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Google says surveillance vendor targeted Samsung phones with zero-days | Zack Whittaker | 2,022 | 11 | 10 | Google says it has evidence that a commercial surveillance vendor was exploiting three zero-day security vulnerabilities found in newer Samsung smartphones. The vulnerabilities, discovered in Samsung’s custom-built software, were used together as part of an exploit chain to target Samsung phones running Android. The chained vulnerabilities allow an attacker to gain kernel read and write privileges as the root user, and ultimately expose a device’s data. Google Project Zero security researcher Maddie Stone said in a that the exploit chain targets Samsung phones with a Exynos chip running a specific kernel version. Samsung phones are sold with Exynos chips primarily across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, which is likely where the targets of the surveillance are located. Stone said Samsung phones running the affected kernel at the time include , A50, and A51. The flaws, since patched, were exploited by a malicious Android app, which the user may have been tricked into installing from outside of the app store. The malicious app allows the attacker to escape the app sandbox designed to contain its activity, and access the rest of the device’s operating system. Only a component of the exploit app was obtained, Stone said, so it isn’t known what the final payload was, even if the three vulnerabilities paved the way for its eventual delivery. “The first vulnerability in this chain, the , was the foundation of this chain, used four different times and used at least once in each step,” wrote Stone. “The Java components in Android devices don’t tend to be the most popular targets for security researchers despite it running at such a privileged level,” said Stone. Google declined to name the commercial surveillance vendor, but said the exploitation follows a pattern similar to recent device infections where malicious Android apps were abused to deliver powerful nation-state spyware. Earlier this year security researchers discovered Hermit, an developed by RCS Lab and used in targeted attacks by governments, with known victims in Italy and Kazakhstan. Hermit relies on tricking a target into downloading and installing the malicious app, such as a disguised cell carrier assistance app, from outside of the app store, but then silently steals a victim’s contacts, audio recordings, photos, videos, and granular location data. Google began notifying Android users whose . Surveillance vendor Connexxa also used to target both Android and iPhone owners. Google reported the three vulnerabilities to Samsung in late 2020, and Samsung rolled out patches to affected phones in March 2021, but did not disclose at the time that the vulnerabilities were being actively exploited. Stone said that Samsung has since committed to begin disclosing when vulnerabilities are actively exploited, following and , which also disclose in their security updates when vulnerabilities are under attack. “The analysis of this exploit chain has provided us with new and important insights into how attackers are targeting Android devices,” Stone added, intimating that further research could unearth new vulnerabilities in custom software built by Android device makers, like Samsung. “It highlights a need for more research into manufacturer specific components. It shows where we ought to do further variant analysis,” said Stone. |
We may all be #RatVerified forever | Amanda Silberling | 2,022 | 11 | 10 | I rarely update my Twitter display name, except maybe when I am on vacation and want to warn people that if you email me, I will either not see it or I will become very annoyed that you emailed me about NFTs. But I was convinced to add a little emoji to my name by Alex Cohen, an internet funny guy whom I’ve crossed paths with since the days of , and “ .” “W why would i pay $8 to get a blue check if i could put a rat next to my name for free??? i’m calling on everyone to join me in becoming — alex 🐀 (@tinysnekcomics) To become “rat verified,” all you have to do is edit your Twitter display name and add a rat emoji. That’s it. You did it. You are now rat verified. Cohen’s tweet went so viral that it even reached TechCrunch’s own , who is so disconnected from this corner of Weird Internet that I once had to explain “ ” to him. The hashtag #RatVerified even reached on Twitter’s list of trending topics in the United States. Of course, Cohen is making fun of new Twitter owner Elon Musk’s boneheaded idea to charge users $8 per month to be verified, which has already imploded into a . But since impersonation has become so rampant with the advent of the “I paid Elon $8” variant of blue check — which looks the same as the “I am a public figure” blue check — Twitter is currently not letting verified users change their usernames. i am rat verified forever — amanda silberling 🐀 (@asilbwrites) Even Doja Cat, who had changed her display name to “christmas,” has with the Chief Twit to free her from perpetual festivity. i don’t wanna be christmas forever please help i’ve made a mistake — christmas (@DojaCat) This whole rollout has been a mess — #tbt to yesterday when TechCrunch was for like two hours. And now as a result, what was supposedly a fleeting internet gag is now a bit more permanent. May my little rat friend prosper forever. |
Crypto’s crown prince stumbles | Anita Ramaswamy | 2,022 | 11 | 10 | Once we ran through the background behind the situation that’s been unfolding in real time this week, we shared our thoughts on the massive implications this fiasco might have for the rest of the crypto industry, from This list was compiled with information from Messari as well as TechCrunch’s own reporting. Who better to give an insider take on the recent Binance/FTX news than Binance chief executive CZ himself? Score a free ticket, get the lowdown and explore the many conversations and networking opportunities at on November 17 in Miami. The first 25 readers to register with this |
Even Healthcare lands additional capital to advance primary care adoption in India | Andrew Mendez | 2,022 | 11 | 10 | , an Indian “healthcare membership” company, landed new financial support in the form of $15 million to further drive its mission of providing affordable care to communities across India. Even isn’t insurance, but allows members to access primary and preventative care at any of over 100 partnered hospitals. Typically, the way Indians access healthcare is through emergency services as opposed to the preventative care model followed in Western countries. They most often more affordable, comprehensive care model. T “For us, Even is about giving members access to complete healthcare and building trust like a family doctor,” said co-founder Matilde Giglio. “Right from preventive care to diagnostics to hospitalization, our members will be assured of our support throughout their healthcare journey.” Depending on a user’s financial capabilities, there are three plans they can choose from. The cheapest is ₹ 40 per month ($0.50 USD) which includes unlimited consultations and a care team, but according to the company is meant for individuals looking to still pay for some services out of pocket. The plan gives users a glimpse at the care provided to then transition individuals to the second tier plan, Even Lite. Even Lite costs users ₹ 320 ($4 USD) per month and includes tests, consultations and a care team. For ₹ 528 ($6.54 USD) per month care becomes more comprehensive, including COVID-19-specific services, emergency care across India and cashless hospitalization. The company’s standard pricing is for individuals, but it does have group plans for companies and groups. Even currently has 20,000 active members and has partnered with over 100 hospitals since its launch in 2020. Just a year ago the company had 5,000 on a waitlist. The Bangalore-based company asks new users to talk to a doctor to collect health information and assess risk for underlying conditions. According to Giglio, conditions like diabetes, high cholesterol, high BP and obesity are common in India, but often go uncontrolled due to a lack of primary care. The company claims half their new users learned they suffered from diabetes during the onboarding process. The new capital raised comes from Alpha Wave and Aspada (Lightrock). They are joining existing investors Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund, Lachy Groom, Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora, CRED CEO Kunal Shah and DST Global partner Tom Stafford. Even first raised a $5 million seed round in 2021 led by Khosla Ventures. This round’s funds will be used to expand its clinical team and scale preventive care in conditions like diabetes, PCOS (polycystic ovary syndrome) and obesity. |
Dispatches from the conference room | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 11 | 10 | New England morning. I’m finally here on my long threatened trip to Boston. I was planning to be here in early July ahead of our robotics event, but SARS-CoV-2 and its many variants had different ideas. I narrowly avoided another reschedule on my third time around with COVID, but now I’m in that brief (and ever narrowing) window of relative immunity. It’s like I’m Superman or something (probably shouldn’t have gone with one of the few DC superheroes without a mask). Given the fact that I haven’t been out since 2019, I may well have overbooked. Met with four startups yesterday afternoon after arriving at Logan, spent this morning meeting with a couple of VCs/accelerators and startups, and am currently writing to you from a MassRobotics conference room (shoutout to Joyce, who kindly reserved me a conference room to chat with some founders ahead of a panel and more meetings tonight). An aerial general view during a game between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees on August 13, 2022 at Fenway Park in Boston, Massachusetts. Billie Weiss/Boston Red Sox/Getty Images Call it a fact-finding mission. Or maybe a temperature check. We’ve entered an interesting moment, where superpowered robotic VC investments are finally having to contend with the realities of market forces. For a moment there, the industry appeared relatively immune to the slowdown, but in spite of continued bullish feelings about automation at large, nothing here can appropriately be labeled “recession proof.” Anecdotally, we may have also entered the stage in which the key players in already well-represented categories such as logistics/fulfillment are already in place. That isn’t to say there isn’t room for key new players to enter the picture, but I suspect it’s a lot harder to get tens of millions in funding by telling investors that you’re an Amazon Robotics killer than it was at the beginning of the pandemic. At the moment, I’ve got a keen eye out for two things: First, the companies solving the extremely unsexy problems. There are still a lot of extremely bad — and impossible-to-staff — jobs out there that are ripe for automation. I spoke with a company that’s a great representation of that phenomenon, which I’ll dive into when I debrief my Boston trip in next week’s Actuator. Second, the key components of the broader robotics experience. I know a lot of well-funded companies are looking to create their full-stack solutions, but as these technologies grow in application, a ton of smaller industries are going to sprout up around that. If you’ve got a sufficiently adaptable piece of that puzzle, you’ve got a great — and perhaps overlooked — business on your hands. There’s value in well-placed myopia. Sometimes thinking small is the right business move. I realize and respect that a lot of folks enter the space with plans to change the world, but they think globally and act locally and all of that good stuff. Roughly 24 hours into this trip, and I’m realizing how much I missed landing in a place and talking to as many startups as possible. Glad I’m able to do this in Boston again, and hoping to be in more cities soon to see what companies are cooking and, perhaps, check the temperature of the industry from a much closer vantage point. Again, lots more on all of the above next week. Iron OX For now, two things are top of mind on this newsletter. One is fun. The other less so. We’ll start with the bad news first. Layoffs. Almost overnight, half the staff at Iron Ox . Even forgetting the extremely real and immediate human impact of such a move, it’s very disheartening for the industry. There are a lot of questions here. Is this a broader indictment of fully automated greenhouses? Is it something specific to Iron Ox? Perhaps the company’s solution was more proprietary and less adaptable to existing systems than a startup needs to be in the space. Either way, it’s hard not to walk away from this with the sense that such a well-funded firm is something of a bellwether for automation’s hard road ahead, as the space grapples with bigger macroeconomic issues. Chief legal officer Myra Pasek confirmed the layoffs this week with TechCrunch. All told, they amount to just under half of Iron Ox’s staff, and appear to run across the organization. It’s a gutting of a company that is clearly doing some soul searching around which existing elements to capitalize on going forward. Says Pasek: We’ve decided to hyperfocus on our core competence of engineering and technology; as a result, we eliminated many roles that are not core to our renewed focus. However, the layoff was comprehensive and included positions throughout the organization — i.e., not limited to only certain departments. Reducing the Iron Ox team was a painful decision — one we did not take lightly. We are working with our board members and leaning into our extensive ecosystem throughout Silicon Valley to help employees find meaningful new work at mission-aligned companies. Iron Ox has always hired world-class talent, and I’m confident that the individuals we unfortunately had to cut this week will have many options open to them. As a matter of policy, we are not going to provide additional details or comment on specific personnel, and we ask that you respect their privacy at this sensitive time. This was precisely the caveat I was alluding to in last week’s newsletter when talking about climate robotics firms. Not everything is a surefire bet, but that shouldn’t distract founders from the fact that there’s a lot of good to be done and money to be made in this space. NimbRo The more pleasant news this week is around teleoperation. Our TC Sessions: Robotics pitch-off winner Touchlab made it to the semifinals, but ultimately, the XPrize Avatar trophy went to NimbRo, which hails from the Autonomous Intelligent Systems group at the University of Bonn, Germany. The company won the $5 million prize at the finals competition in Long Beach, California. “NimbRo’s work demonstrates the remarkable potential of avatar technology to transcend time and distance and help address urgent human challenges, from health care access to disaster relief,” Xprize CEO Anousheh Ansari said in a release. “The final testing event was an exciting opportunity to share the power of telepresence with thousands of people in-person and around the world. We are grateful to all the participating teams for their impressive work and their efforts to boldly push technological boundaries.” NimbRo beat out 98 other teams, completing the 10 teleoperation tasks in five minutes, 50 seconds. The second-place team Pollen Robotics took ten minutes, 50 seconds, and the third-place team from Northeastern did so in 21 minutes, nine seconds. Here’s a breakdown of the event’s numerous stages, . If I wasn’t on the road this like, I likely would have contributed a significant portion of this week’s newsletter to the topic of telepresence. Namely, it seems like the automotive market dominated the conversation and caused many folks in the space to skip directly to full automation. But there’s some important middle ground here to explore. Remote operation makes a lot of sense in a lot of contexts, especially as many are recognizing precisely how difficult a problem full automation truly is. Ouster demo vehicle Ouster Earlier this week, two major lidar companies . Both Ouster and Velodyne signed a deal on November 4 that finds the two firms maintaining 50% of the stock in the newly formed company. The key factors at play here, as Rebecca points out in her article, are (1) there are a lot of companies in the lidar space — A LOT, a lot — and (2) things are returning to Earth after the big SPAC land grab. Ouster co-founder and CEO Angus Pacala will become the CEO of the combined firms, while Velodyne CEO Ted Tewksbury will serve as executive chairman of the board. Wing Meanwhile, drone delivery service Wing continues to expand its Australian operations. The Alphabet-owned firm that will provide drone delivery of convenience and grocery items in 15 minutes or less through the popular app. “While Wing has traditionally provided delivery services directly to residential and business customers, to further accelerate our technology development, we’ll be increasingly working with marketplaces and logistics partners to expand their delivery options,” says Wing Australia GM Simon Ross. “[We’re focused on] making fast drone delivery affordable and sustainable for them and their customers.” Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch |
null | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 11 | 17 | null |
Who’ll get the last laugh over Musk toying with Twitter’s veracity? | Natasha Lomas | 2,022 | 11 | 10 | Twitter’s painstakingly layered infosphere looks to be light-speeding back to chaotic noise under new owner Elon Musk. The billionaire is no fan of meritocratic signals nor, it seems, a friend to genuine information — preferring anyone pay him $8/m to have their account on his microblogging social network badged with a check-mark that looks like the old Twitter verification check yet does not involve Musk’s Twitter checking they are who they say they are. In short, it’s a joke made real. Now, in order to verify if a check mark displayed on a Twitter account is a legacy verification of actual identity — or just a late stage capitalism status symbol for Musk’s most loyal fanboys — users must click on the check symbol next to an account name and read the small print that pops up and will either read: “This account is verified because it’s notable in government, news, entertainment, or another designated category” (aka, it’s pre-Musk Twitter verified); or “This account is verified because it’s subscribed to Twitter Blue” (aka, not verified; but yes probably a Musk super fan). At the time of writing, there is no ‘at a glance’ way to distinguish between the old ‘identify verified’ Twitter check mark and non-verified paying subscribers. It’s inherently confusing — presumably intentionally so, given Musk’s love of trolling. He certainly wasted no time laughing about the informational chaos he’d wrought… (At least, we *think* the below account posting crying-with-laughter emojis is him but who can tell anything on Twitter these days?) Screengrab: Natasha Lomas/TechCrunch Musk’s new Twitter Blue subscription product enables imposters and other purveyors of misinformation to assume (and, if they wish, trash) reputations of others, one check-marked tweet at a time — as on launch — just so long as they can sign up for an $8 charge to pay for Musk’s “leveller” tool. Early targets for impersonation by Twitter Blue subscribers have included basketball star LeBron James, former president George W Bush, former U.K. prime minister Tony Blair, and tech and gaming brands Apple, Nintendo and Valve Software among others. Account bans followed for some of these impersonator accounts soon after — but the barrier to entry to Musk’s chaos game is so plenty more trolls will surely follow. (Hence Twitter’s new nickname being ‘$8chan’.) Twitter Blue is also touted to boost the visibility of subscribers’ tweets vs non-subscribers thereby skewing the information surfaced by the platform’s algorithms — and most likely eroding the visibility of quality information (based on who’s happy to pay vs ). Who could possibly have predicted this! 💩 — Natasha ($0) 🧗♀️ (@riptari) As we’ve , the risks aren’t just reputational (nor to information quality on Twitter): Scams and fraud could easily result if genuine Twitter users are taken in by a fake that’s seeking to harvest their personal information for identity theft or pointing them towards malicious websites to try to run phishing scams to compromise financial information or other sensitive data. Thing is, Twitter is an existing signatory to the EU’s recently beefed up — a voluntary set of “commitments and measures” platforms agree to apply with the goal of Seriously. Musk-owned Twitter is already signed up to . Yes, we lol’d too. If you take a look at the it makes especially awkward reading for Musk-Twitter (and/or the European Commission) — with a requirement on the platform to “limit or further bolstering) policies against “ ” (emphasis ours); and against “ “ Hands up anyone who thinks Musk’s chaotic product iteration at Twitter since taking over as “Chief Twit” fits the bill for “safe design practices”? Er… anyone? No, of course not. It took Musk a matter of hours to — which took the confusing form of a duplicate check mark and ‘official’ label (yes, srsly) — and had been (very) briefly applied to a sub-set of (legacy) verified accounts by certain of the remaining Twitter staff after Musk fired the other half of the company in a massive cost cutting drive immediately on taking over. “I just killed it,” Musk tweeted yesterday in response to (legacy verified) YouTuber Marques Brownlee — who had just spotted that the ‘Official’ badge he’d also just spotted was now missing; aka, AWOL soon after materializing. So, basically: Ohhai chaos! “Blue check will be the great leveler,” was all Musk offered by way of public explanation at the time. Blue check will be the great leveler — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) Trust & safety features that come and go within a matter of days/hours/minutes — product launches that drastically impact trust & safety being rushed out without to their impact on, um, trust & safety — is the new normal at Musk-Twitter. The Chief Twit said as much — tweeting soon after nixing the extra ‘Official’ label: “Please note that Twitter will do lots of dumb things in coming months. We will keep what works & change what doesn’t.” Which is really another way of Musk taking a pen to the Disinformation Code and doing this: “ Please note that Twitter will do lots of dumb things in coming months. We will keep what works & change what doesn’t. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) Oh and it keeps getting worse: too. Next up: Pre-Musk Twitter , of course. Most notably, it was for misrepresenting the security and privacy of user data over several years, for example. (And one can only imagine the scale of regulatory penalties that could rain down on Musk-Twitter if it fails to live up to its existing consent decree commitments to the FTC.) What blowback is Musk going to face in the EU for thumbing his nose at regional lawmakers’ carefully constructed Code of Practice on Disinformation? In the short term probably not a lot — although some EU lawmakers are calling for Musk to testify in front of the European Parliament, as reported earlier. MEP Sophie However it’s the European Commission that’s responsible for the Code of Practice on Disinformation — and for monitoring how it’s being applied. We reached out to the Commission to ask if it has any concerns about Musk’s intentional levelling of Twitter’s verification system. A spokesman responded by telling us it is in contact with Twitter “in the context of the Code of Practice”. “As Commissioner Breton recalled again recently we expect Twitter to respect all EU rules, this also includes the Code of Practice,” they added. , the EU’s internal market commissioner, Thierry Breton, wasted not time in schooling Musk on his taking ownership of Twitter that the bird must ‘fly by the EU’s rules’. But at press time we’d received no direct response from his office on the question of whether he has any concerns about account impersonations on Twitter spreading disinformation in the wake of Musk torching the value of verification. The next batch of reports from Disinformation Code signatories aren’t due til January — so the EU’s executive may be trying to keep its head down to watch what unfolds in the coming, uhhhh, hours and minutes of Musk’s chaotic reign. The Commission spokesperson did also imply that it’s watching to see if Musk launches Twitter Blue in the Single Market (the product has not yet been made available in the EU — in Europe it’s only available to U.K. users so far) — so, again, it could be keeping its powder dry to see if he adapts the feature-set for an EU launch to make it less, er, disinformation friendly. (That said, EU users are already being exposed to confusingly labelled tweets from Twitter Blue subscribers located outside the bloc so limiting scrutiny to local product launches would entirely miss the big picture confusion and risk letting Musk off the hook.) It should be noted that the EU Code of Practice on Disinformation, while recently toughened up, remains a voluntary framework — so Musk violating commitments and measures that Twitter’s prior leadership signed up to can’t attract legal sanction at present. It’s just a piece of paper — and the ink on the dotted line wasn’t even his to spill. So Musk doubtless does not feel beholden, if he’s even noticed this tiny detail. (Yes we also reached out to Twitter for comment but received no response.) That said, the situation is set to change next year as the EU’s new flagship digital regulatory framework, the (DSA), starts to come into application for larger platforms. This is relevant because the Commission has intentionally linked following the Disinformation Code to compliance with the DSA — and the latter legally binding across the EU (and can carry fines of up to 6% of global annual turnover for violations). So larger platforms that flout the bloc’s Code on Disinformation are risking the Commission finding them in breach of the DSA. Which will be a lot harder to ignore — at least for normal companies and CEOs. Whether the EU will designate Twitter a VLOP (aka very large online platform) under the DSA is the big, burning question for regional Internet users at this point. And, really, for anyone concerned about Twitter’s slide into chaos under Musk — because the regulation looks to be one of the few meaningful checks (ha!) on Musk-Twitter in core areas of democratic risk like disinformation. The real $44BN question, then, is who will pay the biggest price for Musk’s decision to devalue veracity on Twitter? The billionaire lord — assuming he gets slapped with hefty (enough) fines for intentionally wreaking havoc on trust & safety — or everyone else; the ‘peasants’ in this analogy, who can do nothing but wait to find out; aka, all the Internet users and people whose societies and democracies are being targeted for levelling down by disinformation purveyors (whether they’ve paid $8 to tweet or $44 billion to own Twitter). For now, clearly, Musk’s chaos reigns. |
Pitch Deck Teardown: Syneroid’s $500K seed deck | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,022 | 11 | 10 | a $500,000 round of funding to bring to market. The company is finding some interesting slices of the market, but the deck, overall, leaves a few things to be desired. We learn more from mistakes than from perfection, so I figured it’d be a great one to dive into for this week’s pitch deck teardown! Throughout this pitch deck teardown, you’ll see the company referred to as Syneroid and GPC Smart — the company’s official name is the former, but the brand they are using for the pitch deck and its products is the latter. The company told me it raised this round at a $3.9 million valuation. The company used a tight, 12-slide deck for its pitch, and no information has been redacted or omitted. is entering a market that’s very easy to understand: Lost animals are something that most of us have an experience with in one way or another. That’s an advantage in that you don’t have to explain the market in detail. It also means that the company is facing a wall of potential competitors even as it is trying to gain traction. That’s a challenge, and it’s interesting to see how Syneroid is tackling it. [Slide 2] The overview slide does a great job of getting investors up to speed. GPC Smart Tags An investor likely knows at least some of this, but these bullets augment (or gently correct) any preconceived notions an investor might have, smoothing the delta between their of the market and the . This slide — while fairly wordy — does a really good job of ironing out any misunderstandings an investor may have. Having said that, it also brings up some important questions. Lost pets are just one part of the challenge; stolen pets will have their collars removed, and animals that go astray are on occasion able to shed their collars. Syneroid doesn’t really address either scenario. It’s pretty rare to see a startup put its competitor overview front and center, but I think that was a really shrewd move in this case. Again, this is not a deep tech play or a market shrouded in mystery. I suspect that most would-be investors would be able to come up with the two major competitors. Tackling that head-on does seem a little defensive, but given the market, I think it makes a lot of sense in this case. Here’s how the company addressed it: [Slide 3] Tackling competitive alternatives this early in a slide deck is unusual but probably a good move in this case. GPC Smart Tags This slide shows an understanding of the competitive landscape. I love that the company chose to tackle this upfront. I think it’s important, and it’s a great way to get out ahead of the most obvious pushback from investors. Like on the previous slide, although its presence is encouraging, it raises some questions. I think an NFC/QR code dog collar is interesting, but I’m struggling to see how they are inherently better than standard engraved tags. The exact laser-engraved tag in the photo doesn’t cost $15, as listed on the slide, but , with four lines of text on each side of the metal tag. Sure, you can’t “update” the information, but pet owners are probably able to afford the $4 every time they move or change their phone numbers. You can’t include location information, but someone who is willing to catch a stray pup is probably able to text or call the owner with an address and details. Again, if the animal is stolen, the thief will simply discard the collar altogether, and at that point, it doesn’t really matter what’s on the collar. As far as tracking goes, an Apple AirTag might be a good solution for those situations (but it’s as easy to throw an AirTag into the bushes as any other collar). This slide shows that the founders understand the challenges with their messaging and positioning, but it also shows that its answers are a work in progress. The pet market, both in the U.S. and globally, is fantastically big. Investors know that, but adding a reminder can’t hurt. You don’t have to capture of a market share to build a very significant business here. [Slide 7] Hellooooo market size. GPC Smart Tags This slide shows the overall size of the market, which is awesome, but I would have liked it even better if the company said something about what it believes its serviceable market is and how it is going to go after those customers. The thing you can learn from this slide as a startup? Have clarity on your market size and show off that it is big and trending toward growth. In the rest of this teardown, we’ll take a look at three things Syneroid could have improved or done differently, along with its full pitch deck! |
Galaxy and Gradient VCs will judge the TC Sessions: Crypto Pitch-off | Lauren Simonds | 2,022 | 11 | 10 | |
Google Play to pilot third-party billing in new markets, including US; Bumble joins Spotify as early tester | Sarah Perez | 2,022 | 11 | 10 | Google today it’s expanding its user choice billing pilot, which allows Android app developers to use other payment systems besides Google’s own. The program will now become available to new markets, including the U.S., Brazil and South Africa, and Bumble will now join Spotify as one of the pilot testers. Google additionally announced its implementation of the program starting this week. The company its intention to launch a third-party billing option back in March of this year, with Spotify as the initial tester. Since then, the program has steadily expanded. Last month, for example, for the user choice billing program in select markets, including India, Australia, Indonesia, Japan and the European Economic Area (EEA). The company also a similar policy for developers in the EEA region in July, but the new guidelines raised the commission discount to for developers who opted in. With today’s expansion, user choice billing will be made available to 35 countries worldwide. Google says it’s been working with Spotify to help develop the experience and now the streaming music service will begin to put the new features into action in supported markets. The experience could still change over time, Google warned, as this is still the early days of the pilot test. In addition, Bumble has now joined Google to test user choice billing in its own app, with plans to roll out the options to users in select countries in the coming months. Developers interested in adopting user choice billing have to follow set by Google that detail how to implement the feature in their apps. These guidelines currently require developers to display an information screen and a separate billing choice screen. The information screen only has to be shown to each user the first time they initiate a purchase, but the billing choice screen must be shown before every purchase, the rules state. There are other requirements around when and how to display the screens and how the user interface should appear. With the launch, Spotify users on Android will see a new user interface that allows them to choose how they want to pay for their Spotify subscription (see image below). For the first time, the two options — Google Play billing and Spotify billing — will appear side-by-side. If the user selects Google Play billing, they’ll be transitioned to the usual experience and will be able to track their subscription in the Google Play Store’s Subscription Center. If the user selects Spotify billing, they’ll then continue within Spotify’s own checkout process and user experience. This test will become available in a few markets at first, then expand to others over the coming weeks, Spotify says. Spotify “Spotify has been publicly advocating for platform fairness and expanded payment options for years. We believe that fair and open platforms enable better, frictionless consumer experiences that also empower developers to imagine, innovate, and thrive,” a Spotify post stated. While the general terms offer a in commissions paid to Google when user choice billing is used, Spotify wouldn’t comment on its confidential deal with Google, but notes it meets the company’s standards of fairness. It’s unclear if the streamer has been offered more favorable terms as an early adopter. These changes follow a period when the major app stores from Apple and Google have been under pressure from lawmakers and regulators in global markets to open up their app ecosystems. This includes pressure to give developers the ability to use third-party payment systems and allow developers to inform customers of other ways to pay, among other things. In addition, some developers have taken to suing the app giants directly. In the U.S., for instance, Fortnite maker Epic Games sued both Apple for their alleged monopolistic practices due to their restrictions around in-app payments and for the right to distribute apps and games directly to end users outside the official app stores. Dating app giant . (Which makes Google’s choice to invite Bumble into the program that much more interesting!) Other companies have been lobbying lawmakers for more app store openness, too, through organizations like the , which includes big-name like Epic Games, Spotify, Tile and others, including indie developers. Google and Apple are also under investigation in various markets, with the Justice Department in the early stages of and EU antitrust officials the Play Store. In a blog post, Google says the goal of its pilot is to “understand complexities involved in supporting user choice billing for developers and users in countries across the world while maintaining a safe and positive user experience.” The company has yet to say when it expects the pilot test to wrap. |
OpenAI leads $23.5M round in Mem, an AI-powered note-taking app | Kyle Wiggers | 2,022 | 11 | 10 | Last year, OpenAI announced the , a tranche through which it and its partners, including Microsoft, are investing in early-stage AI companies tackling major problems. Mum’s been the word since on which companies have received infusions from the Fund. But today, the OpenAI Startup Fund revealed that it led a $23.5 million investment in , a work-focused app that taps AI to automatically organize notes. The investment values Mem at $110 million post-money and brings the startup’s total raised to $29 million. Co-founded by Kevin Moody and Dennis Xu, Mem differentiates itself from traditional note-taking apps by emphasizing “lightweight organization,” in Moody and Xu’s words. The workflow revolves around search and a chronological timeline, allowing users to attach topic tags, tag other users and add recurring reminders to notes. Mem users can capture quick notes, send links and save images from anywhere using SMS, messaging apps and the platform’s mobile client. Collaboration features let teams share, edit and comment on notes and directly attach them to shared calendars for faster reference. Mem’s search experience uses AI to search across notes, aiming to understand which notes might be most relevant in a given moment to a particular person. Moody and Xu say the platform is designed to augment knowledge workers in their typical responsibilities, like reading through pages of information, extracting the pieces relevant to a particular question and transforming the information into an answer or a report. Mem taps AI to organize notes in real time. Mem There’s no doubt knowledge-seeking tasks are time-consuming. to Gartner, professionals spend 50% of their working hours searching for information and on average take 18 minutes to locate a file (albeit the of metrics like these has been challenged over the years). One estimates that document disorganization costs businesses $3,900 per employee each year in productivity losses, making Mem an attractive proposition if the tech works as advertised. “The number one thing we hear from the organizations we talk to is the desire to be able to marry their vast troves of proprietary knowledge with … generative AI models — to support use cases that range from conducting research to writing to selling and beyond,” Moody and Xu told TechCrunch in an email interview. “The magic of Mem is that we bring together your own private and proprietary data along with state-of-the-art generative language models to unlock truly personalized, factual outputs. We combine knowledge sources across the individual, team and organizational levels, leading to significantly better performance across the board.” Mem recently launched Mem It for Twitter, which allows users to save threads, get AI-generated summaries of their contents and see suggestions for similar tweets. It’s also continuing to refine Mem X, Mem’s built-in work assistant, with new features like Smart Write and Smart Edit, which leverages AI to generate text based on a prompt, summarize files, generate titles for documents and let users use natural language commands to edit or format text. Mem’s AI-powered writing tools, which are launching in preview soon. Mem The plan for the foreseeable future is to increasingly lean into these sorts of AI-powered experiences, Moody and Xu say, with support from OpenAI through the OpenAI Startup Fund. OpenAI Startup Fund participants receive early access to new OpenAI systems and Azure resources from Microsoft in addition to capital. “OpenAI is obviously leading the wave of technological revolutions that we are riding,” Moody and Xu said. “This makes the OpenAI Startup Fund the ideal partner for what we’re building — for both the technical expertise and strategic guidance they bring to the table.” OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap, who also manages the OpenAI Startup Fund, added in an emailed statement: “Mem uses powerful AI to make knowledge workers more productive by removing the tedium and drudgery of organizing and accessing information, ultimately allowing people to focus on the parts of their work that matter. Their vision aligns squarely with our goal at the OpenAI Startup Fund to accelerate companies using AI to enhance productivity and, more broadly, human potential.” Mem competes with a number of companies seeking to tackle the same knowledge-finding and notes-organizing challenges. In enterprise search, there’s Glean, which recently $100 million in a venture equity round. On the knowledge management side, Atlassian’s wiki-like collaborative workspace Confluence and Notion, which was at $10 billion in 2020, still dominate. But Moody and Xu argue that 16-employee Mem has an advantage in that it’s “self-organizing,” ostensibly resulting in less manual curation and labor. While they declined to reveal Mem’s revenue or the names of any major customers, they assert that Mem is successful, owing to its AI-driven tech. “We’re confident in our unique approach to self-organizing and generative knowledge management. … Our personalized machine learning models not only help knowledge workers stay organized automatically, but also go beyond simply helping find things — we actually help people do their work,” Moody and Xu said. “The shift to remote work has made effective, asynchronous knowledge sharing more important than ever, and the market slowdown has caused companies to focus on efficiency. Our AI-assisted knowledge work saves people time, and the rapid improvement in large language models gives us a further tailwind.” |
