Category: Tech news

SpaceX’s grand vision for Starship, the next-generation spacecraft it’s currently in the process of developing, includes not only trips to Mars, but also regular point-to-point flights right here on Earth. These would skim the Earth’s outer atmosphere, reducing travel times for regular international flights from many hours to around 30 minutes. They’ll need to take off from somewhere, however, and rockets are a bit more disturbing to their local environs than traditional aircraft, so part of SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s plan for their regular use is covering oil rig platforms into floating spaceports.

Musk has talked about these plans before, and SpaceX recently went so far as to purchase two rigs — which it nicknamed Phoibos and Deimos after the moons of Mars. These are currently in the process of being retrofitted for use with Starship, and they’ll be stationed in the Gulf of Mexico near SpaceX’s Brownsville, Texas development site.

On Wednesday, Musk said on Twitter that one of the two platforms could be at least partially operational by the end of 2021. The SpaceX CEO is known for his optimistic timelines, but a lot of them have actually been relatively accurate lately — or at least not quite as unrealistic as in years past.

What he means by “in limited operation” isn’t necessarily clear. That could mean that they’re floating where they’re supposed to be, and technically capable of playing host to a Starship prototype, but not that SpaceX will be actively launching Starships from one by end of year. He did add that the plan is to put floating launchpads for Starship not only in the Gulf, but also at various points around the world — which is in keeping with the bold plan he shared via CG concept videos when Starship debuted, which depicted launch and landing facilities stationed in bodies of water near urban destinations.

When in 2018, Smash Ventures showed up as an investor in a $1.25 billion round for Epic Games — reportedly the largest ever investment in a video game company at the time — it was the first time many had heard of the investing outfit.

When the brand showed up again last summer in an even bigger round for Epic — last August, the games giant announced $1.78 billion in fresh funding at a post-money equity valuation of $17.3 billion — a diner near Epic’s Cary, North Carolina headquarters that sells “smash waffles” started getting calls from reporters, says Eric Garland, who used to lead venture and growth deals for The Walt Disney Company after selling his company, BigChampagne, to Live Nation in 2011.

“Some reporters really turned over rocks,” he says.

Garland knows this, he says, because he co-founded Smash Ventures with Evan Richter, a former member of Disney’s corporate strategy and business development team (and who, before that, was an investor at Insight Partners).

The pair say they weren’t trying to duck the press after striking out on their own a few years ago; they were mostly just trying to get their firm off the ground, which they’ve seemingly done and then some. First, there’s the newly closed $75 million debut fund from strategic partners and notable investors like Kevin Mayer, the former CEO of TikTok and the former Disney executive; Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull; and journalist Willow Bay, who is now dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Yet it’s just a small piece of what they have assembled.

Indeed, at a time when money is more of a commodity than ever and can be accessed easily by many founders, Smash has a few tricks up its sleeve, Richter and Garland suggest.

One thing to know, for example, is that the two apparently have little trouble spinning up side vehicles when they wedge their way into an interesting deal. While they got to know Epic Games through Disney (it made an investment in the company in 2017 when Epic took part in its accelerator program), when they persuaded founder Tim Sweeney to take a bigger check from Smash Ventures in 2018, they were able to package together “several hundred million dollars” from their LPs for a stake in the business.

They also “flexed up” with the help of their limited partners to put a separate $200 million into others of its handful of portfolio companies. These include DraftKings, before it went public through a blank-check company last year; the footwear, apparel and accessory brand Nobull; the men’s grooming company Manscaped; and India’s biggest e-learning startup, Byju’s.

Disney — one of the world’s most powerful brands —  is a common thread throughout. In addition to inviting Epic into its accelerator program, Disney began work on an education app with Byju’s back in 2018 and it owned 6% of DraftKings when it went public last year.

Mayer, the former Disney exec who more recently began launching special purpose acquisition vehicles, credits Richter and Garland with finding “a lot of really cool companies like Epic” while inside Disney, saying he has “been supporting them ever since, because I think they’re great.”

Underscoring the strength of that former Disney network — another apparent advantage here — Mayer says that in addition to being a limited partner, he will sometimes “try and talk to their CEOs, give strategic advice, and talk about exits and M&A with some of their portfolio companies.” (Catmull, who was the president of Walt Disney Animation Studios after Disney acquired Pixar in 2006, was also pulled in to help seal the Epic deal, says Garland.)

As for whether Smash’s dealings have irritated current execs at Disney — it isn’t hard to imagine the entertainment giant would have liked a bigger stake in Epic — Garland says no, adding that, “Outside of its accelerator, Disney is not generally in the venture business.”

In the meantime, Smash also says it’s getting into deals by helping companies tell stories to their respective, captive audiences. As Richter explains it, “The leading consumer software and internet businesses are building massive, and dedicated, user bases, and media, whether it’s a Travis Scott experience within Epic Games, or an IP collaboration between Marvel or Disney [and Byju’s], or whether it’s doing something with the UFC [which last year partnered with Manscaped], can be an incredible way to keep and grow a user base.”

