Category: Tech news

When George Floyd was murdered in May 2020, it set off a firestorm of protests and shed a bright hot spotlight on the issues of racism in America and elsewhere. As a response, many companies gave messages of support to people of color, yet have failed to make substantive change since that time. One company that is attempting to move beyond lip service and diversity quotas is Twilio, whose CEO Jeff Lawson has made a commitment to work toward being an anti-racist company.

As part of that commitment, he hired Lybra Clemons, who has years of experience in corporate diversity jobs, as chief diversity officer and the two of them have worked together with the rest of the executive team to try and execute the company’s anti-racist vision.

It’s a complex and challenging task to parse personal bias and institutional and societal racism and try to build a company that actively works to combat all of this, but Lawson and Clemons seem determined to be an example to all tech companies.

As part of this effort, the company published a diversity report recently, partially to document its progress and partly to share some of the lessons it has learned as it goes on this journey to build a better and more inclusive company.

I spoke to both executives to learn about their efforts and how they think about anti-racism, deal with it on multiple levels from personal to business to societal — and how the work is never really done.

Making the effort

Clemons said that when she came on board in September 2020, it was part of an overall effort on the part of Lawson and the executive team to commit to being anti-racist, and part of her job was to help define what that meant. In part, it was an effort to move beyond some of “the perfunctory responses” from other companies, but also an honest attempt at trying to do something different to improve how they hired people, and the systems they put in place to make people feel welcome and succeed, regardless of who they were, what they looked like or where they came from.

“I’m not saying that all companies are like that, but there were a lot of perfunctory responses [after George Floyd was murdered],” Clemons told me. “I do believe that there was a full-on commitment [at Twilio] to figure out what it means to become an anti-racist company, [figuring out what] anti-racism means — which we are grappling with right now — and, if we use that lens, how we’ll be able to approach diversity, equity and inclusion in a different way.”

Lawson says that this isn’t something he just picked up on in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. He has been thinking about this for a long time. One of Twilio’s early backers was Kapor Capital. The firm’s principals, Mitch Kapor and Freada Kapor Klein, who have been preaching about diversity and inclusion for decades, encouraged Lawson to come to meetings with other founders to discuss diversity in the early days of the company, which was founded in 2008.

In an interview in 2017, Kapor Klein told TechCrunch about the importance of establishing a positive culture as early as possible in a startup’s evolution because it becomes much harder, the larger you get as a company.

“It’s almost impossible to overemphasize the importance of intentionally building a positive culture from the start. Finding time to articulate values, principles and how you want to be known is critical. There’s always too much to do, but retrofitting culture or diversity and inclusion in a big company is much harder,” she said at the time.

Lawson says these early meetings with the Kapors and other startup founders helped plant the seeds about the kind of company he wanted to build. He realized at the time that as focused as he was on building the successful business his startup would become, there was no perfect time to start thinking about DEIB (diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging), and it was his responsibility as the leader of his startup to begin thinking about it right then and there, before, as he said, “the company was a thousand white men.”

That thinking evolved over the last year on how to build an anti-racist company, a concept he picked up by reading the book ‘How To Be An Antiracist’ by Ibram X. Kendi, and he is committed to that approach.

“Anti-racism just speaks to the fact that there are systems, institutionalized systems in any society … that biases certain people over others, and that can be done intentionally or unintentionally, and the work of anti-racism is to say, let’s try to do the work and to identify what those systems are, and then ask how we can combat that,” Lawson said.

Using data to move, not prove

Clemons says that throughout the mid-2000s, the standard way of looking at diversity was simply to look at the data and pat yourself on the back if you reached your diversity goals, but she said that she wanted to help Twilio use the data to move beyond that approach to use data to drive substantive change at the company.

“The data is helping us understand that either we increased or we didn’t increase in this particular demographic or population. So how do we use the data to actually move and make some changes or shifts to our policies or practices and so forth,” she said.

“This is a full journey of really understanding the history of the U.S., the history of the world as it relates to racism, colonialism, all of the -isms, colorism and homophobia, and addressing that. Figuring out what our choices are, our individual stakes in them and then using that as a way to build out anti-racist policies and practices to actually start to make some shifts in our diversity, equity and inclusion strategy.”

In a story earlier this year about Valence, a startup with the goal of advancing Black professionals in the workplace, company CEO Guy Primus said he wants to help companies move beyond the numbers game that Clemons referenced.

“People want the numbers to go up, and there’s [this notion of] recruit, retain and promote. The problem is that everyone is focused on the recruiting pipeline, but they’re not focused on retention and promotion, which ultimately affects recruiting. So it’s an ecosystem problem, not a pipeline issue,” Primus told TechCrunch at the time.

That’s an area where Twilio is moving into actionable programs to help move beyond simply recruiting, although that’s clearly part of it, and helping build a company where every employee feels appreciated, that they can succeed based on their skills, and that they truly belong.

The Twilio report cites a number of specific programs to help make this happen.

One is called Hatch, which launched in 2017. Hatch looks for folks from non-traditional backgrounds who have been through a coding boot camp and puts them in a six-month apprenticeship program. The program is designed to teach them more advanced coding skills and learn what it takes to be a successful coder with coaching and mentorship.

Lawson says that as of last year, 93% of the folks who came through this program are still with the company. That’s a track record that suggests people are coming into the company, which is putting systems in place to help ensure their success.