Amazon previews its new delivery drone, the MK30 | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 11 | 10 | Following this morning’s , Amazon just unveiled MK30, the latest iteration of its delivery drone. The system is the successor to the MK27-2, which is set to debut limited deliveries to residents in . The MK30, which is set for a 2024 debut, is both smaller and lighter than the earlier version and able to withstand harsher temperatures and a broader range of weather conditions. Another key element here is making things quieter. Drone noise has been one of the most anticipated complaints about bringing these systems into residential settings. The system maintains the same basic hexacopter foundation as its predecessor — a different tack than the fixed-wing systems deployed by the likes of Wing. Brian Heater Amazon writes: Reducing the noise signature of our drones is an important engineering challenge our team is working on. Our drones fly hundreds of feet in the air, well above people and structures. Even when they descend to deliver packages, our drones are generally quieter than a range of sounds you would commonly hear in a typical neighborhood. Prime Air’s Flight Science team has created new custom-designed propellers that will reduce the MK30’s perceived noise by a further 25%. That’s a game-changer we’re very excited about. Also on-board are new safety systems designed to avoid a wide range of different obstacles, from fellow drones to trees to people and pets. “While it’s impossible to eliminate all risks from flying, we take a proven aerospace approach to design safety into our system,” the company writes. “As always, our newest drone will go through rigorous evaluation by national aerospace authorities like the Federal Aviation Administration to prove its safety and reliability.” Pictured: Amazon’s previous model. Amazon The acknowledgement of risk is important here. The truth is as these things become more common, so too, will accident reports. Amazon’s delivery drones have been through their share of ups and downs (so to speak), but the program appears to have survived some wide ranging cuts from CEO Andy Jassy — the same may not apply to the company’s last-mile , however. Amazon: A drone being tested in a wind tunnel. Amazon “[T]o sustainably deliver a vast selection of items in under an hour, and eventually within 30 minutes, at scale,” Amazon writes, “drones are the most effective path to success.” Plenty of skepticism remains around the efficacy of such programs, of course. Amazon, however, isn’t alone in betting big on drone delivery — one baby step at a time. Alphabet’s Wing program recently for food deliveries in Logan, Australia. Amazon Prime Air VP David Carbon discussed the company’s ambitions thusly at today’s event: A demonstrated, targeted level of safety that is validated by regulators and a magnitude safer than driving to the store. Delivering 500 million packages by drone, annual by the end of this decade. Servicing millions of customers, operating in highly populated, suburban areas such as Seattle, Boston and Atlanta. Flying in an uncontrolled space autonomously. |
Police arrest suspected LockBit operator as the ransomware gang spills new data | Carly Page | 2,022 | 11 | 10 | A dual Russian and Canadian national linked to has been arrested over his alleged involvement in attacks targeting critical infrastructure and large industrial groups worldwide. Mikhail Vasiliev, 33, was arrested in Ontario, Canada on October 26 following an investigation led by the French National Gendarmerie with the help of Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre, the and the Canadian Royal Canadian Mounted Police. During the arrest, police seized eight computers, 32 external hard drives and €400,000 in cryptocurrencies, Europol said. The arrest follows a similar action in Ukraine in October last year when a joint international law enforcement operation led to the arrest of two of his accomplices. Europol says Vasiliev, described as “one of the world’s most prolific ransomware operators,” was one of its high-value targets due to his involvement in numerous high-profile ransomware cases. The EU police agency added that he is known for trying to extort victims with ransom demands between €5 to €70 million. A separate press release from the Department of Justice notes that LockBit has claimed at least 1,000 victims in the United States and has extracted tens of millions of dollars in actual ransom payments from their victims. Vasiliev is awaiting extradition to the United States, where he is charged with conspiracy to intentionally damage protected computers and to transmit ransom demands. If convicted, Vasiliev faces a maximum of five years in prison. “Yesterday’s successful arrest demonstrates our ability to maintain and apply relentless pressure against our adversaries,” said FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate. “The FBI’s persistent investigative efforts, in close collaboration with our federal and international partners, illustrates our commitment to using all of our resources to ensure we protect the American public from these global cyber threat actors.” Brett Callow, a ransomware expert and threat analyst at Emisosft, tells TechCrunch that Vasiliev’s arrest could signal the end of the LockBit operation “as other cybercriminals will lose confidence in the integrity of the operation. “Unfortunately, the group will probably rebrand, but this is nonetheless a significant arrest,” Callow added. “Vasiliev could well lead law enforcement to others involved in the operation.” Specific victims targeted by the suspected LockBit operator were not named by Europol. However, France’s involvement in the operation suggests Vasiliev could be linked to a recent attack on French aerospace and defense group Thales. LockBit, a prominent ransomware operation that’s previously claimed , and , added Thales to its leak site on October 31. The group claimed to have published data stolen from the company today, which it describes as “very sensitive” and “high risk” in nature. Contents of the data leak include commercial documents, accounting files and customer files, according to LockBit, though the files had not been published at the time of publication. “As far as customers are concerned, you can approach the relevant organizations to consider taking legal action against this company that has greatly neglected the rules of confidentiality,” a message on the LockBit leak site reads. In a statement given to TechCrunch, Thales spokesperson Marion Bonnet says the company is “aware of an allegation of data theft by LockBit 3.0” but adds that it has not received any direct ransom notification. “We carefully monitor every allegation related to data theft,” Bonnet added. “A dedicated team of security experts systematically investigates this type of situation as security of data remains our key priority.” LockBit also claims to have today leaked 40 terabytes of data stolen from German automotive giant Continental, and samples of the data suggest that the gang has accessed technical documents and source code. Though a ransom demand was not explicitly stated, the ransomware gang’s leak page claims to offer access to the full tranche of stolen data for $50 million. Continental spokesperson Marc Siedler told TechCrunch that the company’s investigation into the incident has revealed that “attackers were also able to steal some data from the affected IT systems,” but refused to say what types of data were stolen or how many customers and employees have been affected. |
Now anyone can hail a Waymo robotaxi in downtown Phoenix | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 11 | 10 | Waymo has opened up its fully driverless ride-hail service in downtown Phoenix to members of the general public. Previously, the company had only been with no safety driver behind the wheel for participants in its “trusted tester” program. The expansion in Phoenix is yet another sign of Waymo’s accelerated push toward commercialization. It comes a day after from the California Department of Motor Vehicles, which allows Waymo to charge for autonomous services, like delivery, in San Francisco. More importantly, it’s a prerequisite to securing the California Public Utilities Commission’s own driverless deployment permit, which Waymo needs to operate a commercial robotaxi service with no human safety operator in the city. Waymo’s service in downtown Phoenix will mirror the one it has operated in Chandler, Arizona since 2020. It will be a paid rider-only service that’s available 24/7 to anyone who downloads the app and hails a ride in Waymo’s service area. Waymo said this is an important step as it plans to expand the service to even more of the downtown area in coming months. Earlier this month, Waymo also launched rides, with a driver in the front seat, from the city’s downtown. The service is currently only available to trusted testers, but will likely expand using the same recipe Waymo has used throughout its many expansions — Waymo will probably next test fully driverless rides to the airport with employees before opening that up to trusted testers, and then finally to members of the public. Waymo did not confirm or deny this roadmap. Waymo’s service area in downtown Phoenix. Waymo Waymo did not say how many of its fleet of Jaguar I-Pace’s would be dedicated to the commercial ramp in Phoenix, but a spokesperson told TechCrunch the company is ready to meet what it projects to be a “healthy demand” for a 24/7 autonomous ride-hailing service downtown. |
Meet Pineapple, the platform aiming to reshape professional networking for Gen Z | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 11 | 10 | , an app that’s aiming to reshape professional networking for Gen Z, is to the public today. The idea behind Pineapple is to give young professionals a way to network with others through a visual story profile that’s kind of like a digital portfolio. For now, the platform is only . The professional network is the brainchild of Pineapple’s 22-year-old co-founder and CEO David Diamond, who got an early start in tech as a product design intern at Intercom at age 15. Diamond was initially rejected from Intercom after applying with a standard paper resume and was also told he was too young to work there. After strengthening his resume and building a portfolio, Diamond says he landed the role. “I started to think about how I landed the job and how lucky I was,” Diamond told TechCrunch in an interview. “I wondered, if I had to put together a portfolio, what was the rest of my generation doing? From there, we had a clear vision of building a professional network for Gen Z. We saw that other networks weren’t accurately representing Gen Z. We wanted to make a network that helps Gen Z network with each other and gain opportunities, rather than focusing on creating another jobs board. The goal was to give users profiles that really represent them.” In 2020, Diamond founded Pineapple alongside Oliver Cruise with the goal of changing professional networking for Gen Z. After beta testing the platform with 10,000 users, Pineapple is now ready to grow. Pineapple Diamond says the main focus of Pineapple is user profiles, which are designed to help create deep and meaningful professional connections by allowing users to express themselves in a visual way. The app’s profiles are a cross between LinkedIn and Instagram, as they showcase a user’s introduction, experience, projects and more in a visual Story-like way. Another big part of Pineapple is Communities, which aim to help users find other people who are passionate about the same thing as them. From VCs to marketers to designers, there are specific communities for all sorts of topics. You can see the member directory for each community and connect with specific people. Within Communities, there are Jams, which are threaded conversations for discussions that last for 24 hours. Jams can be used to go in-depth about a specific topic. For instance, a founder can start a Jam to answer questions that people may have about their journey. Pineapple also includes an Explore page where you can discover more Jams, people and communities. The app also has a TikTok-inspired For You page that is designed to help you keep up with your connections. Some may see Pineapple as the “LinkedIn for Gen Z,” but Diamond says the platform still has a ways to go before looking to take on LinkedIn. Right now, Pineapple is focused on helping people network in different ways than LinkedIn is. For instance, Diamond says that some young users may use LinkedIn to find a mentor, but Pineapple is where they can come to network with their peers, learn new things and find people for their side projects. Pineapple also isn’t focused on status/job updates or the hustle culture that is often associated with LinkedIn, Diamond says. Pineapple For the time being, Pineapple is going to focus on growth before venturing into monetization. When Pineapple is ready to add monetization features to its platform, Diamond says the company will focus on helping creators earn money. One of the ways the company plans to do this is through creator subscriptions where popular creators will be able to offer educational content to users for a price. In addition, Pineapple hopes to partner with companies who will be able to recruit employees directly from the platform. “We want to be the go-to professional network for Gen Z and folks who are early on in their career,” Diamond says. “From a roadmap standpoint, we want Pineapple to be the obvious solution for people who are starting their career. I think in order to do that, we need to up our game when it comes to profile-building. I think you should be able to build a mini-website within Pineapple, and I don’t think there should be a need to ever have a portfolio website if you have Pineapple.” In terms of funding, Pineapple raised a $1.1 million pre-seed round in April that was co-led by F7 Ventures and 500 Global. The round included participation from angel investors Bradley Horowitz, the VP of product at Google, and Julie Zhou, the former VP of design at Facebook. Diamond says the funding mainly went toward research and development, along with making key early hires. Pineapple is kicking off its seed round soon and plans to close it sometime next year. |
OK, I take back what I said about tech layoffs | Natasha Mascarenhas | 2,022 | 11 | 19 | Well, that didn’t take long. In late October, I wrote about highlighting that 70% of layoffs that happened this year were conducted over the summer. In fact, using layoffs.fyi data, I claimed that the fall was shaping up to be far less gruesome in terms of net new events and people impacted. Then, things got worse. Since I published that post, a number of layoffs have been announced from companies including but not limited to Twitter, Meta, Amazon, Chime, Stripe, Lyft, Salesforce and Cisco. (Update: As I put this newsletter together, my colleague Kirsten Korosec broke the news ). (Update #2: Now I’m hearing that ). Just a few weeks ago, 2022 workforce reductions impacted at least 92,558 known people, per layoffs.fyi. That same data source now says that the number has grown to 134,739 known people, or a 46% increase. Put differently, I said the summer was bad. But now, nearly as many people who were laid off in the summer months of June, July and August, were laid off in November (and the month isn’t even over). Talk about a rough start to November. According to executives and other industry sources, founders may squeeze more layoffs into the next few days ahead of Thanksgiving and the holiday season. All seem to agree that the worst of the worst is ahead of us — and the true extent of layoffs may only materialize in Q1 2023. I wasn’t entirely wrong in my poorly aged column. I wrote then that we may just be experiencing a reporting delay and that more layoffs may come as company runways dwindle. There are still loads of companies that raised a ton of money over the boom cycle but aren’t producing nearly enough revenue to justify their historical valuations; the late-stage market is full of them. Still, to suggest that tech is about to have a big reality check is somewhat surprising to me. Isn’t that what this entire year has been? The only hint that I can latch onto is that some companies have shown us that layoffs have a learning curve — , basically underlining, highlighting and bolding that they were unable to cut deep enough the first time. I’ll end by saying that I’m working on an end of the year story about the human impact of layoffs, namely where tech talent goes after they’ve been let go. If you lost your job this year and have an interesting story of what you did next, and how your definition of risk changed, Well, at least as long as the site is. Otherwise, you can find me on and and, well, I’m not going to share my LinkedIn just yet but maybe soon. In the rest of this newsletter, we’ll talk about Elizabeth Holmes, the FTX fall out, eavesdropping and some corners of the internet that made me smile this week. Elizabeth Holmes, the infamous founder of Theranos, The sentencing comes months after Holmes was found guilty on four of 11 counts related to defrauding investors. Theranos COO and Homles’ former boyfriend Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani is still awaiting his sentencing after being convicted on in his own trial. The sentencing caps off a long wait to see how Holmes would be held accountable, if at all, for her crimes. Since its launch, the Theranos story has been synonymous with the strengths, and clearly damaging weaknesses, of Silicon Valley hype culture. Justin Sullivan / Getty Images I was out on vacation (and then out sick) while FTX’s meltdown began. Thankfully, my co-workers gifted me on the actual impact of a crypto exchange collapsing in such a public way. If last week was all about the how, this week was all about the now what. How do investors, startups and people in the crypto world move on? And what lasting impacts does FTX’s fall out have? As we talked about this week, the human side of all of this is finally starting to emerge. Take Nestcoin, for example. The African web3 startup declared that it held many of its day-to-day cash used for operating expenses in FTX. As a result, it is We also heard about SoftBank following Sequoia’s lead in marking down its investment, but what I really care about is Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch I’m not going to run you through the latest Twitter headlines because, similar to the introduction of this newsletter, I will probably need to update it every hour to include all the pivots, contradictions and straight up meltdowns that are happening on the platform. What I will do, however, is My earnest co-workers, and I, the most earnest of them all, put together a little post about why we value Twitter and Obviously, we’re not saying the platform is dead or going anywhere immediately. But, what if it did? I’m nosy, curious and have a constant fear that I’m missing key comprehension or a hidden angle on a macroeconomic trend. It’s probably why I’m a reporter (and why I’m addicted to Twitter). Twitter lets me be an eavesdropping, unassuming fly on the wall. That was important when I first re-downloaded it in college and subscribed to get a notification every single time Boston Business Journal tweeted news — and it’s important now as I try to understand what founders think in real time (versus what they want to tell a TechCrunch reporter over Zoom). It helped me get up to speed when I was an intern at the Boston Globe, and it helps me blend in and understand more as a senior reporter at TechCrunch. Eavesdropping became even more important to me about one week into the pandemic, which happened to be one week into my job at TechCrunch. It became how I found my sources, showing up in the embeds of my stories. It also became how I balanced out my sources, aiming to not just quote the people with the spiciest takes in 180 characters. As an early-career reporter, I feel like Twitter gave me a fighting chance at catching up to all my brilliant colleagues and competitors digesting the news in real time. I mean, I literally saw their thought process every single day. We all heard that Twitter became our town square during quarantine, but for me, it also became a map. For the rest of the piece, check out our TC+ piece: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch We’re officially at the time of year, and part of the news cycle, when I’m desperately searching for good news to highlight. On , we started with some positive growth-focused tech news, including , and In the spirit of smiling, here are some tweets and jokes from the week that made me smile: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch If you like this newsletter, do me a quick favor? Forward it to a friend, tell me what you think and follow In the meantime, I’m taking next week off to enjoy the holiday season with friends and family, so I hope you do the same. Startups Weekly will be back on December 4! Best, |
Elon Musk ends Trump’s Twitter ban | Amanda Silberling | 2,022 | 11 | 19 | Former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account has been reinstated following a in January 2021. On Friday, new Twitter owner Elon Musk posted a poll asking if Trump should be allowed back on the platform. Just over 15 million people voted, with 51.8% voting in favor of reinstating Trump on Twitter. As of July 2022, when Twitter filed its last before going private, the platform has about 237.8 million monetizable daily active users. Yet when Musk’s impromptu poll ended on Saturday with a small fraction of the user base taking part, Trump’s account was . “The people have spoken. Trump will be reinstated. Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” Musk , quoting a Latin phrase that translates to “the voice of people, the voice of God.” Meanwhile, the former president announced this week that for the nation’s highest office once again in 2024. Reinstate former President Trump — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) Trump’s controversial ban took place days after the January 6 riots on the U.S. Capitol, in which insurrectionists violently attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. “After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them — specifically how they are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter — we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence,” Twitter in a January 2021 blog post. Since taking over Twitter mere weeks ago, Elon Musk has already on two high-profile accounts that were deplatformed for maliciously misgendering trans people: conservative satire publication The Babylon Bee and Jordan Peterson. He also reversed the ban on Kathy Griffin, a comedian who had impersonated Musk on Twitter. When Musk initially announced his bid to take over Twitter, he had for overturning the permanent ban on the former president. Now that he owns the company, Musk is using his own Twitter account to announce updates to platform policy. “New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach,” Musk yesterday before starting his poll about Trump’s account. “Negative/hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter.” Already in his tenure, Musk has gone on the of new features, so it’s challenging to take his word as the end-all-be-all with regard to how Twitter will handle content moderation. Yet Musk is certainly setting a precedent for his leadership at Twitter by allowing the results of a spontaneous day-long poll to dictate complex content moderation decisions. Regardless, it is unclear whether the former president will actually return to Twitter. After he was deplatformed from mainstream social media networks like Twitter, and , Trump created his own social platform called . One of Truth Social’s main selling points is that Trump actively uses it. Donald Trump on Truth Social “Vote now with positivity, but don’t worry, we aren’t going anywhere. Truth Social is special!” the former president posted on Truth Social this evening, referencing Musk’s Twitter poll. Truth Social debuted on iOS in February with a , using source code from Mastodon. For the next several months, the app struggled to get on Google Play, since Google reportedly found numerous posts that violated its Play Store content policies. Internally, Truth Social’s parent company, the Trump Media and Technology Group, is a proposed merger to go public via SPAC. As of September, data from SensorTower shows that about 3.7 million users had downloaded the Truth Social app. |
Okta CEO opens up about Auth0 acquisition, SaaS slump and Lapsus$ attack | Ron Miller | 2,022 | 11 | 10 | identity product back in 2009 when most people were locked into Microsoft Active Directory, an on-prem incumbent so entrenched that nobody believed that anyone could touch it. It took a little audacity to go after a giant like that, but Okta took a cloud-first approach, a markedly different strategy from Active Directory at the time. The company raised over $230 million before . It reached unicorn status with on a $1.2 billion valuation back in 2015 when the designation meant a little more than it does these days. With ownership of the workforce side of the market, Okta decided to make another bold move when during the stock market bubble that accelerated in 2020. The idea behind the deal was not simply to own an identity tool favored by developers — although that was certainly a big part of it — it was really about owning another large piece of the market, one that could make Okta a one-stop identity shop. Okta wanted to own both the workforce market, the core of its approach to that point, as well as the customer identity market where Auth0 lived. And Okta made a substantial bet for a company of its size to make that happen. Okta isn’t alone in the identity space; competitors include companies large and small like ForgeRock, SAP, IBM, Ping Identity, Salesforce, Microsoft and Akamai, among others. Like every other SaaS company out there, Okta has had a rough year in the public markets, down over 80% in the past year (although it was up almost 10% in midday trading Thursday). It also had to deal with that happened in January but was reported in March — and the fallout from its response. Despite these headwinds, the company has big long-term goals to own the cloud identity market and believes it can ride out the current temporary macroeconomic conditions and the legacy vendors to get there. We sat down with CEO and co-founder Todd McKinnon recently and asked him about how he is navigating these times — and the lessons he’s learned along the way. McKinnon emphasized that he spent 14% of his stock value at the time to acquire Auth0, a number he knows off the top of his head, because he wants his company to own the cloud identity market, and he doesn’t think he could do it without Auth0. “We bought them to change, and we bought them because we needed change to win this customer identity market,” he told TechCrunch. “Our strategy is that we have to win both the workforce market and the customer identity market. And the only way we’re going to turn identity into one of these most important platforms for every company is we have to [own] both use cases.” He said integrating two companies like this didn’t come without challenges, and he may have moved too quickly to bring the products together. |
Gopuff launches scheduled deliveries, gifting and in-store pickup | Kyle Wiggers | 2,022 | 11 | 19 | Rapid grocery deliver startups like , and , once heralded as the next big thing in on-demand ordering, are running up against logistical challenges that might very well be insurmountable. Even faced with competition and sky-high operating costs, though, they’re taking what steps they can to stick around. Case in point, Gopuff today launched features aimed at eliminating some of the platform’s biggest pain points, like the inability to schedule orders ahead or pick up orders from nearby stockrooms. Starting today, Gopuff customers can place an order when the Gopuff marketplace closes — the exact hours depend on the market — to have Gopuff deliver the order as soon as it reopens. (Needless to say, this doesn’t apply to locations where Gopuff delivers 24/7.) Alternatively, customers can schedule an order in advance for a specific date and time, similar to most major food delivery apps, or arrange for an order to be picked up where Gopuff offers retail and in-store shopping. The in-store shopping experience remains rather limited. According to Gopuff, only in BevMo! outlets — recall that , the alcohol retailer, for $350 million in 2020 — and locations in New York City is shopping in-store an option. Strictly pickup of online orders will be offered at “many” locations, however, Gopuff says (it’s unclear just how many), with the hours mirroring that of in-app ordering. Gopuff is also introducing gifting, which will allow customers to add gifts to their cart for recipients both on and off the platform. Once they enter the recipient’s address, name and phone number and a gift message, both the gift recipient and the sender will receive a text message confirming a gift order is being prepared. The recipient will also receive SMS alerts when the order is close by, delivered or canceled. Gopuff didn’t initially respond to TechCrunch’s question about whether gift recipients’ information are retained for marketing or other purposes. Gopuff, like many app-based products and services, a broad swath of personal information that it reserves the right to use for ad targeting and promoting its subscription services, as well as sharing with third parties including business partners and “affiliates and subsidiaries.” In a follow-up email, a Gopuff spokesperson clarified that gift recipient info isn’t retained for use in these ways. The new features are only available via the latest Gopuff app (version 8.1.0), the company notes, which began rolling out nationwide this morning. Gopuff has had a rough go of it lately, no pun intended. Originally to IPO as soon as mid-2022 after ex-Disney CEO Bob Iger as an advisor and investor, Gopuff this summer of Spain, one of its markets, to slash costs, and laid off 10% of its global workforce. Further hit Gopuff in October — mainly affecting various customer service departments — as the startup looked to secure a credit line as high as $300 million to buffet against inflationary headwinds. |
Amazon layoffs begin, Ticketmaster can’t handle Taylor Swift, and much of Twitter HQ quits | Greg Kumparak | 2,022 | 11 | 19 | Hello again! Time for another edition of , the newsletter where we recap the week’s most read TechCrunch stories in one quick and easy-to-skim blast. Get it in your inbox every Saturday AM by . If you read last week’s edition, you’ll notice some echoes here: more layoffs, more FTX drama, and more absurdity at Elon’s Twitter. Let’s dive in! — : After laying off thousands of Twitter employees over the past few weeks, Elon presented something of an ultimatum to those remaining: commit to being “extremely hardcore” as “part of the new Twitter” or leave with three months severance…and, well, a of people took door number 2. It’s unclear at this point (even to Twitter, it seems) how many declined the ultimatum, but are that it was hundreds/thousands. : For some reason the founder of FTX — the once massive crypto exchange that imploded last week — decided to have an impromptu interview with a Vox reporter by way of DM. Seemingly without any agreement that any of it was off the record, said DMs were, of course, quickly published. His biggest regret in all this? Weirdly, filing for bankruptcy. : Evernote was once something of an App Store darling — an early go-to example of design, quality, and company leadership. Then after a series of pricing/privacy/design changes pissed off the user base, it just sort of…faded away. This week the company was acquired by Italian app developer Bending Spoons, in what Kyle Wiggers calls “the end of an era.” : Rumors suggested layoffs were on the way at Amazon, with some estimates suggesting upward of 10,000 would be let go. This week the layoffs began, with CEO Andy Jassy writing in a memo that the layoffs will continue into next year. : Tickets for Taylor Swift’s first tour in years went on presale this week, and Ticketmaster, the website that no one on earth is happy to use, couldn’t keep up with the Swifties. Things went so awry with the gated presale that the scheduled public sale was outright canceled. You know your site outage is bad when it to break up your company’s overwhelming dominance. Podcasts! We’ve got them! People seem to like them! Or a lot of people are just downloading/subscribing for the sake of inflating our collective ego. That’s okay too. Here’s what’s up in TC podcasts lately: : “Through the third quarter of 2022, U.S. venture firms raised $150.9 billion across 593 funds,” writes Rebecca Szkutak. Where did it all go? Rebecca breaks down the stats. : 90% of the planet has no cell connectivity. What if you need an IoT device to phone home from, say, the middle of the ocean? That’s the idea behind Sateliot, which raised an $11.4 million Series A earlier this year. The company shared the pitch deck it used to raise with our resident pitch expert Haje Jan Kamps, who explored “the good and the bad of this high-flying space deck.” |
You shouldn’t skim over gross dollar retention | Anna Heim | 2,022 | 11 | 19 | TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the where it gets its name. “Gross retention really speaks to the true stickiness and health of your customer base. It’s what protects you during really challenging times,” growth stage VC said in a at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2021. And yet, the co-head of growth-stage Endeavor Fund added, most VCs she talked to “probably only care about net retention.” However, her comments were made in 2021, not 2022. “Challenging times” have come upon us since then, making investors and founders . and I have already written about the when efficient growth is the new holy grail. But how does it differ from gross dollar retention, and how has the latter been faring at most tech companies? Let’s dive in. |
This Week in Apps: Apple-Epic antitrust battle resumes, Apple sued over tracking, Google’s new rules for kids’ apps | Sarah Perez | 2,022 | 11 | 19 | 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 slowed down. 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. Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg / Getty Images This week, Apple’s antitrust battle against Fortnite maker Epic Games after appealed last year’s ruling in a potentially precedent-setting case over Apple’s alleged anti-competitive behavior. Last year, a U.S. District Court judge had largely favored Apple by ruling the tech giant was not acting as a monopolist with regard to its App Store practices. Epic Games was unhappy with that decision, of course, as it had wanted the court to force Apple to support third-party payments and/or third-party app stores which would have allowed Fortnite to maximize its revenues. Meanwhile, Apple didn’t want to agree to the court’s order that said it would have to permit apps that provide links to alternative payments. Oral arguments kicked off this week at the U.S. Court of Appeal for the Ninth Circuit, in what will be an even higher-stakes trial for determining Apple’s future in the app market and its ability to set its own rules around payments and commissions. This time around, were granted time to present their own arguments to help explain the proper legal framework for evaluating the antitrust claims against Apple. Though both were technically being neutral, they expressed concerns over how the lower court had too narrowly interpreted parts of U.S. antitrust law, the Sherman Act, among other issues. The DoJ, notably, is in the early stages of filing its own antitrust suit against Apple, so how the appeals court rules on this matter could ultimately shape its own ability to effectively prosecute Apple further down the road. In the opening arguments, the lawyer for the DoJ, Nickolai Levin, began by stating the district court erred in saying the Apple Developer Program Licensing Agreement (DPLA) is not concerted action. He explained that Section 1 of the Sherman Act prohibits contracts that restrain trade, which would include the licensing contract Apple is enforcing here. While the U.S. government wasn’t prepared to call out Apple’s contract as either reasonable or unreasonable, it wanted the court to understand that it was not above Section 1 scrutiny. One of the judges pushed back against this claim, asking if Epic had actually agreed to Apple’s Developer Program Licensing Agreement with the intention of “going forward to restrain trade?” He suggested Epic signed in order to get into a market, actually. The lawyer responded that’s true, but the terms of the contract are binding, with one party forcing terms on another — so excluding contracts from Section 1 scrutiny would allow anti-competitive terms to go unpunished. The court also asked for information on how the government believes the pro-competitive and anti-competitive effects should be weighed against one another to make a judgment, as there was no specific formula to make such a calculation. Levin explained that this boiled down to whether or not the effect of the restraint was to suppress or restrict competition, and cited legal precedent to guide the judges’ understanding. The U.S. government also believed the lower court misapplied the rule of reason and erred in how it analyzed monopoly power. For example, Apple was able to set prices and keep them there regardless of what its competition did. “And, as Microsoft explained, that’s something only a monopolist can do,” Levin noted. Of course, Apple’s legal team came well-prepared too. And, as one judge discovered, Apple’s lawyer, Mark Perry, who had been a longtime partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, was now at a new firm, . But that didn’t mean Apple had changed firms — it just meant it now had two. Or as Perry put it, “we are one big happy family.” Perry’s arguments re-iterated points from the lower court’s decision, particularly noting that the iPhone was designed to be more secure than the Mac, which is why there’s no “sideloading,” and instead puts apps through human review. And it’s a requirement that’s hard-coded into the iOS, the lawyer explained. “That’s a technical requirement. Apple then reflected that in the DPLA,” he said. The lawyer also told the court Apple does allow developers to communicate with their users, and there are “no restrictions on communications.” Expect, of course, the restrictions he mentioned in his very next breath: that “Apple does not allow links and buttons because we can’t review them. We can’t track them. We can’t protect users from malware, fraud, porn, hackers, and all those other things. It would be a breach in the wall, an opening that bad actors could exploit. And it’s not well-thought-out.” The case will likely continue for six months or more, so don’t expect any near-term resolution. And, if neither party is satisfied, it will likely be appealed to the Supreme Court, delaying the decision even longer. TechCrunch While the Epic-Apple antitrust battle is one of the most significant lawsuits facing Apple right now, the company was also sued this week over another matter. Another lawsuit is taking on Apple’s data collection practices in the wake of a recent report by independent researchers who found Apple was continuing to track consumers in its mobile apps, even when they had explicitly configured their iPhone privacy settings to turn tracking off. The proposed class action lawsuit, filed by plaintiff Elliot Libman on behalf of himself and other impacted consumers, alleges that Apple’s privacy assurances are in violation of the California Invasion of Privacy Act. As reported last week by , app developers and independent researchers Tommy Mysk and Talal Haj Bakry discovered that Apple was still collecting data about its users across a number of first-party apps even when users had turned off an iPhone Analytics setting that promises to “disable the sharing of Device Analytics altogether.” In their tests, the researchers examined Apple’s own apps including the App Store, Apple Music, Apple TV, Books, and Stocks, and found that disabling this setting as well as other privacy controls didn’t impact Apple’s data collection. The plaintiff is looking to have the lawsuit certified as a class action and is seeking compensatory, statutory, and punitive damages in addition to other equitable monetary relief. Google Play rolled out a series of changes to its programs and policies around apps designed for children. The company described the update as an expansion of its previously launched “Teacher Approved” program, which includes a review process where teachers and experts vetted apps not just for safety and security elements, but for educational quality and other factors. The newly revamped policies will now impact how apps qualify for this program, which allows apps to gain entry to the Play Store’s “Kids” tab. Before, Google Play ran two (sometimes overlapping) programs around apps aimed at kids. App developers were required to participate in if their app was aimed at children, and could optionally choose to participate in the program if their app targeted both kids and older users. The Designed for Families program included a number of requirements around the app’s content, its functionality, use of ads, data practices, use of warning labels, feature set, underlying technology components, and more. Any apps in this program were also eligible to be rated for the program, which had stricter guidelines, but entry was not guaranteed. Now, the additional policy requirements for the Designed for Families program are being rolled into the Play Store’s broader . This simplifies the rules for developers building apps for kids and opens up a broader selection of apps to be eligible to be rated for the stricter Teacher Approved program, as well. The changes aren’t just about serving developers or consumers — they also help Google to meet stricter regulations being considered, drafted, and enacted worldwide around how software is permitted to handle kids’ data — such as the EU’s GDPR and . Failure to meet these requirements can result in significant penalties, as Meta recently learned when it was for how it treated children’s data on Instagram, for instance. Apple Snap You can now search for businesses on WhatsApp Newzoo DuckDuckGo led by Valar Ventures. The app offers commission-free investments in U.S. stocks and ETFs. led by cryptofund Multicoin Capital. The app, which focuses on having users join interest groups, is popular with Gen Z and creators who use it to talk to fans. 🤝 , for an undisclosed sum. The deal is expected to close in early 2023. Evernote had raised $290 million to date. Vimcal to its existing web and desktop calendar applications, available for Windows, Mac and Chrome. Similar to apps like Fantastical, users can type in meeting information in natural language, like “lunch with Lisa at 1 pm tomorrow.” It also offers a more customizable solution for finding timeslots for meetings, compared with existing players like Calendly. The iOS app, in beta since this April, has also optimized the software’s keyboard shortcuts for the touchscreen interface and adds other features. You can read a full review from TechCrunch’s Ivan Mehta . |
