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Did Sam Altman make YC better or worse?

Y Combinator revealed yesterday that its president, Sam Altman, is stepping down from his role to become the accelerator program’s chairman. This change, said YC, will allow Altman to “spend more time focusing on OpenAI,” the San Francisco-based nonprofit that was cofounded by Altman and Elon Musk three years ago to get ahead of the risks posed by artificial intelligence.

The timing may not be so coincidental. Two weeks ago, Musk separated from OpenAI, whose operations Musk and Altman have funded, along with Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel, YC cofounder Jessica Livingstone, and Stripe’s former CTO Greg Brockman, who is today the CTO of OpenAI . Musk cited disagreements about the company’s development as reason to “part ways on good terms.” A source tells us now that Altman actually intends to become CEO of the organization, though asked about this directly yesterday, Altman said he was too busy to discuss his immediate plans.

Either way, Altman’s newest move begs a question that industry watchers are likely to be asking for some time, and that is whether Altman – – who was part of the first YC startup class in 2005, began working part-time as a YC partner in 2011, and was made the head of the organization five years ago — made YC better or worse during his tenure at the top.

Certainly, it is much changed. When Altman was handed the reins, YC had just graduated 67 startups, all of them from the U.S. It was a record number at the time, but Altman has since more than tripled the number of startups that YC will process in one batch, with YC set to present 205 startups to investors over two days across two stages in San Francisco two weeks from now.

Those numbers merely hint at Altman’s ambition. In the past two years, YC has launched Startup School, a free 10-week online program; the Series A program, which coaches seed-stage alums on how to nab follow-on funding; the YC Growth program, a 10-week dinner series that it characterizes as a kind of grad school program; Work at a Startup, a platform that connects engineers with YC companies; and YC China, a standalone program that be run out of Beijing once it gets up and going.

Even with a network that has 4,000 alumni and 1,900 companies, Altman has long said that he thinks YC can do even more. “Part of our model is to make the cost of mistakes really low, and then make a lot of mistakes,” he said at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2017. “We’ll fund a lot of people doing a lot of things that sound really dumb, and most of the time they will be. And some of the time, it will seem like a bad idea and be jaw-droppingly brilliant. The very best startup ideas are at the intersection of the Venn diagram of, ‘sounds like a bad idea,’ ‘is in fact a good idea.’”

Some worry that Altman may have taken YC to unsustainable extremes, encouraging too many people with wobbly ideas to forsake safer, more conventional options for a chance to become the next Brian Chesky, and encouraging them, specifically, to come to the Bay Area for its accelerator program, despite overcrowding and soaring costs.

Others wonder if startups might eventually revolt against YC’s terms, which see it investing $150,000 in exchange for 7 percent of each company — a stake that it can maintain throughout the company’s life it it so chooses, per its pact with its founders.

While the halo effect of YC is real, giving away so big a piece of one’s company for so little funding vexes some founders later.

DRESDEN, GERMANY – JUNE 09: Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator, arrives at the Hotel Taschenbergpalais Kempinski Dresden for the 2016 Bilderberg Group conference on June 9, 2016 in Dresden, Germany. The Taschenbergpalais is hosting the 2016 Bilderberg Group gathering that will bring together 130 leading international players from politics, industry, finance, academia and media to discuss globally-relevant issues from today until June 12. A wide spectrum of groups have announced protests to be held nearby. Critics charge the secretive nature of the Bilderberg Group annual meetings is undemocratic. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

VCs — many of whom have a love-hate relationship with the powerful accelerator  — have also whispered at times about possible conflicts of interest owing to Hydrazine Capital, a venture fund that Altman formed before being appointed as head of YC, with “significant investment” from Peter Thiel, as described in a 2017 New Yorker article about Altman.

Still, even people who might be tempted to take Altman down a notch say he has done a phenomenal job of running Y Combinator, including by turning the outfit into a global brand, creating a constant stream of new products, and by overseeing the development of infrastructure and software that has allowed the company to continue to scale for the foreseeable future.

Altman also diversified the types of founders that YC admits (though it could do better); 15 percent of the founders to pass through the accelerator last summer were women. And whereas the program was once dominated by consumer startups, it now graduates business-to-business software and services startups, healthcare startups, blockchain startups, real estate, govtech and fintech startups, among others.

Equally important, Altman — a masterful networker who isn’t known for being a terribly warm boss — ensured that everyone at the partner level at Y Combinator enjoys the same economics. It’s a surprisingly rare structure in venture capital, where it’s more often the case that a small group of investors is accruing most of the financial rewards based on how long they’ve been involved with an outfit or their specific contributions.

Indeed, Altman’s obvious drive will make it all the more interesting to see what he does with OpenAI, which just two weeks ago said it had developed an AI system that can create fake news so authentic looking that it decided not to release the full research to the public so it can better weigh its ramifications.

In the meantime, one guesses that YC, where Altman has not been involved operationally for some time, will be fine without him at the helm, including thanks to the continued involvement of Altman and YC founders Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston at the board level. More crucially, YC has Michael Seibel, its CEO, who has led the core YC program for the last four-and-a-half years. (Others of its numerous partners have also been with firm for years.)

As one VC told us yesterday, even with a YC that looks very different than it did five years ago — perhaps because of it — investors would be “idiots not to pay attention” to the founders it backs. Many of even the most nascent YC startups have begun raising funding at valuations that make it too expensive for angels or some seed-stage firms to participate — and that these founders may later regret when the market downturn inevitably comes.

But for Series A and later-stage investors, there’s still no better avenue to reaching up-and-coming founders. When it comes to curating talent, says this investor, YC “is just too good.”


Source: Tech Crunch

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Small VC funds continue to raise, despite pressure from above

Jason Rowley
Contributor

Jason Rowley is a venture capital and technology reporter for Crunchbase News.
More posts by this contributor

Recently, we bore out with data what has been felt for several years in most U.S. tech scenes: a rising venture market raises funds of all sizes. But it’s a trend that most favors entrenched firms, which raise ever-larger funds to accommodate a shift in the startup life cycle. Private companies are dawdling at the exit door, postponing graduation to public markets because private-market money is cheap and plentiful, for now.

In a time when “blitzscaling” is the business strategy du jour, some high-growth companies raise supergiant nine and 10-figure VC rounds to help them build moats around walled-garden markets they’re trying to build up from both sides, or they’ll die trying.

This is all to point out that, at the high end of the assets-under-management (AUM) spectrum, fund size has ballooned. This nets the biggest size class of VC funds a supermajority of all the capital general partners (GPs) call down from limited partners (LPs). This trend has accelerated in more recent fund vintages.

