Month: September 2019

“Terrace House” (a co-production between Netflix and Fuji Television) is back, and it hasn’t changed much since we reviewed it last year.

As with previous seasons, “Terrace House: Tokyo 2019-2020” features six cast members (three men and three women, mostly in their twenties) who all live in a house together. Rather than manufacturing competition or drama, the show largely allows everyone to go about their normal lives, while also tentatively exploring romance with their castmates.

On the latest episode of the Original Content podcast, we talk about our impressions of the new cast members. Then Anthony grills Darrell (who’s watched every episode) about why he continues to find the reality TV franchise so addictive.

Apparently it boils down to the fact that the formula works: It’s a beautifully-produced show, with a likable, attractive cast. And the producers continue to resist any temptation to ramp up the drama to match American TV.

We also discuss NBCUniversal’s announcement that its upcoming streaming service will be called Peacock, and it will feature a reboot of “Battlestar Galactica.”

You can listen in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You can also send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)

And if you’d like to skip ahead, here’s how the episode breaks down:

0:00 Intro
0:43 Listener to response to “The Family” review
1:55 NBCUniversal/Peacock news
12:56 “Terrace House: Tokyo 2019-2020” review (mild spoilers)

Source: Tech Crunch

According to a new WSJ report, certain members of WeWork’s seven-person board, which includes cofounder and CEO Adam Neumann, are planning to pressure Neumann to step down and instead become We’s non-executive chairman. The move, says the outlet, “would allow him to stay stay at the company he built into one of the country’s most valuable startups, but inject fresh leadership to pursue an IPO that would bring We the cash it needs to keep up its torrid growth.”

The WSJ and Bloomberg are reporting that it is SoftBank specifically that wants Neumann to step down. Neither WeWork nor SoftBank is commenting publicly.

It’s a fascinating development, the kind we saw when Uber’s board successfully forced cofounder and longtime CEO Travis Kalanick to abandon his role as CEO. Still, we’d caution against drawing too close a comparison. While the venture firm Benchmark, which spearheaded Kalanick’s ouster, stood to lose billions of dollars if Kalanick dragged down Uber and continued to push off an IPO, Benchmark was not in a do-or-die situation because of its Uber investment.

SoftBank appears to be in more dire straights, making this standoff a particularly meaningful one.

Let’s back up a minute first, though, and consider who is involved and which way this could potentially go. A few days ago,  Business Insider put together a useful cheat sheet about WeWork’s board members that may hint at their allegiance.

1.) Ronald Fisher — who is vice chairman at SoftBank Group after founding SoftBank Capital, a U.S. venture arm of SoftBank — joined SoftBank’s board last year.  He oversees 114 class A shares, each of which carries one vote. Obviously, he’s going to side with SoftBank.

2.) Lewis Frankfort — the chairman of a fitness studio chain called Flywheel Sports — has been a board member of WeWork for roughly five years, and BI says WeWork once loaned him $6.3 million, which he repaid in interest earlier this year. We have to think he’d stick with Neumann out of loyalty. At the same time, he doesn’t wield much power unless he has the right to block significant actions at the company (some shareholders get these blocking rights; some don’t.)  What he know: he controls 2 million shares, and 750,000 of them are Class B shares that carry 10 votes each.

3.) Benchmark, which first backed WeWork in 2012, is represented on the board by Bruce Dunlevie, the founding partner of the venture firm. Benchmark owns 32.6 million Class A shares, and could go either way, seemingly. On the one hand, Benchmark doesn’t want to establish a reputation for pushing out founders after the Kalanick debacle, and if it supports SoftBank over Neumann, it risks this exact thing happening. On the other hand, Benchmark might not want to battle with SoftBank if it thinks it has staying power or it’s concerned (suddenly) that it allowed Neumann to amass too much control.

4.) Harvard Business School professor Frances Frei was brought in roughly a minute ago to add a much-need sprinkling of gender diversity to WeWork’s all-male board. Frei’s name first came to be more broadly recognized when she was hired to help address Uber’s battered culture, so presumably she has ties to Benchmark. We’d guess she’ll side with Dunlevie, meaning that we have no idea whose side she will take.