The firm certainly appears to spend a lot of time with its portfolio companies on these efforts. While Smash wrote its first check in 2018, it has just five portfolio companies to date, and it plans only to invest in 10 to 12 companies altogether with that $75 million pool of capital, writing checks as small as $5 million to $10 million, with the ability to write far larger checks when the opportunity arises and its LP network says yes to it.

It’s because the firm is on the hunt now for that next big thing that Smash is suddenly going public with its efforts, Richter suggests. Not that a lot of public speaking is in the partners’ future, seemingly. “We like to stay focused,” Garland says. “We make a lot of noise for our portfolio companies, but we are ourselves very heads down.”

“Ten years in, TransferWise is now Wise,” screams the press release that landed in my in-box late last week. The fintech giant, most recently valued by private investors at $5 billion, is re-branding ahead of an expected IPO.

Of course, the company doesn’t actually make reference to a public listing — for regulatory reasons, it probably shouldn’t even if it wanted to — but the change of name will certainly make for a more streamlined ticker, while more broadly, the new moniker reflects how the decade-old company has long moved beyond B2C international money transfers alone to build what it now dubs a “cross-border payments network”.

“Originally launched in 2011 as a money transfer service for people, the company has expanded to build a cross-border payments network helping to make international banking cheaper, faster and more pleasant for its 10 million personal and business customers,” explains TransferWise.

The company has come far in tens years — you can view an early funding deck here — and today processes £4.5 billion in cross-border transactions every month, claiming to help customers save approximately £1 billion a year in reduced fees compared to using legacy banks.

More recently, having launched consumer and business products akin to a multi-currency bank account, including its own debit card, Wise has started to resemble a challenger bank, too, even if it has previously stated that there are no plans to apply for a full bank license.

Here’s how the company pitches the current product line:

Wise – building the world’s most international account. Send and spend money internationally, hold money in 55 currencies and get real account numbers in 10 currencies. Customers now hold over £3 billion in Wise, with 1.4 million debit cards issued.

Wise Business – the business account for going global, it has all the features of the personal account plus extras like bank feeds, mass payouts and multi-user access. Over 150,000 businesses joined Wise in the last 12 months

Wise Platform – the platform banks and companies like Monzo, GoCardless, and Xero use to tap into the Wise infrastructure, giving their customers cheaper, faster payments and international banking features. Wise Platform is live with banks in 10 countries across 4 continents.

Cue quote from Kristo Käärmann, CEO and co-founder, of Wise: “Today our name catches up with who we’re already building for – a community of people and businesses with multi-currency lives. That community now even includes the banks themselves. We’ve evolved to fix more than just money transfer, but the core experience of using Wise will remain faster, cheaper, and more convenient than anything else. Our mission remains the same. We’re still making — and always will be making — money work without borders.”

Customers can already opt into the new website at Wise.com. “The final switchover for all customers to the Wise brand will take place in March 2021,” says the company.

Zhou Yuxiang doesn’t have the typical profile for working in China’s manufacturing world. A soft-spoken yet incisive person in his early thirties, Zhou graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in government and went on to work in investment banking in Hong Kong, following the path of many Chinese overseas returnees.

But a few years into his career, Zhou realized he wanted to build his own business. This was around 2015, a time when China was consumed by a startup craze amid Premier Li Keqiang’s campaign for “mass entrepreneurship and innovation.” Rather than going into the sleek world of consumer lifestyle, fintech or AI, Zhou picked manufacturing as a starting point.

During his time at Barclays, Zhou helped deep-pocketed Chinese manufacturers scour for merger and acquisition deals in Europe. He saw how factories in Germany digitize their operations using Siemens and SAP solutions. In China, “factories had a lot of money and could buy top-of-the-line equipment. But on the software management front, they were still very primitive,” said Zhou in an interview with TechCrunch.

“Most of the operation was done on paper. Every day, workers received a stack of papers telling them what to do, and in turn, they filled up the sheets reporting what material they had used… When you acquire these financially underperforming factories in Europe, you realize their software infrastructure capabilities are still far superior to yours,” Zhou added.

That digital gap encouraged Zhou to start Black Lake, a software platform for factory workers to log their daily tasks and managers to oversee the plant floor. Since its inception in 2016, the startup has raised over $100 million from GGV Capital, Bertelsmann Asia Investments, GSR Ventures, ZhenFund and others. The company recently closed a Series C round, pocketing nearly 500 million yuan ($77 million) and bringing on new backers including Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund Temasek, who led the round, as well as China Renaissance and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Black Lake’s vision is to be a one-stop collaboration platform for factory workers and managers, digitizing data incurred in all stages of production, from client orders, material procurement, quality compliance, warehouse management, to logistics and shipment. The software analyzes these reams of data, churning out reports for bosses to check for abnormalities in production and for workers to see how they could increase their output and income.

Compared to SaaS incumbents from the West, Black Lake’s more localized services and affordable prices have a greater appeal to China’s wide swathes of small and medium-sized factories, Zhou argued. Black Lake tries to simplify its user experience to a Lego-like building process so factory bosses can easily customize the software for their own use. Workers access the cloud-based software from their smartphones, which have become ubiquitous in China’s affluent cities thanks to increasingly friendly device prices and data fees. A foreign SaaS giant’s solution could cost a factory at least three million yuan a year, while Black Lake charges 300,000 yuan or less, Zhou said.