Small-dollar funds may get less of the overall fundraising pie, but their ranks continue to grow as more fund managers enter the industry. In most cases, sub-$100 million funds aren’t competing for the same institutional capital or sovereign wealth that typically invests in much bigger funds.

All this said, the upswing in smaller-sum funds continues. U.S.-based general partners raised more sub-$100 million venture funds in 2018 than in any year prior. This is true for two separate size classes: “Micro” and “Nano,” which exhibit similar growth patterns over time.

Featherweight funds soar on market thermals

Let’s tackle the smallest funds first. “Nano VC” is a relatively new entrant into the venture lexicon, and its definition is somewhat in flux. Samir Kaji, a managing director at First Republic Bank who has tracked the phenomenon of small venture funds for years, coined the term in early 2017 to describe new venture funds raising $15 million or less. Recently, we’ve heard the term “Nano VC” used to reference funds under $25 million, a slightly more expansive definition (perhaps accounting for growing seed and early-stage deal size).

Below, we plot the count of new U.S. Nano VC funds raising $25 million or less, by year announced (via press release or regulatory filing), over time. It is based on a snapshot of Crunchbase’s data taken at the time of writing.

Funds at these sizes are mostly focused on pre-seed, seed and Series A deals. Many are led by first-time and other “emerging” fund managers early on in their investing careers, according to follow-up research by Kaji.

The next size class up, Micro VC, includes venture funds in the $25 million to $100 million range. (Quick terminology note: Sometimes, people refer to all funds under $100 million as Micro, without designating Nano funds as a separate size class.) Micro VC funds are also generally focused on investing in seed and early-stage companies, and are also commonly run by new and emerging managers.

Creation of Micro VC funds also picked up over time, as well.

Although it’s a tidy little coincidence that our analysis shows roughly the same number of Micro and Nano VC funds raised in 2018, it’s important to remember that we’re sometimes talking about an order-of-magnitude difference in AUM between the two size classes. Nano and Micro VC funds accounted for roughly 24 and 25 percent, respectively, of the count of new venture firms announced or disclosed (via SEC filing) in 2018. However, Micro VC funds ($25 million-$100 million) raised six percent of the total capital raised by venture firms, while Nano VC funds (<$25 million) accounted for roughly one percent of total LP-GP dollar volume in 2018.

Good reason for caution

Lately, there’s been a lot of talk about declines in the reported number of seed-stage deals, a primary destination for capital raised by smaller funds. However, it’s likely that these declines aren’t as precipitous as the numbers may suggest. There are known delays in seed and early-stage deal reporting, as documented by Crunchbase News (in our quarterly reporting and methodology guide) and others. And, at least anecdotally, it seems like startups are staying in “stealth mode” longer, which only serves to exacerbate the reporting lag.

All this being said, projections (which try to compensate for delays using historical patterns of deal disclosures) from our Q4 2018 report on U.S. and Canadian venture investing found that seed-stage deal volume has declined for the past couple of quarters, while total dollar volume raised by seed-stage companies rose slightly in the final quarter of last year. Projected early-stage deal volume leveled off in the past several quarters, while projected dollar volume grew more than 11 percent quarter over quarter.

In other words, both seed and early-stage deals are getting bigger, on average, at the same time deal volume growth is stagnating in the U.S. and Canada. If this trend continues, funds on the smaller end of the AUM spectrum may face deal-flow pipeline problems in the future, or get priced out of bidding wars for a diminishing supply of equity in fledgling technology ventures with high growth potential.


Source: Tech Crunch

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Transportation Weekly: Waymo unleashes laser bear, Bird spreads its wings, Lyft tightens its belt

Welcome back to Transportation Weekly; I’m your host Kirsten Korosec, senior transportation reporter at TechCrunch . This is the fifth edition of our newsletter and we love the reader feedback. Keep it coming.

Never heard of TechCrunch’s Transportation Weekly? Catch up here, here and here. As I’ve written before, consider this a soft launch. Follow me on Twitter @kirstenkorosec to ensure you see it each week. (An email subscription is coming). 

This week, we explore the world of light detection and ranging sensors known as LiDAR, young drivers, trouble in Barcelona, autonomous trucks in California, and China among other things.

ONM …

There are OEMs in the automotive world. And here, (wait for it) there are ONMs — original news manufacturers. (Cymbal clash!) This is where investigative reporting, enterprise pieces and analysis on transportation lives.

This week, we’re going to put our analysis hats as we explore the world of LiDAR, a sensor that measures distance using laser light to generate highly accurate 3D maps of the world around the car. LiDAR is considered by most in the self-driving car industry (Tesla CEO Elon Musk being one exception) a key piece of technology required to safely deploy robotaxis and other autonomous vehicles.

There are A LOT of companies working on LiDAR. Some counts track upwards of 70. For years now, Velodyne has been the primary supplier of LiDAR sensors to companies developing autonomous vehicles. Waymo, back when it was just the Google self-driving project, even used Velodyne LiDAR sensors until 2012.

Dozens of startups have sprung up with Velodyne in its sights. But now Waymo has changed the storyline.

To catch you up: Waymo announced this week that it will start selling its custom LiDAR sensors — the technology that was at the heart of a trade secrets lawsuit last year against Uber.

Waymo’s entry into the market doesn’t necessarily upend other companies’ plans. Waymo is going to sell its short range LiDAR, called Laser Bear Honeycomb, to companies outside of self-driving cars. It will initially target robotics, security and agricultural technology.

It does put pressure on startups, particularly those with less capital or those targeting the same customer base. Pitchbook ran the numbers for us to determine where the LiDAR industry sits at the moment. There are two stories here: there are a handful of well capitalized startups and we may have reached “peak” LiDAR. Last year, there were 28 VC deals in LiDAR technology valued at $650 million. The number of deals was slightly lower than in 2017, but the values jumped by nearly 34 percent.

The top global VC-backed LiDAR technology companies (by post valuation) are Quanergy, Velodyne (although mostly corporate backed), Aurora (not self-driving company Aurora Innovation), Ouster, and DroneDeploy. The graphic below, also courtesy of Pitchbook, shows the latest figures as of January 31, 2019.

Dig In

Researchers discovered that two popular car alarm systems were vulnerable to a manipulated server-side API that could be abused to take control of an alarm system’s user account and their vehicle.

The companies — Russian alarm maker Pandora and California-based Viper (or Clifford in the U.K.) — have fixed the  security vulnerabilities that allowed researchers to remotely track, hijack and take control of vehicles with the alarms installed. What does this all mean?

Our in-house security expert and reporter Zack Whittaker digs in and gives us a reality check. Follow him @zackwhittaker.