Efficient growth? No problem, bootstrapped startups say | Anna Heim | 2,022 | 11 | 26 | TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the where it gets its name. In 2021, and I wondered out loud if startups eschewing venture capital . The answer this year seems to be yes. Indeed, Capchase’s recent contains an interesting finding: In 2022, bootstrapped SaaS companies are doing better than VC-backed startups in many respects. “Despite the war chest of funding that VC-backed firms raised last year, bootstrapped companies are doing better than VC-backed companies across nearly every metric we analyzed,” the SaaS-focused fintech wrote. |
A love letter to micro funds, the backbone and future of venture capital | Rebecca Szkutak | 2,022 | 11 | 19 | and the Andreessen Horowitzes of the world continue to swell in size, their influence on venture capital may be heading in the opposite direction as micro funds increase their impact on the industry. Whether you define micro funds as below $50 million or sub-$25 million, these are truly the funds that power the future of the industry. They help venture hubs take off, bring expertise and specialization to the market, and fill a role in the venture capital ecosystem that larger firms simply can’t. They also can be credited with getting a lot of the large unicorn and public companies we know today off the ground, as many of them received some of their first dollars from a micro fund: Robinhood (Elefund), Coinbase (Initialized Capital, which was investing out of a $7 million fund at the time) and Flexport (Anorak Ventures). I’ve written about the rise of micro funds in the U.S. before, but when Sweetwood Ventures reached out to me a month ago about its new to back nano — sub-$15 million — funds in Israel, I was intrigued. I hadn’t realized that the explosion of micro funds extended beyond the U.S. market, but Sweetwood general partner Amit Kurz told me it was one he had been tracking for a few years now. |
Paytm falls to all-time low amid competition risk from Reliance | Manish Singh | 2,022 | 11 | 21 | Shares of Paytm ended Tuesday at an all-time low of 477 Indian rupees ($5.8), a week after the lockup period for early backers of the Indian financial services firm ended last week and mounting concerns of growing competition. The lockup period for the company’s earlier backers expired on November 15, freeing significant investors such as SoftBank Group and Alibaba to sell their shares. SoftBank sold shares worth over $200 million last week. (Indian law requires pre-IPO investors to hold the shares post-listing for up to one year from the IPO.) At 476 Indian rupees, Paytm’s shares are down over 77% from the IPO price of 2,150 ($26.3). The company, which was , currently has the market cap of $3.8 billion. Paytm raised more than $6 billion across private rounds and IPO (including secondary transactions). Tech firms have lost significant value this year as the market takes a downturn and reverses much of the gains from the previous 13-year bull run. Paytm is among a number of Indian startups that went public last year. Zomato, Policybazaar, Nykaa and Delhivery — some of the other startups that have gone public in the past two years — are all trading considerably below their IPO prices. Vijay Shekhar Sharma, the founder of Paytm, assured investors last week that the firm is working “on the right path to profitability and free cash flows.” He added: “Our journey to build a scalable and profitable financial services business has just started.” The erosion in Paytm’s shares may also have a knock-on effect on the broader fintech startup ecosystem in India. PhonePe, a rival of Paytm, is attempting to raise a round from General Atlantic and Walmart at , according to Moneycontrol. Sharma has said the company is working to make Paytm hit $1 billion in annual revenue by the end of this fiscal year in March. The drop in price also coincides with a report from the brokerage firm Macquarie, which notes that Reliance’s growing attempts to build a financial services business could pose a “significant growth and market-share risk for players like Bajaj Finance and Paytm with whom it could be competing head-on.” Macquarie gained reputation for its target prices last year after it recommended clients avoid Paytm at the issue price. Many other brokerages and wealth managers, in contrast, recommended they buy. An analyst at Bernstein, in comparison, had estimated that Paytm’s valuation will swing between $21 billion and $24 billion. (A Bernstein spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment last year.) The analyst has since moved focus to crypto. The Indian conglomerate announced last month that it will , a move that it said will allow the oil-to-telecom giant to enter and expand into financial services such as consumer and merchant lending business and also build fintech for “all Indians.” Reliance Industries, run by billionaire Mukesh Ambani, said that it will be incubating, acquiring and inking joint ventures in the new unit, which is called Jio Financial Services, to broaden its offerings to add insurance, payments, digital broking and asset management. Indian telecos thought they could win in India's financial services market thanks to payment banking licenses. Everyone, including me, thought replicating the m-pesa success was imminent. But that didn't happen. Largely because of UPI. Will this time be different for Jio? — Osborne Saldanha (@os7borne) |
Spain’s Cobee raises $41M for an employee benefits ‘superapp’ | Ingrid Lunden | 2,022 | 11 | 21 | Benefits are one of the great oxymorons of full-time employment: the name implies help and advantages, but in a lot of cases, it’s hard to know what perks and rewards you might have available to you, much less use them on a regular basis. Now a startup called — which has built a platform and an app to make organizing and accessing these a little easier, a payment card (physical or virtual), and an integration with payroll — is today announcing some funding on the heels of seeing strong interest for its services, with revenues growing 3x this year. The company has raised €40 million ($41 million) in a Series B round of funding co-led by Octopus Ventures and Notion Capital, with participation from previous backers Balderton Capital, Speedinvest and Dila Capital. Cobee is based out of Madrid and its focus currently is on Spain and Portugal, where it has carved out a space providing benefits to companies ranging in size from small businesses to enterprises, with around 800 customers in those countries, including Ogilvy, Booking, Workday, N26, JTI, Job & Talent, Avis, Línea Directa, Michelin, Petronas and Glovo. It will use the funds to expand to other Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking markets in Latin America, starting with Mexico, as well as to other countries in Southern Europe. The round brings the total raised by Cobee to around €60 million (including a seed round we covered ). Borja Aranguren — the CEO who co-founded the company in 2019 with Nacho Travesí — said in an interview that it is not disclosing its valuation. But as a rough guide, there have been a number of other startups looking to rethink how to package up and deliver benefits. out of France raised money from SoftBank last year at a $1 billion valuation; out of the U.S. raised $40 million earlier this year; Chicago’s raised $60 million last month; is making waves in the U.K.; Sodexo is coming at benefits from a position as a giant in hospitality; and Brazil has two benefits startups, Caju and Flash, going head to head with each other, with the latter counting investors like among its backers. That selection of companies speaks to the wider competitive field for Cobee, as well as the opportunity and the gap in the market. Benefits and perks together form part of what is meant to attract and retain employees to an organization, but often they also include items that are less optional and just part of what everyone expects or might be required to have from their employer. For example, in some countries, offices are required by law to provide lunch or vouchers for lunch to employees; in some markets, employers provide optional health insurance while in others, it might be the primary way that insurance is provisioned. Some might offer discounts for various services like gym memberships or shopping with certain retailers. Some will provide discounts on professional training courses while others pay for these, but others offer nothing at all. All of this has in most cases all been lumped together behind the basic concept of “benefits” but in a way that’s not that easy to understand, let alone access, not least because the teams that administer these usually deal with multiple suppliers and systems to provision them. Cobee’s service, investors say, stands out in part because it makes dealing with all of that easy for both employers and employees. “What’s unique about Cobee, compared to other players in this space, is their flexible platform, capable of being adapted to different company types and different countries with little friction,” said Itxaso Del Palacio, partner at Notion, in a statement. At the front end, Cobee is based around an app that employees use to browse and select whatever benefits they want to use to activate them. In cases where it involves physical commerce or paying for specific items on the spot, they are then issued with a card that can be used to redeem these. At the back end, these plus whatever benefits are activated without the card (e.g., health insurance plans or training) are calculated and automatically integrated with payroll to come up as monthly deductions on that employee’s paycheck. Users can always see a more itemized list of benefits and what they’re spending in the app. Cobee currently covers benefit programs for meals, transport, nursery, training, gift cards, rent, life and health insurance, and soon a wider package of wellness options that have increasingly become part of the benefit offer (and expectation) from employers. The system is effective, in that it’s getting used regularly, both around daily mandatory benefits and optional ones, said Aranguren. “Almost every user we have uses Cobee every single month,” he said. On average, employees are using their payment cards 10 times per month, a number boosted by the fact that meals and transportation are redeemed with the card. “It’s a lot for a monthly user,” he said. While some industries, like tech, have been hit hard with layoffs, the bigger picture for now seems to be that organizations are still hiring and are trying to attract top talent, and also generally trying to keep those who work productive and not frustrated by little things (and bigger things). For as long as that continues, there will be a focus on making benefits something that works, too — an opening for companies like Cobee. Nick Sando, a principal at Octopus, estimates that the market size for benefits works out to about $53 billion of business spend. “Increased competition and mobility in the job market has transformed employee benefits from a ‘nice to have’ to a ‘need to have’ talent attraction and retention tool,” he said in a statement. “Cobee stands to play a fundamental role in the employee benefits markets by providing both best-in-class service providers and a core platform for HR teams to best manage and distribute these services.” |
Hacker George Hotz, long a frenemy of Elon Musk, signs on for 12 weeks at Twitter | Connie Loizos | 2,022 | 11 | 21 | A lot has been made of Twitter’s shrinking workforce, which is reportedly at people, down from the 7,500 employed by the company when new owner Elon Musk took control. While we posited that the newest wave of departures was part of Musk’s to shrink down the company, many worry about the haphazard ways it has been downsized. Insider reported on Friday, for example, that Twitter’s payroll department was last week when employees who were given a stark ultimatum by Musk opted to bounce. Still, Musk has plenty of supporters who want to help him improve Twitter, and he apparently just brought one into the fold on a short-term basis: George Hotz, the security hacker known for developing iOS jailbreaks and reverse engineering the PlayStation 3 before later founding Comma.ai, whose driver assistance system startup aims to bring Tesla Autopilot–like functionality to other cars. Hotz definitely falls into the category of people-who-wouldn’t-be-on-your-remake-of-Twitter bingo board. Hotz founded Comma.ai after getting into a fight with Musk after Musk allegedly tried to hire him at Tesla but “kept changing the terms,” as Hotz told Bloomberg in 2015. At the time, Tesla said Hotz’s bold claims that his tech could beat that of Autopilot was “extremely unlikely.” Hotz promptly set out to prove Musk and the rest of Tesla wrong. So why team up now? For one thing, Hotz has a little extra time on his hands. As early this month, Hotz considers that some of his own work at Comma.ai is done for the moment. It currently sells a $1,999 driver assistance system developer kit that is compatible on more than 200 vehicles; the company is also on solid ground as it looks to turn its devkit into a productized consumer product, he told TechCrunch. The momentum gives him a little space to explore. “I’m good at things when it’s wartime,” Hotz told TechCrunch for that story. “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.” Hotz, now 33, may also want to again prove his mettle to Musk. Indeed, last week, after tweeting out his support of Musk’s offer to Twitter employees (Musk said they could work “long hours at high intensity” or take three months of severance), Hotz further tweeted that he would be “down for a 12-week internship at Twitter for the cost of living in SF.” Musk soon tweeted in response, “Sure, let’s talk.” I’ll put my money where my mouth is. I’m down for a 12 week internship at Twitter for cost of living in SF. It’s not about accumulating capital in a dead world, it’s about making the world alive. — George Hotz 🐀 (@realGeorgeHotz) And just like that, the New Jersey native has started his “internship,” he said today on the platform. It sounds like a hefty internship at that. As Hotz describes it on Twitter, he’s in charge of search for the social media outfit. that’s what Elon told me my job was, and I will try my hardest to do it. I have 12 weeks also trying to get rid of that nondismissable login pop up after you scroll a little bit ugh these things ruin the Internet — George Hotz 🐀 (@realGeorgeHotz) He is half-kiddingly giving himself reachable goals given that time commitment, joking today that “[I]f I just get rid of the pop up I still consider my internship a win. I have a chrome extension on my laptop to block it. [R]eminds me of the guy who got a job at Apple, made Wallet automatically delete your expired boarding passes, and quit the next week.” While Hotz is a comparatively glitzy new hire, the idea right now generally is to layer in talent, Musk suggested today at an all-hands meeting at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters, according to Insider. Reportedly, Musk said during the meeting that no more layoffs are . According to The Verge, Musk also said that Twitter is now for roles in engineering and sales and that employees are encouraged to make referrals. (As The Verge notes, it’s a lot harder to get confirmation from Twitter given that its entire public relations department has been disbanded.) . you want to come do ML for Twitter search? there's a lot of low hanging fruit… — George Hotz 🐀 (@realGeorgeHotz) Hotz is doing his part, seemingly, including reaching out to recent rivals to see if they might be interested in teaming up on its turnaround. Today, specifically, Hotz asked Andrej Karpathy, a former director of AI at Tesla who led the computer vision team of Tesla Autopilot, if he wanted a job at Twitter after Karpathy weighed in with an answer to a question Hotz posed. Hotz’s question? “How do you feel the quality of Twitter search is? What would get you to use Twitter search instead of Google?” Karpathy’s answer: “I search twitter on google with site: https://twitter.com/. Works quite well.” |
Daily Crunch: Finnish tech conference yanks $1M pitch contest prize from Russian co-founders | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 11 | 21 | What’s up, Crunchers! Haje is back from his away-ness, and we are chomping at the bit to bring you a wall of amazing stories from our dastardly team of TC wordcraftspeople. Let’s goooooo! — and Actor Noah Schnapp, who plays Will on Netflix’s hit original series “Stranger Things,” is passionate about tbh, , reports . The company is turning to crowdfunding to raise money for the vegan alternative. At our TC Sessions: Crypto event last week in Miami, sat down a veritable who-is-who in crypto to talk about the crypto regulation landscape. The 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. You can watch the segment on the site. Here’s a fellowship of stories to see you through the rest of your Monday. May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out. / Getty Images You don’t need to move the needle far to optimize customer success. SaaS startups that incrementally improve will stack small wins that have the potential to alter the company’s trajectory. Instead of a traditional siloed approach, rolling product and CX teams into a single unit helps align incentives, writes Bryan House, SVP of product and customer success at Elastic Path. “Regardless of what you call the role, product management, UX and customer success should report to the same person,” he advises. “This leader should create a structure that shares incentives and common goals aligned to your customers’ measures of success.” Three more from the TC+ team: It’s a bit of déjà vu for Broadcom, which is . This time, the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority is looking into the chip giant’s proposed . If you don’t recall the last time, it was when Broadcom tried to in 2018. The deal was scrapped after former president Donald Trump . writes that “both the political and competitive optics are different this time around, so it’s difficult to predict how this will all unfold,” but he did get a comment from Broadcom on what the company thinks. Oh, and . has your guide to streaming it. Five more for your Monday: |
Faraday Future warns it may not be able to deliver its luxury EV | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 11 | 21 | Electric vehicle Faraday Future has raised a going concern warning, per regulatory . The company said it has substantial doubt as to whether it would be able to continue operating over the next year, adding that it is uncertain when it will dispatch first deliveries of its FF 91 luxury EVs. This isn’t the first time Faraday Future has delayed deliveries of the FF 91s. In July, the company and first deliveries to the third and fourth quarter, citing supply chain issues and a lack of money. Now, Faraday says it doesn’t expect deliveries to occur in 2022. As of November 17, Faraday has 369 preorders, down from 399 refundable, non-binding, paid deposits it had as of June 30, according to the company. Faraday cited many conditions that will affect the timing of deliveries, including whether suppliers meet their deliverables, the timing and success of certification testing and the implementation and effectiveness of the company’s headcount reductions. Top of the list of concerns is whether Faraday will be able to secure the funds it needs to make it through the year, much less make it to first deliveries. Last week, Faraday got a potential to help it launch its vehicle when it signed a financing deal with Yorkville Advisors Global. The equity line of credit includes an initial commitment of $200 million from the investment firm. In September, in funding from Hong Kong holding company Senyun International. However, it seems the access to eventual liquidity is not enough to keep Faraday out of hot water in the near term. Per Monday’s filing, Faraday “projects that it may require additional funds during the remainder of 2022 and will require additional funds beyond 2022 in order to continue operations and support the ramp-up of production of the FF 91 to generate revenues to put the Company on a path to cash flow break-even.” Since Faraday was founded, the company has incurred total losses from operations, negative cash flows from operating activities and has an accumulated deficit of $3.3 billion. The startup closed out the third quarter with $31.76 million in cash, down from $121 million at the end of last year. Net losses for the quarter total $103.4 million, which is about a third of the losses reported in Q3 2021. Faraday’s stock is down 6.79% today and over 94% this year. The company has been battling controversies since through a merger with Property Solutions Acquisition Corp. in July 2021. Months after its debut, a short seller report by J Capital alleged that Faraday had made a number of inaccurate statements. An followed, prompting the company to restructure its board, cut the pay of two top executives and suspend at least one other. The investigation confirmed that employees made inaccurate statements to investors and that its “corporate culture failed to sufficiently prioritize compliance,” which resulted in the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission issuing to several executives. |
Max Q: We are going | Aria Alamalhodaei | 2,022 | 11 | 21 | Hello and welcome back to Max Q. Before we get to the news, I have a pretty exciting announcement myself: about the event and get your free ticket by . In this issue: It finally happened. After years of preparation and two false starts, NASA’s heavy-lift Space Launch System has finally taken off and entered orbit. It’s a big win for the space agency — even as it . Some pre-launch jitters threatened to scrub the launch, but a “red crew” went out to the hot pad to tighten something, and a bad Ethernet switch of all things later also needed to be replaced. But everything came together about 40 minutes after the original T-0, and the rocket had a clean (and impressive-looking) ascent with no hiccups to speak of. It reached orbit and as of 13 minutes after launch the various stages, separations and cut-offs were green across the board. The SLS is a key part of NASA’s Artemis program, intended to bring humanity back to the moon “to stay,” as they often emphasize. That means bringing a lot of gear up there, stuff that might take years of ferrying with smaller launch vehicles like the SpaceX Falcon 9 and Rocket Lab Electron. NASA used the hashtag in the run up to launch and, well — now we finally are. And I’m psyched. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images The space industry is on the cusp of a revolution. The cost of launch, which has dramatically decreased over the past five years, will continue to drop as heavy-lift rockets like SpaceX’s Starship and Relativity’s Terran R become operational. Parallel to these developments, multiple private companies have introduced plans to build commercial space stations for science, manufacturing and even tourism. If space stations are the next phase of business in orbit, they’re going to need standard parts — and aims to be the one making them. The startup is headed by space industry veteran Colin Doughan, who surveyed these currents and saw a gap in the market. Private station operators “are going to need an easy LEGO brick to build in space,” he told TechCrunch in a recent interview: versatile, modular hardware to let humanity build in space at scale. Gravitics, which emerged from stealth following the announcement of a $20 million seed round, is calling the building block “StarMax.” Gravitics |
Elon Musk puts Twitter’s Blue Verified relaunch on hold | Amanda Silberling | 2,022 | 11 | 21 | If you didn’t jump at the chance to give Elon Musk $7.99 for a blue check while you could, you might have to wait a bit longer. Originally slated to , Musk that the product will be put on hold until “there is high confidence of stopping impersonation.” The initial roll out of Twitter Blue Verified (or, the “I-paid-Elon-$7.99” blue check) was . Of course, the feature was quickly to help bad actors pretend to be celebrities, corporations and government officials. One account impersonated the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly to post, “We are excited to announce insulin is free now.” The tweet was viewed before it was removed. The company’s 4.37%. Holding off relaunch of Blue Verified until there is high confidence of stopping impersonation. Will probably use different color check for organizations than individuals. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) Musk added in his tweet that Twitter “will probably use different color check for organizations than individuals.” Already, Twitter has tested using a grey “official” designation beneath high-profile accounts, though that feature has been multiple times since it was first rolled out. According to a report from , Musk also talked about building features like encrypted direct messages and video calls in an internal presentation named “Twitter 2.0.” This is not the first time he has talked about introducing end-to-end encrypted DMs. Musk hinted that in a reply to that highlighted code related to that. Earlier this month, the Twitter CEO that the “goal of Twitter DM is to superset Signal.” As some Twitter users try out alternative platforms like and , Musk says that Twitter has added monetizable daily active users this week, hitting a company all-time high of 259.4 million. Notably, Musk entered a months-long after he deemed these inaccurate in an attempt to reverse course on his Twitter purchase. |
Tumblr to add support for ActivityPub, the social protocol powering Mastodon and other apps | Sarah Perez | 2,022 | 11 | 21 | Tumblr will add support for , the open, decentralized social networking that today is powering social networking software like , the Instagram-like Pixelfed, video streaming service PeerTube, and others. The news was revealed in response to a Twitter user’s complaint about Mastodon’s complexities. Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg — whose company — the user “come to Tumblr” as the site would soon “add activitypub for interconnect.” “Don’t stress,” he said, before that Tumblr first has to deal with the waves of new users coming in right now from Twitter but that support for “interop and activitypub” were due to come “ASAP.” In short, this announcement means Tumblr would move from being only a niche blogging platform to becoming a part of a larger, decentralized social network of sorts — and one whose user base has grown in size in recent days as people flee Elon Musk’s Twitter in search of new communities. Come to . We'll add activitypub for interconnect. Don't stress. — Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt) We are mostly dealing with the waves of new users right now and keeping everything scaling but interop and activitypub are ASAP. — Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt) The ActivityPub protocol, its explains, provides a client-to-server API for creating, updating, and deleting content, as well as a federal server-to-server API for delivering notifications and subscribing to content. In practice, this means that Mastodon users can interact with and follow users on other instances (independently run nodes) and on other social apps (like PeerTube), which also support the implementation of ActivityPub. It makes for a web of social networks where users can find and follow each other without having to set up new accounts on each new service. This is the opposite approach to today’s “walled garden” social networks, where a post on one platform can’t be viewed by those on others, unless you re-upload or repost the content directly or share a link to the other site where the content can be found. If Tumblr were to add ActivityPub support, it means users on Mastodon could follow Tumblr users’ posts from their own Mastodon instance — without having to use the Tumblr app. It could also provide Tumblr users with an entry point into the so-called without having to face some of the complexities that are involved with for the first time. Tumblr from the Twitter exodus, having grown its U.S. app installs 7% week-over-week from the week prior to the acquisition and the 7 days after, earlier this month. And, as of 12 days after Twitter’s acquisition, Tumblr’s worldwide downloads surged 77% to 301,000 up from 170,000 in the 12 days before the acquisition, . Mullenweg later offered a glimpse into Tumblr’s metrics, noting to that iOS downloads of the Tumblr app were up 62% the week after Musk took over Twitter. But even before Musk took Twitter’s helm, Mullenweg had been thinking “I just want there to be an open alternative, I want you to be able to choose your algorithm…we’re trying to make Tumblr a space for art and artists…,” he had said earlier this year, one where “you’re not doomscrolling, you’re joy-scrolling.” More recently, Mullenweg has been trying to directly , setting up a dedicated website for the purpose. I think the biggest opportunities for influencing come from people who helped create Twitter's timeline, ranking, and self-serve ad systems. — Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt) Automattic, we should note, already has some experience with ActivityPub. In addition to Tumblr, Automattic runs the blogging service WordPress.com and contributes to the open source WordPress blogging software platform. The latter today offers for self-hosted WordPress sites. This allows a WordPress blog’s readers to follow their posts on Mastodon and other federated social platforms. One could imagine a similar scenario for Tumblr, if ActivitiyPub support was added. Mullenweg did not offer an ETA as to how “ASAP” this support would be added. Tumblr was not able to provide an immediate comment when reached. |
Crypto firm Genesis says it has ‘no plans to file bankruptcy imminently’ | Jacquelyn Melinek | 2,022 | 11 | 21 | Genesis, a digital assets financial services firm, may be in hot water as it looks to raise fresh capital for its lending unit or potentially face bankruptcy if it can’t, according to a by Bloomberg. “We have no plans to file bankruptcy imminently,” a Genesis spokesperson said in an emailed statement to TechCrunch on Monday. “Our goal is to resolve the current situation consensually without the need for any bankruptcy filing. Genesis continues to have constructive conversations with creditors.” According to The Block, that Genesis cut its capital raise target 50% from $1 billion to $500 million, as it may face bankruptcy without the funding. Genesis was facing a liquidity crisis after , which “created unprecedented market turmoil, resulting in abnormal withdrawal requests which have exceeded our current liquidity,” it shared in a series of last Wednesday. The firm decided to “temporarily suspend redemptions and new loan originations in the lending business.” The suspension has not been lifted since. Prior to that, the firm on November 10 that it had $175 million in “locked funds” in its FTX trading account but tried to reassure users that the locked amount “does not impact our market-making activities.” This news comes at a time when the crypto industry is facing extreme stress and volatility from the downfall of FTX, previously one of the largest crypto exchanges by volume, which 10 days ago. An additional 130 affiliated companies, including FTX US and Alameda Research, also began the bankruptcy process, the company at the time. |
FTX processed billions monthly in Africa before going bust | Tage Kene-Okafor | 2,022 | 11 | 21 | , one of the startups leading crypto and web3 efforts in Africa, announced that it was . At least 30 employees across various departments were let go, while those who were left at the company had their salaries slashed by as much as 40%, according to people familiar with the matter. The news is, in part, connected to the downfall of crypto exchange FTX, according to chief executive officer Yele Bademosi. Bademosi revealed the news in a letter to investors . He acknowledged that Nestcoin held assets, which the Financial Times at $4 million, in the bankrupt crypto exchange platform FTX to manage operational expenses. Most FTX customers have been unable to withdraw their funds from the platform as the Bahamas-headquartered company goes through bankruptcy proceedings. Bademosi also disclosed that FTX’s trading-focused sister entity Alameda Research, one of the investors in Nestcoin’s $6.45 million pre-seed round announced this February, had less than 1% equity in the startup. Other African companies that have received money from Alameda and FTX include Chipper Cash, Mara, VALR, Jambo and Bitnob. There has been speculation that FTX and Alameda may have required their portfolio companies to hold their assets on the FTX exchange as part of their investment terms. However, it appears that if such terms existed, they didn’t apply to every company, or some may have turned down the offer. , for instance, said it was never asked for said terms. FTX offered to invest in Bitnob via stablecoins, to be held in custody on the defunct exchange, but the Nigerian crypto platform declined, according to two people familiar with the matter. Both companies have that they had zero exposure to FTX in the wake of its crash. Mara confirmed to TechCrunch that it didn’t enter into any such arrangement and doesn’t have its assets sitting on the bankrupt crypto platform. Chipper Cash wasn’t exposed either, according to two people familiar with the company’s dealings with FTX. Jambo has yet to respond to TechCrunch’s requests for comment. To many crypto companies and retail customers, FTX acted as a bank, offering an 8% annual interest rate on the stablecoin stored on the platform. It was the perfect marketing required to onboard several customers in Africa and challenge , the world’s largest crypto exchange by volume, for market share. Before its demise, FTX managed to acquire over 100,000 customers in Africa, sources told TechCrunch. In addition to trading on the platform, these customers used FTX to convert their local currencies to dollars and gain yield on savings. For the past two years, FTX built a considerable following among the crypto community in Africa by capitalizing on the continent’s unstable banking access and rapid adoption of cryptocurrency (mostly via remittance use cases). It’s also worth emphasizing that FTX’s business in Africa was not just another attempt to add to the platform’s overall volume; it was instead an area of focus for the company. Before FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (known as “SBF”) saw his $32 billion crypto behemoth evaporate this month, FTX was processing billions of dollars monthly and planned to set up an office in Nigeria, according to two people familiar with the company’s dealings. Integral to raking in these numbers, after just a few months in the region, were three full-time employees working remotely and a contract team of about 30 campus and trading ambassadors who preached the SBF gospel at college-wide events to anyone who cared to listen. However, following the events of the past two weeks that brought about FTX’s tumble, many of them, including local celebrities signed as brand ambassadors, have been left bemoaning their decision. For example, on the day FTX declared bankruptcy, Harrison Obiefule, the PR and marketing manager for FTX in Africa, that he was in hiding and “getting threats and calls nonstop from celebrities, family and friends, and strangers.” Meanwhile, TechCrunch learned about retail customers who had various amounts of money locked up on FTX, ranging from $7,000 saved up for a World Cup trip to a celebrity who lost “millions of naira,” and a trader who had $2 million on FTX before the Sequoia-backed crypto platform imploded. “All my UK ISA [Individual Savings Account, an account that allows users to save and invest free from UK tax] I saved for the past 15 years was what I lost,” , a veteran of the Nigerian tech industry and strong advocate for FTX in Africa, narrated to TechCrunch on a call. “You know those days you’d laugh at people who lose money in Ponzi schemes. I never knew it could happen to me. This is the biggest Ponzi scheme ever. It’s crazy — it’s the last thing anybody expected.” The repercussions for FTX’s meltdown are severe. FTX bankruptcy filings state that it owes money to over a million people and businesses after SBF used billions of dollars from customer money to prop up Alameda Research. But as FTX and its chief executive undergo criminal investigation, this event will push forward regulatory changes for crypto across various markets. In countries like Nigeria where the government and to reduce incentives for using unregulated crypto, the crackdown against crypto usage might intensify. “The CBN [Nigeria’s apex bank] and regulators will argue that they were right for banning crypto,” said Asemota, who has invested in several crypto upstarts. “Those of us advocating for crypto all look stupid and they now look right because of FTX. I fear for crypto companies in Nigeria.” Once valued at $32 billion, FTX marketed itself as a platform where people could safely trade crypto and make returns. Now valued at nothing, FTX owes creditors at least $8 billion. Its bankruptcy filing has also revealed a house that commingled assets and didn’t have its books in order. In one case, FTX BTC Africa, the parent company of Kenya-based payment automation and settlement platform AZA Finance, and its subsidiaries as entities under its Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings. FTX, via a tweet, later and removed AZA Finance and its subsidiaries, among other entities, from the filings. Press Release: Clarification on Certain Entities Not Included in Chapter 11 Filings. — FTX (@FTX_Official) This April, FTX announced a with AZA Finance to roll out African and digital currency pairs and expand trading in nonfungible tokens (they managed to launch the fiat rails for and prior to FTX’s collapse). That partnership, according to some sources, morphed into an M&A play where FTX was close to acquiring AZA Finance pending regulatory approval. However, AZA Finance CEO Elizabeth Rossiello has denied the acquisition talks and told TechCrunch that both were just partners. “You’re either a shareholder or you’re not, and they were not,” the chief executive said. “And if they were a shareholder, we would have had to file a change of control in the UK, where we’re licensed. It’s public record that it never happened. They didn’t invest in us, they’re not a shareholder, and there was no acquisition.” For the people in the back who source incorrect information was a client of full stop. 1) They were not shareholders and we are not affected by their bankruptcy or situation. They were very small clients as they had just recently launched — Elizabeth Rossiello (@e_rossiello) While referencing FTX’s new chief’s , Rossiello described FTX’s error as “a complete lack of ” resulting from the . She also stated how unfair it was for small fintechs, including those with no access to customers’ deposits, to get highly regulated while platforms that held billions in customers’ funds such as FTX are held accountable to no one. “Fintechs like us that have boards with much information and oversight even find it hard to raise money. But because some people look a certain way or tick a certain box, they get all the funding, no governance, no reporting, and no accounting department. I mean, it’s unfair and just goes back to the who gets funded question, which I think is the real story here.” |
