which he calls Tiny Corporation. His aim is to write a new framework for machine learning that is faster and less complex than PyTorch. Instead of training the ML model in the cloud and shipping it to the edge, Hotz wants to build tools that allow ML models to be trained at the edge. “The current PyTorch and TensorFlow are not going to cut it for training the edge,” he said. AI-related fields including automated driving are turning more to deep neural networks — a sophisticated form of artificial intelligence algorithms that allow a computer to learn by using a series of connected networks to identify patterns in data… sort of how a brain works. But as Hotz notes, “we’re all pretty new to this neural network stuff.” Andrej Karpathy, a deep learning and computer vision expert and former director of AI at Tesla, has referred to this stage as programming 2.0, or , in which programming is done by example and humans are really only writing the general scaffolding. In other words, software that writes itself. “You shouldn’t be building a (AI) chip until you can build software that outperforms or at least performs the same as PyTorch on Nvidia,” Hotz said. “As the build up to building AI chips, first let’s build the software.” |
OpenAI will give roughly 10 AI startups $1M each and early access to its systems | Kyle Wiggers | 2,022 | 11 | 2 | OpenAI, the San Francisco-based lab behind AI systems like GPT-3 and DALL-E 2, today launched a to provide early-stage AI startups with capital and access to OpenAI tech and resources. Called Converge, the cohort will be financed by the , OpenAI says. The $100 million entrepreneurial tranche was announced last May and was backed by Microsoft and other partners. The 10 or so founders chosen for Converge will receive $1 million each and admission to five weeks of office hours, workshops and events with OpenAI staff, as well as early access to OpenAI models and “programming tailored to AI companies.” “We’re excited to meet groups across all phases of the seed stage, from pre-idea solo founders to co-founding teams already working on a product,” OpenAI writes in a blog post shared with TechCrunch ahead of today’s announcement. “Engineers, designers, researchers, and product builders … from all backgrounds, disciplines, and experience levels are encouraged to apply, and prior experience working with AI systems is not required.” The deadline to apply is November 25, but OpenAI notes that it’ll continue to evaluate applications after that date for future cohorts. When OpenAI first detailed the OpenAI Startup Fund, it said recipients of cash from the fund would receive access to Azure resources from Microsoft. It’s unclear whether the same benefit will be afforded to Converge participants; we’ve asked OpenAI to clarify. (Update: An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed that Converge will include Azure access.) We’ve also asked OpenAI to disclose the full terms for Converge, including the equity agreement, and we’ll update this piece once we hear back. Beyond Converge, surprisingly, there aren’t many incubator programs focused exclusively on AI startups. The Allen Institute for AI has a small that launched in 2017, which provides up to a $500,000 pre-seed investment and up to $450,000 in cloud compute credits. Google Brain founder Andrew Ng heads up the , a $175 million tranche to initiate new AI-centered businesses and companies. And Nat Friedman (formerly of GitHub) and Daniel Gross (ex-Apple) fund the AI Grant, which provides up to $250,000 for “AI-native” product startups and $250,000 in cloud credits from Azure. With Converge, OpenAI is no doubt looking to cash in on the increasingly lucrative industry that is AI. The Information that OpenAI — which itself is in talks to raise cash from Microsoft at a nearly $20 billion valuation — has agreed to lead financing of Descript, an AI-powered audio and video editing app, at a valuation of around $550 million. AI startup Cohere is said to be a $200 million round led by Google, while Stability AI, the company supporting the development of generative AI systems, including Stable Diffusion, recently raised $101 million. The size of the largest AI startup financing rounds doesn’t necessarily correlate with revenue, given the enormous expenses (personnel, compute, etc.) involved in developing state-of-the-art AI systems. (Training Stable Diffusion alone cost around $600,000, according to Stability AI.) But the continued willingness of investors to cut these startups massive checks — see ‘s $225 million raise, $580 million in new funding and so on — suggests that they have confidence in an eventual return on investment. |
Digital bank Chime is cutting costs across the board – including 12% of staff | Natasha Mascarenhas | 2,022 | 11 | 2 | Digital bank confirmed today that it is 12% of its workforce, or about 160 people. The Information . According to an internal memo obtained by TechCrunch, Chime co-founder Chris Britt described that the move was one of many that would help the company thrive “regardless of market conditions.” In the memo, Britt said that he and co-founder Ryan King are re-calibrating marketing spend, decreasing the number of contractors, adjusting workspace needs and renegotiating vendor contractors. “The changes will help, but we also need to adjust the size of our organization as we increase our focus and forge our path to profitability,” Britt wrote in the memo. Chime was notoriously one of the first neobanks to hit EBITDA profitability, a milestone it shared Its latest Since its 2012 inception, Chime has raised , according to Crunchbase. Sure enough, the co-founder added that the startup is “well-capitalized” but the financial market uncertainty was a factor in these changes. A spokesperson for Chime reiterated this perspective, adding over email that “as we look at current market dynamics, we are adjusting our organization to be fully aligned with our company priorities. As a result, we are eliminating some positions, while still hiring to select others.” The spokesperson did not immediately respond to other questions regarding severance details, the impact on C-level executives and salaries, as well as the profitability of the company. The company’s memo, along with the fact that Chime has paused its public debut plans, suggests that growth trends may have changed – have been similarly dealing with. Most recently, corporate spending startup , also citing the challenging macroeconomic environment. Still, broadly speaking, the tide is somewhat shifting on the cadence of tech layoffs. According to layoffs.fyi, nearly 70% of people who have been laid off this year lost their jobs during May, June, July and August. Since the , staff cuts have decreased. September had half the number of layoff events than August, and in October, new layoff events slowed while people impacted slightly inched upward from August. While November is off to a not-so-great start, considering Chime’s cuts and , the data brings some hope. |
Opendoor lays off about 550 employees, or 18% of its workforce | Mary Ann Azevedo | 2,022 | 11 | 2 | Opendoor is letting go of about 550 people, or 18% of the company, across all functions, its co-founder and CEO Eric Wu announced in today. The real estate technology company is one of many property technology (proptech) companies that have had to lay off workers in 2022. Online mortgage lender has had multiple rounds of layoffs and in June, Redfin and Compass . Skyrocketing mortgage interest rates and inflation are largely to blame for the decreased demand that has led to slowdowns in business at such companies. For his part, Opendoor’s Wu said his company was navigating “one of the most challenging real estate markets in 40 years.” In his blog post, the executive said that his company over the past two quarters had worked to reduce its operating expenses. He wrote: “Prior to today, we scaled back our capacity by over 830 positions — primarily by reducing third party resourcing — and we eliminated millions of fixed expenses. We did not make the decision to downsize the team today lightly but did so to ensure we can accomplish our mission for years to come.” Impacted employees will receive 10 weeks of severance pay, with an additional two weeks of pay for every full year beyond two years of tenure. All current healthcare benefits will remain active for the rest of the month, then Opendoor will pay for three months of health insurance. The company also plans to offer “job transition support” and launch an opt-in talent directory to help laid-off team members “connect with new opportunities.” Opendoor went public in late December 2020 after completing its with the SPAC Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings II, headed by investor Chamath Palihapitiya. The eight-year-old company closed its first day of trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange at $31.25, “well above the $10 share price at which Social Capital sold shares in an April [2020] initial public offering,” per and reporting. At the time of writing today, at $2.48, only slightly higher than the company’s 52-week low of $2.26. This means that the company is valued at just $1.56 billion, down from a valuation of $8 billion in 2021. When it comes to venture capital, Opendoor last raised $300 million at in March of 2019. Over time, it has raised about $1.3 billion in equity funding and nearly $3 billion in debt financing to finance its home purchases. Investors in the company include General Atlantic, the SoftBank Vision Fund, NEA, Norwest Venture Partners, GV, GGV Capital, Access Technology Ventures, SV Angel and Fifth Wall Ventures, along with others. Founders include Eric Wu and Founders Fund general partner Keith Rabois. |
Gmail to add a new package tracking feature ahead of holiday shopping season | Sarah Perez | 2,022 | 11 | 2 | Google today a small but useful update to Gmail that will allow users to soon be able to track their upcoming package deliveries directly from their inbox. The feature works by looking for emails that include tracking numbers, then using that information to determine the order’s expected delivery date and flagging this for you right in your inbox. That means when you’re scanning through your email list in Gmail, you won’t have to click on your order confirmation emails to see when your package is due to arrive. Instead, this information will be displayed just below the email sender’s name and subject line in the inbox in a small green label. You’ll notice a little truck icon followed by text indicating the order’s status, followed by the delivery date. This label will be updated as the order progresses, with information like “label created,” the arrival date or the delivery date, Google says. Google This feature will save online shoppers a lot of extra steps as typically, consumers have to open their order confirmation emails and then either copy and paste the tracking information into the appropriate carriers’ system, into Google, or click on a provided link to begin tracking the order, for example. Now, all they’ll need to do is look at their Gmail inbox. However, if you do click to open the order confirmation email, it will now include a summary card at the top that offers a bit more detail, including a timeline with checkmarks that shows the current order status — order placed, shipped or delivered — and a link that takes you to the order detail page. Google says the new feature will be available in the U.S. across “most major” shipping carriers in the coming weeks. The expectation is that this feature will arrive ahead of the holiday shopping season when it would be most useful. To enable package tracking, Gmail will first ask users if they want to opt-in to receive tracking updates in a pop-up at the top of the inbox. Users will click “Allow”or “Now now,” depending on their preference. This can also be enabled in Gmail’s settings. Google The system, of course, involves having your email scanned for tracking information, but this is automated — humans aren’t reading your email. Still, some may view this a potential privacy concern, particularly if Gmail chooses to use this data to help inform its and first-party shopping features. The new addition could impact the adoption of popular third-party package tracking apps including Parcel, Route, AfterShip and Shopify’s Shop app — though the latter offers more functionality beyond tracking, like the ability to browse and buy from Shopify merchants. Later, Google says it will expand the package tracking feature to proactively update the label when a package is delayed and bring that email to the top of users’ inboxes to make sure they’re aware. |
HBO series ‘The Last of Us’ premieres this January | Lauren Forristal | 2,022 | 11 | 2 | “ ” HBO’s upcoming original series, gets an official release date of January 15, 2023, WarnerMedia today. Based on the popular video game, the series will make its debut on HBO at 9:00 p.m. ET and then stream in 4K on HBO Max. It appears HBO Max is looking to compete with streaming giant Netflix, which has adapted many video game franchises into series such as “Arcane,” “Resident Evil” and “Witcher,” among others. While Warner Bros. Discovery last a total of 92.1 million subscribers across HBO, HBO Max and Discovery+, the company still lags behind Netflix’s whopping . “The Last of Us” is likely HBO Max’s chance to pull in fans of the game to subscribe to the streaming service. The video game launched in 2013 and were sold across PlayStation 3 and PS4 users in 2018. The series will feature a ton of familiar characters from the game, such as Joel, who’s played by Pedro Pascal, and Ellie played by Bella Ramsey, along with Tommy (Gabriel Luna), Tess orv), Sarah (Nico Parker), Frank (Murray Bartlett), Bill (Nick Offerman), Kathleen (Melanie Lynskey), Florence (Elaine Miles), Riley (Storm Reid), Perry (Jeffrey Pierce), Henry (Lamar Johnson), Marlon (Graham Greene) and more. |
Warner Bros. Discovery and HBO announce plans for ‘Game of Thrones’ NFTs | Lauren Forristal | 2,022 | 11 | 2 | Nifty’s the official sale of “Game of Thrones” NFTs. Starting today, customers can buy the Series 1 Hero Box for $150. The box comes with one “Hero” avatar or a rare “Legendary Hero,” nine resource cards that can be used to build a realm, and three story cards, which feature scenes, characters and locations from the TV series. The hero avatars available in the first series are characters from The North, such as White Walkers, The Night’s Watch, Commoners, Nobles, Maesters and Free Folk. The legendary heroes are The Night King, Wun Wun and Mance Rayder. HBO/Nifty’s “Game of Thrones” NFTs are coming this winter. Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) and HBO have with NFT platform to launch digital-collectible non-fungible tokens based on the hit series. The NFT experience, “Game of Thrones: Build Your Realm,” will allow fans to build a realm by collecting customizable avatars inspired by characters from the series as well as assorted packs with various collectibles like “equipable” items to “strengthen” their avatars such as weapons, companions and gear, “Throughout the program, varying themed packs will also be available,” WBD noted in its announcement. Other NFTs will include special moments from the series, “Game of Thrones” characters and locations. The experience will also have “thematic activities [and] on-site engagement” for fans to enjoy, WBD said. “Our goal, as always, with the fans, is to create new ways for them to interact with the stories and characters they love,” Josh Hackbarth, head of NFT Commercial Development for Warner Bros Discovery, said in a statement. “We’re excited to expand the ‘Game of Thrones’ fandom and franchise with this unique digital collectible program that’ll engage fans on a deeper level, allowing them to immerse into the world of Westeros, and enhance the overall fan experience.” WBD is likely looking to generate additional revenue with the launch of “Game of Thrones” NFTs, arguably one of HBO’s most popular franchises. The company is in need of money after experiencing a net loss of $3.4 million . Plus, WBD has a debt load of about $53 billion. The company will report its Q3 results tomorrow, November 3. “Every so often, a film or television series comes along that pushes the boundaries of its genre so far it forever changes the creative landscape, becoming a part of our collective cultural identity. ‘Game of Thrones’ is that series for this generation,” added Jeff Marsilio, CEO and co-founder of Nifty’s. “Nifty’s is thrilled to be working alongside Warner Bros. Discovery Global Consumer Products to keep pushing the bounds of creativity and imagination through a new kind of digital collectible that will allow fans of the franchise to connect in ways they never have before.” Also, 3D-content company Daz 3D will collaborate with the companies on the design, development and production of the NFT experience. This isn’t the first time the media company has collaborated with Nifty’s, as it launched in June. Separately, WBD also partnered with on various NFT drops. And last month, Warner Bros. partnered with blockchain company Eluvio to release , with NFT versions of the film. |
Fairmat raises $35M to recycle carbon fiber composite into a new material | Romain Dillet | 2,022 | 11 | 20 | closed a $35 million Series A funding round (€34 million) last month. It wants to turn carbon fiber composite that is no longer in use into a new material that can be used in new products. Temasek and CNP (Compagnie Nationale à Portefeuille) are leading the round, with Pictet Group, Singular, the Friedkin Group International and others also participating. Overall, the company has raised $45.5 million (€44 million) since its inception. The idea behind Fairmat is quite simple. Some high-tech materials like carbon fiber composites have great properties. These materials are light, flexible and resistant. That’s why you can find carbon fiber composites in wind turbines or aircrafts. When these industrial projects reach the end-of-life status, Fairmat comes in and picks up those elements with carbon fiber composites. The startup then creates a new kind of material that isn’t as sophisticated as carbon fiber composites but that can be quite useful. You won’t find Fairmat material in wind turbines, but you may buy objects that you use in your everyday life that are made with this new kind of material. This is called Fairmat Quest and it could be 10 times less expensive than new composites and twice as light as aluminum. And the company has made some great progress since my on Fairmat. It has signed partnerships with 15 industrial companies to collect their carbon fiber waste, including Hexcel, Tarmac Aerosave, Siemens Gamesa, Dassault Aviation and MerConcept. It’s a highly concentrated market, as those 15 companies represent more than 35% of carbon fiber composite waste in Europe. On the other end of the market, some manufacturing companies are already working on prototypes with Fairmat’s new material. While the startup can’t disclose the names behind its 30 contracts, you will soon find sporting goods, audio products and furniture made with Fairmat Quest. With today’s funding round, the company plans to progressively improve the processing capacity of its automated sorting plant. Eventually, 100 robots will handle up to 3,500 metric tons of scrap per year. In 2023, Fairmat also plans to expand to the U.S. There are currently 80 people working for the company. By 2025, Fairmat hopes that it will work with 400 people. Repurposed materials have a much lower carbon footprint than virgin material, and that’s the main reason why Fairmat will easily find customers in the coming years. As soon as carbon accounting rules become widespread, manufacturers will be looking at new materials like Fairmat Quest to lower the overall impact of their production. |