Since the first widely publicized car hack in 2015 proved hijacking and controlling a car was possible, it’s opened the door to understanding the wider threat to modern vehicles.

Most modern cars have internet connectivity, making their baseline surface area of attack far greater than a car that doesn’t. But the effort that goes into remotely controlling a vehicle is difficult and convoluted, and the attack — often done by chaining together a set of different vulnerabilities — can take weeks or even longer to develop.

Keyfob or replay attacks are far more likely than say remote attacks over the internet or cell network. A keyfob sends an “unlock” signal, a device captures that signal and replays it. By replaying it you can unlock the car.

This latest car hack, featuring flawed third-party car alarms, was far easier to exploit, because the alarm systems added a weakness to the vehicles that weren’t there to begin with. Car makers, with vast financial and research resources, do a far greater job at securing their vehicle than the small companies that focus on functionality over security. For now, the bigger risk comes from third parties in the automobile space, but the car makers can’t afford to drop their game either.

A little bird …

We hear a lot. But we’re not selfish. Let’s share.

blinky-cat-bird

The California Department Motor Vehicles is the government body that regulates autonomous vehicle testing on public roads. The job of enforcement falls to the California Highway Patrol.

In an effort to gauge the need for more robust testing guidelines, the California Highway Patrol decided to hold an event at its headquarters in Sacramento. Eight companies working on autonomous trucking technology were invited. It was supposed to be a large event with local and state politicians in attendance. And it was supposed to validate autonomous trucking as an emerging industry.

There’s just one problem: only one AV trucking company is willing and able to complete this course. We hear that this AV startup actually already went ahead and completed the test course.

The California Highway Patrol has postponed event, for now, presumably until more companies can join.

Got a tip or overheard something in the world of transportation? Email me or send a direct message to @kirstenkorosec.

Deal of the week

Instead of highlighting one giant deal, let’s step back and take a broader view of mobility this week. The upshot: 2018 saw a decline in total investments in the sector and money moved away from ride-hailing and towards two-wheeled transportation.

According to new research from EY, mobility investments in 2018 reached $39.1 billion, down from $55.2 billion in the previous year. (The figures EY provided was through November 2018).

Ride-hailing companies raised $7.1 billion in 2018, a 73 percent decline from the previous year when $26.7 billion poured into this sector.

Investors, it seems, are shifting their focus to other business models, notably first and last-mile connectivity. EY estimates $7 billion was invested in two-wheeler mobility companies such as bike-sharing and electric scooters in 2018. The U.S. and China together have contributed to more than 80 percent of overall two-wheeler mobility investments this year alone, according to EY research shared with TechCrunch.

Other deals:

Snapshot

Let’s talk about Generation Z, that group of young people born 1996 to the present, and one startup that is focused on turning that demographic into car owners.

There’s lots of talk and hand wringing about young people choosing not to get a driver’s license, or not buying a vehicle. In the UK, for instance, about 42 percent of young drivers aged 17 to 24, hold a driver’s license. That’s about 2.7 million people, according to the National Travel Survey 2018 (NTS) of the UK government’s department of transport. An additional 2.2 million have a provisional or learner license. Combined, that amounts to about 13 percent of the car driving population of the UK.

In the UK, evidence suggests that a rise in motoring costs have discouraged young people from learning. And there lies one opportunity that a new startup called Driver1 is targeting.

Driver 1 is a car subscription service designed exclusively for first car drivers aged 17 to 24. The company has been in stealth mode for about a year and is just now launching.

“The young driver market is being underserved by the car industry, Driver1 founder Tim Hammond told TechCrunch. “And primarily it’s the financing that’s not available for that age group. It’s also something that’s not really affordable for any of the car subscription models like Fair.com and it’s not suitable for the OEM subscription services either financially or from an age perspective for young drivers.”

The company’s own research has found this group wants a newer car for 12 to 15 months.

“The car is the extension of their device,” Hammond said, noting these drivers don’t want the old junkers. “They want their iPhones and they want the car that goes with it.”

The company is working directly with leasing companies — not dealerships — to provide young drivers with 3 to 5-year-old cars that have lost 60 percent or so of their value. Driver1 is targeting under $120 a month for the customer and has a partnership with remarketing company Manheim, which is owned by Cox Automotive.

The startup is focused on the UK for now and has about 600 members who have reserved their cars for purchase. Driver1 is aiming to capture about 10 percent of the 1 million or so young people in the UK who pass their learners permit each year. The company plans it expand to France and other European countries in the fall.

Tiny but mighty micromobility

Bird Rocking Out GIF - Find & Share on GIPHY

Ca-caw, ca-caw! That’s the sound of Bird gearing up to launch Bird Platform in New Zealand, Canada and Latin America in the coming weeks. The platform is part of Bird’s mission to bring its scooters across the world “and empower local entrepreneurs in regions where we weren’t planning to launch to run their own electric-scooter sharing program with Bird’s tech and vehicles,” Bird CEO Travis VanderZanden told TechCrunch.

MRD’s two cents: Bird Platform seems like a way for Bird to make extra cash without having to do any of the work i.e. charging the vehicles, maintaining them and working with city officials to get permits. Smart!

Meanwhile, the dolla dolla bills keep pouring into micromobility. European electric scooter startup Voi Technology raised an additional $30 million in capital. That was on top of a $50 million Series A round just three months ago.

Oh, and because micromobility isn’t just for startups, Volkswagen decided to launch a kind of weird-looking electric scooter in Geneva. Because, why not?

— Megan Rose Dickey

One more thing …

Lyft is trimming staff to prepare for its IPO. TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden learned that the company has laid off about 50 staff in its bike and scooter division. It appears most of these folks are people who joined the Lyft through its acquisition of  electric bike sharing startup Motivate a deal that closed about three months ago.

Notable reads

It’s probably not smart to suggest another newsletter, but if you haven’t checked out Michael Dunne’s  The Chinese Are Coming newsletter, you should. Dunne has a unique perspective on what’s happening in China, particularly as it related to automotive and newer forms of mobility such as ride-hailing. One interesting nugget from his latest edition: there are more than 20 other new electric vehicle makers in China.

“Most will fall away within the next 3 to 4 years as cash runs out,” Dunne predicts.

Other quotable notables:

Here’s a fun read for the week. TechCrunch’s Lucas Matney wrote about a YC Combinator startup Jetpack Aviation.The startup has launched pre-orders this week for the moonshot of moonshots, the Speeder, a personal vertical take-off and landing vehicle with a svelte concept design that looks straight out of Star Wars or Halo.

