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Saturday, May 18, 2019
Geek Trivia: What Sci-Fi Franchise Yielded The Best Selling Instrumental Single Of All Time?
from How-To Geek http://bit.ly/2HB21hX
32 current and former employees on the cultural shift inside Google and the decline in trust and communication between the rank and file and the management (Beth Kowitt/Fortune)
32 current and former employees on the cultural shift inside Google and the decline in trust and communication between the rank and file and the management — Some employees say Google is losing touch with its “Don't be evil” motto. What happens when an empowered tech workforce rebels?
from Techmeme http://bit.ly/2QaI7y3
Experts are skeptical about Huawei's claim it can ensure a steady components supply without the US, say it would struggle to replace chips, lasers, other parts (Reuters)
Experts are skeptical about Huawei's claim it can ensure a steady components supply without the US, say it would struggle to replace chips, lasers, other parts — SAN FRANCISCO/HONG KONG (Reuters) - Chip experts are calling out Huawei for its claims that it could ensure …
from Techmeme http://bit.ly/2QauYVQ
By 2023, Uber Eats may own 25% of the global food delivery industry worth $191B, but both DoorDash and GrubHub make more sales, and DoorDash is growing fastest (Danielle Abril/Fortune)
By 2023, Uber Eats may own 25% of the global food delivery industry worth $191B, but both DoorDash and GrubHub make more sales, and DoorDash is growing fastest — Investor sentiment in Uber is rapidly sinking. Since last week's initial public offering, the company's stock has nosedived …
from Techmeme http://bit.ly/2YGY5mV
Equity transcribed: Away’s $1.4B valuation and CrowdStrike’s S-1
Welcome back to another transcribed edition of Equity, the wildly popular TechCrunch podcast that digs deep into the week’s news about … equity.
There were no IPOs this week so there was only one episode, but it was jam-packed with news about direct-to-consumer scooters, luggage funding and fake meat. This is where tech has taken us this week.
Oh, and Slack set the date for its direct listing.
Kate: So [Away] raised a 100 million, series D. This round was led by Wellington Management, so not by a traditional venture capital firm. Though Away is backed by big name faces like Forerunner Ventures, which is responsible for investments in pretty much direct to consumer companies. So this valued Away at 1.4 billion, and that’s obviously quite large, but what’s particularly surprising about that valuation is that Away was valued at just 400 million the last time they raised money, which was a series C of 50 million, maybe about 1 or 2 years ago.
Alex: Oh gosh.
Kate: I’m not sure exactly when that was. But we’re seeing a major, major, major uptick in its valuation. And the reason why is because at its series C, Away was profitable already. Like I was telling Alex, they didn’t say anything about profitability this time, so I don’t know where that stands, but I do know they have $150 million in revenue.
Alex: Yearly revenue.
Kate: Yes. They are growing top line at 100%. They have an NPS score in the 80’s, and they have a bunch of new investors in this round that I think kind of shows that they’re going well. And also, they want to use this capital to create a generic travel brand. So they want to be more than just these Instagram-friendly cute luggage, suitcases, carry-ons, whatever they want to be. Kind of provide anything and everything you might need when you’re going on a trip of any kind.
For access to the full transcription, become a member of Extra Crunch. Learn more and try it for free.
Kate Clark: Hello, and welcome back to Equity. I am TechCrunch’s Kate Clark. This week, I am in the studio with Alex Wilhelm of Crunchbase News. Hello Alex, how are you doing today?
Alex Wilhelm: I am good, but as we were just saying before we hit record, this is in some ways a bittersweet moment for us in this room, because it is the last time that the three of us, you, myself, and our excellent producer Christopher Gates, will be together in the TC podcast studio at 410 Townsend.
Kate: It is indeed a bittersweet moment for all of us.
from TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2JUOAwh
Sam Altman’s leap of faith
Earlier this year, founder-investor Sam Altman left his high-profile role as the president of Y Combinator to become the CEO of OpenAI, an AI research center at its outset that founded by some of the most prominent people in the tech industry in late 2015. The idea: to ensure that artificial intelligence is “developed in a way that is safe and is beneficial to humanity,” as one of those founders, Elon Musk, said back then to the New York Times.
