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Zeus raises $24M to make you a living-as-a-service landlord

Cookie-cutter corporate housing turns people into worker drones. When an employee needs to move to a new city for a few months, they’re either stuck in bland, giant apartment complexes or Airbnbs meant for shorter stays. But Zeus lets any homeowner get paid to host white-collar transient labor. Through its managed ownership model, Zeus takes on all the furnishing, upkeep, and risk of filling the home while its landlords sit back earning cash.

Zeus has quietly risen to a $45 million revenue run rate from renting out 900 homes in 23 cities. That’s up 5X in a year thanks to Zeus’ 150 employees. With a 90 percent occupancy rate, it’s proven employers and their talent want more unique, trustworthy, well-equipped multi-month residences that actually make them feel at home.

Now while Airbnb is distracted with its upcoming IPO, Zeus has raised $24 million to steal the corporate housing market. That includes a previous $2.5 million seed round from Bowery, the new $11.5 million Series A led by Initialized Capital whose partner Garry Tan has joined Zeus’ board, and $10 million in debt to pay fixed costs like furniture. The plan is to roll up more homes, build better landlord portal software, and hammer out partnerships or in-house divisions for cleaning and furnishing.

“In the first decade out of school people used to have two jobs. Now it’s four jobs and it’s trending to five” says Zeus co-founder and CEO Kulveer Taggar. “We think in 10 years, these people won’t be buying furniture.” He imagines they’ll pay a premium for hand-holding in housing, which judging by the explosion in popularity of zero-friction on-demand services, seems like an accurate assessment of our lazy future. Meanwhile, Zeus aims to be “the quantum leap improvement in the experience of trying to rent out your home” where you just punch in your address plus some details and you’re cashing checks 10 days later.

Buying Mom A House Was Step 1

“When I sold my first startup, I bought a home for my mom in Vancouver” Taggar recalls. It was payback for when she let him remortgage her old house while he was in college to buy a condo in Mumbai he’d rent out to earn money. “Despite not having much growing up, my mom was a travel agent and we got to travel a lot” which Taggar says inspired his goal to live nomadically in homes around the world. Zeus could let other live that dream.

Zeus co-founder and CEO Kulveer Taggar

After Oxford and working as an analyst at Deutsche Bank, Taggar built student marketplace Boso before moving to the United States. There, he co-founded auction tool Auctomatic with his cousin Harjeet Taggar and future Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison, went through Y Combinator, and sold it to Live Current Media for $5 million just 10 months later. That gave him the runway to gift a home to his mom and start tinkering on new ideas.

With Y Combinator’s backing again, Taggar started NFC-triggered task launcher Tagstand, which pivoted into app settings configurer Agent, which pivoted into automatic location sharing app Status. But when his co-founder Joe Wong had to move an hour south from San Francisco to Palo Alto, Taggar was dumbfounded by how distracting the process was. Listing and securing a new tenant was difficult, as was finding a medium-term rental without having to deal with exhorbitant prices or sketchy Cragislist. Having seen his former co-founder go on to great success with Stripe’s dead-simple payments integration, Taggar wanted to combine that vision with OpenDoor’s easy home sales to making renting or renting out a place instantaneous. That spawned Zeus.

Stripe Meets OpenDoor To Beat Airbnb

To become a Zeus landlord, you just type in your address, how many bedrooms and bathrooms, and some aesthetic specs, and you get a monthly price quote for what you’ll be paid. Zeus comes in and does a 250-point quality assessment, collects floor plans, furnishes the property, and handles cleaning and maintenance. It works with partners like Helix mattresses, Parachute sheets, and Simple Human trash cans to get bulk rates. “We raised debt because we had these fixed investments into furniture. It’s not as dilutive as selling pure equity” Taggar explains.

Zeus quickly finds a tenant thanks to listings in Airbnb and relationships with employers like Darktrace and ZS Associates with lots of employees moving around. After passing background checks, tenants get digital lock codes and access to 24/7 support in case something doesn’t look right. The goal is to get someone sleeping there in just 10 days. “Traditional corporate housing is $10,000 a month in SF in the summer or at extended stay hotels. Airbnb isn’t well suited [for multi-month stays]. ” Taggar claims. “We’re about half the price of traditional corporate housing for a better product and a better experience.”

Zeus signs minimum two-year leases with landlords and tries to extend them to five years when possible. It gets one free month of rent as is standard for property managers, but doesn’t charge an additional rate. For example, Zeus might lease your home for $4,000 per month but gets the first month free, and rent it out for $5,000 so it earns $60,000 but pays you $44,000. That’s a tidy margin if Zeus can get homes filled fast and hold down its upkeep costs.

“Zeus has been instrumental for my company to start the process of re-location to the Bay Area and to host our visiting employees from abroad now that we are settled” writes Zeus client Meitre’s Luis Caviglia. “I particularly like the ‘hard truths’ featured in every property, and the support we have received when issues arose during our stays.”