Other programs include Rise Up, which helps Black and Latinx employees move into management positions via a leadership development program, and Twilio Unplugged, which teaches candidates from historically excluded backgrounds how to succeed in a tech company interview process to get through that initial step to get hired.

These and so many more programs are designed to help achieve the company’s anti-racism goals. Lawson is the first to admit that it is not a perfect system, and that with the help of Clemons and others, he and the rest of the executive team are still working and learning and trying to build a company where everyone can succeed and everyone feels a part of the team.

Twilio is still 60% male and just over 38% female, a number that was up 6% in 2020. The overall racial and ethnic makeup of the company is around 51% white, 26% Asian, 6.5% Latinx and 5.5% Black. While the ratio of whites to nonwhites is quite favorable, with a large percentage of Asians, it still has work to do when it comes to other historically excluded groups.

Image Credits: Twilio

The company certainly understands that. Lawson says that by working on an individual, company and societal level, Twilio hopes to do its part to improve its own record and continue to get better at this. Part of that is sharing what they’ve learned in the report, not to pat themselves on the back, but to bring the conversation outside the company.

As Clemons said in the video that accompanied the company’s diversity report: “Everyone has their experience. Everyone comes in with all types of experiences, whether good or bad, and we cannot change that, but what Twilio can do is provide a space for those to feel like they are part of something, and it goes back to this anti-racist framework of ensuring that there’s equity for all people to feel like they can have a great career and a great career journey at Twilio.”

Turo, the peer-to-peer car-sharing startup, has initiated the confidential process of filing for an initial public offering with the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission.

The number of shares to be offered in the IPO and the price range have not yet been determined, the company said in a statement. Turo declined to provide additional information to TechCrunch.

The eleven-year-old Turo’s marketplace is analogous to Airbnb, letting car owners post an ad to rent out their vehicle on its app and website. Cars are available to rent in more than 5,500 cities across three countries. Turo was in Germany after taking over Daimler AG’s car-sharing subsidiary Croove alongside an investment deal. The company is no longer in Germany.

The company had a $250 million Series E in July 2019, which pushed the company into unicorn status and “past the billion-dollar valuation mark,” CEO Andre Haddad said in a blog post. Turo followed that up with a $30 million extension round the following February, bringing its total funding to date to over $500 million.

Turo did not have a completely smooth ride during the pandemic; like other transportation startups Bird and Getaround, Turo laid off 30% of its workforce, or 108 employees, in March 2020 according to data tracker Layoffs.fyi.

Sexual harassment is, unfortunately, always in the news. Of late, it’s revelations at gaming giants and governments. Yet despite how prevalent harassment is, companies often adopt an “it can’t happen here” stance — until it does, and then there are knee-jerk reactions and crisis communications.

A better approach: recognizing how pervasive it is and planning with that in mind.

When I first started Ethena, I explained the concept of innovative harassment prevention training to my father. Like any good parent, he thought my entrepreneurial genius was actually a terrible idea and advised me to stay put at my job. But when he finally accepted that I was going to start this company, he said, “Make sure you don’t have harassment at your company. That would be bad.”

He’s not wrong. My team provides a modern compliance training platform. Since our first product was harassment prevention training, it would be pretty bad if we were talking the talk without walking the walk.

If I could prevent workplace harassment on optimism alone, I absolutely would. But I’ve seen the data on the prevalence of workplace harassment.

A 2018 Pew survey, for example, found that 59% of women and 27% of men reported experiencing sexual harassment. And the rise of remote work hasn’t changed things. In fact, there are some indications that harassment is on the rise thanks to “keyboard courage.”

Knowing that, I’ve come to terms with the fact that these are issues we’ll likely face, so I want us to be prepared. Today’s workplace demands that leaders acknowledge gray areas and engage with uncomfortable topics; it’s how companies grow in new and healthy directions. Here’s how we think about that growth.

Plan for it

As a Floridian, I grew up assuming hurricanes would hit my house. We always had some plywood and canned food because when you know something is going to happen, you plan for it.

Unlike prepared Floridians, startups tend to adopt an ostrich approach when it comes to harassment. Instead of stocking the pantry, so to speak, companies wait until they’re already in a storm.

Early on, a startup is a small group of (usually homogeneous) friends, and it’s uncomfortable to acknowledge that bad things could happen. It’s much easier to hope that building a team of stellar humans is enough.

But, unfortunately, bad things do happen, because sometimes harassment is not as cut-and-dried as we are led to believe. Rather, harassment often grows from the complexities of human interactions — intent, perception, privilege and context, to name a few. It can start with a few small jokes, a colleague who gets drunkenly inappropriate every Friday, or a team that never seems to hire anyone outside of their social circle.

Then, things can escalate, and people start to realize that what they’re actually experiencing is a hostile work environment. Unfortunately, at that point, it’s really hard to right the ship because the company is suddenly 600 people and change gets harder as companies grow.

Knowing that problems are more likely as companies scale, it’s vital that teams prepare by learning how to identify warning signs early. At a bare minimum, train your team members to recognize what workplace harassment looks like and better understand inclusion so that the bar is set higher than “let’s just not get sued.”

