Specializing in Computer Repair, Networking, Internet Solutions, Web Designing, Hybrid App Designing and Windows Operating systems.
Karen Hao / MIT Technology Review:
A growing number of civil lawyers in the US are developing litigation strategies to push back against automated systems that deny the poor basic services — A growing group of lawyers are uncovering, navigating, and fighting the automated systems that deny the poor housing, jobs, and basic services.
Natasha Mascarenhas / TechCrunch:
Pave, which aims to help startups close the pay and equity gap by analyzing employee compensation with its software tools, raises $16M Series A led by a16z — Compensation within private venture-backed startups can be a confusing minefield that if unsuccessfully navigated can lead …
Joshua Franklin / Reuters:
Stem, whose AI-driven energy storage system can automatically switch between battery and grid power, is going public via a SPAC merger at a $1.35B valuation — U.S. artificial intelligence-driven energy storage company Stem Inc said on Friday it has agreed to go public by merging …
Brian Heater / TechCrunch:
AI construction startup Versatile raises a $20M Series A — San Francisco-based construction startup Versatile is announcing today that it has raised a $20 million Series A. The round was led by Insight Partners and Entree Capital, along with existing investors Robert Bosch Venture Capital GmbH, Root Ventures and Conductive Ventures.
Chainalysis Blog:
Only 37 darknet markets were active in Nov. 2020, down from a peak of 59 in Feb., as exit scams, DDoS attacks, and the pandemic accelerate market consolidation — This blog is an excerpt from the Chainalysis 2021 Crypto Crime Report. Click here to download the full document!
With one fell swoop, WarnerMedia eradicated the status quo in Hollywood, turning its 2021 feature film schedule on its head. Well, not quite. By moving 2021’s theatrical releases to both physical and digital theaters, the AT&T affiliate gave us a reason to sign up for its HBOMax streaming service. With a simultaneous window of one month per title, the idea is that the vaccines will govern the timetable for viable return to movies plus popcorn.
Streaming has picked the lock on our path to the future. Even Donald Trump thinks so. Faced with open refusal by the networks to carry his rants about the election, he’s taken to Facebook Live to produce “press conferences” with his own cameras and no press. These shows are designed to fuel contributions of (so far) 200 million dollars to fund what in essence will be a nonstop infomercial campaign for the 2024 election. One problem: I don’t think it will work.
Instead, millions of Americans will begin to turn working from home into living through work. Digital networks like Zoom are becoming a superhighway for transforming ideas into post-pandemic realities. As the vaccines take root, we’ll inexorably restore the dream of mobility, the feeling of hitting the open road in search of our dreams. Only this time, we’re taking our families, friends, and coworkers with us. The rise of digital devices and notifications is disrupting the old business models and replacing them with next best step workflow.
We know what the office gives us: a place for hallway conversations that harness the elastic essence of the team. It’s based on inspiration, camaraderie, shared values, and just plain good timing. Don’t believe me? Ask anybody how their parents met. In the rush to virtualize the hallway conversation, we’re missing the fact that it’s really the only thing that’s working by default. The notification channel dominates our attention, and in aggregate who we give that to creates successful business outcomes.
Zoom is a perfect example of hallway serendipity. A brain dead simple on boarding process starts by clicking on a notification. If you have the Zoom client installed you’re in; if you don’t the download starts, and then you’re in. Zoom takes care of what device you’re using, what software tools are necessary to gather multiple people together across time zones and latencies, and provides in our case the recording and switching tools to stream the meeting across the network. If you can’t make the scene in real-time you can time shift until later.
How does Hollywood compete with that? The short answer is they don’t. HBO is saying the old way of business is over. It may seem like it will return to the good old days of the Saturday afternoon matinee (and it will) but the way it will happen is infused with digital. If you’re embedded in the Zoom economy you first hear about things over that channel. News, pitches, reminders, delivery arrivals, early voting, everything that can most efficiently alert you will succeed. If the networks you use produce effective service and empathetic trustworthy processes, they will be rewarded with your attention.