TSMC to produce 3-nanometer chips at its Arizona factory | Catherine Shu | 2,022 | 11 | 20 | TSMC founder Morris Chang said today that the semiconductor giant and Apple supplier will build 3-nanometer chips at its factory in Arizona, though final plans are not ready yet. The factory is currently under construction, with . During a press conference in Taipei, Chang said “three-nanometer, TSMC right now has a plan, but it has not been completely finalized,” . “It has almost been finalized— in the same Arizona site, phase two. Five-nanometer is phase one, 3-nanometer is phase two.” On its , TSMC says its 3-nanometer tech, called N3, will be a full node stride from its 5-nanometer technology and will offer up to 70% logic density gain, up to 15% speed improvement at the same power, and up to 30% power reduction at the same speed when compared to its predecessor. It is targeting volume technology in the second half of this year. The world’s largest foundry, TSMC of the world’s most advanced chips. The dominance of Taiwan’s semiconductor companies (TSMC’s peers include Foxconn) is one of its major advantages against China, which considers Taiwan a province, but as worldwide chip shortages stymie the production of electronics, it also . TSMC’s Arizona factory, along with a , is part of the Biden administration’s strategy to bolster U.S. chipmaking. TSMC is also building a factory in Japan and is in talks with the German government to build another one in that country. Other foundries working on 3-nanometer chips include Samsung Electronics, which in June, ahead of TSMC. The South Korean tech giant is producing 3-nanometer chips at its Hwaseong and Pyeongtaek semiconductor facilities. Samsung said last year it would invest 171 trillion KRW ($132 billion) in its logic chip and foundry business by 2030, and it is also building a semiconductor plant in Texas. |
Bob Iger is returning to head Disney as Bob Chapek steps down | Ivan Mehta | 2,022 | 11 | 20 | The Walt Disney Co. said today that Bob Iger is returning to head the company as Bob Chapek is stepping down from the CEO post. Iger, who , is set to take command immediately. The company said that he will serve as the CEO for two years. “We thank Bob Chapek for his service to Disney over his long career, including navigating the company through the unprecedented challenges of the pandemic. The Board has concluded that as Disney embarks on an increasingly complex period of industry transformation, Bob Iger is uniquely situated to lead the Company through this pivotal period,” Chairman of the Board Susan Arnold said in a letter. “Mr. Iger has the deep respect of Disney’s senior leadership team, most of whom he worked closely with until his departure as executive chairman 11 months ago, and he is greatly admired by Disney employees worldwide — all of which will allow for a seamless transition of leadership.” The company said that there is no change in the board and Arnold will continue to serve as a chairperson. Iger served as Disney’s CEO from 2005 to 2020 for 15 years before and hand over the reins to Chapek. Notably, Chapek signed . On his return, Iger said that he was optimistic about Disney’s future and was thrilled to return to the company. “Disney and its incomparable brands and franchises hold a special place in the hearts of so many people around the globe — most especially in the hearts of our employees, whose dedication to this company and its mission is an inspiration. I am deeply honored to be asked to again lead this remarkable team, with a clear mission focused on creative excellence to inspire generations through unrivaled, bold storytelling,” he said in a statement. In his previous stint, Iger oversaw major acquisitions like Pixar, , and . The returning CEO also sent an email to the Disney staff, including cast members, saying they’ll hear more about this move from the leadership “tomorrow and in coming weeks.” Email from Bob Iger to Disney staff, 7:19 p.m. — The Ankler (@TheAnkler) Chapek’s 11-month tenure hadn’t been great for the company, as its stock value has dropped by more than 40% at the time of writing. He was for not taking an active stance to oppose Florida’s anti-gay bill. Under his management, the company and cricket tournament. The company registered a revenue of $20.2 billion in Q3 2022 and missed . At that time, Disney’s CFO Christine McCarthy said that the entertainment company aims to achieve profitability by fiscal year 2024. The company adjusted its target of global Disney+ subscribers by 2024 from . |
What to expect from crypto regulation in the wake of the FTX scandal | Darrell Etherington | 2,022 | 11 | 20 | At our TC Sessions: Crypto event last week in Miami, I sat down with Bitwise Asset Management General Counsel and Chief Compliance Officer Katherine Dowling, Perkins Coie Partner Sarah Shtylman and Paradigm Policy Director Justin Slaughter to talk about the crypto regulation landscape, with a specific focus on the U.S. What we didn’t know heading into the panel was just how much would change about the industry owing to the fallout from FTX’s collapse the week prior. Slaughter in particular felt the impacts of the FTX fiasco firsthand: Paradigm wrote down a $278 million investment in the exchange following its declaration of bankruptcy. We talked about that up front, but mostly as a jumping-off point to discuss the knock-on effects for the state of regulation, which was itself already a contentious mess, particularly when it comes to U.S. lawmakers and the various federal regulators involved in the market, including the SEC and the CFTC. The key takeaways that all three panelists essentially agreed upon is that the benefit of the FTX situation is that there’s now more impetus than ever to arrive at some kind of regulatory framework specific to crypto in the U.S., and that there’s now ample demand from the industry side, as well as an opportunity to further educate regulators since they’re looking for illumination coming out of the FTX collapse. On the incentive side, there’s harm reduction, since regulators and lawmakers don’t want more FTX scenarios to continue to unfold, as well as FOMO on the business being done abroad in markets where they’ve raced ahead to encourage crypto adoption. Check out the full panel above for much more. |
The era of oil-driven foreign policy is over. Welcome to decarbonization diplomacy | Tim De Chant | 2,022 | 11 | 20 | 20th century, oil dominated foreign policy. Countries spent the better part of the century scrambling to secure supply. Sometimes it happened through negotiations and diplomacy. All too often it resulted in the overthrow of governments or outright invasions. But with fossil fuels on the wane, we’re starting to get a glimpse of foreign relations in the 21st century, and it seems like investment will be the defining characteristic. Decarbonization diplomacy is looking a lot less violent than what preceded it. It took a while to get to this point — probably too long — but the dam appears to be breaking. |
Einride founder on building an underlying business to support future tech goals | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 11 | 20 | was founded in 2016 with a mission to electrify freight transport. Today, that means designing electric trucks and an underlying operating system to help overland shippers make the transition to electric. In the future, it will mean deploying electric autonomous freight — more specifically, Einride’s autonomous pods, which are purpose-built for self-driving and can’t accommodate human drivers. founder and CEO Robert Falck told TechCrunch a year ago that he felt a to create a greener mode of freight transport after spending years building heavy-duty diesel trucks at Volvo GTO Powertrain. On top of that, he saw the need to eventually automate the role of long-haul trucking. Falck, a serial entrepreneur, decided against the route many autonomous trucking companies have taken — doggedly pursuing self-driving technology, even if it meant putting sensors and software stacks on diesel vehicles. Rather, Falck chose a two-step process to bring Einride to market. The first involves working with OEM partners to build electric trucks and partnering with shippers to deploy them and earn revenue. That revenue then goes back into the business for the second step, which is the development of an autonomous system. By the time Einride is ready to go to market with its autonomous pods, it will ideally already have a range of commercial shipping partners in its pipeline. Einride’s current shipping clients across Sweden and the U.S. include Oatly, Bridgestone, Maersk and Beyond Meat. The company said it clears close to 20,000 shipments per day. Over the past few months, Einride has completed a of its electric, autonomous pod in Tennessee with GE Appliances, in partnership with home appliance giant Electrolux, announced plans to in Sweden and Los Angeles, and introduced its second-generation autonomous pod. We sat down with Falck a year after our initial interview with him to talk about the challenges of reaching autonomy when connectivity on the roads is lacking, why the Big Tech crashes are actually healthy for the industry and what consolidation looks like for autonomous driving. |
How to stream the 2022 FIFA World Cup in the USA | Lauren Forristal | 2,022 | 11 | 20 | Fans across the globe will be tuning in to the most-watched sporting spectacle — — set to kick off on Sunday, November 20, with host nation Qatar facing off against Ecuador. expects worldwide to watch this year’s tournament. If you’re planning on streaming the 2022 World Cup, here’s how: U.S viewers can livestream all 64 matches on FOX and FS1. Live TV streaming services that carry FS1 and local FOX stations include Hulu Live TV, YouTube TV, DIRECTV STREAM, FuboTV, Sling TV and Vidgo. All games can also be streamed live and on-demand on the FOX Sports app. Fox-owned ad-supported streaming service, Tubi, will only have World Cup games on-demand — which will be available to stream on the platform once the matches are already done. For Spanish-speaking viewers, NBCUniversal’s streaming service Peacock will be the Spanish-language streaming home for all World Cup matches. The first 12 games are free to all subscribers; the remaining 52 matches will only be available for Peacock Premium subscribers. Also, 56 matches will be simulcast on Telemundo, and eight games will be simulcast on Universo. The 2022 FIFA World Cup is available to be broadcast in 4K in the Fox Sports and Fox Now apps. Subscribers of Sling TV, Hulu Live TV, FuboTV, DIRECTV STREAM and YouTube TV can watch the World Cup in 4K. Tubi will also offer 4K viewing. Fire TVs, Android TVs, Apple TVs and Roku devices are . Note that 4K through Fox isn’t available on the web or mobile. FIFA Group A Group B Group C Group D Group E Group F Group G Group H Round of 16 Quarterfinal (QF) Round Semifinal Round Championship Round |
Hyundai launches home charging ecosystem as part of EV push | Abigail Bassett | 2,022 | 11 | 20 | Hyundai announced this week at the LA Auto Show a new way for its customers to charge at home as part of the company’s efforts to woo a new group of EV buyers. Hyundai Home, the automaker calls it, incorporates solar panels, energy storage and EV charging for Hyundai owners. Hyundai announced a partnership with Electrum, a solar panel, home battery and heat pump installer, which will help customers in 16 states find the right power installers and systems for their EV charging needs. Prior to this week’s announcement, dealers were helping customers get in touch with local installers and power suppliers in order to get charging and storage set up for their new Hyundai EVs like the Ioniq 5, according to Ian Tupper, the senior group manager of strategic environmental partnerships at Hyundai. “With Hyundai Home, we’re really trying to democratize, not only EV charging and being able to adopt an electric vehicle, but the entire ecosystem around it. We want to make it easy for customers to go solar to get energy storage and to eventually use all those systems together to reduce their energy bill,” Tupper told TechCrunch during an interview at the LA Auto Show. As the U.S. increasingly makes a push to reduce carbon emissions, especially those from tailpipes (aka fossil-fueled powered vehicles), states like California have banned the sale of new gasoline vehicles by 2035. That means that an increasing number of Americans are going to be looking at EVs, PHEVs and hybrids for their next new car purchase. Yet, rentals make up roughly one-third of American housing, according to the U.S. Census and most of that housing stock is older, which means that in order to get access to at-home charging, landlords will have to be willing to invest to upgrade panels and provide charging access in multifamily garages. The average cost to upgrade a single family home’s electrical panel to handle charging a vehicle at home, can run , or more. Add that into the high price of battery-electric, hybrid and plug-in electric vehicles and many people wont be able to afford or access home charging, especially those who live in multifamily buildings without access to home charging. That’s something that Tupper says Hyundai is taking into consideration, but he wasn’t able to share any concrete details around future plans. “If we want to achieve mass adoption, we need to solve that problem for renters and so we’re attacking it in a couple of different ways. First through our partnership with Electrify America. We’re working with them to incentivize to construction of as much charging infrastructure as possible and we’re trying to give it to customers for free,” Tupper told TechCrunch. “We’re taking a strategic partnership approach and trying to identify the players right to offer, really a smattering of solutions. If there’s a city where, you know, we can help support the production or the development of charging hub, great. But if there’s a way for us to even incentivize low-power AC charging. We’re going to take a look at that as well.” Tupper says that Hyundai is working with its partners like Electrum to bring more charging and power storage options to more customers in other states outside of the 16 that Electrum currently services, too. “We’re just starting out,” Tupper said, “Our guiding principles are that customers not only get the right products, but they also get the right products at the right price. Electrum helps us help the customer find the right solution on the marketplace, that way we’re actually able to deliver, usually a substantially better deal than something that they would normally just get by going to a local provider.” |
The exodus at Twitter may have been the plan all along, maybe? | Connie Loizos | 2,022 | 11 | 18 | When last updated his LinkedIn profile, he listed his role as “Layoff Survivor” at Twitter. Yet Clowes, a senior software engineer who joined the company in the spring of 2020, is now gone, too. He quit yesterday, dispassionately explaining on Twitter that he decided to leave not to hobble Twitter or because he hates its new owner, Elon Musk, but simply because he no longer had any incentive to stay. It now appears that a significant percentage of Clowes’s colleagues felt the same way. While they weren’t part of the of Twitter employees who lost their jobs at the end of October in an unprecedented layoff at the social media outfit, as its 3,700 remaining staffers, they were presented with an ultimatum this week by Musk. The he gave them: commit to a new “extremely hardcore” Twitter, “working long hours at high intensity,” or leave the company with three months of severance pay. A , Musk was clearly hoping that some percentage of Twitter’s remaining employees — who are expensive and who he had no say in hiring — would opt to leave the company. In fact, Musk reportedly told investors he might slash before taking over the company, so whether he’s in shock, having cut into the muscle of the company, or he’s celebrating the success of his enigmatic plan is only something Musk and his inner circle knows. Certainly, the numbers are stunning to nearly everyone else. Fortune earlier today that based on its sources’ internal estimates, at least 1,200 full-time employees just handed in their figurative key cards. Clowes, in a long series of about his own departure, suggests the number could be even higher. Talking about his own “org,” he writes that “85%+” of his colleagues were laid off in October and that a stunning “80%” of those who remained opted out yesterday. What strikes us, reading Clowes’s explanation about why he left, isn’t that so many people walked out with him. It’s almost more astonishing that 100% of employees didn’t leave, raising questions about who Musk thought would stick around. If he wanted only those employees with no choice but to kill themselves for now, that seems . . . like a flawed business strategy. Otherwise, if Musk was hoping to hold onto anyone else, one assumes a carrot would have been offered. Instead, as Clowes wrote yesterday, there were only sticks and lots of them. Clowes wrote, for example, that he left because he “no longer knew what I was staying for. Previously I was staying for the people, the vision, and of course the money (lets all be honest). All of those were radically changed or uncertain.” Clowes left because had he stayed he “would have been on-call constantly with little support for an indeterminate amount of time on several additional complex systems I had no experience in.” He left because he saw no upside to Musk’s brash management style, which Clowes suggests he could have tolerated longer if he wasn’t operating wholly in the dark. Instead, by his telling, Musk still hasn’t shared a vision for the platform with employees. “No five-year plan like at Tesla,” wrote Clowes. “Nothing more than what anyone can see on Twitter. It allegedly is coming for those who stayed, but the ask was blind faith and required signing away the severance offer before seeing it. Pure loyalty test.” There has been so little communication from the top that rumors and speculation have run rampant, Clowes suggested. Among staffers’ apparent concerns: that not only will Twitter become subscription based but that adult content could become a core component of its offerings. (Underscoring how little insiders have been told, Clowes went on to reference a about a story about Musk’s reported discussions with employees about monetizing adult content on Twitter.) Last, wrote Clowes, there was “no retention plan” for those who stayed and “no clear upside for sticking it through the storm on the horizon. Just ‘trust us’ style verbal promises.” Indeed, by yesterday, Clowes was living in a fairly bleak work world, one in which his “friends are gone, the vision is murky, there is a storm coming and no financial upside,” he wrote. So “[w]hat would you do?” he continued. “Would you sacrifice time with your kids over the holidays for vague assurances and the opportunity to make a rich person richer or would you take the out?” You would take the out, which Musk surely expected. Right? One would think? We may never know for certain and it probably doesn’t matter. The bigger question now is whether Musk can build back with whoever is left — before the . |
