Category: Tech news

Editor’s Note

This week, we hosted 23 panels on all aspects of building startups on the Extra Crunch stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF. Thanks to the thousands of attendees who attended those talks, as well as the workshops we held on the Breakout Stage — your enthusiasm was palpable.

We also had hundreds of new EC members join during the conference — to all of you: welcome!

This newsletter covers all of last week, and is a bit abbreviated thanks to Disrupt. Back to normal next week.

Where top VCs are investing in edtech

Extra Crunch media columnist Eric Peckham interviewed almost a dozen leading venture capitalists about the state of edtech, including Jennifer Carolan of Reach Capital, Aydin Senkut of Felicis Ventures, and Charles Birnbaum of Bessemer. There is still a lot of enthusiasm for the space, but the theses for these investors have diverged quite significantly.

Marlon Nichols , Managing Partner at MaC Venture Capital (a new LA-based seed fund with investments in Catalyte, Codeverse, and Wonderschool):

“Many education technology companies target individual teachers, which presents a long path to sizable revenue (requires too many customers) while others usually attempt to navigate the lengthy and bureaucratic sales cycle of selling to school districts. VCs prefer companies that have short sales cycles that can scale revenue quickly so in general, edtech companies are difficult investments for venture capital.

That said, education is a giant opportunity in the US because high quality education is not evenly distributed across communities or social classes. It’s a crisis. Companies that address this at scale are attractive if the revenue model makes sense. That’s why I led the first round into Wonderschool, which delivers high quality education and child care at costs relative to one’s zip code. The schools double as the educator’s home so there isn’t a need for real estate investment.”

Why is Dropbox reinventing itself? A chat with Dropbox VP of Product Adam Nash and CTO Quentin Clark

Dropbox may be known for its singular file storage product, but the company is adapting and changing as it seeks new customers and also learns more about what “file storage” really means to users.

The tech industry has won at capitalism. From America to China, from Amazon to Alibaba, from Alphabet to Tencent, the most valuable and most dynamic companies in the world are technology companies. But what kind of capitalism? Because there are really two different modes, two ways to get rich.

One is to claim a share of the wealth that already exists. This is the capitalism of Wall Street, of Russia¹, of cronies and rent-seekers, of the infamous “resource curse.” Obviously the more wealth there is around you, the more incentivized this approach becomes. Call it the siphon.

The other is to create new wealth; manufacture better goods, offer better services, design better hardware, write better software. This is — or is supposed to be — the capitalism of Silicon Valley, of China², of rocket ships and electric cars, of Moore’s Law. Obviously this is the purer, more idealistic form of capitalism. Call it the forge.

It seems apparent that public opinion has turned sharply against the tech industry of late:

Isn’t that surprising? After all, Silicon Valley is building new and better things for us all, while Wall Street, having offered essentially no generally beneficial financial innovations in decades, is greedily siphoning off roughly a quarter of all American profits; the pharmaceutical industry is spending vastly more on marketing than on R&D; and the rest of the US health-care industry is basically a huge kludge of a bloodsucking siphon.

So why has tech, the forge of the modern world, found itself in the crosshairs of a backlash?

I put it to you that this is in part because while tech likes to portray itself as a forge, in many prominent cases, it is actually a siphon. Consider Facebook, Twitter, and Google. All are unquestionably forges, whose new products have done many good things. But that’s not their business model. Their business model, their original sin, is that siphon called advertising.

You could once have argued that advertising is a forge, in that is makes consumers aware of desirable products, just as you could once have argued Wall Street was a forge, in that it makes capitalism more efficient. No longer, in both cases. Online display / social-media advertising has become the tech equivalent of high-frequency trading: a pure siphon. (You can, however, make a good case for Google’s AdWords as a forge.)

People know when they’re being siphoned. What’s more, the industry being siphoned from is the media, which is unsurprisingly now inclined to train its own guns on tech as a result.

It’s not just ads. A more nuanced view is that “siphon” and “forge” are two ends of a spectrum, and numerous notable tech companies are closer to the former than the latter. Every app aimed at the wealthy-urbanite target market is essentially a siphon aimed at the wallets of the rich. (Yes, forge technology is often only affordable by the rich at first, too; but that’s very different from servants-as-a-service.) WeWork was, apparently, largely a siphon for SoftBank.