At Home, Anywhere

There’s no shortage of competitors chasing this $18 billion market in the US alone. There are the old-school corporations and chains like Oakwood and Barbary Coast that typically rent out apartments from vast, generic complexes at steep rates. Stays over 30 days made up 15 percent of Airbnb’s business last year, but the platform wasn’t designed for peace-of-mind around long-term stays. There are pure marketplaces like UrbanDoor that don’t always take care of everything for the landlord or provide consistent tenant experiences. And then there are direct competitors like $130 million-funded Sonder, $66 million-funded Domio, recently GV-backed 2nd Address, and European entants like MagicStay, AtHomeHotel, and Homelike.

There’s plenty of pie, though. With 330,000 housing units in SF alone, Zeus has plenty of room to grow. The rise of remote work means companies whose employee typically didn’t relocate may now need to bring in distant workers for a multi-month sprint. A recession could make companies more expense-cautious, leading them to rethink putting up staffers in hotels for months on end. Regulatory red tape and taxes could scare landlords away from short-term rentals and towards coprorate housing. And the need to expand into new businesses could tempt the big vacation rental platforms like Airbnb to make acquisitions in the space — or try to crush Zeus

Winners will be determined in part by who has the widest and cheapest selection of properties, but also by which makes people most comfortable in a new city. That’s why Taggar is taking a cue from WeWork by trying to arrange more community events for its tenants. Often in need of friends, Zeus could become a favorite by helping people feel part of a neighborhood rather than a faceless inmate in a massive apartment block or hotel. That gives Zeus network effect if it can develop density in top markets.

Taggar says the biggest challenge is that “I feels like I’m running five startups at once. Pricing, supply chain, customer service, B2B. We’ve decided to make everything custom — our own property manager software, our own internal CRM. We think these advantages compound, but I could be wrong and they could be wasted effort.”

The benefits of Zeus‘ success would go beyond the founder’s bank account. “I’ve had friends in New York get great opportuntiies in San Francisco but not take them because of the friction of moving” Taggar says. Routing talent where it belongs could get more things built. And easy housing might make people more apt to live abroad temporarily. Taggar concludes, “I think it’s a great way to build empathy.”


Source: Tech Crunch

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The inevitability of tokenized data

Chris McCoy
Contributor

Chris McCoy is the chief executive of Footprint and the creator of Storecoin.
More posts by this contributor

We’re reaching the endgame of an inevitable showdown between big tech and regulators with a ley battleground around consumer data. In many ways, the fact that things have gotten here reflects that the market has not yet developed an alternative to the data paradigm of Google and Facebook as sourcers and sellers and Amazon as host that today dominates.

The tokenization and decentralization of data offers such an alternative. While the first generation of “utility” tokens were backed by nothing more than dreams, a new generation of tokens, connected explicitly to the value of data, will arise.

The conversation around data has reached a new inflection point.

Presidential candidate, Sen. Elizabeth Warren has called for the breakup of technology giants including Amazon and Facebook. In many ways, the move feels like an inevitable culmination of the last few years in which public sentiment around the technology industry has shifted from overwhelmingly positive to increasingly skeptical.

One part of that growing skepticism has to do with the fact that when populist ideology rises, all institutions of power are subject to greater scrutiny. But when you hone in on specifics, it is clear that the issue underlying the loss of faith in technology companies is data: what is collected, how it is used, and who profits from it.

Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a significant amount of user data was used to help Russian political actors sew discord and help Trump get elected in 2016, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s subsequent testimony in front of Congress were a watershed moment in this loss of faith around data.

Those who dismissed consumer outrage around the event by pointing out that barely anyone actually left the platform because of the event failed to recognize that the real impact was always more likely to be something like this – providing political cover for a call to break up the company.

Image courtesy of Bryce Durbin

Of course, not every 2020 Democratic candidate for the Presidency agrees with Warren’s call. In a response to Warren, Andrew Yang — the upstart candidate who has made waves with his focus on Universal Basic Income and after appearances on Joe Rogen’s popular podcast – wrote: “Agree there are fundamental issues with big tech. But we need to expand our toolset. For example, we should share in the profits from the use of our data. Better than simply regulating. Need a new legal regime that doesn’t rely on consumer prices for anti-trust.”

While one could suggest that Yang is biased, since he comes from the world of technology, he has been more vocal and articulate about the coming threat of displacement from automation than any candidate. His notion of a different arrangement of the economics of data between the people who produce it and the platforms who use (and sell advertising against) it are worth considering.

In fact, one could make an argument that not only is this sort of heavy-handed regulatory approach to data inevitable, but represents a fundamental market failure in the way the economics of data are organized.

Modern server room interior in datacenter

Data, it has been said, is the new oil. It is, in this analogy, the fuel by which the attention economy functions. Without data, there is no advertising; without advertising, there are none of the free services which have come to dominate our social lives.