Out of everyone at the company, managers really need to get the memo. As a company scales, senior leaders have a limited span of control, so frontline managers become the most crucial employees in either promoting or preventing inclusive workplaces. It just so happens that training is legally required in states like California and New York.

Make feedback, not just “tell HR,” an option

The traditional way that harassment is talked about is very binary. Either a workplace is perfectly inclusive or it’s a toxic cesspool. Obviously, it’s important to take these issues seriously, but the problem with treating every act as either fine or serious, capital-H harassment is that it gives employees a choice between bad and worse.

Let’s say Elena is on an engineering pod with Jonah, and Jonah occasionally does small things that cause her to feel less than included.

For example, they’re hiring for a new front-end engineer and Jonah always refers to this future hire as “he.” In the traditional, frowny-faced lawyer version of harassment, Elena has two options:

1. Do nothing: Bad because Jonah is going to keep doing it.
2. Tell HR: Also bad. Elena doesn’t want to get Jonah fired. She just wants him to be more inclusive.

However, if training teaches Elena — and, ideally, everyone else on her team — to say something in the moment, Elena now has a tool she can actually use.

Next time Jonah says, “OK so when he joins … ” Elena can jump in with, “Unless you’re psychic, which seems unlikely given how poorly you did in Fantasy Football, please use ‘they’ to refer to our new hire, since we don’t know their gender.”

Did Elena need to insert the burn? Probably not, but humor can diffuse a tense situation so sure, why not? Regardless, once Elena says something, it’s on Jonah to accept her feedback and make a change; and, if team values are clear, hopefully Jonah’s colleagues will hold Jonah accountable, too.

Accountability is everything

This last lesson is only applicable after something at the company happens. Let’s say Jonah’s comments escalate, even after Elena gives feedback. Jonah consistently excludes Elena and other women from key meetings, talks over them, and when confronted, says, “Look, we all know they’re only here for diversity stats.”

If Jonah’s manager at this fictitious, problematic company does nothing, that’s the ballgame. There’s literally no amount of workshops, training, blog posts or all-hands meetings that can convince Elena that the company cares. Actions speak loudest.

The best possible version of dealing with an issue involves transparency so that people can learn from what happened and see that the company does care. Obviously, it’s hard when issues involve private information and protecting those who reported the issues, but to the extent possible, it’s crucial to have accountability.

Of course, my dad is right: Harassment at my company would be bad. But we’re preparing for it because scaling a company means rapidly increasing the number of human interactions.

Thankfully, building an inclusive company looks a lot like building a good company — preparation, feedback and accountability are managerial best practices that should be put in place early.

Instagram is further investing in its e-commerce business, Instagram Shops, with the launch of a new advertising product, Ads in Instagram Shop. The company says it’s currently testing the new format, which includes both single images and the option for an image carousel, with select U.S.-based advertisers ahead of an expansion to other markets in the months to come.

The company first introduced Instagram Shops last year as part of a larger effort at Facebook to make its social platforms not just a place to connect with friends and follow favorite brands, but also an online shopping destination with an integrated checkout experience. Naturally, this type of initiative also lends itself to Facebook’s advertising model, as brands looking to connect with consumers could pay for expanded reach.

Like Instagram’s other advertising products, Ads in Instagram Shop will launch with an auction-based model, the company says. The ads will only appear on mobile, as the Instagram Shop tab is a mobile-only feature. However, how many ads an individual consumer sees will be based on how they use Instagram and how many people are shopping in the Instagram tab. The company plans to monitor consumer sentiment on this point, in order to balance ads and content.

Initially, Instagram is working with a handful of U.S. advertisers who will test the product and provide feedback, including Away, Donny Davy, Boo Oh, Clare paint, JNJ Gifts, DEUX and Fenty Beauty. These brands encompass some of the more popular categories of goods Instagram users like to shop for, including beauty, home décor, pet products, travel and more.

The company hasn’t yet disclosed an exact time frame for rolling out the ads more publicly, but says the plan is to expand the new format to advertisers in other, non-U.S. markets over the next several months.

The Instagram Shop tab has been one of the app’s more controversial additions in recent years, as it replaced the popular “Activity” tab (heart button) in the bottom navigation row — a change that made the app feel more commercially driven than in the past and alienated some users. Today, the creative community is weighing its options as Instagram distances itself further from its photo-sharing roots with other new additions, like its TikTok clone Reels, as well.

SpaceX will be acquiring satellite connectivity startup Swarm Technologies, the first such deal for the 19-year-old space company headed by Elon Musk.

Swarm operates a constellation of 120 sandwich-sized satellites as well as a ground station network. The deal would transfer control of Swarm’s ground and space licenses to SpaceX, in addition to any licenses pending before the commission. If the transaction is approved, the startup would become a “direct wholly-owned subsidiary” of the larger company.

The acquisition, which was reported in under-the-radar filings with the Federal Communications Commission, marks a sharp departure from the launch giant’s established strategy of internally developing its tech.

The deal was reportedly reached between the two companies on July 16. The FCC filings do not disclose any financial details or terms of the transaction. Neither SpaceX nor Swarm could be reached for comment.

“Swarm’s services will benefit from the better capitalization and access to resources available to SpaceX, as well as the synergies associated with acquisition by a provider of satellite design, manufacture, and launch services,” the companies said in the filing. For SpaceX’s part, the company will “similarly benefit from access to the intellectual property and expertise developed by the Swarm team, as well as from adding this resourceful and effective team to SpaceX.”

