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Franchised esports leagues have allowed players to become full-time employees but critics say game publishers like Activision have too much power over players — Franchised leagues are a modern experiment in what happens when a marketing initiative becomes a billion-dollar industry.
Paris-based insurance tech startup Descartes Underwriting, specializing in climate risk modeling and transfer, raises $18.5M Series A to expand in US and Asia — Descartes Underwriting, an insurance tech company specializing in climate risk modeling and transfer, today announced it has raised $18.5 million.
Vancouver-based Klue, which develops AI-powered software aimed at giving enterprises better insights into their competitors, raises $15M Series A — Vancouver-based artificial intelligence startup Klue, which has developed software aimed to give enterprises a better view of their competitors …
Ubicquia, which helps cities provide services such as public WiFi through connected streetlights, raises $30M Series C, claims its tools are used in 100+ cities — Ubicquia is helping keep the streetlights on in cities across the country, and its smart cell and smart grid technologies have investors taking notice.
Several H-1B employees hired at TikTok's Silicon Valley campus are facing visa approval delays that, legal experts say, are unusual — The hits to California's TikTok workers just keep coming: First, the Trump administration threatened to shutter the company's U.S. operations; then its CEO quit after just three months on the job.
Facebook says it is removing misleading posts about how Oregon wildfires were started after initially saying it was reducing the distribution of such posts — As emergency responders in Oregon struggle to contain a record 900,000 acres of wildfires across the state, local police have been fighting …
IT service company Virtusa to be acquired by Baring Private Equity Asia in an all-cash deal worth about $2B — The large global IT services provider will join several other global IT solution providers that are partially or wholly owned by Baring Private Equity Asia.
PE firm EQT to buy Madrid-based property classifieds site Idealista for €1.3B from Apax Partners; Idealista was valued at €235M during its acquisition in 2015 — Swedish buyout group to buy company for five times the price rival Apax paid five years ago
Disney’s live-action remake of “Mulan” comes with some serious baggage.
First, the film has drawn political controversy for its star’s statements in support of the action Hong Kong police against protestors, as well as the fact that “Mulan” was partly filmed in the Xinjiang region, where the Chinese government has held Muslim ethnic minorities in detention camps.
And although it’s less weighty, it’s also hard to escape the business context: “Mulan” is one of the first big Hollywood blockbusters (along with “Tenet”) to be released after the pandemic shuttered movie theaters around the world. Warner Bros. opted to release “Tenet” in theaters, while Disney is bringing “Mulan” to Disney+ with a hefty price tag of $29.99. (There’s still a theatrical release in some markets, including China.)
On the latest episode of the Original Content podcast, we acknowledge all of that context while also doing our best to discuss the merits of the film itself. It’s arguably the best of Disney’s live-action remakes, and it’s certainly gorgeous to watch, with some thrilling action scenes and beautiful landscape shots.
At the same time, Jordan argued that it doesn’t live up to the animated original, and we both agreed that the script can feel sleight and forgettable — particularly in the shadow of those real-world controversies. Plus, it’s hard to justify the current price, unless you’ve got kids who are eager to see it. Otherwise, you can probably wait until December 4, when “Mulan” becomes available to regular Disney+ subscribers.
Before we jump into our review, we also talk about this coming week’s virtual Disrupt conference.
You can listen to our review 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 follow us on Twitter or send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)
If you’d like to skip ahead, here’s how the episode breaks down:
0:00 Intro
0:31 Disrupt preview
6:33 “Mulan” review
35:10 “Mulan” spoiler discussion
Sources: about a dozen states, mostly led by GOP, are considering joining DOJ's upcoming antitrust lawsuit against Google, while readying their own complaints — - Democratic states have sought more time for broader probe — States are scrutinizing Google search, advertising, Android
How TechCrunch moved Disrupt online, expanding to 5 days to mitigate screen fatigue and creating a 3D rendering of Moscone Center using green screens and sets — Help us make your experience with Digiday even better by taking a quick survey. Respondents will be entered to win a $25 Amazon gift card.