null | Mike Butcher | 2,022 | 11 | 10 | null |
Private investors appear key to COP27’s ‘loss and damage’ fund for vulnerable countries | Tim De Chant | 2,022 | 11 | 21 | , the world’s nations wrapped a meeting where they tried to figure out how to deal with climate change. It was the 27 time they’ve done it in as many years. Think about that. We’ve been at this for nearly three decades, and we’re still . COP27, as the meeting is known, didn’t start auspiciously — though to be honest, these things are always fraught affairs. Nearly everyone involved is trying to wean the world off carbon, but that doesn’t mean they agree on how to get there. Wealthy nations, having already burned a bunch of fossil fuels, haven’t been keen to pay for it. Poorer countries, who aren’t responsible for much warming at all, just want cheap energy so their people don’t have to live in poverty. Given that cheap energy often comes from the most polluting sources, both camps are usually at loggerheads. That’s why not many people had high hopes for this Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP). That pessimism was partially validated by the fact that COP27 did nothing to rein in runaway carbon pollution. But it wasn’t all a waste of time and effort. Something beneficial and substantial did emerge: a deal to provide financial support for poorer countries that are most vulnerable to climate change — countries like Bangladesh and the Marshall Islands, which are threatened by rising sea levels, and Pakistan, which suffered record flooding in September. The “loss and damage” fund, which was announced yesterday, is still just a skeleton. Countries have another year to work out the details, but here’s the gist: Money will flow from rich countries to “particularly vulnerable” ones to help them mitigate and adapt to a climate that’s increasingly hostile to them. The modifier “particularly vulnerable” was key to the deal. Wealthy nations didn’t want the fund to benefit those that are doing just fine but are still considered developing under the UN framework — most notably China, which has the world’s second-largest economy, and is like there’s no tomorrow. (Remember, it’s taken the world nearly 30 years to get to this point in the negotiations, and China and a handful of other countries have come a long way in that time.) |
Quit Twitter better with these free tools that make archiving a breeze | Kyle Wiggers | 2,022 | 11 | 21 | It’s never a bad time to back up your data. But for Twitter users, it’s arguably more urgent than usual, what with the platform’s recent … unpredictability. Mass firings and resignations, whiplash policy changes and crippled infrastructure don’t instill a ton of confidence that Twitter will remain stable well into the distant future. That’s why it’s worth considering archiving your account for posterity. Twitter’s long offered a tool for archiving account data, which at present allows you to copy your data in a machine-readable format that’s portable to a select few other services. But while the tool works well for simple backups, the archives it creates aren’t particularly user friendly. There isn’t an obvious way to quickly organize the tens to thousands of tweets an archive might contain, for instance, or drill down within an archive for specific types of tweets and embedded media. Fortunately, thanks to the open source community, there’s freely available tools for those who wish to exercise more control over their Twitter archives. They don’t subvert Twitter’s archive request process — you’ll need an account archive directly from Twitter to use many of the tools — but they make working with Twitter archives less painful while expanding the archives’ usefulness, at least in theory. Note that not all of the tools are necessarily easy to use for non-developers. Many require knowledge of Python and other programming languages, and any tool that accesses Twitter’s API needs keys from a . (Disclaimer: Don’t provide tools access to your account if you don’t fully trust them.) But the tools at the very least provide basic setup instructions to help novices get up and running. Perhaps the most comprehensive of the bunch is the , which aims to fix and/or work around some of the more egregious flaws in Twitter’s archiving system (e.g., shortening links, storing tweets in a complex code structure, etc.) The tool converts tweets and even direct messages into markdown, the markup language supported by most content management systems and editors, and also HTML — complete with embedded images, videos and links. The Twitter Archive Parser goes beyond the Twitter archiver’s barebones functionality to replace shortened URLs with their original versions, copy tweeted images to a folder (for easier sorting), output lists of followers and people you’re following and download images in their original sizes. (By default, Twitter’s archiver swaps out full-sized images in tweets for smaller ones.) If a more user-friendly archive viewing experience is all you’re after, however, fits the bill. It displays your entire Twitter timeline going back to the very first Tweet and lets you browse direct message history offline. As you’d expect, Twitter Archive Browser will remain completely functional in the event you delete your Twitter account, showing any media you’ve uploaded including images and videos. Another Python-based tool, , is more limited in its capabilities than, say, Twitter Archive Parser. But it does exactly what it advertises: extracts the URLs of your tweets, retweets, replies, quote tweets and “likes” from a personal Twitter archive. (Taupe is a loose acronym for “ witter rchive RL ars r”). Taupe takes a Twitter archive, extracts the URLs corresponding to the tweets, retweets and such, and outputs the results in a spreadsheet format that can be used with other software and services, such as Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. While Taupe has limitations — for example, because the Twitter archive format for “likes” doesn’t contain a timestamp, Taupe can’t know or show exactly when individual tweets were liked — it’s one of the simplest ways to quickly convert historical Twitter data into a more useable format. As a complement to Taupe, there’s the self-descriptive tool, which saves all your Twitter bookmarks — including photos and videos and fully expanded URLs attached to tweets — in a markdown file. (Twitter archives don’t include bookmarked tweets.) And for bulk-deleting tweets in an archive, comes in handy. It can auto-delete tweets in a certain timeframe or containing certain keywords. Folks in need of more exhaustive Twitter timeline pruning will want to try , which can automatically delete tweets, retweets and favorites from an archive. Twitter Cleaner can also remove entries from an active timeline but that requires a Twitter developer account. What if you’re only interested in specific artifacts from your Twitter account, like photos? While there’s no way around downloading your entire account archive, some tools help to surface only the items of interest within that archive. For example, processes your Twitter archive to create a local database containing all your photos. It’ll even work for image galleries and photos from retweets, albeit not for videos and GIFs. (You’ll see a single still frame in place of a GIF.) is even more stripped down. The tool converts individual tweets in an archive into PDFs for storage purposes. Well — that’s all the open source tools we’ve spotted for managing Twitter archives so far. If we missed any, feel free to send us an email and we’ll see about adding it to the list. |
Twitter alternative Hive hits 1 million users after surge of sign-ups | Sarah Perez | 2,022 | 11 | 21 | In the wake of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, to other social apps like and niche communities like CounterSocial. Now, another social app called is in sign-ups in response to the upheaval at Twitter. The app today finds itself in the top 20 on the U.S. App Store after seeing a surge of new interest over the weekend as the situation at Twitter continues to devolve. Founded in 2019 by then-22-year-old , Hive is not a direct Twitter clone. Instead, the Gen Z-focused social app was described in a as combining concepts from a variety of social networks, including both Instagram and Twitter and even MySpace — the latter thanks to a feature that lets Hive users add music to their profiles, among other things. The app is also not solely timeline-based, as Twitter is. In addition to the main feed, Hive’s users can explore their interests across a range of topic-based communities, like Science, Tech, Cars, Music, Fashion, Pets, Crafts, Books, Travel, Gaming, Art, Food and many others. Here, users can like, comment and repost the shared content, similar to other social networks, as well as click on hashtags to dive in further. Hive In some respects, Hive may feel more comfortable to former Twitter users looking for a new home because the app has a simple and familiar set of navigation options — there are tabs for viewing the main timeline or feed, a “Discover” section for exploring the social network, a tab for accessing your profile, and another for your notifications, for example. In the center, there’s a button to create a new post. Hive also uses the same follower-based model as Twitter, as opposed to the mutual friending model you’d find on a network like Facebook. However, unlike most social networks, Hive avoids personalization algorithms in favor of a chronological feed and it doesn’t monetize using ads. Instead, Hive offers users the ability to pay to unlock additional slots that let them showcase more of their favorite music on their profile. These range from $0.99 for a second slot to $1.99 for a third or fourth, the app’s App Store listing indicates. Hive has been gaining traction in the weeks leading up to Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and the days that followed. According to data from app intelligence firm Sensor Tower, around 214,000 of Hive’s total 733,000 lifetime installs across iOS and Android arrived over the last 30 days alone. Of note, Hive seems to have gained the attention of those outside the U.S. — its non-U.S. installs account for around 86% of Hive’s total downloads, Sensor Tower said. Data.ai’s estimates are largely in line with Sensor Tower’s, as it sees 720,000+ lifetime installs as of Nov. 20, but sees a higher number — 370,000 — coming from the U.S. Hive The app saw another surge in sign-ups starting on Friday and continuing over the weekend. Perhaps not coincidentally, this was around the time to Twitter by unlocking his account. Though Trump hasn’t yet tweeted, he prefers his own app Truth Social, it seems Musk’s move was enough to encourage even more of Twitter’s users to look for alternatives as they contemplate jumping ship. Sensor Tower’s data indicates Hive gained around 144,000 new installs over the past few days (Friday, Nov. 18 through Sunday, Nov. 20, 2022). 22,000 of those installs were from the U.S. alone, it says. During this time, the app also jumped from the No. 338 overall iPhone app on the U.S. App Store to become the No. 17 app today. In the U.K. it’s No. 17 and it’s No 24 in Canada. The app was also the No. 3 app in the U.S. Social Networking category as of the time of writing, Sensor Tower said. According to posts on Hive’s TikTok, the app crashed over the weekend as signed up to check it out. As of this morning, the app now has “nearly 900,000” users signed up in total. (This number doesn’t exactly line up with Sensor Tower’s download estimates, but third-party data is not an exact science.) This weekend isn’t the first time Hive has seen an influx of new users. The app also saw a brief spike in downloads in Feb. 2021, when it gained 439,000 new installs, 64% of which were from the U.S., Sensor Tower data shows. This surge can be attributed to the founder’s decision to pay a TikTok influencer to create a video, which resulted in some 250,000 installs in a matter of days, . Hive’s appeal may not only be due to its mixing of social networking concepts or its ease-of-use compared with signing up for Mastodon, which has confused some would-be users who don’t understand how to pick a server or what “fediverse” means. As with BeReal, Gen Z seems more drawn to newer social networks run by indie founders, not launched by big tech brands. The app was previously but has not made any official fundraising announcements. (The app, which is available at Hivesocial.app, should not be confused with the older Hive Social app, previously hosted at and by “The Bachelorette” contestant Peter Kraus.) We had trouble pulling up Hive on Twitter via search, where it’s ranked in the 30th spot for a search for the keywords “hive social,” (sans quotes) and doesn’t come up at all if you search “hive app.” The actual Twitter account for the app is “ ,” but even a search for “thehive_social” specifically returns only the (Raluca is her Romanian name). Hive hadn’t responded to requests for comment at the time of publication. Shortly after, Kassandra Pop replied with the most recent metrics as of today, Nov. 21, 2022, 12:52 PM PT. She said sign-ups since Thursday night had topped 400,000 and the app currently has 998,000 users. It later topped 1 million. We understand Hive is run by a of three, including Pop and two other developers, whose full names the founder won’t provide to the press. Users are raising concerns about Hive’s security, given this situation, and noting the app has some odd quirks — like non-unique usernames which could lead to impersonation, for example. Others have pointed to vague’s and , lack of 2FA and the inexperienced team as reasons to be cautious. Reached for comment, Pop said Hive’s sudden traction is “a lot for [the team] to process and they’re focusing on the product itself,” when asked why she won’t name her fellow team members. |
Space startup Stells wants to put spacecraft-charging covers on the moon | Stefanie Waldek | 2,022 | 11 | 21 | The portable power bank first came on the scene in 2001, and since then, on-the-go charging has been a possibility for most mobile device users. Now, a new space company — not for cell phones, of course, but for rovers and landers. Toronto-based Stells, founded by CEO Alex Kapralov and CTO Vital Ioussoupov in 2021, is developing a rover called Mobile Power Rover (MPR-1) that would be able to provide power to lunar spacecraft via wireless charging. The company has via a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and an lander, with a tentative landing on the moon in January 2025. Stells was initially interested in the lunar drilling industry, specifically in lunar craters. But early research proved that a power source for a drilling rover would likely be prohibitively expensive. That inspired MPR-1. “Why don’t we just provide power to others so they can have a redundancy in their power supply?” Kapralov tells TechCrunch. Most spacecraft derive their power from one of two sources: solar panels and Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTG). Solar panels, of course, only function in areas that receive sunlight — deep craters don’t always receive any sunlight. Solar panels also require a lot of surface area. With rovers the size of cars, such as the ones on Mars, that’s not a problem. But the next generation of moon rovers will be much smaller. NASA, for instance, is developing Called Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Explorers that will be the size of shoe boxes. RTG, on the other hand, is not reliant upon the sun, instead using the radioactive decay of plutonium-238 to create electrical power. The technology is, perhaps unsurprisingly, quite expensive, and it might not be cost-effective for small rovers. Given the current push for moon projects — Artemis 1, for instance, launched with four CubeSats destined for the moon (along with six others heading elsewhere) — MPR-1 has the potential to be quite useful. Illustration of a possible mining operation in dark crater, with power coming from solar at the edge. Stells “The way we’re planning on delivering power is by using a box we call the wireless charging box, or WCB,” says Kapralov. The WCB would harness the power via solar panels — in the case of a lunar crater, it would place those on the crater’s rim, then run power lines down to the crater floor, where the WCB would be stationed. The WCB would then store that power in its batteries, then distribute it quickly to other rovers via wireless charging. Those rovers, which would need a specific wireless charging port compatible with the WCB, would be able to navigate to the WCB using a beacon or visual navigation. With no atmosphere to attenuate the wireless power signal, this process would be much more efficient than on Earth. Kapralov also hopes that the WCB would be able to travel to power-drained lunar spacecraft to provide a jumpstart charge, though that’s a challenge for a future mission. The first mission would simply be a technology demonstration for the WCB. Thus far, Stells has been building prototypes and testing them on Earth — and it’s been entirely self-funded. “But we are probably going to start close to the beginning of next year to try to secure some funds for the development and the flight launch,” says Kapralov. Over the past two decades, there’s been a significant push for lunar exploration, and while development is rife, results have been minimal. Google’s Lunar XPRIZE competition, for instance, had companies developing lunar rovers for a $20 million grand prize. The competition commenced in 2007 and had a 2014 deadline for a lunar landing; when it was clear no one would be ready by 2014, that deadline was extended, ultimately to 2018. Though five teams secured launch contracts, . Moon Express and Team Indus of those teams had their contracts canceled, while Hakuto/ispace and Synergy Moon are still working toward launch. The fifth team, SpaceIL, did launch to the moon in 2019, but . Still, the lunar industry continues to develop, and more missions are closer to reality than ever before. Nothing is guaranteed — there is fertile ground for well-meaning failure. But the moon is the limit for the dozens of companies like Stells hoping to get there. |
Holmes’ sentencing sends a clear message that the startup ecosystem must be built on good faith | Ron Miller | 2,022 | 11 | 21 | the supposition that the venture-founder compact is built almost entirely on trust, especially early on. Sure, due diligence matters in the investment process, but lying about your capabilities can undercut the founder-investor relationship — and in extreme cases, to the detriment of the larger, global startup market. In the wake of for defrauding investors, I’ve seen people argue that she was only guilty of messing with the wrong people — the wealthy. The implication here is that Holmes’ rich investors deserved to lose their money. I would argue what she did helped undermine the entire venture compact, and that’s why she’s going to jail. As TechCrunch’s Amanda Silberling wrote on Friday : 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 technology didn’t work. What Holmes did was build a company by convincing investors that she could create something . The tech startup ecosystem exists in part because investors with capital to spare are willing to risk some of that money on a founder with an idea. These investors can be fabulously wealthy individuals. They can be athletes like Stephen Curry or Serena Williams, or entertainers like Kevin Hart or Ashton Kutcher. But they could also be larger entities like venture capital firms, investment funds or pension funds investing on behalf of people who aren’t fabulously wealthy. |
Everything that stood out to us at the 2022 LA Auto Show | Kirsten Korosec | 2,022 | 11 | 21 | The 2022 Los Angeles Auto Show is in the rearview mirror, leaving us with one final task: sharing a roundup of the weird and wonderful, the awkward and eye-popping vehicle unveilings and new announcements that made this year’s show. The auto show didn’t quite capture the energy of those heady pre-COVID pandemic days, although it was . Electric vehicles, and the greenwashing that often comes with it, took center stage, and hydrogen fuel cell technology made a few cameos. There were even several startups that showed up to reveal electric restomods, 3D printing tech and three-wheeler design. Let’s dig into the good, bad, ugly and surprising moments of the 2022 LA Auto Show. Kirsten Korosec Word on the street is that there was an internal debate at Toyota headquarters over the future of the Prius: Leave it unchanged and allow it to maintain its commodity car status or invest in the vehicle and give it a makeover? The company took the latter approach and the end result surprised a lot of people who were on hand for the reveal at the 2022 LA Auto Show. The upshot? The Toyota Prius is attractive, even sleek. The has a sportier powertrain and a curvier, low-slung silhouette to broaden its appeal to sports car customers who would not have considered a Prius in the past. However, the hybrid won’t become much greener: Toyota said the new model can deliver 57 mpg, similar to the outgoing Prius. A lower, longer and wider Prius Prime, the nameplate’s plug-in hybrid version, also debuted at the auto show. The electric range on this PHEV went from 25 miles to 37 miles, a 50% increase. Toyota also revealed a . Kirsten Korosec Porsche wanted to pay homage to the Porsche 953, a heavily modified 911 Carrera, that took home the prize at the 1984 Paris-Dakar Rally. So, it took a Carrera 4 GTS coupe and turned it into a four-wheel drive sporty monster capable of tackling sand dunes, gravel and rocky passes. The Porsche 911 Dakar comes with a a twin-turbo flat-six engine that produces 473 horsepower, which is transferred to all four wheels by the eight-speed Porsche Doppelkupplung (PDK) transmission. There are two new modes, rally mode for gravel roads, muddy trails and wet grass, and off-road mode for sand dunes and rocky conditions. The automaker removed the backseats, added lightweight components like a carbon fiber hood and lighter glass, a red tow hook and special dual-carcass tires specially designed with Pirelli to prevent punctures. Porsche said it is making 2,500 of the 911 Dakar, which starts at $220,000. Kirsten Korosec VinFast really wants to tap into the U.S. market. And its answer is an . The company revealed four EVs, ranging in size from small five-passenger crossovers to large seven-passenger SUVs. VinFast expects to bring two SUVs, the VF6 and VF7, to market by early 2023. VinFast unveiled some vehicles at the 2021 LA Auto Show. But those had a decidedly prototype feel. This year, the vehicles seemed more complete. The company even showed off the interior and gave rides. VinFast still has a ways to go but it’s getting much closer. Its next vehicle might even be a sports car. Kirsten Korosec Hyperion showed off its vision for hydrogen refueling, a space station-inspired mobile station able to store 200 kilograms of the fuel. The mobile station, which has an estimated cost of $900,000, can be transported to different locations depending on the need. The station is also equipped with solar panels to provide power to the station’s accessories, such as lighting. For this to be green hydrogen, which Hyperion advocates, a system would have to be located next to renewable energy like wind or solar power. The fuel could be made on site, then shipped to the stations. The so-called “XF-1 Hyper:Fuel” mobile hydrogen station can also alleviate strained utility grids by providing mobile emergency backup power with its advanced hydrogen-electric storage systems. Kirsten Korosec Kirsten Korosec A hydrogen fuel cell hybrid concept vehicle called the received a number of “hey that looks like a DeLorean!” But Sang Yup Lee, the Hyundai Global Design Center and an executive VP at the automaker, was quick to make the correction. The N Vision 74 pays homage to the Hyundai Pony Coupe concept from 1974, which was developed by the legendary car designer Giorgetto Giugiaro, who also designed the DeLorean. (The DeLorean made its debut in 1981 after the Pony Coupe.) “Don’t say they look alike, because we did it first,” Lee said. Hyundai calls the N Vision 74 a “rolling lab,” — a testbed of sorts for future products, including how electrification may play a part. Harri Weber London-based startup Charge Cars showed off its 67, a carbon-fiber-clad EV inspired by a 1967 Mustang — just don’t expect it to growl like a V8. “This car, when it’s on the road, you get, for free, honest EV noise,” said chief creative officer Mark Roberts, who was hired away from McLaren in 2020. “I hate the whole thing of people having fake spaceships, or symphony orchestras, and things like that,” the exec said. He added during a presentation at the 2022 LA Auto Show: “You might think for 10 seconds, ‘hey, that’s fine.’ Then you switch it off.” Ford apparently sees things differently! The Detroit automaker built into its Mustang Mach-E, and plenty of other firms have turned to more out-there sound effects, , to accompany quieter EVs. Kirsten Korosec The all-electric Fiat 500e launched in Europe in 2020 and has since sold like hot cakes in the region. The diminutive vehicle — fresh with a purpose-built EV platform — has proven to be a massive success for Stellantis. Whether it will be embraced by U.S. buyers is unclear. Fiat CEO Olivier Francois took a in an interview after his on-stage presentation about the upcoming Fiat 500e that will come to North America in early 2024. Stellantis plans to “explore alternative business models,” such as subscriptions and car sharing, when it launches the Fiat 500e in the United States. Francois did not rule out limiting the 500e’s U.S. launch entirely to subscriptions , saying: “Maybe you will never have a price. Maybe it will just be usership. Maybe there will be there will be a combination of both.” The executive added cryptically, “There will be a healthy dose of digital, that’s for sure. We all collectively need to reinvent the business model.” Here are a few slated for the U.S. Harri Weber While hyping up the 500e’s return to the U.S., Fiat showcased three one-off vehicles made in collaboration with Bvlgari, Kartell and Armani. For the 500 Bvlgari’s exterior in particular, the brand “literally turned recycled gold from their jewelry making into metallic paint,” Fiat CEO Olivier Francois said. He added, “nothing is too precious to not be reused.” The vehicle also featured seats made with recycled ocean plastic. Fiat’s one-offs are destined for auction, and when the all-electric 500e comes to the U.S. in early 2024, its exterior won’t come freckled in actual gold. But according to Francois, the North American 500e’s seats will be “really made with reclaimed plastic taken from the oceans.” The executive declined to share specifics, including what percentage of the seats will be made with virgin plastic. : ► ► ► |
Series C is the new venture-startup bottleneck | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 11 | 21 | building a startup today, it’s likely harder for you to raise money than it was a year ago. New data makes it clear, however, that not every startup stage is feeling the same headwinds. A lack of uniformity in the startup fundraising climate is not novel. We have seen, variously, a , and a . Today, however, we’re seeing something different altogether: A Series C crunch. This does not mean that all early-stage rounds are in fine shape or that later venture rounds are healthy. Nearly everywhere you look, there are declines in venture activity that founders must contend with. But indicates that Series C is the current, and real, bottleneck in Venture Land, which means that this is the new crunch point for startups looking to raise their next tranche of cash. The data point isn’t that surprising. It’s somewhat common wisdom that the later a startup is in its maturity cycle, the more scrutiny it will be under when it seeks more money. With the IPO window closed, public-market valuations in the proverbial latrine, and crossover capital suddenly becoming scarce, late-stage startups are being vetted more like public companies today. And many of them are not ready. |
Musk’s impact on content moderation at Twitter faces early test in Germany | Natasha Lomas | 2,022 | 11 | 21 | A German law requiring social media platforms to promptly respond to reports of hate speech — and in some cases remove illegal speech within 24 hours of it being brought to their attention — looks like it will provide an early test for whether Elon Musk-owned Twitter will face meaningful legal consequences over how recklessly he’s operating the company. Since the self-proclaimed ‘free speech absolutist’ took over Twitter at the end of October and set to mass sackings and radical policy shifts (including, just , lifting a permanent suspension on former U.S. President Trump), concern has been and social media users that Twitter could degenerate into a hellscape of low-to-no content moderation under its new staff-liquidating, shitpost-loving billionaire owner. Thing is, some content moderation laws do apply to Twitter internationally — and Germany has one: The ‘Enforcement on Social Networks’ law, commonly referred to as NetzDG (an abbreviated version of its full German name), allows for fines of up to €50 million for failures to comply with reports to takedown illegal hate speech. But given Musk’s mass Twitter layoffs — and a number of notable resignations since he took over, including the departure of the former head of trust and safety, — it’s not clear how much core content expertise and moderation resource is left in-house to enable it to comply with various existing regulatory requirements falling on the business in international markets like Germany and . At some estimates, mere hundreds of employees are left at Twitter out of a prior headcount of around 7,500 following Musk’s “hardcore” ultimatum to staff . Entire international offices have reportedly been decimated, attracting some swift attention from lawmakers — such as in Spain, where scores of staff were reportedly laid off, which led the minister for work to a warning to the company earlier this month about the need to comply with local labor laws (which she followed by saying the labor inspectorate was acting on the case after union complaints). Staff in Germany have also been among laid-off international employees at Twitter — with a local union reporting that a large number of software engineers had received Musk’s notorious ‘agree to be hardcore or resign’ email late last week. Also last week reported on remarks by a German government spokesperson — who said it was watching developments at Twitter with “growing concern.” A specialist IT law firm in Germany, JunIT Rechtsanwälte, has a hearing coming up this Thursday for an injunction procedure against Twitter. It’s accusing the company of failing to act on reports of hate speech and remove illegal content as required under the NetzDG law. The firm’s founder and managing partner, Chan-jo Jun, tweeted a “save the date” marker earlier this month — saying Twitter will have to answer for its failure to act on hate speech reports at the public hearing where he said it would be applying for platformwide injunctive relief. Save the date: Am 24.11. muss sich (nach bisheriger Recherche) erstmals in einem Verfügungsverfahren vor Gericht in öffentlicher Verhandlung wegen unterlassener Löschungen und Freischaltung von illegalen Inhalten mit Antrag auf plattformweite Unterlassung verantworten. — Chan-jo Jun (@Anwalt_Jun) Under German law a lot can qualify as illegal hate speech — sharing Nazi symbols or denying the Holocaust, for example — as it has some of the strictest anti-hate speech laws in the Western world. So it’s clear that if Musk seeks to apply a purely American-centric flavor of free speech across Twitter everywhere — and/or simply fails to have enough staff working on content moderation and adequately resourced to respond to reports about illegal content — it puts him on a direct collision course with the German law for starters. The NetzDG law came into effect in Germany back in — and was further beefed up in , when the German parliament agreed to put a reporting obligation on platforms that requires them to report certain types of “criminal content” to the Federal Criminal Police Office. While a further reform of the law, last year, focused on bolstering user rights by dialing up transparency on platforms — by requiring tech firms to pass details of takedowns to researchers, among other changes. Although NetzDG has been in force for several years in Germany it has remained a topic of controversy — with critics arguing its existence has a chilling effect on online freedom of speech by encouraging social media firms to shrink their risk and over-block social media users’ content. At the same time, for years the running content moderation-related joke about Twitter for users of the platform in markets outside Germany wanting a quick escape from online hate that flourished on Twitter in earlier, pre-Musk years — when its prior leadership allowed a toxic bloom of U.S. white supremacist and neo-Nazi speech via lackluster and inconsistent application of claimed community standards — was to switch their location to Germany in the settings and get all this toxic speech purged since Twitter was at least complying with Germany’s hate speech rules. It would therefore be rather ironic now if German law is the main (only?) available legal tool to upbraid Musk for dismantling Twitter’s content moderation norms right now. (A pan-EU Digital Services Act that’s also focused on regulating illegal content takedowns does not come into force until February next year at the very earliest). That’s a big ‘if’ though. Because one pressing question for international regulators is whether Musk will pay any attention to obeying speech-related laws, or any laws, outside the U.S. (Equally, concern is growing inside the U.S. over — leading to a ‘shot across the bow’ statement by the U.S. regulator.) Back in October, the messaging platform Telegram was hit with a couple of NetzDG fines in Germany, totaling around €5 million — for violations of requirements to provide channels for users to report illegal hate speech and failure to appoint a local representative to be served documents with a legally binding effect — a level of penalty that seems unlikely to cause Musk any more sleepless nights than he’s already getting by having bought Twitter. Although, on paper at least, the German law does allow for larger penalties for breaches — which could stack up for an ad platform that’s seen major advertisers flee post-Musk takeover, adding to . Still, another question international regulators may soon be forced to face is how (or even whether) they’re able to collect fines and enforce legal consequences against a ‘self-driving’ Twitter — if, for example, Musk pulls all employees out of their markets and leaves no local entities to be served papers. What’s their route to actually enforcing compliance? One nightmare scenario for international regulators is thus, surely, willful non-compliance by Musk — leaving them with a choice between letting him get away with publicly thumbing his nose at their rulebooks or being forced to essentially punish local users of Twitter by issuing a ban of the service and trying to block access within their own markets (as much as that’s even possible in wealthy regions like Europe where users can use VPNs to circumvent geoblocks, etc.). Politically a service ban would probably be very unpopular to instigate — and easily trolled by Musk as outrageous censorship — putting lawmakers in a bind. Hence, swiftly tweeted threats from international regulators to ban Twitter (such as the one embedded below) may be shown up as rather hollow, in the coming weeks and months (and beyond … ), if none of these entities can follow through and enforce against irreverent rule breakers. (Another case that looks instructive here is Clearview AI — which has faced a bevvy of penalties from European data protection regulators in but it’s less clear whether any of these fines will actually be collectable as the U.S. firm continues to deny breaching any rules or even that these European laws apply to its business.) The German court hearing that’s looming for Twitter this week is just one early example of unfolding legal consequences of the Musk Twitter takeover. But it looks like one watch — as much to see how (or indeed whether) Musk-Twitter responds to the court proceeding and legal process as for any parking ticket fines which might ensue if there’s a finding of NetzDG hate speech takedown failings. One thing is clear: Regulators everywhere should buckle up for a bumpy ride as Musk drives the Twitter clown car out of the goldmine. The will be supported by strong oversight & enforcement: 💸 of up to 6% of global turnover ⛔️ And even a from the EU in case of repeated serious breaches To conclude:👇 Everyone is welcome to do business in the 🇪🇺, but they will have to follow our rules. — Thierry Breton (@ThierryBreton) |
NASA’s Thomas Zurbuchen tackles cosmic questions at TC Sessions: Space | Lauren Simonds | 2,022 | 11 | 21 | If you follow NASA’s many interplanetary and orbital missions, you’re no doubt familiar with Thomas Zurbuchen, the agency’s associate administrator of science. He also oversees NASA’s science program with a total budget approaching $7 billion a year. That’s a mighty big number, but there’s an even bigger reason why we’re thrilled that Dr. Zurbuchen will join us onstage at on December 6 in Los Angeles. Zurbuchen is responsible for NASA’s science program, which includes earth science, heliophysics, planetary science and astrophysics. The program is helping to answer some of humanity’s biggest origin questions. A keen observer of the natural world from an early age in Switzerland, Zurbuchen received a master’s degree and a doctorate of physics degree from the University of Bern. As a professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor — where he taught classes in space science, aerospace engineering and innovation — he focused on solar, heliospheric and planetary instrumentation and data analysis. He led several University of Michigan innovation initiatives in both education and research, one of which led to the top-ranked national undergraduate entrepreneurship program. Zurbuchen joined NASA in 2016, and he engages people worldwide with the agency’s work and the inspiration of science. In a conversation called “Asking and Answering Humanity’s Biggest Questions,” Zurbuchen will discuss the kind of elusive questions he, his program, and a diverse group of other leaders strive to answer: Where did we come from? Are we alone? How does the universe work? These questions and the answers — and the science behind finding them — are more important than ever as the space economy develops, as collaboration between governments and private commercial space companies increases and as geopolitical conflict continues to impact national security. We’re excited to hear Zurbuchen’s perspective on how NASA — its mission and the science it performs — is evolving. Will this evolution affect the potential for discovering answers to the big, cosmic questions facing our collective humanity? We should note that Zurbuchen, who has served in this position longer than anyone else, recently announced his retirement. You can be sure we’ll ask what’s next for him. Be in the room for what’s sure to be a fascinating discussion. takes place on December 6 in Los Angeles. , join us to learn about the latest space economy trends, see cutting-edge technology and network for opportunities to help you build a better, stronger startup.