5.) Steven Langman, the cofounder of private equity firm Rhône Group, has ties that go back a ways with Neumann, and he has benefited richly from the association, seemingly. According to an April story in the WSJ, Langman met Neumann through a shared rabbi in its earlier days and joined the board in 2012. He also invested in the company (he owns 2.28 million shares in the company, according to a bond filing). Langman is on both the company’s compensation committee and its succession committee. He also runs a real-estate investment vehicle in partnership with We that buys and develops buildings to then lease back to the co-working company, despite that it raises conflict-of-interest questions. We’d guess he’s on Team Neumann.

6.) John Zhao is the chairman and CEO of Hony Capital, which partnered with SoftBank and WeWork to create a standalone entity called WeWork China back in 2017, and Hony has subsequently poured more capital into that subsidiary. We’re not sure how close Zhao is to SoftBank, but if SoftBank brought Hony into WeWork, we’re guessing he’ll back the Japanese conglomerate on this one. Hony doesn’t own 5 percent or more of WeWork’s parent company so its share holdings aren’t listed publicly.

Neumann, it’s very worth noting, is himself is far more powerful than any of these six individuals. Even after the company recently revised Neumann’s supervoting rights, which gave him 20 times the voting power of ordinary shareholders and now give him 10, he could fire the entire board if he so chooses, notes the WSJ.

Naturally, that wouldn’t be a good look for Neumann, who is already battling growing public perception that, among other negatives for a public company CEO, he smokes a whole lot of pot and that he is delusional, following a WSJ piece that reported Neumann confided to different people his interest in the role of Israel’s prime minister and, more recently, to become president of the world.

All that said, SoftBank is also fast-losing credibility. While its CEO, Masayoshi Son, has been long revered as a visionary, a growing number of sources we’ve spoken to question the viability of his entire Vision Fund operation, and they point to WeWork — whose valuation leaps on the private market, from $20 billion to, more recently, $47 billion, were entirely a product of SoftBank’s doing — as just one in a costly string of poor calls.

Indeed, despite the roughly $10 billion that SoftBank has sunk into WeWork, the financial loss it would take if WeWork falls apart would pale in comparison to the reputation hit Son would suffer, and you can bet there will be ripple effects.

Put another way, given the Vision Fund’s impact on the startup industry over the last few years, there’s a lot more riding on what happens with WeWork than meets the eye. Stay tuned.

Source: Tech Crunch

We might have just completed a full-day program devoted completely to enterprise at TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise last week, but it doesn’t mean we plan to sell that subject short at TechCrunch Disrupt next month in San Francisco. In fact, we have something for everyone from startups to established public companies and everything in between along with investors and industry luminaries to discuss all-things enterprise.

SaaS companies have played a major role in enterprise software over the last decade, and we are offering a full line-up of SaaS company executives to provide you with the benefit of their wisdom. How about Salesforce chairman, co-CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff for starters? Benioff will be offering advice on how to build a socially responsible, successful startup.

If you’re interested in how to take your startup public, we’ll have Box CEO Aaron Levie, who led his company to IPO in 2015 and Jennifer Tejada, CEO at PagerDuty, who did the same just this year. The two executives will discuss the trials and tribulations of the IPO process and what happens after you finally go public.

Meanwhile, Slack co-founder and CTO Cal Henderson, another SaaS company that recently IPOed, will be discussing how to build great products with Megan Quinn from Spark Capital, a Slack investor.

Speaking of investors, Neeraj Agrawal, a general partner at Battery Ventures joins us on a panel with Whitney Bouck, COO at HelloSign and Jyoti Bansal, CEO and founder of Harness (as well as former CEO and co-founder at AppDynamics, which was acquired by Cisco in 2017 for $3.7 billion just before it was supposed to IPO). They will be chatting about what it takes to build a billion dollar SaaS business.

Not enough SaaS for you? How about Diya Jolly, Chief Product Officer at Okta discussing how to iterate your product?

If you’re interested in security, we have Dug Song from Duo, whose company was sold to Cisco in 2018 for $2.35 billion, explaining how to develop a secure startup. We will also welcome Nadav Zafrir from Israeli security incubator Team 8 to talk about the intriguing subject of when spies meet security on our main stage.

You probably want to hear from some enterprise company executives too. That’s why we are bringing Frederic Moll, chief development officer for the digital surgery group at Johnson & Johnson to talk about robots, Marillyn A. Hewson, chairman, president and CEO at Lockheed Martin discussing the space industry and Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg going over the opportunity around 5G.

We’ll also have seasoned enterprise investors, Mamoon Hamid from Kleiner Perkins and Michelle McCarthy from Verizon Ventures, acting as judges at the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield competition.