Testing and deployments

Spanish ride-hailing firm Cabify is back operating in Barcelona, Spain despite issuing dire warnings that new regulations issued by local government would crush its business and force it to fire thousands of drivers and leave forever. Turns out forever is one month.

The Catalan Generalitat issued a decree last month imposing a wait time of at least 15 minutes between a booking being made and a passenger being picked up. The policy was made to ensure taxis and ride-hailing firms are not competing for the same passengers, following a series of taxi strikes, which included scenes of violence. Our boots on the ground reporter Natasha Lomas has the whole story.

Sure, Barcelona is just one city. But what happened in Barcelona isn’t an isolated incident. The early struggles between conventional taxis and ride-hailing operations might be over, but that doesn’t mean the matter has been settled altogether.

And it’s not likely to go away. Once, robotaxis actually hit the road en masse — and yes, that’ll be awhile — these same struggles will pop up again.

Other deployments, or, er, retreats ….

Bike share pioneer Mobike retreats to China

On the autonomous vehicle front:

China Post, the official postal service of China, and delivery and logistics companies Deppon Express, will begin autonomous package delivery services in April. The delivery trucks will operate on autonomous driving technologies developed by FABU Technology, an AI company focused on intelligent driving systems.

On our radar

There is a lot of transportation-related activity this month. Come find me.

SXSW in Austin: TechCrunch will be at SXSW. And there is a lot of mobility action here. Aurora CEO and co-founder Chris Urmson was on stage Saturday morning with Malcolm Gladwell. Mayors from a number of U.S. cities as well as companies like Ford and Mercedes are on the scene. Here’s where I’ll be. 

  • 2 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. (local time) March 9 at the Empire Garage for the Smart Mobility Summit, an annual event put on by Wards Intelligence and C3 Group. The Autonocast, the podcast I co-host with Alex Roy and Ed Niedermeyer, will also be on hand.
  • 9:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. (local time) March 12 at the JW Marriott. The Autonocast and founding general partner of Trucks VC, Reilly Brennan will hold a SXSW podcast panel on automated vehicle terminology and other stuff.
  • 3:30 p.m (local time) over at the Hilton Austin Downtown, I’ll be moderating a panel Re-inventing the Wheel: Own, Rent, Share, Subscribe. Sherrill Kaplan with Zipcar, Amber Quist, with Silvercar and Russell Lemmer with Dealerware will join me on stage.
  • TechCrunch is also hosting a SXSW party from 1 pm to 4 pm Sunday, March 10, 615 Red River St., that will feature musical guest Elderbrook. RSVP here. 

Nvidia GTC

TechCrunch (including yours truly) will also be at Nvidia’s annual GPU Technology Conference from March 18 to 21 in San Jose.

Self Racing Cars

The annual Self Racing Car event will be held March 23 and March 24 at Thunderhill Raceway near Willows, California.

There is still room for participants to test or demo their autonomous vehicles, drive train innovation, simulation, software, teleoperation, and sensors. Hobbyists are welcome. Sign up to participate or drop them a line at contact@selfracingcars.com.

Thanks for reading. There might be content you like or something you hate. Feel free to reach out to me at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com to share those thoughts, opinions or tips. 

Nos vemos la próxima vez.


Source: Tech Crunch

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Funerals are tough. Ever Loved helps you pay for them

Alison Johnston didn’t plan to build a startup around death. An early employee at Q&A app Aardvark that was bought by Google, she’d founded tutoring app InstaEDU and sold it to Chegg. She made mass market consumer products. But then, “I had a family member who was diagnosed with terminal cancer and I thought about how she’d be remembered” she recalls. Inventing the next big social app suddenly felt less consequential.

“I started looking into the funeral industry and discovered that there were very few resources to support and guide families who had recently experienced a death. It was difficult to understand and compare options and prices (which were also much higher than I ever imagined), and there weren’t good tools to share information and memories with others” Johnston tells me. Bombarded by options and steep costs that average $9,000 per funeral in the US, families in crisis become overwhelmed.

Ever Loved co-founder and CEO Alison Johnston

Johnston’s startup Ever Loved wants to provide peace of mind during the rest-in-peace process. It’s a comparison shopping and review site for funeral homes, cemeteries, caskets, urns, and headstones. It offers price guides and recommends top Amazon funeral products and takes a 5 percent affiliate fee that finances Ever Loved’s free memorial site maker for sharing funeral details plus collecting memories and remembrances. And families can even set up fundraisers to cover their costs or support a charity.

The startup took seed funding from Social Capital and a slew of angel investors about a year ago. Now hundreds of thousands of users are visiting Ever Loved shopping and memorial sites each month. Eventually Ever Loved wants to build its own marketplace of funeral services and products that takes a 10 percent cut of purchases, while also selling commerce software to funeral homes.

“People don’t talk about death. It’s taboo in our society and most people don’t plan ahead at all” Johnston tells me. Rushing to arrange end-of-life logistics is enormously painful, and Johnston believes Ever Loved can eliminate some of that stress. “I wanted to explore areas where fewer people in Silicon Valley had experience and that weren’t just for young urban professionals.”

There’s a big opportunity to modernize this aging industry with a sustainable business model and empathy as an imperative. 86 percent of funeral homes are independent, Johnston says, so few have the resources to build tech products. One of the few big companies in the space, the $7 billion market cap public Service Corporation International, has rolled up funeral homes and cemeteries but has done little to improve pricing transparency or the user experience for families in hardship. Rates and reviews often aren’t available, so customers can end up overpaying for underwhelming selection.

On the startup side, there’s direct competitors like FuneralWise, which is focused on education and forums but lacks robust booking features or a memorial site maker. Funeral360 is Ever Loved’s biggest rival, but Ever Loved’s memorial sites looked better and it had much deeper step-by-step pricing estimates and information on funeral homes.

Johnston wants to use revenue from end-of-life commerce to subsidize Ever Loved’s memorial and fundraiser features so they can stay free or cheap while generating leads and awareness for the marketplace side. But no one has hit scale and truly become wedding site The Knot but for funerals.

I’ve known Johnston since college, and she’s always had impressive foresight for what was about to blow up. From an extremely early gig at Box.com to Q&A and on-demand answers with Aardvark to the explosion of online education with InstaEDU, she’s managed to get out in front of the megatrends. And tech’s destiny to overhaul unsexy businesses is one of the biggest right now.

Amazon has made us expect to see prices and reviews up front, so Ever Loved has gathered rate estimates for about two-thirds of US funeral homes and is pulling in testimonials. You can search for 4-star+ funeral homes nearby and instantly get high-quality results. Meanwhile, funeral homes can sign up to claim their page and add information.