What this means for SpaceX’s operations, particularly its Starlink satellite network, is unclear, as these satellites operate in a different frequency band from that of Swarm. In the short term, Swarm CEO Sara Spangelo told TechCrunch last month that the company is “still marching” toward its goal of operating a 150-satellite constellation.

Compared to SpaceX, Swarm is a relatively new company. It raised a $25 million Series A almost exactly three years ago, in August 2018, but it only went commercially live with its flagship product earlier this year. That product, the Tile, is a small modem that can be embedded in various connectivity devices and linked to the satellite network to allow users a low-cost way to power Internet of Things devices.

Swarm’s Evaluation Kit. Image Credits: Swarm (opens in a new window)

Swarm also launched its second product last month, the $499 Evaluation Kit, an all-in-one package designed to give anyone the ability to create an IoT device using a Tile, a solar panel and a few other components.

Facebook’s decision to close accounts connected to a misinformation research project last week prompted a broad outcry from the company’s critics — and now Congress is getting involved.

A handful of lawmakers criticized the decision at the time, slamming Facebook for being hostile toward efforts to make the platform’s opaque algorithms and ad targeting methods more transparent. Researchers believe that studying those hidden systems is crucial work for gaining insight on the flow of political misinformation.

The company specifically punished two researchers with NYU’s Cybersecurity for Democracy project who work on Ad Observer, an opt-in browser tool that allows researchers to study how Facebook targets ads to different people based on their interests and demographics.

In a new letter, embedded below, a trio of Democratic senators are pressing Facebook for more answers. Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Chris Coons (D-DE) and Mark Warner (D-VA) wrote to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg asking for a full explanation on why the company terminated the researcher accounts and how they violated the platform’s terms of service and compromised user privacy. The lawmakers sent the letter on Friday.

“While we agree that Facebook must safeguard user privacy, it is similarly imperative that Facebook allow credible academic researchers and journalists like those involved in the Ad Observatory project to conduct independent research that will help illuminate how the company can better tackle misinformation, disinformation, and other harmful activity that is proliferating on its platforms,” the senators wrote.

Lawmakers have long urged the company to be more transparent about political advertising and misinformation, particularly after Facebook was found to have distributed election disinformation in 2016. Those concerns were only heightened by the platform’s substantial role in spreading election misinformation leading up to the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, where Trump supporters attempted to overturn the vote.

In a blog post defending its decision, Facebook cited compliance with FTC as one of the reasons the company severed the accounts. But the FTC called Facebook’s bluff last week in a letter to Zuckerberg, noting that nothing about the agency’s guidance for the company would preclude it from encouraging research in the public interest.

“Indeed, the FTC supports efforts to shed light on opaque business practices, especially around surveillance-based advertising,” Samuel Levine, the FTC’s acting director for the Bureau of Consumer Protection, wrote.

Trendyol, an e-commerce platform based in Turkey, has raised $1.5 billion in a massive funding round that values the company at $16.5 billion. General Atlantic, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Princeville Capital and sovereign wealth funds, ADQ (UAE) and Qatar Investment Authority co-led the round. 

The deal marks SoftBank’s first in the country.

The new financing also makes Trendyol Turkey’s first decacorn, and among the highest-valued private tech companies in Europe. It comes just months after strategic — and majority — backer Alibaba invested $350 million in the company at a $9.4 billion valuation.

Founded in 2010, Trendyol ranks as Turkey’s largest e-commerce company, serving more than 30 million shoppers and delivering more than 1 million packages per day. It claims to have evolved from marketplace to “superapp” by combining its marketplace platform (which is powered by Trendyol Express, its own last-mile delivery solution) with instant grocery and food delivery through its own courier network (Trendyol Go), its digital wallet (Trendyol Pay), consumer-to-consumer channel (Dolap) and other services.

Image Credits: Founder Demet Mutlu / Trendyol

Trendyol founder Demet Suzan Mutlu said the new capital will go toward expansion within Turkey and globally. Specifically, the company plans to continue investing in nationwide infrastructure, technology and logistics and toward accelerating digitalization of Turkish SMEs. She said the company was founded to create positive impact and that it intends to continue on that mission.

Evren Ucok, Trendyol’s chairman,  added that part of the company’s goal is to create new export channels for Turkish merchants and manufacturers.

Melis Kahya Akar, managing director and head of consumer for EMEA at General Atlantic, said that Trendyol’s marketplace model — ranging from grocery delivery to mobile wallets — “brings convenience and ease to consumers” in Turkey and internationally.

“Turkey is one of the fastest growing economies in the world and benefits from attractive demographics, with a young population that is very active online,” wrote General Atlantic’s Kahya Akar via e-mail. “We expect its already sizable e-commerce market –$17 billion in 2020 – to continue to grow meaningfully on the back of growing online penetration. We think Trendyol is ideally positioned to meet the needs of consumers in Turkey and around the world as the company expands.”

A 2020 report by JPMorgan found that e-commerce represented only 5.3% of the overall Turkish retail market at the time but that Turkish e-commerce had notched impressive leaps in revenues in recent years: 2018 alone saw the market jump by 42%, followed by 31% in 2019. As of 2020, 67% of the Turkish population were making purchases online.