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Former Snap Kitchen CEO whips up Prado for better access to fresh food | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 11 | 21 | Meal delivery continues to be popular, but most of us use it to get perhaps not the best-for-us food delivered. This is what Austin-based wants to change. CEO Jon Carter, the former CEO of healthy meal delivery service Snap Kitchen, started the company in 2020 to provide a customizable e-commerce platform for local meal delivery companies. Its technology enables users to combine into one place what are usually individual software programs for marketing, sales, fulfillment and shipping of perishable products, so they can focus on preparing better-for-you meals. Carter, whose background also includes financial services and Live Nation Ticketmaster, knows what it’s like to live in a food desert, as do , and not have access to fresh food. That’s why he wanted to create a better, more affordable toolkit for food subscription businesses. “Losing my father to diabetes was a transformational moment for me where I wanted to tie my professional endeavor to something personal and apply technology transformation at scale to something worthy itself,” he told TechCrunch. “I set out to address food access, health and wellness and nutrition. Growing up, I was more likely to see a Burger King or a donut shop within 10 miles of where I grew up rather than a Whole Foods, and I wanted to do something about that.” Now he is, and also doing it with a fresh cash infusion of $5.75 million in seed funding. Bonfire Ventures led the round and was joined by Slauson & Co., January Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Bridge Investment Group and Supply Change Fund. The investment will be used to add to the team, scale the platform and bring on more merchant partners in additional markets, Carter said. Prado is a subscription-based service and offers two tiers, Pro at $49 per month and Enterprise for $199 per month. The difference in price gets you API data access, a monthly account review meeting and custom consulting. Carter sees his company going up against the likes of shipping and fulfillment software companies, including Shopify, Happy Meal Prep, Bottle, Sprwt and EatFreshTech, but said Prado differentiates itself by not only being designed for perishable food items and having the all-in-one platform, but also providing a more modern and customized tech stack for the back end of the user’s experience. The company is working with customers like Everytable, Prep To Your Door and Lucky Lime. Carter declined to give any hard numbers to his traction so far, but did say Prado’s annual recurring revenue was close to triple what it was in January 2022. Prado also has partnerships with delivery services, including DoorDash and ShipEngine, so that local food subscription services can go right to the source and avoid the often , Carter said. “We are looking to add more partners in the last-mile logistics category and are also very much focused on integrations so that we are building an ecosystem that adds value on top of what we’ve built,” he added. |
Amazon quietly opens its logistics network to third-party merchants in India | Manish Singh | 2,022 | 11 | 7 | Amazon is quietly beginning to offer its transportation and logistics network as a service to third-party merchants, businesses and direct-to-consumer brands in India, tapping its large delivery chain to drive revenue in the key overseas market as the e-commerce group attempts to replicate a model it has been testing in the U.S. for several months. The service, called Amazon Shipping, offers “extensive reach and the highest reliability – all at the lowest logistics cost,” the company . Amazon Shipping “will pick up your parcels 7 days a week, and deliver them to your customers,” the company adds. The retailer, which has over the past seven years, says it’s offering its shipping at “competitive rates,” and includes a dedicated support channel. There’s no additional fee for deliveries on weekends and customers are not tied to any contract for a consignment, allowing them to cancel the service at any time. It has partnered with local firms Shiprocket, Unicommerce, EasyEcom, ClickPost and Vinculum for order and delivery management systems, it says on the site. The company has been testing the service for at least a few months in India, according to an analysis of the archived pages. Amazon Shipping (Amazon India website screenshot) As Amazon expands the Shipping service, it may become a headache to local firms, including Delhivery, Ecom Express and even legacy logistics giants including Blue Dart and India Post. Flipkart, the Walmart-backed rival of Amazon in India, also to third-party firms earlier this year. Indian newspaper Economic Times about Amazon Shipping, and added that Amazon Shipping covers all types of products other than dangerous and hazardous goods. On a , Amazon says Shipping currently offers the ground mode of deliveries and resricts the number of shipments items to 99 per order. Amazon opened its logistics network to third-party merchants in the U.S. earlier this year with a service called . Analysts say that Amazon can pose a greater challenge to rivals like Shopify with the move because it has built a nearly “impregnable moat in logistics.” “Today Amazon’s logistics is massive and fully integrated from the fulfillment center to the doorstep, even though it only serves Amazon; the obvious next step is opening it up to non-Amazon retailers, and that is exactly what is happening,” Stratechery’s Ben Thompson . |
Musk’s $56 billion Tesla pay deal goes to trial amid Twitter overhaul | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 11 | 7 | As if Elon Musk didn’t have enough on his plate, the world’s richest man is headed to court next week to defend his $56 billion Tesla pay package. Richard Tornetta, a Tesla shareholder who filed suit in 2019 to rescind Musk’s 2018 pay deal, claims the package — “the largest compensation grant in human history” — is unjustly paid to Musk without demanding he focus entirely on the carmaker. The trial begins November 14, yet another drama Musk will have to juggle as he works to overhaul Twitter. Musk’s deal to buy the social media company at the end of October, and since then Musk has set to work swathes of employees, for said layoffs and generally scheming out loud on the platform about to get a blue tick next to their names. The Twitter buy didn’t exactly help Musk’s case in the lawsuit over his pay package. Aside from Tesla, Musk already serves as CEO of SpaceX, the Boring Company, OpenAI and Neuralink. With Twitter, Musk will only lend credence to Tornetta’s claims that Musk is a “part-time executive” at Tesla. Tornetta also claims the board set low bars on performance targets for Musk and that the grant was “demanded for the avowed purpose of colonizing Mars (the planet).” Tesla has said Musk’s pay package delivered a tenfold increase in value to shareholders. The trial will be decided by Kathaleen McCormick on Delaware’s Court of Chancery. McCormick oversaw that ended in him agreeing to close his $44 billion deal, an acquisition which he financed in large part by . Tornetta’s lawyers argue the 2018 package did not achieve its stated purpose of getting Musk to focus on Tesla, and no wonder — there were no provisions requiring Musk to devote time or attention to Tesla nor were there provisions limiting Musk’s allocation of time or attention to non-Tesla endeavors. “Indeed, Musk testified that since the Grant’s approval, he has spent a little more than half his time on Tesla matters and has dedicated substantial time and attention to various other endeavors,” the lawsuit reads. Musk’s lawyers responded that his ambition is what makes him unique as a CEO and that he does not punch a clock to determine time spent at the company. The disputed pay package allows Musk to buy 1% of Tesla stock at a discount each time performance and financial targets are met. If they aren’t met, Musk gets nothing. Tesla hit 11 out of 12 targets, according to court papers. “In any event, under the proposed plan, Musk would not earn any compensation at Tesla unless he drove tremendous growth, which could not be accomplished without significant time and attention from the CEO,” said Musk’s lawyers. The suit against Musk also claims the package was not entirely fair because Musk controls the board. “None of the committee members were independent of Musk,” wrote Tornetta’s lawyers. For example, Kimbal Musk, Musk’s brother, sits on Tesla’s board — a pretty clear conflict of interest. Tornetta’s filing also points to former board member Antonio Gracias who the plaintiff describes as a close friend of Musk’s. Gracias, personally and through his private equity firm, has collectively invested over half a billion dollars in “essentially all of Musk’s entities,” according to the filing, including PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity, The Boring Company and Neuralink. In addition, the filing calls out Ira Ehrenpreis and James Murdoch, who are both still on Tesla’s board, as being personal friends of Musk and investors in Musk’s entities. Gracias, Murdoch and Ehrenpreis are also listed among the defendants on the case. |
Nvidia touts a slower chip for China to avoid US ban | Rita Liao | 2,022 | 11 | 7 | Two months after the U.S. China’s access to two of Nvidia’s high-end microchips, the American semiconductor design giant unveiled a substitute with a reduced processing speed for its second-largest market. The Nvidia A800 graphic processing unit is “another alternative product to the Nvidia A100 GPU for customers in China,” a spokesperson for Nvidia said in a statement to TechCrunch. “The A800 meets the U.S. government’s clear test for reduced export control and cannot be programmed to exceed it.” The new chip was first by Reuters on Monday. The A100 processor is known for powering supercomputers, artificial intelligence and high-performing data centers for industries ranging from biotech and finance to manufacturing. Alibaba’s cloud computing business . A100, along with Nvidia’s enterprise AI chip H100, were placed under a U.S. export control list to “address the risk that the covered products may be used in, or diverted to, a ‘military end use’ or ‘military end user’ in China and Russia.” Nvidia previously reported that the U.S. ban could affect Indeed, chip distributors in China, , are already marketing A800 in their product catalogs. The chip looks to be designed to circumvent U.S. export rules while still carrying out other core computing capabilities. Most of the key specs of A100 and A800 are identical except for their interconnect speeds: A800 runs at 400 gigabytes per second while A100 functions at 600 gigabytes per second, which is the set by According to an from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a bipartisan think tank, “By only targeting chips with very high interconnect speeds, the White House is attempting to limit the controls to chips that are designed to be networked together in the data centers or supercomputing facilities that train and run large AI models.” Nvidia isn’t the only one slowing down its chips in order to evade U.S. sanctions. Alibaba and Chinese chip design startup Biren, which have been pouring resources into making rivals of Nvidia processors, are modifying the performance of their latest semiconductors, . That’s because Alibaba and Biren, like other fabless semiconductor firms, contract Taiwan’s TSMC to make their products. And because U.S. export controls cover chip sales by companies using American technologies, sales from TSMC fabs to China could be curtailed. |
Outgoing YC President Geoff Ralston: The market is changing; YC’s terms are not | Connie Loizos | 2,022 | 11 | 7 | Last week at Web Summit, we were asked to interview outgoing Y Combinator President Geoff Ralston about the past, present and future of the popular accelerator program. We covered a lot of ground during our 20-minute chat, including why Ralston — long a partner at YC — decided to leave after assuming the role of president just three years ago ( assumes the role in January). We also discussed where YC’s investing capital comes from and whether, given the market slowdown, YC will be changing its terms to reflect that slowdown. Here is much of that conversation, edited lightly for length and clarity. You can the longer conversation here, or just . GR: I actually count my tenure at YC from just after 2006, when I left Yahoo [and] started hanging out with Paul [Graham] and company, so really, almost 16 years. And I’ve been an employee at YC since 2011. So it’s been over a decade. And, you know, I felt inside me an urgency that it was time for a change. And I think you have to do that justice, when you feel that, even though I love YC. I love what I do. I think it’s important work. I think it matters. We’re very mission driven. We think entrepreneurship is important and makes a real positive difference in the world. And I love working with founders. It’s weird. I love it. But it was just time to do something different. So I’m moving on. I’ve made what some people consider outlandish claims for how many companies we could possibly fund. It’s never been infinite. It scales a lot. There is extraordinary opportunity for entrepreneurship and for founders to find success across the United States and across the world, in every demographic. In the beginning, we were just scratching the surface. One of the things that I think YC did that was really special was to democratize the idea of entrepreneurship, to open it up to different folks. Originally, the idea was to open it up to technologists, to hackers. That was really an opening of entrepreneurship to folks who really didn’t quite have the access. And we’ve continued that to this day. For that reason our batches have continued to grow. It’s supply and demand. There’s a demand for entrepreneurship. Yeah, totally, and to be fair, PG, Paul Graham, the founder of YC, started opening up the ideas behind entrepreneurship with his essays, which I’m sure a number of people in the audience have read. They were really a turning point for how people thought about entrepreneurship. We raise funds, and we do it rather quietly. It’s sort of our internal sausage making, and it’s not so relevant to talk about. We’ve evolved over time. Originally, YC was funded exclusively by Paul and company. And later on, we took on, from a funding perspective, the nature of most VCs, where we have limited partners from whom we raise money on a relatively regular basis. And we have a number of funds in which those LPs place their money. We look like a standard VC from that perspective. They’re not. Yeah. I would like to point out that one of the innovations that Sam probably talked about when you talked about these five innovations was that we think of the folks who go through Y Combinator as our alumni and we’ve created this community of founders. If that tight community can actually reinvest the success they found back into YC, it ties us all more tightly together. The best answer to that is we have really good software. We actually consider ourselves, more than anything else, a software platform. We’ve all been software engineers. Paul has a PhD in computer science. Sam was a software engineer. I’m a software engineer. My successor, Garry Tan, is a software engineer. So we take a software attitude toward scaling and toward creating tools that bring our companies and our founders together. In fact, Garry built the community software originally that we still use at YC. It’s a new world, right? It changed in two fundamental ways, which caused us to retrench a little bit on our batch size. One is that the pandemic sort of is coming to an end, and we’re much more in person, and it’s harder to scale in person than purely virtual, which we were from March 2020 until the winter of 2022. The second thing is the economy is doing somewhat different things than in 2021, so it’s really important for us to fund those that have the best chance of survival and raising funds in the future and thriving in a more difficult economic situation. Not in the short term, okay. I mean, over the years, we’ve changed the deal that we give to YC companies and you probably know that recently, we changed the amount of money we gave each company from $125,000 to $500,000. That’ll stick for a while. We’re actually sort of super pleased that just as we’re coming into stormy economic weather, every YC company gets to start off with a minimum of $500,000 and has a great chance therefore of making it through to the other side, and there will be another side. There’s always another side. Web Summit I think someone on the previous panel just said, nobody really knows. And it’s true, nobody really knows. But there’s reason to believe that we might have a relatively soft landing, that maybe we’ll have a recession but it probably won’t last for that long. There’s pretty good employment statistics and pretty bad inflation and we’ll see how those balance out. I don’t know. Fight Club implies pugilism between the companies, and that seldom happens within our community; even when companies end up being in the same space, we still all feel like we’re fighting the same fight. Look, we’ve funded over 4,000 companies now. So it is inevitable that people will be in similar or the same space, it just, it’s okay, it happens. We’re driven by the founders who apply. We seldom say: we’re going to take 20 consumer businesses, 100 B2B Saas [teams]. Sadly, B2B SaaS tends to be the biggest component of batches and has for a while for the same reason that Willie Horton used to rob banks, because [business customers] have the money. If you want to persuade consumers to spend money, it’s just a little bit harder than companies that, when you provide a product, really want to spend money [in order to] have a guaranteed business relationship with you. The way our application process works hasn’t changed much over time at all. There’s an online application. It’s free, so anyone who wants to apply to YC should. It’s very helpful for startups to go through the set of questions that we ask and fill it out and it takes a few hours. There’s also a short video, just introducing the founders. After the applications come in, we review all the applications, every one, and we tend to get on the order of 20,000 applications per batch. Then we select a limited number for interviews. And we do a 10-minute interview with every company that we select. And based on that interview, we select them for the batch. It’s even higher than that. For us, it’s a twofold question of how we come out of the pandemic, and businesses everywhere are struggling with this question as a company. We became 100% virtual in March of 2020. Like almost everyone else, it stayed that way for two years. And we’re just figuring out what does YC as a company look like in 2022, 2023 and beyond. The good news for me is mostly it’s Garry’s problem. But we did open another office in San Francisco and I recently did a straw poll of YC employees to ask how often they were going to come into the office, and the average was something like 1.5 days. So we’re almost fundamentally a remote, virtual organization henceforth. The related question is, what do our batches look like? I mentioned that in the summer of 2022, we [returned to] in person [meaning], components of in person. We had a retreat at the beginning of the batch, we had weekly meetups during the batch and we had an alumni event at the end of the batch, and we’ll continue to incrementally work with how much ‘in person’ we’ll bring back and how much virtual there is. We learned so much during the pandemic as to what works. In fact, we were able to spend more time with founders, because it turns out office hours over Zoom are really effective and really efficient. So we did more of them. And we connected with our founders over tools like Slack and WhatsApp and in some ways, even though we weren’t in person, these brought us closer. So we’re trying to find the happy medium, the best of both worlds where we can spend that sort of quality time helping founders and also kind of the very human aspect of, you know, meeting them in person, hugging them when they need a hug. Those things actually are super important. |
Former Tink employees launch Atlar, a payment automation startup | Romain Dillet | 2,022 | 11 | 7 | Stockholm-based startup raised a $5 million (€5 million) seed round led by Index Ventures. The company has been working on an application programming interface (API) that facilitates bank-to-bank payments for European businesses. In addtion to Index Ventures, La Famiglia VC, Cocoa and various business angels also participated in the round, such as Revolut CFO Mikko Salovaara, former EVP of global sales at Adyen Thijn Lamers and N26 CFO Jan Kemper. While European consumers are already quite familiar with open banking and payment initiation, a lot of B2B transfers are still processed manually. Business banking hasn’t experienced the same level of innovation when it comes to payments. And yet, corporate banks already offer ways to initiate payments without having to connect to a web portal and upload a spreadsheet. But banks don’t necessarily run modern REST APIs. They expect a text file formatted in a very specific way on an SFTP server. If you have a development team, they could build a custom integration. But many companies simply don’t have the resources to maintain these connections. They would rather pay a partner to handle all the technical details. Atlar provides a modern API that hides all the complexities involved with bank connections. Once a company uses Atlar, it can trigger transfers, reconcile transactions and process direct debits through Atlar’s API directly. In particular, Atlar can be used for payouts, insurance premiums, deposits and loan payouts. Companies that operate across multiple European countries likely have multiple bank accounts. That’s why automating payments could be a nice upgrade for those businesses. “Accepting payments as a business is pretty painless now, but initiating them with your bank is still agonisingly slow and manual,” Atlar co-founder and CEO Joel Nordström said in a statement. “This is why Atlar is on a journey to becoming the operating system for bank-based payments. By creating a new category, we hope to unleash a wave of innovation for our clients which will ultimately benefit European consumers and businesses.” In addition to Joel Nordström, Joel Wägmark and Johannes Elgh are the two other co-founders. They were all working at Tink, the open banking company that was for $2.2 billion. Atlar competes with , a French startup that I covered . So far, Atlar focuses on the Nordics, Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Today’s funding round will be helpful when it comes to European expansion. |
Lyft takes $135.7 million hit on Argo AI shutdown | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 11 | 7 | Ride-hailing company Lyft lost $135.7 million in the third quarter due to the of autonomous vehicle company Argo AI, in which Lyft had a small stake. Late last month, Argo AI closed its doors as its main backers, Ford and Volkswagen, pulled their investments in order to like advanced driver assistance systems in passenger vehicles. Lyft and Argo were working together to test autonomous ride-hailing using Argo’s tech on the Lyft platform. The two companies had launched public , Texas in September and Miami, Florida in December of last year. Both of those services have now been discontinued, a Lyft spokesperson told TechCrunch. Lyft did not say how it will adjust its AV strategy in the future, but the company has also , another AV tech company, to launch robotaxis in Las Vegas in August. Lyft’s losses incurred by the Argo shutdown only account for about a third of the company’s total losses for the quarter. In Q2, Lyft lost $422.2 million, which is a larger cost than the $99.7 million in the same period of 2021 and a net loss of $377.2 million in the second quarter of this year. A bigger portion of Lyft’s losses are attributable to $224.1 million in stock-based compensation and related payroll expenses, an increase from $179.1 million in the second quarter. The uptick is related to the top-up that Lyft issued to employees when its stock price declined earlier in the year, according to a Lyft spokesperson. Lyft said the increase isn’t yet related to the rounds of layoffs from the company, the first of which and the second as Lyft tries to cut down on operating expenses. In regards to that reduction in workforce, Lyft expects to “incur a charge of between $27 million and $32 million” in Q4, as well as “a stock-based compensation charge and corresponding payroll tax expense related to affected team members, as well as restructuring charges related to a decision to exit and sublease, or cease use, of certain facilities,” said Elaine Paul, Lyft’s chief financial officer, during Monday’s earnings call. “However, we aren’t able to estimate these charges at this time because they depend in part on our future stock price.” Paul also said Lyft has been working to reduce stock-based compensation next quarter by ceasing new hires in the U.S. and shifting the nexus of hiring away from the U.S. and toward international markets like Canada and Eastern Europe where “there’s a different compensation model with low or no equity.” For the third quarter, Lyft reported revenue of $1.05 billion, which is slightly less than of $1.06 billion. The company’s earnings per share hit -$1.18 versus the $0.09 that was expected. Even active riders, which saw an improvement quarter over quarter, only topped 20.3 million, and the Street had hoped for 21.1 million. That said, Lyft’s revenue per active rider beat expectations of $49.94 at $51.88. Lyft’s stock, which had started to climb after Uber reported strong earnings last week, fell 14.36% Monday in after-hours trading. The company’s shares have slid 69.29% since the start of the year. Lyft closed the quarter with $143.7 million in cash. Looking forward, Lyft expects revenue to be between $1.145 billion and $1.165 billion in the fourth quarter, with revenue growth reaching between 9% and 11% quarter over quarter and 18% to 20% year over year. Part of that growth will come from increased revenue per rider, which is backed by Lyft’s recent decision to . Paul said Lyft intends to cut its operating expenses by roughly $20 million in Q4 versus Q3, which is in part due to the reduction in force. John Zimmer, Lyft’s president, said he was confident that Lyft would be able to achieve its Q4 goals regardless of the macro environment. “ a |
Foxconn invests another $170M into EV SPAC Lordstown Motors | Kirsten Korosec | 2,022 | 11 | 7 | Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn is increasing its investment in EV startup Lordstown Motors by buying $170 million in common stock and newly created preferred shares. Once the deal is complete, Foxconn will hold all of Lordstown’s outstanding preferred stock and 18.3% of its common stock on a pro forma basis. Foxconn will also have the right to two board seats, the companies said Monday. The additional investment comes a year after the electric light-duty truck manufacturer sold its 6.2-million-square-foot Lordstown, Ohio, factory to Foxconn. As part of that , which included a direct investment of $50 million, Foxconn agreed to help Lordstown Motors manufacture its Endurance pickup truck. Production of the began in September 2022. This latest deal, specifically the $100 million direct preferred stock investment, replaces the joint venture funding announced last year by Foxconn and Lordstown Motors. The investment will occur in tranches and is subject to a review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. An initial closing is expected to be held later this month. Foxconn will purchase about 12.9 million shares of common stock at a purchase price of $1.76 per share, resulting in total proceeds of $22.7 million. Foxconn will also buy 300,000 shares of preferred stock at $100 per share, resulting in total proceeds of $30 million. The remaining shares of preferred stock will be purchased by Foxconn as Lordstown Motors achieves certain milestones. After receiving approval from CFIUS, Foxconn will buy an additional 26.9 million shares of common stock at a purchase price of $1.76 per share, resulting in total proceeds of about $47.3 million. “Since announcing our first transaction with Foxconn more than a year ago, it has been our objective to develop a broad strategic partnership that leverages the capabilities of both companies. Foxconn’s latest investment is another step in that direction,” Lordstown Motors executive chairman Daniel Ninivaggi said in a statement. The companies said the fresh injection of capital will be used to fund development and design activities for a new electric vehicle program in collaboration with Foxconn, a manufacturing company best known for making Apple’s iPhone. Lordstown Motors is one of several companies that went public over the past two years by merging with a special purpose acquisition company DiamondPeak Holdings Corp., with a market value of $1.6 billion. The company struggled almost from the get-go, its demise fueled by a by short-seller firm Hindenburg Research that accused the EV SPAC of misleading investors on both its demand and production capabilities. Hindenburg disputed that the company booked 100,000 preorders for its electric pickup truck, a stat shared by Lordstown Motors in January 2021. The company later cut its forecast, and . The resignation came just few weeks after Burn reassured investors of the company’s bright future. The missteps continued and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice opened investigations into the EV startup. Even after receiving a from a hedge fund managed by investment firm Yorkville Advisors, Lordstown had its struggles, including losing . Its deal with Foxconn has been its best chance at survival even as supply chain issues limit production of its EV pickup. |
Harmonic helps investors query the startup searches of their wildest dreams | Natasha Mascarenhas | 2,022 | 11 | 7 | Siri, show me fintech companies, founded in the last two years, that haven’t raised over the past year but have grown headcount by 100% in the same time frame; and can it be founded by Stanford alumni whose Twitter traction has grown by at least 50% in the last six months? This is Harmonic’s vision; well, only if you swap out Siri for ’s text-based startup search query tool. The data platform, led by and co-founded by and
, thinks it can help executives discover the next big startups without hundreds of hours of manual sourcing and research. Harmonic is a more specific version of its largest competitors, Crunchbase and PitchBook, which aggregate and organize private startup data. “We go out and look at every nook and cranny of the web where there might be information about companies and we take that structured and unstructured data and figure out how to merge it all together into some canonical representation of a company,” Ruderman told TechCrunch. Harmonic’s aggregation differentiation, per Ruderman, is the intelligence it uses to help recognize which public data is more accurate for certain fields, and then merges those sources to develop the “most accurate, fresh representation at any point in time.” Harmonic joins a flock of other startups trying to make venture more data-driven, transparent and equitable. In theory, and pushes emotions to the side. Fintech unicorn Clearco and venture firm SignalFire have spent years implementing data-focused investment processes, joined by AngelList and Hum Capital. In a landscape where investors are re-learning discipline, data feels safe. But, as other solutions have matured, the cleanliness and reliability of said data (One founder even played a prank once, listing that Andreessen Horowitz was an investor in his startup on Crunchbase; when other investors piled on looking to put money into his upstart, he explained it was a joke to show the poor quality of data on the platform, Another question to consider is if Harmonic truly helps investors break out of their pattern matching tendencies, or just helps reinforce already existent values. Ruderman admitted that data reliability and consistency is one of the hardest problems to get right — and that their strategy is a big differentiator for them. “We’re able to keep data up-to-date at scale, and merge together fragmented bits of structured and unstructured data from all over the web with confidence,” Ruderman said, adding that its main measure of success is an internal score they use that captures freshness, inventory and taxonomy. When asked for more specifics on how they gain an upper edge on freshness, Ruderman didn’t share many specifics (and given that it’s a competitive moat, I’m not too surprised by this). He also said that pricing will evolve as the product evolves, but currently the startup charges licensing and API usage fees. Ruderman’s background adds some color to why he is confident in a better way to search. The co-founder was at Google for around six and a half years — with his last role being a senior software engineer on a team in Search that was all about building tools to help Google do UX research and design at scale. Before that, he spent time learning about behavioral economics in the people operations department, technical infrastructure on the business intelligence team, machine learning on the finance team and, ultimately, Search. So far, his direction and the company behind him has landed Harmonic at least 150 customers, including SaaS startups such as Some of those early adopters have even turned into the startup’s largest investors. Harmonic announced today that it closed a $23 million Series A round led by Sozo Ventures, with participation from Craft Ventures, which led its $7 million seed round last year. Floodgate, another customer, was Harmonic’s first investor. “By creating a really powerful discovery tool in venture, it lets capital flow out to more innovation in a more efficient way…if we bring this to sales teams, it lets teams bring their service and push forward at the right time,” Ruderman said. “And then eventually, we want to make it the case that talent can find startups to match their talents, driving startups forward.” |
Daily Crunch: Say ‘fromage’! French startup PhotoRoom captures $19M Series A | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 11 | 7 | Hello, dear crunchers! We hope you’ve had a peaceful weekend and that you were able to stay clear of social media for a few days. LOL Who are we kidding? We’ve all been glued to the slow-moving, painful, Elon-catalyzed bird crash over at Twitter. Now, if only Mastodon would call its posts something other than “toots,” we might be able to get behind those. In the meantime, come say hello to us on Mastodon! Much love from Christine ( ) and Haje ( ). And, given that those social handles don’t exactly roll off the tongue, we’ll probably go back to linking to our Twitter accounts tomorrow. We are nothing if not creatures of habit, after all. Evidently, the downturn hasn’t soured investors on the travel industry. Travel booking startup , bringing the company’s total raised to close to $730 million, reports. The fresh cash will be put toward several efforts, CEO and co-founder Frederic Lalonde said in a press release, including supporting Hopper’s new social commerce initiatives. Want to start a DAO? It’s not that hard. . Some of those steps are daunting. is here to help, and he’s invited Alex Taub and one of his investors to learn more about how starting and onboarding for a DAO is about to become a lot easier, at least if they have something to do with it. Tune in to our next episode of TechCrunch Live on Wednesday to hear from Alex and investor Karin Klein from Bloomberg Beta. A smattering more: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch Dear Sophie, I was laid off and I’m on an H-1B. I have enough savings to survive for a while. What should I do if I have been let go from my job? I am on an H-1B, have an approved I-140, and an I-797 that expires in March 2024. If I have to leave the U.S., can my current I-797 be transferred to my next employer? Are there any issues I should be aware of? — Upended & Unemployed Three more from the TC+ team: has your look at the , a $790 high-end portable speaker. And he actually uses the term “portable” lightly because it weighs five pounds, so more like a speaker you can pick up and change rooms with, not one you carry around in a backpack. Business marriage is in the air, with . writes that this move “signals consolidation in the lidar industry” and also describes the background and what led up to this. Ready for five more? |
Elon Musk’s Twitter faces US midterm elections, his first high-stakes test | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,022 | 11 | 7 | braces for midterm elections, the first major voting cycle since the violence on January 6, Elon Musk’s adds more uncertainty to an already tense time. While other major platforms for dealing with viral misinformation, coordinated attacks and misleading claims about election results, Twitter’s new owner just slashed the company in half, sending some teams tasked with handling elections and misinformation . Twitter is a relatively small social network but it plays an outsized role in politics due to its superiority as a breaking news source and the fact that most elected leaders (and many other government officials) spend time there. With Musk in charge and half the company gone, including some people who — oops —Twitter’s policies and likely even its products are about to be put to the test. One day before the U.S. midterm elections, Musk inexplicably waded into the political fray, throwing his weight behind Republicans. “Shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties, therefore I recommend voting for a Republican Congress, given that the Presidency is Democratic,” Musk wrote. Musk isn’t the first tech CEO to hold political beliefs, but his last-minute advocacy shows that he isn’t interested in being “politically neutral,” no matter how he frames it. For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) Like almost everything he’s tweeted since taking over at Twitter, Musk’s shallowly reasoned last-minute political endorsement only undermines trust in his ability to run the platform. The political message isn’t particularly surprising given recent spats with high-profile Democrats on Twitter, but it’s still alarming that are the issues Twitter’s new owner is frittering away his (and our) time with. Since buying the company, Musk has clashed with both Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Hillary Clinton, and the latter interaction offered at just how little Twitter’s new owner understands or cares about trustworthy information, particularly when it doesn’t suit his worldview. With a week until Election Day, Musk demonstrated his seriousness on the subject by replying to Clinton with an from a known misinformation source offering a false narrative about the violent assault on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband. Musk has since deleted the tweet, demonstrating that at least one of the sycophants in his inner circle must have flagged the reply as a risk on some level, likely to advertisers. Twitter’s new owner quickly moved on to sowing discord around other topics without taking any accountability — or a sorely needed news literacy course. Not great. There’s a lot that can go wrong when it comes to election misinformation, both on Election Day and in the vote-tallying days that follow. It’s not just about the big calls — which party takes the House and the Senate, for example — but also the thousands of critical little calls coming from state and local election administrators. Two years after the January 6 insurrection, election deniers in states like Arizona continue to spread false narratives about past election results while making efforts to seize oversight for local elections for themselves. Will Twitter have the staff or the political will to quickly fact-check conspiracy theories this time around? We’re surely in for a wave of about voting irregularities, mail-in ballots and political fates that shift over time as more votes are counted. Musk hasn’t yet rewritten Twitter’s policies, but he’s already sent the platform into a critical situation with a skeleton crew. The company’s layoffs were and so fast that it’s likely some core knowledge about how to operate the company and respond to threats walked out the door along with half of its workforce. In spite of , Twitter’s head of Safety and Integrity who apparently has Musk’s ear at the moment, the company . That includes Twitter’s curation team, which provided context, monitored for misinformation and curated Twitter’s trending and moments modules during live events — like elections. The curation team topped different parts of the platform with fact-checked updates that filled information voids and served as counterprogramming for misinformation, which spreads quickly in fast-moving news environments. “With early voting underway in the US, our efforts on election integrity — including harmful misinformation that can suppress the vote and combatting state-backed information operations — remain a top priority” Roth said. Here are the facts about where Twitter’s Trust & Safety and moderation capacity stands today: tl;dr: While we said goodbye to incredibly talented friends and colleagues yesterday, our core moderation capabilities remain in place. — Yoel Roth (@yoyoel) Twitter also reportedly cut , including a former director of public policy and elections who worked to prepare the platform for the U.S. midterms. that the Twitter layoffs also significantly reduced the engineering team focused on “user health,” which plays an active role in content moderation. The only positive news is that someone at Twitter on his pay-for-play verification plan, so the platform just barely dodged the absolute chaos that a flood of newly verified accounts gifted with algorithmic priority would have created on Election Day. Misinformation with domestic origins is a massive concern this election cycle, but Putin allies in Russia are proactively scaremongering around their own efforts to undermine U.S. elections. Russian entrepreneur Yevgeny Prigozhin boasted that “we have interfered, are interfering and will interfere” in U.S. politics, though ominous statements are certainly cheaper than the hiring necessary to see that agenda through, likely to similar effect. Meta’s head of Security Policy Nathaniel Gleicher made some good points on that front: 3/ Threat actors try perception hacking to trick the public & the media into doing the deception for them. Don’t fall for it. That includes not amplifying those claims — and asking for evidence to back them up. — Nathaniel Gleicher (@ngleicher) In spite of what most Americans would probably prefer to believe, the threat to U.S. elections this year is coming from within, not without. And while Tuesday will again put social media platforms and U.S. democracy to the test, the effort to undermine the election has been underway for months with and against election officials and poll workers. Twitter isn’t the only social network grappling with election misinformation. Researchers with Global Witness and NYU’s Cybersecurity for Democracy team found that containing false voting-related claims, including the wrong election date. Facebook detected some ads and failed to flag others, while YouTube detected all of the English-language ads and banned the channel publishing them (a similar test for political ads in Brazil showed that non-English content moderation still offers gaping loopholes to anyone who’d take advantage of them). But most political misinformation isn’t advertising, which must be submitted and reviewed. The vast majority of political conspiracies and misleading claims just float along with the massive bulk of normal user-generated content that companies haphazardly sift through. Most of it is never reviewed at all. Whatever happens on Election Day, bad actors looking to manipulate the American electorate know that Twitter has its guard down. Accordingly, we’re going to see all kinds of stuff pushing the boundaries of what’s allowed under Musk’s new Twitter regime. Musk has already shown that he’s willing to change the rules on the fly, doling out his harshest punishment to date not to serial harassers or accounts spreading hate speech but to . Nothing we’ve seen so far inspires confidence that Twitter’s new owner will rise to the occasion, whatever challenges for Twitter — and perils for American democracy — that this week presents. |
null | Sylvain Le Borgne | 2,022 | 11 | 21 | null |
Max Q: Ocean splashdown | Aria Alamalhodaei | 2,022 | 11 | 7 | Hello and welcome back to Max Q. TC’s in-person Space event is almost upon us. Will you be there? In this issue: Rocket Lab’s second attempt to catch a rocket booster mid-air using a helicopter was aborted, though it’s unclear at the time of writing what exactly went wrong. Rocket Lab aims to recover its rocket boosters using a parachute and a helicopter — a bit different than SpaceX, whose boosters return to Earth by vertically landing on a pad. Instead, Rocket Lab’s technique is to equip the booster with a parachute to slow its descent, and keep a helicopter waiting nearby to snag it out of midair. From there, the plan is for the helicopter to carry the booster straight back to the company’s production complex. But alas, we did not see a catch after this launch. Here’s what we know: After a nominal launch and payload deployment, the company’s Sikorsky S-92 helicopter did not make the catch attempt. Instead, the company recovered the booster from the ocean after it splashed down. We’ll be looking out for more information on what went wrong in the days ahead. Tokyo-based startup ispace’s lunar ambitions will soon be put to the test, as the company gears up for its first launch at the end of this month. The startup will attempt to send its “Hakuto-R” lander to the moon’s surface, kicking off an ambitious lunar exploration program of the same name. Founded in 2010, ispace is one of many emerging companies that want to foster new markets on and around the moon; on its website, it describes its goal as becoming “a gateway for private sector companies to bring their business to the moon.” Being the middle- and last-mile delivery partner of the moon could prove to be lucrative, given the intensifying interest from both government space agencies and private companies in lunar exploration. But there’s more than far-off revenues at stake in this first launch; that ispace is preparing to list on the Tokyo Stock Exchange as early as this fiscal year. While the company was previously targeting a launch window of November 9-15, ispace said Monday it was now aiming to launch no earlier than November 22. The new date was chosen “in careful coordination” with launch partner SpaceX, the startup said in a statement. Indeed, ispace founder and CEO Takeshi Hakamada confirmed that the lander had arrived in Cape Canaveral, Florida, via cargo plane in advance of launch. The ispace M1 Hakuto-R lander. ispace Blue Origin’s BE-4 rocket engine. Blue Origin |
Last day to save with early-bird passes to TC Sessions: Crypto | Lauren Simonds | 2,022 | 11 | 7 | We’re less than two weeks away from kicking off in Magic City on November 17. Yep, that’s Miami’s official nickname. Who knew? But listen up, crypto fans, because the bit of magic we call our early-bird special is about to perform a disappearing act in less than 24 hours – 11:59pm PST on November 7 to be exact. Don’t watch $150 in savings vanish before your eyes. and avoid the price hike. Then use that extra cash to deck yourself out Miami Vice style — no socks required — and join the blockchain, crypto, DeFi, NFT and web3 communities to conjure up your own brand of magic. Check out the . It’s grown to be an impressive day all around — with more than 15 early-stage startups exhibiting on-site, and interviews and panel discussion featuring the sector’s top leaders, creators and investors. Folks like Binance’s Changpeng (CZ) Zhao, FTX Ventures’ Amy Wu, OpenSea’s Devin Finzer, Sequoia Capital’s Michelle Bailhe Fradin, Yuga Labs’ Nicole Muniz and . Whether you want to connect and collaborate with founders or investors or hire students determined to build the future generations of the cryptoverse, the networking at this event will be world-class. Expand your network and drive your business forward. Beyond the interviews, panel discussions and exhibition floor, you’ll also find a live podcast recording of . Join the TechCrunch crypto team as they dive into lively discussions on the latest blockchain news, drama and trends. And, in true TechCrunch tradition, we’ll have a pitch-off — crypto style. Don’t miss the industry’s brightest entrepreneurs as they take the stage in front of a live audience and a panel of experts — including Galaxy Ventures’ Will Nuelle, Gradient Ventures’ Wen-Wen Lam, and Lux Capital’s Grace Isford — to pitch their revolutionary technologies. Don’t miss your chance to make magic happen. — while you still can — and crank up the heat with us at in Miami on November 17.