Facebook popularized online event pages. But its heavy-handed prerogatives, generalist tone, and backlash can make it feel like a disrespectful place to host funeral service details. And with people leaving their hometowns, newspapers can’t spread the info properly. Ever Loved is purpose-built for these serious moments, makes managing invites easy, and also offers a place to collect obituaries, photos, and memories.

Rather than having to click through a link to a GoFundMe page that can be a chore, Ever Loved hosts fundraisers right on its memorial sites to maximize donations. That’s crucial since funerals cost more than most people have saved. Ever Loved only charges a processing fee and allows visitors to add an additional tip, so it’s no more expensive that popular fundraising sites.

Next, “the two big things are truly building out booking through our site and expanding into some of the other end of life logistics” Johnstone tells me. Since the funeral is just the start of the post-death process, Ever Loved is well positioned to move into estate planning. “There are literally dozens of things you have to do after someone passes away — contacting the social security office, closing out bank accounts and Facebook profiles…”

Johnston reveals that 44 percent of families say they had arguments while divvying up assets — a process that takes an average of 560 hours aka 3 months of full-time work. As the baby boomer era ends over the next 30 years, $30 trillion in assets are expected to transfer through estates, she claims. Earning a tiny cut of that by giving mourners tools outlining popular ways to divide estates could alleviate disagreements could make Ever Loved quite lucrative.

“When I first started out, I was pretty awkward about telling people about this. We’re death averse, and that hinders us in a lot of ways” Johnston concludes. My own family struggled with this, as an unwillingness to accept mortality kept my grandparents from planning for after they were gone. “But I quickly learned was this was a huge conversation starter rather than a turn off. This is a topic people want to talk about more and educate themselves more on. Tech too often merely makes life and work easier for those who already have it good. Tech that tempers tragedy is a welcome evolution for Silicon Valley.”


Source: Tech Crunch

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‘Captain Marvel’ never quite takes flight

“Captain Marvel” isn’t a bad movie, exactly.

It seems, at this point, that Marvel’s moviemaking machinery is incapable of producing a genuinely terrible film. There’s no “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice” or “Suicide Squad” in the Marvel filmography, just “Thor: The Dark World,” “Ant-Man” and “Doctor Strange” — movies that are fine but forgettable.

Still, I wanted more than that for “Captain Marvel,” and I suspect that I’m not alone.

That’s because after 20 films, Marvel Studios is finally giving a woman top billing. It’s “Captain Marvel,” full stop, and the film was also co-directed by a woman — Anna Boden, who directed and co-wrote the film with her regular collaborator Ryan Fleck. As a result (and also in response to star Brie Larson’s efforts to make the press tour more inclusive), the movie has predictably attracted its share of online trolls.

So it’d be nice to report that “Captain Marvel” is an absolute triumph. The fact that it’s not has nothing to do with Larson, who plays Carol Danvers (the current incarnation of Captain Marvel) with a winning mix of charm and determination. The problem, I suspect, lies in the movie’s depiction of the Captain Marvel character.

Nick Fury

Marvel Studios’ CAPTAIN MARVEL..Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) ..Photo: Film Frame..©Marvel Studios 2019

When the story begins, she isn’t Captain Marvel per se. Instead, she’s an amnesiac soldier-in-training known as Vers, who serves an alien race known as the Kree in their war against their shapeshifting enemies, the Skrulls.

As the movie goes on, the story eventually brings us to Earth in the 1990s, where we eventually learn more about Vers. Still, both her backstory and her pryotechnic powers remain abstract: When the credits rolled, I still thought of her as a blank slate, and while Larson commits to the handful of big, heroic that the script gives her, the lines feel more like generic messages of empowerment, rather than dialogue that really shows us who the character is.

Luckily, though Captain Marvel remains a cipher, she’s surrounded by a strong supporting cast, including Samuel L. Jackson and Ben Mendelsohn, both of them transformed — Mendelsohn (who seems completely incapable of being boring on-screen) into a goblin-like Kree soldier, Jackson into a facsimile of his younger self.

In fact, the CGI technology that Marvel has been using to de-age its older actors is at its best here, largely avoiding the uncanny valley feeling that I got in “Captain America: Civil War” and “Ant-Man and the Wasp.” And the middle stretch, which pairs up Jackson and Larson on a buddy comedy-style road trip, is probably the film’s highlight.

Unfortunately, the genuinely funny character moments have to share screentime with by-the-numbers Marvel plot, and with tired jokes that harp on the ’90s setting. (Though the audience at my preview screening seemed to dig the period humor — maybe it depends on whether you find the sight of a Blockbuster Video, or of Brie Larson wearing a Nine Inch nails T-shirt, to be inherently funny.)

If anything, this feels like an illustration of how remarkable “Wonder Woman” and “Black Panther” were: They broke down barriers in on-screen representation, but they managed to be fun and memorable (and, in the case of “Black Panther,” a genuinely great film) at the same time.

With “Captain Marvel,” on the other hand, we get the first in what may be the new standard. Now women and minorities can star in their superhero films, and they can be just as middle-of-the-road as the ones featuring white guys.

Marvel’s ‘Black Panther’ is a new high point for superhero cinema


Source: Tech Crunch

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Flickr says all Creative Commons photos are protected from deletion, not just past uploads

Flickr announced today that all Creative Commons images will remain protected on its site – including those uploaded in the past and those that will be added in the future. The news follows Flickr’s November 2018 announcement where it had stated it wouldn’t delete Creative Commons photos already on its service, after switching over to a new business model which put an end to the free terabyte of storage in favor of a new subscription-based service.

There had been concern prior to Flickr’s statement in November that the photography site’s revamped business model would see works deleted from Creative Commons, as a result of its implementation.

That would have been a huge loss to the wider photography community and the web as a whole.

Creative Commons is a significant resource, as it makes creators’ works freely available through a variety of copyright licenses that respect how the owner wants them shared and/or attributed. Flickr, before being acquired by new owners SmugMug, had been a longtime Creative Commons partner, offering millions of photos under the CC license types on its site.

Though Flickr’s November decision to not delete the CC archive was a good step forward, it didn’t necessarily protect all the CC-licensed photos that would be uploaded to its site in the future. Instead, the company said only those CC photos uploaded prior to November 1, 2018 would be grandfathered in, so to speak.

At the time, CEO at Creative Commons, Ryan Merkley, expressed some concern about this decision. It wasn’t clear where future CC-licensed photos would end up.

Today, both organizations announce they’ve come to an agreement: all CC-licensed photos and public domain works will continue to be free on Flickr for anyone to upload and share. That’s a step further than simply protecting all the past uploads before the business model transition.