HBO has decided to run a vaccine trial where they give out a dose of the what will be alongside a placebo, what has been working up til now. Same product, two different experiences. What they’re really saying is: at some point, we’ll feel safe enough to return to the theaters. But will we? Sure, for the big experiences, the blockbusters, the roar of laughter and shared relief of having made it through. But that blockbuster is not the experience we crave, and the new streaming shared water cooler experience has its own joys and power.
How else do you explain the success of streaming shows like The Queen’s Gambit, where millions of us watch a small story about a young girl’s path to chess stardom. A chess movie? You betcha. Or The Crown, which blatantly makes up stories about the Royal Family with an underlying central truth that the show’s writer proclaims. To paraphrase, if I tell the essential truth about these people, I can get away with making up the dialogue. These shows are the thing the blockbusters can’t deliver, the emotional truth that soothes us as we shelter in place. HBO is betting on that model, plus the blockbusters when they’re safe again. Make America Safe Again.
__________________
The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, November 29, 2020.
Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang
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The Gillmor Gang on Facebook … and here’s our sister show G3 on Facebook.
Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Subscribe here.
Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors.
So very much happened this week. If you are just catching up, the Equity crew spent good time this week parsing through a host of recent early-stage venture capital rounds; if that’s your jam, head here. Today for the newsletter The Exchange is digging into later-stage news, though smaller startups will still make an appearance.
We begin with notes on a company that was net-new to me when I met it earlier this week: Nextiva. Now north of $200 million in revenue, the company is a quiet giant and, notably, has not taken venture capital funding along its path to scale.
Given how frequently conversation in the tech press concerns funding news it was a refreshing break to talk to Nextiva about how it managed to scale without leaning on high-burn growth and external capital.
Chatting with CEO and co-founder Tomas Gorny, I got to dig a little under the skin of the company’s history. It goes a little something like this: After moving to California in 1996 at the age of 20, Gorny eventually founded a web hosting company in 2001 after working for tech companies during the dot-com boom. The web hosting company wound up selling to another company called Endurance International in 2007, which sold as a combined entity for around a billion dollars in 2011, later going public before being taken private last month for $3 billion — you can read this TechCrunch piece that mentions Endurance from 2010 for a bit of the historical record.
Gorny founded Nextiva in 2008, focused on what it describes today as “UcaaS,” or unified communications as a service. The startup grew to about $40 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), at which point it ran into issues with a third-party system that would integrate hardware, and support and services software, which sparked a shift in its thinking. The company set out to build a platform.
Nextiva expanded horizontally, adding CRM software, analytics and other functionality to its broader suite as it scaled. And it grew efficiently; starting with money from its founding team, Gorny told TechCrunch that even if he had used someone else’s money, he would have built the company in the same manner.
The platform switch was expensive, with Nextiva calculating that it spent $100 million on the project, telling TechCrunch that it might have been able to grow more quickly in the short-term if it had only focused on its original offerings.
The platform work that Nextiva has spent so much time and money on is now in the market, and after scaling from $100 million ARR in 2016 to $200 million this year, the company now considers itself to have completed the evolution to platform status. Which raised my hackles slightly, as quite literally every company wants to be a platform. And nearly none of them are.
Gorny, however, swayed me somewhat with his thinking on the matter. Nextiva built a suite of products, he explained, but wasn’t a platform at that point. Correct. However, he argued that the company became one when it built a system that created a shared pool of customer data for all its apps and services, allowing Nextiva to build faster on top of its foundational layer. By the definition of platform that precedes tech’s abuse of the word, that seems fair.
What’s next for Nextiva? Growing at more than 30% a year, it could go public. Given that it is self-funded, it cannot have horrorshow cash burn by definition and meet requisite benchmarks for an IPO. Even more, while Gorny did highlight that being private allowed his company to accelerate and decelerate growth when it wanted to focus more on product work, I got the impression that Nextiva wants to be better-known. And an IPO would help with that.
2021 is said to be a coming ground for a stampede of unicorn IPOs. Perhaps some of those debuts will be dark horses as well.