We’ve all been there. (Or at least I have.)

You’re getting ready to vacate a property you’ve rented, only to be told by the landlord that you won’t be getting your security deposit back.

This happened to me the first time I ever rented a place in the late 90s. I was shocked, but more than anything, I was angry at the injustice because I knew that what the landlord claimed was not true. It was her word against mine and my roommate’s. Still, we took her to small claims court, not so much over the $800 she was trying to keep but more to prove her wrong. In the end, we won.

But it was a lot of work, and a lot of time spent. If only there was some kind of technology available to have helped us make our case.

Well, today there is. RentCheck, a startup that is out to help solve the “he said, she said” challenge in these situations with an automated property inspection platform, has recently raised $2.6 million in seed money.

Lydia Winkler and Marco Nelson started the company in mid-2019 after Winkler experienced a similar situation to mine and ended up suing her landlord in small claims court. She was working on getting her JD/MBA at Tulane University at the time.

“It was an injustice for me not to pursue it,” she told TechCrunch. “I took meticulous photos of the move-out condition of my apartment. The process took 18 months. But not everyone has the time or knowledge to fight in court.”

She then met Nelson, who had bought several properties that he ended up renting out. He had issues with security deposits too, but the opposite ones. He had to settle disputes over deposits, and found himself documenting properties’ condition at the time of move-out.

“I met Lydia and we realized we were passionate about the same problem,” Nelson recalled.

And so New Orleans-based RentCheck was born.

Image Credits: RentCheck; Co-founders Marco Nelson and Lydia Winkler

There are an estimated 48 million rental units in the U.S., with an average deposit of $1,000.

“A good chunk of that is being fought after on aggregate,” Winkler said. “And so many need that money to put down a deposit on another unit.”

To address the problem, RentCheck built a web app for property managers that they believe also benefits tenants. The company’s digital platform works by providing a way for property managers to facilitate and conduct remote, guided property inspections. For obvious reasons, the company saw increased demand upon the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, considering that the platform was automated and contactless. It saw 1,000% — mostly organic — growth in terms of the number of properties on the platform.

“What we do is, using a guided inspection process, prompt users and guide them room by room, telling them exactly what to take photos of so that floors, ceilings, windows and walls are all accounted for,” Winkler said.

Everything is done within the app so that users can’t upload photos that were previously on their camera roll “to ensure the integrity of the inspection” and that  everything is time stamped. Once the inspection is complete, whoever does it signs off on it that they completed it accurately and honestly. Then the property manager can also sign off on it so both parties can agree on the move-out condition.

The company operates as a SaaS business, and charges property management companies a subscription fee based on the number of properties that they have on the RentCheck platform. They can then conduct “as many inspections as they want,” Nelson says, “whether the residents are doing them, their internal teams are doing them, or a third-party vendor, or a hybrid of the three.”

Image Credits: RentCheck/Bryce Ell Photography

The startup has attracted some large-name investors since its inception, first catching the attention of James “Jim” Coulter, the founder of TPG Capital, when the company won New Orleans Entrepreneurship Week. Coulter subsequently became one of the company’s first investors in its $1 million pre-seed round.

The company’s seed round included participation from Cox Enterprises, for its operations in the multifamily housing space, and angels such as Jim Payne, who previously sold MoPub to Twitter, and MAX to AppLovin; Ken Goldman, the former CFO of Yahoo, and who currently runs Hillspire, Eric and Wendy Schmidt’s family office; Mark Zaleski and John Kuolt of BCG Digital Ventures, and Brian Long, the founder of Attentive, who previously sold TapCommerce to Twitter. It also included institutional investors such as Irongrey, Context Ventures and Techstars. 

“What we love about RentCheck is that it’s using very clever technology to automate and solve arguably the industry’s biggest problem in terms of money and time for both property managers and tenants,” said Kuolt, former managing director at BCG Digital Ventures and an early RentCheck investor. “The deposit deduction issue needs a technology-based solution, and almost everyone, at some time, has felt like they’ve been screwed over on their deposit by a landlord. When you see and use RentCheck’s solution, it makes you think: ‘Why didn’t I think of this?’ ” 

Roku this morning announced an expansion of its original content lineup, with the addition of 23 new Roku Original programs that will debut on August 13 on The Roku Channel free streaming hub. The new programing — which also hails from Roku’s acquisition of failed streamer Quibi’s catalog — will supplement the initial slate of 30 originals which were first released in May. Among the new programs are four shows that had not yet gone live on Quibi’s service before Roku purchased the content catalog for its own originals business.

These unreleased programs include “Eye Candy,” a “Nailed It!”-like competition series hosted by Josh Groban and inspired by Japan’s “Sokkuri Sweets;” “Squeaky Clean,” a cleaning competition series hosted by Leslie Jordan; Season 2 of pay-it-forward reality show “Thanks a Million,” executive produced by Jennifer Lopez; and 10-part docuseries “What Happens in Hollywood,” directed by Marina Zenovich, which details some of the industry’s most controversial secrets.

Other programs now arriving include: “&Music,” “The Andy Cohen Diaries,” “Benedict Men,” “Elba vs Block,” “Fierce Queens,” “Floored,” “Gone Mental with Lior,” “Mapleworth Murders,” “Memory Hole,” “Nice One!,” “Nikki Fre$h,” “Run this City,” “The Sauce,” “Sex Next Door,” “Singled Out,” “Skrrt with Offset,” “The Stranger,” “Survive” and “Wireless.”