It means that Flickr has committed to continue to steward the Commons, as before.

Today, Flickr hosts more than 500 million CC-licensed works, and that number increases daily.

“Choosing to allow all CC-licensed and public domain works to be uploaded and shared without restrictions or limits comes at a real financial cost to Flickr, which is paid in part by their Pro users. We believe that it’s a valuable investment in the global community of free culture and open knowledge, and it’s a gift to everyone,” said Merkley today, in a blog post announcement about Flickr’s decision.

“We’re grateful for the ongoing investment and enthusiasm from the entire Flickr team, and their commitment to support users who choose to share their works,” he added.

Along with this news, Flickr says it has disabled bulk license change tools in its Settings, Camera Roll and Organizr for Flickr Free accounts in order to prevent users from switching large archives to a free license to take advantage of this decision. Instead, photos’ licenses can only be changed on the photo page itself.

The company additionally said it will now offer “in memoriam” accounts for Flickr members who have passed away, instead of deleting their works if or when a Pro subscription lapses.

Flickr has seen many transitions over the years. It had been bought by Yahoo, which then became a part of (TechCrunch parent) Verizon before being sold off last year to SmugMug. But that move meant the company had to come up with a more sustainable business model in order to survive.

It’s unclear if Flickr will have the resources to make this new commitment to the Creative Commons indefinitely without coming up with other monetization options beyond Pro subscriptions, but the company has committed on building out features focused on users’ needs, not on catering to advertisers. It hopes to make its service valuable and worth paying for, instead of being the “digital shoebox” that massive amounts of free storage led it to become over the years.

 


Source: Tech Crunch

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UK military veteran launches crowd-funding for Pixie app to revive local stores

What if, instead of sitting on your phone on the sofa ordering stuff from Amazon, you could buy the same things locally from local stores that ultimately enliven and enrich your local neighborhood? What if by doing that, you wouldn’t be walking through deserted main streets, past boarded-up shops, dark alleys and graffiti? What if someone created a marketplace for independent businesses, local events and experiences that kept the money in the local economy rather than being siphoned off into global giants who don’t care about human-scale communities?

That’s the idea behind Pixie, a new take on the “shop-local app” startup model which, although it’s been tried before, has never quite managed to take off. Perhaps Pixie will have more luck?

Here’s how it works: The Pixie app connects people to independent businesses through a curated marketplace, incentivizing them to pay through the app and get rewarded for being loyal customers. Integrated into the app is Pixie Pay, a bespoke payment solution which keeps money in local hands.

The startup has a fascinating background. Whilst serving in the British Special Forces, Pixie’s founder Greg Barden understood that his mission was also to ‘win hearts and minds’ with the local population. Whether by buying bread from the local baker in a village in Afghanistan, or coffee from the market in Baghdad, he and his soldiers could tear down even the most hostile barriers.

He also realized that when more money stayed inside these the local economies rather than being sucked away by organized crime or large scale, globalized businesses, the local economy might flourish and the risk of the societies there becoming yet again destabilized could potentially diminish.

“Whether it was stalls in the bazaars of Baghdad or small boutiques on Bath high-street, I realized independent shop owners are linchpins in their community. They add variety to the mundane and nurture community spirit. Even local guardians need protecting sometimes, which is why we created Pixie.”

The threat to independent stores from globalization and digitization isn’t just happening in Afghanistan. Across the western world, ‘Main Street’ stores are closing at a prodigious rate. In the UK over 1,500 local stores closed in 2018. (And that was BEFORE Brexit…)

Pixie has stress-tested its idea in mid-sized town in the UK, including Bath, Frome and Sherbourne, completing transactions across 250 businesses, ranging from cafes to fashion boutiques, and spinning up 5,000 app users. It’s now going on the fund-raising trail, aiming to raise £500,000 in funding through its ‘Equity for Explorers’ campaign on Crowdcube a UK-based crowd-equity platform. The total addressable market for independent business in the UK is estimated to be £31.5bn in gross transactional value.

Barden — who last year spoke about his startup life at the launch of the military tech non-profit TechVets — says: “There might be thousands of independent businesses across the UK, but at the rate the high-street is disappearing they are severely under threat. Pixie isn’t here to turn people away from the bigger players on the high-street, but create opportunities for enriching discovery. Needless to say, in a world with increasing nationalism, Brexit, Trump and — dare I say it — Amazon, we feel Pixie has a huge part to play in countering the worst aspects of globalization.”

Pixie’s revenue comes from transaction fees taken when people use its ‘Pixie Pay’ payment mechanism. The payment system is designed to bypass Visa/Mastercard at the point of sale, whilst the loyalty scheme unites independent businesses under one umbrella, so the users can earn and spend their loyalty points (as money) across the entire Pixie community. If a store using Pixie is in Australia, a person from Bath could also use their points there. This keeps the money circulating inside local, independent stores, wherever they are on the planet.

Pixie distributes its own payment terminal that sits next to whatever the business has in place to take normal card payments (iZettle etc). The cards are contactless but don’t utilise visa MasterCard. It’s literally their own e-money system. Think PayPal where users can either add money to their balance by debit card or bank and/or link a debit card to Pixie if they don’t have a balance.

Obviously this also creates it an alternative to competitors like iZettle, Square, SumUp and WorldPay, but this time specifically aimed at local independent stores, not huge national and international chains.

The third element of Pixie is its discovery marketplace that gives its community of explorers (users) the ability to discover local businesses across the Pixie footprint of stores.

I’ve seen several startups try and tackle this problem, but it may well be that Pixie, under its charismatic leader, finally has a shot at cracking this idea around local markets.


Source: Tech Crunch

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Lyft lays off up to 50 in bikes and scooters as it gears up for another wave of launches

As Lyft continues to prepare for its IPO, the on-demand transportation startup is trimming staff to cut costs ahead of another wave of expansion.

TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that Lyft has laid off around 50 staff in its bike and scooter division, mainly people who had joined the company when it acquired the electric bike sharing startup Motivate a deal that closed about three months ago. The cuts range from managers and through to technical people and those holding less senior roles, and have been made across a number of cities, including Boston, San Francisco and New York.

(The Information separately also published a short report about the layoffs last night.)

A spokesperson for the company told TechCrunch that Lyft is continuing to hire in its scooter and bike division. “This was part of our performance management process,” she said in a statement. “We are actively hiring for this part of the business with hundreds of hires planned this year.”

Given that Lyft currently employs around 5,000 people, the cuts work out to a small percentage of that, around one percent to be exact. But it’s notable because of where the cuts were made, and because they are coming as the company gears up for a public listing, after which it will be subject to more public scrutiny.