Of course, the market for data has another aspect as well, which is where it lives. Investor (and former Facebook head of growth) Chamath Palihapitiya pointed out that 16% of the money he puts into companies goes directly into Amazon’s coffers for data hosting.

This fact shows that, while regulators – and even more, Presidential candidates looking to score points with a populist base – might think that all of technology is aligned around preserving today’s status quo – there are in fact big financial motivations for something different.

Enter ‘decentralization.

In his seminal essay “Why Decentralization Matters,” A16Z investor Chris Dixon explained how incentives diverge in networks. At the beginning of networks, the network owners and participants have the same incentive – to grow the number of nodes in the network. Inevitably, however, a threshold is reached where it pure growth in new participants isn’t achievable, and the network owner has to turn instead to extracting more from the existing participants.

Decentralization, in Dixon’s estimation, offers an alternative. In short, tokenization would allow all users to participate in the financial benefit and upside of the network, effectively eliminating the distinction between network owners and network users. When there is no distinct ownership class, there is no one who has the need (or power) to extract.

The essay was a brilliant articulation of an idealized state (reflected in its 50,000+ claps on Medium). In the ICO boom, however, things didn’t exactly work out the way Dixon had imagined.

The problem, on a fundamental level, was about what the token actually was. In almost every case, the “utility tokens” were simply payment tokens – an alternative money just for that service. Their value relied on speculation that they could achieve a certain monetary premium that allowed them to transcend utility for just that network – or enable that network to grow so large that that value could be sustained over time.

It’s not hard to understand why things were designed this way. For network builders, this sort of payment token allowed a totally non-dilutive form of capitalization that was global and instantaneous. For retail buyers, they offered a chance to participate in risk capital in a way they had been denied by accreditation laws.

At the end of the day, however, the simple truth was that these tokens weren’t backed by anything other than dreams.

When the market for these dream coins finally crashed, many decided to throw out the token baby with the ICO bathwater.

What if it prompted a question instead: what if the tokens in decentralized networks weren’t backed by nothing but dreams, but we’re instead backed by data? What if instead of dream coins, we had data coins?

Data is indeed the oil of the new economy. In the context of any given digital application, data is where the value resides: for the companies that are paid to host it; for the platforms that are able to sell advertising against it; and for the users who effectively trade their data for reduced priced services.

Data is, in other words, an asset. Like other assets, it can be tokenized and decentralized into a public blockchain. It’s not hard to imagine a future of every meaningful piece of data in the world will be represented by a private key. Tying tokens to data explicitly creates a world of new options to reconfigure how apps are built.

First, data tokenization could create an opportunity where nodes in a decentralized hosting network – i.e. a decentralized alternative to AWS – could effectively speculate on the future value of the data in the applications they provided hosting services for, creating financial incentive beyond simple service provision. When third parties like Google want to crawl, query, and access the data, they’ll pay the token representing the data (a datacoin) back to the miners securing and storing it as well as to the developers who acquire, structure, and label the data so that it’s valuable to third parties — especially machine learning and AI-driven organizations.

Second, app builders could not only harness the benefits of more fluid capitalization through tokens, but easily experiment with new ways to arrange value flows, such as cutting users in on the value of their own data and allowing them to benefit.

Third, users could start to have a tangible (and trackable) sense of the value of their data, and exert market pressure on platforms to be included in the upside, as well as exert more control over where and how their data was used.

Tokenized data, in other words, could create a market mechanism to redistribute the balance of power in technology networks without resorting to ham fisted (even if well meaning) regulation like GDPR, or even worse, the sort of break-up proposed by Warren.

Even after the implosion of the ICO phenomenon, there are many like Fred Wilson who believe that a shift to user control of data, facilitated by blockchains, is not just possible but inevitable.

Historically, technology has evolved from closed to open, back to closed, and then back to being open. We’re now in a closed phase where centralized apps and services own and control a vast majority of the access to data. Decentralized, p2p databases — public blockchains — will open up and tokenize data in a disruptive way that will change the flow of how value is captured and created on the internet.

Put simply, tokenized and open data can limit the control data monopolies have on future innovation while ushering in a new era of computing.

It’s how information can finally be set free.


Source: Tech Crunch

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PagerDuty just filed its S-1

Yet another San Francisco-based company looks to be going public imminently. PagerDuty, an 8.5-year-old startup that sends a wide range of companies information about their technology, just filed its S-1, a public disclosure about its IPOs plans.

PagerDuty, which helps companies quickly respond to IT incidents, as well as increasingly tries to anticipate them, had reportedly filed confidentially several months ago, but the 35-day government shutdown meant that no one could review its prospectus (or that of other companies) at the time.

According to a January story from Bloomberg, Morgan Stanley is leading the offering.

We’ve reached out to the company for more information.

PagerDuty was valued at $1.3 billion last fall when it closed on $90 million in Series D funding led by T. Rowe Price Associates and Wellington Management. Earlier backers Accel, Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners also joined the round, which brought the company’s total funding to $173 million.