The move is intriguing for many reasons, including that artificial general intelligence — or the ability for machines to be as smart as humans — does not yet exist, with even AI’s top researchers far from clear about when it might. Under the leadership Altman, OpenAI has also restructured as a for-profit company with some caveats, saying it will “need to invest billions of dollars in upcoming years into large-scale cloud compute, attracting and retaining talented people, and building AI supercomputers.”
Whether OpenAI is able to attract so much funding is an open question, but our guess is that it will, if for no reason other than Altman himself — a force of nature who easily charmed a crowd during an extended stage interview with this editor Thursday night, in a talk that covered everything from YC’s evolution to Altman’s current work at OpenAI.
On YC, for example, we discussed that “ramen profitable” was once the goal but that a newer goal seems to be to graduate from the popular accelerator program with millions of dollars in venture funding, if not tens of millions of dollars, and what the implications of this evolution might be. (“If I could control the market — obviously the free market is going to do its thing — I would not have YC companies raise the amounts of money they raise or at the valuations they do,” Altman told attendees at the small industry event. “I do think it is, on net, bad for the startups.”)
Altman was also candid when asked personal and occasionally corny questions, even offering up a story about the strong relationship he has long enjoyed with mom, who happened to be in town for the event. Not only did he say that she remains one of a small handful of people who he “absolutely” trusts, but he acknowledged that it has become harder over time to get unfiltered feedback from people outside that small circle. “You get to some point in your career where people are afraid to offend you or say something you might not want to hear. I’m definitely aware that I get stuff filtered and planned out ahead of time at this point.”
Certainly, Altman is given more rope than most. Not only was this evidenced in the way that Altman ran Y Combinator for five years — essentially supersizing it time and again — but it’s plain from the way he discusses OpenAI that his current thinking is no less audacious. Indeed, much of what Altman said Thursday night would be considered pure insanity coming from someone else. Coming from Altman, it merely drew raised brows.
Asked for example, how OpenAI plans to make money (we wondered if it might license some of its work), Altman answered that the “honest answer is we have no idea. We have never made any revenue. We have no current plans to make revenue. We have no idea how we may one day generate revenue.”
Continued Altman, “We’ve made a soft promise to investors that, ‘Once we build a generally intelligent system, that basically we will ask it to figure out a way to make an investment return for you.'” When the crowd erupted with laughter (it wasn’t immediately obvious that he was serious), Altman himself offered that it sounds like an episode of “Silicon Valley,” but he added, “You can laugh. It’s all right. But it really is what I actually believe.”
We also asked what it means that, under Altman’s leadership, OpenAI has become a “capped profit” company, with the promise of giving investors up to 100 times their return before giving away excess profit to the rest of the world. We noted that 100x is a very high bar — so high in fact that most investors investing in plain-old for-profit companies seldom get close to a 100x return. For example, Sequoia Capital, the only institutional investor in WhatsApp, reportedly saw 50 times the $60 million it had invested in the company when it sold to Facebook for $22 billion, a stunning return.
But Altman not only pushed back on the idea the idea that “capped profit” is a bit of marketing brilliance, he doubled down on why it makes sense. Specifically, he said that the opportunity with artificial general intelligence is so incomprehensibly enormous that if OpenAI manages to crack this nut ahead of the big competitors also at work on it, including Google and Microsoft, it could “maybe capture the light cone of all future value in the universe, and that’s for sure not okay for one group of investors to have.”
Before we parted ways, we also shared with Altman various criticisms by AI researchers who we’d interviewed ahead of our sit-down and who’d complained that, among other things, OpenAI seeks out attention for qualitative and not foundational leaps in already proven work, and that its very mission of discovering a path to “safe” artificial general intelligence needlessly raises alarms and makes their research harder.
Altman absorbed and responded to each point. He wasn’t entirely dismissive of them, either, saying of OpenAI’s alarmist bent, for example, that he does have “some sympathy for that argument.”