To date, the company has served nearly 2,000 manufacturers and suppliers across the Greater China Region and Southeast Asia, counting in its customers Tesla, L’Oréal, Xiaomi, Sinopec, and Chinese state-owned conglomerate China Resources’ pharmaceutical group. In all, the company claims to have reached 500,000 production workers.

Manufacturing 2.0

Black Lake is riding a perfect wave of “upgrading” in China’s manufacturing world. For one, the demand for customized products is rising as consumers become savvier. Instead of producing bottled water with the same packaging, for instance, beverage companies now design various looks tailored to different demographics. Factories need to adjust quickly to the flood of customized orders, and a cloud-based data management platform could be the solution, Zhou suggested.

The U.S.-China trade war is another impetus for China’s push for factory upgrade. Having felt the heat from trade sanctions, Chinese manufacturers look to cut expenses and improve productivity. That shift, along with the government’s “new infrastructure” policy to breathe high tech into traditional industries, makes Zhou all the more bullish about his business.

But Black Lake is certainly not the only one to have spotted opportunities in China’s efforts to modernize production, and enterprise software in China has a notoriously slow monetization cycle in part due to low adoption and companies’ reluctance to pay for services. The key is finding a viable business model to fund its dream to be the ultimate “data entry point” for China’s millions of factories.

With proceeds from its new funding, Black Lake plans to spend on product development, hiring, market expansion, and building an open platform for third-party developers. The startup realizes it can’t build everything factories need, and it’s already working with partners across telecommunications, cloud computing, automation and consulting, such as Huawei, Alibaba, SAP and McKinsey.

“When Chinese factories ‘wake up’, their speed of digitization will definitely leapfrog that of their American and European counterparts,” Zhou asserted.

It’s been almost 10 years since Justworks launched. The platform, founded by Isaac Oates, was yet another example of software eating the world; in this particular instance, it was the world of HR. Since, the company has raised nearly $150 million in funding.

All the way back in 2016, Bain Capital Ventures caught a whiff of Justworks’ potential for success. Partner Matt Harris led the company’s $13 million Series B round back when Justworks hadn’t even hit $1 million in annual revenue.

On the next episode of Extra Crunch Live, we’ll sit down with Oates and Harris to discuss how they met, how the deal went down, and how they’ve managed their board member/founder relationship over the last five years.

As with any episode of ECL, Oates and Harris will also give live feedback on audience-submitted pitch decks during the Pitch Deck Teardown.

Extra Crunch Live is a members-only series that goes down each Wednesday at 12pm PT/3pm ET. If you’re not yet an Extra Crunch member, you should take a hard look in the mirror and then hit up this link.

Matt Harris started his investing career at Bain Capital private equity in 1995. In 2000, he founded his own firm called Village Ventures where he spent 12 years and invested primarily in fintech startups. In 2012, he returned to Bain Capital Ventures. His portfolio includes Acorns, Finix, Ribbon, and of course, Justworks, among many others.

Oates served for 12 years in the National Guard and Army Reserve as an intelligence officer. He also served as a software engineer at Amazon before starting his first company, Adtuitive, which was acquired by Etsy. Oates led the HR and payments team at both Adtuitive and Etsy, learning first-hand the ways in which the system was fundamentally broken. Justworks was born in 2012 and has gone on to become a household name in enterprise tech.

On Wednesday’s episode, we’ll talk about why Harris felt conviction in making a bet on Justworks and why Oates went with Harris over other investors. We’ll also learn more about how they handle disagreements, build trust, and their broader thoughts on current enterprise trends.

Then, we’ll dive into the Pitch Deck Teardown. Anyone can submit a pitch deck to be featured on an episode of Extra Crunch Live, but EC members will be prioritized in the list. If you want to get in on the action, submit your deck right here.

As with just about everything we do here at TechCrunch, audience members can also ask their own questions.

Extra Crunch Live has left room for you to network (you gotta network to get work, amirite?). Networking is open starting at 2:30 p.m. EST/11:30 a.m. PST and stays open a half hour after the episode ends. Make a friend!

As a reminder, Extra Crunch Live is a members-only series that aims to give founders and tech operators actionable advice and insights from leaders across the tech industry. Here’s yet another chance for you to join.

Harris and Oates join a world-class cast of speakers on Extra Crunch Live. In February alone we spoke to Lightspeed’s Gaurav Gupta and Grafana’s Raj Dutt, Felicis’ Aydin Senkut and Guideline’s Kevin Busque, and Accel’s Steve Loughlin and Ironclad’s Jason Boehmig.

You can check out past episodes of ECL here and upcoming schedule here.

Information on how to register for the Bain + Justworks episode on Wednesday is below.

See you there!

Chaat is filled with recipes for making Indian-style snack foods, each a fireworks show of flavor.

The oldest DNA ever sequenced shows how the genus split off into new species.

By digging out signals hidden within the brain’s electrical chatter, scientists are getting new insights into sleep, aging, and more.

In 2003, Barrett Lyon created a map of the internet. In 2021, he did it again—and showed just how quickly it’s expanded.

No one has time to look professional anymore. Just toss on one of these hoodies, shirts, or sweatpants and bask in the snuggles.