We have three themes this week for our discussion of the broader startup market that warrant discussion: AI fundraising, fintech and private-market liquidity.
On the AI front, it’s been a busy sector of late, especially amongst the later-stages. Ohio-based healthcare AI company Olive raised $225.5 million, or about half of the $456 million that it has raised to date. Olive is a unicorn, to boot, with PitchBook pegging its new valuation at $1.50 billion on a post-money basis.
It’s nice to see a win for the Midwest. But Olive was hardly alone. Scale AI also raised a huge chunk of money, this time $155 million at a $3.5 billion valuation. Last year it raised $100 million at a valuation north of $1 billion. And elsewhere in the AI startup realm, Versatile raised $20 million, and ultimate.ai raised $20 million. Busy!
Scooting along. Stripe dropped a host of banking-as-a-service tooling, shifting the richly valued payments company from its initial niche into a much broader — and potentially lucrative — domain.
So, doom for smaller startups working in the same problem space? Not if they have anything to say about. Chris Dean, the CEO of Treasury Prime, a startup that I’ve written about that offers banking services via an API, wrote in to The Exchange, saying that the “most significant signal [from the Stripe news] is to banks” that they “need an open banking API to stay relevant.”
And Dean reckons that as every fintech has multiple vendors for different things, there will be room for many vendors per major fintech served by banking-via-an-API services, noting that Treasury Prime has “clients who use Marqeta, Galileo, and Stripe” for their banking needs.
Let’s see; but the Stripe news is big news all the same. And the new updates explain the IPO wait, I reckon. Better to go public when it has these new pieces driving growth. So much for our notes last week that were censorious concerning its IPO lag.
Finally, Carta X. I am bursting with excitement about this bit of news. Carta, which helps startups manage their cap table and employees handle their equity stakes, is building an exchange of sorts that should bring more liquidity — and therefore more pricing signal, and, pray, transparency — to the private markets. It’s coming early next year. More here.
We’re low on room, so just three final things to close out this week:
And, to close, The Exchange caught up with Yext CEO Howard Lerman about its recent earnings report, which bested near-term expectations regarding its Q3 results, but left investors wanting more when it came to Q4 guidance.
Chatting with Lerman — who joined TechCrunch for an Extra Crunch Live the other week — I got the lay of the land. On one hand, Yext’s push into offering search services is working, driving new logo lands, and helping it trim costs in its sales process. On the other, the world is reentering a shutdown, which means that the company is seeing upsell weakness in certain geographies, denting its near-term net retention results, a key driver of growth for software companies.
Now, Yext is a single public SaaS company, so I don’t want to over-index on its results too much, but the company’s honest assessment of the uncertainties that it faces in terms of near-term growth cannot be unique to its operations — something to consider as we ask startups about their Q4 growth in a few weeks’ time.
For what it’s worth, Yext appears in the midst of an intelligent product expansion while parts of the market it sells into struggle with a macro hangover. This is the situation that startups say is best to weather while private. Perhaps Yext will become a working case for how to navigate the same circumstance while public.
Hugs, and thank golly for the weekend’s respite,
Welcome back to Human Capital, a weekly newsletter that looks at the latest in diversity and inclusion in tech, as well as labor.
This week, Google made headlines a couple of times for its workplace issues, while Coinbase found itself back in the news after the New York Times reported on alleged issues of racism and discrimination at the cryptocurrency startup. On the more positive side, however, Nasdaq proposed to the SEC some diversity requirements for public companies.
To get this sent directly to your inbox every Friday at 1 p.m. PT, be sure to sign up here.
The week kicked off with news about cryptocurrency company Coinbase’s diversity issues. Specifically, the NYT reported a myriad of internal complaints alleging discriminatory treatment against Black employees. Here’s a key snippet from the story:
“The 15 people worked at Coinbase, the most valuable U.S. cryptocurrency start-up, where they represented roughly three-quarters of the Black employees at the 600-person company. Before leaving in late 2018 and early 2019, at least 11 of them informed the human resources department or their managers about what they said was racist or discriminatory treatment, five people with knowledge of the situation said.”