If that’s not enough for you, there will also be enterprise startups involved in the Battlefield and Startup Alley. If you love the enterprise, there’s something for everyone. We hope you can make it.

Still need tickets? You can pick those up right here.

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Source: Tech Crunch

Last week someone knocked out 5% of world oil production with a small swarm of drones and cruise missiles, and in doing so, inaugurated “a change in the nature of warfare globally,” to quote The Independent. These were relatively crude drones, too. Let’s pause a moment to imagine what happens if and when sophisticated autonomous drones become cheap enough for even small groups of technically capable insurgents and terrorists to use at scale.

There’s controversy over where and whom the Abqaiq–Khurais attack came from. Even in cases like this, where video exists and wreckage is indicative — “serial numbers on some of the missiles used by the Yemeni rebels in past attacks reveal their Iranian origin” — attribution is hard. What happens if and when autonomous attack drones can be built relatively easily from off-the-shelf parts?

We’re already in the midst of a new arms race. Here’s some video of Indra’s anti-drone system. Here’s Raytheon’s Windshear. Here’s Boeing’s Compact Laser Weapon System. Startups are in on the action too: Dedrone and especially Fortem.

The need for these defenses is obvious. Remember when small, unarmed commercial drones basically shut down the second busiest airport in the UK for days last year?

But, looking forward, will those detect small autonomous drones which hug the ground while avoiding obstacles like a Skydio? Or kamikaze drones which can conceivably defend themselves? Iterations will continue, on both sides, in a classic arms race. One side builds better defenses; he other side builds bigger drones that fly faster/farther and carry more explosive and nosedive onto their targets, or smaller nimbler drones that outswarm defenses; then the defenders upgrade; then the attackers innovate. All in a highly irregular, punctuated way, over the space of years.

That future already seems all but guaranteed. But the bigger question is: even if you can protect hard targets — oil infrastructure, airports, the White House, etc. — how do you defend against the innumerable soft targets out there? What happens when autonomous drones can recognize and target a particular license plate on the highway, and are all but impossible to track back to the attacker?

I’ve been asking these questions for more than a decade now and I still don’t have any good answers. What I do know, though, is that we’d best start analyzing and answering these questions before we are thrown into collective irrational panic and fury by some kind of widespread coordinated drone attack, high-profile assassination, and/or soft-target drone massacre … because if we wait until that hits, we’re pretty much guaranteed to get our answers wrong.

Source: Tech Crunch

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, a 35-year-old billionaire who keeps refusing to sit in front of international parliamentarians to answer questions about his ad business’ impact on democracy and human rights around the world, has a new piece of accountability theatre to sell you: An “Oversight Board“.

Not of Facebook’s business itself. Though you’d be forgiven for thinking that’s what Facebook’s blog post is trumpeting, with the grand claim that it’s “Establishing Structure and Governance for an Independent Oversight Board”.

Referred to during the seeding stage last year, when Zuckerberg gave select face-time to podcast and TV hosts he felt comfortable would spread his conceptual gospel with a straight face, as a sort of ‘Supreme Court of Facebook’, this supplementary content decision-making body has since been outfitted in the company’s customary (for difficult topics) bloodless ‘Facebookese’ (see also “inauthentic behavior”; its choice euphemism for fake activity on its platform). 

The Oversight Board is intended to sit atop the daily grind of Facebook content moderation, which takes place behind closed doors and signed NDAs, where outsourced armies of contractors are paid to eyeball the running sewer of hate, abuse and violence so actual users don’t have to, as a more visible mechanism for resolving and thus (Facebook hopes) quelling speech-related disputes.

Facebook’s one-size-fits-all content moderation policy doesn’t and can’t. There’s no such thing as a 2.2BN+ “community” — as the company prefers to refer to its globe-spanning user-base. So quite how the massive diversity of Facebook users can be meaningfully represented by the views of a last resort case review body with as few as 11 members has not yet been made clear.

“When it is fully staffed, the board is likely to be forty members. The board will increase or decrease in size as appropriate,” Facebook writes vaguely this week.

Even if it were proposing one board member per market of operation (and it’s not) that would require a single individual to meaningfully represent the diverse views of an entire country. Which would be ludicrous, as well as risking the usual political divides from styming good faith effort.

It seems most likely Facebook will seek to ensure the initial make-up of the board reflects its corporate ideology — as a US company committed to upholding freedom of expression. (It’s clearly no accident the first three words in the Oversight Board’s charter are: “Freedom of expression”.)