Drive Capital’s investors reach a fork in the road | Connie Loizos | 2,022 | 11 | 18 | Drive Capital was founded by two former Sequoia Capital Partners looking to start anew in the Midwest. But investors in the Columbus, Ohio-based firm have had a bumpy ride of late, and according to our sources, they aren’t enjoying it. It’s a dramatic turn for Drive, which announced $1 billion in capital commitments back in June, a healthy amount for a 10-year-old firm whose mission it is to invest nearly everywhere in the U.S. outside of Silicon Valley. In fact, in June, the firm — co-founded by veteran VCs Mark Kvamme and Chris Olsen — seemed to be riding high, with a couple of apparent wins in its portfolio and assets under management that had grown to more than $2 billion. Yet dating back to September — soon after we interviewed Olsen — we heard rumblings about a rift, along with separate plans that Kvamme was making. Then came the announcement last month that the team was splitting up. At first, the story was that Kvamme, who logged more than twice as many years at Sequoia than Olsen, was transitioning to “partner emeritus” because, as he told the regional outlet , 10 years and four funding cycles was longer than he originally planned to lead Drive Capital. (This came as news to Drive’s investors.) This week, the other shoe dropped. reported that Kvamme, who , is not zipping off to semi-retirement but instead talking with potential backers about a new fund, the Ohio Fund, which will apparently invest in multiple asset classes, including other funds, public stocks, private companies in Ohio and infrastructure. The idea is to “focus on the future economic vitality of Ohio,” said an unnamed source to the outlet. Olsen now says that he’s surprised by this development. We obtained a letter that Drive sent out to its limited partners tonight that reads: Dear Limited Partner: This week an article was published indicating that our Partner Emeritus Mark Kvamme is launching a new investment fund. All of us at Drive were surprised by this news, as we are sure you were too. While we will not send you a note each time a new article about Mark is published, we feel that in the spirit of being a good partner, it’s appropriate to provide you with a transparent update about this situation and our relationship with Mark. After the article was published we spoke with Mark and learned that the prospect of him raising a new fund was leaked to a journalist from an unknown source. According to Mark, he has not yet determined what he is going to do next. Raising a new type of fund is something he is considering, along with other options in public service and personal endeavors. We have a formal separation agreement with Mark that prevents him from starting a competitive firm or fund to Drive. Please know that this was a heavily negotiated agreement to ensure that it substantially protects Drive, our Limited Partners’ interests, and everything we are building toward at Drive. Again, we do not intend to communicate with you each time a new article is written about Mark, but in this instance, we thought it appropriate to provide clarification. Should you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out [contact information redacted by TechCrunch]. Sincerely,
The Drive Team Olsen declined to comment for this story; we reached out to Kvamme and did not receive a response. But it’s complicated, to say the least. According to our sources, part of the split traces to a relationship between Olsen and Yasmine Lacaillade, who was Drive’s COO for nearly seven years before leaving the firm in April to launch her own investment outfit. Asked about this, a Drive spokesman downplayed any tensions that may have arisen from a romantic relationship between the two, writing: “Yes you heard right in that Chris and Yas are in a relationship. That’s been public knowledge for some time. No comments beyond that.” Like most venture outfits right now, Drive also finds its portfolio in rougher shape than a year or two ago. One of Drive’s biggest exits to date has been that of Root Insurance, a now seven-year-old, Columbus, Ohio-based insurance company that specializes in automotive coverage and that staged a traditional IPO in . Though the shares performed initially, they’ve tanked since, currently priced at roughly $7 each after a reverse stock split, down from $486 per share the day the company went public. Olsen stepped off the board in November of last year. The other big star of Drive’s portfolio currently — Olive AI — is trying to overcome its own challenges. The Columbus-based healthcare automation startup, founded in 2012, has long framed its extensive history of pivots (more than 30 to date) as an inspirational story of trying, then trying again. Olive was rewarded by investors for its willingness to shift gears, too. It has raised a staggering $902 million over the years and said last year that it was valued at . But the outfit was never all that it appeared, according to a series of , and by September, the wheels were fast loosening. Most notably, the company’s chief financial officer and chief product officer were abruptly fired, following out the door numerous C-level executives who also left this fall, including its president, a senior director of operations, its EVP of operations and its SVP of payer product strategy. Olive AI has since said it will sell a portion of its products and services to Rotera, a company built out of Olive’s own venture studio. Limited partners aren’t happy about these collective developments, but as far as we’re aware, they have not talked about taking action and it seems unlikely that they will. First, it’s exceedingly rare for limited partners to organize against a venture firm to which they’ve committed capital and only slightly less rare for VCs to extend LPs the courtesy of scaling back their commitments. They might also expect that Olsen will land on his feet. He does have 16 years of venture investing experience and a staff of roughly 20 at Drive to support him. Further, there isn’t much interest in creating headaches for Kvamme, who borders on VC royalty. (His father was a partner at Kleiner Perkins; his first wife is the daughter of another famed VC, former Sequoia Capital partner Pierre Lamond.) Kvamme is very connected in Ohio, after being lured there originally by his longtime friend John Kasich to take an economic development job. He may also have political aspirations of his own. Indeed, one regional investor recently that Kvamme may be launching a fund meant to bolster Ohio’s economy as groundwork for a future campaign. It’s a playbook that’s been used effectively before. VC and author JD Vance set up a venture firm in Cincinnati called Narya in late 2019 before announcing his bid for Senate roughly 1.5 years later. In late September, according to Cleveland.com, Kvamme a fundraiser for Vance, who won his race earlier this month. |
The backlog of IPOs in fintech keeps growing as valuations continue their retreat, report says | Kyle Wiggers | 2,022 | 11 | 20 | Hey, hey, Mary Ann here, feeling all sorry for myself because I have COVID for the first time when I should be grateful that it took so long for me to get it, right? Thankfully you can’t catch my germs through a computer or phone screen. I’ll be okay but as a result…you’re stuck with another slightly abbreviated version of this newsletter! Huge credit to, and gratitude for, TechCrunch’s Kyle Wiggers, who once again saved the day by writing up all the blurbs (and there were many to cover) here. Kyle, you’re the best. Since Thanksgiving is less than a week away, I’ll take this opportunity to say how truly thankful I am to be given the trust and confidence to draft this newsletter and for you all to take the time to read and share it. I do not take this lightly because without your support, I would not be doing this. I know there are a ton of fintech-focused newsletters out there, so it really does mean the world. Okay, now that I’m done with the cringe part of this newsletter (to quote my children), let’s go straight to the news. John Anderson, head of payments / Plaid announced it has , a former Meta exec, to serve as its first head of payments. The move comes as the fintech startup leans into payments, both in terms of facilitating them itself and aiming to help others do so better and faster. Our first thought is that it was taking another swing at Stripe, but interestingly the two remain partners — for now. Plaid also announced that its is out of beta with early users such as Robinhood, Webull and Uphold. It claims that by using Signal, companies can “unlock instant ACH.” In contrast to crypto, some segments of the lending market appear to be robust — at least presently. , the Warren Buffett–backed Brazilian banking firm that offers credit cards and personal loans and that is more commonly known as Nubank, in Q3 revenue on Monday. While publicly traded Nu has seen its U.S. shares lose over half their value this year, its customer base has grown to over 70 million following a dramatically expanded footprint in Mexico. Nu’s total revenue in Q3 reached $1.3 billion, up 171%, while profit climbed to $427 million, up 90%. Five years ago, Revolut, the British fintech company with an expanding portfolio of banking services, made the when it reached over a million customers across Europe. That seems quaint now; this week, 25 million customers globally as the firm prepares to expand into new markets, including India, Mexico, Brazil and New Zealand. Revolut was last valued at $33 billion, but as of last year at least, the company wasn’t yet profitable; Revolut reported a £167 million (~$197.94 million) net loss in 2021, its largest ever. Are valuations retreating and the backlog of IPOs growing in fintech, as chatter across the Twitter-verse implies? says yes on both counts in its State of Fintech out this week. According to the firm, the steepest declines in valuation have occurred for late-stage fintech companies; “enterprise value” to “next 12 months” revenue multiples for public fintechs have dipped 55% since the market peaked in early January. Meanwhile, since the end of 2021, the number of U.S. fintech unicorns has grown by 38% to 159 — standing at a staggering $656 billion in aggregate valuation, highlighting the massive backlog looking to exit. According to a by the National Institute of Mental Health, 72% of startup founders are affected by mental health issues. Stepping out of its lane somewhat, fintech giant launched a program, Catharsis, which is designed to provide resources dedicated to mental health. Brex says it’ll facilitate access to therapists via a partnership with as well as extend a discount on the sleep-tracking . Seems like a worthwhile cause, but part of us wonders whether the effort is intended to distract from Brex’s away from supporting small businesses. Charge cards are big business. to Research and Markets, the segment could be worth over $2 billion by 2026, growing from $1.96 billion this year. That’s probably why banking-as-a-service startup is investing in it — the company on Tuesday a service that’ll allow customers to build custom charge cards for their own end users. Unit handles nearly all aspects of the back end, including card printing, compliance and transaction tracking. In this way, it’s a different approach than corporate card issuers Brex and Ramp, Unit CEO Itai Damti argues, which are strictly business-to-business — Unit sees its offering as more “business-to-business-to-consumer.” If you’re itching for reading material on the economic woes in the tech sector, Ukraine-based fintech investor wrote an excellent piece for TC+ on what founders can do to help their companies prosper in times of crises. Among other steps, he suggests that founders double down on developing and proving the quality of their products, manage risk and look for ways to shore up their company’s ranks with high-performing talent. Just over a year ago, — the company formerly known as TransferWise — went on the London market. Now, in search of new growth avenues, Wise is an expanded partnership with up-and-coming remote hiring startup to enable companies to pay employees faster (ostensibly). Wise and Deel’s new feature lets customers send funds via Deel using just an email address, opening up new currencies in Deel’s existing payments infrastructure. To take advantage, Deel customers simply need to open an account with Wise and connect it to the Deel platform. In another for TC+, fintech consultant lays out four moves he believes fintech firms must make to set themselves up for success over the coming months. He urges startup founders to ensure their tech stacks support fintech’s cutting edge, and he warns of competition from traditional financial firms offering more of a “super app” experience with strong member benefits and perks. The fintechs that outperform the market will either specialize in specific services or embrace a strategy to build compelling new products and perks, Easterbrook says. Despite being the world’s largest prepaid debit card company by market cap, usually flies under the radar. But the firm has faced challenges in recent months, disclosing that it’s in a dispute with Uber — one of its contract customers — and that “several” of its banking-as-a-service clients declined to renew their contracts this summer. In a aimed at righting the ship, Green Dot named a new CFO, COO and chief revenue officer this week and said it was focusing on tech modernization, including a move to a cloud-based core banking platform and card management system. Fintech startup is with and on a new card aimed at musicians and content creators (think TikTok influencers). on a new card aimed at musicians and content creators (think TikTok influencers). How does one build a card for creators, you might ask? Well, in Bump’s case, they do away with monthly fees and credit checks, factoring in things like a customer’s web3 assets (e.g., cryptocurrencies, NFTs) when determining credit limits. There’s plenty of other cards out there that don’t require a credit check, and at least one startup, , is attempting to create a system of web3 “credit scores.” But Bump’s offering is intriguing nonetheless. , a credit-building service that makes bill payments on your behalf and reports them to the major credit bureaus, is on the upswing. The company this week that it has surpassed $1 million in annual recurring revenue just five months after launch and that its customer base has grown 83% during the past month. The current economic climate likely has something to do with StellarFi’s success — U.S. inflation remains above 7% and short-term borrowing rates are at their highest level since January 2008. Co-founders Carolina Nucamendi and Brenna Curran / Waivr That’s it for now. I’m taking off next week and hope many of you are too! This newsletter will be back on December 4. Wishing you all the best, and a safe and healthy holiday week. xoxo, Mary Ann |
Daily Crunch: Nuro founders admit aggressive hiring ‘was a mistake’ in email to laid-off workers | Kyle Wiggers | 2,022 | 11 | 18 | Hey, folks. It’s Kyle, filling in for the Daily Crunch stalwarts Haje and Christine. I can’t match my esteemed colleagues’ pith and wit, but — unlike a certain megalomaniac billionaire who shan’t be named — I’ve promised to avoid any passive-aggressive language about committing to “hardcore” work culture. You won’t have to press a button to pledge your loyalty here, not to worry. While Twitter under Elon Musk remains the talk of the town (for all the wrong reasons), I’d like to draw attention for a moment to TechCrunch Sessions: Crypto, our event that took place in Miami this week — coincidentally as crypto exchange FTX and its tangled web of investments imploded. (We swear we didn’t plan that, honest.) Happened to be in attendance? Great! If not, we’ve got you covered with in-depth reviews of all the major sessions. Check them out . If you’d much prefer a break from the current news cycle — and I can’t blame you, really — please considering giving this from and a read. (You’ll need a subscription.) While touching on the FTX debacle, it takes a higher-level, detailed look at web3 and tries once and for all to answer the question: “Is web3 truly innovative or a simple repackaging of existing tech?” The answer might surprise you. Now, without further ado, here’s a roundup of this week’s happenings. — : For the masochists out there who signed up for Twitter within the past few weeks, you’ll have to wait before you can buy a subscription to , Twitter’s premium plan that adds — among other benefits — a blue “verified” checkmark. In a policy change this week reported by , Twitter said that new Twitter accounts will have to wait 90 days before they can buy Blue. It’s likely aimed at stemming the that have been increasingly pervading the platform in recent weeks. : Taylor Swift fans are none too pleased with Tickemaster’s handling of presales to the megastar’s upcoming Eras tour. Neither are regulators. Tennessee attorney general Jonathan Skrmetti is among those looking into whether Ticketmaster violated consumers’ rights and antitrust regulations by subjecting customers to technical glitches and hours-long wait times, with many ultimately unable to buy a ticket, reports. : Merch is coming to OnlyFans. writes about the platform’s new partnership with Spring, the e-commerce company formerly known as Teespring, which will allow OnlyFans creators to list physical products directly on their profile pages. OnlyFans isn’t taking a cut of the transactions, but, as Amanda notes, the feature incentivizes creators to integrate their businesses more deeply within the platform. Is Patreon still the hip place to be for content creators? Fanfix argues that it isn’t. A Gen Z–focused rival, Fanfix today SuperLink, a stand-alone “link-in-bio” tool for existing apps like Instagram and Snapchat that displays a creator’s Fanfix page. It might not be novel — Linktree has long dominated the link-in-bio space — but, as writes, one-year-old Fanfix sees SuperLink as a path to grow its base of more than 9.6 million users, which are reportedly earning millions of dollars on the platform. Certainly there’s ample opportunity for expansion. A recent Adobe found that the creator economy — that is, adults who participate in “creative activities” and post and promote their work online — has grown by over 165 million globally in the last two years. Turing our gazes skyward, India’s first private rocket, built by startup , made a successful liftoff this week. reports that the launch of the rocket — called Vikram-S — came after much anticipation and years-long work by Skyroot, which was founded by former Indian Space Research Organization scientists Pawan Kumar Chandana and Naga Bharath Daka. In other news of note: / Getty Images Getting a startup off the ground is hard work, so asking founders to prepare for an acquisition may sound just as silly as telling them to practice their Academy Award speech in the bathroom mirror. Still . . . if you’re ready to launch a startup, you must also be prepared to sell one. In an explainer for TC+, Peyton Carr, managing director of Keystone Global Partners, offers a framework for calculating taxation upon an exit and lays out the differences between short-term capital gains and long-term capital gains rates. “As a founder, you’ll need to plan for your personal tax situation to optimize the opportunity set that is presented to you.” Here’s a few more from the TC+ team: Kenya and Nigeria have both witnessed a proliferation of loan apps in recent years, many of which offer quick unsecured personal credit lines up to $500. The lack of regulations has attracted rogue operators, unfortunately — roughly by the office of the data protection commissioner over data breach complaints from users. Following the passage of new laws in the countries to clamp down on the industry, available on Android from the Google Play Store, reports . That’s welcome news, I’d say. On the subject of regulation, the FCC this week announced that it’ll for any plan they offer. As explains, the labels will show things like price and contract length, whether the price will change after a certain period and “typical” download and upload speeds as well as latency. Don’t expect labels to show up right away — the FCC’s rules must first be reviewed by the Office of Management and Budget and published in the federal register, at which point broadband providers will have six months to a full year to comply — but greater transparency in internet plans can only be a good thing, I’d argue — even if it comes slowly. Here’s the rest of this week’s happenings: |