When people are angry at Amazon, Uber, and Lyft for how they treat warehouse workers, Whole Foods clerks, and drivers, it’s in large part because it seems to them like the wealthiest industry in the world is acting like a siphon geared to drain the minimal wealth of struggling workers, rather than a forge building new systems to empower and enrich us all.

Of course some of this criticism is unfair. And what almost every tech luminary really wants is to follow the Elon Musk model, wherein his stint at PayPal — which, like all payments companies³, is at least half siphon, albeit one largely aimed at even less appealing rivals — funded the forges of SpaceX and Tesla.

But all too often, the road to a siphon is paved with good intentions of a forge. Say what you want about Wall Street, at least they’re not hypocrites; high-frequency traders and hedge funds rarely pretend to be making the world a better place for anyone but themselves and their clients. This perceived hypocrisy is especially acute for companies like Facebook and Twitter, which offer “free” products from their forges … carefully engineered to optimize the siphons on which they survive.

In retrospect it’s surprising it took this long for the tension between the siphon and the forge to erupt into the cultural dissonance in which social media, and gig-economy apps, and indeed much of the publicly visible tech industry, now exists. While that tension continues, it’s hard to imagine this dissonance diminishing.

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¹ An oversimplification — again, it’s really more a spectrum than a binary — but not an invalid one.
² An oversimplification — again, it’s really more a spectrum than a binary — but not an invalid one.
³ Excepting those which create whole new kinds of payments, such as M-Pesa.

Hey everyone. Thank you for welcoming me into you inbox yet again.

Last week, I talked about Juul’s unraveling mission statement and the highly-valued startup’s new Big Tobacco CEO. I got some great email responses and plenty of a pro-Juul DMs.

If you’re reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can get this in your inbox here, and follow my tweets here.

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The big story

This section might slowly turn into my grievance of the week, but this week the tale isn’t a screed against Juul, it’s a prolonged eye roll after the merger of two adtech companies responsible for pumping the internet full of garbage.

Taboola and Outbrain have merged forming a $2 billion adtech giant. Those startup names likely don’t mean much to you, but they’re both responsible for a lot of the publishing world’s junkiest ad units.

You’ve seen them. You’ve tried not to see them.

These startups grew their networks by sending traffic from one partner to another and incentivizing the flow of more traffic through them.

By adding a bit of Javascript, publications were able to bring in traffic and more importantly effortless cash. It’s been an irresistible sell to plenty of publishers, but it’s also been an eyesore for many of them and a race to the bottom in terms of selling the most salacious headlines. This has brought in revenues to publications that aren’t afraid to sell a bit of

Being an adtech “giant” is pretty relative these days. Taking on Google and Facebook’s overwhelming ad duopoly is an incredibly noble goal — I would love for a true competitor to emerge — but I have very little faith that a frankensteined fusion of these two crap ad companies is going to do much to halt a war path, I hope someone else can find a path.

Send me feedback
on Twitter @lucasmtny or email
[email protected]

On to the rest of the week’s news.

Trends of the week

Here are a few big news items from big companies, with green links to all the sweet, sweet added context:

• Microsoft’s dual screen unveil
  Microsoft dove headfirst into dual-screen folding displays at its hardware event this week. Take a peek at the Neo and Duo. Read more here.
• Tesla buys a startup
  Tesla has been arranging its efforts around robo taxies and its now making some acquisitions to bolster its presence. See them all here.

GAFA Gaffes

How did the top tech companies screw up this week? This clearly needs its own section, in order of badness:

1. Facebook news can’t be trusted:
   [Facebook leads in news consumption among social feeds, but most don’t trust it]

 

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Did you miss the deadline to apply for Startup Battlefield at Disrupt Berlin 2019? Well don’t despair, founders. There’s more than one way to place your early-stage startup in front of thousands of influential technologists, investors and global media. Apply to be considered for our TC Top Picks program and the opportunity to exhibit in Startup Alley for free.

Deadline alert: You must apply to be a TC Top Pick by 18 October at 12 p.m. (PT). It’s simple to do and it’s free. Don’t let this opportunity slip through your time-strapped fingers.

TC Top Picks is a pre-conference competition. To be considered, your early-stage startup must fall within one of the following categories: AI/Machine Learning, Biotech/Healthtech, Blockchain, Fintech, Mobility, Privacy/Security, Retail/E-commerce, Robotics/IoT/Hardware, CRM/Enterprise and Education.