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Truveta’s big data healthcare project is pretty cool | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 11 | 7 | A few weeks back, TechCrunch caught up with and others from the Truveta team to chat through an important product update from the company. This publication has , curious about its objectives as a business that has a strong public-health component, and because Myerson was a longtime Microsoft denizen that we were familiar with from covering Windows for years and years. Our interest was also piqued late last year when , slightly more than doubling its capital base. With , Truveta had a roster of folks with whom we were familiar, and enough cash to bring to bear whatever it was dreaming up. The Truveta concept is simple: Work with different healthcare groups to collect anonymized patient data, pool the information and make it available to third parties so that they can see what’s actually going on in terms of patient outcomes in a more holistic sense. The potential public health and commercial applications are reasonably apparent, but what struck your scribe when chatting with Myerson and the team was that this sort of aggregated database of depersonalized information was not already in existence. While having a private-public healthcare system has some advantages, centralized data is seemingly not one of them. Back to the recent: Truveta has expanded the roster of health systems contributing to its dataset from a handful toward the end of 2021 to 25 today. More data is good when it comes to this sort of “healthcare analytics” work, so the additional 11 providers matter. But more notably, Truveta’s software product launched earlier this month. Back in 2021, the company made a bit of a splash when it rolled out a COVID-focused product. Now, Truveta Studio is out, and I got a tour. Something that Truveta has to handle is harmonizing information from disparate systems. This is something it’s tackling, allowing users to set up definitions in a computable format, and then collect results and graph them. The resulting wall of charts and graphs is exciting to look at if you, like myself, are a huge dork for data visualization. The service is not something, from my run-through of it, that anyone with a passing interest in healthcare outcomes could use. But for an expert, it could pay off — our tour guide explained that, in his prior research environment, he would spend weeks executing what he can do in minutes with Truveta. That’s more than an order of magnitude of time savings. Provided that the service is sufficiently user-friendly for professionals, the company could be onto something. The question now is how much people — customers — want to use it. Truveta’s early goals — getting its data ingestion set up, raising money, building a team, and then a product for regular use — have been met. Now we are down to the business brass-tacks of the effort. And there are nine figures of capital wagered that it will succeed. Given that healthcare in the United States is exorbitantly expensive, opaque and full of inequitable outcomes, folks working to make it a bit less impossible to parse are fine by me. |
Perceptron: AI that sees with sound, learns to walk and predicts seismic physics | Kyle Wiggers | 2,022 | 11 | 7 | Research in the field of machine learning and AI, now a key technology in practically every industry and company, is far too voluminous for anyone to read it all. This column, , aims to collect some of the most relevant recent discoveries and papers — particularly in, but not limited to, artificial intelligence — and explain why they matter. This month, engineers at Meta detailed two recent innovations from the depths of the company’s research labs: an AI system that compresses audio files and an algorithm that can accelerate protein-folding AI performance by 60x. Elsewhere, scientists at MIT revealed that they’re using spatial acoustic information to help machines better envision their environments, simulating how a listener would hear a sound from any point in a room. Meta’s compression work doesn’t exactly reach unexplored territory. Last year, Google announced , a neural audio codec trained to compress low-bitrate speech. But Meta claims that its system is the first to work for CD-quality, stereo audio, making it useful for commercial applications like voice calls. An architectural drawing of Meta’s AI audio compression model. Meta Using AI, Meta’s compression system, called , can compress and decompress audio in real time on a single CPU core at rates of around 1.5 kbps to 12 kbps. Compared to MP3, Encodec can achieve a roughly 10x compression rate at 64 kbps without a perceptible loss in quality. The researchers behind Encodec say that human evaluators preferred the quality of audio processed by Encodec versus Lyra-processed audio, suggesting that Encodec could eventually be used to deliver better-quality audio in situations where bandwidth is constrained or at a premium. As for Meta’s protein folding work, it has less immediate commercial potential. But it could lay the groundwork for important scientific research in the field of biology. Protein structures predicted by Meta’s system. Meta Meta says its AI system, , predicted the structures of around 600 million proteins from bacteria, viruses and other microbes that haven’t yet been characterized. That’s more than triple the 220 million structures that Alphabet-backed DeepMind managed to predict earlier this year, which covered nearly every protein from known organisms in DNA databases. Meta’s system isn’t as accurate as DeepMind’s. Of the ~600 million proteins it generated, only a third were “high quality.” But it’s 60 times faster at predicting structures, enabling it to scale structure prediction to much larger databases of proteins. Not to give Meta outsize attention, the company’s AI division also this month a system designed to mathematically reason. Researchers at the company say that their “neural problem solver” learned from a dataset of successful mathematical proofs to generalize to new, different kinds of problems. Meta isn’t the first to build such a system. OpenAI developed its own, called Lean, that it in February. Separately, DeepMind has experimented with systems that can solve challenging mathematical problems in the studies of symmetries and knots. But Meta claims that its neural problem solver was able to solve five times more International Math Olympiad than any previous AI system and bested other systems on widely used math benchmarks. Meta notes that math-solving AI could benefit the the fields of software verification, cryptography and even aerospace. Turning our attention to MIT’s work, research scientists there a machine learning model that can capture how sounds in a room will propagate through the space. By modeling the acoustics, the system can learn a room’s geometry from sound recordings, which can then be used to build visual renderings of a room. The researchers say the tech could be applied to virtual and augmented reality software or robots that have to navigate complex environments. In the future, they plan to enhance the system so that it can generalize to new and larger scenes, such as entire buildings or even whole towns and cities. At Berkeley’s robotics department, are accelerating the rate at which a quadrupedal robot can learn to walk and do other tricks. One team looked to combine the best-of-breed work out of numerous other advances in reinforcement learning to allow a robot to go from blank slate to robust walking on uncertain terrain in just 20 minutes real-time. “Perhaps surprisingly, we find that with several careful design decisions in terms of the task setup and algorithm implementation, it is possible for a quadrupedal robot to learn to walk from scratch with deep RL in under 20 minutes, across a range of different environments and surface types. Crucially, this does not require novel algorithmic components or any other unexpected innovation,” write the researchers. Instead, they select and combine some state-of-the-art approaches and get amazing results. You can read the paper . Robot dog demo from EECS professor Pieter Abbeel’s lab in Berkeley, California in 2022. (Photo courtesy Philipp Wu/Berkeley Engineering) Another locomotion learning project, from (TechCrunch’s pal) Pieter Abbeel’s lab, was described as “training an imagination.” They set up the robot with the ability to attempt predictions of how its actions will work out, and though it starts out pretty helpless, it quickly gains more knowledge about the world and how it works. This leads to a better prediction process, which leads to better knowledge, and so on in feedback until it’s walking in less than an hour. It learns just as quickly to recover from being pushed or otherwise “purturbed,” as the lingo has it. Their work is documented . Work with a potentially more immediate application came out of Los Alamos National Laboratory, where researchers developed a machine learning technique to predict the friction that occurs during earthquakes — providing a way to forecast earthquakes. Using a language model, the team says that they were able to analyze the statistical features of seismic signals emitted from a fault in a laboratory earthquake machine to project the timing of a next quake. “The model is not constrained with physics, but it predicts the physics, the actual behavior of the system,” said Chris Johnson, one of the research leads on the project. “Now we are making a future prediction from past data, which is beyond describing the instantaneous state of the system.” Dreamstime It’s challenging to apply the technique in the real world, the researchers say, because it’s not clear whether there’s sufficient data to train the forecasting system. But all the same, they’re optimistic about the applications, which could include anticipating damage to bridges and other structures. Last this week is , who warn that neural networks being used to simulate actual neural networks should be carefully examined for training bias. Neural networks are of course based on the way our own brains process and signal information, reinforcing certain connections and combinations of nodes. But that doesn’t mean that the synthetic and real ones work the same. In fact, the MIT team found, neural network-based simulations of grid cells (part of the nervous system) only produced similar activity when they were carefully constrained to do so by their creators. If allowed to govern themselves, the way the actual cells do, they didn’t produce the desired behavior. That doesn’t mean deep learning models are useless in this domain — far from it, they’re very valuable. But, as professor Ila Fiete said in the school’s news post: “they can be a powerful tool, but one has to be very circumspect in interpreting them and in determining whether they are truly making de novo predictions, or even shedding light on what it is that the brain is optimizing.” |
Dear Sophie: How can I stay in the US if I’ve been laid off? | Sophie Alcorn | 2,022 | 11 | 7 | of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies. “Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says , a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to in my next column.” TechCrunch+ members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; . Dear Upended, I’m so sorry to hear you’ve been laid off and for the stress this has no doubt added to your life! Your questions are top of mind in light of the thousands of others being laid off from Twitter, Facebook, Stripe, Brex, Lyft and other tech companies. I realize this can be an incredibly stressful time. It is my personal life mission to help immigrants have peace of mind, including being able to stay in the United States, keep their families safe and build their dreams of making the world a better place. I am so happy to have the opportunity to share my advice through this column! The good news is U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) allows a 60-day grace period to remain in the U.S. if you lose your job while on an , , , , , , or visa. And we can turn your 60-day grace period into a total of eight months of immigration runway — it is possible to extend your time in the U.S. beyond 60 days by filing a change of status from H-1B to another category such as a visitor, student or dependent spouse. When individuals who need visa sponsorship get laid off, we often hear their highest priority is to maintain their ability to stay in the United States beyond the 60-day grace period, especially if they own a home, have a spouse or have dependent kids in school. Often people ask me what they need to do if they can’t get a job that offers visa sponsorship within the 60-day grace period or how they can finally follow their heart to explore their own startup ideas. Here are my recommendations for how to stay in the United States, as well as options and opportunities you should keep in mind. Unfortunately, you cannot transfer your current I-797 to your next employer. However, you can to your new employer following the H-1B application process. If you are approved, you will receive a new I-797. Put all of your efforts into finding another job. Get as many interviews as you can. Reach out to everyone in your network — friends, family, former colleagues, co-workers, neighbors and acquaintances. Take advantage of social media and attend networking events. Also, take a look at where venture capital is flowing these days; companies that are receiving Series A funding or above are likely hiring. At a job interview, be direct about your need to transfer your H-1B to a new employer. If the company is not willing to sponsor you, move on. Ideally, you should accept a job offer no more than 45 days into your 60-day grace period unless you have applied for another fallback status because it can take several weeks to prepare and file the H-1B transfer. Additionally, if you qualify for an , you could consider on your behalf, which would make your visa independent of any particular employer. This offers you both redundancy because you can change or add paid jobs in the United States without amending the petition every time, generally, as long as you are continuing to work in your field. If you want to create your own tech venture, find someone you can work with to be your co-founder. Find out if you qualify for an O-1A ASAP or determine if you want to set up your startup to be compatible with an H-1B transfer. Talk with both an immigration attorney and a corporate attorney to devise the best structure for your startup and determine an immigration strategy for your startup to sponsor you for a visa. For many people, if they qualify, I suggest that your startup sponsor you for an O-1A, which offers more flexibility and freedom than an H-1B transfer. Many individuals on an H-1B visa in Silicon Valley and beyond are surprised when we tell them they already qualify for an O-1A. The added benefit of the O-1A is that it serves as a stepping stone to qualify for the extraordinary ability green card, which is currently available. Have a backup plan and work with an immigration attorney to assess your options. You could transfer your H-1B, become an H-4 dependent visa holder if your spouse has an H-1B or change your status to an O-1A visa. Since you have an approved I-140 green card petition, there are various opportunities to both preserve your green card process and also transfer it to another company or formulate it as a self-petition so you are no longer dependent on any particular company for your green card and permanent residence in the U.S. The good news is that you will retain your green card priority date and it can be used on another EB-1, EB-2 or EB-3 I-140 petition! Your priority date is the date that either: That means if you self-petition for a green card or if your new employer agrees to sponsor you for a green card, you will retain your place in the green card line — and not have to go to the back of the line. If you were born in India or China, and your I-140 application was for an EB-2, (National Interest Waiver), or EB-3 green card, ask your immigration attorney to assess whether you would be a candidate for an EB-1A green card, which is currently available regardless of country of birth. While you’re waiting for job interviews and job offers, make sure you assemble all the documents you will need to provide to your new employer for your H-1B transfer. This includes: If you’re planning on pursuing an O-1A, start gathering letters of recommendation and evidence that you meet at least three of the eight O-1A requirements, such as: Check out this column in which I talk about each O-1 criterion in more detail. Whether you’re working for yourself or for another company, make sure you keep track of your timing: A H-1B application or O-1A application will need to be submitted to USCIS on or before the 60th day since you were laid off. If you’re working for a new company, ask your new employer to initiate the Labor Condition Application (LCA) process ASAP. Submitting an LCA to the U.S. Department of Labor for approval is the first step in getting your H-1B transferred. The Labor Department usually takes seven to 10 days to process an LCA. The approved LCA will need to be included with the H-1B petition that your new employer will submit to USCIS on your behalf. Your new employer can request premium processing for an H-1B application, which means USCIS will either issue a request for evidence or make a decision on your case within 15 days. Premium processing is also available for O-1A applications. You can begin working for your new employer as soon as USCIS receives your H-1B or O-1A application and issues a Form I-797 receipt notice. As long as the I-129 for either the H-1B or O-1A is filed on or before the 60th day of your grace period, you’re allowed to remain in the U.S. while waiting for USCIS to make a decision. That means your stay will extend past the 60-day grace period! All my best, Sophie Have a question for Sophie? . We reserve the right to edit your submission for clarity and/or space. The information provided in “Dear Sophie” is general information and not legal advice. For more information on the limitations of “Dear Sophie,” please view . “Dear Sophie” is a federally registered trademark. You can contact Sophie directly at . Sophie’s podcast, , is available on all major platforms. If you’d like to be a guest, she’s accepting applications! |
Here’s the rundown on the Binance and FTX fiasco | Jacquelyn Melinek | 2,022 | 11 | 7 | exchange by volume (Binance) and the third-largest crypto exchange by volume (FTX) faced off in recent days after Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao that his exchange would slowly withdraw billions of its holdings in FTX’s native token, FTT, “due to recent revelations that have came to light.” But first, let’s take a few steps back. Concerns surrounding FTX’s liquidity grew following a Thursday about the balance sheet of Alameda Research, a crypto trading firm once run by FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. Alameda holds $14.6 billion in assets with $8 billion in liabilities as of June 30, CoinDesk reported. The report showed Alameda’s largest asset was about $3.66 billion of “unlocked FTT” and $2.16 billion of “FTT collateral.” (FTT is the token behind FTX.) This means the $5.82 billion in total FTT that Alameda owns is equal to 193% of the total known FTT market cap, which is about $3 billion, according to CoinMarketCap . “The issue is that Alameda cannot sell even small amounts of their FTT holdings without heavily impacting the price,” Marcus Sotiriou, an analyst at the publicly listed digital asset broker GlobalBlock, said in a note. “Data from CryptoQuant [ … ] tells us that there are only around 200-300 active addresses trading the FTT token, which is very small in comparison to many other large caps. Hence, large sell orders would crash the FTT price, due to being illiquid.” |
GIPHY comes to connected TVs with launch of a GIPHY Arts app for Roku | Lauren Forristal | 2,022 | 11 | 7 | GIPHY Arts, the Giphy division dedicated to GIF art and artists, a free exclusive today that allows users in select regions to view GIPHY Clips — 30-second original short clips with audio — with their Roku devices. The new “Public Axis” channel is Giphy’s first app for connected TVs and brings short-form video content made by artists from mobile to the TV screen. It arrives on the same day that its own plan to bring short-form video to TV viewers to challenge TikTok. At launch, “Public Axis” is available to Roku users in the U.S., the U.K., Mexico, Canada, Germany, Ireland, France, Panama, Colombia, Costa Rica, Chile, Australia, El Salvador, Peru, Argentina, Guatemala, Honduras and Brazil. It’s free to download in the Roku Channel Store and doesn’t have ads. Users have access to various shorts, clips or “episodes” made by a commissioned artist. For instance, released a three-episode series, “Remote Work Tales,” that features relatable animated shorts about the work-from-home experience. Viewers can also check out Public Axis content on . GIPHY Arts launched the Public Axis app on Roku devices to help promote artists to “an even broader audience,” Roku a net add of 2.3 million active accounts for the third quarter, bringing the total to 65.4 million. Roku, meanwhile, has recently embraced the short-form video trend, as well. The streaming media platform rolled out a new , “The Buzz,” to give users access to short content like trailers, interviews and images from AMC+, Apple TV+, BET+, SHOWTIME, Starz and other partners. Giphy has been in the short-form video space a bit longer. It made its first step into this market in 2019 when it launched “ ,” which has since been renamed “GIPHY Clips.” Today’s announcement comes eight months after TikTok integrated GIPHY Clips into the new , an in-app creation tool. Also, the company revealed a new last week, which is currently playing in movie theaters across New York City and Los Angeles. |
Signal is the latest app to roll out a Stories feature | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 11 | 7 | End-to-end encrypted messaging app Signal is rolling out a new Stories feature to all users on Android and iOS, the company on Monday. The official launch comes a few weeks after the company the feature with select users. Signal plans to release its Stories feature on desktop soon. As with other platforms’ Stories features, Signal Stories allow users to create and share images, videos and texts that automatically disappear after 24 hours. Signal notes that like everything else in its app, Stories are end-to-end encrypted. Signal users have the option to choose who can see their Stories by navigating to their settings. From there, you can choose to share your Stories with everyone in your phone’s contact list who uses Signal, anyone you’ve had a one-on-one conversation with in Signal or anyone whose message request you’ve accepted. You also have the option to manually hide your Story from specific people. If you would rather choose to share your Stories with a smaller subset of people, you can create a custom Story. In addition, you have the option to share Stories to existing group chats. Like with read receipts for chats, you can decide if you want to send view receipts for Stories you look at and whether you see who’s seen your Stories. You can turn view receipts on or off in the Settings menu. You may be wondering why a messaging app like Signal is adding Stories, but the company says Stories “happen to be one of the most common feature requests” among users, which is why it decided to add them to its platform. Signal “Stories have emerged to serve these specific functions and others in the broader communications landscape, and many of us have integrated them as one of the ways that we connect with one another,” the company said in a “That’s why they have a natural place in any messaging app, including Signal. People use them, people want them, so we’re providing a way to do stories privately. And without having to wade through a sea of ads.” Signal is aware that not everyone will see Stories as a welcome addition to the app, which is why it’s offering an opt-out setting for the feature. If you’re not interested in seeing or posting Stories, you can opt out by going into your settings and selecting the “Turn off stories” option. The company says although the addition of Stories may seem like a “big shift” for the app, they’re just another way for users to privately communicate with people. Signal notes that its Stories feature isn’t designed to help people build a following or amplify content for engagement, and that it instead sees Stories as a way to facilitate intimate conversations. Signal is a little late to the game when it comes to Stories, which first rose to popularity through Snapchat. Over the years, the ephemeral feature has been adopted by nearly every popular platform, including , , , , and . |
YouTube begins rolling out Shorts on TV globally starting today | Sarah Perez | 2,022 | 11 | 7 | YouTube is expanding the reach of its TikTok competitor, YouTube Shorts, with today’s that it will begin rolling out Shorts on TV to its global users. The company’s updated smart TV app will now allow users to view the popular vertical videos in an optimized experience that’s designed to feel more consistent with what users see on mobile, YouTube explains. This was a challenge given that YouTube Shorts, like TikTok, were largely meant to be watched on smaller smartphone screens. The new Shorts-watching feature will require a smart TV from 2019 or later, a newer gaming console or a streaming device, YouTube says. The videos themselves can be found on the new Shorts shelf on the homepage of the YouTube app or on a creator’s channel page. In a blog post, the company detailed the different design experiments it researched in coming up with the final concept for Shorts on TV. It found Shorts videos didn’t look great in the YouTube app’s conventional video player, which had too much black space on either side of the vertical video. It also considered a “jukebox” style format which would line up three Shorts side-by-side to take full advantage of the TV’s screen without leaving any additional space on the sides. But this experience was not only cluttered, it also deviated from how Shorts are meant to be viewed — one-by-one. The design YouTube landed on is a customized option that attempts to better fill in the sides of the video with a color-sampled blurred background and an outline around the video that resembles a smartphone’s screen. It then further iterated on this format to add more functionality off to the side of the video, including information about the creator, the sound used in the video, and thumbs-up and down buttons. This information can be displayed by clicking the right button on your remote. In this initial rollout, viewers can subscribe to a creator’s channel in addition to liking or disliking the video after viewing. The company plans to introduce more community features over time, it says. When watching Shorts, you can also use the remote to start or stop the video from playing by clicking directly on the short or by using the Play and Pause buttons on the remote control itself. The Short will continue to play until you advance to the next Short using your remote. You can use the up and down buttons on the remote to move to the next video or return to a prior Short, YouTube says. The company noted it was unusual for consumers to prefer to use the remote control to move through the Shorts videos, as typically watching videos on TV is more of a lean-back experience. But in this case, it found that viewers wanted to manually control which Short played or which they skipped, as they would on mobile. While today YouTube Shorts are watched by over 1.5 billion logged-in users every month, there hasn’t been a way to watch them on the big screen until now as the YouTube app hasn’t allowed users to cast Shorts to their TV and the main TV app didn’t support Shorts viewing. The expansion of Shorts to TV will help YouTube to better challenge TikTok, which had also rolled out its own TV app to , Google TV, Android TV OS and select LG and Samsung Smart TVs in North America. TikTok had also offered a TV app for Google TV and Android TV in the U.K., France and Germany, and on Samsung TVs in the U.K. But unlike TikTok’s TV app, YouTube’s TV app has the advantage of being pre-installed on many smart TV platforms. And its rollout is global. However, users won’t necessarily gain immediate access to the feature today, as these sorts of rollouts take time. The company says all users should gain the ability to view Shorts in the “coming weeks.” |
Travel app Hopper raises $96M from Capital One to double down on social commerce | Kyle Wiggers | 2,022 | 11 | 7 | Evidently, the downturn hasn’t soured investors on the travel industry. Travel booking startup today that it closed a $96 million follow-on investment from Capital One, bringing the company’s total raised to $740 million. The fresh cash will be put toward several efforts, CEO and co-founder Frederic Lalonde said in a press release, including supporting Hopper’s new social commerce initiatives. As a part of the funding, Hopper says it’s extending its partnership with Capital One (which Hopper’s Series F) to create new travel products aimed at Capital One customers. Hopper’s tech already powers Capital One Travel and Premier Collection, Capital One’s marketplace of hotels and resorts exclusive to Capital One Venture X cardholders. It’s a safe bet that similar experiences along that vein are forthcoming. “With Hopper, we have found a partner who can not only match that pace, but help us continue to challenge the status quo and take a differentiated approach to building a world-class travel brand,” Capital One managing VP Matt Knise said in statement. “Through this strategic partnership, we’re well-positioned to adapt to a rapidly changing travel environment and create industry-leading solutions for our customers along their travel journey.” Founded by Frederic Lalonde and Joost Ouwerkerk in 2007, Hopper spent six years in stealth building what it claimed at the time was the “world’s largest structured database of travel information.” The company’s web-crawling tech ingested blogs, photo-sharing sites and other sources of information about locales and tagged them to a geolocation in a massive place database. But after Hopper’s public debut in 2014, the company’s leadership decided to pivot to mobile and devote engineering resources to flight prediction, building a tool that continuously monitors airline prices and sends price change alerts via push notification. Hopper Since then, Hopper has evolved into one of the largest travel apps in North America, with more than 80 million downloads and sales of flights, hotels, homes and rental cars on the platform set to exceed $4.5 billion this year. Hopper differentiates itself from rival travel services (e.g. Travelocity) with features such as airfare price freezes, “cancel for any reason” and flight disruption guarantees, the former of which the company says represents about 40% of its total app revenue. Last year, Hopper ventured into the business-to-business market with the launch of Hopper Cloud, a partnership program that allows travel providers including Kayak, Marriott and Trip.com to resell Hopper’s fintech and travel agency products through a white-label portal. Hopper claims that Cloud has seen a rapid uptake, now comprising more than 40% of Hopper’s business; Lalonde claims that Hopper Cloud is on track to make more in 2022 than all of Hopper did last year. On the consumer side, this spring, Hopper shifted its focus to in-app promotions, discounts and sales events. Social commerce is the company’s next big push, anchored by features like referrals, share-to-earn, team buying and daily gift, which rewards users with discounts on travel purchases for launching the app and engaging in sharing with friends. “International users comprised less than 3% of sales last year but now comprise over 20% of sales,” Hopper president Dakota Smith noted to TechCrunch in an email, attributing the growth partly to the company’s renewed social focus. “The app is quickly internationalizing.” Hopper was last valued at $5 billion, TechCrunch in early February; a source familiar with the matter says it’s increased since then. The 1,500-employee-strong company — which has an estimated 11.2% of the third-party air travel market in the U.S. — plans to eventually go public. |
Sequoia Capital marks its FTX investment down to zero dollars | Connie Loizos | 2,022 | 11 | 9 | just marked down to zero the value of its stake in the cryptocurrency exchange FTX — a stake that accounted for a minor percentage of Sequoia’s capital but as of last week likely represented among the most sizable unrealized gains in the venture firm’s 50-year history. It alerted its limited partners in a letter that it sent out to them this evening. (See below.) No doubt those backers are collectively still processing the events of this week. They’re accustomed to startup failures; this is outright calamity. When Sequoia invested in the Series B round of FTX in July 2021, the high-flying, Bahamas-based outfit was valued at . Two months later, the company was valued by investors at . In January of this year, FTX raised a $400 million in Series C round that brought its total funding to $2 billion and its valuation to a breathtaking . Now, following a series of missteps — that’s the best-case scenario — FTX didn’t just lose its rich valuation. According to the WSJ, FTX founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried told investors today that he needed emergency funding to cover a shortfall of up to $8 billion due to withdrawal requests received in recent days. Reportedly, he has been seeking a mixture of debt and equity. It’s not surprising that Sequoia decided instead to write off its roughly $210 million investment. Presumably, others of FTX’s investors — including BlackRock, Tiger Global, Insight Partners and Paradigm — are shooting out their own communications to limited partners about making the same decision. (The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board, which invested directly in FTX, has a much broader base of shareholders who may be wondering about their retirement savings, even while their pensions are .) More uncharacteristic was Sequoia’s decision to out the letter tonight after sending it directly to its investors. It’s hard to interpret the move as anything other than a clear signal that Sequoia wants to distance itself as far from FTX as it can, just as details of FTX’s abrupt unspooling continue to surface. What is known already: Binance, an early investor in FTX turned into a fierce rival, announced on Sunday it was selling off its FTT holdings, the native token of FTX exchange, worth $529 million at the time, due to “recent revelations that came to light.” Those revelations came courtesy of CoinDesk, which last week that Alameda Research, a trading house also owned by Bankman-Fried, had fully one-third of its assets in FTX’s own FTT token, raising questions about possible market manipulation as well as making it apparent that the two outfits were dangerously intertwined and thus vulnerable. Binance promptly went for the jugular, tweeting about those “revelations” and dumping its FTT holdings and creating enough uncertainty that other FTT holders raced to unload FTT tokens. By yesterday, a crippled FTX had collapsed at the doorstep of Binance, and after Binance said it signed a letter of intent to acquire the outfit (victory at a fire-sale price), the internet with the whole saga. Except that the story is still unfolding, as it turns out. After conducting some due diligence, Binance said it was backing away from FTX. Specifically, it said in a statement: “In the beginning, our hope was to be able to support FTX’s customers to provide liquidity, but the issues are beyond our control or ability to help.” (Ouch.) Bankman-Fried has since been searching for funds elsewhere. He’s clearly not getting more money from Sequoia. The question is what happens in the very likely scenario that of FTX’s backers want to throw FTX a lifeline. On the one hand, FTX’s fall is setting off fears of a . On the other, the risks to FTX are mounting. Very notably, the SEC has begun investigating whether FTX mishandled customer funds and looking into its relationships with other parts of Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire, Bloomberg earlier today. It leaves a lot of firms with ties to FTX in a precarious position, including Sequoia. In just one potential scenario, FTX customers out billions of dollars will be focused on getting some portion of those funds back, possibly with the help of regulators. Sequoia wants no part of that. Which may be why it stressed publicly tonight in its LP letter that it does “extensive research and thorough thorough diligence on every investment” it makes, and suggested that if FTX screwed up, it was after Sequoia’s checks were cashed. We’ll see if that settles things. It seems as likely that for the firm and its co-investors, their $2 billion loss isn’t the end of this chapter. Dear Limited Partner, “We are reaching out to share an update on our investment in FTX. In recent days, a liquidity crunch has created solvency risk for FTX. The full nature and extent of this risk is not known at this time. Based on our current understanding, we are marking our investment down to $0. Sequoia Capital’s exposure to FTX is limited. We own FTX.com and FTX US in one private fund, Global Growth Fund III. FTX is not a top ten position in the fund, and our $150 million cost basis accounts for less than 3% of the committed capital of the fund. The $150 million loss is offset by ~$7.5B in realized and unrealized gains in the same fund, so the fund remains in good shape. Separately, SCGE Fund, L.P. invested $63.5M in FTX.com and FTX US, representing less than 1% of the SCGE Fund’s 9/30/2022 portfolio (at fair value). We are in the business of taking risk. Some investments will surprise to the upside, and some will surprise to the downside. We do not take this responsibility lightly and do extensive research and thorough diligence on every investment we make. At the time of our investment in FTX, we ran a rigorous diligence process. In 2021, the year of our investment, FTX generated approximately $1B in revenue and more than $250M in operating income, as was made public in August 2022. The current situation is developing quickly. We will communicate in a timely manner when more information is available. If you have any additional questions, please contact Andrew Reynolds, Marie Klemchuk and Kathleen Forte at: investorrelations@sequoiacap.com. For SCGE questions, please contact Kimberly Summe at summe@sequolacap.com. Sincerely. Team Sequoia Footnotes: Global Growth Fund III (GGFIlI) data is as of September 30, 2022 and is based on U.S. GAAP. The $7.5B is composed of $5.8B of unrealized gain and $1.7B of realized gain. which includes the General Partner distribution on May 27, 2021 pursuant to the 2021 Amendment. Past performance is not indicative of future results Global Growth Fund III (GGFIII) refers to Sequoia Capital Global Growth Fund III – Endurance Partners, L.P. and does not include Sequoia Capital Global Growth Fund III – U.S./India Annex Fund, L.P., Sequoia Capital Global Growth Fund III – China Annex Fund, L.P., and their parallel funds |
Airly fights air pollution with a network of affordable sensors | Catherine Shu | 2,022 | 11 | 9 | Clean-tech startup wants to help communities around the world improve air quality with affordable sensors and software that provides actionable insights. Based in London and Krakow, the startup announced today it has raised $5.5 million. The round was led by firstminute capital and Pi Labs, with participation from returning investors like the Sir Richard Branson Family Office, AENU and Untitled. New investors include Cal Henderson, one of Slack’s co-founders, Snowflake co-founder Marcin Zukowki and institutional investors Semapa Next and TO Ventures. This brings Airly’s total raised to $8.8 million since March 2021. Airly is currently used by more than 500 local authorities in over 40 countries, with 5,000 of its sensors covering a total of 40,000 active measurement points. Cities include Warsaw, where Airly has installed 165 sensors. It also has networks of sensors in United Kingdom and Indonesia cities. So far, Airly has struck trategic partnerships with JCDecaux, NHS and NILU (Norwegian Institute for Air Research). It is also partnered with the DivAirCity project, which is funded by European Union’s Horizon 2020. Airly plans to build a dashboard that will allow users to monitor more data and get insights on how air quality is affecting health, and how to improve it. It will include a report generator, insights, impact tracker and city ranking. An online map and mobile apps already let people in a community check the air quality around them based on Airly’s data. Airly started after co-founder and CEO Wiktor Warchałowski and two of his friends at AGH Technical University of Krakow were training for a marathon. “During the course of our training, we found it hard to cope with the intensity and realized it was down to air pollution,” he told TechCrunch. “So we devised a system using our own air quality sensors to tell us where the cleanest air was and we used those spaces for our training.” Airly founders Michał Misiek, Wiktor Warchałowski and Aleksander Konior. Airly After realizing that other people had the same problem, they started building the Airly platform to monitor real-time air quality. State-owned air quality monitoring stations are usually only affordable for large cities, Warchałowski explained, and since they are expensive, there are often only three to five covering large expanses of land. Not only that, but they typically have a delay of several hours in reporting data. Airly wants to solve that problem with affordable sensors that are easy to install, so one can be on every street in a city. They also send data to Airly’s app every five minutes, so air quality can be monitored in real time. The platform’s insights help communities gauge real-time health risks of poor air quality, based on WHO standards or illegal emissions. It analyzes trends to identify sources of pollution, and gives recommendations on how to improve air quality. For example, it can tell communities if they should implement low-emission zones, solid fuel bans and green school streets. It also tracks improvements once those measures are made. A couple examples of how Airly has been used include the #LetSchoolsBreathe campaign in the United Kingdom, where Airly’s monitors were installed in 50 schools. It’s also helped a large city in Central Europe get evidence that fuel combustion-free zones were working as planned. Communities have used data collected by Airly to lobby local governments to take air quality action. “On a macro scale, our data has repeatedly become an incentive to change local policy in terms of reducing the use of solid fuels, car traffic or influencing local polluters,” Warchałowski said. “Airly supports organizations in their journey to eliminate pollution, improve air quality and protect public health as the data is the first step toward pollution-free cities and communities. You can’t control what you can’t measure.” Airly currently has 500 paying customers and uses a “sensing-as-a-service” model. Customers pay a yearly subscription based on how many nodes they access, and pricing starts from $540 per node per year. There’s a one time setup fee for installing devices. One of Airly’s main competitors is , which was acquired in September by Google. Breezometer’s competitive advantage is the breadth of its air quality network coverage, which stretches across more than 100 countries and has a resolution of five meters. But Breezometer’s is not able to provide the hyperlocal insights that Airly can, said Warchałowski. Another competitor is Clarity, which is also building an end-to-end air quality and control platform with software and hardware. But Airly says it also delivers recommendations based on data. Airly will use its new funding on research and development and to expand into new markets. In a statement about the funding, Founders Fund and firstminute capital co-founder and executive chairman Brent Hoberman said, “Trailblazers in London are showing how real-time local air quality data is the catalyst for taking action to make our urban spaces healthier and more sustainable. I expect many cities and local authorities to follow their leadership, starting with more precise and local data. Airly is at the forefront of building this data infrastructure and our fight against air pollution, and we’re very proud to continue our support by co-leading their Series A.” |