null | Frederic Lardinois | 2,022 | 11 | 2 | null |
Google introduces Workspaces Spaces Chats conversations summaries | Devin Coldewey | 2,022 | 11 | 18 | Having trouble keeping up with the conversations in your Chats in your Workspace Spaces? Google feels your pain, and is “ conversation summaries in Google Chat for messages in Spaces.” Now your conversations in Spaces Chats will be summarized right in your Premium Workspace. The issue is, of course, that while Chats in Spaces are perfectly good for conversations, in larger Workspaces these Chats conversations can be difficult to keep up with unless you’re always checking your Spaces for new conversations in Chats. You know the drill — you log into your Workspace, click over to your Spaces, pull up the Chats, and your conversations are just too numerous and long-winded to catch up on! You can’t very well tell your Workspace Spaces conversationalists to leave off chatting in your Chats. Conversation is the very reason Chats exist, that’s why they call it Spaces! I mean Chats! Fortunately Google is bringing its expertise in communications apps to remedy this conversational crisis in your Workspace Spaces Chats. Starting soon, the messages in your conversations will be summarized right in your Chats, inside Spaces in Workspaces! Selected Premium Workspaces, anyway. Google put a summary in your Premium Workspace Spaces Chat conversations. Google You read that correctly. The Conversation Summary of the messages in your Workspace Spaces Chat will appear at the top of the Chats within Spaces, summarizing any unread chatter in the Chats conversation. Click on the summary of the Spaces Chats and you’ll jump straight to the conversation, even if it’s already visible and the Conversation summary has only summarized a few lines of the Chats conversation. If you use Spaces in your Workspace, and tend to have conversations in the Chats of those Spaces, Conversation Summary in Google Chat could be just the thing to keep those chatty Chats summarized. Sadly, this doesn’t appear to be available for Google Chat, though — which is to say Google Chat (that is, the newish one in your Gmail that , possibly), only Google Chat for Spaces in Workspaces, and (don’t forgot) select Premium Workspaces at that. Definitely not Meet messaging. So you probably don’t have access. But you might eventually, if Workspace Spaces Chats are still something that exist in six months. (I’m checking with Google on this.) Check out the technical details on how the Google AI team quickly and effectively summarizes conversations in Chats in Spaces in Workspaces . 🙂 |
Elizabeth Holmes sentenced to 11 years in prison for Theranos fraud | Amanda Silberling | 2,022 | 11 | 18 | Ten months after she was found guilty of fraud, the former youngest self-made female billionaire Elizabeth Holmes was sentenced to 11.25 years in prison, plus three years of supervised release. At her trial, she was found guilty on related to defrauding investors, but she was not found guilty of defrauding patients. The former founder and CEO of Theranos, Holmes could have faced up to 20 years in prison for each of the four counts. By comparison, former pharmaceutical executive was sentenced to seven years in prison for securities fraud, but was released after a bit more than four years. At the courthouse in San Jose, both sides of United States vs. Elizabeth Holmes presented their cases regarding whether Judge Edward Davila can consider Holmes’ “ ” of patients in sentencing. Davila rejected that proposal, since at the original trial, Holmes was only found guilty of defrauding investors. Regardless, it took over four hours before Holmes’ sentence was decided. Alex Schultz, father of whistleblower Tyler Schultz, spoke to the court, recounting how his son slept with a knife under his pillow when he suspected he was being followed by Theranos’ private investigators. Alex Schultz says Holmes hired an investigator to follow his son Tyler Schultz and he slept with a knife under his pillow b/c he thought someone was going to kill him. “My family home was desecrated by Elizabeth and the lawyers,” he says. — Dorothy Atkins (@doratki) Then, Holmes herself spoke. “I regret my failings with every cell of my body,” she . That was when Judge Davila delivered his decision. Holmes is expected to report to prison in . Currently, she is pregnant with her second child. Holmes founded Theranos in 2003 after dropping out of Stanford. She pitched investors and partners on technology that would revolutionize the healthcare system — instead of drawing blood intravenously and waiting days for test results, her technology would prick a tiny bit of blood and instantly conduct dozens of tests on it. Soon she was the CEO of a company with a $10 billion valuation, but it turned out that the . Theranos has been defunct since 2018, but Holmes’ criminal trial only began last fall after delays due to the pandemic and the birth of her first child. According to a letter from Holmes’ husband in a , she is now pregnant with a second child. The filing includes 282 pages of other letters from Holmes’ friends, family and business associates, ranging from childhood photos and drawings to notes from high-profile supporters like Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) and venture capitalist Tim Draper. “Although there is substantial popular outcry against Theranos and Elizabeth, the attitude in much of the venture world is very different,” Draper wrote. “Venture-backed startup companies often announce and deliver products to the market before they are ready.” The former CEO’s sentencing was further delayed because her lawyers tried to request a new trial, arguing that new evidence had come to light after former Theranos lab director Adam Rosendorff visited Holmes at home in an attempt to find closure. Rosendorff, who worked at Theranos between 2013 and 2014, testified for six days last year during Holmes’ four-month trial. With his highly technical knowledge of the inner workings of Theranos’ labs, Rosendorff’s testimony was key to the trial. In court, he that Holmes knew that Theranos’ technology produced inaccurate blood test results, yet she pushed for it to be used on patients anyway. After repeatedly raising his concerns about the faulty technology, he ultimately quit Theranos. Holmes’ lawyers alleged that when Rosendorff visited her home this summer, he expressed guilt that he made Theranos seem worse than it was in court. But Judge Edward Davila did not find merit to these allegations. Rosendorff affirmed once again that last year’s testimony was accurate. The former lab director clarified that he for Holmes’ child, who will grow up without a mother if she is sent to prison, but not for Holmes herself. Holmes’ former boyfriend and Theranos COO, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani awaits sentencing. He was convicted on in his own trial, where the jury found him guilty of defrauding both patients and investors. |
Booz Allen says former staffer downloaded employees’ personal data | Zack Whittaker | 2,022 | 11 | 18 | U.S. government contractor has disclosed that a former staffer downloaded potentially tens of thousands of employees’ personal information from the company’s internal network. The government and defense contractor said that one of its staffers, while still employed by the company, downloaded a report containing the personal information of “active employees as of March 29, 2021.” A archived in March 2021 said the company had 27,600 employees, many of whom are contracted to U.S. government, military and intelligence agencies and hold high-level security clearances. The notice said that the report downloaded by the employee contained, “your name, Social Security number, compensation, gender, race, ethnicity, date of birth, and U.S. Government security clearance eligibility and status as of March 29, 2021.” Booz Allen said the report containing the personal information was “improperly stored on an internal SharePoint site,” but did not say what circumstances led to the discovery of the data, only that it “recently learned” of the staffer’s activity. The , filed with the California attorney general’s office this week, said the employee obtained the report on April 14, 2022. Booz Allen spokesperson Jessica Klenk said the company learned of the exposure months later on October 5. The data breach notice said the now-former staffer acted “in direct contradiction” of the company’s policies, but that the company does “not believe that the individual intended to misuse any of the personal information in the report to cause harm to Booz Allen employees.” It’s not clear if the individual has been charged with any criminal offenses. |
Quantifying the global e-commerce slowdown | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 11 | 18 | was many things. Global contagion. Health catastrophe. Herald of new geopolitical tensions and a long-running commentary on how far we’re willing to go to protect — or not — our fellow humans. It was also a business earthquake that shook up most industries around the world. But as quickly as COVID came on the scene, breaking supply lines and business models, it also faded. In the wake of most of the world learning to live with — or merely deciding to endure — the health impacts of the pandemic, many industries snapped back to their prior form. Airlines went from trash to first class; in contrast, tech companies flipped from darlings to disparaged. Some tech concerns picked up tailwinds during COVID, in that a newly reformed business climate helped them grow for a time. You can cast a wide net here: Robinhood exploding in part thanks to consumers stuck at home with more cash than usual, Instacart seeing explosive demand for its grocery delivery service. Some tech companies went the other way, as was the case with Airbnb’s business cratering during the early COVID months as went from aspirational to insane overnight. Since the return to what passes as normalcy, the businesses impacted initially by COVID have charted diverging courses. Robinhood lost some of its shine as its user base, per the usually chatted narrative, went back outside. Instacart saw its growth slow but managed to hold onto its pandemic-era gains. Airbnb, an early example of the layoffs that COVID could induce at erstwhile healthy companies, recovered, and has retained much of its value since going public, a rare feat for its IPO cohort. |
VinFast’s bid to attract US buyers includes 4 all-electric SUVs and maybe a sports car | Abigail Bassett | 2,022 | 11 | 18 | VinFast showcased four battery-electric SUVs at the LA Auto Show this week, and even hinted at a sports car, as the Vietnam-based automaker pushes ahead with its plan to break into the U.S. market. The four EVs, which ranged in size from small five-passenger crossovers to large seven-passenger SUVs, is part of the company’s effort to resonate with U.S. consumers. In an EV market that now has just about every automaker jumping in, it may take more than simply offering SUVs. Although choice is part of the plan, according to Craig Westbrook, the chief service officer of VinFast U.S. VinFast’s plan is to flood the space with plenty of options so that Americans get familiar with the new brand, Westbrook told TechCrunch. The executive also hinted that by this time next year, VinFast may show off a sports car for the U.S. market. “We need a product offensive,” Westbrook said in an interview at the LA Auto Show. “We need to come to market strong. We don’t need to trickle down or ease out models and buying opportunities for the few. So within probably less than a 12-month period, you’ll have all four models, all SUVs across these four major size and price segments.” VinFast expects to bring two SUVs, the VF6 and VF7, to market by early 2023. VinFast VF6. Kirsten Korosec VinFast showed off the VF6, VF7, VF8 and VF9 at the LA Auto Show, and offered ride-alongs in the five-passenger VF8 outside the convention center. Unlike last year’s auto show, where the company showed off global vehicles the VFe36 and VFe35 with no interiors, the VF6 and VF7 had interiors that customers and media could poke around to get a feel for what the new-to-the-U.S. company might deliver. In the two short laps around the tiny test track in front of the LA Convention Center the VF8 felt like any other EV crossover — the weight of the battery pack, which VinFast estimates will get up to 292 miles of range, is apparent, especially over uneven bumps. The vegan leather interior and large central screen make the interior feel luxurious and surprisingly ample. A large dual-pane roof makes the backseat feel spacious and open, and the ride in the rear is equally engaging. Westbrook said the VF8 and VF9 vehicles are currently on their way to the U.S. and should be delivered to buyers in early 2023. Globally, VinFast says it has taken 65,000 reservations for the VF8 and VF9, but the company didn’t have a specific breakdown for North America at the time of our interview. Most of those orders are coming to California, according to Westbrook, and customers, according to Westbrook’s observation, are mostly those who are making the first-time EV-leap. “Most of the preorders have taken place here [California],” Westbrook said. “California is easy. This is where headquarters are and where a port is, and so, we’re going to serve these customers first. Obviously we want to look at all our customers, but that’s going to be the first way that we can try to splash into the market as effectively as possible.” VinFast currently has six retail locations open in California, all located in shopping malls where people can come in and check out the vehicles, much like a Tesla store. Westbrook says that some of the first vehicles coming off the boat from Vietnam will go to stores so that more potential customers can get into the vehicles and test drive them. Westbrook said that many of the reservation holders have not come to the point in the buying journey where they have to decide between opting for the company’s somewhat controversial battery leasing program, or buying their vehicle outright. When asked about the reception that reservation holders had to the battery leasing option, Westbrook said, “We’ve seen sort of growing acceptance and interest in the option.” During the presentation at the LA Auto Show, Westbrook noted that VinFast recently took an order for 2,500 vehicles from the car subscription company Autonomy, which generally deals only in Teslas. VinFast’s goal is to make the transition to battery-electric as barrier free as possible for new customers, Westbrook said. And to that end, the company announced more details of its bumper-to-bumper warranty, offering an industry-leading 10-year and 125,000-mile of coverage and a 10-year, unlimited-mile battery warranty that the company says is designed to offer EV customers peace of mind as they transition to electric driving. The company also announced a mobile service that will come to customers or offer rideshare options if customers get stranded. “I would say that when it comes to quality, people have expectations, and we have to meet them,” Westbrook said. “We do understand that when you purchase car over here and our service point is over there, you may not want to come to us. So we can help you, right? And that’s part of our model. It’s not being forced into something. We realize that’s what you want as a customer.” |
TechCrunch+ roundup: TAM takedown, green card layoffs, when to ignore investor advice | Walter Thompson | 2,022 | 11 | 18 | When the downturn began, many VCs urged founders to slash their marketing spending. On its face, that’s an effective way to extend runway while cutting costs. Several months later, we’ve since learned that cutting marketing budgets doesn’t make early-stage startups healthier, but it is a great way for VCs to reduce burn rates across their entire portfolio. As Rebecca Szkutak reported this week, . In business, if someone’s offering you advice, it’s probably for their own benefit. Which is why I take investors at their word when they say most founders cannot properly assess their total addressable market (TAM). Most founders submit a slide with three concentric circles: TAM on the outside, SAM (serviceable addressable market) in the middle and SOM (serviceable obtainable market) in the center. “When this slide appears, most investors chuckle (or weep),” writes Bill Reichert, partner and chief evangelist at Pegasus Tech Ventures. Few investors will wire funds based on how many billions you think you’ll make in year eight. Instead, founders must demonstrate that they have . “How many customers will you acquire this year? Next year? The year after?” asks Reichert. And just as importantly, “How many can you convert? How will you reach them?” Don’t spend too much time calculating future revenue or reading Gartner studies for factoids that sound authoritative. Instead, build a bottom-up model that focuses on the size of the opportunity, not the market. “Show investors how you are going to build an ever-expanding cadre of delighted customers,” Reichert advises. “Don’t suggest that your focus is on acquiring market share in a large established market.” Have a great weekend, Walter Thompson
Editorial Manager, TechCrunch+