Alameda-based rocket launch startup Astra finally got the chance to launch its first orbital test mission from its Alaska-based facility on Saturday, after the attempt had been delayed multiple times due to weather and other issues. The 8:19 PM PT lift-off of Astra’s ‘Rocket 3.1’ test vehicle went well – but the flight ended relatively shortly after that, during the first-stage engine burn and long before reaching orbit.
Astra wasn’t expecting to actually reach orbit on this particular flight – it has always said that its goal is to reach orbit within three test flights of Rocket, and prior to this first mission, said that the main goal was to have a good first-stage burn on this one specifically. This wasn’t a nominal first-stage burn, of course, since that’s when the failure occurred, but the company still noted in a blog post that “the rocket performed very well” according to their first reviews of the data.
The mission ended early because of what appears to be a bit of unwanted back-and-forth wobbling in the rocket as it ascended, Astra said, which caused an engine shutdown by the vehicle’s automated safety system. That’s actually also good news, since it means the steps Astra has taken to ensure safe failures are also working as designed. You can see in the video above that the light of the rocket’s engines simply go out during flight, and then some time later there’s a fireball from its impact on the ground.
It’s worth noting that most first flights of entirely new rockets don’t go entirely as planned – including those by SpaceX, whose founder and CEO Elon Musk expressed his encouragement to the Astra team on Twitter. Likewise, Rocket Lab’s Peter Beck also chimed in with support. Not to mention that Astra has been operating under extreme conditions, with just a six-person team on the ground in Alaska to deploy the launch system, which was set up in under a week, due to the COVID-19 crisis.
Astra will definitely be able to get a lot of valuable data out of this launch that it can use to put towards improving the chances of its next try going well. The company notes that it expects to review said data “over the next several weeks” as it proceeds towards the second flight in this series of three attempts. Rocket 3.2, the test article for that mission, is already completed and awaiting that try.
Microsoft this week changed how it will deliver updates to the parts of Windows 10 that receive and install files from Windows Update, claiming that a new bundling approach will eliminate confusion and streamline the OS's regular refreshes.
Up to now, Microsoft has distributed each servicing stack update (SSU) separately from any cumulative update (CU). The new practice will combine the two – SSU and CU – into one package for download and deployment by IT administrators.
Most Windows end users would be hard pressed to define SSU, even though their PCs have received numerous examples. Not an update to the Windows Update service itself, an SSU is instead a refresh of the components of Windows 10 needed to receive, verify and install files from that service. SSUs are a necessary part of the Windows servicing and maintenance ecosystem, as Microsoft makes plain.
Goodreads has held on to its dominant spot online despite being nearly unusable, but its reign is now being challenged by competitors, including The StoryGraph — On a typical day, a long-time user of Goodreads, the world's largest community for reviewing and recommending books, will feel like they're losing their mind.
Study: ~180 online-only, open-access science, social sciences, and humanities journals have disappeared in the last 20 years and their content wasn't preserved — Eighty-four online-only, open-access (OA) journals in the sciences, and nearly 100 more in the social sciences and humanities …
David Chao, the cofounder of the cross-border venture firm DCM, speaks English, Japanese, and Mandarin. But he also knows how to talk to founders.
It’s worth a lot. Consider that DCM should see more than $1 billion from the $26.4 million it invested across 14 years in the cloud-based business-to-business payments company Bill.com, starting with its A round. Indeed, by the time Bill.com went public last December, when its shares priced at $22 apiece, DCM’s stake — which was 16% sailing into the IPO — was worth a not-so-small fortune.
Since then Wall Street’s lust for both digital payments and subscription-based revenue models has driven Bill.com’s shares to roughly $90 each. Little wonder that in recent weeks, DCM has sold roughly 70 percent of its stake for nearly $900 million. (It still owns 30 percent of its position.)