Our TechCrunch editors — always on the hunt for the best early-stage startups — will vet each application and select up to five startups in each category. If you’re named a TC Top Pick, you’ll receive a free Startup Alley Exhibitor Package and a VIP experience at Disrupt Berlin.

What sort of startup catches TechCrunch’s discerning editorial eyes? Great question. Take a look at the list of TC Top Picks from Disrupt Berlin 2018.

The exclusive TC Top Pick cadre will exhibit in a prime location within Startup Alley and — thanks to plenty of pre-conference marketing — be on the receiving end of intense investor and media interest. One of the best perks is the live Showcase Stage interview. TechCrunch editors interview each Top Pick to showcase their company and product. We record the interview and promote the video across our social media platforms.

If you’re still kicking yourself for missing the Startup Battlefield deadline, here’s more good news. There’s always the possibility that you’ll compete as a Wild Card. Say what, now?

Out of all the startups exhibiting in Startup Alley, TechCrunch editors will choose one — the Wild Card — to compete in the Startup Battlefield. At Disrupt Berlin 2018, TC editors chose Legacy, and the feisty startup went on to win the Startup Battlefield and the $50,000 prize.

Disrupt Berlin 2019 takes place on 11-12 December, and TC Top Picks is your chance to place your extraordinary startup in front of the people who can move your business forward. If you want to exhibit in Startup Alley for free, do not miss this deadline. Apply to be a TC Top Pick before 18 October at 12 p.m. (PT). We’ll see you in Berlin!

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt Berlin 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Several months back, we invited HTC cofounder and CEO Cher Wang to appear on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt. Sometimes, however, life happens. Two weeks ago, the company announced that Wang would be stepping down from the role, which would immediately be filled by longtime telecom vet, Yves Maitres. Thankfully, the former Orange exec also agreed to appear on stage at this week’s event.

Maitres took the stage immediately following a one on one with OnePlus cofounder, Carl Pei. The contrast of the two companies couldn’t be more stark. In six short years of existence, OnePlus has managed to buck a number of industry trends with a controlled growth that flies in the face of wider industry smartphone trends.

HTC, meanwhile, has been struggling for years. In Q2, the Taiwanese hardware maker posted its fifth consecutive quarterly loss. Last July, it laid off around a quarter of its staff. It’s been a precipitous fall. In 2011, the company comprised around 11 percent of global smartphone sales, per analyst figures. Now its figures are routinely classified among the “Others” in those reports.

Speaking to Maitres at an event such as this offers a rare opportunity for insight from a newly minted exec who has spent years watching his new company from the outside. As such, he addressed HTC’s struggles with a refreshing candidness.

“HTC has stopped innovating in the hardware of the smartphone,” he told the audience. “And people like Apple, like Samsung and, most recently, Huawei, have done an incredible job investing in their hardware. We didn’t, because we have been investing in innovation on virtual reality. When I was young, somebody told me, ‘to be be right at the wrong time is to be wrong and to be wrong at the right time is right.’ I think we’ve been right at the wrong time and now we have to catch up. We made a timing mistake. It is very difficult to anticipate the time. HTC made a mistake in terms of timing. It is a difficult mistake and we are paying for that, but we still have so many assets in terms of innovation, team and balance sheets that I feel we are recovering from the timing mistake.”

‘Timing,’ here, is primarily a reference to the company’s decision to move much of its R&D money into XR (primarily VR through its Vive wing). Maitres said he anticipates that HTC’s XR offerings will overtake the mobile side in about five years.

“We’ll do our best to make it shorter, but customer adoption is key,” he explained. “How people are adopting your technology. And we all know know it is absolutely critical. And the end of the day, we have human beings in front of us, and they’re dealing with something total new and totally unusual, which is virtual.”

On the mobile side, Maitres sees 5G as the primary bottleneck to growth. Contrary to suggestions that the company’s best play is in developing nations, he says HTC’s play going forward will be more premium handset focused on “countries with higher GDP.”

“The competition is changing,” he says. “We’re all having a situation where worldwide marketshare is going down and the customer is disappointed in not being to have the latest Huawei phone anymore. How to give our customers the ability to come back to what they wish, in terms of best in class hardware and photography that HTC to will to solve in the next few months.”

While figures will largely be dependent on decisions Brough to HTC’s board, Maitres maintains optimistic projections when it comes to returning the company profitability.