According to the S-1, venture investors currently own about 55 percent of the company. Andreessen Horowitz Fund owns the biggest stake in the company, with 18.4 percent of its shares sailing into the IPO. Accel meanwhile owns 12.3 recent, Bessemer owns 12.2 percent, Baseline Ventures owns 6.7 percent, and Harrison Metal owns 5.3 percent.

PagerDuty, which employed 500 employees as of last fall, has never been profitable according to its filing, which says it generated a net loss of $38.1 million for the fiscal year ended January 31, 2018. (It saw revenue of $79.6 million during the same period.)

The risk factors for the company hold few, if any, surprises, including competition and management changes. Another risk is security. In fact, the company reveals in its S-1 that its security measures have, in the past, been compromised and notes that they could be again, which isn’t nothing, considering how much information PagerDuty requires to execute its work, including the personally identifiable information of its clients, including contact information and physical location.

As the filing notes, cyber incidents and malicious internet-based activity continues to increase generally, putting pretty much every organization at risk.

We profiled the company’s CEO, Jennifer Tejada, last fall. She joined the company in 2016 after previously serving as the CEO Keynote Systems, a company that specialized in developing and marketing software as a service and which as since merged with another company. For roughly the last year, she has also been a director on the board of the cosmetics giant Estee Lauder.

Tejada owns 6.4 percent of PagerDuty, shows the filing. Meanwhile, PagerDuty cofounders Andrew Miklas and Baskar Puvanathasan, both of whom have since left the company, each own a 7.1 percent stake.

Assuming PagerDuty’s plans move forward without a hitch, Tejada will join a small but growing list of women CEOs who’ve taken the tech companies they lead public, including Eventbrite’s Julia Hartz and Stitch Fix CEO Katrina Lake.

PagerDuty also looks to be joining at least a handful of startups that are situated in San Francisco proper and planning to go public in 2019, including Slack, Lyft, Uber, Pinterest, and, very likely, Airbnb.

Little wonder the city’s Board of Supervisors is trying to prepare for how the influx of even more wealth will impact life for its already crowded residents, many of whom are already struggling to afford life in San Francisco, where everything from rent to restaurant bills have been steadily rising for years.

The cost of buying a home is expected to rise, too. A recent study completed by academics from UCLA and Pennsylvania State University titled “Cash to Spend: IPO Wealth and House Prices” analyzed the impact of IPOs in California between 1993 and 2017. What it discovered, unsurprisingly: that home prices within 10 miles of the company’s headquarters rose on average one percent after the filing date and another .8 percent after the company went public.


Source: Tech Crunch

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James Gunn is back at the helm of Guardians of the Galaxy 3

In a rare turn, director James Gunn is once again heading up up the third installment of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy series. Gunn, who directed the previous two films, was fired over the summer when offensive tweets dating from between 2008 and 2011 resurfaced after being promoted by right-wing personalities like Jack Posobiec and Mike Cernovich.

The news comes courtesy of Deadline, who has since confirmed things with both Marvel and Gunn’s representatives. Gunn addressed the firing on Twitter in July, apologizing for “shocking jokes” and noting that he “viewed [himself] as a provocateur” at the time, but had since changed his ways. Gunn appears to have stopped tweeting altogether since that apology thread.

Marvel/Disney parted ways with Gunn, but reportedly never chose a successor the project. The director, meanwhile, agreed to take on the second Suicide Squad film for DC/Warner. He will return to production on the new Guardians after completing the sequel to that less critically beloved series.

While the content of Gunn’s off-color jokes have been roundly denounced from both sides of the political spectrum, Guardians cast members including Chris Pratt, Zoey Saldana, Vin Diesel and Bradley Cooper penned an open letter asking the studio to reinstate him for the third film.


Source: Tech Crunch

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UC Berkeley’s Ken Goldberg and Michael I. Jordan will discuss AI at TC Sessions: Robotics + AI April 18

We’re just over a month out from our TC Sessions: Robotics + AI event at UC Berkeley on April 18. We’ve already announced a number of marquee guests for the event, including Marc Raibert, Colin Angle, Melonee Wise and Anthony Levandowski. Today we’ve got another exciting panel to unveil and as an FYI our early bird sale ends Friday!

This is our third robotics event, but it’s the first time artificial intelligence has shared the spotlight. Today we’re revealing that two of UC Berkeley’s top names in the space will be sharing a stage to discuss the role of AI in society for a panel titled, TC Sessions: Robotics + AI Artificial Intelligence: Minds, Economies and Systems that Learn.

The pair of professors will be discussing how AI grew to become of modern society’s most ubiquitous and wide ranging technologies. The panel will also explore where the tech will go from here.

Ken Goldberg is a Professor, Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at U.C. Berkeley. He has co-authored more than 200 peer-reviewed papers on automation, robotics and social information. He is the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering and cofounder of the the Berkeley Center for New Media.