Waymo can now charge for fully driverless services in San Francisco | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 11 | 9 | The California Department of Motor Vehicles approved an amendment to Waymo’s existing deployment permit Wednesday to include driverless, as well as drivered, operations. Now, Waymo will be able to charge for usage of its autonomous vehicles, which will operate without anyone in the driver’s seat, for services like food and grocery delivery. The upgraded DMV permit is a prerequisite to launching a fully autonomous commercial ride-hail service in San Francisco, as its main competitor . All Waymo needs now is a driverless deployment permit from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) to finally start charging for rider-only autonomous rides in the city. The company will be eligible to apply for that permit once it has operated its driverless cars on public roads for at least 30 days. Waymo received its from the DMV last September, which allowed the company to begin a commercial autonomous delivery pilot in San Francisco with Albertsons earlier this year. Per the permit’s requirements, a human safety operator has to be in the front seat during operations. Waymo’s service area in San Francisco. Waymo Waymo then received a CPUC drivered deployment permit in February this year and began charging its “trusted testers” for robotaxi rides with a human safety operator in the front seat in May. Between June and August, Waymo completed more than 709,000 miles with a safety driver in the state of California, according to the . The company recently expanded its service in downtown Phoenix to include trips, with a human safety operator, and said it would launch a |
I guess you can (officially) use your fancy Canon camera as a webcam studio now | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,022 | 11 | 9 | When the pandemic slammed into our shores a couple of years ago, many of us were shoo-ed inside, doomed to endless Zoom meetings. At the time, Canon released a beta of its , and then seemed to pretty much forget about it. Until today. In a “geez, Canon, this would have been helpful two years ago” kind of move, the company released the software, so you can finally show up crisply high-def with Canon’s blessing. Canon claims that “millions of users” have already been using the EOS Webcam Utility for streaming and meetings, and its “pro” installment of the software lets you give the company money (yay!) and “unlock exclusive features that take video communication and customization capabilities to the next level.” Forgive the sarcasm; Canon’s EOS cameras are legitimately high-end and high-quality products and its lens lineup continues to be world-class, so if you really want to highlight every pore and every stray eyelash, Canon’s got your, er, front. The subscription version of the software will set you back $4.99 per month, or $50 per year. It enables you to hook up several cameras, unlocks wireless connectivity, and gives more camera and content control. It ups the framerate available to 60 fps, and you can push the video streams to multiple channels at once, such as YouTube, Facebook Live and others. The new software also includes layout options, watermarking, scene transitions and other stuff. Now, if those things were important to you, you have probably already discovered the and a slew of other, paid-for solutions that have various degrees of sophistication and feature sets. But, you know. Canon. |
Lyft-backed plan to fund electric cars flops in California | Harri Weber | 2,022 | 11 | 9 | Prop. 30’s primary backer was Lyft, which paid more than The measure’s opponents — which included Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom and venture capitalists Michael Moritz and Ron Conway — cast Prop. 30 as a “Lyft grift,” a “scheme to further line the pockets of Silicon Valley tech billionaires.” Yet, Prop. 30 did not include carve-outs for rideshare companies. It would have raised tens of billions of dollars to push down the price of electric cars for individuals, including drivers for ride apps like Lyft and Uber. Both companies have committed to going electric by 2030, and this measure could have helped them hit their targets. Earlier this year, California mandated that go electric by 2030, as part of a broader effort to gradually push combustion engines off roads. Although the state already to help cover the cost of going electric, Prop. 30 could have provided further assistance. Without it, ride-app companies may be forced to fork up additional cash, one way or another, to incentivize their drivers to switch, so they’ll comply with the state’s mandate. Lyft called the vote results an “unfortunate setback for the climate movement” in a statement to TechCrunch. Across the avenue, the No on Prop 30 campaign the results were “thanks to the courageous leadership of the Governor and the California Teachers Association.” Though options are gradually coming to market, electric vehicles are generally still in short supply, and most are upfront for . This is no good for the climate, because light-duty vehicles like cars and SUVs make up more than half of transportation-related emissions in the U.S., per the . On the Nasdaq, Lyft closed at $10.64, down by almost 2.4% from the prior day. The decline pales in comparison to the nosedive Lyft shareholders suffered on Monday, after disclosing hefty losses in . Earlier this month, , or about 13% of its workforce. |
Apple limits AirDrop ‘Everyone’ option to 10 minutes in China | Rita Liao | 2,022 | 11 | 9 | A change in the iOS 16.1.1 update for Chinese users is turning some heads. Apple is restricting the “Everyone” option in AirDrop to 10 minutes on iPhones purchased in mainland China, according to . Apple says it is improving the AirDrop experience by automatically reverting the receiving setting back to “Contacts Only” after 10 minutes to help mitigate unwanted file sharing. Some that this feature should have long been an option for all Apple users — sometimes one just forgets to switch Airdrop off and end up with unsolicited content from unknown users — but others interpret the decision as Apple’s response to recent incidents in China. Apple says it plans to bring this capability to users globally in the coming year. The default setting for AirDrop is “Contacts Only.” A user needs to manually change the setting to receive files from “Everyone.” Airdrop, which uses to enable instant file transferring, remains one of the few uncensored communication mediums in China, which is why people were using the feature to politically sensitive content with others in recent weeks as the country’s . Despite the rise of local rivals like Huawei and Oppo, Apple has managed to hold onto its dominance in China, especially among more affluent demographics. In the , iPhones accounted for 13% of handset shipments in China, according to Counterpoint’s research, down from 18% and 22% in Q1 and Q4 respectively. It’s not unusual for Apple to introduce region-specific restrictions to abide by local regulations. In EU countries, for example, users as a result of hearing protection standards. In China, Apple has a history of applying more stringent rules on content-related services, including games and podcasts, a closely watched area by the local authorities. |
Canoo to buy vehicle manufacturing facility in Oklahoma City | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 11 | 9 | Commercial electric vehicle company Canoo entered into an agreement to acquire a vehicle manufacturing facility in Oklahoma City, the company announced Wednesday along with its third-quarter earnings. The news comes a week after Canoo said it would build an in Pryor, Oklahoma. The new facility will be dedicated to producing Canoo’s electric Lifestyle Delivery Vehicle (LDV) and Lifestyle Vehicle (LV), an electric SUV. Canoo is still working on its , but until that comes online, this new facility will help Canoo ramp production and bring EVs to market in 2023. Canoo CEO Tony Aquila said the company expects to start production for the LDV on November 17 and complete final certification in the first quarter of 2023. The goal is to build 15 production vehicles this year, which will go to committed order customers like NASA and Walmart. The Oklahoma City 120+ acre facility has “production-ready infrastructure” and is “strategically located with easy access to road and rail,” according to Canoo Aquila. Canoo will adapt the facility to accommodate a full vehicle assembly line with robotics, a paint shop and upfitting center. Canoo said the facility will be powered by clean energy. “A w in 2H 2023 Aquila said the megamicro factory in Pryor is “a bit delayed due to economic reasons,” but that when Canoo is able to shift resources there, the startup will be able to double its run rate to 40,000 units by the end of 2024. Long term, the Oklahoma City facility announced Wednesday will focus on producing defence and specialty products, said Aquila. In April, to provide crew transportation vehicles for the crewed Artemis lunar exploration launches, and in July, the to supply EVs for analysis and demonstration. Canoo closed out the quarter with cash and cash equivalents of $6.8 million. That’s down from last quarter’s $33.8 million, and $224.7 million from the fourth quarter of 2021. In less than a year, Canoo burned through $217.9 million, and it’s still not generating revenue. Quarter-over-quarter, Aquila says Canoo’s cash burn is down 25% as the company continues to shift its expense mix, increasing the ratio of capital spend to operating spend. The company’s loss from operating activities totaled $109.4 million this quarter, and its GAAP net loss and comprehensive loss hit $117.7 million. Canoo says it has access to $200 million through an “at-the-market offering” program, as well, but access to capital isn’t the same thing as having cash on hand. $ Canoo seems to be riding promises of future revenue to get access to more financing and stay afloat. After reporting first-quarter earnings this year, Canoo issued a , saying that it may not have enough funds to make it stay in business. Things improved for the company in , in part due to its agreement with Walmart to sell 4,500 electric delivery vehicles. This not only assured future revenue for Canoo, but also gave the company another opportunity to go after additional non-dilutive and lower-cost capital financing opportunities. Since then, Canoo has also secured binding fleet orders from and to purchase 9,300 and 3,000 vehicles, respectively, with the option to increase to 18,600 and 5,450 vehicles, respectively. Today, Canoo has over $2 billion in total orders in its pipeline, according to Aquila. “ Aquila said that even though Canoo’s cash situation looks dire, he believes having less access to cash has led to more competitiveness and efficiencies. ‘just in time’ milestone “ Canoo revised its expenditure guidance for the remainder of the year, anticipating $70 million to $90 million in operating expenses, excluding stock-based compensation, and $30 million to $50 million of capital expenditures. Canoo’s stock, which closed at $1.17, is up 3.42% in after-hours trading. |
Rivian upholds 2022 production targets as net loss widens | Jaclyn Trop | 2,022 | 11 | 9 | Electric vehicle maker Rivian affirmed Wednesday that the company is on track to hit its annual production target of 25,000 vehicles despite unpredictable supply chain crunches and component shortages. The startup-turned-public company remained committed to its production goal even as industry-wide challenges, supply chain snarls and macroeconomic forces have conspired this year to keep automakers from satisfying a strong consumer appetite for cars, trucks and SUVs. Rivian reported that its third-quarter production rose 67% over the same period a year ago, for a total count of 15,000 vehicles, including the automaker’s truck, SUV and Amazon delivery vans, through September 30. During the quarter, the company produced 7,363 vehicles, boosted by the addition of a second shift at its Normal, Illinois, factory. It delivered 6,584 of them — a significant jump from the 4,467 vehicles Rivian delivered in the second quarter of the year. Like other automakers, and especially other startups, Rivian has struggled this year, with founder and CEO RJ Scaringe forced in July to , or roughly 900 employees. For the third quarter, Rivian reported a net loss of $1.72 billion on revenue of $536 million. That compares with a net loss of $1.23 billion on revenue of $1 million the same period a year ago. In October, to fix a steering defect. Meanwhile, the company is gearing up for long-term supply chain constraints it foresees in the battery supply chain. The industry’s ongoing semiconductor chip shortage is “an appetizer to the degree of the sort of supply chain constraint we’re likely to see across the battery supply chain over the next 15 years,” Scaringe said from the TechCrunch Disrupt conference stage later in the month. However, the demand for Rivian’s vehicles remains, with more than 114,000 preorders in the U.S. and Canada as of Monday. That’s on top of Amazon’s initial order of 100,000 electric vans. Rivian pointed to several segments where it sees potential growth, including the 2026 launch of its next-generation R2 EV platform, a partnership with Mercedes-Benz to build electric vans at scale and the hiring of James Philbin to lead Rivian’s efforts in AI and automated driving technology. The near-term economic challenges are putting pressue on EV makers of all sizes. British electric vehicle startup Arrival, which restructured its business amid a cash crunch and pivoted to for the U.S. instead of Europe, said Tuesday it doesn’t expect to earn revenue until after 2023. Also on Tuesday, Lucid Motors reported a net loss of $530 million for the third quarter, on $195.5 million in revenue. The startup confirmed it’s on track to build between 6,000 and 7,000 of its Lucid Air luxury sedans in 2022, down from an . Tesla nearly doubled its third-quarter income, to $3.3 billion compared with the same year-ago period, but said production remains hamstrung by supply. The record-setting $21.45 billion revenue Tesla reported for the quarter still . Rivian, Tesla and the others also face competition from strong legacy automakers that continue to launch electric trucks and SUVs, such as the revealed Wednesday morning, on their quest to go fully electric by the end of the decade. |
Some crypto VCs see decentralization as the future following FTX collapse | Jacquelyn Melinek | 2,022 | 11 | 9 | market digests the of , venture capitalists see the moment as a warning, but also as an opportunity for the growth of decentralization and maturation of the larger blockchain space. “As venture investors, we take a long-term view on the industry; despite the current market turmoil. We are actively assessing and investing in the right opportunities,” Marc Weinstein, founding partner of Mechanism Capital, said to TechCrunch. “The premise of DeFi has, if anything, been strengthened by the collapse of centralized entities from opaque counterparty relationships.” Decentralized finance (DeFi) is often associated with trusting blockchain technology to execute services through smart contracts, while centralized finance (CeFi) usually refers to more traditional business models and involves having people manage funds and manually execute services. Historically, the venture market doesn’t get “too offended” by what transpires in secondary markets, David Gan, general partner at OP Crypto, said to TechCrunch. Regardless, he said, the seeming death of FTX is saddening for everyone, “not just in the VC space, but across the board.” When there are massive crashes and burns, it speaks to what we’ve been seeing over the past decade: It’s the Wild West out there, Samantha Lewis, principal at Mercury, said to TechCrunch. “When summarizing it all, I see it as a continuation of the phase that started when winter hit and we saw and all these crazy companies crash and burn like , and now we have FTX,” Lewis said. “As an early-stage venture investor, it’s telling me the hype is now for sure gone. But that ushers in the maturation of the space that a lot of us have been craving for a really long time.” |
Daily Crunch: Meta decimates its staff as the social media giant lays off 11,000 | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 11 | 9 | Whooo-weee interesting times for crypto land, as Bitcoin crashes down to under $17,000 for the first time in a while. Wild, given that the cryptocurrency was trading at $65,000 or so a year ago. That’s a 74% decrease. What kind of winter is this — are we seeing a crypto cold snap or crypto permafrost? Answers on an immutable blockchain transaction, please. If you’re excited to make sense of the crypto world, we’ve got ! — and . Edge computing cloud and global data network in a round led by Akamai Technologies, as the two announce a new partnership and product integrations, reports. The funding also included participation from Shasta Ventures and Sixty Degree Capital. Akamai Technologies CTO Andy Champagne will join Macrometa’s board. Startups might be in a funding midwinter, but the , reports . EQT Ventures, the venture fund arm of Sweden’s investment giant EQT making early-stage bets on startups primarily in Europe, has closed its latest fund and filled its coffers with €1 billion (and $1.1 billion in total commitments). Like our headline stories, but more summarized: / Getty Images Remote work is not for every business, and it may not be everyone’s cup of tea. When and his co-founder decided to build a distributed engineering team for their startup, numerous questions raced through their minds: Will the team be productive? How will decisions be made? How do they keep the culture alive? Today, the startup manages a remote team of about a dozen engineers, and they’ve learned quite a bit along the way. On TechCrunch+, he shares some of the tips and advice the company has learned — most of the advice is best applicable to earlier-stage startups. Three more from the TC+ team: Following today’s Meta announcement regarding the layoff of 11,000 employees, did a deep dive into the company’s 8-K and emerged with some fresh catch, including the predictable — that will help the company’s 2023 bottom line. Meanwhile, writes about IBM’s , which isn’t exactly the 4,000 qubits the company wants to achieve by 2025, but at 433 qubits, it’s a good start. And we have five more for you: |
Binance backs out of deal to buy FTX | Jacquelyn Melinek | 2,022 | 11 | 9 | The world’s largest crypto exchange by volume, Binance, said it would walk away from a deal with the third largest crypto exchange by volume, FTX. On Tuesday, Binance signed a letter of intent to purchase its troubled competitor, FTX, in what appeared to be a potential bailout of the latter amid a liquidity crunch. But just a bit over 24 hours later, that plan crumbled. Binance backed out after reviewing the company’s structure and books, it said in a to The Wall Street Journal. “Our hope was to be able to support FTX’s customers to provide liquidity, but the issues are beyond our control or ability to help,” Binance said. “As a result of corporate due diligence, as well as the latest news reports regarding mishandled customer funds and , we have decided that we will not pursue the potential acquisition of [FTX],” Binance . “Every time a major player in an industry fails, retail consumers will suffer,” Binance . “We have seen over the last several years that the crypto ecosystem is becoming more resilient and we believe in time that outliers that misuse user funds will be weeded out by the free market.” Earlier today, sources familiar with the matter that FTX’s loan commitments among Binance’s top brass. The report follows Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao that FTX “going down is not good for anyone in the industry.” |
Fake Twitter accounts flock to blue check mark chaos | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,022 | 11 | 9 | Elon Musk’s and are already creating fertile ground for confusion on Twitter. We’ve lost count of how many times Musk has changed his mind or offered contradictory claims about what a new paid $8 verification badge would do, but after pushing the feature live, fake accounts are seizing on the chaos. Twitter’s bought blue check marks are now available for some paying subscribers, injecting the timeline with tweets that appear to be from official accounts. And apparently Musk’s Twitter skeleton crew made no meaningful changes to the visual language of the blue check, so right now it signals that you’re either really who you say you are — @CocaCola, for instance — or you’re somebody random who just coughed up $8 and got a stamp of approval. Now when tweets appear in Twitter’s timeline it’s impossible to visually distinguish the two categories of blue check accounts from one another. Doing so would require clicking through to examine a user’s follower count, which isn’t necessarily a reliable way to tell, or searching for whatever clues might be found in their other tweets. Clicking on the check mark itself from a profile page apparently displays different copy too, but like everything on Twitter right now, that is subject to change. So far this has resulted in some quick attention for an account impersonating LeBron James, which announced that the basketball star was requesting a trade away from the Lakers. A few other athletes got the same treatment, including baseball pitcher Aroldis Chapman and NHL player Connor McDavid. Following sports transactions and news could become a total mess with the new verification system Already fake LeBron and Aroldis Chapman tweets going around — Joon Lee (@joonlee) As we’ve reported, Musk has already changed his mind a number of times already on the scheme to get rid of bots and spam by making people pay $8 a month. But now that the feature is suddenly live, anyone can impersonate someone else for $8 a month and see their content boosted algorithmically without any vetting. (Though apparently that paid perk, like nearly all of the “new” Twitter Blue’s features beyond the blue check mark, is “coming soon.”) All of those accounts are suspended now, but only after the tweets gained traction and caught the attention of Twitter moderators. With one half of the staff it was previously operating with, it’s impossible for Twitter to catch all of this stuff after the fact if it doesn’t have any interest in vetting at the time of payment, which Musk apparently doesn’t. The implications for Twitter as a reliable news source and the potential for abuse here is massive. Musk held off on his haphazard plan until the day after the U.S. elections, but with many races not yet called we can definitely expect to see confusion that’s orders of magnitude more consequential than a fake basketball trade. Misinformation potential aside, Musk’s plan also undermines the presence of celebrities — one of the things that makes Twitter interesting for the average user. If Twitter users can’t even reliably find prominent people like athletes, politicians and movie stars to follow, the platform’s value is going to fall off a cliff pretty fast, with its advertising revenue not far behind. |
Google and Twitter veteran maps out a Twitter alternative | Ingrid Lunden | 2,022 | 11 | 9 | Twitter’s new CEO and owner Elon Musk is rattling the cage at his social network and ruffling a lot of feathers both inside and outside of the company. But while some in the tech world describe that kind of chaos as a garbage fire, others see it as something very different: an opportunity. Years-old social networks, that have their own issues and a cacophony of pre-existing fringe efforts are all emerging as possible alternatives to Twitter. And in that vein, so are completely new ideas. One of these is being hatched by , a repeat founder who wants to build what he described to me as “a new Twitter.” In true Valley hustle style, Gabor is still honing in on small details like a name and what, exactly, all this will entail. He’s doing that , with a that you can view. He’s worked on products at those two titans between and after those acquisitions, and that experience — he focused on Timeline, new-user onboarding and logged-out experiences at Twitter; and on many, many different consumer ideas as director at Area 120, Google’s in-house incubator project — has given him a taste of what’s interesting, and what is not. And also what works, and what does not. Gabor left Google in July 2022 and has since been tweeting out his daily journey to figure out what to do next. ( , for example, was spent at TechCrunch Disrupt, where he came to see Paul Davison, another hustler, talk about the highlights of Clubhouse and the low lights of Highlight.) Gabor’s public chronicle has been giving him some Twitter-style viral momentum and attention and, naturally, insight into conversation about Twitter itself. He tells me that Elon’s to buy Twitter led to a huge whir of interest among his friends and contacts, who chattered in downcast tones about how the whole place would fall apart. Then, Musk . And then, the — a tipping point for Gabor. “I had been thinking about a new Twitter for a while,” he said. “But after multiple friends of mine still at the company were laid off last week, I thought to myself, ‘This is the thing I’ve been thinking about for so long! Maybe this is the time.'” Gabor is long on big-picture ideas at the moment. “I want to build the next public square for discussion. I want it to be delightful and fun, rewarding and valuable, and safe from harassment,” he tells me. “We’ve had 15-20 years of content moderation experience on the internet now, and so let’s build that in.” He’s also a big fan of Andrew Chen’s concept. For his own cold start, Gabor is focusing first on coalescing a critical mass of people — a community to hit the ground running when “T2” launches. According to the Google Doc, this is currently set to be September 2023, a date Gabor tells me he might try to move up. He’s even had some investor interest, which he has been building via iMessage. That inbox includes a former Twitter-exec-turned-investor who he will not name, who has already texted asking how much money Gabor would like to have to get this new bird off the ground. And he’s had plenty of unsolicited advice. Twitter is great for that. “Someone asked last week, why doesn’t someone just start a new Twitter? It would only take three days and $50 million,” he said. “That’s what got me first to ask what a roadmap might look like. I think for me it wouldn’t be a three-day build, but it also doesn’t take $50 million.” This brings up many other questions… not least why he thinks he can build what Twitter has never managed to build itself, or why yet more centralized social media walled gardens have any future at all given all the problems we’ve seen in the ones we have today. For now, his hunch is what he has: Creating something from scratch will be easier than trying to fix something that’s already big and in operation, and that it definitely won’t be as simple as just bringing together what he calls “the best people,” but also not impossible. “I think right now I’m seeing this empty space,” he said, “and I want to be in that space.” Sign up if you want to take a gander, too. |
Gaming company Kabam lays off 7% of its workforce to better align with goals | Jagmeet Singh | 2,022 | 11 | 9 | , the gaming company that has developed mobile games in partnership with entertainment brands including Disney, Marvel and Universal, has laid off about 7% — around 35 people — of its workforce, TechCrunch has learned from sources and confirmed with the company over email. The Vancouver-based company informed the affected employees about the move earlier this week, a person familiar with the development said. “As we at Kabam reviewed our strategic priorities, we made the decision to adjust our resourcing structure in alignment with our goals. This means that while we will continue to hire in key areas in the year ahead, unfortunately, we are reducing our workforce by approximately 7%. For those we are parting ways with, we are grateful to [sic] their contributions to our success, and are supporting them through this challenging transition,” a Kabam spokesperson said in a statement emailed to TechCrunch. The company has a headcount of over 500 employees. Kabam has a catalog of mobile games generating hundreds of millions of downloads in total, including Marvel Contest of Champions, Disney Mirrorverse, Shop Titans, Transformers: Forged to Fight, Mini Guns, Fast & Furious 6: The Game, Fast & Furious: Legacy and Blastron. The company also has studios and offices in Montreal, San Francisco, Charlottetown, Austin and Los Angeles — alongside its headquarters in Vancouver. Founded in 2006, the gaming company ran as a startup until 2016 when it was for a reported $700 million to $800 million. In March this year, Netmarble’s North American operations with Kabam. It aimed to bring many Netmarble game titles to western markets. Kabam is one of many companies in the tech world that have cut its workforce during this economic slowdown. In the last few days, the impact of the ongoing financial crunch was largely seen through massive layoffs announced by and . Companies including , and also let some of their staff go. Similarly, Indian startups such as , and have also laid off hundreds and thousands of employees to reduce the burden of limited funding and investments. |
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Power up with our partners at TC Sessions: Crypto | Lauren Simonds | 2,022 | 11 | 9 | We’re packing our bags and getting pumped about flying to Miami for on November 17. What about you? Don’t miss your chance to rub elbows with the kings and queens of blockchain, cryptocurrency, DeFi, NFT and web3 — the current rulers and the up-and-coming contenders for the crown. and join the royal courtiers of the cryptoverse. You’ll hear from the likes of Binance founder and CEO, Changpeng (CZ) Zhao; OpenSea co-founder and CEO, Devin Finzer; Sequoia Capital partner, Michelle Bailhe Fradin; and . I mean, just look at this . Like all TechCrunch events, these great speakers, interviews, panel discussions — plus world-class networking opportunities — are 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. Take a look at the companies who have partnered with us for TC Sessions: Crypto: , , , , and . They do more than cut a check — they show up to deliver their expertise and relevant content and to provide resources that educate, engage and support early-stage founders. takes place on November 17 in Miami. Don’t miss your opportunity to connect with our partners and to tap into the tech, trends and controversy spanning the blockchain, cryptocurrency, DeFi, NFT and web3 cryptoverse. !
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Elon Musk addresses Twitter advertisers in a meandering Q&A | Amanda Silberling | 2,022 | 11 | 9 | New Twitter owner Elon Musk joined a Twitter Space today to address concerns from advertisers about changes at the company. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO’s nascent foray into running a social media platform has been tumultuous, from launching , to , to laying off . Twitter’s Client Solutions Leader Robin Wheeler moderated the hour-long conversation with Musk, Trust & Safety Head Yoel Roth and International Advertising Bureau CEO David Cohen. For the most part, Musk repeated many of the same talking points that he has been peddling since he initially launched his bid for Twitter. “We really want to be, as I’ve mentioned before publicly, sort of the digital town square, where that is as inclusive as possible… Like, can we get 80% of humanity on Twitter, and talking, and maybe, ideally, in a positive way?” Musk asked at the top of the call. “Can we exchange… instead of having violence, have words, and maybe once in a while people change their minds? The overarching goal here is like, how can we make Twitter a force for good for civilization?” If Musk wants to get 80% of humanity on Twitter, he has his work cut out for him. If Twitter’s estimate of 237.8 million monetizable daily active users is correct, then 3% of the world’s population currently uses Twitter daily. — Robin Wheeler (@robinw) Musk also addressed the questions around his plan to verify any user who is willing to pay $8 per month for a blue check. “The issue is that creating a fake account is extremely cheap, it maybe is a tenth of a penny,” he said. “By charging $8 a month, it raises the cost of a bot or troll by somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000.” He obliquely nodded at the idea that only a certain number of accounts connected to an individual phone number or credit card can be verified. “Wouldn’t a state actor have $8 million a day to create a million fake accounts? Well, yes, they’ve got the budget. But here’s the problem. They don’t have a million credit cards, and they don’t have a million phones. That’s the actual kicker. There’s no way to overcome that. And we will be vigorously pursuing any impersonation,” he said. With regard to the verification process, Musk laid out clearly: “Someone has to have phone, a credit card and $8 a month. That’s the bar.” Musk has continued doubling-down on the idea that by verifying as many users as possible — and charging users for that privilege — it will be more difficult to see posts from users who don’t pay to be verified. “Over time, maybe not that long of time, when you look at mentions and replies and what not, the default will be to look at verified. You can still look at unverified, just as in your Gmail or whatever, you can still look at the probable spam folder,” Musk said. “You can still look at all the others, but it will be defaulted to the highly, highly relevant category, which will be verified.” Since before Musk’s acquisition, Twitter has offered a separate feed for verified users that only shows notifications from fellow blue checks. In terms of other product updates, Musk elaborated on some plans for how Twitter can get more into . He also reiterated his previous statements about investing in creator monetization, though existing creator features have for Twitter thus far. With major advertisers listening to the call, Wheeler pivoted the discussion to ask about content moderation and brand safety. Last week, a 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 for clients to temporarily pause their spending on Twitter because of moderation concerns. 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 Twitter’s handling of content moderation. Yet Musk’s comments were vague and did not specifically address these groups’ concerns. “It stands to reason that if somebody’s advertising, that they do not want super negative information right next to their ad,” Musk said. “We all kind of work hard to make sure that there’s not bad stuff right next to an ad.” He also said that Twitter is working to increase the relevance of ads. When asked about hate speech, Musk responded, “I don’t think having hate speech next to an ad is great.” Musk was equally avoidant when asked about his plan to create his own content moderation council. Musk has continually said that this group will represent a diverse set of viewpoints, but did not state what kinds of people or groups will be on the board. After a with human rights groups last week, Musk committed to including representatives from groups that suffer from hate-fueled violence. But Musk said today that it might take a few months to put this council together. Please note that Twitter will do lots of dumb things in coming months. We will keep what works & change what doesn’t. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) Roth commented on how enforcement policies might change soon, too. “For many years, the only thing that Twitter could do was delete tweets and ban accounts,” he said. “One of the directions that we’re trying to build towards is having more tools in our toolbox to be able to reduce the harmful impacts of content without always having to go to that step of a ban. And so in the coming days and weeks, you’re going to see us start to introduce some of these new concepts and frameworks for content moderation.” Roth elaborated: “There’s a lot of other stuff that we can do, from warning messages, to interstitials, to reducing the reach of content, that we haven’t fully explored in the past. And you’re going to see us move quickly to build some of these new tools and to integrate that with our policy approach.” In a key moment of the talk, Wheeler asked, “Do the same rules apply to you, Elon, that apply to everyone else on the platform?” “Yeah, absolutely,” Musk replied. |
The bottom keeps dropping for software valuations | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 11 | 9 | 52-week low. It seems that instead of finding fresh support, the value of software companies keeps discovering new basement levels to descend into. This afternoon, software stocks were off 3% or so, while the broader Nasdaq composite was down around 2% in mid-afternoon trading. The dramatic collapse in the value of software stocks has been a key story starting when the trend began in late 2021. Since then, the value of a dollar of software revenue has been cut, slashed, beaten back, and then kicked in the shins. How much decline are we talking about? Here’s one way to examine the situation, the chart of the : |
Elon Musk details his vision for a Twitter payments system | Sarah Perez | 2,022 | 11 | 9 | Elon Musk detailed his vision for Twitter’s plan to enter the payments market during with Twitter advertisers, hosted on Twitter Spaces on Wednesday. The new Twitter owner suggested that, in the future, users would be able to send money to others on the platform, extract their funds to authenticated bank accounts and, later, perhaps, be offered a high-yield money market account to encourage them to move their cash to Twitter. The new remarks followed a report this morning by which confirmed Twitter last week had filed registration paperwork that would allow it to process payments. The report cited Twitter’s filing with the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), noting that a business would need to register before it could conduct money transfers, exchange currency or cash checks. In today’s meeting, Musk explained how paid verification, which , as well as support for a creator ecosystem, could pave the way for a payments system on its platform. He stressed that, initially, Twitter would need to make fundamental technology architecture changes in order to better support video. The company was recently reported to be that would allow creators to charge for access to their content. This suggests Twitter could be moving into a space where it may try to compete more directly with various social media video providers, like TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and others. of this concept where a tweet with a video could be unlocked for as little as $1.00. It said creators may be able to choose from preset prices, like $1, $2, $5 or $10 when paywalled videos were launched. As a result, creators would end up with a cash balance as they began to monetize their content. In addition, Musk noted that Twitter’s paid verification program would help in its plan for payments because anyone who subscribed to Twitter Blue would have already been verified by the “conventional payment system.” That is, Twitter Blue subscribers have to sign up using a credit or debit card and have their payments processed through the app stores’ in-app purchase system, which helps to combat fraud. Musk then explained how this payments system could scale, “Now we can say, okay, you’ve got a balance on your account. Do you want to send money to someone else within Twitter? And maybe we pre-populate their account…and say, okay, we’re gonna give you 10 bucks. And you can send it anywhere within Twitter,” Musk said. Later, the user could move their money out of Twitter by transferring it to an authenticated bank account, he added. In the longer term, however, Musk appeared to be toying with the idea of establishing bank accounts on Twitter’s platform that would pay a high-interest rate to attract users. This could become a competitor, perhaps, to Apple’s for its cardholders, various fintechs or other payment providers, like PayPal and Venmo, which encourage their users to retain cash balances within their own ecosystems. Explained Musk, “the next step would be this offer for an extremely compelling money market account where you get an extremely high yield on your balance.” If such a system existed, he believed people would move cash to Twitter. “And then add debit cards, checks and whatnot and…just basically make the system as useful as possible. And the more useful and entertaining it is, the more people will use it,” he said. Musk didn’t offer any details about plans for cryptocurrencies, though this is also expected to be a part of its new payments system. Of course, any such ideas spouted by Musk at this time may be later abandoned, tweaked or entirely revamped if or when they come to pass. Twitter is entering an experimental era and much of what Musk says is in the works, is just the idea and not necessarily a glimpse into Twitter’s road map. That said, the move to enter the payments business ties to Musk’s larger plan to turn the social media platform into an “everything app” ” called “X.” While that plan today is still fairly vague, the general sense is that Musk aims to combine payments, social networking, entertainment and other things into one experience, similar to China’s WeChat ( .) Musk has experience in payments, of course, as he founded an early digital payments company X.com. It’s not surprising that he would try again, given the opportunity Twitter presents. His ideas about Twitter payments, however, may not have been good fodder for a conversation with advertisers who are already worried about Twitter’s long-term commitment to their goals, given the company’s move into subscriptions, which signals a desire to reduce reliance on ad dollars. Musk tried to assuage these fears by saying that Twitter was thinking about protecting advertisers’ brand safety in the longer term, not just about its ability to drive short-term sales. |
Say hello to the newest crypto startups from web3 accelerator Alliance DAO’s demo day | Jacquelyn Melinek | 2,022 | 11 | 9 | New crypto startups forged ahead during Alliance DAO’s demo day on Wednesday amid the . “This is actually worse than the 2018 bear market,” Qiao Wang, a core contributor at Alliance DAO, said, referring to the tentative plans for Binance to absorb competitor FTX. “Today, everyone was caught off guard, myself included … the last three months of working closely with our founders in All9, I’m hopeful again. It’s people like them that will push our industry forward.” The most recent cohort, known as All9, for Alliance DAO, a web3 accelerator and builder community, presented their ideas on Wednesday during a demo day, exclusively covered by TechCrunch. It seems like it was just yesterday that we covered , but four months have passed. Twice a year, Alliance DAO brings in web3 founders for a three-month program. To date, Alliance DAO alumni have created more than $10 billion in market capitalization, Wang said. There were about 953 applications for this cohort, but only 17 teams were chosen and graduated from the program. Many of the teams are looking at improving crypto themes like proof-of-physical-work, wallet experience for everyday users, product-driven protocols, crypto B2B products, on-chain data and verticalization, Wang said. “The cohort is a fairly representative sample of what’s happening in the industry at large.” The cohort focused on a range of subsectors and products across web3, like authentication, liquid staking, crypto wallets and decentralized machine learning, among others. About 38% of the startups focused on the ecosystem, while made up 21% and 17%. Mentors include Colleen Sullivan, co-head of ventures at Brevan Howard Digital; Mike Dudas, founder of LinksDAO, The Block and an investor for 6th Man Ventures; Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana; Ryan Selkis, founder and CEO of Messari; Mounir Benchemled, founder of ParaSwap; Amir Bandeali, co-CEO of 0x Labs; and Ryan Wyatt, CEO of Polygon Studios. Here’s a breakdown of the 17 startups: |