“I truly believe that it is going to depend on the way carriers deploy 5G,” he says. “And you know that 2020 will bee the starting point for 5G. Usually it takes two years to deploy a network. So 2023 will have significant coverage. That’s why I believe that 2025, probably even earlier will be the turning point. We are dependent on carrier deployment speed.”

If you want to set your movie or game on the Moon, it’s not hard to find imagery of our photogenic satellite. But NASA has just released a useful and beautiful new set of data just for creators that includes not just imagery but depth data, making it simple to build an incredibly detailed 3D map of the Moon.

The CGI Moon Kit comes from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, where science visualization expert Ernie Wright found that data he had assembled for other purposes was proving popular with 3D artists.

The data came from two instruments on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, a spacecraft that has been in orbit around the Moon for more than a decade, snapping pictures and taking measurements the whole time.

On board the LRO is a high-quality “traditional” camera (really a sophisticated multispectral imager), which it has been using to build an amazingly high-quality map of the lunar surface. It can only capture a small portion at a time, but it does so constantly and as its orbit has shifted, it has captured pretty much the entire visible area of the Moon, though some shadowy regions can’t be imaged even after passing over them thousands of times.

Great photographs are only one part of a map, though. If you really want to recreate the surface of the Moon you need information on the topology of its surface as well. And that’s what the LRO’s laser altimeter has been collecting.

The laser altimeter works like any typical orbital laser ranger you have around the house. It sends a pulsed laser towards the surface and tracks both how long it takes to come back and how strong it is. These tell the device how far away the surface is (and therefore its altitude) down to half a meter, and what that surface is like, for instance a hard rocky structure or soft powdered regolith.

That data is assembled into what’s called a displacement map, sort of like a topographic map where instead of the height actually changing, the color does. There are a couple varieties of this map, but the basic use case is the same: You overlay the displacement map on the photographic map, then wrap it all around a sphere — and you’ve got a virtual topographic globe.

Here’s a slower version of the GIF you see above.

This would be really interesting to explore in first person in a game where you build a lunar colony, or maybe have dogfights in spacecraft above a realistic lunar surface. Or maybe an artist could use it to create a model of the Moon like this one.

The CGI Moon Kit is free to download and all the assets are available with a few options that 3D artists will probably understand. You can learn more about it and get it here.

Adam Neumann may be out of the daily flow of WeWork, but he seemingly remains top of mind to some of the company’s bankers.

According to a new Business Insider piece, Neumann is working with JPMorgan, UBS, and Credit Suisse to consider new terms for a $500 million loan that he took out before WeWork filed to go public, and from which Neumann has already drawn down $380 million. Since he can no longer pay the loan with proceeds from selling WeWork shares publicly (it yanked its S-1 filing earlier this week), he may have to put up some of his properties or other assets as collateral for the loan, according to one of BI’s sources.

“No terms have been set,” a spokeswoman for Neumann tells the outlet.

Per earlier reports, Neumann has plenty to offload if it comes to it, having acquired numerous residential and commercial properties over the years.

Among his reported investments is a $10.5 million Greenwich Village townhouse; a farm in Westchester, New York; a home in the Hamptons where he reportedly weathered the storm with his family ahead of resigning as CEO last week; and a $21 million, 13,000-square-foot house in the Bay Area with a guitar-shaped room.

According to an earlier WSJ report, Neumann has also bought several commercial properties through investor groups that he had leased back, in some cases, to WeWork.

WeWork, and Neumann, have both enjoyed a close relationship with JPMorgan in recent years. As recently reported in the NYTimes,  JPMorgan “lent Mr. Neumann money personally (with his inflated shares as collateral), provided equity and debt for the company, served as a corporate adviser for the I.P.O. and secured nearly $6 billion in financing as part of the now scotched offering.”

At the very beginning, there were 20 startups. After two days of incredibly fierce competition, we now have a winner.

Startups participating in the Startup Battlefield have all been hand-picked to participate in our highly competitive startup competition. They all presented in front of multiple groups of VCs and tech leaders serving as judges for a chance to win $100,000 and the coveted Disrupt Cup.

After hours of deliberations, TechCrunch editors pored over the judges’ notes and narrowed the list down to five finalists: OmniVis, Orbit Fab, Render, StrattyX and Traptic.

These startups made their way to the finale to demo in front of our final panel of judges, which included: Mamoon Hamid (Kleiner Perkins), Ashton Kutcher (Sound Ventures), Alfred Lin (Sequoia), Marissa Mayer (Lumi Labs), Ann Miura-Ko (Floodgate Ventures) and Matthew Panzarino (TechCrunch).