Do more with your library—find lost tracks, organize your collections, discover new tunes.

It turns out the most important decision made was not the vote to choose (and remove) in the election but Twitter’s permanent banning of the former President from the social network. Suddenly the temperature cooled, the new administration engaged with the details of vaccine rollout, and the second impeachment trial ended with an expected outcome. Twitter’s move was bipartisan if the trial was not.

Twitter’s other big move was the acquisition of Revue, a Substack competitor we’re moving to in production of the Gillmor Gang newsletter. It features tools to drag and drop articles from Twitter, Feedly, and other newsletters, but crucially the ability to reorganize these chunks as the writing develops. It’s my bet that the newsletter container will absorb blogs, podcasts, and streaming into a reorganized media platform available to creators small and large.

This kind of organic process development meshes well with the newsletter model. It encourages more timely releases, and an editorial feel that prizes quality over quantity. As newsletters proliferate, an evaluation of time over volume becomes most significant. It’s less an eyeballs pattern than a prioritization of what is not chosen and then what is, consumed or annotated with social recommendations. As with the Gang’s Frank Radice Nuzzel newsletter, the focus becomes less flow and more authority or resonance.

Daily Commentary

I have made the decision to cover the media exclusively in “The Radice Files” There are plenty of general news aggregators out there, and I for one, am just tired of those stories. I hope you’ll stay with me.

Instead of non-stop Trump, the only political story in the revamped Radice File is about how Fox News cut away from House manager video testimony to a commentary on the futility of covering the violence given the lack of votes for conviction. This shadow dance happens not just on Fox but the other centrist or left networks like CNN and MSNBC. The slant is not what’s interesting; the networks’ business model and the subtle effect on media programming is.

No wonder that streaming’s impact is being felt in the latest unicorn from Silicon Valley, Clubhouse. The audio streaming podcast disruptor is marketed as a FOMO inside hallway conversation, with a Twitter social cloud viral onboard mechanism that digs deep into your contact list and never lets go. Big ticket items such as a keynote-like conversation with Elon Musk are overbooked from the first minute. I tried unsuccessfully to join this week’s follow up with Marc Andreessen and his VC partner Ben Horowitz but it was sold out at 5000 after 30 minutes.

But there is definitely something tugging at me as I get notifications of people joining and creating rooms on various glitzy Valley topics. The live feeling of serendipity and catch it as you can promises the possibility of lightning in a bottle, the sensation of history being made, not just observed. Probably just an illusion, but it’s reminiscent of the feeling we used to get when putting a record on the turntable and daring the artist(s) to succeed. I still get that every time Miles’ Kind of Blue resumes, the awe with which time is reorganized at the atomic level.

People say a Clubhouse can go easily from 1 to 5 hours. I think RSS was killed by the red unread marks indicator. Size matters? Probably, if my college research suggests. But more important than length is ROI, and that’s where the Clubhouse effect dovetails with the newsletter moment. The ingredients of both are intuition, choice, the organic breadcrumb trail, and the payload.

Intuition

Does this notification fit in with what pattern I’m trying to discern this moment. I love movies like Citizen Kane and North By Northwest for the mirage that they project of a universe fated by a biologically innate DNA. Sometimes we call it fate, other times dumb luck, but always that dumbest of phrases: It is what it is. Only this time the conceit is: It is what it’s about to be is. And if something happens, yes, I knew it. Not specifically, but given the mood the planet is in, it figures this could happen.

In a newsletter: the game is not to read everything, but only what and when and in what order. The prize is the analytics, which reward the reader with more stuff, and the publisher with validation of the impact of the combination of choice (citations) and context (writing.) In Clubhouse, it’s being in the room and what — knowing when to bail? For me it’s escaping the inevitability of the point being made in a podcast, or the filter of the business model of what I’m going to do next. If it’s Sunday, it’s Meet the Press. Maybe…

Choice

There’s a bunch of choice: Choice of room, people, time invested, moment of throwing good money after bad. Choice of what I’m playing hookey on — work, cable news, family fun, sleep. Clubhouse lets you publicly eavesdrop, a broadcast @mention that doesn’t give you the option of lurking. But you can do the closest thing to multitasking: doing the dishes, playing with the dog, monitoring. cable news with the sound off, DJ-ing for a private room, driving, etc. It is the new radio, pandemic be damned. Wherever you go, there you still are.

Newsletters? People, time reading, research replacement, subscription development, form of payment (money, authority, trust), influence or eyeballs. The game is trading current media for future rebundling, where the new publishers, studios, and artists are grown.

Breadcrumb trail

These choices create the breadcrumb trail, plowing under the old and furrowing the new. Newsletters are the leading edge of this refactoring, tilling the memes, models, and markets for the trends that become viral. The analytics of opens, email vs. web clicks, and notification triage are implicit for the most part in their signal. Harvesting these breadcrumbs requires the impact of new content created in response to the earlier data. Once you’ve identified a valuable consumer, your real work has just begun.

First, you look for the signature of exultation, the embedded essence of the experience that a certain combination of intuition and action rewards the detective. For that is what this new media is: an information thriller that taps into deep reading, listening, and sharing. Every catch phrase — round up the usual suspects, or we are not the droids you are looking for — represent uber themes we crave to navigate a terrifying treacherous world. We are the droids we’re looking for, and these new medias represent possible parallel worlds where we can not just survive but honor values of our choosing.