We talked with Chao earlier today about Bill.com, on whose board he sits and whose founder, René Lacerte, is someone Chao backed previously. We also talked about another very lucrative stake DCM holds right now, about DCM’s newest fund, and about how Chao navigates between the U.S. and China as relations between the two countries worsen. Our conversation has been edited lightly for length and clarity.
TC: I’m seeing you owned about 33% of Bill.com after the first round. How did that initial check come to pass? Had you invested before in Lacerte?
DC: That’s right. Renee started [an online payroll] company called PayCycle and we’d backed him and it sold to Intuit [in 2009] and Renee made good money and we made money. And when he wanted to start this next thing, he said, ‘Look, I want to do something that’s a bigger outcome. I don’t want to sell the company along the way. I just want this time to do a big public company.’
TC: Why did he sell PayCycle if that was his ambition?
DC: It was largely because when you’re a first-time CEO and entrepreneur and a large company offers you the chance to make millions and millions of dollars, you’re a bit more tempted to sell the company. And it was a good price. For where the company was, it was a decent price.
Bill.com was a little bit different. We had good offers before going public. We even had an offer right before we went public. But Renee said, ‘No, this time, I want to go all the way.’ And he fulfilled that promise he’d made to himself. It’s a 14-year success story.
TC: You’ve sold most of your stake in recent weeks for $900 million; how does that outcome compare with other recent exits for DCM?
DC: We actually have another recent one that’s phenomenal. We invested in a company called Kuaishou in China. It’s the largest competitor to Bytedance’s TikTok in China. We’ve invested $49.3 million altogether and now that stake is worth $3.8 billion. The company is still private held, but we actually cashed out around 15% of our holdings. and with just that sale alone we’ve already [seen 10 times] that $30 million.
TC: How do you think about selling off your holdings, particularly once a company has gone public?
DC: It’s really case by case. In general, once a company goes public, we probably spend somewhere between 18 months to three years [unwinding our position]. We had two big IPOs in Japan last year. One company [had] a $1 billion market cap; the other was a $2 billion company. There are some [cases] that are 12 months and there are some [where we own some shares] for four or five years.
TC: What types of businesses are these newly public companies in Japan?
DC: They’re both B2B. One is pretty much the Bill.com of Japan. The other makes contact management software
TC: Isn’t DCM also an investor in Blued, the LGBTQ dating app that went public in the U.S. in July?
DC: Yes, our stake wasn’t very big, but we were probably the first major VC to jump in because it was controversial.
TC: I also saw that you closed a new $880 million early stage fund this summer.
DC: Yes, that’s right. It was largely driven by the fact that many of our funds have done well. We’re now on fund nine, but our fund seven is on paper today 9x, and even the fund that Bill.com is in, fund four, is now more than 3x. So is fund five. So we’re in a good spot.
TC: As a cross-border fund, what does the growing tension between the U.S and China mean for your team and how it operates?
DC: It’s not a huge impact. If we were currently investing in semiconductor companies, for example, I think it would be a pretty rough period, because [the U.S.] restricts all the money coming from any foreign sources. At least, you’d be under strong scrutiny. And if we invested in a semiconductor company in China, you might not be able to go public in the U.S.
But the kinds of deals that we do, which are largely B2B and B2C — more on the software and services side — they aren’t as impacted. I’d say 90% of our deals in China focus on the domestic market. And so it doesn’t really impact us as much.
I think some of the Western institutions putting money into the Chinese market — that might be decreasing, or at least they’re a little bit more on the sidelines, trying to figure out whether they should be continuing to invest in China. And maybe for Chinese companies, less companies will go public in the U.S., etcetera. But some of these companies can go public in Hong Kong.
TC: How you feel about U.S. administration’s policies? Do you understand them? Are you frustrated by them?
DC: I think it requires patience, because what [is announced and] goes on the news, versus what is really implemented and how it truly affects the industry, there’s a huge gap.