Before the article was published, Coinbase flagged the upcoming story for its employees, saying “only three of these people filed complaints during their time at Coinbase,” and that there was no evidence of any wrongdoing.
Ben Silbermann (Pinterest) at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2017
A group of shareholders filed a lawsuit against Pinterest executives, including CEO Ben Silbermann, alleging they enabled a culture of discrimination. The complaint also alleges that culture of discrimination has harmed Pinterest’s reputation and led to financial harm.
In a statement to Fast Company, Pinterest said:
“Pinterest’s leadership and Board take their fiduciary duties seriously and are committed to continuing our efforts to help ensure that Pinterest is a place where all of our employees feel included and supported,” said a Pinterest spokesperson when reached for comment. “We believe the actions we’ve initiated as well as the ongoing independent review regarding our culture, policies, and practices will help us achieve our goal of building a diverse, equitable and inclusive environment for everyone.”
The National Labor Relations Board this week issued a complaint against Google after investigating the firing of several employees last November. The complaint alleges Google violated parts of the National Labor Relations Act by surveilling employees, and generally interfered with, restrained and coerced employees in the exercise of their rights guaranteed by Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act.
The NLRB also alleges Google discouraged “its employees from forming, joining, assisting a union or engaging in other protected, concerted activities,” the complaint states.
“Google has always worked to support a culture of internal discussion, and we place immense trust in our employees,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch. “Of course employees have protected labor rights that we strongly support, but we have always taken information security very seriously. We’re confident in our decision and legal position. Actions undertaken by the employees at issue were a serious violation of our policies and an unacceptable breach of a trusted responsibility.”
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – SEPTEMBER 07: Google AI Research Scientist Timnit Gebru speaks onstage during Day 3 of TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018 at Moscone Center on September 7, 2018 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch)
Timnit Gebru, a leading researcher and voice in the field of ethics and artificial intelligence, says Google fired her for an email she sent to her direct reports. According to Gebru, Google fired her because of an email she sent to subordinates that the company said reflected “behavior that is inconsistent with the expectations of a Google manager.”
The email in question, obtained by Casey Newton, discussed how Gebru was disappointed in how her organization had, “After all this talk,” only hired 14% or so women this year, she wrote. She pointed to how Samy Bengio, who leads a group of researchers inside the Google Brain team, hired 39% women but that there is no incentive for him to do so. She added:
“What I want to say is stop writing your documents because it doesn’t make a difference. The DEI OKRs that we don’t know where they come from (and are never met anyways), the random discussions, the “we need more mentorship” rather than “we need to stop the toxic environments that hinder us from progressing” the constant fighting and education at your cost, they don’t matter. Because there is zero accountability. There is no incentive to hire 39% women: your life gets worse when you start advocating for underrepresented people, you start making the other leaders upset when they don’t want to give you good ratings during calibration. There is no way more documents or more conversations will achieve anything. We just had a Black research all hands with such an emotional show of exasperation. Do you know what happened since? Silencing in the most fundamental way possible.”
Gebru’s email also discussed issues with silencing marginalized voices, how her expertise has been dismissed and how she’s felt gaslighted by Google.
As part of Prop 22, gig workers promised healthcare subsidies for their workers. This week, Instacart provided some more detail on what that means in practice. TL;DR is that it will be available on a quarterly basis to shoppers who work an average of 15 hours or more per week.
Those who average between 15 to 25 hours per week will be eligible for 50% of the average contribution. Those that average 25 hours or more will be eligible for 100% of the average contribution.
But it’s important to note that those with employer-sponsored healthcare, Medicare and Medicaid are not eligible for subsidies.
Nasdaq filed a proposal with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to adopt new rules around diversity. If approved, the SEC would require companies listed on the Nasdaq to publicly report the diversity of its board of directors. The rule would also require many companies to have at least two diverse directors — one who self-identifies as female and one who self-identifies as either a person from an underrepresented minority group or as LGBTQ+. If a company does not meet that requirement, they would need to explain why.