In the movies, it’s called the plotline. Clubhouse presumes there’s a story worth waiting for, the moments where we gain power by sharing and decorating reactions with clues as to what part of the same elephant we are investigating. We know intuitively that we’re not going to learn business secrets, but there is gold to be retrieved from the participants as they share their sense of humor or lack of it, their rhythm of when they join, raise their hand, are successful at being invited on stage, when they leave, whether they boomerang, and only a little what they actually say. The price for this is your breadcrumbs.

The Payload

As much as I’m intrigued by Clubhouse, I’ve only actually joined or started a room twice. Once was by accident, as I realized by clicking on a link to see who was there. Me, I found out. Another was a conversation about a Techmeme podcast by the podcaster and Chris Messina of hashtag fame. I never could get into the big A16Z attractions. Like Frank Radice’s newsletter pivot, I was primarily interested in the atmospherics surrounding Andreessen Horowitz’s media strategy. But that doesn’t obviate the steady feeling that something substantial is going on here.

Media generally is swallowing its pride in the wake of the political nightmare we’ve been living through. Notice I say media, not mainstream media or social media. Smarter people than me can debate the distinction, but I think the difference between the two is overstated, and more importantly, not that indicative of what the value of these new media surges will turn out to embody. More and more, the substantial writing that filters in on Twitter, RSS (through Feedly), and aggregators like Nuzzel and Medium is significant in its approach to the central issues we’re struggling with. That includes traditional players like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Information, and the tech journals, as they combine newsletter techniques with their substantial resources.

We’re seeing a merger of the medias, with the consensus around value and weight being measured by new metrics. In television, it’s the NewFronts combining digital and linear TV; in music it’s at the song level, not the album. Streaming has shaken the old networks to their core, with a horse race between Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu, and ABC, NBC, and the old CBS. M&A has swallowed Fox, Time Warner, FX, and even an old studio, Paramount. And radio? You could say the usual suspects Apple, Google, Amazon, and Spotify, but Clubhouse? Like Zoom, I think so. Twitter and Facebook have bigger fish to fry, but Apple Car and Glasses are the key platforms Clubhouse will play in as we move into the autonomous work from anywhere reality. The payload is value, time management, and notifications at the core of the move to digital.

from the Gillmor Gang Newsletter

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The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, February 19, 2021.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang

Subscribe to the new Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the backchannel here on Telegram.

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You’ve landed on the web version of the weekly Human Capital newsletter. Sign up here to get this in your inbox every Friday at 1 p.m.

Welcome back to Human Capital. A lot happened this week pertaining to on-demand companies like Uber, Postmates, DoorDash and Instacart, and their respective gig workforces. Meanwhile, New York’s attorney general hit Amazon with a lawsuit over its warehouse labor practices and Twitter made some new commitments to increase diversity at the leadership level by 2025.

But that’s not all. Google fired another AI top ethicist, Margaret Mitchell. The company also internally published the results of its investigation into what happened with Dr. Timnit Gebru.

Apologies in advance for a slightly lengthier than usual newsletter but it’s all worth knowing, I promise.

Quick note: Human Capital is getting a new name because it seems to be causing some confusion, so don’t be alarmed when this hits your inbox next week with a different name. Name TBD. 

The essential workforce

New bill aims to regulate Amazon warehouses

California assemblyperson Lorena Gonzalez, who was behind gig worker bill AB 5, introduced new legislation that would regulate productivity quotas from companies like Amazon, Walmart and others. Called AB 701, the bill aims to better protect warehouse workers by implementing statewide standards. 

“While corporations like Amazon are collecting record profits during the pandemic, employees in their warehouses are being expected to do more, go faster and work harder without clear safety standards,” Assemblywoman Gonzalez said in a statement. “It’s unacceptable for one the largest and wealthiest employers in the country to put workers’ bodies and lives at risk just so we can get next-day delivery.”

NY AG sues Amazon

New York Attorney General Leticia James filed a lawsuit against Amazon for allegedly failing to provide adequate health and safety measures for its workers. As part of the lawsuit, James alleges Amazon retaliated against workers Christian Smalls and Derrick Palmer after they complained to Amazon about the company’s lack of support during the COVID-19 pandemic. James’ suit came after Amazon’s preemptive lawsuit against her office, alleging that workplace safety is not something she has authority over.

James’ statement:

While Amazon and its CEO made billions during this crisis, hardworking employees were forced to endure unsafe conditions and were retaliated against for rightfully voicing these concerns. Since the pandemic began, it is clear that Amazon has valued profit over people and has failed to ensure the health and safety of its workers. The workers who have powered this country and kept it going during the pandemic are the very workers who continue to be treated the worst. As we seek to hold Amazon accountable for its actions, my office remains dedicated to protecting New York workers from exploitation and unfair treatment in all forms.

Meanwhile, of course, Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer are actively seeking to form a union. This week, reports showed Amazon was altering traffic signals as a way to prevent workers from being able to effectively talk with each other. 