Roku had praised the performance of its original lineup during its second quarter earnings last week, saying the new catalog had demonstrated “good performance,” without sharing specific metrics.

The company also said it would continue to invest in originals, but downplayed the size of their role in its larger strategy for The Roku Channel, where original programming is a smaller fraction of the content Roku offers its customers.

Noted Roku CEO Anthony Wood, The Roku Channel’s catalog consists mainly of content that comes from the licensing deals Roku strikes with various partners.

“It’s a portfolio approach and the originals are part of that portfolio,” he said. “The primary source of content is still licensing, but originals have benefits, as well. And as part of the portfolio, they’re a great addition,” Wood added. He also was careful to explain that the addition of originals wouldn’t have any impact on the gross margins related to The Roku Channel’s ad-supported video on demand (AVOD) business model. Instead, the expansion into originals, which has also included Roku’s purchase of “This Old House,” is more about user acquisition and its ad business.

“The other advantage of the originals is, of course, there’s a halo effect. So it’s helpful with the upfronts, it’s helpful with our advertising business and it’s helpful for bringing in new customers into The Roku Channel,” Wood said.

The company explained that originals drove more engagement among users, which then drove more advertisers — including new advertisers — and that gives Roku more money to invest in more content and further scale its business. Roku said that more than 42% of its advertisers were first-time upfront advertisers with the company, which had a lot do with its ability to offer original programming on The Roku Channel.

Overall, however, Roku saw a mixed Q2. The company beat Wall Street expectations with earnings per share of $0.52 versus estimates of $0.13, and revenue of $645 million versus estimates of $618 million, but reported a decline in streaming hours. Roku said streaming hours decreased by 1 billion from the first quarter of 2021, but attributed this to the pandemic, as more people were leaving their homes for activities like dining, entertainment and travel. Shares fell by more than 8% after the earnings report, despite Roku reporting that streaming hours had grown year-over-year by 19% worldwide.

Back in December 2020 we covered the launch of a new kind of smartphone app-based search engine, Xayn.

“A search engine?!” I hear you say? Well, yes, because despite the convenience of modern search engines’ ability to tailor their search results to the individual, this user-tracking comes at the expense of privacy. This mass surveillance might be what improves Google’s search engine and Facebook’s ad targeting, to name just two examples, but it’s not very good for our privacy.

Internet users are admittedly able to switch to the U.S.-based DuckDuckGo, or perhaps France’s Qwant, but what they gain in privacy, they often lose in user experience and the relevance of search results, through this lack of tailoring.

What Berlin-based Xayn has come up with is personalized, but a privacy-safe web search on smartphones, which replaces the cloud-based AI employed by Google et al. with the innate AI in-built into modern smartphones. The result is that no data about you is uploaded to Xayn’s servers.

And this approach is not just for “privacy freaks”. Businesses that need search but don’t need Google’s dominant market position are increasingly attracted by this model.

And the evidence comes today with the news that Xayn has now raised almost $12 million in Series A funding led by the Japanese investors Global Brain and KDDI (a Japanese telecommunications operator), with participation from previous backers, including the Earlybird VC in Berlin. Xayn’s total financing now comes to more than $23 million.

It would appear that Xayn’s fusion of a search engine, a discovery feed and a mobile browser has appealed to these Asian market players, particularly because Xayn can be built into OEM devices.

The result of the investment is that Xayn will now also focus on the Asian market, starting with Japan, as well as Europe.

Leif-Nissen Lundbæk, co-founder and CEO of Xayn said: “We proved with Xayn that you can have it all: great results through personalization, privacy by design through advanced technology and a convenient user experience through clean design.”

He added: “In an industry in which selling data and delivering ads en masse are the norm, we choose to lead with privacy instead and put user satisfaction front and center.”

The funding comes as legislation such as the EU’s GDPR or California’s CCPA have both raised public awareness about personal data online.

Since its launch, Xayn says its app has been downloaded around 215,000 times worldwide, and a web version of its app is expected soon.

Over a call, Lundbæk expanded on the KDDI aspect of the fund-raising: “The partnership with KDDI means we will give users access to Xayn for free, while the corporate — such as KDDI — is the actual customer but gives our search engine away for free.”

The core features of Xayn include personalized search results; a personalized feed of the entire internet, which learns from their Tinder-like swipes, without collecting or sharing personal data; and an ad-free experience.

Naoki Kamimeada, partner at Global Brain Corporation said: “The market for private online search is growing, but Xayn is head and shoulders above everyone else because of the way they’re re-thinking how finding information online should be.”

Kazuhiko Chuman, head of KDDI Open Innovation Fund, said: “This European discovery engine uniquely combines efficient AI with a privacy-protecting focus and a smooth user experience. At KDDI, we’re constantly on the lookout for companies that can shape the future with their expertise and technology. That’s why it was a perfect match for us.”

In addition to the three co-founders (Leif-Nissen Lundbæk, chief executive officer, Professor Michael Huth, chief research officer, and Felix Hahmann, chief operations officer), Dr Daniel von Heyl will come on board as chief financial officer. Frank Pepermans will take on the role of chief technology officer and Michael Briggs will join as chief growth officer.