Anything less US-focused might risk the charter’s other clearly stated introductory position — that “free expression is paramount”.

But where will that leave international markets which have suffered the worst kinds of individual and societal harms as a consequence of Facebook’s failure to moderate hate speech, dangerous disinformation and political violence, to name a few of the myriad content scandals that dog the company wherever it goes.

Facebook needs international markets for its business to turn a profit. But you sure wouldn’t know it from its distribution of resources. Not for nothing has the company been accused of digital colonialism.

The level of harm flowing from Facebook decisions to take down or leave up certain pieces of content can be excruciatingly high. Such as in Myanmar where its platform became a conduit for hate speech-fuelled ethnic violence towards the Rohingya people and other ethnic minorities.

It’s reputational-denting failures like Myanmar — which last year led the UN to dub Facebook’s platform “a beast” — that are motivating this latest self-regulation effort. Having made its customary claim that it will do a better job of decision-making in future, Facebook is now making a show of enlisting outsiders for help.

The wider problem is Facebook has scaled so big its business is faced with a steady pipeline of tricky, controversial and at times life-threatening content moderation decisions. Decisions it claims it’s not comfortable making as a private company. Though Facebook hasn’t expressed discomfort at monetizing all this stuff. (Even though its platform has literally been used to target ads at nazis.)

Facebook’s size is humanity’s problem but of course Facebook isn’t putting it like that. Instead — coming sometime in 2020 — the company will augment its moderation processes with a lottery-level chance of a final appeal via a case referral to the Oversight Board.

The level of additional oversight here will of course be exceptionally select. This is a last resort, cherry-picked appeal layer that will only touch a fantastically tiny proportion of the content choices Facebook moderators make every second of every day — and from which real world impacts ripple out and rain down. 

“We expect the board will only hear a small number of cases at first, but over time we hope it will expand its scope and potentially include more companies across the industry as well,” Zuckerberg writes this week, managing output expectations still many months ahead of the slated kick off — before shifting focus onto the ‘future hopes’ he’s always much more comfortable talking about. 

Case selection will be guided by Facebook’s business interests, meaning the push, even here, is still for scale of impact. Facebook says cases will be selected from a pool of complaints and referrals that “have the greatest potential to guide future decisions and policies”.

The company is also giving itself the power to leapfrog general submissions by sending expedited cases directly to the board to ask for a speedy opinion. So its content questions will be prioritized. 

Incredibly, Facebook is also trying to sell this self-styled “oversight” layer as independent from Facebook.

The Oversight Board’s overtly bureaucracy branding is pepped up in Facebook headline spin as “an Independent Oversight Board”. Although the adjective is curiously absent from other headings in Facebook’s already sprawling literature about the OB. Including the newly released charter which specifies the board’s authority, scope and procedures, and was published this week.

The nine-page document was accompanied by a letter from Zuckerberg in which he opines on “Facebook’s commitment to the Oversight Board”, as his header puts it — also dropping the word ‘independent’ in favor of slipping into a comfortable familiar case. Funny that.

The body text of Zuckerberg’s letter goes on to make several references to the board as “independent”; an “independent organization”; exercising “its independent judgement”. But here that’s essentially just Mark’s opinion.

The elephant in the room — which, if we continue the metaphor, is in the process of being dressed by Facebook in a fancy costume that attempts to make it look like, well, a board room table — is the supreme leader’s ongoing failure to submit himself and his decisions to any meaningful oversight.

Supreme leader is an accurate descriptor for Zuckerberg as Facebook CEO, given the share structure and voting rights he has afforded himself mean no one other than Zuckerberg can sack Zuckerberg. (Asked last year, during a podcast interview with recode’s Kara Swisher if he was going to fire himself, in light of myriad speech scandals on his platform, Zuckerberg laughed and then declined.)

It’s a corporate governance dictatorship that has allowed Facebook’s boy king to wield vast power around the world without any internal checks. Power without moral responsibility if you will.

Throughout Zuckerberg’s (now) 15-year apology tour turn as Facebook CEO neither the claims he’ll do things differently next time nor the cool expansionist ambition have wavered. He’s still at it of course; with a plan for a global digital currency (Libra), while bullishly colonizing literal hook-ups (Facebook Dating). Anything to keep the data and ad dollars flowing.