Sophia Kunthara / Crunchbase News:
Sourcegraph, whose universal code search service is used by companies like Amazon and PayPal, raises $50M Series C, following a $23M Series B round in March — Sourcegraph, a code search startup for developers, has secured a $50 million Series C, the company announced Thursday.
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy.
The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019. People now spend three hours and 40 minutes per day using apps, rivaling TV. 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.
This week, Apple and Google announced their editorially curated lists detailing the best apps of the year, and Apple also revealed those that were downloaded the most. Apple also made a notable new hire for an App Store role and opened up its anticipated App Store Small Business Program to developers.
Image Credits: Apple
Both Apple and Google released their “best apps of 2020” year-end lists and there were some similarities between the two, as well as some differences. Both companies’ lists reflected the tough and stressful year 2020 has been, with everyone being stuck at home during a pandemic that changed how we worked, attended school, connected with friends and family, and entertained ourselves.
Apple and Google, as a result, both selected at least one “de-stressing” app among their year-end winners. In Apple’s case, it was Endel, an iOS app that won for Apple Watch App of the Year. Google, however, awarded sleep app Loóna the title of best app of the year.
Disney+ also made both Apple and Google’s lists, the former as Apple TV App of the Year and the latter as the User’s Choice for app of the year. The new streaming service was a godsend for families with younger children, who often struggled in 2020 to keep kids entertained. New releases like Onward and Mulan in 2020 helped give families something to look forward to, while Marvel and Star Wars content, including new series “The Mandalorian,” were hits with streamers, as well.
Another pandemic-prompted choice was Zoom, which won as iPad App of the Year. Though Zoom was around before the coronavirus outbreak, it’s now become a part of our everyday lexicon as an interchangeable term for “online video meeting” — as in, “let’s do a zoom call about that.” The iPad app at least made these endless virtual meetings a little less painless.
And home workout companion Wakeout! become Apple’s iPhone app of the year, as most people gave up the gym due to coronavirus risks. The app’s quick one-minute breaks helped users stay moving, even when stuck at home for days on the couch or working on their laptop in bed.
Image Credits: Genshin Impact (screenshot via Sensor Tower)
Meanwhile, gacha-based action role-playing game Genshin Impact won as “best game” of the year on both Apple and Google’s lists. While a cynical take is that the app stores wanted to point users to a huge moneymaker — the game reportedly earned $245 million its first month and nearly $400 million in two months on mobile — it also highlights consumers’ desire for console-like experiences on mobile.
The game, however, has been heavily criticized for its gacha game monetization techniques, which though common to games in China, Japan and South Korea, are basically gambling mechanics. And addictive ones at that. But as a Wired report noted, some of this comes down to cultural differences. U.S. users grew up on cartridge games, not arcade games, where you were constantly inserting more money to keep playing. Western users just aren’t as comfortable with this “spend to keep playing” business model, which they feel is predatory.
Apple’s other top apps of the year included perennial favorite Fantastical as Apple’s Mac App of the Year; Legends of Runeterra as iPad Game of the Year; Disco Elysium as Mac Game of the Year; Dandara Trials of Fear as Apple TV Game of the Year; and Sneaky Sasquatch as the Apple Arcade Game of the Year.
Google’s list also included SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off as users’ choice for best game, and it highlighted a variety of top titles in various gaming subgenres in a dedicated section of its Play Store.
Apple also gave a peek into the “best” apps of the year, as determined by app downloads. The pandemic played a role here as well, making Zoom the most-downloaded iPhone app of 2020.
Also of note, TikTok was the biggest social media app by downloads, ahead of all the Facebook-owned apps making the list, including Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. Square’s Cash App hit No. 10, as the pandemic saw increased demand for contactless payments and direct giving to people in need.
The most-downloaded apps and games of 2020 were, as follows:
VC Josh Elman announced this week he was joining Apple in a role that will see him helping customers “discover the best apps for them.” In other words, app discovery.