Michael I. Jordan is the Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Department of Statistics at U.C. Berkeley. His work touches on a wide range of topics, including computer science, AI and computational biology. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Early bird ticket sales end tomorrow, Friday. Book your tickets today and save $100 before prices increase.

Students, grab your discounted $45 tickets here.

Startups, make sure to check out our demo table packages, which include 3 tickets for just $1500.


Source: Tech Crunch

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In a challenge to Twitch and YouTube, Facebook adds ‘Gaming’ to its main navigation

Facebook’s gaming efforts and challenge to Twitch are taking another big leap today, as the social network begins the initial rollout of a dedicated Facebook Gaming tab in the main navigation of Facebook’s app. The goal with the new addition is to help people more easily find games, streamers and gaming groups they follow, as well as discover new content, based on their interests.

After clicking the new Gaming tab, there will be a feed of content that points you to instant games you can play with friends; videos to watch from top streamers, esports organizations, and game publishers; and updates from your various gaming groups, the company says.

The new Facebook Gaming tab builds on the gaming video destination the site launched last year as Fb.gg. That hub had offered a collection of all the video games streaming on Facebook, and a way to for gamers and fans to interact. As a top-level navigation item, Facebook’s new Gaming tab will now further extend the gaming hub’s reach.

While Twitch and YouTube are today dominating the gaming space, Facebook’s advantage – beyond its scale – are its promises of a reduced cut of transactions. On Fb.gg, gamers were able to attract new fans with the aid of Facebook’s personalized recommendations based on users’ activity, and then monetize those viewers through a virtual tipping mechanism.

Facebook’s cut of those tips ranges from 5 to 30 percent, with the cut getting smaller when users buy larger packs of the virtual currency. Meanwhile, Facebook’s fan subscriptions payments for streamers also see it taking a cut of up to 30 percent, the same as YouTube but smaller than Twitch’s roughly 50 percent.

That could potentially attract streamers who want to maximize their earnings and believe they can port their audience over to a new destination. Of course, some streamers may not trust Facebook to maintain those same percentages over time, nor believe it will ever offer the sorts of features and innovations that a more focused gaming destination like Twitch can.

Facebook also last year experimented with making its gaming hub mobile with the launch of Fb.gg as a standalone mobile app.

The app, like the web-based gaming hub, offered a way for gamers and fans to discover content, join communities, and even play instant games like Everwing, Words with Friends, Basketball FRVR, and others.

However, the strategy of keeping Facebook’s Gaming efforts more separated from Facebook’s main site may not have paid off – the Fb.gg Android app, for example, only has some 100,000+ installs according to Google Play.

Instead, much like YouTube recently decided – Facebook will now leverage the power of its platform to boost interest in its gaming content.

YouTube in September said it was giving its Gaming hub a new home right on the YouTube homepage, and would shut down its standalone Gaming app. (The latter doesn’t seem to have occurred, however). As YouTube noted, gaming was a popular category, but the majority of viewers weren’t looking for a separate app or experience – they were just visiting YouTube directly.

Similarly, Facebook today says that over 700 million people play games, watch gaming videos or engage in gaming groups on Facebook. That’s a far larger number than those who downloaded the Fb.gg app, and surely a much larger number than those who have been visiting the Fb.gg destination directly.

That said, Facebook is continuing its tests on mobile with a standalone (rebranded) Facebook Gaming app on Android, which will have more features that the Gaming tab.

Facebook says it will roll out the Gaming tab to a subset of the over 700 million Facebook game fans, and will expand it over time to more gaming enthusiasts across the network. If you don’t see the new tab in your main navigation bar, you can still find it by going to the Bookmarks menu on Facebook.

 

 


Source: Tech Crunch

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Facebook loses CPO Chris Cox and WhatsApp VP Chris Daniels

13-year Facebook veteran, Chief Product Officer, and the spirit animal of the social network Chris Cox is departing the company after two years of seeking to do something new. Cox’s exit is part of a big executive reshuffle as Facebook embarks on prioritizing privacy through messaging, groups, Stories, and integration of its chat features.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained the departure of his long-time friend, saying “For a few years, Chris has been discussing with me his desire to do something else . . . But after 2016, we both realized we had too much important work to do to improve our products for society, and he stayed to help us work through these issues and help us chart a course for our family of apps going forward. At this point, we have made real progress . . .  As we embark on this next major chapter, Chris has decided now is the time to step back from leading these teams.”

Cox bowing out after so long is understandable, but more surprising is today’s departure of Chris Daniels, an 8-year employee who was moved from being head of Internet.org to VP of WhatsApp just last May.

The changes solidify that Facebook is entering a new era as it chases the trend of feed sharing giving way to private communication. Cox and Daniels may feel they’ve done their part advancing Facebook’s product, and that the company needs renewed energy as it shifts from a relentless growth focus to keeping its users loyal while learning to monetize a new from of social networking.

