TechCrunch |
- This Week in Apps: WWDC preview, hitting the Top Charts, Instagram’s AMBER Alerts
- Nuance? In this startup market?
- The battle for BNPL buyers and other TC news
- The 2022 Bentley Flying Spur Hybrid is a shaky step towards a luxurious EV future
- Perceptron: Robots that feel pain and AI that predicts soccer players’ movements
- For mental health startups, happiness is in niches
- A downturn is nothing new for diverse founders
- Google disables RCS ads in India following rampant spam by businesses
- Lots of sellers, fewer buyers, in markets for startup shares
- KQED launches free media literacy training course
- Daily Crunch: Tesla shares drop after leaked CEO email reveals hiring freeze, plans to cut 10% of staff
- Agtech robotics firm FarmWise just raised another $45 million
- To better manage cybersecurity risk, extend zero-trust principles to third parties
- SEO tool Ahrefs invests $60M in building creator-friendly search engine, ‘Yep’
- AI model’s insight helps astronomers propose new theory for observing far-off worlds
- This is not (just) another roundup of tech layoffs
- TechCrunch+ roundup: Optimizing dev teams, O-1A visa criteria, growth’s golden metric
- Armed with experience, insurtech MGAs are paving the way for insurtech 2.0
- New York Senate passes moratorium to ban carbon-based crypto mining
- Satechi’s USB-C slim dock is how the iMac shoulda been designed in the first place
| This Week in Apps: WWDC preview, hitting the Top Charts, Instagram’s AMBER Alerts Posted: 04 Jun 2022 11:45 AM PDT Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry continues to grow, with a record number of downloads and consumer spending across both the iOS and Google Play stores combined in 2021, according to the latest year-end reports. App Annie says global spending across iOS and Google Play is up to $135 billion in 2021, and that figure will likely be higher when its annual report, including third-party app stores in China, is released next year. Consumers also downloaded 10 billion more apps this year than in 2020, reaching nearly 140 billion in new installs, it found. Apps aren't just a way to pass idle hours — they're also a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus. In 2020, investors poured $73 billion in capital into mobile companies — a figure that was up 27% year-over-year. 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. Do you want This Week in Apps in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here: techcrunch.com/newsletters Top StoriesWWDC 2022 PreviewIt’s that time again. Google I/O has come and gone, which means it’s now WWDC season. Apple’s big developer conference is back this year as a hybrid event with invites sent to some developers (and press), and a keynote that airs Monday, June 6 at 10 a.m. PT. Amid the possibility of new Macs (or maybe even the rumored AR headset?), app developers are most interested in the coming updates to Apple’s development platforms and what’s ahead for its mobile operating systems, including the big new release of iOS 16. Thanks to leaks largely from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, iOS 16 — code-named “Sydney” — could be a fairly big upgrade. Rumored changes include an updated lockscreen that features the Today View widgets, perhaps — more real estate for app developers to capture users’ attention — as well as the chance that an iPhone 14/iOS 16 combo will include an always-on display. Other updates could see first-party apps like Messages and Health getting updates, the former with enhancements to its audio features, the leaks claim. Elsewhere, we’re expecting multitasking improvements for iPadOS, plus updates to macOS, watchOS and tvOS, including other first-party app updates (Settings, Mail, Safari, Podcasts and Notes, potentially), new watch faces and more. If Apple wanted to surprise us, it could announce the rumored homeOS or its smartglasses, but for the time being, we’re not betting on those releases. Daily downloads to reach top of the App Store have increased 37% since 2019 Image Credits: Sensor Tower New analysis indicates it's gotten harder to get an app to the top of the App Store, in terms of downloads, over the past several years. According to new data from app intelligence firm Sensor Tower, the number of downloads needed for an app to break into the No. 1 position on Apple's iPhone App Store in the U.S. has climbed by 37% since 2019. Specifically, it estimates an app now requires approximately 156,000 downloads on a given day to hit the top spot on the U.S. App Store, up from 114,000 daily downloads back in 2019. Meanwhile, Android apps only need 56,000 daily downloads, down from 83,000 in 2019.  Image Credits: Sensor Tower Of course, developers know that downloads alone don't move an app to the top of the charts. It's only one of several factors that Apple's ranking algorithm takes into account for managing its Top Charts. Still, it’s an interesting metric to track as it does matter — and Sensor Tower has done the work to analyze the median needed per marketplace, by categories, and even among select markets. You can read our write-up here. Weekly NewsPlatforms: Apple
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| Nuance? In this startup market? Posted: 04 Jun 2022 11:10 AM PDT Welcome to Startups Weekly, a fresh human-first take on this week's startup news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. From black swan memos and heart-to-hearts to not-so-subtle emails asking for on-the-record confirmations that your startup does, indeed, have revenue, investors have a lot to say about the downturn. Yet, it's a quieter and more realistic truth that has landed my attention as of late: For diverse founders, the downturn is nothing new. Some investors, largely those who focus on backing historically overlooked founders, say that the crackdown on tech companies isn't impacting diverse founders as harshly as their overly funded, homogeneous counterparts because of pre-existing biases. All Raise CEO Mandela SH Dixon, who joined the Equity podcast fresh off of her annual summit, told TechCrunch that women and racially diverse investors, founders and operators don't have the "doom-and-gloom mentality because we are so used to doing more with less." "We are so used to not having access to this influx of capital that we have already adjusted and built muscles and capacity to weather a lot of storms that more privileged founders who have like this never-ending flow of capital and access to advice and insider information" haven’t had to deal with, she said. "We as women, and as women of color, have a long history of weathering storms, so this isn’t new to us." Dixon's belief — that minority founders may be more prepared for a pullback because they were already experiencing one — feels both spot-on and nuanced. Yes, diverse founders still receive disproportionately less venture capital financing than their homogeneous counterparts, making them smarter with their money. We have reams of studies spanning years that show that women and diverse teams can be more capital-efficient. At the same time, if even the small dollars heading their way are at risk, won't the industry slide further and further from a more equitable spot? For the rest of my thoughts on this topic, check out my TechCrunch+ column: "For diverse founders, a downturn is nothing new." In the rest of this newsletter, we'll talk about the myth of the moniker that is the girl boss, a nuance about all these layoffs and a deal that may have flown under your radar this week. As always, you can support me by forwarding this newsletter to a friend or following me on Twitter or subscribing to my blog. Deal of the weekOn Equity this week, we spoke about a venture-backed startup that has attracted even more capital to make maps mainstream. Felt, co-founded by Sam Hashemi and Can Duruk, allows users to build a map with datasets integrated into it and to work with each other to showcase impact in a less static way than your average Google maps query. Here's why it's important: The co-founders cited proven business models from Figma and Notion, both valued in the billions, as reason to believe in their work. The aforementioned companies both succeeded in rolling out to users for personal use, then pivoting to the enterprise, a playbook that Felt wants to follow (and that VCs can certainly speak the language of).
 Image Credits: Felt How the myth of the “girlboss” harms emerging women in techIf there's one story you read this weekend, make it this one. My colleagues Anita Ramaswamy and Amanda Silberling wrote about the myth of the girlboss and how it impacts women in tech. They explore how "once a vaguely aspirational term of praise reserved only for affluent white women, the moniker now reflects the maddening contradiction of workplace feminism: We know that it's not enough to just be a woman in power, and that what we do with that power matters far more than simply wielding it." Here's why it's important: The story puts into words a lot of the irony, emotion and impact of why this term frustrated so many people. Here are two excerpts that stand out:
And, this, from Sruti Bharat, who most recently worked as interim CEO at All Raise.
 Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch About all these layoffsI know, I know. There was a lot of layoff news last month and June is starting no differently. This week, we wrote about layoffs at IRL, SWVL, PolicyGenius, Loom, Gemini and Carbon Health. Here's why it's important: At this point, it still feels newsworthy to report on layoffs of venture-backed startups regardless of if they're impacting 10% or 50% of staff. I don't want to get in the game of deciding what number of people need to lose jobs for it to be relevant, but I also realize it's going to be hard to cover every single workforce reduction. One nuance that I want to remind everyone, but mostly myself, of is that there’s the layoffs that happen due to market uncertainty, and there’s the layoffs that happen due to the ability to cite market uncertainty. Questions and reasoning matter a lot, and the "no comment" speaks volumes.
 Image Credits: Joey Gannon (opens in a new window) / Flickr (opens in a new window) under a CC BY-SA 2.0 (opens in a new window) license. (Image has been modified) Across the week
Seen on TechCrunch
Seen on TechCrunch+
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| The battle for BNPL buyers and other TC news Posted: 04 Jun 2022 10:00 AM PDT Welcome back to The TechCrunch Podcast where you'll hear everything you need to know about the week's top stories in tech from the people who wrote them. This week we talk with Mary Ann Azevedo about two fintech giants, Affirm and Stripe, partnering up and what that means for competitors and Brian Heater comes on to preview next week's Apple Worldwide Developer Conference. As always, you'll get a rundown of the week's top news on TechCrunch. Articles from the episode:
Other news from the week: |
| The 2022 Bentley Flying Spur Hybrid is a shaky step towards a luxurious EV future Posted: 04 Jun 2022 07:00 AM PDT Bentley is engaged in a never-ending battle to balance classic luxury coach-building and modern automobile manufacturing. The luxury automaker not only has to keep up with changing technology, consumer taste and industry standards, it must also consistently deliver the old world-inspired sophistication that its known for. The automotive industry’s move towards electrification adds another challenge — one Bentley is also taking on with its Beyond 100 initiative to become a fully electric brand by 2030 and electrified versions of all its products on offer by 2023. Bentley first tested the electrified waters in 2019 with the hybrid version of the Bentayga SUV. Now it’s time for the Flying Spur, a full-size luxury sedan that has historically been paired with either a decadent W12 engine or a spirited V8. The automaker swapped in a V6-centric hybrid powertrain in an effort to prove that a Bentley is more than just a boisterous power plant. The upshot: the Bentley Flying Spur Hybrid is an uncharacteristic bump in the rocky road towards the future. Nuts and bolts Image Credits: Alex Kalogianni Beneath the bonnet of the Bentley Flying Spur Hybrid is the first V6 to be found in a Bentley sedan in 64 years, specifically a 2.9-liter twin-turbo power plant that gins up 410 horsepower on its own. This is paired with a 134-horsepower electric motor that sits between the engine and the 8-speed dual-clutch automatic transmission. With everything working in unison, the Flying Spur Hybrid boasts an output of 536 horsepower and 553 pound-feet of torque, sending it to all four wheels and leaping from 0 to 60 in 4.1 seconds. This is just a tenth of a second slower than the V8, for those keeping score. To put this in perspective, the W12 Flying Spur can muster up 626 horsepower and sprint to 60 mph in 3.7 seconds. It can also sail to 207 mph, while the 542-horsepower V8 can top out at 198 mph. The new hybrid is limited to 177 mph. All of this is academic for those who live sans a handy unrestricted stretch of autobahn, but it does collectively paint a picture of a car struggling to meet an established standard, not exceed expectations. Batteries and modes Image Credits: Alex Kalogianni Along with the e-motor, new components include an 18.0-kWh battery and a level 2 J1772 charging port, which Bentley states can be topped up in two and a half hours. It’s good for about 21 miles of all-electric cruising and gives the Flying Spur a solid 46 combined MPGe, a far cry from its other, thirstier iterations. The extra port and the “Hybrid” badging are the only things that betray that this Flying Spur differs from any other. Like other Bentley vehicles, there is a selection of modes that influence driving dynamics, determining the gentleness or sportiness of various systems. With the new hybrid setup, a new, separate set of modes are added for drivers to adjust the behavior of the powertrain: EV Drive, Hybrid and Hold. The Flying Spur Hybrid puts its best foot forward at start-up, defaulting to EV Drive. It’s the quiet, gliding hint of what an all-electric Bentley will feel like once it arrives. Hybrid mode predictably flicks between systems, depending on driver behavior and conditions, but also through route optimization thanks to a link between this system and the on-board navigation. Punch in a route and the Flying Spur will determine the most efficient segments to use its remaining charge. Hold mode will limit battery use, though it won’t discontinue it altogether. It will primarily utilize the V6, but will engage the e-motor for extra boost. This is also the default setting when in Sport driving mode. Speaking of driving, some notable sacrifices were made to facilitate all the new hybrid hardware. Rear-wheel steering and a 48-volt anti-roll system can be found on the V8 and W12 Flying Spurs. These systems not only provide more balance and stability for comfortable cruising, but assist in altering the dynamics of the healthy-sized sedan when engaged in speedy and sporty jaunts. Luxury accommodations Image Credits: Alex Kalogianni Within the cabin, the tech matches that found in the rest of the Flying Spur lineup as well as the Continental GT Coupe: a 12.3-inch digital touchscreen that tumbles away when not needed to reveal three analog gauges, an all-digital gauge cluster and a head-up display are all present. They’ve been updated with additional graphics to monitor battery usage, remaining charge and regeneration, with the gauge cluster specifically updated to show powertrain behavior in real time. Battery status is one of the many things that can be tracked away from the Flying Spur, thanks to connected car services that link to the car via a smartphone app. Along with the current charge, the app allows users to schedule charging times and receive charge time estimates. It also logs trip data that includes average fuel consumption, allowing for more informed planning on future journeys. The cabin can also be remotely primed ahead of arrival, so it can be warmed or cooled, depending on the current climate. What hasn’t changed is Bentley’s masterful interior craftsmanship. Like an indulgent feast, the Flying Spur is a sensational delight with soft leather seats, open pore Koa wood accents, metal diamond-cut knurled knobs, and a laundry list of other intricate details. It’s fair to say Bentley has the luxury side of things properly nailed down at this point, though this doesn’t yet seem to be the case when it comes to electrification. The UX Image Credits: Alex Kalogianni Defaulting to EV mode upon start-up is a clever showcase of the Flying Spur Hybrid’s best attributes. Relatively silent and incredibly gentle, the electrified Bentley feels as if this is what it was meant for all along. Combine this with the cabin’s substantial sound dampening and the experience is almost frightening at times, and it takes a split second for your senses to remember it’s all working as intended and that nothing has switched off. Passengers are treated to the sensation of wafting on a quiet, luxurious cloud through town, and though this may be the peak Bentley experience from the rear seats, it’s a different story from behind the wheel. While the temptation of plowing full steam ahead in a W12 version or taking a spirited jaunt with the V8 is ever present, the Flying Spur is a car meant to be driven in comfort for most of its operation. Effortless acceleration, seamless gear shifts and cushiony braking has been the name of the game in that regard, and they’ve all been altered in this iteration of the Spur.  Image Credits: Alex Kalogianni Bentley’s “Bentley” mode is the automatic catch-all setting that changes depending on the driver’s behavior: tread lightly and it will behave in comfort mode, but start getting feisty, and it will switch things over to sport. Generally, these affect the steering tightness, damper rigidity, and also the input speeds for throttle and braking. These three settings now have to contend with whichever drivetrain setting a driver wishes to use, and this begins to complicate things. By default, the throttle has a small input delay that isn’t uncommon in luxury-oriented vehicles to mitigate jerky hops forward. It works fine in E-mode when at low speeds but operating solely on the electric motor has its limitations. Any desire to really get a move on requires the activation of the V6. In fact, trying to customize only the throttle response necessitates sport mode. All of this effectively breaks the spell the all-electric mode has cast. Traditionally, this is where the satisfactory grunt of either of the other engines declares its presence, ready for duty, but the V6 doesn’t come to life in hardly the same way. The additional sound baffling further diminishes it in a disappointing way. Apart from the sound, the Flying Spur is seamless when it flips from battery to engine power, and once it’s up to speed, it coasts unmistakably as a Bentley. Once it’s time to slow things down, the newly implemented regenerative braking gives the Flying Spur a strange “hop” right at the end, making it difficult to finesse a smooth halt. All told, from start to finish, the core luxury experience is compromised by the inclusion of the hybrid system. Things are more familiar in sport mode. With the V6 always engaged, most of the new quirks are diminished. Braking still suffers, but throttle and steering are as sharp as ever. The extra battery juice makes up for the smaller engine’s shortcomings, though it’s preciously finite, and it takes a long time in “hold” to recoup a mile’s worth of range. Losing the rear steering doesn’t sting so much as the loss of the anti-roll system does, which certainly helped mitigate the Flying Spur’s heft in the past when taking it around corners.  