James Neil / Getty Images Investors might enjoy listening to a founder’s well-rehearsed story, but sharing the right customer data “can definitively power up a pitch deck,” says David Smith, VP of data and analytics at TheVentureCity. “Investors need to see that you’re not being blindsided by easy wins that can go up in smoke within weeks, but are using hard data to build a sustainable company that will endure, and thrive, with time.” / Getty Images Many VCs advised founders to dial back their sales and marketing outlays to preserve runway this year. And, as it turns out, many VCs have been giving the wrong advice. According to data from Capchase, a fintech that offers startups non-dilutive capital, “companies that didn’t cut spending on sales and marketing were in a better financial and growth position now than those that did when the market started to dip in 2022,” reports Rebecca Szkutak. Of the 500 companies surveyed, bootstrapped firms showed the strongest growth, said Miguel Fernandez, Capchase’s co-founder and CEO. “What we have seen in this case, and what is most interesting, is that the best companies have actually cut every other cost except sales and marketing.” Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch Cell phone coverage is built to serve people, which is why Sateliot is launching nanosatellites to provide IoT connectivity for ocean buoys and autonomous drones. The company shared its €10 million Series A deck with TC+, which includes all 18 slides: / Getty Images Getting a startup off the ground is hard work, so asking founders to prepare for an acquisition may sound just as silly as telling them to practice their Academy Award speech in the bathroom mirror. Still: If you’re ready to launch a startup, you must also be prepared to sell one. In an explainer for TC+, Peyton Carr, managing director of Keystone Global Partners, offers a framework for calculating taxation upon an exit and lays out the differences between short-term capital gains and long-term capital gains rates. “As a founder, you’ll need to plan for your personal tax situation to optimize the opportunity set that is presented to you.” |
The US Securing Open Source Software Act of 2022 is a step in the right direction | Javier Perez | 2,022 | 11 | 18 | Cybersecurity continues to be a hot topic. More and more organizations are getting hit by ransomware attacks, critical open software vulnerabilities are making news, and we’re seeing industries and governments coming together to discuss initiatives to improve software security. The U.S. government has been working with the tech industry and open source organizations such as the Linux Foundation and the Open Source Security Foundation to come up with a number of initiatives in the past couple of years. The without a doubt kick-started subsequent initiatives and defined requirements for government agencies to take action on software security and, in particular, open source security. An important produced active working groups, and only a few weeks later, they issued the . This plan included 10 streams of work and budget designed to address high-priority security areas in open source software, from training and digital signatures, to code reviews for top open source projects and the issuance of a software bill of materials (SBOM). One recent government initiative regarding open source security is the a bipartisan legislation by U.S. Senators Gary Peters, a Democrat from Michigan, and Rob Portman, a Republican from Ohio. Senators Peters and Portman are chairman and ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, respectively. They were at the , and subsequently introduced this legislation to improve open source security and best practices in the government by establishing the duties of the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). This is a turning point in U.S. legislation, because, for the first time, it is specific to open source software security. The legislation acknowledges the importance of open source software and recognizes that “a secure, healthy, vibrant, and resilient open source software ecosystem is crucial for ensuring the national security and economic vitality of the United States.” Finally, it states that the Federal Government should play a supporting role in ensuring the long-term security of open source software. |
TechCrunch staff on what we lose if we lose Twitter | Ron Miller | 2,022 | 11 | 18 | the other day that journalists would suffer if Twitter ever shut down because they would lose a driver of traffic. While there is some truth to that — Twitter does help expose your writing to a larger audience — it’s also true that Twitter has value beyond that for journalists and other users. It’s safe to say that as Elon Musk fecklessly tries to grasp the business, instituting as the remaining essential employees flee the general chaos, spurred on by . That most recent missive, it seems, triggered a mass resignation, according . When you add that to the people who were let go in the layoffs, it’s fair to ask how many people are left to run the site. Even before all this happened, the TechCrunch team had a conversation on Slack about what we would miss if Twitter went away tomorrow. At the time ( ), it felt more like a whimsical game than a real possibility. For all its warts, Twitter has a way of connecting people who otherwise might never connect. It gives us a place to share our passions, our random thoughts, and yes, our shitposts, all while keeping us up on what’s happening in the world in real time. While there are surely negatives to the platform — it’s way too easy to spread misinformation and hate speech and attack people you disagree with — there are also loads of positives, and many things we would miss if Twitter perishes. It now feels like it very well could. So several TechCrunch staffers contributed what they would miss most if Twitter went away (while hoping it’ll still be up tomorrow): I’m not even sure where to begin to describe the immense impact Black Twitter has had on, well, the world, really. From when I was a teenager, watching so many Black people mobilize to bring awareness to the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, to that time we all shared experiences and made jokes as to what it was like having Thanksgiving with a Black family. “When it’s time to leave and the plate you hid is missing, *insert Kermit screaming meme here.*” The memes are endless, as is the support — and the heat — we give and place onto people and topics. It was a place to find community in a world so unkind to us. It really does feel like its own universe sometimes. I remember a few years ago going to Clubhouse to hear the talks and then running to Twitter to watch everyone live-tweet the conversations. This thread from a few days ago really brought back memories, in which Kira J hosted a little “Black Jeopardy.” Famous dates for 500, please. “On December 21st, 2020, what were Black people waiting around to get?” Superpowers. And they’re coming still, don’t worry. They’re just running on CP time. The community always felt quite insular; what happened there rarely burst out of our bubble. When it does hit the mainstream, everything shifts, everything changes. Like someone walking in on you mid-shower. Non-Black people often don’t understand the humor, the sarcasm, the “wait, did we all have the same childhood?” I’m always reminded of some tweet awhile ago asking, “How does one get into Black Twitter?” It’s not quite the same or as easy as people just giving invites to the cookout (stop just giving those out, please!!!). I often wonder what it is like to be in Black Twitter. What do people think when they of Chris Evans wearing long neon yellow acrylics with a honey mustard-colored satin bonnet? Where do other people get their news, if not from ? I’ll miss seeing something trending and saying yep, that’s Black Twitter, it to be. I would miss the solidarity, the camaraderie often not easily made or reciprocated out in the physical world. Yes, I think I would even miss , also known as LLC Twitter, also known as the people who tell everyone to start a business and become entrepreneurs. “Would $500,000 or dinner with Jay-Z?” Seriously, just take the money and run. Last week, , the features editor at Essence, what we were going to wear to Twitter’s homegoing service. Someone made programs, started planning gospel music performances, and, of course, we started picking out our hats. I to get an at the repast and would probably show up with slicked-back baby edges and in Valentino couture, as Zendaya did to the Emmys. It’s hard to imagine anything could replace Black Twitter. But if history has taught us anything, it’s that we’ll always find our way. |
India’s securities depository CDSL says malware compromised its network | Jagmeet Singh | 2,022 | 11 | 18 | India’s leading central securities depository, Central Depository Services Limited, or CDSL, says its systems have been compromised by malware. On Friday, the securities depository said in with India’s National Stock Exchange that it detected malware affecting “a few of its internal machines.” “As a matter of abundant caution, the company immediately isolated the machines and disconnected itself from other constituents of the capital market,” the filing said. CSDL said it continues to investigate, and that it has so far “no reason to believe that any confidential information or the investor data has been compromised” due to the incident. CDSL has not yet revealed the exact details of the malware. At the time of writing, the company’s website was down. The company declined to say if the two are related. Banali Banerjee, an agency spokesperson, said CDSL also declined to answer our other questions, including if the company stores logs that would allow it to determine what, if any, data was exfiltrated from its network. “We are working towards resolutions,” the spokesperson said. Mumbai-based CDSL to maintain and service nearly 75 million trader accounts — locally called demat accounts — of investors across the country. The company also counts Bombay Stock Exchange, Standard Chartered Bank and Life Insurance Corporation among its significant shareholders. Founded in 1999, CDSL is India’s only publicly listed and the country’s second-largest depository after the National Depository Services Limited, or NDSL, the oldest securities depository. CDSL allows the holding of securities and their transactions in electronic form and facilitates trade settlements on stock exchanges. “The CDSL team has reported the incident to the relevant authorities and is working with its cyber security advisors to analyze the impact,” the company said in its stock exchange filing. |
Autonomous delivery startup Nuro lays off 20% of workforce | Kirsten Korosec | 2,022 | 11 | 18 | Nuro, the autonomous vehicle delivery startup , is laying off about 300 people, or 20% of its workforce, in an effort to preserve cash amid a stormy economic outlook, according to an email sent to employees this morning. Several Nuro employees also posted on Twitter and LinkedIn this morning that they had been affected by the layoffs. In the email viewed by TechCrunch, co-founders The co-founders said they take responsibility for the layoffs, which were the result of over-hiring in 2021 smacking into economic headwinds in 2022: Each and every one of you have made important contributions to this company, and saying goodbye to talented Nurons is not a decision we have taken lightly. For those of you leaving Nuro, we are very sorry for this outcome — this is not the experience we wanted to create for you. We made this call and take full responsibility for today’s circumstances. Ferguson and “In that environment, we determined it made sense to invest heavily across the board and grow our team rapidly.” Exactly one year ago, Nuro raised $600 million in a fundraising round led by new investor Tiger Global Management. The Series D round, which pushed its valuation to about $8.6 billion, attracted high-profile investors including Baillie Gifford, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Google, China-based venture firm Gaorong Capital, grocery retailer Kroger, SoftBank Vision Fund 1, funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. and Woven Capital, a venture arm of Toyota subsidiary Woven Planet. That led the company to double the size of its team in less than two years and significantly increased operating expenses based on an assumption that the funding environment would remain robust. “This was a mistake,” they wrote. Macroeconomic conditions in 2022, which include inflation and an impending U.S. recession, prompted the founders to slash costs, including cutting its workforce in an effort to extend its capital runway into 2025. Nuro still has more than $1 billion on its balance sheet, the pair wrote. notice period to ease this transition and, if applicable, travel assistance, the email said. While the company has made progress and is operating in Houston, Palo Alto and Mountain View, California, it’s also in at least one area. The company closed its Phoenix facility this summer as it shifted its commercial strategy away from the desert metropolis and toward the San Francisco Bay Area and Houston. |
Patreon competitor Fanfix launches ‘SuperLink,’ a link-in-bio platform aimed at Gen Z creators | Lauren Forristal | 2,022 | 11 | 18 | , the Patreon-style platform focused on Gen Z, announced today the launch of , a standalone monetization-focused link-in-bio platform that displays a creator’s Fanfix page. Fanfix previously partnered with various link-in-bio companies, including Koji, Beacons and Hoo.bee. However, the company says many of its creators requested Fanfix build its own version of the feature. It adds that 90% of its referrals come from link-in-bio links or swipe-ups from Instagram and Snapchat. More creators are looking for a way to connect audiences across all their social media platforms and, of course, promote their paywalled content. SuperLink is free to use, and 46% of ad revenue goes to creators. For comparison, reportedly plans to give its creators “Fanfix has grown to 10 million users so quickly by focusing on monetization and putting creators first. Fanfix has helped thousands of creators monetize their passions and turn content creation into a sustainable career. We are taking these same philosophies to our new products,” said co-founder Harry Gestetner in a statement. “By launching these new features, we will be further shifting the balance of power back to the creator, and subscribers will have even more benefits to joining their favorite creators’ membership clubs. Platforms have taken advantage of creators for so many years, so we are thrilled to launch the most monetization-centric, creator-first link-in-bio on the internet.” Major social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are often criticized for dismissing the wants and needs of influencers. Founder and CEO of Patreon, Jack Conte, has been open about , Meta-owned platforms that mitigate “the relationship between the creator and the subscriber,” he said. In August, Meta got a lot of flak for making to emphasize algorithmic curation on its two platforms. While rival TikTok’s algorithmic approach helps creators gain followers quickly, . The launch of SuperLink comes as , a behemoth in the link-in-bio space, announced its “ ” (currently in beta) feature yesterday, which lets visitors access a purchased document. The company has other monetization solution tools like , a tipping feature, as well as a “Request Link” for visitors to pay for requests like personalized videos. Linktree currently has over 30 million users, but Fanfix tells TechCrunch, “We plan to eclipse Linktree within 12 months.” Fanfix is Gen Z-focused and is for clean content only. It targets audiences around the ages of 13 to 24 years old. Some notable influencers on Fanfix include social media influencers Cameron Dallas, Madi Monroe, Brooke Monk, Anna Shumate and more. It currently has over 9.6 million registered users (including two million monthly active users and 2,000 creators) — impressive growth for a one-year-old company. , rival Patreon had a total of only within a year of launching, which included 50,000 fans (aka patrons) and 15,000 creators. Fanfix Fanfix says that it has processed hundreds of thousands of transactions to date and individual creators are earning millions of dollars on the service. The platform is very selective about which creators it accepts — they must have 10,000 followers across their social media accounts and fit with Fanfix’s “brand image.” Creators won’t get accepted if Fanfix doesn’t think they’ll convert. Creators can charge fans whatever they want for membership, but the minimum monthly subscription cost is $5. One downside is that Fanfix takes a 20% commission fee, letting creators keep 80% of earnings. For comparison, Patreon charges a monthly fee that ranges from 5% to 12%, depending on the subscription plan. The platform launched in August 2021 and was co-founded by Harry Gestetner (22) and Simon Pompan (23). Shortly after the launch, they brought Dallas — a 28-year-old creator with millions of followers — on board. Simon Pompan (left) and Harry Gestetner (right). Fanfix , a growth partner and marketing expert, for eight figures, marking its first investment in the creator space. Fanfix notes that its creators will benefit from SuperOrdinary as the company provides access to a portfolio of over 140 consumer brands, including Farmacy, OLAPLEX, The Honest Company and more. Soon, Fanfix creators will be able to collaborate with SuperOrdinary and . Fanfix has launched multiple monetization features. In March, Fanfix rolled out a pay-to-message feature, “Tip-to-DM,” letting fans chat with creators by paying anywhere between $3 to $500. According to Fanfix, the top few hundred creators earn thousands of dollars in messages. In general, the feature has generated around seven figures, which accounts for half of the company’s revenue. Plus, Fanfix plans to keep adding new monetization features to the growing platform, such as one-to-one calls and personalized videos, as well as venturing into podcasting and gaming. In December, Fanfix will launch a livestreaming capability for creators to put a paywall on their streams and offer additional perks to followers, like live podcast episodes, Q&As and more. Fans will be able to watch livestreams of their favorite creators, chat in real time and tip creators any amount. Earlier this month, Patreon finally launched a ; however, it has yet to launch livestreaming. |
Pick your poison: Recruitment or retention? | Natasha Mascarenhas | 2,022 | 11 | 18 | Hello and welcome back to , a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This week, and discussed the latest and greatest of this consuming news cycle. Our goal with the episode, as always, is to go beyond what you may see in a 140-character-take on [insert big story here]. And in today’s recording? That wasn’t hard at all. And that’s a wrap. As always you can follow the show , leave us and, most importantly, be kind to your people. Talk soon! |