The Chinese government’s crackdown on its domestic technology industry continues, with Tencent under fresh pressure despite the company’s efforts to follow changing regulatory expectations.

News broke over the weekend that Beijing filed a civil suit against Tencent “over claims its messaging-app WeChat’s Youth Mode does not comply with laws protecting minors,” per the BBC. And NetEase, a major Chinese technology company, will delay the IPO of its music arm in Hong Kong. Why? Uncertain regulations, per Reuters.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

Read it every morning on Extra Crunch or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

The latest spate of bad news for China’s technology industry follows a raft of regulatory changes and actions by the nation’s government that have deleted an enormous quantity of equity value. After a period of relatively light-touch regulatory oversight, domestic Chinese technology companies have found themselves on defense after the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came after their market power in antitrust terms — and some of their business operations from other perspectives. Sectors hit the hardest include fintech and edtech.

Gaming is also in the CCP crosshairs.

After state media criticized the gaming industry as providing the digital equivalent of drugs to the nation’s youth last week, shares of companies like Tencent and NetEase fell. Tencent owns Riot Games, makers of the popular League of Legends title. NetEase generated $2.3 billion in gaming revenue out of total revenues of $3.1 billion in its most recent quarter.

NetEase stock traded around $110 per share in late July. It’s now worth around $90 per share after expectations shifted in light of the gaming news, indicating that investors are concerned about its future performance. Tencent’s Hong Kong-listed stock has also fallen, from HK$775.50 to HK$461.60 this morning.

Tencent tried to head off regulatory pressure, announcing changes to how it controls access to its games after the government’s shot across the bow. The effort doesn’t appear to have worked. That Tencent is being sued by the government despite its publicly announced changes implies that its proposed curbs to youth gaming were either insufficient or perhaps moot from the beginning.

Our Extra Crunch Live series continues with some heavy hitters in August, including Jen Nwankwo, founder and CEO at 1910 Genetics, and Playground Global general partner Jory Bell. They’ll be with us live on August 11 at 12 p.m. PT (3 p.m. ET) to tell us all about how Nwankwo and her startup won over Bell and Playground as an investor, and as we do every week on Extra Crunch Live, we’ll conduct a live pitch feedback session featuring you, the members of our audience.

Extra Crunch Live gives you the chance to hear live from entrepreneurs who have successfully raised significant rounds of venture capital — and from the investors who believed in them. We go into detail about how the deal got done, and you’ll hear from both about what it takes to pitch VCs and what industry-leading VCs look for in prospective portfolio companies.

We’re thrilled to have Nwankwo and Bell joining us for this episode. Nwankwo founded and leads 1910 Genetics, which takes advantage of AI to accelerate the discovery and development of new drug therapies across a wide range of disease and condition categories. She has a Ph.D. in pharmacology and experimental therapeutics from Tufts University School of Medicine and participated in drug discovery development that led to the creation of Type 2 diabetes drug Trulicity prior to her graduate school work.

Bell’s career includes designing and building autonomous robots for deep-sea exploration, as well as a six-year stint at Apple designing notebooks for the consumer technology leader. Bell’s venture investment work began at Playground Global in 2015; he focuses on deep tech investments, including in aerospace, genomics, synthetic biology, and AI-assisted drug discovery, as in the case of 1910 Genetics.

Extra Crunch Live also features the ECL Pitch-off, where startups in the audience can virtually “raise their hand” to pitch their startup live on our stream. Our expert guests will give their feedback on each pitch. If you want to throw your hat in the ring, you have to show up.

Extra Crunch Live is accessible to everyone, but only Extra Crunch members can access the content on demand. We do these every week, so there are scores of episodes across a wide variety of startup sectors in the ECL Library. It’s but one of many reasons to become an Extra Crunch member. Join here.

Interested in hanging with us for this upcoming episode? Register here for free! 

When Oleg Stavitsky and his co-founders started Endel, they didn’t necessarily expect for it to become a venture-backed business with the likes of Amazon’s Alexa Fund as investors. Stavitsky and his founding team describe themselves as a “collective of imaginative creatives and artists,” and the group had previously developed a unique set of apps for children called Bubl that were designed to foster creative development and avoid the usual tropes of character-based kid-focused entertainment.

Endel is a wholly different project, delivering personalized soundscapes to its users that help them achieve states of focus, relaxation and sleep. These are tailored specifically to individual users, and have more in common with meditative exercises and other wellness techniques than with traditional music. And the company has attracted a lot of big-name attention, including a partnership with Grimes that originated when she reached out because she loved using the app and wanted to see if they could work together.

Oleg talks to us all about his experience building Endel, and what it’s like being part of a highly unconventional founder collective building a consumer tech startup outside of Silicon Valley.

We loved our time chatting with Oleg, and we hope you love yours listening to the episode. And of course, we’d love if you can subscribe to Found in Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, on Google Podcasts or in your podcast app of choice. Please leave us a review and let us know what you think, or send us direct feedback either on Twitter or via email at [email protected], or leave us a voicemail at (510) 936-1618. And please join us again next week for our next featured founder.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and me here.