Recently Facebook also paid a $5BN FTC fine to avoid its senior executives having to face questions about their data governance and policy enforcement fuck-ups — leaving Zuckerberg & co free to get back to lucrative privacy-screwing business as usual. (To put the fine in context, Facebook’s 2018 full year revenue clocked in at $55.8BN.)

All of which is to say that an ‘independent’ Facebook-devised “Oversight Board” is just a high gloss sticking plaster to cover the lack of actual regulation — internal and external — of Zuckerberg’s empire.

It is also an attempt by Facebook to paper over its continued evasion of democratic accountability. To distract from the fact its ad platform is playing fast and loose with people’s rights and lives; reshaping democracies and communities while Facebook’s founder refuses to answer parliamentarians’ questions or account for scandal-hit business decisions. Privacy is never dead for Mark Zuckerberg.

Evasion is actually a little tame a term. How Facebook operates is far more actively hostile than that. Its platform is reshaping us without accountability or oversight, even as it ploughs profits into spinning and shape-shifting its business in a bid to prevent our democratically elected representatives from being able to reshape it.

Zuckerberg appropriating the language of civic oversight and jurisprudence for this “project”, as his letter calls the Oversight Board — committing to abide by the terms of a content decision-making review vehicle entirely of his own devising, whose Facebook-written charter stipulates it will “review and decide on content in accordance with Facebook’s content policies and values” — is hardly news. Even though Facebook is spinning at the very highest level to try to make it so.

What would constitute a newsworthy shock is Facebook’s CEO agreeing to take questions from the democratically elected representatives of the billions of users of his products who live outside the US.

Zuckerberg agreeing to meet with parliamentarians around the world so they can put to him questions and concerns on a rolling and regular basis would be a truly incredible news flash.

Instead it’s fiction. That’s not how the empire functions.

The Facebook CEO has instead ducked as much democratic scrutiny as a billionaire in charge of a historically unprecedented disinformation machine possibly can — submitting himself to an awkward question-dodging turn in Congress last year; and one fixed-format meeting of the EU parliament’s conference of presidents, initially set to take place behind closed doors (until MEPs protested), where he was heckled for failing to answer questions.

He has also, most recently, pressed US president Donald Trump’s flesh. We can only speculate on how that meeting of minds went. Power meet irresponsibility — or was it vice versa?

 

International parliamentarians trying on behalf of the vast majority of the world’s Facebook users to scrutinize Zuckerberg and hold his advertising business to democratic account have, meanwhile, been roundly snubbed.

Just this month Zuckerberg declined a third invitation to speak in front of the International Grand Committee on Disinformation which will convene in Dublin this November.

At a second meeting in Canada earlier this year Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg both refused to appear — leading the Canadian parliament’s ethics committee to vote to subpoena the pair.

While, last year, the UK parliament got so frustrated with Facebook’s evasive behavior during a timely enquiry into online disinformation, which saw its questions fobbed off by a parade of Zuckerberg stand-ins armed with spin and misdirection, that a sort of intergovernmental alchemy occurred — and the International Grand Committee on Disinformation was formed in an eye-blink, bringing multiple parliaments together to apply democratic pressure to Facebook. 

The UK Digital, Culture, Media and Sport committee’s frustration at Facebook’s evasive behavior also led it to deploy arcane parliamentary powers to seize a cache of internal Facebook documents from a US lawsuit in a creative attempt to get at the world-view locked inside Zuckerberg’s blue box.

The unvarnished glimpse of Facebook’s business that these papers afforded certainly isn’t pretty… 

US legal discovery appears to be the only reliable external force capable of extracting data from inside the bellow of the nation-sized beast. That’s a problem for democracies. 

So Facebook instructing an ‘oversight board’ of its own making to do anything other than smooth publicity bumps in the road, and pave the way for more Facebook business as usual, is like asking a Koch brothers funded ‘stink tank’ to be independent of fossil fuel interests. The OB is just Facebook’s latest crisis PR tool. More fool anyone who signs up to ink their name to its democratically void rubberstamp.

Dig into the detail of the charter and cracks in the claimed “independence” soon appear.

Aside from the obvious overriding existential points that the board only exists because Facebook exists, making it a dependent function of Facebook whose purpose is to enable its spawning parental system to continue operating; and that it’s funded and charged with chartered purpose by the very same blue-veined god it’s simultaneously supposed to be overseeing (quite the conflict of interest), the charter states that Facebook itself will choose the initial board members. Who will then choose the rest of the first cohort of members.