Ransomware is a global problem that needs a global solution | Carly Page | 2,022 | 11 | 18 | year, we were optimistic. It seemed like the after the U.S. government scored a handful of wins against the cybercriminals carrying out these increasingly damaging attacks: the Justice Department successfully seized $2.3 million in bitcoin that paid to the DarkSide ransomware gang to reclaim its data, and months later it . Our optimism was short-lived. Despite this action, 2022 looks set to top last year as the worst year on record for ransomware attacks; a recent shows that attacks have increased by 80% year-over-year and that the cybercriminals responsible for these attacks have easily dodged law enforcement action by taking advantage of ransomware as a service, or by simply rebranding. “It’s clear that ransomware attacks are on the rise,” Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, tells TechCrunch. “In September 2022, nearly one in every four respondents to our customer survey reported receiving a ransomware attack or threat, the highest month so far of 2022.” 2022 hasn’t just been the worst year for ransomware attacks statistically, it has also just been… the . While hackers last year focused on critical infrastructure and financial services, this year’s focus has been on organizations where they can inflict the most damage. An attack on the Los Angeles Unified School District saw , including previous conviction reports and psychological assessments of students, while an attack on left the U.K’s NHS scrambling after it was forced to cancel appointments, and staff relying on taking notes with pen and paper. Perhaps the most devastating attack of 2022 came just weeks ago after and accessed roughly 9.7 million customers’ personal details and health claims data for almost half-a-million customers. Data stolen during the attack included sensitive files related to abortions and alcohol-related illnesses. These attacks don’t just demonstrate that ransomware is worsening. They also show that ransomware is a global problem and that global action is needed to fight back successfully. Earlier in November, the U.S. government started to take strides in the right direction, announcing that it will establish an International Counter Ransomware Task Force, or ICRTF, to promote information and capability sharing. “This is a global issue, so governments need to come together,” Camellia Chan, CEO and founder at cybersecurity firm X-PHY tells TechCrunch. “That said, collaboration alone won’t provide a solution. It’s more than signing an agreement.” Fuel tanks are seen at Colonial Pipeline Baltimore Delivery in Baltimore, Maryland on May 10, 2021. The U.S. government declared a regional emergency on May 9, 2021 as the largest U.S. fuel pipeline system remained largely shut down, two days after a ransomware attack. Jim Watson / AFP via Getty Images. This is a viewpoint shared among the cybersecurity community: Signing agreements and sharing intelligence is all well and good, but it’s unlikely to deter financially motivated cybercriminals that continue to reap the rewards of these attacks. To gain ground on cybercriminals that continue to achieve a high rate of success, governments need a fresh approach. “You can’t arrest your way out of the problem,” Morgan Wright, chief security advisor at SentinelOne, tells TechCrunch. “There are numerous examples of both transnational criminal ransomware actors and nation-state actors being identified and indicted for various crimes. These offenders almost always live in countries with no extradition treaty with the country that has issued the indictments.” “One area I would like to see an increased effort is in the area of human collection of intelligence,” Wright added. “We need more penetration of state actors and criminal organizations. Too often, ransomware is viewed as a technical issue. It’s not. It’s human greed that uses technology to achieve an end goal.” This element of greed could also be targeted by increasing regulation of the cryptocurrency market, which many believe could be on the horizon . Former CISA assistant director Bob Kolasky said that in order to discourage ransomware actors for good, governments need to reduce the financial instruments available for them to use. “This includes using regulatory pressure on the cryptocurrency market to make tracking and recouping ransomware payments easier,” Kolasky tells TechCrunch, a view shared by others. “We need governments to take a bigger role in blocking cryptocurrencies, which is the enabler of attacker monetization strategies,” David Warburton, director of networking company F5 Labs, agrees, telling TechCrunch: “While decentralized currencies, such as bitcoin, aren’t inherently bad, nor solely responsible for the ransomware epidemic we’re facing, there’s no denying they are a huge factor.” “While control and regulation somewhat defeat the original intent of decentralized currencies, there’s no escaping the fact that without Bitcoin, ransomware simply wouldn’t exist,” said Warburton. But legislation wouldn’t work unless it’s a global effort, he said: “Many ransomware groups operate from countries which have no motivation to help those that are being targeted.” This is a problem that, like ransomware itself, has been worsened by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has ended any cooperation between Europe, the U.S. and Russia on ransomware operations inside Russia. Jason Steer, chief information security officer at threat intelligence giant Recorded Future, said that this is an area that immediately needs more global government support. “The focus has significantly dropped off in 2022 due to Russia’s activities, where in fact many groups operate safely from,” said Steer. Even if governments joined forces to collaboratively fight the growing ransomware problem, it’s unlikely to have any immediate effect. Security experts expect no respite from ransomware as we enter 2023 as increasingly savvy hackers exploit new attack vectors and continue to reap the financial rewards. “There are governments that are working to provide more support and resources. But it will never be enough,” says Wright. “Bad actors will always have the advantage, but we should make them pay in a significant way every time an attack is launched.” |
Jumia to cut products and overhead as new management chases profits | Tage Kene-Okafor | 2,022 | 11 | 18 | co-founders Sacha Poignonnec and Jeremy Hodara from their roles as co-CEOs, just ten days before the company’s third-quarter 2022 financial report. The end of their tenure, therefore, marked the first time a new face — Francis Dufay, the ex-chief at Jumia Ivory Coast and now acting CEO of Jumia — took charge of the investor briefing. a liquidity position of $284.7 million, among which $104.3 million is in cash and cash equivalents. |
VCs dish on why food tech investment was so light in Q3, while SAVRpak bags freshness deal with Jüsto | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 11 | 18 | Like many other venture-backed sectors in recent months, investment in food tech has largely been quiet over the past few months. Sure, there have been some bigger deals in the third quarter, for example grabbing $150 million for its mushroom root-based meat (still the best alternative protein food photo I have seen since I started covering this sector two years ago). also took in $72 million for its whole cuts of vegan chicken, and , Singapore’s first oat milk product, raised $65 million. However, for the most part, investment has been down, with last week that for the third quarter, there was $2.7 billion injected into 269 deals. PitchBook considers “food tech” to include everything from plant-based products to grocery tech, so it’s a pretty broad definition. The data and research company noted that both investment values and count were down 63% and 28.5% quarter-over-quarter, respectively. And, “deal values declined for the fourth straight quarter, falling to a 10-quarter low, and to levels not seen since Q1 2020.” Ouch. The Good Food Institute pulled out alternative protein deals and found that $420 million went into those companies during the third quarter. That’s down from $833 million in the second quarter and $911 million in the first quarter, according to GFI’s analysis of PitchBook’s data. While that might scare away some VCs, others are sticking with it. Elly Truesdell, founder and managing partner at New Fare Partners, said via email that some tech investors in the last decade overlooked some crucial fundamentals like taste, brand and consumer trust when betting on food tech companies. “The next generation of businesses that prioritize this and utilize tech to enable great food, brand experiences and access to both, have a stronger chance of seeing better outcomes,” Truesdell added. Meanwhile, Lisa Feria, partner and CEO at Stray Dog Capital, said via email that “the same macroeconomic and geopolitical factors that are impacting the public markets and the global venture ecosystem are also driving the decline in foodtech venture funding.” She noted that contributing to the sector’s decline over the past few years were factors like crossover investors who entered the space and then fled “due to the turbulence in the markets, leading to an outflow of available capital.” In addition, the food tech industry, like so many others, initially saw double-digit growth that then cooled off in the past year. There were also reports about major industry players that “led some to question whether innovations in plant-based meat alternatives will be able to deliver on the early promise that they could take a significant market share from traditional meat.” Still, Feria has “a very positive outlook” about this sector, despite this investment setback. Part of that is due to what she said was an industry still very much in the “early innings in the development of innovative foods.” “The alternative protein space has a ton of room to grow and we continue to see new products delivering amazing improvements on taste, texture, health and price,” she added. “Ultimately, the sustainability story that drives the need for food innovation is only going to be more important in the world’s fight against climate change, as we cannot reach our greenhouse gas emission reduction goals without transitioning the food system away from animal agriculture, one of the highest polluting and most destructive industries in the world.” said it is working with Mexico’s first online supermarket, , for it to be the first to market with SAVRpak’s plant-based thermodynamic pouch designed to remove 50% of condensation, which often leads to mold and early spoilage, and keep new condensation from forming, thus extending the shelf-life of produce, like strawberries, by up to three times, Scott Nelson, president of SAVRpak, said via email. The company already works with food distributors, like Sysco, but on the customer retail side. “Jüsto is one of the first retail customers we can discuss publicly, but we will be making more announcements soon as we have various pilots/trials ongoing across over 30 farms, as well as grocers in the U.S. and Canada,” Nelson added. “Consumers will start to see SAVRpak popping up in individual packaging of their favorite berries and greens at select supermarkets starting this spring, and in January, we’ll be announcing our consumer retail product with one of the largest big box retailers in the U.S.” Other big news this week came from , which announced, alongside the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, that its conclusions on if warranted “no further questions.” This represents a milestone for the cultivated meat industry and prompted Upside founder and CEO Uma Valeti to say, “Cultivated meat has never been closer to the U.S. market than it is today. This historic announcement from the FDA is the foundational step in the regulatory process.” From Paul Sawers: “ , a VC-backed Dutch company that recently debuted its first product lineup in the form of synthetic sausages, today announced a partnership with Singaporean food startup Love Handle to create what it touts as ‘the .’” Israeli cultivated meat technology company to , saying that its rebranding represents “a big step in the broader strategic transformation of Future Meat into a technology-rooted food company as Believer prepares for its product launch.” The company’s technology is pending U.S. regulatory approval and expects to break ground on a commercial-scale production facility in the United States by the end of the year. Plant-based meat brand , known for making beef products like steak, unveiled , a two-pound piece of 100% plant-based meat in what it is calling “the world’s largest piece of plant muscle.” , a humanitarian snack brand co-founded by actress Kristen Bell, Ryan Devlin, Todd Grinnell and Ravi Patel. Financial details were not disclosed. The , organized by the UAE Ministry of Climate Change and Environment, Tamkeen and ASPIRE, to participate in a six-week mentorship program. In early 2023, four startups will be selected to win the competition’s pooled prize of up to $2 million. Eat Just’s cultivated meat division at the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP27. This is the first time in two years that the meat, made from animal cells, was showcased outside of Singapore, according to the company. : Molecular farming startup Bright Biotech closed on $3.2 million in seed funding, led by FoodLabs, to continue R&D for a new genetic engineering method for growth factors used for cell-based meat production. : Just a reminder, us TechCrunchers love scoops. If you’ve got a news tip or inside information about a topic we have covered (or haven’t yet but should), please reach out to me at or . You can also drop us a note at , or to remain anonymous, , which includes SecureDrop ( ) and various encrypted messaging apps. |
Hive ransomware actors have extorted over $100M from victims, says FBI | Carly Page | 2,022 | 11 | 18 | The U.S. government has warned of ongoing malicious activity by the notorious Hive gang, which has extorted more than $100 million from its growing list of victims. A released by the FBI, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and the Department of Health and Human Services on Thursday revealed that the Hive ransomware gang has received upwards of $100 million in ransom payments from more than 1,300 victims since the gang was first observed in June 2021. This list of victims includes organizations from a wide range of industries and critical infrastructure sectors such as government facilities, communications and information technology, with a focus on healthcare and public health entities. Hive, which operates a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) model, claimed the Illinois-based Memorial Health System as its first healthcare victim in August 2021. This cyberattack forced the health system to divert care for emergency patients and cancel urgent care surgeries and radiology exams. The ransomware gang also released sensitive health information of about 216,000 patients. Then, in June 2022, the gang before targeting New York-based emergency response and ambulance service provider Empress EMS the following month. Over 320,000 individuals had information stolen, including names, dates of services, insurance information and Social Security numbers. Just last month, Hive also added Lake Charles Memorial Health System, a hospital system in Southwest Louisiana, to its dark web leak site, where it posted hundreds of gigabytes of data, including patient and employee information. Hive also , a top power generation company in India, in October. The joint FBI-CISA-HHS advisory warns that Hive typically gains access to victim networks by using stolen to access organizations’ remote desktop systems, virtual private networks and other internet-facing systems. But CISA also warns that the ransomware group also skirts some multi-factor authentication systems by exploiting unpatched vulnerabilities. “In some cases, Hive actors have bypassed multi-factor authentication and gained access to FortiOS servers by exploiting ,” the advisory says. “This vulnerability enables a malicious cyber-actor to log in without a prompt for the user’s second authentication factor (FortiToken) when the actor changes the case of the username.” The advisory also warns that Hive actors have been observed reinfecting victims that restored their environments without paying a ransom, either with Hive or another ransomware variant. Microsoft’s Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) researchers earlier this year that Hive had upgraded its malware by migrating its code from Go to the Rust programming language, enabling it to use a more complex encryption method for its ransomware as a service payload. The U.S. government shared Hive indicators of compromise (IOCs) and tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) discovered by the FBI to help defenders detect malicious activity associated with Hive affiliates and reduce or eliminate the impact of such incidents. |
Fund of funds Sweetwood Ventures bets big on VC’s smallest funds | Rebecca Szkutak | 2,022 | 11 | 18 | Despite legacy venture capital firms continuing to raise bigger and , LPs may have more luck focusing on the small stuff. Amit Kurz, a general partner at Israel-based fund of funds , thinks so. He told TechCrunch that last year he started to notice more and more tiny funds he wasn’t familiar with getting on the cap tables of competitive deals. While these “nano” funds wouldn’t fit the thesis for Sweetwood’s $140 million flagship fund, he thought it was worth figuring out a way to back them. “I got really intrigued as to how can we gain exposure to that space,” Kurz relayed to TechCrunch. “They really generate this access to the most oversubscribed rounds and they invest a small amount, which is a classic win-win situation. You aren’t competing with the main VCs, yet everyone wants you because you are bringing a ton of value.” So, Sweetwood decided to raise a fund dedicated to these investors. Now, the firm is announcing that it raised $20 million for a separate fund to cut checks of up to $2 million into funds that are $15 million in size or smaller, with a focus on funds based in Israel. Sweetwood has backed seven funds thus far. It’s also looking to essentially create nano funds by working with angel investors. For this side of the fund, Sweetwood will work with angels to match their investment into a company while also giving them carry on the money that the firm puts in. While this would mean a hit to the firm’s potential returns compared to just investing directly, they don’t take that type of stake to begin with. They’ve closed on two such deals so far. “It’s a no-brainer for these guys,” Kurz said about approaching angel investors. “[They are] doing these deals anyway and there is this external partner that doesn’t look to be a tech scout but pays them as tech scouts.” The firm started raising the nano-focused fund in the peak of 2021’s craziness and is now looking to deploy into very different market conditions where smaller and less established firms are really struggling to raise. Kurz said that while they were initially apprehensive when the market conditions started to sour, they quickly got over that fear because they realized that the funds they back will now be writing checks to companies at more reasonable valuations and will actually have time to spend on due diligence. Kurz said when evaluating these potential investments the big question they ask, since neither the angel investor nor nano funds are big enough to lead any of the rounds they are in, is, why do startups want to take their money? He said that the firm is looking for funds and individuals that fall under two categories of answers: expertise and access. For some, especially on the angel investor side, access is king. If you are a notable former tech entrepreneur that is well connected, the thinking is that you are just going to hear about more notable deals and be invited to participate over other angels just due to your background. Kurz said this can include angels that were successful or well-known former founders. On the other side, Sweetwood is looking for funds and individuals with expertise and specialization that are going to be sought out by companies to fill out rounds because they bring an outsized value add to the table compared to their check size. “Why are people giving you access? Why are people wanting you on the cap table?” he said. “It’s very much focused about the value add and ability to gain access to the deals more so than your ability to distinguish the deals or do selections on the deal.” While this nano fund is separate from the firm’s flagship series, Kurz anticipated that some of these funds will grow up to be good candidates for the flagship fund down the line. It will also help them get into companies earlier that might end up in the flagship’s fund portfolios as well. “The very small funds tend to outperform,” he said. “The smaller you are the more probable you are to generate outsized returns. I thought, this is really interesting, how do we build something for this?” |