Here’s the breakdown of the executive changes:

  • Chris Cox will depart Facebook, but hasn’t revealed plans for what’s next. He will not be immediately replaced
  • Chris Daniels will leave WhatsApp, and Facebook declined to provide any details on why or the circumstances
  • Will Cathcart wil go from running the main Facebook app to VP of WhatsApp
  • Fidji Simo who was the VP of Product for Facebook video, news, and advertising will take over Cathcart’s role running Facebook’s main app
  • Javier Olivan who was Facebook’s VP of growth will oversee integration of Facebook’s products, including the plan to unify the backend of Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram direct to expand encryption and allow cross-app messaging that some see a shield against Facebook being broken up.
  • Instagram’s VP Adam Mosseri
  • Instagram VP Adam Mosseri, Messenger’s VP Stan Chudnovsky, Simo, and Cathcart will now report directly to  Zuckerberg, while Chief Marketing Officer Antonio Lucio reports to COO Sheryl Sandberg

The change in priority from growth to sustainability through privacy is cemeted by Olivan’s move. While rarely in the spotlight, his team was seen as one of the most important and powerful at the company. He’e

Mark Zuckerberg’s blog post:

Hey everyone — I want to share some important updates as we organize our company to build out the privacy-focused social platform I discussed in my note last week. Embarking on this new vision represents the start of a new chapter for us.

As part of this, I’m sad to share the news that Chris Cox has decided to leave the company. Chris and I have worked closely together to build our products for more than a decade and I will always appreciate his deep empathy for the people using our services and the uplifting spirit he brings to everything he does. He has played so many central roles at Facebook — starting as an engineer on our original News Feed, building our first HR teams and helping to define our mission and values, leading our product and design teams, running the Facebook app, and most recently overseeing the strategy for our family of apps. Along the way, Chris has helped train many great leaders who are now in important roles across the company — including some who will now take on bigger roles in our new product efforts.

For a few years, Chris has been discussing with me his desire to do something else. He is one of the most talented people I know and he has the potential to do anything he wants. But after 2016, we both realized we had too much important work to do to improve our products for society, and he stayed to help us work through these issues and help us chart a course for our family of apps going forward. At this point, we have made real progress on many issues and we have a clear plan for our apps, centered around making private messaging, stories and groups the foundation of the experience, including enabling encryption and interoperability across our services. As we embark on this next major chapter, Chris has decided now is the time to step back from leading these teams. I will really miss Chris, but mostly I am deeply grateful for everything he has done to build this place and serve our community.

At the same time, as we embark on this new chapter, Chris Daniels has also decided to leave the company. Chris has also done great work in many roles, including running our business development team, leading Internet.org, which has helped more than 100 million people get access to the internet, and most recently at WhatsApp, where he has helped define the business model for our messaging services going forward. Chris is one of the clearest and most principled business thinkers I’ve met and the diversity of challenges he has helped us navigate is impressive. I’ve really enjoyed working with Chris and I’m sure he will do great work at whatever he chooses to take on next.

While it is sad to lose such great people, this also creates opportunities for more great leaders who are energized about the path ahead to take on new and bigger roles.

I’m excited that Will Cathcart will be the new head of WhatsApp. Will is one of the most talented leaders at our company — always focused on solving the most important problems for people and clear-eyed about the challenges and tradeoffs we face. Most recently he has done a great job running the Facebook app, where he has led our shift to focusing on meaningful social interactions and has significantly improved the performance and reliability of the app. In his career here, Will has helped lead our teams focused on security and integrity, and he believes deeply in providing end-to-end encryption to everyone in the world across our services.

I’m also excited that Fidji Simo will be the new head of the Facebook app. She is one of our most talented product and organizational leaders — passionate about building community and supporting creativity, and focused on building strong teams and developing future leaders. She has played key roles in building many aspects of the Facebook app, including leading our work on video and advertising. She believes deeply in helping people get more value out of the networks they’ve built. She has already led this team for much of last year while Will was out on parental leave, and she is the clear person to lead these efforts going forward.

Our family of apps strategy has been led jointly by Chris Cox and Javier Olivan. Chris managed the leaders of the apps directly and Javi has been responsible for all of the central product services that work across our apps, including safety and integrity, analytics, growth, and ads. Javi will now lead identifying where our apps should be more integrated. Javi is an incredibly thoughtful, strategic and analytical leader, and I’m confident this work will continue to go well. Since we have now decided on the basic direction of our family of apps for the next few years, I do not plan on immediately appointing anyone to fill Chris’s role in the near term. Instead, the leaders of Facebook (Fidji Simo), Instagram (Adam Mosseri), Messenger (Stan Chudnovsky), and WhatsApp (Will Cathcart) will report directly to me, and our Chief Marketing Officer (Antonio Lucio) will report directly to Sheryl.

This is an important change as we begin the next chapter of our work building the privacy-focused social foundation for the future. I’m deeply grateful for everything Chris Cox and Chris Daniels have done here, and I’m looking forward to working with Will and Fidji in their new roles as well as everyone who will be critical to achieving this vision. We have so much important work ahead and I’m excited to continue working to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. 