Winner: Render

Render has created a managed cloud platform. The company wants to provide an alternative to traditional cloud providers, such as AWS, Azure and GCP. And it starts with an infrastructure that is easier to manage thanks to automated deployments and a abstracted way to manage your application that is reminiscent of Heroku.

Read more about Render in our separate post.

Runner-Up: OmniVis

OmniVis aims to make detection of cholera and other pathogens as quick, simple and cheap as a pregnancy test. Its smartphone-powered detection platform could save thousands of lives.

Read more about OmniVis in our separate post.

NASA issues a new formal request for info from industry specifically around spacesuits. The agency is hoping to gather information in order to help it figure out a future path for acquisition of spacesuit production and services from external industry sources.

That doesn’t mean it’s outsourcing its spacesuit design and production immediately – NASA will build and certify its own spacesuits for use in the first Artemis missions, including Artemis III which is the one that’ll see the next American man and the first American woman take their trip to the lunar surface. But for Artemis missions after that, of which there are currently five more proposed (Artemis 4 through 8), four of which will have crew on board.

NASA has of course already worked with private industry, as well as academic institutions and researchers, on the technologies that will go into its own space suits. And the agency fully expects that the current exploration suit will form the basis of any future designs. It is however looking to fully transition their prouduction and testing to industry partners, and will additionally expect those partners to “facilitate the evolution of the suits” and also suggest improvements on the existing suit design.

On top of the suits, NASA is looking for input on tools and support hardware to be used with the suits, during extra-vehicular activities, or in making sure the suits work well with the vehicles that’ll be transporting them, as well as the lunar gateway that will act as the staging ground between Earth and the Moon’s surface.

Finally, NASA also would like to hear from companies about how to better commercialize spacesuits and spacewalks – making them available to customers outside of the agency itself, as well.

This isn’t surprising given how many signals NASA has been giving lately that it’s interesting in partnering with industry more deeply across both Artemis, future Mars exploration, and the ISS (and its potential commercial successor). The full RFI issued by NASA is available here, in case you’re interested in spinning up a spacesuit startup.

Physical storage-turned-rentals startup Omni is dealing with layoffs today, two sources familiar with the situation tell TechCrunch. Omni just shed seven operations team members. The startup is in talks to sell its engineering team to Coinbase after also receiving interest from Thumbtack.

Omni’s rental business was doing poorly without enough users paying a few bucks to borrow a tent, bike or power drill. Omni had planned to launch a white-labeled platform allowing brick-and-mortar merchants to operate and market their own rental business.

But despite having plenty of cash left after raising $25 million from cryptocurrency company Ripple early last year, Omni feared the new platform would flop too and its prospects would worsen.

The company is in talks with Coinbase to hire some of the engineering staff, who would have them work on Coinbase Earn, which rewards users with cryptocurrency for completing online educational programs. Some employees are interviewing at Coinbase today. However, a Coinbase spokesperson told me there’s currently no official deal — before noting that there is nothing on the record they can share. Omni promised TechCrunch a statement but then refused to talk on the record.

Omni got its start in on-demand storage, where it would come to your home, pick up and tag your stuff, store it in a warehouse and bring it back whenever you wanted it. It grew popular in San Francisco and started to scale out to other cities. In April, Omni began allowing users to earn money by renting out their stored goods to other Omni customers.

But by May, Omni was selling its storage business to SoftBank-funded competitor Clutter, and the transition was rocky. Users complained about changing prices and misplaced items, alarmed that suddenly a different startup had control of their possessions.

I was formerly a happy Omni customer of its storage business, but the transition to Clutter was botched and shook faith that users’ stuff would be taken care of. At one point they lost some of my belongings, until C-level executives stepped in to figure out what happened.

Going forward, instead of storing goods itself, Omni would rely on local storefronts for pickup and drop-off of rentals. But many users balked at the hassle of rentals when Amazon makes buying so easy.

One source said that Omni had discussed telling rental partners in two weeks that it would be shutting down the rental service, though TechCrunch cannot confirm that. Another source said Omni was frantically trying to stop members of its team from talking to the press today.

Omni’s vision of cloud storage for the physical world and access over ownership had attracted capital from Flybridge, Highland, Allen & Company, Founders Fund, Precursor and a wide array of angels. But efforts to change user behavior and operate a logistically complicated business, matched with spotty execution, led the startup to hit the skids and seek a soft landing.