Still, Altman insisted there’s a better argument to be made for thinking about — and talking with the media about — the potential societal consequences of AI, no matter how aggravating some may find it. “The same people who say OpenAI is fear mongering or whatever are the same ones who are saying, ‘Shouldn’t Facebook have thought about this before they did it?’ This is us trying to think about it before we do it.”
You can check out the full interview below. The first half of our chat is largely centered on his Altman’s career at YC, where he remains chairman. We begin discussing OpenAI in greater detail around the 26-minute mark.
from TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2Qaqm1W
Swedish startup Einride's driverless truck T-pod gets a permit to make short trips on a public road in an industrial area in central Sweden at up to 5 km/hr (Esha Vaish/Reuters)
Swedish startup Einride's driverless truck T-pod gets a permit to make short trips on a public road in an industrial area in central Sweden at up to 5 km/hr — JONKOPING, Sweden (Reuters) - Resembling the helmet of a Star Wars stormtrooper, a driverless electric truck began daily freight deliveries …
from Techmeme http://bit.ly/30sMlG2
Profile of Tall Poppy, which has raised $1M+ seed round to help companies protect employees against online threats from trolls and hackers (Sean Captain/Fast Company)
Profile of Tall Poppy, which has raised $1M+ seed round to help companies protect employees against online threats from trolls and hackers — Anyone who's spent some time on Twitter knows that vilification and personal attacks-as extreme as threats of rape and murder-are a standard feature of some people's online lives.
from Techmeme http://bit.ly/2WSZSof
Immigrant founders, smartphone growth, SEO tactics, SoftBank’s financials, and AR tech
How an immigration crackdown is hurting UK startups
Our European correspondent Natasha Lomas spent the past few weeks investigating what’s been happening to immigrant founders and tech talent in the UK, who have been receiving more scrutiny from the Home Office in recent months. Natasha zooms in on Metail, a virtual fitting room startup, and its tribulations with the immigration authorities and the damage those action are having on the broader ecosystem:
The January 31 decision letter, which TechCrunch has reviewed, shows how the Home Office is fast-tracking anti-immigrant outcomes. In a short paragraph, the Home Office says it considered and dismissed an alternative outcome — of downgrading, not revoking, the license and issuing an “action plan” to rectify issues identified during the audit. Instead, it said an immediate end to the license was appropriate due to the “seriousness” of the non-compliance with “sponsor duties”.
The decision focused on one of the two employees Metail had working on a Tier 2 visa, who we’ll call Alex (not their real name). In essence, Alex was a legal immigrant had worked their way into a mid-level promotion by learning on the job, as should happen regularly at any good early-stage startup. The Home Office, however, perceived the promotion to have been given to someone without proper qualifications, over potential native-born candidates.
In addition to reporting the story, Natasha also wrote a guide specifically for Extra Crunch members on how founders can manage their immigration matters, both for themselves and for their employees.
The state of the smartphone
TechCrunch hardware editor Brian Heater analyzed the slowdown in smartphone sales, finding few reasons to be optimistic about how smaller handset manufacturers can compete with giants like Apple and Samsung. There are slivers of good news from the developing world and also from 5G and foldable tech, but don’t expect profits to reach their zenith again any time soon.
from TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2VMSVZf
A look at various tools such as drones, sensors, and AI being deployed at the US-Mexico border, as a proposed "smart wall" garners bipartisan political support (Shirin Ghaffary/Vox)
A look at various tools such as drones, sensors, and AI being deployed at the US-Mexico border, as a proposed “smart wall” garners bipartisan political support — Here's what a so-called “smart wall” of technology at the US-Mexico border looks like. — Graphics by Javier Zarracina/Vox
from Techmeme http://bit.ly/2VJWobb
Big revenues, huge valuations and major losses: charting the era of the unicorn IPO
We can make charts galore about the tech IPO market. Yet none of them diminish the profound sense that we are in uncharted territory.
Never before have so many companies with such high revenues gone public at such lofty valuations, all while sustaining such massive losses. If you’re a “growth matters most” investor, these are exciting times in IPO-land. If you’re the old-fashioned value type who prefers profits, it may be best to sit out this cycle.