Chris Cox’s Facebook Post

It is with great sadness I share with you that after thirteen years, I’ve decided to leave the company.

Since I was twenty-three, I’ve poured myself into these walls. The pixels, the code, the products we’ve built together, the language, the culture, the values, the big ideas, and most of all, the people. Most all my personal highs and lows of the last decade have been tied up in the journey of this company, with Mark, and with so many of you. This place will forever be a part of me.

On Monday I gave my last orientation at Facebook to a hundred new faces. For over a decade, I’ve been sharing the same message that Mark and I have always believed: social media’s history is not yet written, and its effects are not neutral. It is tied up in the richness and complexity of social life. As its builders we must endeavor to understand its impact — all the good, and all the bad — and take up the daily work of bending it towards the positive, and towards the good. This is our greatest responsibility.

As Mark has outlined, we are turning a new page in our product direction, focused on an encrypted, interoperable, messaging network. It’s a product vision attuned to the subject matter of today: a modern communications platform that balances expression, safety, security, and privacy. This will be a big project and we will need leaders who are excited to see the new direction through.

I’m proud of the team who will succeed me: Fidji, Will, Adam, Stan, and Antonio. They are strong leaders, serious thinkers, good managers, craftspeople, and most importantly, deeply good people. I trust that, along with Mark, they will carry on the work of building out our platforms in a way that honors the responsibilities we have to the billions of people who rely upon our tools each day.

Mark, thank you for creating this place, and for the chance to work beside a dear friend for over thirteen years. Thank you Sheryl, Schrep, and Javi for your partnership, and for showing me what a wise and dedicated team is meant to be. And to the company: thank you for your creativity, humanity, resilience, and sleepless nights. It has been an honor to work alongside you and I will miss you dearly.

Chris


Source: Tech Crunch

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Firework officially launches a short-form video storytelling app, backed by Lightspeed

Facebook usage declined for the first time in a decade, while video-centric apps like TikTok are being touted as the future of social media. Entering this redefined playing field comes Firework, a fast-growing social video app whose clever trick is something it calls “Reveal videos” – a way for creators to take both horizontal and vertical video in one shot from their mobile device. Video viewers can then twist their phone as the video plays to watch from a new perspective and see more of the scene.

While Snapchat pioneered the idea of vertical video, newer companies are trying to free viewers from format constraints.

For example, Jeffrey Katzenberg’s mobile streaming service Quibi is pitching its ability to offer an ideal viewing experience no matter how you hold your phone. As Quibi CEO Meg Whitman explained last week in an interview at SXSW, the company has “created the ability to do full-screen video seamlessly from landscape to portrait,” she said.

That sounds a lot like Firework, in fact.

Firework has filed a patent on its own flip-the-screen viewing technology which it believes will give creators new ways to tell stories. Besides letting viewers in on more of the action, “reveal videos” also provide an opportunity for things like unexpected plot twists or surprise endings.

The way this works is that creators hold their smartphone horizontally to film, and Firework places a vertical viewfinder on the screen so they know which part of their shot will appear to viewers when they hold their phone straight up and down.

This recording screen has some similarities to TikTok, as you can stop and start recording, reshoot the various parts, and add music.

“Snapchat really pushed being vertical only,” explains Firework Chief Revenue Officer Cory Grenier, who joined the company from Snapchat, where he was the first Director of Sales & Marketing.

“What we see is that most professional filmmakers want to show their work on Vimeo first, and second on YouTube. There isn’t this world where you can really frame the context and the characters of a cinematic story on vertical – it just can’t happen,” he says.

Beyond the technology involved with Firework’s new filming technique, the company is also aiming to carve out a space that will differentiate it from other short-form video – whether that’s TikTok or soon, Quibi.

Firework’s videos are longer than TikTok’s at 30 seconds instead of just 15, but far shorter than Quibi’s eight minutes.

“30 seconds is really the sweet spot between the Snaps that are 10 seconds and something that’s longer-form,” notes Grenier. “10 seconds is too short to really tell a story. You want to have a powerful opening, a clear middle, and a really interesting or unexpected ending,” he says.

This format lends itself better to short stories, rather than the remixed, music-backed memes found on TikTok, the company believes. But it also remains user-gen, as opposed to the high production value “TV quality” content shot for Quibi using two cameras. (And a lot more money).

Instead, Firework is focused on what it calls “premium user-gen” – meaning, it will feature a mix of professional creators and up-and-comers. To date, Firework has worked with names like Flo Rida, Dexter Darden (Maze Runner), model and Miss USA Olivia Jordan, Disney star Jordyn Jones, Frankie Grande, and others.

It’s also working with a handful of brands, including Refinery29 and Complex Networks. But the company doesn’t want to inundate the app with content from brands, it says.