Image Credits: Alex Kalogianni Take all of the above with a very refined grain of salt. We’re still talking about a Bentley here, and it still does everything in a comparatively stellar fashion relative to most vehicles out there. But when stacking it against other Bentleys, the Flying Spur Hybrid stumbles a bit too often to be top of the line. The Bentley Flying Spur Hybrid sets itself apart from its other iterations by being the most fuel efficient version literally by miles. Its 21-or-so miles of electric range isn’t much on its own but paired with the V6, it can go the distance, so long as it’s kept regularly charged at home. Bentley is kind enough to throw in a charging unit with the roughly $210,000 purchase, so buyers don’t need not deign to visit the local community charging station. Compromising the performance of the Flying Spur’s luxury characteristics feels like a necessary growing pain in light of Bentley’s greater mission. In context, this will feel like an important step to reach the promises of full electric luxury. In the present, the Bentley Flying Spur Hybrid fumbles between doing what it does best and what it’s doing for the first time, resulting in a rare Bentley that falters in its execution. This car’s all electric mode is a tantalizing morsel of what’s to come, it’s just a shame that the taste is so fleeting. |
| Perceptron: Robots that feel pain and AI that predicts soccer players’ movements Posted: 04 Jun 2022 06:30 AM PDT 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, Perceptron (previously Deep Science), 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 week in AI, a team of engineers at the University of Glasgow developed “artificial skin” that can learn to experience and react to simulated pain. Elsewhere, researchers at DeepMind developed a machine learning system that predicts where soccer players will run on a field, while groups from The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) and Tsinghua University created algorithms that can generate realistic photos — and even videos — of human models. According to a press release, the Glasgow team’s artificial skin leveraged a new type of processing system based on “synaptic transistors” designed to mimic the brain’s neural pathways. The transistors, made from zinc-oxide nanowires printed onto the surface of a flexible plastic, connected to a skin sensor that registered changes in electrical resistance.  Image Credits: University of Glasgow While artificial skin has been attempted before, the team claims that their design differed in that it used a circuit built into the system to act as an “artificial synapse” — reducing input to a spike in voltage. This sped up processing and allowed the team to “teach” the skin how to respond to simulated pain by setting a threshold of input voltage whose frequency varied according to the level of pressure applied to the skin. The team sees the skin being used in robotics, where it could, for example, prevent a robotic arm from coming into contact with dangerously high temperatures. Tangentially related to robotics, DeepMind claims to have developed an AI model, Graph Imputer, that can anticipate where soccer players will move using camera recordings of only a subset of players. More impressively, the system can make predictions about players beyond the view of the camera, allowing it to track the position of most — if not all — players on the field fairly accurately.  Image Credits: DeepMind Graph Imputer isn’t perfect. But the DeepMind researchers say it could be used for applications like modeling pitch control, or the probability that a player could control the ball assuming it’s at a given location. (Several leading Premier League teams use pitch control models during games, as well as in pre-match and post-match analysis.) Beyond football and other sports analytics, DeepMind expects the techniques behind Graph Imputer will be applicable to domains like pedestrian modeling on roads and crowd modeling in stadiums. While artificial skin and movement-predicting systems are impressive, to be sure, photo- and video-generating systems are progressing at a fast clip. Obviously, there’s high-profile works like OpenAI’s Dall-E 2 and Google’s Imagen. But take a look at Text2Human, developed by CUHK’s Multimedia Lab, which can translate a caption like “the lady wears a short-sleeve T-shirt with pure color pattern, and a short and denim skirt” into a picture of a person who doesn’t actually exist. In partnership with the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, Tsinghua University created an even more ambitious model called CogVideo that can generate video clips from text (e.g., “a man in skiing,” “a lion is drinking water”). The clips are rife with artifacts and other visual weirdness, but considering they’re of completely fictional scenes, it’s hard to criticize too harshly. Machine learning is often used in drug discovery, where the near-infinite variety of molecules that appear in literature and theory need to be sorted through and characterized in order to find potentially beneficial effects. But the volume of data is so large, and the cost of false positives potentially so high (it’s costly and time-consuming to chase leads) that even 99% accuracy isn’t good enough. That’s especially the case with unlabeled molecular data, by far the bulk of what’s out there (compared with molecules that have been manually studied over the years).  Image Credits: CMU CMU researchers have been working to create a model to sort through billions of uncharacterized molecules by training it to make sense of them without any extra information. It does this by making slight changes to the (virtual) molecule’s structure, like hiding an atom or removing a bond, and observing how the resulting molecule changes. This lets its learn intrinsic properties of how such molecules are formed and behave — and led to it outperforming other AI models in identifying toxic chemicals in a test database. Molecular signatures are also key in diagnosing disease — two patients may present similar symptoms, but careful analysis of their lab results shows that they have very different conditions. Of course that’s standard doctoring practice, but as data from multiple tests and analyses piles up, it gets difficult to track all the correlations. The Technical University of Munich is working on a sort of clinical meta-algorithm that integrates multiple data sources (including other algorithms) to differentiate between certain liver diseases with similar presentations. While such models won’t replace doctors, they will continue to help wrangle the growing volumes of data that even specialists may not have the time or expertise to interpret. |
| For mental health startups, happiness is in niches Posted: 04 Jun 2022 06:00 AM PDT Welcome to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It's inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. Last April, Alex and I reported CB Insights data showing that venture investment into mental health startups had dropped sharply in Q1 2022 compared to the preceding quarter. But in the last couple of weeks, I have heard about several venture-backed deals into the subsector of health tech. They got me curious: In which areas of mental health are VC firms still willing to invest? Let’s explore. — Anna Mood swingsThe more the pandemic seemed to subside, the less venture capital investors seemed willing to commit to companies and sectors that had initially benefited from strong tailwinds when most of the world started staying at home. On public markets, the pandemic trade is over, with former darlings like Peloton and Zoom experiencing whiplash. Similarly, we saw a net decline in private investment into telehealth and mental health startups. Market corrections after a period of hype are part of the investing game. But it would be hard to argue that mental health needs have decreased. According to the World Health Organization, incidents of anxiety and depression increased by 25% in the first year of COVID-19. Just because we are now hopefully leaving the worst of the pandemic behind us doesn’t mean everyone is suddenly feeling better — which is why a few recent funding rounds in the mental health space raised my attention. Of course, a few mental health–related deals are anecdata. And since we are talking mostly about early-stage deals, this doesn’t mean that the investment decline has been reversed. In aggregate, we will only have more clarity once Q2 numbers are available. But what’s interesting is that these startups hint at some novel approaches to mental health in which VCs are still willing to invest. Or, dare I say, show us where their mind is at. No longer underserved?VCs might have no headspace left for the next Headspace. The broad-ranging mental health-focused platform and its most direct competitor, Calm, seem to have captured most of the mainstream market for bite-sized mindfulness. But there are still gaps in the mental health market to address — at least, some startups think so. |