“To support the initial formation of the board, Facebook will select a group of cochairs. The co-chairs and Facebook will then jointly select candidates for the remainder of the board seats,” it writes in pale grey Facebookese with a tone set to ‘smooth reassurance’ — when the substance of what’s being said should really make you go ‘wtf, how is that even slightly independent?!’

Because the inaugural (Facebook-approved) member cohort will be responsible for the formative case selections — which means they’ll be laying down the foundational ‘case law’ that the board is also bound, per Facebook’s charter, to follow thereafter.

“For each decision, any prior board decisions will have precedential value and should be viewed as highly persuasive when the facts, applicable policies, or other factors are substantially similar,” runs an instructive section on the “basis of decision-making”.

The problem here hardly needs spelling out. This isn’t Facebook changing, this is more of the same ‘Facebook first’ ethos which has always driven its content moderation decisions — just now with a highly polished ‘overseen’ sheen.

This isn’t accountability either. It’s Facebook trying to protect its business from actual regulation by creating a blame-shifting firewall to shield its transparency-phobic execs from democratic (and moral) scrutiny. And indeed to shield Zuckerberg & his inner circle from future content scandals that might threaten to rock the throne, a la Cambridge Analytica.

(Judging by other events this week that mission may not be going so well… )

Given the lengths this company is going to to eschew democratic scrutiny — ducking and diving even as it weaves its own faux oversight structure to manage negative PR on its behalf (yep, more fakes!) — you really have to wonder what Facebook is trying to hide.

A moral vacuum the size of a black hole? Or perhaps it’s just trying to buy time to complete its corporate takeover of the democratic world order…

Because of course the Oversight Board can’t set actual Facebook policy. Don’t be ridiculous! It can merely issue policy recommendations — which Facebook can just choose to ignore.

So even if we imagine the OB running years in the future, when it might theoretically be possible its membership has drifted out of Facebook’s comfortable set-up “support” zone, the charter has baked in another firewall that lets Zuckerberg ignore any policy pressure he doesn’t like. Just, y’know, on the off-chance the board gets too independently minded. Truly, there’s nothing to see here.

Entities structured by corporate interests to role-play ‘neutral’ advice or ensure ‘transparent’ oversight — or indeed to promulgate self-interested propaganda dressed in the garb of intellectual expertise — are almost always a stacked trick.

This is why it’s preferable to live in a democracy. And be governed by democratically accountable institutions that are bound by legally enforcement standards of transparency. Though Facebook hopes you’ll be persuaded to vote for manipulation by corporate interest instead.

So while Facebook’s claim that the Oversight Board will operate “transparently” sure sound good it’s also entirely meaningless. These are not legal standards of transparency. Facebook is a business, not a democracy. There are no legal binds here. It’s self regulation. Ergo, a pantomime.

You can see why Facebook avoided actually calling the OB its ‘Supreme Court’; that would have been trolling a little too close to the bone.

Without legal standards of transparency (or indeed democratic accountability) being applied, there are endless opportunities for Facebook’s self interest to infiltrate the claimed separation between oversight board, oversight trust and the rest of its business; to shape and influence case selections, decisions and policy recommendations; and to seed and steer narrative-shaping discussion around hot button speech issues which could help move the angry chatter along — all under the carefully spun cover of ‘independent external oversight’.

No one should be fooled into thinking a Facebook-shaped and funded entity can meaningful hold Facebook to account on anything. Nor, in this case, when it’s been devised to absorb the flak on irreconcilable speech conflicts so Facebook doesn’t have to.

It’s highly doubtful that even a truly independent board cohort slotted into this Zuckerberg PR vehicle could meaningfully influence Facebook’s policy in a more humanitarian direction. Not while its business model is based on mass-scale attention harvesting and privacy-hostile people profiling. The board’s policy recommendations would have to demand a new business model. (To which we already know Facebook’s response: ‘LOL! No.’)

The Oversight Board is just the latest blame-shifting publicity exercise from a company with a user-base as big as a country that gifts it massive resource to throw at its ‘PR problem’ (as Facebook sees it); i.e. how to seem like a good corporate citizen whilst doing everything possible to evade democratic scrutiny and outrun the leash of government regulation. tl;dr: You can’t fix anything if you don’t believe there’s an underlying problem in the first place.

For an example of how the views of a few hand-picked independent experts can be channeled to further a particular corporate agenda look no further than the panel of outsiders Google assembled in Europe in 2014 in response to the European Court of Justice ‘right to be forgotten’ ruling — an unappealable legal decision that ran counter to its business interests.