In addition to the horizontal-to-vertical trick, Firework is also doing something different in terms of fan engagement: it’s ditching comments. Users can only privately message a video’s creator – they can’t comment on the video itself.

“Haters and trolls, they want an audience  – they want to elicit a polarizing reaction. We remove that,” says Grenier.

And instead of “liking” a video, users can only bookmark the video or share it – an engagement which is styled like a retweet, as the video is posted to your profile with all the original credit intact.

Founded less than two years in Mountain View and now relocated to Redwood City with teams in L.A., Japan, and Brazil, Firework parent Loop Now tested a couple apps that didn’t find product market fit before launching Firework.

Its team of 51 full-time today combines both tech talent and Hollywood expertise.

This includes: CEO Vincent Yang, a Stanford MBA and previously co-founder and CEO at EverString; co-founder and COO Jerry Luk, employee No. 30 at LinkedIn and previously at Edmodo; biz dev head Bryan Barber, formerly of Warner Brothers, Universal Pictures and Fox; and CRO Corey Grenier, noted above.

Unlike Quibi, Firework’s parent company Loop Now Technologies has raised “millions” – not a billion dollars – to get off the ground. Its early backers include original Snap investor Lightspeed, IDG Capital, and an (undisclosed) early investor in Musical.ly. (Firework is poised to announce its Series A in a few weeks so is holding off on investment details for now.)

The app launched last year and has been in an open beta until now.

According to data from Sensor Tower, it has 1.8 million installs on iOS, 55 percent in the U.S.

Firework claims it has 2 million registered users, across iOS and Android.

 


Source: Tech Crunch

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Uber will reportedly file for IPO next month

Uber, on the heels of Lyft’s official documentation for its initial public offering, is expected to file its S-1 in April, Reuters reports. Uber, in December, filed confidential paperwork for its IPO.

Uber will also reportedly kick off its IPO roadshow next month. As part of its offering, Uber is also expected to reward some of its more active, or long-time drivers with a cash award.

About a month ago, Uber reported $3B in Q4 2018 revenues with net losses of $865 million. That figure, however, was aided by a tax benefit that saved the company from reporting a $1.2 billion net loss in the period. On an adjusted, pro-forma basis, Uber’s net loss in the final quarter of 2018 was a slimmer $768 million.

The figures were an improvement of sorts. The firm reported a pro-forma net loss of $939 million in the preceding, third quarter of 2018, but also reported a smaller pre-tax net loss of $971 million. Regardless, Uber’s stiff losses continued in the quarter. On an annual basis, Uber’s revenues came in at $3 billion while losses came in at $1.8 billion for 2018, compared to $2.2 billion in 2017.

Competitor Lyft filed its S-1 earlier this month, reporting $2.2 billion in revenue and nearly $1 billion in losses in 2018. In its S-1, Lyft outlined its program to give a maximum cash bonus of $10,000 to drivers “in good standing” who have completed at least 20,000 rides as of February 25, 2019.

Uber declined to comment on this story.


Source: Tech Crunch

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Apple Music comes to Fire TV

Apple Music is launching on Amazon Fire TV in the U.S. today, after rolling out in December to Amazon’s Echo line of smart speakers. The news is notable as it’s yet another example of the eased tensions between the two rivals following Apple CEO Tim Cook’s 2017 announcement of Apple’s agreement with Amazon. Their deal allowed Amazon’s Prime Video app to launch on Apple TV and saw the return of Apple products on Amazon.com.

Since then, the companies have made several moves to honor their deal.

Last year, for example, Amazon expanded its assortment of Apple inventory to include other devices beside Apple TV – like iPads, iPhones, Apple Watch and Beats headphones. It also brought its FreeTime Unlimited app to iOS. And most recently, Apple Music arrived on Echo.

Now it’s coming to Amazon Fire TV, too.

The launch will allow Apple Music subscribers the ability to access the streaming service’s catalog of 50 million songs just by asking Alexa. Users can request songs, artists, playlists and albums, by saying things like “Alexa, play today’s hits on Apple Music,” or “Alexa, play music by [artist’s name] on Apple Music,” for example.

On Fire TV Cube, Apple Music can also be streamed within multi-room music groups.

To use Apple Music on Fire TV, you’ll have to enable the Apple Music skill and link your account. (Those who had already done so in order to listen on their Echo device won’t need to do this again.)

Amazon isn’t the only company benefiting from Apple’s decision to shift more of its company’s focus to subscription services – like its streaming music offering and, soon, its streaming video service.

Apple also recently announced a partnership with Samsung to bring iTunes content to Samsung Smart TVs through a dedicated app, and related deals with TV makers like Vizio and LG to support AirPlay. It’s said to be working on a similar deal to get AirPlay supported on Roku.

Apple Music is available to U.S. Fire TV owners starting today.

Amazon says Apple Music support will roll out to both Fire TV and Echo users in the U.K. in the weeks ahead.


Source: Tech Crunch