| A downturn is nothing new for diverse founders Posted: 04 Jun 2022 04:00 AM PDT From black swan memos and heart-to-hearts to not-so-subtle emails asking for on-the-record confirmations that your startup does, indeed, have revenue, investors have a lot to say about the downturn. Yet, it's a quieter and more realistic truth that has landed my attention as of late: For diverse founders, the downturn is nothing new. Some investors, largely those who focus on backing historically overlooked founders, say that the crackdown on tech companies isn't impacting diverse founders as harshly as their overly funded, homogeneous counterparts because of pre-existing biases. All Raise CEO Mandela SH Dixon, who joined the Equity podcast fresh off of her annual summit, told TechCrunch that women and racially diverse investors, founders and operators don't have the "doom-and-gloom mentality because we are so used to doing more with less." "We are so used to not having access to this influx of capital that we have already adjusted and built muscles and capacity to weather a lot of storms that more privileged founders who have like this never-ending flow of capital and access to advice and insider information" haven’t had to deal with, she said. "We as women, and as women of color, have a long history of weathering storms, so this isn’t new to us." Dixon's belief — that minority founders may be more prepared for a pullback because they were already experiencing one — feels both spot-on and nuanced. Yes, diverse founders still receive disproportionately less venture capital financing than their homogeneous counterparts, making them smarter with their money. We have reams of studies spanning years that show that women and diverse teams can be more capital-efficient. At the same time, if even the small dollars heading their way are at risk, won't the industry slide further and further from a more equitable spot? |
| Google disables RCS ads in India following rampant spam by businesses Posted: 04 Jun 2022 02:21 AM PDT Google has halted businesses from using RCS for promotion in India, the company’s biggest market by users, following reports of rampant spam by some firms in a setback for the standard that the company is hoping to help become the future of SMS messaging. Rich Communication Services, or RCS, is the collective effort of a number of industry players to supercharge the traditional SMS with modern features such as richer texts and end-to-end encryption. Google, Samsung and a number of other firms including telecom operators have rolled out support for RCS to hundreds of millions of users worldwide in recent years. Google said last month that RCS messaging in the Messages app for Android had amassed over 500 million monthly active users. At its developer conference last month, the company also urged that “every mobile operating system” (in a subtle jab at Apple) to support RCS, which is also aimed at helping businesses reach users in a more interactive way. The problem, however, is that scores of businesses in India including top banks and other lending firms have been abusing the feature to send unsolicited promotional materials to any individual’s phone number they can find in the country.
Several users began complaining about it on Twitter last month and it looks like their messages have reached Google. In a statement, Google acknowledged “some businesses are abusing our anti-spam policies to send promotional messages to users in India.” As a result of that, Google said it is disabling the feature as it “works with the industry to improve the experience for users.” |
| Lots of sellers, fewer buyers, in markets for startup shares Posted: 04 Jun 2022 12:25 AM PDT There’s a lot of confusion in the private market right now. On the one hand, venture firms are still announcing new funds on a daily basis. They’re hosting catered sushi brunches. On the other, layoffs abound, and titans of industry sound worried. JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon sees an economic hurricane ahead. For his part, Elon Musk reportedly told Tesla executives this week he has a “super bad feeling” about the economy. He’s also laying off 10% of Tesla’s salaried employees, he told them in a brief email this morning. You could hardly blame people looking to sell their startup shares, or those looking to buy them, for feeling unsure about where to meet on price, and that’s exactly what’s happening right now, says secondary market experts like CEO Kelly Rodriques of Forge Global. In fact, Rodriques says, on Forge, a trading platform for private firms’ shares that went public earlier this year via a SPAC, the “supply of private shares right now is higher than it’s ever been in history — by a lot.” Rodriques calls it “price disequilibrium. There’s a ton of seller interest, but the range between seller and buyer expectations is too wide for a lot of trading to happen.”  Image Credits: Forge Global He’s not alone in seeing this pattern. Justin Fishner-Wolfson separately says the most remarkable thing about the secondary market right now is how stagnant it is. Fishner-Wolfson cofounded and oversees 137 Ventures, a San Francisco-based firm that offers loans to founders, executives, early employees and other large shareholders of private, high-growth tech companies in exchange for the option to convert their debt into equity, and he notes that valuations in the private markets are “slow to change” because “people are waiting to see what things are actually worth.” You can hardly blame them, he suggests; the signals all around appear haywire. “If you look at the public markets, you’ve got even very large companies moving 5 to 10 percentage points a day, without specific news. Like, this isn’t an earnings call that’s driving the price.” Given that “people don’t really know what things are worth on any given day,” he says, “in the private markets, things are mostly just slowing down while people wait to see whether or not pricing is something [they] could sort of approximate today, whether or not it gets worse from here, [or] whether or not it gets better from here.” Some sellers are plowing forward at prices they might not like out of necessity. “The only transactions you’re seeing are the ones that people desperately need to have happen,” says Fishner-Wolfson. It’s true of companies; it’s also true of individuals, he says. “Companies with strong balance sheets aren’t going to raise money in this environment; they’re going to try to put off [a new round] as long as they can.” He sees the same with founders and executives. “If your company is doing really well, why do you want to take a price that’s not a great price, or at least a reasonable price, if you can wait a few quarters, see how things settle out, and get a better deal later?” There is some good news for sellers, says Rodriques. For one thing, Rodriques says he’s seeing signs that sellers are growing “more realistic” about their expectations, which should bring more buyers — who want the biggest discount possible — to the table. He also says that while prices appear to be falling almost uniformly, companies that were venture-backed and went public somewhat recently are still trading at premiums to where they were valued in their last private funding rounds. Specifically, according to Forge, they’re trading at roughly a 24% premium to their pre-IPO valuations. That’s way down from the fourth quarter, when companies on Forge were trading at a 58% premium over their last private round, but that cushion is keeping buyers, and sellers, in the market who might disappear otherwise. Rodriques points, for example, to the buy-now-pay-later startup Affirm, a company that Forge had previously tracked and traded on its platform and which went public through a traditional IPO process early last year. Currently, Affirm’s shares are down 56% from their IPO price, but they’re up more than 70% from the value that Affirm’s private market investors assigned them during the outfit’s last, pre-IPO round, meaning its private market investors are still very much in the black. How much that really means is, of course, a question mark. Asked if he would himself buy Affirm’s shares at their current price, Rodriques talks at length about Affirm being a ” highly sought after businesses that has a significant sustainable gross margin profile and a growth rate.” “You can say, ‘Well, it’s not worth 28 times [revenue].’ And maybe [the shares] don’t go back up to 28 times [revenue], maybe they settle in at 20,” he continues. “But people are still going to pay premiums — good market or bad market — for a company that’s throwing up organic growth of 50% to 100% a year and gross margins in the 70% to 90% [range].” Asked again: would he buy it right now or would he wait, Rodriques says he’s not so unlike his own customers. “Am I a buyer of Affirm right now? I’m like everybody else. I’m waiting and watching. But I think it’s a great company, and I would invest in it. I’m wanting to see where the market shakes out.”