Believers in putting market dominance before profits got their biggest IPO opportunity perhaps ever last week, with Uber’s much-awaited dud of a market debut. With a market cap hovering around $64 billion, Uber is far below the $120 billion it was initially rumored to target. Nonetheless, one could convincingly argue it’s still a rich valuation for a company that just posted a Q1 loss of around $1 billion on $3 billion in revenue.
So how do Uber’s revenues, losses and valuation stack up amidst the recent crop of unicorn IPOs? To put things in context, we assembled a list of 15 tech unicorns that went public over the past three quarters. We compared their valuations, along with revenues and losses for 2018 (in most cases the most recently available data), in the chart below:
Put these companies altogether in a pot, and they’d make one enormous, money-losing super-unicorn, with more than $25 billion in annual revenue coupled to more than $6 billion in losses. It’ll be interesting to revisit this list in a few quarters to see if that pattern changes, and profits become more commonplace.
History
It’s easy to draw comparisons to the decades-old dot-com bubble, but this time things are different. During the dot-com bubble, I remember penning this lead sentence:
“If the era of the Internet IPO had a theme song, it might be this: There’s no business like no business.”
That notion made sense for bubble-era companies, which commonly went public a few years after inception, before amassing meaningful revenues.
That tune won’t work this time around. If the era of the unicorn IPO had a theme song, it wouldn’t be nearly as catchy. Maybe something like: “There’s no business like lots of business and lots of losses too.”
I won’t be buying tickets to that musical. But when it comes to buying IPO shares, the unicorn proposition is a bit more appealing than the 2000 cycle. After all, it’s reasonably plausible for a company with dominant market share to tweak its margins over time. It’s a lot harder to grow revenues from nothing to hundreds of millions or billions, particularly if investors grow averse to funding continued losses.
Of course, the dot-com bubble and the unicorn IPO era do share a common theme: Investors are betting on an optimistic vision of future potential. If expectations don’t pan out, expect share prices to follow suit.
from TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2w5COqL
Snapchat's popular new gender-changing filter provokes mixed reactions in the LGBTQ community, with some lauding the ability to safely explore themselves (Ina Fried/Axios)
Snapchat's popular new gender-changing filter provokes mixed reactions in the LGBTQ community, with some lauding the ability to safely explore themselves — A Snapchat photo filter that lets people see themselves in highly feminized or masculine form has proven wildly popular.
from Techmeme http://bit.ly/30wSqBF
Original Content podcast: ‘Game of Thrones’ burns it all down
This post and podcast contain spoilers for “Game of Thrones.”
Our original co-host Darrell Etherington returns for this week’s Original Content podcast, which is all about “Game of Thrones” — specifically “The Bells,” an episode that seems to have prompted more fan outcry than anything in the last seven-and-a-half seasons.
The controversy, of course, comes from watching Daenerys (Breaker of Chains, Mother of Dragons, the closest thing the show has to a hero) and her last remaining dragon burn King’s Landing to ash.
But we didn’t just spend 40 minutes venting of our anger and frustration. After all, in a series defined by its ruthless subversion of traditional fantasy narratives, how could the conquest of Westeros end in anything other than mass slaughter? And like “The Long Night,” “The Bells” is full of haunting, beautiful images — except this time, the devastation unfolds in broad daylight.
Plus, as the episode’s pre-credits sequence strains to remind us, Daenerys has always had a ruthless streak; this is a supposedly benevolent ruler who’s crucified some of her enemies and burned others alive.
What fatally undermines all of this, however, is the show’s increased reliance on rushed storytelling. There’s been some giddy fun in watching the early seasons’ deliberate pacing give way to a frantic rush for the finish line, but without crucial connective tissue, Dany’s actions feel less like a carefully constructed tragedy, and more like an arbitrary swing to cruelty and madness.
Put another way: We didn’t sign any petitions, but we’re not feeling optimistic about Sunday’s finale.
You can listen in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You can also send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)
from TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2VyXFg6
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