TipTip uses a hyperlocal strategy to help Southeast Asian creators monetize | Catherine Shu | 2,022 | 11 | 27 | There are a lot of talented people, like chefs and musicians, in Southeast Asia who can earn money through their work online, says founder Albert Lucius. But many of them don’t have the social media clout to attract advertisers. TipTip wants to help them build up followers in their communities using an offline/online strategy, and monetize by selling content instead of relying on advertising algorithms. The Indonesian-based startup announced today it has raised $13 million in Series A funding, just eight months . The latest round was led by East Ventures, with participation from returning investors Vertex, SMDV and B.I.G. Ventures. TipTip was founded in October 2021 by Albert Lucius, whose . It serves as a marketplace for creators to connect with fans, and monetize content like videos and documents by selling them to their followers, or hosting live video sessions. The platform launched in July, and says its revenue has grown 20x since October, with creators earning more than $200 on average within 30 days of being active on TipTip. TipTip currently has 2,500 content creators and over 30,000 users. Its goal is to recruit more than 30,000 creators and 300,000 users by early next year. It is currently focused on Indonesia, with a presence in 40 cities. The people TipTip was created for, like local chefs, musicians and painters, still have few followers and need to build their audiences. To enable them to scale and monetize, TipTip uses a hyperlocal strategy in Indonesian cities and towns, helping them host events and activities tailored to their communities. Lucius says TipTip’s team saw that many people became accustomed to the idea of making money virtually after COVID hit, as interest in consuming digital content also rose. Based on research they sourced from Research and Markets, Digital Journal and Statista, they found that the creator economy in Southeast Asia has a projected CAGR of about 10% to 30%. But Lucius said many Southeast Asian creators cannot monetize with tools on social media platforms, like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram or Patreon, which are better suited for top creators who already have a lot of followers and views, and can draw advertisers. Lucius says TipTip differentiates from social media platforms with an end-to-end solution for creators that includes digital content management and distribution, livestreaming services, one-on-one interactions and direct tipping. Its platform also helps creators with administrative issues, like audience management, know your customer (KYC), payment systems and scheduling. “There are many players who are already established as industry leaders in these respective areas. We view them as necessary and complementary to our services. In fact, we rely on our creators/promoters to continue using external platforms to engage their audiences, post updates, advertise their free offerings there and provide links back to TipTip to monetize their premium contents,” Lucius said. Instead of ads, TipTip provides direct monetization channels through tipping and direct purchases, and takes a cut from every sale on its platform. An example of the content being shared on TipTip includes edutainment in categories such as music. Musicians use the platform to share tips on how to compose better songs, and sometimes accompany that with a live performance. Another example are creators who make multi-segment courses on how to be better public speakers, with a live workshop included. TipTip also has a network of promoters to help creators sell their content. Lucius says promoters serve as affiliates or resellers, often to their own small communities, and take a commission from each sell. “The analogy is like how Uber Eats helps a restaurant sell more food,” Lucius said. “In our case, promoters help creators sell their digital content.” To create a pipeline of creators, TipTip uses awareness programs by partnering with its top creators, using above-the-line marketing campaigns and doing a hyperlocal strategy to find key opinion leaders (KOL), or top influencers, in each community. Part of TipTip’s funding round will be used to recruit more creators, promoters and supporters. It will also create more product offerings, like podcasts, branding deals and personalized requests, so creators have more potential revenue channels, and expand its offline/online presence into 250 cities and towns across Indonesia by the middle of next year. In a statement about the funding, East Ventures co-founder and managing partner Willson Cuaca said, “We strongly believe in Albert’s leadership at TipTip. His past experience in building and running Kudo before being acquired by Grab in 2017 continues to be pivotal in navigating the turbulent economy as we head into 2023. We expect TipTip to continue its exponential growth trajectory on the back of its hyperlocal strategy which adapts really well to the changing creator and customer behavior in the post-COVID era.” |
Lawyers see crypto regulation coming in 2023 because industry needs to rebuild trust | Jacquelyn Melinek | 2,022 | 11 | 27 | year in the crypto markets, many market participants are unperturbed about the long-term health of the sector and say that legal frameworks in 2023 could restore trust in the industry. Given the belief by many that crypto remains here to stay, it’s worth looking ahead. Crypto denizens certainly are — after the FTX collapse, questions circulated concerning crypto’s future and what regulators would do next. But disappointment in what FTX’s implosion represents is very hard to overstate, Yesha Yadav, professor of law and director of diversity, equity and community at Vanderbilt University, told TechCrunch. “The level of disillusionment and disappointment and sense of feeling deceived by FTX is so deep because it was seen as one of the most compliance-friendly institutions in the crypto economy and one that would be leading the regulatory efforts.” Now, obviously, FTX is the “poster child for everything that could go wrong,” Yadav said. Its downfall has regulators going back to the drawing board. “They might have to do something different, more far-reaching and strict in response to what happened.” But, in 2023? Regulators will finalize some of the they introduced, Alma Angotti, partner and global legislative and regulatory risk leader at Guidehouse, said to TechCrunch. “I think there is a realization that the industry is too big to continue to ‘wait and see.’” |
Crypto VC David Pakman on FTX: An ‘entirely avoidable tragedy’ | Connie Loizos | 2,022 | 11 | 11 | If you want to better understand exactly how big a deal it is that the cryptocurrency exchange FTX just imploded, you could do worse than talk with David Pakman, an entrepreneur turned venture capitalist. After logging 14 years with the investment firm Venrock, Pakman — who led Venrock’s investment in the digital collectibles company and even mined bitcoin at his own home years back — leaned into his passion for digital assets and last year joined the now seven-year-old crypto venture firm CoinFund. His timing was either very good or very bad, depending on your view of the market. Indeed, in part because CoinFund was an early investor in the collapsing cryptocurrency exchange FTX, we asked Pakman to jump on the phone with us today to talk about this very wild week, one that began with high-flying FTX on the ropes, and which ended with bankruptcy filings and the resignation of FTX founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, as CEO. Excerpts of that conversation follow, edited lightly for length and clarity. You can hear our longer conversation . DP: I think it’s absolutely terrible on a bunch of levels. First, it was an entirely avoidable tragedy. This failure of the company was brought on by a bunch of flawed human decision-making, not by a failing business. The core business is doing great. In fact, it [was] highly profitable and growing, even in a bear market. It’s one of the most-used non-U.S.-based crypto exchanges and with a big derivatives business. It wrote a lot of really good software. It’s not like it was running out of capital or a victim of the macro environment. But its leadership, with almost no oversight apparently, made a bunch of terrible decisions and did things really wrong. So the tragedy is how avoidable it was, and how many victims there are, including employees and shareholders and the hundreds or even thousands of customers who will be affected [by this bankruptcy]. There’s also the reputational harm to the entire crypto industry, which already suffers from questions like, ‘Isn’t this a scammy place with scammy people?’ This sort of Enron-esque meltdown of one of the most highly valued and arguably most successful companies in the space is just really bad, and it will take a long time to dig out of it. But there are also positives. Well, what’s positive is the technology did not fail; the blockchains did not fail. The smart contracts were not hacked. Everything we know about the tech behind crypto continues to work brilliantly. So it would be different if this was a meltdown because of flawed software design, or the blockchains aren’t scaling, or big hacks that injured people. The long-term promise of the software and the technology architecture about crypto is intact. It’s the people who keep making mistakes. We’ve had two or three pretty big human-generated mistakes this year. I don’t have firsthand knowledge about what they really did or didn’t do. But apparently FTX and [the trading desk also owned and run by Sam Bankman-Fried] Alameda Research had a relationship that maybe was not known to all shareholders, employees or customers. And it sounds like FTX took FTT, which is their token that was held in great amounts by Alameda, and they pledged it as collateral and took big loans in fiat against that. So they took a highly volatile asset, and they pledged it as collateral. One could imagine if a board of corporate executives or investors knew about that, someone would say, ‘Hang on. What happens if FTT goes down by 50%? It happens in crypto with high frequency, right? So, like, why are we pledging this super highly volatile asset? And by the way, half a billion dollars’ worth of the asset is held by our biggest rival [Binance]. What happens if they dump it in the market?’ So just the act of borrowing against it was ill-advised. And it sounds like they also took the proceeds of that borrowing, and they invested that in highly illiquid assets, like maybe to rescue BlockFi or all these other private companies that FTX recently bought. But it’s not like they could quickly sell out of those if they needed to return the proceeds of their borrowing. They were also apparently using customer funds and loaning that out or maybe even loaning it to their trading arm. So all this stuff is just stuff that I think a board, if they knew about it, would be like, ‘No, no, these are total nonstarters, we’re not doing any of that stuff, it’s too high risk.’ I joined CoinFund a little bit more than a year ago, so the investment that the firm made in FTX was a long time ago, before my time, and it’s a tiny, tiny amount. We’re barely on the cap table. We didn’t hold any FTT tokens. But I will address your big question, which I think is about the governance of this company. I come from a traditional tech investing background, where maybe 99% of the time, there’s just a standard set of governance that every entrepreneur agrees to when they take venture capital, which is: there’s going to be a board; the board is going to be made up of investors and employees and maybe outside experts; there’s going to be a set of controls; the controls usually say things like, ‘You have to disclose any related party transactions so you don’t shuffle coconuts between one company and something else that we don’t know about.’ The board also has to approve things, so that whenever you’re going to pledge assets as collateral for borrowing, you can’t issue new shares without [the board] knowing about it. The fact that none of that was present here is mind-boggling. And I hope what comes of this Enron-like moment in crypto is that whatever loose norms there were about not giving that level of oversight and governance as part of investing goes away immediately. How much are we at CoinFund impacted? It’s negligible because we had such a tiny investment in this company from one of our funds and we held none of our assets at FTX*, either its U.S. or international business. [As for broader implications], I don’t think any of us knows the full, long-term impact of what’s happening here because there’s like some contagion, right? Like, how many other funds when companies and investors have assets at FTX and how long will it take to get those funds back? One must assume that the entire thing goes into a massive bankruptcy proceeding that takes many months or years to unwind. And so there’ll be this uncertainty, not just about when you’re getting money back but how much you’re getting. The overwhelming majority of the startups that we invest in aren’t trading on FTX and so they weren’t customers. But FTX was very useful for providing a launching pad for tokens to become liquid, and then either making a market for those tokens or at least providing a place for them to trade and providing liquidity. A big part of crypto today is not just raising equity capital but creating tokens and using tokens as an incentive mechanism, and that requires at some point for these tokens to become liquid and trade on exchanges, and FTX was one of the largest places where those tokens traded. And now you lose that. We’ve talked to a lot of our LPs in the last 48 hours. I think most people are processing. They’re asking, like you’re asking, ‘What happened here?’ I think late-stage capital will freeze up for a little bit here. The dust really needs to clear. And it’s unlikely that capital is attracted to a tragedy like this. A more immediate impact is on startup valuations. Valuing startups is an imperfect process done by investors in non-liquid markets, and one way it’s done is to look at comparables. And one of the brightest star comps that just about everyone in crypto pointed to was FTX. If FTX is worth $40 billion, we’re worth X. So you take the most highly valued venture-backed crypto company, and it goes from $40 billion to zero, then who is the new ceiling of crypto value? It immediately impacts late-stage valuations. |
TechCrunch+ roundup: H-1B worker advice, managing remote teams, pitch deck teardown | Walter Thompson | 2,022 | 11 | 11 | According to , more than 23,000 tech workers have been laid off so far this month. For comparison, the site tracked 12,463 layoffs in October. Facebook’s parent company Meta announced the first major job cuts in its history this week, eliminating 11,000 jobs. Like Twitter, Stripe, Brex, Lyft, Netflix and other tech firms based in the Bay Area, many of the employees impacted are immigrants here on worker visas. An unexpected layoff introduces an element of chaos into anyone’s life, but when an H-1B worker loses their job, a very loud clock starts clicking: unless they can land a new position or change their immigration status within 60 days, they’ll need to leave the country. And because tech companies at every size are enacting hiring freezes and planning more cuts, their ability to live and work in the U.S. is suddenly in question. Earlier today, I hosted a Q&A with immigration lawyer Sophie Alcorn for . “You either get a new job, you leave or you figure out some other way to legally stay in the United States, but you have to take some action within those 60 days.” Start looking now for new opportunities, she advised, as it will take new employers time to submit paperwork to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. “The best-case scenario would be that this new company files your new change of employer petition and USCIS receives the paperwork on or before the 59th day since your last day of employment,” said Alcorn. “It takes at least three weeks to prepare everything,” which means candidates and employers must move quickly as the days count down. “You probably need a signed offer around day 33,” she said. A lot of the information Alcorn provided was just as relevant for hiring managers as it was for workers who’ve been laid off: any number of factors can combine to further complicate a process that’s already hard to puzzle out. For example, what happens to H-1B workers who get laid off while they’re out of the country? Can getting married actually solve an immigration problem? (Definitely not!) Because so many people have been laid off during a season when it’s traditionally hard to land a new position, I asked Alcorn whether she thought the layoffs would cause an exodus of tech talent from Silicon Valley. “The American Dream is still really important to immigrants,” she said. “A lot of people are going to fight to find a way to stay here, even if it’s not necessarily in the Bay Area with the high cost of living. They still want what America represents and they’re going to reevaluate their relationship with Big Tech and the nature of work.” / Getty Images I once managed an office where the CEO and I were the only two people who weren’t on the engineering team. We occupied a pod in a co-working space, so we all sat around one large table. Outside of our group lunches, the developers rarely spoke to each other, as most communication took place via Slack, Jira and GitHub. Today, that team works remotely. In a post for TC+, entrepreneur and angel investor Kuan Wei (Greg) Soh shared his top suggestions for managing distributed engineering teams, which includes mandatory standups and at least three hours each day when everyone is available to chat. “We expect Slack messages to be replied to within an hour, that everyone be reachable if we call them, and that we would work responsibly with our assigned partners,” he says. / Getty Images Founding teams usually select a corporate structure like an LLC or S-Corp, but those who hope to exit for $10 million for more should consider starting up as a Qualified Small Business (QSB) C-Corporation, advises tax attorney Vincent Aiello. Under IRS Code Section 1202, founders who hold QSB stock for five years or longer will be exempt from paying capital gains tax after a sale. “It constitutes a significant tax savings benefit for entrepreneurs and small business investors,” Aiello says. “However, the effect of the exclusion ultimately depends on when the stock was acquired, the trade or business being operated, and various other factors.” Cocoon / Getty Images (Image has been modified) Revenue-based financing can make early-stage startups less dependent on investors so they can hold onto more equity. With terms that usually range from 12-24 months, many teams use these funds for short-term projects, like sales and marketing campaigns. “Because the return on these activities may be higher than the cost of revenue-based financing, startups should use revenue-based financing to fund initiatives that will bear fruit soon,” advises Miguel Fernandez, CEO and co-founder of Capchase. Stolen-vehicle recovery systems have been available for decades, but a lost pet has higher emotional stakes. According to Syneroid, a startup that makes smart tags, 10 million pets are lost each year in the United States, but “less than 30% are returned home.” After raising a $500,000 seed round at a $3.9 million valuation, the company’s founders shared their 12-slide pitch deck with TechCrunch for a review. “No information has been redacted or omitted,” writes Haje Jan Kamps. |