Elman’s background includes RealNetworks, LinkedIn, Zazzle, Facebook and Twitter, and later moved into VC. Elman worked at venture firm Greylock in 2011 as a principal, and by 2013 he had become a general partner. While there, he invested in SmartThings, as well as social networks like Musical.ly (now the massive No. 2 app of the year, TikTok), Nextdoor, Houseparty and Discord. He later moved to fast-rising fintech startup Robinhood and now, he’s heading to Apple.
Image Credits: App Annie
We tried the Apple Watch Family Setup with a tween. They weren’t impressed with the apps or the controls, but did like the Memoji. No Roblox group chat on the small screen? Boo.
Image Credits: Iconboard
If you find it too frustrating to use Apple’s Shortcuts to build your own custom icons, you can turn to Iconboard instead. This newly launched app lets you design a style for your icons and apply it to all of your icons at once. It can even create invisible icons to give you a way to space out items on your screen.
Image Credits: Cardlet
While I’ve been enjoying Punkpost’s custom designs for when I’m too lazy…err I mean busy…to send my own handwritten notes and cards, Cardlet is ready to give my go-to app a run for the money. Like Punkpost, Cardlet will send a real paper card on your behalf, but it adds a modern-day touch: The app includes a hidden AR experience that brings the card to life when viewed with the camera.
Image Credits: Heynote
Some people don’t trust to-do lists, reminders or calendar notifications to always get the job done. When there’s something we really need to remember, we stick it directly on our home screen. (Okay, this one may only appeal to a small niche of scatterbrained users like me.) But if you have, in the past, also designed your own temporary wallpaper just so you won’t forget a super critical appointment, the Android app Heynote, (hat tip to Android Police!) might help. Instead of a widget or reminder, this app lets you put custom text directly on your home screen as a custom wallpaper. Doctor appt. at 11 AM? You can’t forget it when it’s there every single time you look at your phone.
Who says that chats about enterprise software have to be boring? They don’t, we learned during our conversation earlier this week with Sapphire’s Jai Das, a pleasant time that touched on a host of topics including startup sectors, his investing group’s capital base and, of course, the Slack-Salesforce deal.
Our conversation took place about an hour before the deal was formally announced, but the tea leaves had been read by the market far in advance, so we were able to chat about it as if it was already consummated. Which it became a little while later.
Our conversation with Das was part of our Extra Crunch Live series, which you can learn more about here. If you’re not a member, head here to get started. Extra Crunch Live has previously hosted Bessemer’s Byron Deeter and Sequoia’s Roelof Botha, among others.
The whole chat with Das was interesting and good, but his comments explaining why Slack’s sale to the larger CRM giant stuck with me all week. Using Salesforce’s acquisition of MuleSoft (a company in which Das invested) as a prism, here’s how the venture capitalist discussed the plusses and minuses of selling to a bigger company.
After noting that MuleSoft might have been able to earn a larger revenue multiple as an independent company in today’s markets than it managed by selling to Salesforce, Das then detailed the sort of boost that a huge company can bring to one that is merely big (quote has been edited and condensed):
Going into your question about Salesforce and Slack, Salesforce, like any large company, does add a lot of value. When I talked to [former MuleSoft CEOs] Simon [Parmett] and Greg [Schott], they were astonished how much account control these large companies have with CIOs and CMOs.
MulesSoft would be beating on the door to get a meeting with the CIO and it wouldn’t happen. And you know, the Salesforce management team would just make one phone call, and Simon and Greg would be presenting to the CEO on down.
So I think that is the thing that people forget, that these large companies have so much ability to increase your sales velocity with large accounts, [so] it makes a lot of sense for some of these [smaller] companies to end up in Salesforce or SAP or Oracle, or WorkDay.
So perhaps Slack will find more oomph under Salesforce’s auspices than it could as a solo project. We spent the majority of our time talking about startups and smaller companies, so hit the jump for the full video and a few more quotes I transcribed for you.
Have fun!
Lucas Shaw / Bloomberg:
OnlyFans says it will generate $2B+ in sales in 2020, now has 85M users, is adding around 500K users a day, and is paying out $200M+ a month to its 1M+ creators — As Cardi B prepared the release for her new song “WAP,” she checked off all the usual components of her promotional plan …