It’s going to be a busy week, with a Samsung event and a host of earnings reports that we’ll have to pay attention to. But more important there are a few stories still dominating the news cycle:

• Apple’s privacy choices: The American hardware company’s plans to scan iPhones for some illegal material is once again raising the issue of privacy versus safety.
• China’s tech crackdown: The continued clampdown by regulators continued this weekend with Tencent once again under the spotlight.
• The American crypto regulatory push: This is still causing waves this morning as Congress works to pass a major bill that could include crypto regulations that are opposed by industry leaders.

All that and we also riffed on the Siemens-Sqills deal, Cornerstone OnDemand going private and Delivery Hero buying a piece of Deliveroo.

And, for added flavor and fun, Canopy Servicing just raised a $15 million Series A, while Siga OT Solutions raised a $8.1 million Series B.

Writing our way out of the place we’re in is tricky. The words come easily enough, each measured for its emotional weight in the stream of issues we face. It’s possible this paragraph will disappear as I find my ground. Mandates, Cuomo, Olympic mental gymnastics, where we were two weeks ago and how it relates to right now. Let’s triangulate: forget Trump. Forget the Republicans and progressive Democrats who together slow down passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill. Forget the evasions and half truths, the talking points to fill up the airtime until the actual rubber meets the road.

Don’t forget the brave athletes who dare to fail for the greater safety of their colleagues. Celebrate the public servants and the difficult personal choices that lead us to honesty, empathy, resolute choices that will draw distinctions between malignant fraud and real outcomes at the ballot box. If politicians refuse to answer questions, draft laws to weed them out of the process itself. Hold the media to the fire they pretend to examine in their choices of coverage, debate, and commercial breaks.

We’ve been having an argument about the time delay between recording a show and releasing it here on Techcrunch in a post-produced fashion with music added, Sneak Peeks produced to promote the show, and a post somehow related to the context of the show two or so weeks ago. In generating the text, I’ve noticed the time delay serves a useful purpose of diluting the realtime urgency of the conversation with what ends up being a healthy dose of context derived from what actually happened. The news is always rendered as the first draft of history, but the constant need for ratings creates this underlying pressure to convert stories from insight to controversial clickbait.

Marshalled through this take-the-foot-off-the-gas filter, the black and white becomes more shades of gray, less subject to the attitudes of the individual Gang members and more attuned to the sense of the group as a whole. Take the perennial struggle between social media giants and antitrust pressure to regulate the worst aspects of the social storm. One side decries attempts to rein in the success of these companies in building audiences and unparalleled power in the marketplace — a version of “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it.” The other side says it is indeed broke, and needs to be fixed by breaking up these new monopolies born of user satisfaction with the stream of commentary, sarcasm, and family news. Or perhaps the battle lines are drawn around individual rights versus the collective good, as with the struggle to get COVID under control via vaccination mandates. In the middle between these hard-coded partisan stances is potentially something gentler than being right and more powerful in its sense of compromise.

In the case of mandates, the subject comes up every show. The immediate news may be New York City’s new rules governing vaccinated access to indoor restaurants, gyms, and entertainment events, but the larger abstraction is the divide between the federal government’s lack of power to effect a countrywide mandate and the politics of governors in the Red states pushing back on any mandates, most egregiously outlawing local governments from protecting their citizens from the impact of the unvaccinated. Two weeks ago, nothing seemed possible to alleviate any aspect of the crisis. Today, the New York move may encourage more people to act now to protect themselves; the data shows a doubling of new vaccinations in the most impacted states. In turn, the media includes this promising data in their stories, pushing the more partisan memes to the edges of the coverage. The net result is a more flexible narrative that speaks to the old fashioned idea that government can actually get some things done, which in turn helps promote less of the distrust that fuels many of the vaccine hesitant.

Getting back to the new normal drives most of the mandate discussion. The pandemic’s acceleration of digital transformation seems to reflect a growing understanding that we’re not going back to post pandemic anytime soon. Instead, there’s the realization that what we’re thinking of as survival is a foreshadowing of how we’ll live both at work and at home. We talk about our creative heroes on the show, many of whom became household names streaming through the stages of public performance and media networks. Streaming has roiled both Hollywood and the news networks, whose business models and value propositions are under attack from the tech social networks. Facebook talks of video now consuming more than 50 percent of time on its network. Amazon’s advertising revenue is growing rapidly as a counter to Google and Facebook’s control of the advertising markets. Digital advertising is consuming the linear broadcast Upfronts marketplace.

We talk often about the creator economy, a self-important waving of the media red flag in the face of the mainstream media’s bull. The Information, a subscription-fueled tech journal, looks like what the newsletter startups Substack and Twitter Revue will look like when or if they grow up. The social audio Clubhouse clones offer a similar promise of escaping the long tail into viable competition for the Fox, CNN, and MSNBCs of the realigning media companies. On each end of the spectrum, the promise of success runs into the overblown reality of too many hours in search of useful differentiation or unrealistic odds of escaping the noisy underbelly of unprofessional media.

If the numbers don’t seem to add up for the creators, neither do they for the social networks. Once the feature wars settle down, you’ll see a fragmented array of star writers on Substack and Facebook and very little outlet for influencers and talent to bubble up. Corporate adoption of these tools might prove a growth opportunity for enterprise versions. Is that enough to keep tech in the game? Maybe two weeks from now we’ll know.

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, July 23, 2021.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

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

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