Lyft has made a big move in the last year to expand its transportation options beyond private cars. This has been done partly to meet consumer demand in different scenarios (for example, shorter routes that might otherwise be clogged with traffic, or options that let the rider get a little exercise in during the journey); partly because its competitors are also presenting alternatives, which could drive business away from Lyft if it doesn’t offer the same options; and — now that there is a public offering in sight — partly to present a more diversified business to the market. The Motivate acquisition was likely made for at least all of those reasons.

Before Lyft acquired it, Motivate had made its name in bikes alone. In fact, it had grown to be the biggest bike sharing company in the US, with its network including CitiBike in New York; Capital Bikeshare in Washington; Ford GoBike in San Francisco and many others.

Under Lyft, Motivate became part of Lyft’s bigger strategy to expand beyond private car services, which also included its scooter business. While Lyft is continuing to develop business for both transportation mediums — for example, it added 4,000 electric bikes recently to the New York City bike sharing operation — scooter sharing has most definitely had the bigger surge of industry interest in recent months.

One person who tipped us about these layoffs believes that they were made with a specific strategy in mind, to cut costs on the bike operation, which is a more established business, to help channel resources into the costly scooter business. “Lyft is going big on scooters and cutting bike people,” said the tipster. To be clear, though, Lyft itself did not characterise it that way.

Whether the two are directly related, it is true that in the next couple of weeks, the company will be kicking off a big scooter launch in multiple cities, with its SXSW presence this year all about the two-wheeled, electric-powered vehicles.

Other companies and investors are certainly putting their money on scooters right now. Lime is now valued at $2.4 billion after raising $310 million last month. Bird is also reportedly raising at a similar valuation. Uber, meanwhile, acquired Jump last year to spearhead its own scooter and bike strategy.

All that is despite what has been a very uneven path for scooters. Some of the issues have included controversy around safety (for example, Lime appears to have a persistent safety problem with some of its fleet; the after-effect of having gluts of them cluttering the streets and the regulatory issues that surround this; and the tough unit economics.

On the last of those, this essay outlines how difficult it is to make money right now on a scooter business, when you calculate the average price for a ride, the average lifespan of a scooter, and the average price to get one on the street. And that’s before you consider marketing and other costs, and before you have seen the basic premise proven out: that a critical mass of people will use hired electric scooters on a regular basis.

Our tipster estimated that a typical scooter rollout is making a loss of about $23 per scooter per ride ($2 per ride, versus $25 per ride cost). “Better design durability and more scale to get to operational efficiency will address that in theory,” the tipster said, which is likely why hires are still being made, and services are still being rolled out.


Source: Tech Crunch

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Bike sharing pioneer Mobike is retreating to China

In a telling sign of the state of bike sharing, Mobike, a once red-hot startup that attracted billions in investment capital, is closing down all international operations and putting its sole focus on China.

On Friday, Mobike laid off its operations teams in APAC, which entailed more than 15 full-time employees and many more contractors and third-party agency staff across Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, India and Australia. Those affected were told the company will “ramp down” the regional business without being provided specific reasons for the rollback, five people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

These layoffs are a key step towards the eventual goal of closing Mobike’s international footprint since the Asia Pacific region accounts for the majority of its non-China business. More staff cuts are impending outside Asia that can include Europe and the Americans, according to two sources. Eventually, Mobike will only be operational in its native China, which accounts for the majority of its overall global business.

The change of strategy encapsulates the struggle that Chinese bike sharing companies have experienced over the past year. Mobike was arguably the most successful from the camp. Before it was ultimately bought by Chinese delivery giant Meituan for $2.7 billion 11 months ago, it had raised over $900 million from investors such as Tencent, Foxconn, Hillhouse Capital and Warburg Pincus as bike-sharing became the hot topic in 2017. Ultimately, though, Mobike wasn’t able to find a sustainable business model amid tough competition and tight financials.

mobike

Photo source: Mobike

Employees were taken aback by Friday’s announcement as they had been under the impression that Mobike’s prospects were bright and there had not been issues with salaries or other financial concerns. In Singapore, specifically, the bike app claims to be the top player and is working closely with the government to make the city-state greener.

“I was shocked. The business is doing well from my perspective,” one source told TechCrunch. “But just because one country does well doesn’t mean the whole region will survive. Mobike ran a lot of analysis on profits and losses in the [overseas] region and came to the conclusion that there is no way it would turn profitable.”

Things were rosier just a year ago. When Meituan, the one-stop app for neighborhood services in China, acquired Mobike, the buyout was widely seen as a triumph for the young startup as its Chinese peer Ofo suffered mounting financial pressures standing as an independent company. Ofo started to phase out its international operations last year and was reportedly preparing for bankruptcy recently.

Before long, Meituan also started to show its restraint over the mobility segment. In an effort to cut costs, the Hong Kong-listed firm focusing on food delivery and hotel booking announced it would pause expansions on dockless bikes and car-hailing. Its bike unit is also facing growing competition from Hellobike, which is Alibaba’s latest attempt to crack China’s two-wheel transport industry.

Despite the hurdles, Mobike’s APAC employees told TechCrunch that they had believed the overseas business would stick it out as they had generated “a lot of cost-saving and progresses” in recent months after being assigned to boost the company’s operational efficiency.

mobike 3

Photo source: Mobike

Those affected won’t have much time to ponder but feel “unbalanced” and “upset” about the company’s “one-sided” decision. TechCrunch understands that staff weren’t given a chance to negotiate and most will leave by mid-April with a limited number of “key” employees asked to stay until the “ramping down” is completed. Severance packages vary on people’s termination dates, while some employees received no compensation altogether as the notice had arrived before the 30-day period required by the contract.

Meituan’s decision to close down the regional business has also come as a risky move for the company. In Singapore, Mobike’s largest market outside China, bike-sharing companies are required to file an exit plan with the government before they pull the trigger. Mobike has not informed the Singapore Land Transport Authority of its layoff as of Friday, according to two sources, although it has been in talks with the transportation regulator regarding a potential shutdown. Mobike told employees to keep news of the job cuts private before it announces them officially to the LTA.

Meituan declined to comment for this story. The company is scheduled to report earnings on Monday which may shed more light on the situation.


Source: Tech Crunch

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WellSaid aims to make natural-sounding synthetic speech a credible alternative to real humans

Many things are better said than read, but the best voice tech out there seems to be reserved for virtual assistants, not screen readers or automatically generated audiobooks. WellSaid wants to enable any creator to use quality synthetic speech instead of a human voice — perhaps even a synthetic version of themselves.