Ex-Postmates VP speaks out about the gig economy

Vikrum Aiyer, the now-former vice president of global public policy and strategic communications at Postmates, penned a memo to his former colleagues and other stakeholders in the gig economy outlining what he thinks needs to happen next in the industry.

In his letter, Aiyer says “it would be a mistake for us to think that mild tweaks to worker classification, or a single state ballot measure, create a durable path forward for meaningfully addressing what Americans truly worry about: the chance to work, take care of their families, and not fret about what comes next.”

Postmates drivers say they’ve become prey to scammers

A new report in The Markup showed scammers sometimes target Postmates workers. In one instance, a scammer stole $346.73 from a worker. You can read the full story here.

In related news, Uber, which owns Postmates, recently hired labor researcher and Uber critic Alex Rosenblat to lead the company’s marketplace policy, fairness and research efforts. 

Uber drivers demand PPE and compensation for time spent sanitizing vehicles

Uber drivers shut down Market Street outside of Uber’s San Francisco headquarters to demand the company provide them with enough personal protective equipment during the COVID-19 pandemic. They also want to be compensated for time spent sanitizing vehicles in order to keep themselves and riders safe. 

Uber lobbies in the EU for Prop 22-like legislation and loses key battle in the U.K.

Meanwhile, over in the EU, Uber is lobbying for Prop 22-like standards. In a white paper, Uber proposed a “new standard” for platform work, where it outlines the need to offer some benefits to workers while simultaneously steering away from the possibility of collective bargaining among workers. From TC’s Natasha Lomas:

A universal standard for platform benefits may sound progressive, but the notion of “relevant” benefits for gig workers risks fixing this labor force to a floor far below agreed standards for employment — closing off any chance of a better deal for a class of workers who are subject to persistent, algorithmic management.

In the UK, the Supreme Court ruled Uber drivers are employees and therefore entiteld to minimum wage and holiday pay. Also from Lomas:

The case, which dates back to 2016, has major ramifications for Uber’s business model (and other gig economy platforms) in the U.K. — and likely regionally, as similar employment rights challenges are ongoing in European courts.

DoorDash drivers are banding together to decline low-paying orders

The strategy, reported on Vice, is designed to beef up the base pay for drivers by working together to game the system. 

From Vice:

The fundamental principles of the official #DECLINENOW movement rely upon all drivers in the movement to exercise their right to use the decline button to decline lowball offers for higher, more feasible ones,” reads a pinned post on the main Facebook group. “Declining lowball offers forces the algorithm to raise the base pay UP on the declined offer for the next driver as the need for DoorDash to service the order increases. In turn, Dashers will see an increase in higher paying offers, many times doing less deliveries for more money and a much higher paying ‘Per mile rate.’”

Turning jobs into gig work

Bloomberg had a really good feature about how the tech industry’s gig economy is impacting workers in other industries. It’s a must-read, but here’s a snippet:

Companies in a range of industries could use the Prop 22 model to undermine or eliminate employment protections. A week after the election, Shawn Carolan, a partner at early Uber investor Menlo Ventures, wrote an op-ed heralding the potential to spread Prop 22’s vision of work “from agriculture to zookeeping,” including to “nursing, executive assistance, tutoring, programming, restaurant work and design.”

President Biden nominates Jennifer Abruzzo to lead NLRB as general counsel

Abruzzo is currently the special counsel for strategic initiatives for the Communications Workers of America. For those unfamiliar, CWA has been making a name for itself in the tech industry by helping tech companies like Glitch and Alphabet unionize. Her appointment could prove to be quite beneficial for tech workers and gig workers alike.

In a statement, CWA President Chris Shelton said:

There is no one who has a more thorough grasp of the National Labor Relations Board and the purpose of the National Labor Relations Act than Jennifer Abruzzo. She is a brilliant attorney who understands how the actions of the NLRB impact the daily lives of people at their workplaces. President Biden’s selection of Jennifer as the NLRB General Counsel shows that under his watch, issues affecting working people will be handled by people like Jennifer who have dedicated their lives to helping workers — and not union busters like we saw during the Trump administration. We hope Jennifer’s confirmation process is speedy — working people need her at the helm of the NLRB now more than ever.

Instacart at odds with workers again

The company has reportedly suspended workers’ accounts for cancelling orders. According to Vice, these workers said they had good reason to cancel some of these orders, citing things like fears of safety and someone providing the wrong address.

Instacart, however, said it’s part of a fraud prevention policy that places accounts on pause if they suspect fraudulent or suspicious activity. 

Stay woke

Twitter commits to increasing diversity at leadership level

Twitter has committed to the Silicon Valley Leadership’s Group 25×25 pledge, which challenges companies to do one of two things:

• Either make underrepresented employees 25% of its leadership team by 2025
• Or increase the number of underrepresented people in leadership positions by 25% by 2025

Currently, Twitter’s leadership team is just 6.5% Black, 3.9% Latinx, 2.8% multiracial and less than one percent Indigenous, according to its most recent diversity report. 

Examining the “pipeline problem”

As I mentioned last week, I had the pleasure of chatting with Dr. Joy Lisi Rankin, a researcher at AI Now, about her research pertaining to the pipeline problem myth in tech. The story also features some insight from Uber Chief Diversity Officer Bo Young Lee, as well as Paradigm Director Courri Brady.