Google used what it billed as an “advisory committee” of outsiders mostly as a publicity vehicle, holding a large number of public ‘hearings’ where it got to frame a debate and lobby loudly against the law. In such a context Google’s nakedly self-interested critique of EU privacy rights was lent a learned, regionally seasoned dressing of nuanced academic concern, thanks to the outsiders doing time on its platform.

Google also claimed the panel would steer its decision-making process on how to implement the ruling. And in their final report the committee ended up aligning with Google’s preference to only carry out search de-indexing at the European (rather than .com global) domain level. Their full report did contain some dissent. But Google’s preferred policy position won out. (And, yes, there were good people on that Google-devised panel.)

Facebook’s Oversight Board is another such self-interested tech giant stunt. One where Facebook gets to choose whether or not to outsource a few tricky content decisions while making a big show of seeming outward-looking, even as it works to shift and defuse public and political attention from its ongoing lack of democratic accountability.

What’s perhaps most egregious about this latest Facebook charade is it seems intended to shift attention off of the thousands of people Facebook pays to labor daily at the raw coal face of its content business. An outsourced army of voiceless workers who are tasked with moderating at high speed the very worst stuff that’s uploaded to Facebook — exposing themselves to psychological stress, emotional trauma and worse, per multiple media reports.

Why isn’t Facebook announcing a committee to provide that existing expert workforce with a public voice on where its content lines should lie, as well as the power to issue policy recommendations?

It’s impossible to imagine Facebook actively supporting Oversight Board members being selected from among the pool of content moderation contractors it already pays to stop humanity shutting its business down in sheer horror at what’s bubbling up the pipe.

On member qualifications, the Oversight Board charter states: “Members must have demonstrated experience at deliberating thoughtfully and as an open-minded contributor on a team; be skilled at making and explaining decisions based on a set of policies or standards; and have familiarity with matters relating to digital content and governance, including free expression, civic discourse, safety, privacy and technology.”

There’s surely not a Facebook moderator in the whole wide world who couldn’t already lay claim to that skill-set. So perhaps it’s no wonder the company’s ‘Oversight Board’ isn’t taking applications.

Source: Tech Crunch

Alchemist Accelerator, a startup incubator which focuses on enterprise companies, held a demo day yesterday for its 22nd batch.

Each company got 5 minutes to tell a theater full of investors who they are, what they’re building, and why they might be the best to build it. We saw companies working on everything from industrial robotic vacuums, to platforms for healthcare facilities, to AI-driven money lending platforms.

Couldn’t be in the room, but want to know which companies debuted? Here’s my notes on all twenty two teams, in the order in which they presented:

1) Cresance: Uses AI to cut cloud operating costs, using their algorithms to detect wastage. Companies are spending $200B on the cloud in 2019; Cresance estimates that this will go up to $500B in 3-5 years.

2) Bridgefy: Building mobile apps that continue to work when the user’s own internet connection is unavailable. Their framework allows apps to fall back to a Bluetooth mesh network made up of other nearby users. Founder Jorge Rios says they’ve signed over 12,700 license agreements in four months, with Bridgefy’s own messaging app seeing 140,000 downloads in four weeks (largely driven by a surge in users during the Hong Kong protests.) Was introduced to the stage by Twitter co-founder and Bridgefy investor Biz Stone.

3) Synapbox: Helps brands determine how their image/video content will perform, and tells them what they can do to improve performance. Founder Cristina De la Peña says the company is projecting an ARR of over $1 million, with the company making $60k in August and $85k in September.

4) Teleon Health: A software platform for senior care facilities. Their first product is a HIPAA-compliant staff communication platform that allows staffers to easily reach each other, access and discuss patient data, and send scheduling updates.

5) Particle: AI insights for commodity markets (like cobalt, or platinum), constantly scanning “over one million highly relevant data points each day” for things like weather disasters, local conflicts, etc. $1M in revenue in 2019, and predicts that they’ll triple that in 2020.

6) Pristēm: Steam cleaning in a portable box. Meant to be a dry cleaning alternative for offices, hotels, apartments, etc. Hardware license + monthly subscription. The company’s co-founder says they have letters of intent from Marriot, Hyatt, and other hotel chains. Company name is pronounced like “Pristine” mashed up with the word “steam”.

7) EveraLabs: An at-home, mail-in kit which the company says allows for stem cell collection from urine. The idea would be to collect stem cells when you’re young for use in case of health issues later.