On September 17, HTC announced that cofounder Cher Wang would be stepping down as CEO. In her place, Yves Maitre stepped into the role of Chief Executive, after more than a decade at French telecom giant, Orange.

It’s a tough job at an even tougher time. The move comes on the tail of five consecutive quarterly losses and major layoffs, including a quarter of the company’s staff, which were let go in July of last year.

It’s a far fall for a company that comprised roughly 11 percent of global smartphone sales, some eight years ago. These days, HTC is routinely relegated to the “other” column when these figures are published.

All of this is not to say that the company doesn’t have some interesting irons in the fire. With Vive, HTC has demonstrated its ability to offer a cutting edge VR platform, while Exodus has tapped into an interest in exploring the use of blockchain technologies for mobile devices.

Of course, neither of these examples show any sign of displacing HTC’s once-booming mobile device sales. And this January’s $1.1 billion sale of a significant portion of its hardware division to Google has left many wondering whether it has much gas left in the mobile tank.

With Wang initially scheduled to appear on stage at Disrupt this week, the company ultimately opted to have Maitre sit in on the panel instead. In preparation for the conversation, we sat down with the executive to discuss his new role and future of the struggling Taiwanese hardware company.

5G, XR and the future of the HTC brand

When Elizabeth Warren took on Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook earlier this week, it was a low moment for what New Yorker writer Andrew Marantz calls “techno-utopianism.”

That the progressive, populist Massachusetts Senator and leading Democratic Presidential candidate wants to #BreakUpBigTech is not surprising. But Warren’s choice to spotlight regulating and trust-busting Facebook was nonetheless noteworthy, because of what it represents on a philosophical level. Warren, along with like-minded political leaders, social activists, and tech critics, has begun to offer the first massively popular alternative to the massively popular wave of aggressive optimism and “genius” ambition that characterized tech culture for the past decade or two.

“No,” Warren and others seem to say, “your vision is not necessarily making the world a better place.” This is a major buzzkill for tech leaders who have made (positive) world-changing their number one calling card — more than profits, popularity, skyscrapers like San Francisco’s striking Salesforce Tower, or any other measure.

Enter Marantz, a longtime New Yorker staff writer and Brooklyn, N.Y. resident who has recently trained his attention on tech culture, following around iconic figures on both sides of what he sees as the divide of our time — not between tech greats whose successes make us all better and those who would stop them, but between the alternative figures on the “new right” and the self-understood liberals of Silicon Valley who, according to Marantz, have both contributed to “hijacking the American conversation.”

Marantz’s first book, “Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation,” will be released next week, and I recently had a chance to talk with him for this series the ethics of technology.

Greg Epstein: Congratulations on your absolutely fascinating new book Antisocial, and on everything you’ve been up to.

PayPal has become the first company to walk away officially from Facebook’s Libra, a cryptocurrency and related association that it announced earlier this year with a chain of nearly 30 big names behind the effort to help build and operate services around it.

“PayPal has made the decision to forgo further participation in the Libra Association at this time and to continue to focus on advancing our existing mission and business priorities as we strive to democratize access to financial services for underserved populations,” PayPal said in an emailed statement to TechCrunch. “We remain supportive of Libra’s aspirations and look forward to continued dialogue on ways to work together in the future. Facebook has been a longstanding and valued strategic partner to PayPal, and we will continue to partner with and support Facebook in various capacities.”

A high-profile, would-be partner like PayPal backing out from the effort before it’s even gotten off the ground is a big blow to Facebook and the Libra Association, which has been struggling under the weight of speculation that some of the big organizations, initially interested in collaborating on Libra, are now on the fence about the project, put off by wave of negative reaction from regulators and others that might lead to problems launching and ultimately growing the service.

In response, the Libra Association has come out with an understated but scathing statement of its own in response to PayPal’s announcement. (Facebook had referred our questions to the group and did not comment directly.)

“It requires a certain boldness and fortitude to take on an endeavor as ambitious as Libra – a generational opportunity to get things right and improve financial inclusion,” said a spokesperson. “The journey will be long and challenging. The type of change that will reconfigure the financial system to be tilted towards people, not the institutions serving them, will be hard. Commitment to that mission is more important to us than anything else. We’re better off knowing about this lack of commitment now, rather than later.”

PayPal is the first firm to walk away from the Libra Association, but it comes at a difficult time for the project, even before it has launched.