There’s been a series of major advances in voice synthesis over the last couple years as neural network technology improves on the old highly manual approach. But Google, Apple, and Amazon seem unwilling to make their great voice tech available for anything but chirps from your phone or home hub.

As soon as I heard about WaveNet, and later Tacotron, I tried to contact the team at Google to ask when they’d get to work producing natural-sounding audiobooks for everything on Google Books, or as a part of AMP, or make it an accessibility service, and so on. Never heard back. I considered this a lost opportunity, since there are many out there who need such a service.

So I was pleased to hear that WellSaid is taking on this market, after a fashion anyway. The company is the first to launch from the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) incubator program announced back in 2017. They do take their time!

Allen-backed AI2 incubator aims to connect AI startups with world-class talent

Talk the talk

I talked with the co-founders CEO Matt Hocking and CTO Michael Petrochuk, who explained why they went about creating a whole new system for voice synthesis. The basic problem, they said, is that existing systems not only rely on a lot of human annotation to sound right, but they “sound right” the exact same way every time. You can’t just feed it a few hours of audio and hope it figures out how to inflect questions or pause between list items — much of this stuff has to be spelled out for them. The end result, however, is highly efficient.

“Their goal is to make a small model for cheap [i.e. computationally] that pronounces things the same way every time. It’s this one perfect voice,” said Petrochuk. “We took research like Tacotron and pushed it even further — but we’re not trying to control speech and enforce this arbitrary structure on it.”

“When you think about the human voice, what makes natural, kind of, is the inconsistencies,” said Hocking.

And where better to find inconsistencies than in humans? The team worked with a handful of voice actors to record dozens of hours of audio to feed to the system. There’s no need to annotate the text with “speech markup language” to designate parts of sentences and so on, Petrochuk said: “We discovered how to train off of raw audiobook data, without having to do anything on top of that.”

So WellSaid’s model will often pronounce the same word differently, not because a carefully manicured manual model of language suggested it do so, but because the person whose vocal fingerprint it is imitating did so.

And how does that work, exactly? That question seems to dip into WellSaid’s secret sauce. Their model, like any deep learning system, is taking innumerable inputs into account and producing an output, but it is larger and more far-reaching than other voice synthesis systems. Things like cadence and pronunciation aren’t specified by its overseers but extracted from the audio and modeled in real time. Sounds a bit like magic, but that’s often the case when it comes to bleeding-edge AI research.

It runs on a CPU in real time, not on a GPU cluster somewhere, so it can be done offline as well. This is a feat in itself, since many voice synthesis algorithms are quite resource-heavy.

What matters is that the voice produced can speak any text in a very natural sounding way. Here’s the first bit of an article — alas, not one of mine, which would have employed more mellifluous circumlocutions — read by Google’s WaveNet, then by two of WellSaid’s voices.

The latter two are definitely more natural sounding than the first. On some phrases the voices may be nearly indistinguishable from their originals, but in most cases I feel sure I could pick out the synthetic voice in a few words.

That it’s even close, however, is an accomplishment. And I can certainly say that if I was going to have an article read to my by one of these voices, it would be WellSaid’s. Naturally it can also be tweaked and iterated, or effects applied to further manipulate the sound, as with any voice performance. You did’t think those interviews you hear on NPR are unedited, did you?

The goal at first is to find the creatives whose work would be improved or eased by adding this tool to their toolbox.

“There are a lot of people who have this need,” explained Hocking. “A video producer who doesn’t have the budget to hire a voice actor; someone with a large volume of content that has to be iterated on rapidly; if English is a second language, this opens up a lot of doors; and some people just don’t have a voice for radio.”

It would be nice to be able to add voice with a click rather than just have block text and royalty-free music over a social ad  (think the admen):

I asked about the reception among voice actors, who of course are essentially being asked to train their own replacements. They said that the actors were actually positive about it, thinking of it as something like stock photography for voice; get a premade product for cheap, and if you like it, pay the creator for the real thing. Although they didn’t want to prematurely lock themselves into future business models, they did acknowledge that revenue share with voice actors was a possibility. Payment for virtual representations is something of a new and evolving field.

A closed beta launches today, which you can sign up for at the company’s site. They’re going to be launching with five voices to start, with more voices and options to come as WellSaid’s place in the market becomes clear. Part of that process will almost certainly be inclusion in tools used by the blind or otherwise disabled, as I have been hoping for years.

Sounds familiar

And what comes after that? Making synthetic versions of users’ voices, of course. No brainer! But the two founders cautioned that’s a ways off for several reasons, even though it’s very much a possibility.

“Right now we’re using about 20 hours of data per person, but we see a future where we can get it down to 1 or 2 hours while maintaining a premium lifelike quality to the voice,” said Petrochuk.

“And we can build off existing datasets, like where someone has a back catalog of content,” added Hocking.

The trouble is that the content may not be exactly right for training the deep learning model, which advanced as it is can no doubt be finicky. There are dials and knobs to tweak, of course, but they said that fine-tuning a voice is more a matter of adding corrective speech, perhaps having the voice actor reading a specific script that props up the sounds or cadences that need a boost.

They compared it with directing such an actor rather than adjusting code. You don’t, after all, tell an actor to increase the pauses after commas by 8 percent or 15 milliseconds, whichever is longer. It’s more efficient to demonstrate for them: “say it like this.”

Even so getting the quality just right with limited and imperfect training data is a challenge that will take some serious work if and when the team decides to take it on.

But as some of you may have noticed, there are also some parallels to the unsavory world of “deepfakes.” Download a dozen podcasts or speeches and you’ve got enough material to make a passable replica of someone’s voice, perhaps a public figure. This of course has a worrying synergy with the existing ability to fake video and other imagery.

This is not news to Hocking and Petrochuk. If you work in AI this kind of thing is sort of inevitable.

“This is a super important question and we’ve considered it a lot,” said Petrochuk. “We come from AI2, where the motto is ‘AI for the common good.’ That’s something we really subscribe to, and that differentiates us from our competitors who made Barack Obama voices before they even had an MVP [minimum viable product]. We’re going to watch closely to make sure this isn’t being used negatively, and we’re not launching with the ability to make a custom voice, because that would let anyone create a voice from anyone.”

Active monitoring is just about all anyone with a potentially troubling AI technology can be expected to do — though they are looking at mitigation techniques that could help identify synthetic voices.

With the ongoing emphasis on multimedia presentation of content and advertising rather than written, WellSaid seems poised to make an early play in a growing market. As the product evolves and improves, it’s easy to picture it moving into new, more constrained spaces, like time-shifting apps (instant podcast with 5 voices to choose from!) and even taking over territory currently claimed by voice assistants. Sounds good to me.


Source: Tech Crunch