Daily Crunch: FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried quits as crypto exchange files for bankruptcy | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 11 | 11 | Hoooo boy. As Alex would say: This week has been a long year. You just know it has been a pretty wild ride when , and it isn’t even really in the top 10 of crazy things that happened. , you retro-loving nerd, you. , the DOJ of Silk Road crypto, Binance FTX, then , causing Sequoia to . Theranos’s founder , while Peloton’s founder gave up on exercise equipment and . Then there was , including utter chaos with after it laid off half of its staff, before quickly . Oh, and we’re all now, I guess. May next week be more chill for you. It will be for Haje, who’s buggering off to go do some scuba diving for a week, and possibly . As he left for the day, he could be overheard muttering, “I hope there’s a bit of internet left when I come back.” Take a breather, you can always implode with stress next week instead. — and . Our entire news team are flopped over in their respective sofas, slightly shell shocked after one of the wildest news weeks we’ve seen. You know, we’re so exhausted, we’re not even gonna write a proper intro. Here, make yourself a cup of tea and click through these. Or don’t. You’re the master of your own destiny. Stolen-vehicle recovery systems have been available for decades, but a lost pet has higher emotional stakes. According to Syneroid, a startup that makes smart tags, 10 million pets are lost each year in the United States, but “less than 30% are returned home.” After raising a $500,000 seed round, the company’s founders shared their 12-slide pitch deck with TechCrunch for a review. According to , “no information has been redacted or omitted.” Three more from the TC+ team: visited and not only watched cute robots line up, but also learned about the delivery giant’s plans for global domination. If you can’t tell by now, it involves robotics and how Amazon aims to improve the world of last-mile delivery. Need more entertainment? Here’s five more: |
Amazon shutting down wholesale distribution in third business exit in India | Manish Singh | 2,022 | 11 | 27 | Amazon is shutting down its wholesale distribution business in India, the latest in a series of retreats for the retailer in the key overseas market where it has deployed over $7 billion in the past decade. The American e-commerce giant said Monday that it is discontinuing Amazon Distribution, its wholesale e-commerce website available to small neighborhood stores in Bengaluru, Mysore and Hubli. “We don’t take these decisions lightly. We are discontinuing this programme in a phased manner to take care of current customers and partners,” a company spokesperson said in a statement. Amazon Distribution was designed to help kiranas, the neighborhood stores in India, pharmacies and department stores secure inventory from the e-commerce giant. The company didn’t say precisely when the service will be discontinued. “We offer a wide range of products at competitive prices and the convenience of next day delivery at your door-step. As a member, you can purchase thousands of items for resale at any time of the day at competitive prices and in bulk quantities, pay via the various payment options available, get GST bill for your order, and convenient and reliable door-step deliveries the next day,” the company describes on Amazon Distribution website. Amazon did not say why it was shutting down the wholesale distribution offering, but the move follows the company shutting down two other businesses — and — in the country amid a global restructuring of its business. Amazon is planning to , according to media reports, and began eliminating roles in some divisions, including earlier this month. The closure of aforementioned Indian businesses also involves elimination of some roles. In a memo, Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy warned employees that the company will undertake more layoffs next year. The series of announcements in India have nonetheless prompted many to speculate that Amazon, which has in its local business in the country, is slowly scaling down its operations in the South Asian market. The firm has seen several of its senior executives . Amazon plans to continue to focus on its core e-commerce offerings in India, according to a source familiar with the matter. Last week, Amazon launched its second AWS region in India and in its cloud operations in the country by 2030. India is a key overseas market for Amazon, but also one where it faces stiff competition from heavily backed rivals. Amazon is lagging Walmart’s Flipkart and and towns, according to a recent report by Sanford C. Bernstein. Amazon’s 2021 gross merchandise value in the country stood between $18 billion to $20 billion, lagging Flipkart’s $23 billion, the analysts said in a report to clients. Amazon also faces competition from billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Retail, India’s largest retail chain that is increasingly , and social commerce startups and . Amazon has so far offered “a weaker proposition in ‘new’ commerce” in the country, Bernstein analysts said. At stake is one of the world’s last great growth markets. The e-commerce spending in India, the world’s second largest internet market, is expected to double in size to over $130 billion by 2025. Amazon has been attempting to increase its presence in India through stakes in local firms and has also . It also attempted to acquire Future Retail, once India’s second largest retail chain, but was . (Amazon accused the estranged Indian partner and Reliance .) Amazon did not immediately say if it plans to close any other business line in the country. |
Engage with Aerospace Corp, Mynaric and Otter at TC Sessions: Space | Lauren Simonds | 2,022 | 11 | 11 | We’re getting ready to launch our third conference on December 6 in Los Angeles, and we still feel the thrill associated with space technology and the intrepid early-stage startup founders and researchers who dare to explore the possibilities beyond the boundaries of our home planet — and beyond what we thought possible. If you’ve got rocket fuel running in your veins, don’t miss the chance to learn the latest developments within the space economy — from manned space travel, colonization and communications to earth observation data, manufacturing, and even war, in space. now for just $199 — full price is $495 — and get ready to join the spacefaring ecosystem on December 6. We’re not quite ready to reveal the full agenda, but we’re thrilled to share that you’ll hear from like Dr. Carolyn Mercer, chief technologist for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate; Peter Beck, the CEO and founder of Rocket Lab; Frank Calvelli, assistant secretary of the Air Force for Space Acquisitions; and Amela Wilson, the CEO of Nanoracks, to name but a few. Like all TechCrunch events, TC Sessions: Space is designed to help founders and early-stage startups build stronger businesses. But it’s not just us — our event partners are equally committed to your success. TechCrunch partners don’t just cut a check and hand over a logo. They show up, and they deliver a high level of relevant content, educational expertise, resources and connection at the event. Their participation elevates, engages and supports early-stage founders. We’d like to take a moment to highlight just three of our incredible partners, an, while we don’t have clearance to post their presentation topics just yet, we’ll share more info in the coming weeks. is a nonprofit and the only federally funded research and development center for the space enterprise. They will host both a partner session and a smaller roundtable session that allows time for Q&A. You’ll also find them exhibiting on the show floor — the perfect opportunity to connect, network and explore opportunities. develops and builds wireless laser communication systems for air, space and mobile applications. The company, which says its mission is to eliminate global connectivity barriers, will host a partner session. We’ll have more specific info soon. ’s productivity tool records meetings and provides real-time note-taking, transcripts and captioning. We’ll have more speakers, sessions and partners to announce in the coming weeks, so watch this non-galactic space! takes place on December 6 in Los Angeles. , and then join us — and our partners — to learn about the latest space tech, network for opportunities and build a stronger startup to the stars.
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null | Peyton Carr | 2,022 | 11 | 18 | null |
Amazon eyes devices group as it undertakes broad cost cutting | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 11 | 11 | The Echo business has always looked like Amazon playing the long game from the outside. Above all, the company’s home consumer hardware is a convenient vessel for getting Alexa into millions of homes. But when a corporation is doing some , no divisions are safe from cost cutting — certainly not one that is reportedly operating at a $5 billion a year revenue loss. The Wall Street Journal that Amazon’s devices group could be the latest to get hit with cuts as the company braces for further macroeconomic disruption. The paper notes that “Amazon’s leadership is closely evaluating its Alexa business, according to some of the people,” citing internal documents. Many of the cutbacks thus far have been focused on longer-tail products. Devices is a mature division for the company, however, encompassing a wide range of Echo home devices, Fire tablets and Kindles, among others. Amazon offered TechCrunch a fairly boilerplate response to the report, while noting that the normal performance review is certainly being impacted by the overall financial climate. “We remain excited about the future of our larger businesses, as well as newer initiatives like Prime Video, Alexa, Grocery, Kuiper, Zoox, and Healthcare,” the company writes. “Our senior leadership team regularly reviews our investment outlook and financial performance, including as part of our annual operating plan review, which occurs in the fall each year. As part of this year’s review, we’re of course taking into account the current macro-environment and considering opportunities to optimize costs.” A second comment, meanwhile, highlights Alexa’s overall successes: Alexa started as an idea on a whiteboard. In less than a decade, it’s turned into an AI service that millions of customers interact with billions of times each week in different languages and cultures around the world. Even in the last year, Alexa interactions have increased by more than 30%. We’re as optimistic about Alexa’s future today as we’ve ever been, and it remains an important business and area of investment for Amazon. Andy Jassy has been tasked with cutting costs across the firm — not an enviable task in any economy. In his 2021 shareholder letter, the CEO took a trip down memory lane, beginning with the first Kindle in 2007, while highlighting the ups and down of the category, including a little insight into the life (and death) of Fire phone, noting, “The phone was unsuccessful, and though we determined we were probably too late to this party and directed these resources elsewhere, we hired some fantastic long-term builders and learned valuable lessons from this failure that have served us well in devices like Echo and FireTV.” Jassy also highlighted the division’s evolving future, writing: Our goal is for Alexa to be the world’s most helpful and resourceful personal assistant, who makes people’s lives meaningfully easier and better. We have a lot more inventing and iterating to go, but customers continue to indicate that we’re on the right path. We have several other devices at varying stages of evolution (e.g. Ring and Blink provide the leading digital home security solutions, Astro is a brand new home robot that we just launched in late 2021), but it’s safe to say that every one of our devices, whether you’re talking about Kindle, FireTV, Alexa/Echo, Ring, Blink, or Astro is an invention-in-process with a lot more coming that will keep improving customers’ lives. |
Musk’s lawyer tells Twitter staff they won’t be liable if company violates FTC consent decree | Natasha Lomas | 2,022 | 11 | 11 | Following a , TechCrunch has obtained an internal email sent by Elon Musk’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, to all remaining employees — in which he seeks to calm staffers’ concerns by claiming that they do not have individual liability for upholding the requirements of the FTC consent decree. We’ve reproduced the full text of the email (sic) below — which was sent by Spiro to Twitter staff at 5:21PM, November 10: Elon – questions have arisen today regarding the consent decree in effect at the time you took over the company. We have our first upcoming compliance check with the ftc since taking over and we will handle it. The only party to the decree is Twitter- not individuals who work at Twitter. It is Twitter itself (not individual employees) who is a party and therefore only Twitter the company could be liable. I understand that there have been employees at Twitter who do not even work on the ftc matter commenting that they could to to jail if we were not in compliance- that is simply not how this works. It is the company’s obligation. It is the company’a burden. It is the company’s liability. We spoke to the FTC today about our continuing obligations and have a constructive ongoing dialogue. We will of course remain in compliance with the consent decree and the legal department is handling it and happy to answer any questions Thanks Alex The 2011 consent decree required Twitter to establish and maintain a program to ensure and regularly report that its new features do not further misrepresent “the extent to which it maintains and protects the security, privacy, confidentiality, or integrity of any nonpublic consumer information.” In a note (first reported by ) posted in Twitter’s internal slack and visible to all employees, a departing internal attorney said that in fact, individual engineers do engender “personal, professional and legal risk,” seemingly in contradiction to what Spiro sent in the above email. On Thursday, key Twitter executives including the company’s Head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth, as well as its Chief Information Security Officer Lea Kissner, Chief Compliance Officer Marianne Fogarty and Chief Privacy Officer Damien Kieran all abruptly departed the company. The . The FTC fined Twitter after finding a breach of the settlement related to user data provided for security purposes being used for ad targeting. We’ve reached out to the FTC for clarification regarding the consent decree and individual employee liability and will update if we receive more information. |
Can proof of reserves prevent future crypto exchange collapses? | Jacquelyn Melinek | 2,022 | 11 | 11 | exchanges are rushing to publish proof of reserves in a seeming attempt to reassure investors their funds are safe as fellow exchange . Proof of reserves ( ) are independent audits by third parties that aim to provide transparency and evidence that a custodian holds the assets it claims to own on behalf of its clients. Auditors then aggregate balances into something called a , which entails all client balances. FTX exploded this week following a that showed a June 30 balance sheet of its affiliate trading firm, Alameda Research, was largely made up of FTX’s native token, FTT. This all could have been avoided with PoR, Sergey Nazarov, co-founder of , said to TechCrunch. “There was a balance sheet issue and it became known to many depositors all at once,” Nazarov said. “And because it was a surprise, there was a bank run that led to insolvency.” But imagine if depositors knew what FTX and Alameda Research’s balance sheets were from the beginning. |
Crypto’s white knight was a black hat all along and other TC news | Darrell Etherington | 2,022 | 11 | 11 | This week, I talk with about the coalition of VCs that are standing for reproductive rights. And comes on to break down the FTX/Binance saga that’s unfolded over the past week (and that continues to develop). And as always, we break down the biggest stories in tech. Articles from the episode: Other news from the week: |
Tesla opens its EV connector design to other automakers | Kirsten Korosec | 2,022 | 11 | 11 | Tesla is sharing its EV charging connector design in an effort to encourage network operators and automakers to adopt the technology and help make it the new standard in North America. Tesla said Friday that its design and specification files are . The company said it is “actively working with relevant standards bodies to codify Tesla’s charging connector as a public standard.” The charging connector in all Tesla vehicles offers AC charging and up to 1 MW DC charging. Its compact design and performance is considered superior to the Combined Charging System (CCS) connectors used by most EVs in North America. Tesla claims that its charging connector and charge port — which it now calls the North American Charging Standard (NACS) — is the most common charging standard in North America. It’s a stat based on Tesla vehicle sales in North America and the number of chargers at its branded Supercharging stations. Tesla has nearly 1,500 Supercharger stations in the United States. Each station has an average of nine chargers. Tesla didn’t name any automakers or charging infrastructure companies as converts. In this highly competitive environment, in which virtually every automaker is now using the CCS, it’s hard to see GM, Ford and Stellantis switching to Tesla’s technology. However, at least one company — EV startup Aptera — supports the move. Earlier this year, Aptera called for the U.S. government to as the standard for all EV charging in the country. And EVGo has to some of its charging stations in the United States. The company said in the blog post that network operators “already have plans in motion” to incorporate NACS at their chargers. If network providers like ChargePoint, EVConnect or Electrify America add NACS, it would allow Tesla owners to charge at these stations without a need for an adapter. If automakers switch to NACS on its EVs, it would give owners of those vehicles access to Tesla’s North American Supercharging and destination charging networks. |
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