 Image Credits: Forge Global |
| KQED launches free media literacy training course Posted: 03 Jun 2022 04:25 PM PDT In a push-back against people who can’t tell a real news source from an amphetamine-laden hamster with a Tumblr blog, San Francisco public radio station KQED this week announced it is launching a free workshop and self-paced online course to help increase media literacy. The resources are aimed at K-12 educators and other folks who are involved with teaching media, but are freely available to other fans of media nerdery and enemies of fake news alike. Completing the course results in a PBS Media Literacy Educator micro-credential, which is a step toward getting the full Media Literacy Educator Certificaton, which is a set of eight micro-credentials spanning a range of media creation and analysis topics. Personally, I believe one module in particular — “Analyzing Media Messages: Bias, Motivation and Production Choices” — should be mandatory for everyone before they go anywhere near a Twitter or Facebook account, but perhaps that’s just the pinko leftie communist mainstream media journalist in me speaking… If you’re curious or just want to brush up on your media literacy for the weekend — here’s your chance! |
| Posted: 03 Jun 2022 03:05 PM PDT To get a roundup of TechCrunch's biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Happy Fri-yay the 3rd of June 2022. Or, as this cursed pandemic is still doing its thing, perhaps it's March 824, 2020, who knows. Whatever is happening in your world, we hope that you are experiencing peace and that you know the source of peace. Can you tell we've been reading some hippie literature recently? Those folks do seem pretty peaceful — maybe they're onto something. Happy weekend and catch you on the flip side! — Haje and Christine The TechCrunch Top 3
Startups and VCSometimes, you come across companies that speak with a forked tongue. I'm not saying that's the case for Blackbaud's self-proclaimed 'social good' cloud provider business, but it's definitely a little whiffy to have had the National Rifle Association as a customer since 1997, as Devin reports. A propos calling bovine excrement when we see it; the A team (Amanda and Anita, obvz, that other A-team has a lot less finger-on-the-pulse cred) argue that perhaps we should just cool it with the 'girlboss' moniker. But wait, there is more:
Black Founders Matter presses VCs to pledge commitment to diversity Image Credits: Marceau Michel In an interview with new TechCrunch reporter Dominic-Madori Davis, Marceau Michel, founder and managing partner of Black Founders Matter VC Fund, spoke about a new initiative to boost diversity in tech. "This is about changing the power dynamics in venture capital," he told TechCrunch. "You have to start at who is left behind and bring them to the starting line." Under the 25 by 25 Pledge, investors would promise to direct 25% of their funds to BIPOC women founders by 2025. "If a fund does not want to do this pledge … the question is why," Michel said. "The status quo just doesn't hold up anymore. Keeping people that look like us out of the picture just doesn't work." (TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.) Big Tech Inc.Microsoft said it thwarted a plan by a Lebanon-based hacking group, believed to be working with Iranian intelligence, to allegedly target Israeli organizations. The group, called Polonium, was creating Microsoft OneDrive accounts and then using them to attempt the hacks. Amazon's long-time consumer division CEO Dave Clark said he was stepping down from the company in July after 23 years with the company. It's unclear why he is leaving after having only taken on the role two years ago, but Clark did tweet that "it's time for me to build again." In new features news:
You may have missed these gems from yesterday, but Coinbase surprised us by announcing that it was freezing its hiring process. Initial reports said the company was rescinding offers to new employees that were already accepted, but those people had not yet started. Now we are getting word that their jobs are safe. Don't worry, we are on it and will hopefully be able to clear this up soon. Next up, General Motors' autonomous vehicle unit Cruise is now able to charge for driverless robotaxi rides in San Francisco. And we take a look at a report showing just how hard it is to get an app at the top of the App Store. |
| Agtech robotics firm FarmWise just raised another $45 million Posted: 03 Jun 2022 02:48 PM PDT The rest of the startup universe may be struggling to bring in funds, but it's still a good time to get a robotic raise. Agtech is high on that list. The median age of farmers is 55 years old in the United States, and finding human help is increasingly more difficult of late. FarmWise has been at this for a while, deploying its autonomous weeding robotics at farms in California and Arizona for the last few years. The Central Californian company says its robots have logged 15,000 commercial hours on vegetable farms, all told, capturing some 450 million scans of crops for its database. Today the company announced a $45 million raise, led by Fall Line Capital and Middleland Capital. GV, Taylor Farms, Calibrate Ventures, Playground Global, SVG Ventures and Wilbur Ellis also got in on the Series B, which brings FarmWise's total equity raise to $65 million, to date. The funding will go toward accelerating the firm's R&D and rollout of its existing product. “We started FarmWise with the conviction that farmers should be supplied with cost-effective, sustainable solutions to feed a growing world, and artificial intelligence is the ideal technology to make this a reality,” co-founder and CEO, Sebastien Boyer said in a release. “With rising costs in the agricultural industry, we’re continuing to expand our technology to work with many more farmers.” The round also finds Fall Line Capital co-founder and managing director, Clay Mitchell, joining its board. |
| To better manage cybersecurity risk, extend zero-trust principles to third parties Posted: 03 Jun 2022 02:43 PM PDT Today's cybersecurity landscape requires an agile and data-driven risk management strategy to deal with the ever-expanding third-party attack surface. When a business outsources services by sharing data and network access, it inherits the cyber risk from its vendors across their people, processes, technolog, and that vendor's third parties. The typical enterprise works with an average of nearly 5,900 third parties, which means companies face a huge amount of risk, regardless of how well they cover their own bases. For instance, 81 individual third-party incidents led to more than 200 publicly disclosed breaches and thousands of ripple-effect breaches throughout 2021, according to a report by Black Kite. The current outside-in approach to managing third-party risk is inadequate. Instead, the industry needs to move toward a new third-party risk management approach by initiating conversations beyond outside-in assessments. Specifically, businesses should establish zero-trust principles for all vendors, assess risk across external and internal assets with inside-out assessments and measure cyber risk in real time.