You can check that out here.

Tech engineer alleges sexism and bullying at Mailchimp

Kelly Ellis, a now-former principal engineer at Mailchimp, left her job earlier this week, alleging she was paid less than her male counterparts. In an email to employees, a higher-up at Mailchimp said the company “thoroughly and independently investigated the allegations and found them to be unsubstantiated.”

Glassdoor lets you filter ratings by demographics

Despite efforts from companies to create equitable environments, it’s clear that employees of certain demographics, like Black women, sometimes have very different experiences from their counterparts. Glassdoor aims to better surface those experiences through a new feature that allows folks to filter ratings by demographics.

Justice Through Code teaches returned citizens how to code

Justice Through Code, a semester-long coding and interpersonal skills intensive that takes place at Columbia University, aims to provide alternative paths for people once they reenter society.

The program has support from tech companies like Amazon Web Services, Coursera, Google and Slack.

Promise raises $20 million Series A round

Promise, a platform that makes it easy for people to navigate payments for child support, utilities, parking tickets and more, raised a $20 million Series A round. This round makes Promise founder Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins one of a handful of Black women who has raised more than $1 million.

Hey, Google…WTF?

Google fired Margaret Mitchell, the founder and former co-lead of the company’s ethical AI team. Mitchell announced the news via a tweet.

Google confirmed Mitchell’s firing in a statement to TechCrunch, Google said:

After conducting a review of this manager’s conduct, we confirmed that there were multiple violations of our code of conduct, as well as of our security policies, which included the exfiltration of confidential business-sensitive documents and private data of other employees.

News of Mitchell’s firing came shortly after Google internally announced the results of its investigation of Gebru’s exit, according to Axios. The company did not reveal what it found, but said it would implement some new policies to enhance diversity and inclusion at Google.

Google has a new ethical AI lead

Meanwhile, Google appointed Dr. Marian Croak to lead its responsible artificial intelligence division within Google Research, Bloomberg reported earlier today. Croak was previously the vice president of engineering at the company.

In her new role, Croak will oversee the teams working on accessibility, AI for social good, algorithmic fairness in health, brain fairness, ethical AI and others. She’ll report to Jeff Dean, SVP of Google AI Research and Health.

TC Sessions: Justice is almost here!

Also, we’re a little over a week away from TechCrunch Sessions: Justice, which takes place March 3. Be sure to snag your $5 ticket here to hear from folks like Backstage Capital’s Arlan Hamilton, former Amazon warehouse worker Christian Smalls, Congresswoman Barbara Lee and others.

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 morning? Sign up here.

Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors.

Can data fix healthcare?

Not alone, but you might be able to make a lot of progress with the right data in the right hands. And that’s precisely what the startup we’re talking about today is up to.

The Exchange caught up with Terry Myerson and Lisa Gurry this week, the CEO and CMO of Truveta, a young company that wants to collect oodles of data from healthcare providers, anonymize it, aggregate it and make it available to third parties for research.

It’s a big task, but the team behind Truveta has experience with big projects. Myerson is best known for his time one-rung below the top of the Microsoft org chart, where he ran things you might have heard of, like Windows. Gurry was a leader inside that org, most recently working on strategy for the Microsoft Store product.

But now they are at a healthtech data company. How did that come to be? After Myerson left Microsoft he worked with Madrona, the Seattle-area venture capital firm, and the Carlyle Group, a huge investing group with a taste for private equity. A few years later, several former Microsoft co-workers of Myerson had wound up at Providence, a healthcare giant. They reached out to Myerson around when COVID-19 was first locking down the United States. The former Microsoft exec agreed to take part in a few calls, but didn’t formally join them as he was stuck at home.

During that time he learned that Providence had put together a white paper concerning the idea that Truveta would become, that by collecting data from healthcare providers a dataset of sufficient size and diversity could be compiled to allow research of all sorts to leverage it. Myerson got stuck on the concept, later founding the company. Then he called up some former colleagues, including Gurry, to help him build it.

Truveta has around 50 people today and will scale to around 100 this year, Myerson said.

Questions abound in your head, I’m sure. Things are still early at Truveta, but the company announced last week that it has signed up 14 healthcare providers to help with its data goals. Those firms are also investors in the company (Myerson put in capital in as well).

I was curious about the company’s business plan. Per Myerson, Truveta will charge different rates depending on who wants to access its data. As you can imagine, commercial entities will pay a different price than an independent researcher.

Next for Truveta is getting more data, locking down its internal data schema, collecting feedback from researchers and, later, approaching commercial access.

Healthcare in America is inequitable — something that the pair of Truveta executives stressed during our call — thus giving the company a huge market to improve and make less racist and sexist.

It was a bit odd to talk to Myerson and Gurry about their startup. In the past I’d chatted with them about some of Microsoft’s largest platforms. Let’s see how fast they can transform Truveta from an idea I can’t help but dig, to a company that is a viable commercial concern. And then how big they can grow it.

Market Notes

A lot has happened in the past few days that we couldn’t get to. Adyen’s earnings, for example. The European payments platform reported H2 revenues of €379.4 million, up 28% compared to the year ago half-year. And from that it reported EBITDA of €236.8 million. Who said fintech can’t be profitable? (Note: Adyen’s results are required reading if you care about Stripe’s valuation and future public offering.)