Both regulators and other government bodies on both sides of the Atlantic — already scrutinizing Facebook and cryptocurrency as separate issues — have honed in on the project with concerns of how a Facebook-backed and promoted currency could lead to anti-competitive behavior.

Facebook and other members of the Libra Association are due to meet this month in Geneva to appoint its first board of directors, but ahead of that it’s been reported that the government scrutiny has started to spook some who have only nominally backed the project at this point.

The WSJ reported earlier this week that Mastercard, Visa and other companies may join PayPal in backing away from the Libra project. Mastercard has not responded to a request for comment, but Visa’s CEO Al Kelly has made public statements that underscore Visa’s provisional support for Libra — a position we understand remains unchanged as of today, provided regulatory and other issues do not get in the way.

As we reported when Libra first launched, Facebook doesn’t control the Libra organization or currency, but gets a single vote alongside the remaining partners. Those that have endorsed the association currently include, alongside Mastercard and Visa, Stripe, Uber and the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz. Each Libra Association partner invests at least $10 million in the project and the association will promote the open-sourced Libra Blockchain.

The partners would not only pitch the Libra Blockchain and developer platform with its own Move programming language, but sign up businesses to accept Libra for payment and even give customers discounts or rewards.

Facebook has a lot riding on the success of the Association beyond just its Libra stake. The company has also launched a subsidiary company called Calibra that handles crypto transactions on its platform that would use the Libra blockchain. (It’s been quietly developing this alongside the Libra effort, including making acquisitions to expand the functionality around how it will work.)

Governments around the world have been up in arms because they are concerned that, with Libra, Facebook and its partners will try to make an end run around existing financial services and their corresponding regulations.

Perhaps in response to these pressures and how they might play out, earlier this month, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg indicated that the company would be willing to delay the launch of the cryptocurrency — it is currently planned for 2020 — in an interview with the Japanese Nikkei news service. “Move fast and break things” won’t be getting applied here.

We’re excited to announce a new partnership with Amazon Web Services for annual members of Extra Crunch. Starting today, qualified annual members can receive $1,000 in AWS credits. You also must be a startup founder to claim this Extra Crunch community perk.

AWS is the premier service for your application hosting needs, and we want to make sure our community is well-resourced to build. We understand that hosting and infrastructure costs can be a major hurdle for tech startups, and we’re hoping that this offer will help better support your team.

What’s included in the perk:

• $1,000 in AWS Promotional Credit valid for 1 year
• 2 months of AWS Business Support
• 80 credits for self-paced labs

Applications are processed in 7-10 days, once an application is received. Companies may not be eligible for AWS Promotional Credits if they previously received a similar or greater amount of credit. Companies may be eligible to be “topped up” to a higher credit amount if they previously received a lower credit.

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At age 27, Jordan Fudge is quietly making a splash in the VC world.

Fudge is the managing partner of Sinai Ventures, a multi-stage VC fund that manages $100 million and has more than 80 portfolio companies including Ro, Drivetime, Kapwing, and Luminary. His 2017 investment in Pinterest — a secondary shares deal from his prior firm that was rolled into Sinai when he spun out — will have returned the value of Sinai’s Fund I by itself once the lockup on shares expires next week.

Fudge and co-founder Eric Reiner, a Northwestern University classmate, hired staff in New York and San Francisco when Sinai launched in early 2018. Today, they’re centralizing the team in Los Angeles for its next fund, a bet on the rising momentum of the local startup ecosystem and their vision to be the city’s leading Series A and B firm.

Fudge and Reiner have intentionally stayed off the radar thus far, wanting to prove themselves first through a track record of investments.

A part-time film financier who also serves on the board of LGBT advocacy non-profit GLAAD, Fudge describes himself as an atypical VC firm founder, an edge he’s using to carve out his niche in a crowded VC landscape.

I spoke with Fudge to learn more about his strategy at Sinai and what led to him founding the firm. Here’s the transcript (edited for length and clarity):

Eric Peckham: Tell me the origin story here. How did Sinai Ventures get seeded?

Jordan Fudge: I was working for Eagle Advisors, a multi-billion dollar family office for one of the founders of SAP, focused on the tech sector across public markets, crypto, and eventually VC deals. Two years in, I pitched them on spinning out to focus on VC and they seeded Sinai with the private investments like Compass and Pinterest I had done already, plus a fresh fund to invest out of on my own. It was $100 million combined.