Tesla vehicles will soon have Zoom video conferencing | Kirsten Korosec | 2,022 | 11 | 9 | Zoom is working with Tesla to bring video conferencing into its vehicles. The announcement, made at the 2022 Zoomtopia conference, was light on details. But according to Zoom’s group product manager Nitasha Walia, the video conferencing feature “will come standard on all new Tesla models soon.” Nitasha Walia, group product manager at Zoom Video Communications, said Tuesday. “ Zoom What’s unclear is what Zoom means by “comes standard on all new Tesla vehicles.” Will this integration require additional hardware in Tesla vehicles or can this feature be rolled out via a software update? And when? Tesla has continued to add features to its infotainment system designed to entertain its driver or passengers while sitting parked, likely at an EV charger. Its vehicles, all of which have large touchscreen displays, can stream , has karaoke and offers a , including Fallout Shelter, Cuphead and Stardew Valley. All of these entertainment features, as well as performance-related improvements, have been rolled out via wireless software updates. |
Plant-based food brand Huel valued at $560M following Idris Elba-backed round | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 11 | 30 | , the European provider of nutritional products, has sold more than 270 million meals across the globe since Julian Hearn started the company in 2015. Now with $24 million in fresh capital, it plans to do even more. It’s been a while since we covered Huel, which originally launched in the United Kingdom in 2017 with a low-sugar, plant-based and low-carbon-footprint protein powder product and has since expanded into ready-to-drink, snack bars and hot lunch options. In 2019, we reported on them when they At the time, the company was buoyed by a Highland Europe-led $20 million venture round, at a $260 million valuation, it raised in 2018. There was even in 2021. Today, much of the company’s sales are outside the U.K., with U.S. “Hueligans,” the company’s loyal fans, representing Huel’s second-biggest market, followed by Germany and Japan, CEO James McMaster told TechCrunch. The company has now grown to 250 people, including a small office in New York. Year over year revenue growth is 40%, up to $170 million, which McMaster attributes to that strong new customer growth, the ready-to-eat hot lunch product launch (among others) and the company’s transition from solely direct-to-consumer to also retail stores. Huel’s plant-based product line. Huel “We’re at the stage where having this second round of funding allows us to keep focusing on that growth,” he said. “We are going to keep innovating with new products, and are really proud of where we’re heading. We’re now the business that we hope can be a truly global brand.” Highland Europe is back to lead that new $24 million infusion, which now values Huel at $560 million. Joining the venture fund this time is a star-studded group of new investors, including actor and UN Goodwill Ambassador Idris Elba and his wife, Sabrina Dhowre Elba, also a UN Goodwill Ambassador, television presenter Jonathan Ross and sustainable activewear brand TALA’s CEO Grace Beverley. “I’ve been a Hueligan for several years now, starting my journey while preparing for my role in ‘Thor,’ so to come on board with Huel was an easy decision,” Idris Elba said in a written statement. “I believe in their mission to deliver nutritionally complete food, sustainably. We have some exciting projects coming up and I look forward to spreading the message and raising awareness around healthy, low carbon food.” Meanwhile, the new funding will also be deployed in continued international expansion, with a focus on the U.S. The investment will also support new product innovation, and continued expansion online and in retail stores. As part of the Elbas’s investment, one of the new projects will include Huel working with them on their climate change initiative to help people eat at 1.5 degrees Celsius, the global warming limit the is trying to reach. Huel meals fit within a diet aligned with supporting that reduction, and the company “is excited to work with Idris and Sabrina as we’re equally trying to be a force for good in the world,” McMaster added. |
Indian agritech DeHaat tops $700 million valuation in $60 million funding | Manish Singh | 2,022 | 11 | 30 | DeHaat, a startup that , has raised $60 million in a new funding round as it looks to deepen its penetration in the country and reach break-even profitability within two years. Sofina Ventures and Temasek co-led the Patna and Gurgaon-headquartered startup’s Series E funding, it said, at a valuation between $700 million and $800 million, according to a person familiar with the matter. Existing backers RTP Global Partners, Prosus Ventures and Lightrock India also participated in the new round. Farming is a $350 billion industry in India, but farmers face myriad challenges in the country that were largely unaddressed until upstarts such as DeHaat arrived on the scene. Farmers struggle with securing agri-inputs, finding buyers for their produce and in maintaining enough runway. Giants such as Reliance and Adani Group offer some services to farmers, but their involvement in the agriculture sector remains largely limited. A fast-growing population and climate change mean Indian farmers need to adopt technology quickly to improve — and maintain — their yields. uses artificial intelligence to help 1.5 million farmers across 11 states, 110,000 villages and more than 150 ZIP codes in India source raw materials, find advisory and credit services, and sell crops. The startup has onboarded over 2,000 agricultural institutions, including input manufacturers, food and consumer goods giants, banks and insurance firms. It works with over 10,000 micro-entrepreneurs who help the startup run a maze of last-mile supply chains. In the past two years, DeHaat has aggressively expanded across several key Indian states, and co-founder and chief executive Shashank Kumar told TechCrunch in an interview that the startup will focus on deepening its presence across the ZIP codes where it’s already operational in the immediate future and reaching break-even profitability in 12 months. The new funding provides DeHaat with up to 40 months of runway, during which time Kumar said the startup will be profitable. “At least for the next three to five months, we are not adding any new geographies. We will continue to serve more farmers and broaden our network of centers in the states where we are operational,” he said. DeHaat currently doesn’t have a presence in the Southern Indian states. Kumar said the startup is hopeful to start expanding to those states after about a year. Kumar acknowledged that raising funds in the current market scenario isn’t a walk in the park. Funding inflows to local startups has shrunk by more than 80% as investors grow cautious following a sharp reversal in the global market conditions. “The lens is different — everyone is looking for assets that have a clear path to profitability,” said Kumar. “In that way, DeHaat had its own advantage — our unit economics are very strong, whatever burn we have is for adding geographies. We raised the round to be ready for all the future opportunities,” he said, adding that DeHaat still has about two-thirds of the funds left from the previous $115 million funding round. He said the startup, whose name means village in Hindi, has acquired about half a dozen firms in the recent quarters and sees more M&A potential on the horizon and is ready to execute when it finds the right partners. “With the intent to become a contributor to sustainable development goals, Sofina supports organizations that have a positive impact on their communities and the environment. We continue to be impressed by DeHaat’s vision and endeavour to empower farmers and local communities, and with this additional funding we hope to create an even deeper and broader impact within the existing network as well as new geographies,” said Yana Kachurina, principal at Sofina, in a statement. |
SBF claims massive ignorance on obvious conflicts in FTX downfall | Natasha Mascarenhas | 2,022 | 11 | 30 | try to commit fraud on anyone, I was shocked by what happened this month,” Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), the founder and former chief executive of the fallen FTX, said at The in an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin. One of the biggest questions around this debacle is if there was any misuse of funds between Alameda and FTX. For some context, Alameda began struggling to pay lenders back as crypto prices began falling. As a result, it used FTX customer funds to make lenders whole; a move that both showed Alameda’s lack of assets, and triggered part of the crash when FTX customers began the crypto exchange equivalent of a run on the bank. When pushed by Sorkin, SBF said that he didn’t “knowingly co-mingle funds” between Alameda and FTX. “Given the size of the position, I think it was not our intention, it was, in effect, tied together substantially more than I would have ever wanted to be,” he said. “A lot of what we ended up doing and focusing on was a distraction from one unbelievably important area that we completely failed on: that was risk,” SBF said. “That was risk management, customer position risk, and frankly, conflict of interest risk.” The entrepreneur said that he failed to task anyone specifically with oversight of the Alameda and FTX relationship, a misstep that matches up with the fact that FTX, despite being valued at $32 billion, also never had a board of directors. It was his duty, he explained, to have thought about the financial intertwining more — though he offered as an excuse, somewhat ironically, a fear that in looking too closely at the relationship he might be at risk because of his ownership stake conflict in both entities. Some see FTX’s collapse, and SBF’s mistakes along with the team that conspired alongside him, as a pivotal moment that impacts general trust in the cryptocurrency space — a world that is already experiencing a winter as Bitcoin and Ethereum prices shake. SBF, meanwhile, remains a vocal type of vocal, with many surprised that he decided to do the NYT interview in the first place. During the interview, SBF, while sipping (and at least once, spilling) a La Croix in the Bahamas, claimed multiple times that he did not know how certain aspects of the business, from its ties to its eventual bankruptcy, went so wrong. When Sorkin asked what SBF’s lawyers are advising him to do, he said that “they’re very much not” in support of him participating in the interview. “The classic advice is don’t say anything, recede into a hole,” SBF said, when asked about his lawyer’s perspective on if he should be doing interviews right now. “I don’t see what is accomplished by me sitting locked in a room pretending that the outside world doesn’t exist.” SBF’s fall from grace is being heavily chronicled, while many wait to see if he will be indicted for the potential crimes in question. The entrepreneur stepped down from his role earlier this month, and has been succeeded by Enron spin-down veteran John J. Ray III. In a filing, Ray said that he never in his career had “seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here.” The entrepreneur also addressed his leaked DMs from a conversation with a Vox reporter, in which he also made flippant comments, going as far as to say “fuck regulators.” “It was not meant to be a public interview, it was a longtime friend of mine who I stupidly forgot was also a reporter,” he said. “I thought I was speaking in a personal capacity.” In that Vox interview, he added that regulators “make everything worse” and that they don’t protect customers at all. “In FTX’s prime, SBF was a frequent visitor to Capitol Hill, where he advised U.S. legislators on regulations around cryptocurrency. In conversation with Sorkin, SBF said that he spent “probably thousands of hours in D.C.” meeting with regulators. Speaking of personal, though, SBF did say he talked to his parents, both of whom are lawyers, about FTX. There have been allegations that using FTX money; “It was not intended to be their long-term property, it was always intended to be the company’s property…and I think that’s where it will end up…I think they may have stayed there.” SBF says he is not focusing on criminal liability, although that there will be a “time and place” for him to think about himself and his own future. “I’ve had a bad month…but that’s not what happens here…what matters is all the stakeholders in FTX.” Asked directly about whether he’s remaining in the Bahamas because of a fear of authority intervention should he return to the U.S., Bankman-Fried claimed not to be motivated to stay where he is due to that fear. He instead said that he “could, to [his] knowledge” return to the U.S. at will. Toward the end of the interview, SBF said that he has very little money left; including only one working credit card. He believes he has about $100,000 left in a bank account. “I can’t make any promises about anything, but I would have thought that there would be a chance for a pathway forward here that would bring more value to customers than what would happen if you just sold everything out for scraps,” he said. “It’s not really in my hands to a large extent, but I would think that it would make sense to be exploring that, because I think there’s a chance that customers could end up made a lot more whole, maybe even fully whole if there was a concerted effort.” As Sorkin referenced at the start of his interview, when he read a letter from a reader who lost millions due to FTX’s collapse, the company’s implosion has vanished some people’s entire life savings. It’s still not clear if those people will see their money again. “There have been examples of this in crypto history,” SBF said. He referenced the hack of the crypto exchange Bitfinex, in which in 2016. Earlier this year, the DOJ seized the stolen cryptocurrency, and Bitfinex began working with U.S. authorities to help customers get their money back. In the last month, FTX fell from being the third largest crypto exchange to the 233rd, according to FTX US division is 243rd. The third largest crypto exchange, behind Coinbase and Binance, is now Kraken — |
Twitter is going to show you more tweets from people you don’t follow | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,022 | 11 | 30 | As new Twitter owner Elon Musk with the social network’s feature set, more algorithmic recommendations are apparently on the way. Twitter’s support account tweeted about the change on Wednesday, noting that the platform was “expanding recommendations to all users.” This is of course under the guise of giving users the “best” content (Instagram likes to use this line too), but in reality splicing more recommendations into a social feed primes users to expect more paid content too. We want to ensure everyone on Twitter sees the best content on the platform, so we’re expanding recommendations to all users, including those who may not have seen them in the past. You can learn more about them, and how to best control your experience: — Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) Twitter provided no other details about the change to recommendations, but links to a previous blog post explaining how the algorithmic content works and where it might show up. According to the post, “recommendations can appear in your Home timeline, certain places within the Explore tab, and elsewhere on Twitter.” As it stands, you can switch between the home feed and “latest tweets” by clicking the sparkle button in the upper-right corner of the timeline. It’s not immediately clear if Twitter plans to stream more recommended tweets into the “home” timeline or if this is something more aggressive, but we’ve tweeted into the void to ask the company for more clarity. Some users have already noticed changes, which seem to be affecting home feeds for now. Twitter offers two different feeds: “latest tweets” which displays tweets from people you follow in chronological order and “home,” a curated collection of popular tweets from your follows. From our experience, the latter occasionally mixed in some recommendations from beyond our following lists but was mostly a non-chronological collection of tweets from people we did follow. Given Musk’s habit of quickly rolling out (and ), we wouldn’t be surprised to see Twitter get heavy-handed with recommendations or even switch the default feed in that direction, so we’ll keep our eyes peeled for anything major. Pre-Musk, the platform planned to make but reversed course after a backlash from users. On Instagram, users have expressed a similar weariness at seeing their feeds cluttered with content from people they don’t follow. For TikTok, serving algorithmically curated content is in the app’s DNA, but many other social platforms have to tread more carefully. Because they were originally designed to let users follow people they already know (or know of), apps like Twitter and Instagram have to turn the algorithmic spigot on slowly and hope that users don’t notice any sudden changes. In this case, we’ll have to wait and see. |
LastPass says it was breached — again | Zack Whittaker | 2,022 | 11 | 30 | Password manager LastPass said it’s investigating a security incident after its systems were compromised for the second time this year. LastPass chief executive Karim Toubba said that an “unauthorized party” recently gained access to some customers’ information stored in a third-party cloud service shared by LastPass and its parent company, GoTo. Toubba said the unauthorized party used information stolen from LastPass’ systems in August, which the company disclosed at the time. The third-party cloud service wasn’t named, but a 2020 blog post by cited the company’s transition of a billion customer records to Amazon’s cloud. Toubba did not say what specific customer information was taken, but said it was working to “understand the scope of the incident and identify what specific information has been accessed.” GoTo, , which acquired LastPass in 2015, said in that it was investigating the incident. It’s not yet clear if both LogMeIn and GoTo customers are affected by the breach. LastPass said in August that an unauthorized party “gained access to portions of the LastPass development environment through a single compromised developer account and took portions of source code and some proprietary LastPass technical information.” LastPass said that its system design and controls “prevented the threat actor from accessing any customer data or encrypted password vaults.” Toubba added in the blog post Wednesday that “customers’ passwords remain safely encrypted.” GoTo spokesperson Elizabeth Bassler declined to comment beyond LastPass’ blog post. |
SBF says journalists are good, actually | Amanda Silberling | 2,022 | 11 | 30 | “I’ve had a bad month,” Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) said onstage. The crowd instantly broke out in laughter. The former CEO and founder of disgraced crypto exchange FTX, SBF’s month probably got worse today. In his first public interview since his company imploded, But maybe SBF is being so open with the press because he simply just loves good ol’ gumshoe journalism! Yes, . But in what was surely the most important moment of the conversation, SBF affirmed that journalists are good, actually. Most of these big shot tech guys do not like journalists. We’re annoying! Trust me, I know, I have dated fellow journalists before. But SBF (who, I must emphasize again, is being investigated by both the SEC and DOJ and lost billions of dollars this month) understands us. Semafor, a recently launched news outlet, received funding from SBF — a point that Elon Musk has when arguing with Semafor co-founder Ben Smith on Twitter. “I’m certainly seeing, you know…. getting the brunt of a lot of that right now. And frankly, I think it’s healthy for the world that there is real investigative journalism,” SBF said. Honestly, it’s pretty mature of him! Just two weeks ago, SBF unknowingly gave a to Vox reporter Kelsey Piper. Piper, a longtime friend of SBF’s, DMed him on Twitter to ask about… how his entire life is falling apart and how his company’s failure is causing actual real people to lose their entire life savings and how everything is a massive disaster that makes Fyre Fest look like a small oopsie. “It was not meant to be a public interview, it was a longtime friend of mine who I stupidly forgot was also a reporter,” he said. “I thought I was speaking in a personal capacity.” The resulting article made him look very bad. “man all the dumb shit i said. it’s not true, not really,” SBF wrote to Piper. Again, not something you want to say when you are being investigated by both the SEC and the DOJ! To make matters worse, he also said “fuck regulators.” Whoops. Despite it all, SBF is willing to stand up for the rights of the press, and we respect that! However, we did ask him to make a last-minute appearance at a few weeks ago and he didn’t answer, but it’s fine, we instead. |
Daily Crunch: Music fans revisit their year in music with Spotify Wrapped 2022 | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 11 | 30 | Heeeeeey! Couple of fun things we have in the pipeline at the moment… If you’re wondering what our Spotify Wrapped listening personalities are, you are in luck. See below. Happy end of November — onward to the last month of the year! — and Today, crypto exchange Kraken announced it’s . The announcement came from a company blog post, reports. News that Kraken is cutting staff — and therefore costs — is not a surprise, given a generally gloomy macroeconomic climate and even worse climes in crypto land. Speaking of crypto land, reports that Jack Dorsey’s Bitcoin project Meanwhile, the creator of Magic: The Gathering spoke with about . Apart from the world of crypto, it was a good day for new funds — reports that , and has a story today about targeting Southeast Asia–based startups. “Native Americans are the most impoverished group in the US, a vestige of intergenerational, systematic disenfranchisement. They are also being hit the hardest by inflation right now, as a result,” says Danielle Forward, CEO and co-founder of Natives Rising in an interview with . She is . “While the tech industry is slowing down on hiring, tech jobs remain one of the most economically empowering, in-demand job opportunities of the future, especially for those who desire remote work.” Okay, fine, there’s a few more: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch Dear Sophie, Our startup was just accepted into the winter batch of a top accelerator! My co-founder with an H-1B just got laid off from Big Tech, but he’s OK because his immigration lawyer is filing a change of status to B-1 within the 60-day grace period. I’m nervous though, because I’m outside the U.S. and I don’t yet have a B-1/B-2 visitor visa. How can I ace the visa interview? What type of questions will I be asked? How should I prepare? — Tenacious in Tobago Three more from the TC+ team: In Airbnb’s new life, it is playing the role of real estate agent. The vacation home rental giant is now helping , writes. Kind of interesting when you consider that Airbnb and its hosts have gotten into trouble in the past for listing properties without permission from landlords, and in some cases the city government. Speaking of things you’re allowed to do in cities, reports that “ .” The city’s board of supervisors passed the proposal that will allow robots to be used only “in extreme circumstances to save or prevent further loss of innocent lives,” he writes. And we have five more for you: |
Stability AI doubles down on AWS | Frederic Lardinois | 2,022 | 11 | 30 | Microsoft may have long had OpenAI as its trusty partner (after its ), but AWS today announced that , one of the hottest new upstarts in the generative AI space and the company behind , is doubling down on its cloud, making it its “preferred cloud provider to build and scale its AI models for image, language, audio, video, and 3D content generation.” In addition, Stability AI will also work with AWS to make its open source tools and model available to more students, researchers, startups and enterprises (which sounds quite a bit like what Microsoft and OpenAI said when they announced their partnership). Stability AI, which recently a $101 million funding round at a valuation of over $1 billion, was already using thousands of Nvidia GPUs in the AWS cloud to train its models. Now, the two companies are formalizing this relationship, with Stability AI planning to use AWS’ ML platform, on top of its lower-level infrastructure services with GPUs and AWS’ own Trainium chips. Typically, these deals also come with preferred pricing and other perks, though neither AWS nor Stability mention those in today’s announcement. “At Stability AI, our mission is to build the foundation to activate humanity’s potential through AI,” said Emad Mostaque, founder and CEO of Stability AI. “AWS has played an integral role in scaling our open-source foundation models across modalities. We are delighted to run these models on Amazon SageMaker to enable tens of thousands of developers and millions of users to leverage the power of AI with a robust set of tools. We look forward to seeing the amazing things that developers build and customers design and implement using collective intelligence and augmented technology.” Models like Stable Diffusion, which recently hit version 2.0, are not without controversy, be that for their ability to generate adult content, something Stable Diffusion 2.0 automatically filters out, or because these models are often trained on images from artists who have not explicitly opted in to their works being used to train these models. There can be no doubt, though, that Stability AI is taking over quite a bit of mindshare from OpenAI these days, which has long taken a more cautious approach to how it exposes its models. Stability AI’s open source approach, at least for the time being, seems to be winning in bringing on more developers and — for better or worse — driving innovation in this space. |
YouTube acknowledges its iOS app is crashing, says it’s working on a fix | Lauren Forristal | 2,022 | 11 | 30 | YouTube’s mobile app on iOS devices is currently down for some users. The crashes began on Wednesday afternoon as thousands of iOS users reported the app would close shortly after opening it. Users also reported seeing a message on the app that said, “A serious error occurred.” TechCrunch tried to replicate the problem and experienced similar issues. We opened the YouTube app ourselves and found that after playing a video for 30 seconds, the app would close. We then reopened the app and resumed the video without any issues. YouTube, said it’s aware of the crash and is working on fixing it. hi, we're aware that many of you using the YouTube app on iOS devices may be experiencing crashes we're so sorry about this & have begun working on a fix! updates soon🔍 — TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube) The company first acknowledged the issue at 2:19 PM ET on Wednesday and the issues appear to be ongoing as of the time of writing. As of 4:23 PM ET, YouTube replied to a Twitter user’s response of “thank you” after YouTube had directly told them a fix was in the works. It has not yet posted anything more about what has caused the problem or when it expects to have it resolved. At 5:05 PM ET, YouTube , “The YouTube app on iOS devices should now be working fine with no crashes!” |
Musk at Twitter has ‘huge work’ ahead to comply with EU rules, warns bloc | Natasha Lomas | 2,022 | 11 | 30 | European Union regulators have fired another warning shot at Elon Musk over his erratic piloting of Twitter since his takeover last month — saying he has “huge work” ahead if the social media site is to avoid falling foul of major new governance rules for digital services which entered into force . Reminder: Breaches of the EU’s (DSA) can attract penalties of up to 6% of global annual turnover. Since getting his hands on the bird, Musk has and made slashing Twitter’s headcount a priority — with reports of early this month, and further sackings since (including of a large number of contractors). He’s also on former U.S. president Donald Trump’s Twitter account and suggested he’ll implement a for violating its policies — all the while engaging in public boosterism with a small group of mostly far right Twitter accounts, which can be seen egging him on to tear down content moderation systems and policies the company had painstakingly built up over years. The change of ownership at Twitter has also led to the of a number of senior compliance, security, privacy and trust & safety staffers in a few short weeks. And there has been a stream of users leaving to other social media platforms — objecting to the direction Musk’s taking the site and a resurgence in toxicity and abuse since he took over which is also leading advertisers to cool on Twitter over brand safety concerns. So the EU’s assessment that Musk-owned Twitter has its work cut out to comply with the DSA is not exactly rocket science. Putting out its read on the outcome of a meeting today between Musk and the EU’s internal market commissioner, Thierry Breton — who obtained a ‘thumbs up’ from the billionaire, , verbally affirming the bloc’s plan for Internet regulation that the EU is tenaciously interpreting as a commitment to DSA compliance — the EU said Breton told Musk that Twitter will have to significantly increase efforts if it’s to pass the grade. In a statement attributed to Breton after the meeting, the commissioner said (emphasis Breton’s): I welcome Elon Musk’s statements of intent to get Twitter 2.0 ready for the DSA. I am pleased to hear that he has read it carefully and considers it as a sensible approach to implement on a worldwide basis. But let’s also be clear that there is still huge work ahead, as Twitter will have to implement transparent user policies, significantly reinforce content moderation protect freedom of speech, tackle disinformation with resolve, and limit targeted advertising. All of this requires sufficient AI and human resources, both in volumes and skills. I look forward to progress in all these areas and we will come to assess Twitter’s readiness on site. The DSA will start to apply from February 17 next year for larger platforms (so called ‘very large online platforms’; or VLOPs) — which also face extra obligations including to assess and mitigate risks on their platforms under the regulation. This means larger platforms have just a few months to prepare themselves to be able to demonstrate compliance or risk enforcement by the European Commission. For other in-scope services the DSA will start to apply in early 2024 — and enforcement will fall to Member State authorities, rather than the Commission itself. It’s not yet clear whether Twitter will be designated a VLOP. But as we reported , the EU’s executive responded to reports of further layoffs, including the total shuttering of its Brussels office, with alarm — warning that “appropriateness” of resources is one of the factors it will be taking into account as it determines which platforms are designated VLOPs and therefore face an accelerated timeline for compliance, additional requirements and greater regulatory risk. In a put out by Twitter today, on its official blog, the company claimed it remains committed to its existing policies — however it said its approach to policy enforcement “will rely more heavily on de-amplification of violative content”, aka “freedom of speech but not freedom of reach”. it also emerged that the platform has stopped enforcing its policy against misleading information about COVID-19 last week — letting unsubstantiated claims with the potential to endanger public health circulate freely. The Commission quickly described Twitter’s decision to abandon enforcement against misleading tweets about COVID-19 as regrettable — pointing out the pandemic is not over and warning that measures to tackle disinformation will be an important component of achieving compliance with the DSA. The episode raises questions about what EU regulators will make of baldly disingenuous claims put out by Musk — such as that ‘no Twitter polices have changed’ — when an unchanged policy that’s no longer being enforced is, de facto, a drastic change of policy. In an interview yesterday at the Knight Foundation conference, covered by , Twitter’s form head of trust & safety, Yoel Roth, warned the company is not safer under Musk — with far fewer staff to enforce its policies. He said his own decision to leave Twitter, after a few weeks with Musk in charge, came after the company began to stray from an adherence to written and publicly available policies — toward content decisions made unilaterally by the self-appointed ‘Chief Twit’. “One of my limits was if Twitter starts being ruled by dictatorial edict rather than by policy… there’s no longer a need for me in my role, doing what I do,” he said. The EU will soon have to make its own call about Musk’s approach to policy. The EU’s read out of Breton’s working meeting with Musk does call it “constructive” — but that might just be the EU trolling Musk at this point (actually got a meeting and a date in the diary for another one? winning!) — as it writes that they both “agreed” that the Commission’s services will carry out a stress test at Twitter’s headquarters in early 2023. Ergo, the the EU is already preparing to test Musk (and stress test his claims of compliance). Which means he’s getting accelerated ‘special attention’ from the Internet’s newly appointed sheriff. (Frankly Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg must be counting his blessings over Musk’s landing in his toxic patch.) The Commission said this stress test will allow Twitter to “target compliance even ahead of legal deadlines, and to prepare for an extensive independent audit as provided by the DSA”. Translation: Get your house in order fast — because we’ll be back for the receipts. Whether Musk will keep shrugging off — or finally get serious — about all these increasingly shrill soundings from regulators will be interesting to watch. If the former, the final bill for Musk owning Twitter could get more expensive. More details on ⤵️ — Thierry Breton (@ThierryBreton) |
Bret Taylor steps down as co-chair and CEO of Salesforce | Ron Miller | 2,022 | 11 | 30 | It’s been quite a roller coaster ride for Bret Taylor over the last year. , he was named board chair at Twitter and co-CEO at Salesforce. One year later, he doesn’t have either job. Taylor lost the job as Twitter board chair and dissolved the Twitter board immediately. Today, he stepped down as co-CEO at Salesforce in a stunning announcement that appeared to come out of the blue. “After a lot of reflection, I’ve decided to return to my entrepreneurial roots. Salesforce has never been more relevant to customers, and with its best-in-class management team and the company executing on all cylinders, now is the right time for me to step away,” Taylor said in a statement announcing his resignation. Taylor, who helped guide in 2020, appeared to be in line to take over whenever company founder and . Now he has stepped away, and it’s not clear what has changed. Benioff called his co-CEO’s resignation “a bittersweet moment” in a statement, and said he would always be his biggest champion. He repeated Taylor’s words about him returning to his entrepreneurial roots. Perhaps Taylor really had enough of running a big company, but it does seem strange timing, right after he appeared onstage with Benioff at Dreamforce in September. He joined the company in 2016 when for $750 million. He quickly rose through the ranks and was most recently president and chief operating officer prior to the promotion last year. Prior to launching Quip and joining Salesforce, he was CEO at FriendFeed, an early social network, and later served as CTO at Facebook from 2009-2012. While Taylor alluded to the fact the company was in good shape, the company stock price is down 34% over the last year (a year to be fair in which SaaS stocks in general have taken a huge hit). The company is also dealing with activist investor Starboard Value, which . It’s unclear if this had anything to do with the resignation or if there had been friction between the two over roles or timing of the switch. Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research, wondered if the time taking over as sole CEO was simply too long for Taylor to wait, and perhaps he lined up another job elsewhere. “It’s likely that Taylor has a sole CEO position planned for 2023. It raises questions on Benioff’s [succession] plans. Apparently the co-CEO model has a too long a horizon for the junior partner,” Mueller told TechCrunch. It’s worth noting that this is not the first time that Salesforce has had a co-CEO, and the junior partner has chosen to leave the company. In 2018, co-CEO and he remained in the position . Mueller said that with the co-CEO role, however it ensures that when one partner leaves, the company is able to continue without missing a beat. “But it shows once again the power of the two CEO model, as Salesforce is unlikely to miss a beat similar to when Keith Block stepped down [in 2020].” Salesforce stock is down almost 7% after hours on the news. |
null | Dominic-Madori Davis | 2,022 | 11 | 9 | null |
StartupOS launches what it hopes will be the operating system for early-stage startups | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,022 | 11 | 30 | Running a startup can be a chaotic time; a million things need to be built, done, tracked, analyzed, considered, reported and validated. Keeping an overview of it all can be hard, and there’s always a threat of something (maybe something important?!) slipping through the cracks. today launched a platform to bring some sanity to it all in a bid to help founders stay on track. The platform was built in partnership with (and backed by) SVB, the parent company of Silicon Valley Bank. It includes access to business tools, guidance, mentors and investors, with the hope that the founders can learn how to best shepherd their startups through the process of validating ideas, building MVPs and finding product-market fit. The company is headed up by CEO and co-founder Paul Pluschkell, who spent the past quarter century building startups, and has a handful of successful exits under his belt, including MXNet, IXnet, , Global Center and . “One of the primary reasons startups are successful is because they were empowered from the beginning of their journey with access to the tools, sources of funding, and network needed to support the growth of their company,” shares Pluschkell in a statement to TechCrunch. “Unfortunately, however, not every founder has the same level of empowerment and support due to their background and or geographic location. Through StartupOS, we aim to change that.” Early next year, the company is adding the ability to connect to a network of investors, turning the StartupOS into a source of early-stage dealflow to interested angels and investors. StartupOS’s stated mission is that it “aims to dramatically increase the overall number of startups and their probability of success for new, diverse generations of founders.” Which sounds good. As a middle-aged dude with 20+ years of work experience, however, I feel qualified to level this sliver of criticism: It feels a bit rich to have “diverse founders” as a stated goal when the press info features three middle-aged dudes — (CEO), (head of biz dev) and (COO) — with 20+ years of work experience. Adding a woman or some fresher blood to the team might have been a nice touch. When I challenged the StartupOS team on its male-heavy top of the org chart, the company didn’t quite agree. “We do have a diverse leadership team. In fact, approximately 50% of the top execs at StartupOS are diverse, including women and minorities. Our platform was set up so that startups that would traditionally not have an opportunity for mentorships/investments through accelerators can now have a more direct path to success,” said Pluschkell. “This will be a major advantage for minority-owned businesses that have previously struggled to secure the funding that they need to grow. We are proud of the diversity in our leadership team, and we will continue to hire the best talent, regardless of race, religion, gender and creed.” The company’s LinkedIn shows that the company has one woman in a leadership position, who is listed on LinkedIn as the company’s content designer. The company’s PR company claims she was recently promoted to the Director of Customer Success. Paul Pluschkell, founder and CEO at StartupOS. Curiously, none of the press materials nor the site itself says anything about what the platform is considering as its business model, which made me a little suspicious — from the screenshots, it looks as if the platform is gathering a lot of very valuable data about the various startups, and the old adage is true: If you’re not paying for the product, you the product. Digging a little deeper, the team shed a bit of light on the road map: “We have a multi-tiered business model that focuses on the demand side. Startups are free on our platform,” explains Pluschkell. “We will offer a subscription-based service that offers opportunity providers (VCs, accelerators, educational institutions, corporations, etc.) a dashboard to StartupOS companies or enrolled portfolios to view, filter, create watchlists, and connect with Startups on our Platform. We have a Sponsorship & Referral Model that allows for ads on our site for companies that service Startups and can provide services at a discount.” The company also has a “PowerUP Builder” that enables companies to create PowerUPs (tools that provide learn-by-doing exercises) that work within our platform and create initial awareness by offering a lightweight version of their enterprise tools for startups. The idea is that this is lead gen, in the hope that the startups will subscribe to enterprise services once they raise funds and continue their growth trajectory. “Later next year we plan to offer a Data Subscription that is aggregated and anonymized data about certain sectors, geographies, business models, and stages of a company lifecycle,” says Pluschkell. “For example, a corporate client in financial services with a StartupOS data subscription can access median revenue growth, cash burn, etc. of pre-Series A financial services startups.” StartupOS’s terms and conditions were buried at the bottom of . StartupOS I wanted to dig a little deeper and discovered that the site’s privacy policy and aren’t where you’d expect to find them. Instead they were buried at the very bottom of the FAQ. In any case, the T&C’s highlighted that all content (“all information, data, and other content, in any form or medium, that is collected, downloaded, or otherwise received, directly or indirectly, from you […] by or through our Service”) you upload to the site can be shared with other site users in perpetuity, and “You further grant (…) an irrevocable, perpetual, transferable, sublicensable (through multiple tiers), fully paid, royalty-free, and worldwide right and license to use, copy, store, modify, distribute and display Your Content.” Given how much startup info can be proprietary, I’d probably think twice as to whether I’d want to hand over a bunch of my startup’s information to StartupOS. I find myself wondering if, given the incredible breadth of startups and the needs of various founders, StartupOS is able to be as broadly useful as it is setting out to be. SaaS companies can often play by a similar playbook, but hardware companies or companies operating in regulated spaces (fintech, medtech, etc.) often have a lot of variety in terms of what the “long pole in the tent” represents. It’ll be interesting to see whether the platform is able to attract startups, and whether it’s able to help them in a way that ends up being efficient. In any case, StartupOS is one to keep an eye on as it scoops up its first few startups and starts proving its thesis. |
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