The zero-trust principle of “Never trust, always verify” has been adopted widely to manage internal environments, and organizations should extend this notion to third-party risk management. To combat this, enterprises need to consider vendors as subsets of their business. The looming threatThe amount of data and business-critical information one enterprise shares with its vendors is staggering. For instance, a company might share intellectual property with manufacturing partners, store personal health information (PHI) on cloud servers to share with insurers and allow marketing agencies access to customer data and personally identifiable information (PII). This is just the tip of the iceberg, and most businesses often don’t know how big the iceberg really is. In a survey conducted by Ponemon Institute, 51% of the companies surveyed said they do not assess the cyber risk posture of third parties before allowing them access to confidential information. What’s more, 63% of the companies surveyed said they do not have visibility into what data and system configurations vendors can access, why they have access to it, who has permissions and how the data is stored and shared. This massive network of businesses sharing information in real-time results in a vast attack surface that is becoming increasingly difficult to manage. To overcome this challenge, businesses use cybersecurity initiatives such as questionnaire-based onboarding surveys and security rating services in their third-party risk management strategies. While these tools have definite use cases, they also have severe limitations. Cybersecurity rating services are a quick and economical approach to third-party risk assessments. Their simplicity — representing a vendor's cyber risk as a score, like credit ratings in financial services — make them a popular choice, despite the limitations. |
| SEO tool Ahrefs invests $60M in building creator-friendly search engine, ‘Yep’ Posted: 03 Jun 2022 02:11 PM PDT Well, this is straight from the desk of “didn’t see that coming,” but search engine toolkit company Ahrefs just told me they’ve been working on their very own search engine on the sly, plowing $60 million of resources into its own search engine, called Yep. It’s a unique proposition, running its own search index, rather than relying on APIs from Google or Bing. As for the name? I dunno; Yep seems pretty daft to me, but I guess at least the name is one character shorter than Bing, the other major search engine I’ll only ever use by accident. Name aside, Yep is taking a fresh new path through the world of internet advertising, claiming that it’s giving 90% of its ad revenues to content creators. The pitch is pretty elegant: “Let's say that the biggest search engine in the world makes $100B a year. Now, imagine if they gave $90B to content creators and publishers,” the company paints a picture of the future it wants to live in. “Wikipedia would probably earn a few billion dollars a year from its content. They'd be able to stop asking for donations and start paying the people who polish their articles a decent salary.” It’s an impressively quixotic windmill to fight for the bootstrapped company Ahrefs. Its CEO sheds some light on why this makes sense to him: "Creators who make search results possible deserve to receive payments for their work. We saw how YouTube's profit-sharing model made the whole video-making industry thrive. Splitting advertising profits 90/10 with content authors, we want to give a push towards treating talent fairly in the search industry," says Ahrefs founder and CEO, Dmytro Gerasymenko, and continues to make the point that his search engine is meant to be heavily privacy-forward. "We do save certain data on searches, but never in a personally identifiable way. For example, we will track how many times a word is searched for and the position of the link getting the most clicks. But we won't create your profile for targeted advertising." Perhaps it sounds a little idealistic, but damn it, that’s what made me excited about Yep in the first place. It represents the faintest of echoes from a web more innocent and more hopeful than the social-media poisoned cesspool of chaos and fake news we often find ourselves in today. I was a little surprised to learn that the company decided to spin up its own data centers — it claims it has more than 1,000 servers already spun up, storing more than 100 petabytes of data. It’s an odd choice, given that cloud-based solutions are usually more flexible, but Gerasymenko has a plan for that too, claiming that they are much more expensive for such extensive infrastructure, with a goal of hundreds or thousands of high-end servers running under full load 24/7. Of course, this whole project didn’t start with a search engine — the company already had a huge dataset available from its day-to-day business. Ahrefs has been crawling and storing data about the web for 12 years to provide its customers with its core product: an SEO toolset. The search results are powered by its own crawler — AhrefsBot — which the company claims visits more than 8 billion web pages every 24 hours. The company claims the new search engine will be available in all countries and in most languages. So, er, $60 million without external investment? That’s a lot of dough — where did it all come from? The company explains that it re-invested its revenues from its paid subscriptions. The company claims it currently has $100 million worth of revenues per year from its more than 50,000 customers, and has shunned external investment so far. The company has 90 employees and is headquartered in Singapore. The search engine project has a team of 11 — including data scientists, backend engineers and front-end developers. Gerasymenko himself is playing an active role in building the search engine, the company tells me. |
| AI model’s insight helps astronomers propose new theory for observing far-off worlds Posted: 03 Jun 2022 01:53 PM PDT Machine learning models are increasingly augmenting human processes, either performing repetitious tasks faster or providing some systematic insight that helps put human knowledge in perspective. Astronomers at UC Berkeley were surprised to find both happen after modeling gravitational microlensing events, leading to a new unified theory for the phenomenon. Gravitational lensing occurs when light from far-off stars and other stellar objects bends around a nearer one directly between it and the observer, briefly giving a brighter — but distorted — view of the farther one. Depending on how the light bends (and what we know about the distant object), we can also learn a lot about the star, planet or system that the light is bending around. For example, a momentary spike in brightness suggests a planetary body transiting the line of sight, and this type of anomaly in the reading, called a “degeneracy” for some reason, has been used to spot thousands of exoplanets. Due to the limitations of observing them, it’s difficult to quantify these events and objects beyond a handful of basic notions like their mass. And degeneracies are generally considered to fall under two possibilities: that the distant light passed closer to either the star or the planet in a given system. Ambiguities are often reconciled with other observed data, such as that we know by other means that the planet is too small to cause the scale of distortion seen. UC Berkeley doctoral student Keming Zhang was looking into a way to quickly analyze and categorize such lensing events, as they appear in great number as we survey the sky more regularly and in greater detail. He and his colleagues trained a machine learning model on data from known gravity microlensing events with known causes and configurations, then set it free on a bunch of others less well quantified. The results were unexpected: in addition to deftly calculating when an observed event fell under one of the two main degeneracy types, it found many that didn’t. “The two previous theories of degeneracy deal with cases where the background star appears to pass close to the foreground star or the foreground planet. The AI algorithm showed us hundreds of examples from not only these two cases, but also situations where the star doesn't pass close to either the star or planet and cannot be explained by either previous theory,” said Zhang in a Berkeley news release. Now, this could very well have resulted from a badly tuned model or one that simply wasn’t confident enough in its own calculations. But Zhang seemed convinced that the AI had clocked something that human observers had systematically overlooked. As a result — and after some convincing, since a grad student questioning established doctrine is tolerated but perhaps not encouraged — they ended up proposing a new, “unified” theory of how degeneracy in these observations can be explained, of which the two known theories were simply the most common cases.  Diagram showing a simulation of a 3-lens degeneracy solution. Image Credits: Zhang et al They looked at two dozen recent papers observing microlensing events and found that astronomers had been mistakenly categorizing what they saw as one type or the other when the new theory fit the data better than both. “People were seeing these microlensing events, which actually were exhibiting this new degeneracy but just didn't realize it. It was really just the machine learning looking at thousands of events where it became impossible to miss,” said Scott Gaudi, an Ohio State University astronomy professor who co-authored the paper. To be clear, the AI didn’t formulate and propose the new theory — that was entirely down to the human intellects. But without the systematic and confident calculations of the AI, it’s likely the simplified, less correct theory would have persisted for many more years. Just as people learned to trust calculators and later computers, we are learning to trust some AI models to output an interesting truth clear of preconceptions and assumptions — that is, if we haven’t just coded our own preconceptions and assumptions into them. The new theory and description of the process leading up to it are described in a paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy. It’s probably not news to the astronomers among our readership (it was a pre-print last year) but the machine learning and general science wonks may cherish this interesting development. |