And there were some rounds that also fell through our fingers. Investments like CloudTalk’s recent $7.3 million Series A. The Slovakia-based startup previously raised a $1.6 million seed round in 2019. The startup, as its name suggests, offers cloud telephony services to call centers.

We suspected that CloudTalk probably had a pretty good year in 2020 thanks to global growth in remote work. It did. In an email, CloudTalk said that it has not seen “Zoom-like [growth] figures” but that in 2020 demand for its services “exceeded [its] expectations.” That helps explain its latest round.

The Exchange was also curious if the company had a perspective on subscription pricing versus consumption pricing, a rising topic amongst software dorks such as myself (more to come on this next week with notes from Appian, Fastly and others). Per the company, CloudTalk charges “for both seats and for usage,” making it a hybrid company from a pricing perspective. CloudTalk called its pricing setup “a good balance for both parties because customers like to know what they are going to be paying ahead of time.”

It’s a startup to keep in mind. As is Zolve, a globally themed neobank with a focus on helping expats have a working financial world. I couldn’t get to it, but TechCrunch wrote it up. More here.

And in case you didn’t have time to watch television during work the last few days let’s talk about Robinhood. Which enjoyed a Congressional hearing this week that was mostly dull apart from some notes on the fintech giant’s business model.

Finally, it was a busy week for crowded startup niches. There was more money for OKR startups, leading to our question about VCs putting capital into related companies in the future. Public also raised several hundred million dollars. Because why not. And low-code player OutSystems raised $150 million to round out the group. It was one hell of a week.

Various and Sundry

I will leave you with a few data points. First, that Clubhouse’s metrics are finally starting to match the hype around the product. People are showing up in droves, pushing its total download figures over the 10 million mark.

And in news that I missed, Substack crossed the 500,000 subscriber mark. That’s impressive!

And to close, a Chicago-based, home-focused insurtech startup called Kin crossed the $10 billion “total insured property value” mark this week. The Exchange reached out, asking the company about its economics. After all it’s not hard to run up premium volume if you are selling dollars for 50-cent pieces.

Ruth Awad from the company responded that her company’s “ loss rate is 53% and our gross margins are 32%.” Not bad at all. Given how quickly insurtech has gone from experiment to public-success, Kin is a company to keep tabs on.

Wrapping, please make sure to support your local heavy metal band this weekend,

Alex

After garnering an estimated 8 million downloads since its launch, Clubhouse’s popularity continues across the world and even outside of its original tech-focused seed community.

The latest news comes from East Asia, where Korean media reported this morning that the country’s current prime minister, Chung Sye-kyun, has officially joined the social audio app under the username @gyunvely, making him among the most senior political leaders worldwide to join the burgeoning app. His account was created on Valentine’s Day (February 14th) and was “nominated” by a user using the name of TJ Park (Clubhouse does not have verified profiles).

So far, the prime minister has garnered slightly fewer than 500 followers and is following a bit fewer than 200 accounts, perhaps indicating the app’s current reach in one of the world’s most mobile and connected digital economies. His Clubhouse bio reads “???? ? ???” or “That Yellow Jacket Guy,” a reference to the Korean civil defense uniform worn by politicians in times of crisis (such as throughout the COVID-19 pandemic) and which currently serves — in cartoon form — as Chung’s profile picture.

According to local media reports, Chung spoke in a Clubhouse room for over an hour with fellow Democratic Party of Korea member Jung Cheong-rae. In a public Facebook post yesterday, the prime minister said that “I heard this [app] is ‘hot’ these days so I tried it as a nighttime walk.”

He further said “I was a little startled by the unexpected questions and reactions but the new experience was enjoyable. I think I’ll participate from time to time in the future.” Elaborating, he said “the fact that it’s audio-only and everyone can have a conversation without reserve made me think that it’s a better communication tool than any other social media platforms, especially since currently we’re living in the age of non-face-to-face communication.”

Discussions in the Clubhouse room included questions asking whether it was really him, to more bread-and-butter policy issues like the high price of real estate and physical abuse in the sports world, which has dominated headlines in recent weeks in local media.

While Clubhouse has become something of a fixture for techies and every form of hustle culture connoisseur imaginable, the app has increasingly made forays into politics that are hardly unknown to other social networks.

Miami’s mayor Francis Suarez has been on Clubhouse to sell his city’s potential for the tech industry. San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin joined a “debate” on the platform about the future of SF, while NYC mayoral aspirant and all around UBI nerd Andrew Yang joined a discussion about … himself. Meanwhile, Bitcoin aficionado and itinerant Tesla leader Elon Musk has even proposed bringing Vladimir Putin onto Clubhouse for a live fireside chat.

Yet, as the platform expands globally, the challenges to its open and free-wheeling if somewhat moderated conversations are coming under closer scrutiny. China has now blocked Clubhouse within its borders after a brief period of uncensored conversation.

As Clubhouse continues to garner mainstream legitimacy and interest, questions continue to percolate on the future of the app’s success, such as how it will fund creators and continue to thrive once the world opens up after COVID-19.