| This is not (just) another roundup of tech layoffs Posted: 03 Jun 2022 01:45 PM PDT After a month that saw nearly 16,000 tech workers lose their jobs, June is off to a similar tumultuous start. Startups across all sectors, from healthcare to enterprise SaaS to crypto, are laying off portions of staff and citing, seemingly, from the same notes: it's a tough market, a time of uncertainty, and a correction toward sustainability is needed. This week, we'll continue our round-up of layoffs in tech, but we're not stopping there; we extracted a few common themes from the workforce reductions, especially focusing on nuances that may be lost from headlines. To start, here are the companies leveraging layoffs this week:
Nuance of noteNo one wants to be in the unicorn clubDespite cuts happening across all stages, many of the recent layoffs have come from companies that, just one year ago, hit unicorn status. The list includes Cameo, IRL and Loom, and there are a couple of reasons as to why that may be. First, one year is a long time. And it feels even longer in a market that can't make up its mind. Nonetheless, Startups that were hitting growth last year may no longer be on the same trajectory, making growth into their current valuation a significant stretch. As a result, the one year mark could be showing up as a reminder to reflect, and unfortunately for employees, scale down to a more realistic spot. Second, being a unicorn is hard — even in a bull market. Richly valued startups do need to eventually deliver on hopeful value, some would believe, and capital doesn't necessarily ensure success. When you're a late-stage company, there are specific growing pains that come with the title, such as integration with acquisitions, handling a remote workforce and learning how to iterate when the business is no longer as nimble as it was when it was just two people in a dorm room. In the past, layoffs may have been put off by another round of funding, but now that follow-on funding isn't a given, layoffs are becoming more common. Third, many of the pandemic-born unicorns are actually just piñatas filled with expired candy. Hard stop. Layoffs should be treated as a worst case scenario, not a precautionCompanies like Coinbase, Tesla and IRL have enough runway to keep their staff employed during a tumultuous economic time and ongoing pandemic. But they cut costs anyway by letting go of their staff. "Courage is a decision, and we will choose courage," IRL CEO Abraham Shafi wrote in a company memo after laying off 25% of his staff. "Whatever we are facing today can't be any worse than the uncertainty we met at the beginning of the COVID 19 pandemic." Unfortunately, workers can't control getting laid off when their employer has enough money to retain them. And for those of us subject to the endlessly frustrating American healthcare system, losing your job also means medical instability for both you and your family. Let's stop pretending that COBRA isn't exorbitantly expensive. Meanwhile, Coinbase rescinded already accepted offers from a number of employees. According to a LinkedIn search, many of the rescinded employees were students who were soon to graduate with PhDs and bachelor's degrees alike. In those cases, a new hire may accept a job months before their start date, since they'll need to graduate before filling the role. Many soon-to-be graduates who accepted jobs at Coinbase turned down several other offers to work at the major crypto exchange, but now, they're stuck scrambling to find employment. This situation is even more dire for international students, who risk deportation if they can't find an employer to sponsor their visas. Layoffs are sadly an inevitable part of corporate life, especially in startups. But so often, it seems like they're caused by bad management choices that make it more difficult to keep paying staff. People make mistakes, but those mistakes can put innocent workers in situations of financial precarity, potential deportation and limited access to healthcare. So when layoffs are made as a precaution, or a correction to mitigate past mistakes and over-hiring, it's personal. |
| TechCrunch+ roundup: Optimizing dev teams, O-1A visa criteria, growth’s golden metric Posted: 03 Jun 2022 01:10 PM PDT All startups must grow, but as markets contract, conserving resources is a higher short-term priority. Crypto exchange Coinbase is in the headlines this morning after news broke that it is rescinding some candidates’ outstanding job offers. Yesterday, we reported that IRL, a social app, was laying off 25% of its staff a year after raising a $170 million Series A, even though it has enough cash to operate for another two years. I don’t have any insight into IRL or Coinbase’s financials, but I can say with certainty that these companies will have a harder time hiring talented employees from now on. Full TechCrunch+ articles are only available to members Tech isn’t like other industries: workers can explore uniquely personal interests while earning a sliver of equity in a potential unicorn. But they also have options. If you’ve ghosted someone after extending a verbal offer of employment, that’s going to be a consideration for future candidates. People talk! At this point, most tech workers are likely wondering when layoffs are coming to their company. To build trust and keep employees engaged, managers should optimize existing engineering resources, says Ammar Bandukwala, co-founder and CEO at Coder. “High-performing IT teams — which could deploy and push code to production faster than their peers — experienced 60 times fewer failures and recovered from them 168 times faster,” he writes in TechCrunch+. If you manage a software engineering team, I hope you’ll read and share. Have an excellent weekend, Walter Thompson How to improve retention, growth marketing's golden metric Image Credits: GOCMEN (opens in a new window) / Getty Images After helping someone prepare dinner, I was aghast when they informed me that the broccoli stalks I’d just tossed into the compost were excellent for making vegetable stock, as a pizza topping, or adding to a stir-fry. Jonathan Martinez’ latest TC+ article on growth marketing reminded me of this, since many companies are throwing away perfectly good data that can boost retention and conversion. “It's imperative to constantly analyze the sources driving growth at a detailed and bottom-of-funnel level,” he writes. 8 IT spending trends for the post-pandemic enterprise in 2022 Image Credits: TARIK KIZILKAYA (opens in a new window) / Getty Images Market research firm ETR contacted 1,200 IT leaders who oversee a yearly collective IT budget of approximately $570 billion to learn more about their planned spending over the coming year. Although year-over-year spending is projected to rise just 6.7%, “the need for experienced IT personnel has accelerated, and hiring demand in the space has reached the highest level we have ever seen,” writes Erik Bradley, ETR's chief analyst. What connects the stock market contraction to startup valuations? Image Credits: Matthias Kulka (opens in a new window) / Getty Images Without striking a gloomy note: tech layoffs are mounting, investors are urging their portfolio companies to hunker down, and founders are doing everything but casting spells to reduce their burn rate. “But are valuations really down?” asks Daniel Faloppa, founder of Equidam. “For all startups? If so, why, and what can we expect in the short and mid-term?” Pro-rata is easier to get than ever today, but investors are thinking twice Image Credits: Say-Cheese (opens in a new window) / Getty Images “Whenever pro-rata rights are involved, you can always smell some drama,” writes Rebecca Szkutak in her inaugural TechCrunch+ article. Early investors have reserved the right to maintain their stakes in startups that raise additional capital, but with the slowdown in venture funding, it’s unclear if they’ll want to do so. “The pro-rata allocation is becoming more easy for us to attain, and to get the whole thing,” said Eric Bahn, a co-founder and general partner at Hustle Fund. Pitch Deck Teardown: Encore’s $3M seed deck Image Credits: Encore (opens in a new window) Cloud-based software development platform Encore shared the pitch deck its founders used to raise a $3 million seed round with TechCrunch+. Using 24 slides, the deck identifies four fundamental problems with building modern software that Encore aims to solve while using non-technical language to explain its value proposition in detail. “There is a lot to love about Encore's deck: It simplifies a complex product story into a few easy-to-digest slides and shows why there's an opportunity in the market,” writes Haje Jan Kamps. This is the beginning of the unbundled database era Image Credits: miniseries (opens in a new window) / Getty Images As customers moved online over the past couple of years, enterprises saw the benefits of storing as much customer data as they can to improve their products and services. However, old-school relational databases run from server farms won’t be able to meet performance requirements for much longer. As businesses shift more operations to the cloud, their databases are now evolving as well, writes Ethan Batraski, a partner at Venrock. “A new category of cloud database companies is emerging, effectively deconstructing the traditional database monolith stack into core layered services — storage, compute, optimization, query planning, indexing, functions and more.” Dear Sophie: How do we qualify for each of the O-1A criteria? Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch Dear Sophie, Our startup will be sponsoring my co-founders and me for O-1A visas. How do we qualify for each of the O-1A criteria? — Extraordinary Entrepreneur VC funding for crypto projects fell in May, but many investors remain bullish Image Credits: seksan Mongkhonkhamsao (opens in a new window) / Getty Images Many boosters are calling this the start of “crypto winter,” but even as investments slowed down in May, bullish investors are still bringing their floaties and diving into the pool like it’s summertime. The amount of capital deployed into crypto is down in the short term, but it's still significantly higher than levels from a year ago: Investment in the space last month increased 89% to $4.22 billion from $2.23 billion in May 2021, reports Jacquelyn Melinek. “For investors like us, it's time to buy,” Stan Miroshnik, partner and co-founder of 10T Holdings, told Jacquelyn. “Valuations have come in and great companies are now available at a more reasonable price.” |
| Armed with experience, insurtech MGAs are paving the way for insurtech 2.0 Posted: 03 Jun 2022 01:04 PM PDT Just over five years ago, the insurance industry entered the crosshairs of the tech world. Despite serving as the backbone of global growth, insurance lagged the pace of technology adoption enjoyed by other industries. Entrepreneurs saw this as an opportunity to disrupt incumbents, and soon there were lofty claims that everything about the industry was about to change. With tech's embrace, people were about to soon “love their insurance!” Venture capitalists noticed, and startups closed large rounds of capital. Fast-forward to today, and it's safe to say that none of us have found an intimate connection with our insurers. That said, the industry is in a transformational moment as it races to keep pace with technology. Many like to refute the underlying disruption by pointing to public valuations of insurtech firms, some of which are down as much as 85%-90%. But we are experiencing a typical phenomenon that occurs in industries transformed by technology: Early challengers often lack appreciation for the complexities of the market and sometimes overpromise short-term visions.
We learned that it's hard to change a highly regulated industry with a disinterested customer base who rarely shops the competition. Now, a new crop of challengers is learning from their predecessors’ mistakes. As we enter "insurtech 2.0," the lessons learned are becoming the new best practices, and nowhere is this more evident than at the startups building an MGA (a managing general agent). The MGA (R)evolutionAn MGA is a hybrid between an insurance agency (policy sales) and insurance carrier (underwriting and assumption of the risk). MGAs started off during the U.S.’ frontier years. East coast carriers pursued the emerging westward market by granting remote agents unique underwriting and servicing authorities. In return for their added responsibilities, these MGAs received higher sales commissions from their carrier partners. When they arrived on the scene, insurtech challengers revived the dormant MGA structure to monetize their more scalable solutions. Founders pitched carriers a tech-forward relationship with the customer, focusing on: |
| New York Senate passes moratorium to ban carbon-based crypto mining Posted: 03 Jun 2022 12:43 PM PDT The New York Senate has passed a bill that bans crypto mining operations that use carbon-based fuel to power their facilities. The bill specifically is targeting proof-of-work mining, which is one of the two most popular mechanisms cryptocurrencies use to verify new transactions on the blockchain and make new tokens, but it uses a lot of energy to validate blockchain transactions. Some of the most popular proof-of-work tokens include Bitcoin, Ethereum and Dogecoin. The alternative, proof-of-stake, is when cryptocurrencies — like ETH2.0 or Avalanche — use staking to achieve the same thing for less energy and it is thought to be more efficient for scaling than proof-of-work. The bill is an attempt by lawmakers to impede the state's carbon footprint and "mitigate the current and future effects of climate change," according to the bill. "Cryptocurrency mining operations running proof-of-work authentication methods to validate blockchain transactions are an expanding industry in the State of New York," it stated. The continued expansion of operations will "greatly increase the amount of energy usage" in the state, it added. If it passes, all proof-of-work mining activity in the state that relies on burning fossil fuels will face a two-year ban. However, 100% renewable energy proof-of-work mining businesses will still be allowed to operate. "Ultimately, this bill will hurt New York more than it will help, as these miners will increasingly cluster in states such as Texas, Tennessee, Washington State, and elsewhere that provide solar, wind, hydro and other sources of clean energy," said Steven McClurg, co-founder and CIO of Valkyrie Investments, which oversees WGMI, the largest U.S.-based Bitcoin miners ETF. The Senate voted 36-27 in favor of the bill after passing it through the New York State Assembly in April. It now moves to the desk of New York Governor Kathy Hochul, who could sign or veto the legislation. |
| Satechi’s USB-C slim dock is how the iMac shoulda been designed in the first place Posted: 03 Jun 2022 12:34 PM PDT The world of Mac peripherals has a lot of complete and utter garbage in it, so it’s a breath of aluminum-scented air to see the new USB-C slim dock from Satechi. The dock is exactly the same size as Apple’s wireless keyboard, so when it’s not in use, your alphanumerics have a sleek metal hammock for some rest and recuperation. More importantly, the dock slides neatly on top of the 24-inch iMac’s foot, adding a slew of easy-to-reach features and functionality without ruining the dastardly good looks of your silver-and-glass design masterpiece. It makes so much sense that as soon as I saw it, I sighed in a not entirely safe-for-work way. Don’t get me wrong, I applaud Apple for its shapely computers, but the company has long been leaning pretty deep into form-over-function territory. The number of times I’ve been swearing to have to crawl behind my computer to plug in a peripheral for a few minutes, then accidentally yank the wrong USB cable out of the back of it when I’m done… It’s a gorgeous design and a terrible user experience.  I’m a sucker for a tidy desk, and LOOK AT IT! Image Credits: Satechi. Satechi, then, swoops in with a product that just… works. It’s Exclusively designed for 2021 iMac (24-inch) models, and adds extra data storage space and extends the number (and reachability) of the USB ports, all through a single USB-C cable running to the back of your trusty work-steed. The dock packs a USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 data port (with transfer speeds up to 10 Gbps). It also has a USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 data (with up to 10 Gbps), and a couple of slower USB-A 2.0 ports. There’s also microSD and SD card reader slots; perfect for a grumpy-ass journalist or photographer trying to get some work done. Another neat trick the USB-C dock has up its sleeve is a tool-free NVMe SATA NGFF enclosure. That’s a lot of alphabet soup, but in a nutshell, it means you can install a small solid state harddrive to extend the storage available on your computer, all at 10 Gbps speeds.  Add a harddrive in your dock? It makes so much sense it hurts. Image Credits: Satechi. The dock costs $150, but the company is running an early-bird special that knocks $30 off the price if you order now. Deliveries start now-ish. If I didn’t have a dumb Windows box as my work computer, my finger would be twitching over the “add to cart” button right now. |
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