8) testRigor: Produces autonomous “human-level” testing for software in development. Currently seeing a $200k ARR, forecasting $300k in the next 30 days. Co-founder Artem Golubev says testRigor is already talking with 26 companies, including GrubHub, stockX, and Genentech.

9) Spectrum CannaLabs: Faster, accurate, and dedicated testing for legal cannabis products. In many states, all legal cannabis products must be tested for things like residual pesticides, funguses, heavy metals, and foreign materials prior to distribution— but Spectrum says the labs are overrun.

10) Gritwell: A platform meant to connect practitioners like dietitians, nutritionists, and naturopaths to patients with chronic health conditions. The company is initially focusing on patients with Lupus, later expanding to other autoimmune diseases.

11) Green Light Labs: A marketing platform meant to convince users to switch to electric vehicles. Their MyGreenCar and MyFleetBuy apps analyze your trips while you drive, calculating how much different cars might cost you (or your company) to run. Currently has $1.3M in contracted revenue.

12) Friendly Robots: Autonomous vacuums for the cleaning industry — think Roomba, but bigger, built for large/complicated commercial spaces, and with dramatically improved autonomy. CEO Xiao Xiao previously worked at Apple, designing and building things like the odometry/motion sensing algorithms for the Apple Watch.

13) Bludot: A cloud-based platform for helping city governments oversee and analyze the growth of its local businesses, tying into data like licensing/permitting and providing a place for the city to communicate with the owners. They’ve currently completed a pilot program with one mid-size city.

14) Coolso: A muscle-sensing, wrist-worn device for controlling devices with gestures. Initially focused on industrial use cases. Co-founder Jack Wu says their solution is cheaper to build but more stable than alternative approaches like Thalmic Labs’ Myo or Leap Motion.

15) Crelytics: A software platform for lenders with AI-driven risk assessment and fraud detection, and a customizable decision engine. Currently seeing $100k+ in ARR.

16) LEAD: A platform meant to help companies “develop an amazing workplace culture” by matching employees based on interests and professional backgrounds and getting them together every 1-4 weeks for coffee, lunch, or virtual check-ins. Ties into existing software like Slack and Google Suite.

17) Celly.ai: AI-powered microscopy diagnosis. Strap an iPhone to a microscope’s lens with their optical adapter, and Celly’s neural networks can help analyze blood smears, starting with blood cell counts.

18) Blushup: Marketplace and appointment booking solution for beauty retailers (like L’oreal/Lancome). Company founder Monique Salvador says only 37% of beauty retailers currently use online booking solutions.

19) Modality.ai: Analyzes video of a user (recorded while they interact with an on-screen avatar) for facial movements and speech patterns to evaluate changes in neurological diseases. Intended to make clinical drug trials for these conditions more efficient thanks to standardized/objective data.

20) Chowmill: Faster, easier meal ordering for enterprises for things like group meetings and events. Enter info like dietary preferences, favorite cuisines, and budget, and Chowmill automates much of the remaining process away. Founded Mubeen Arbab says the company is currently seeing gross margins of roughly 40%. In January they saw 25k in revenue; by August, that was up to $118k.

21) Yaydoo: Procurement automation for companies, making things like negotiation and recurring orders more efficient. Projecting a $1.2M ARR

22) SmartBins: Smart dispensers for bulk products at the grocery store. Works with existing bulk bins. The customer uses the bulk bin as normal, and SmartBin’s system automatically calculates how much product was pulled from the bin and has a label/tag printed for them at a nearby kiosk. Company co-founder David Conway say they’ve already got a sale agreement with the company that makes 100% of the bulk bin fixtures on the market. Brands and retailers get a dashboard with item-by-item purchasing analytics.

Source: Tech Crunch

Aicha Evans, CEO of self-driving startup Zoox, is joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco in just two short weeks.

Evans came on board to Zoox earlier this year following the unexpected firing of co-founder and former CEO Tim Kentley-Klay in August. At the time of the announcement, Zoox co-founder and CTO Jesse Levinson told TechCrunch he and the board of directors believed “that to take the company through the next stage and to scale the company, we thought finding someone with executive and operational experience would be helpful to the company.”

That’s where Evans came in. Before joining Zoox, Evans served as Intel’s chief strategy officer. Evans spent 12 years at Intel, where she was responsible for leading the company’s transition from a PC-centric business to a data-centric one. She also served as a general manager in the communication and devices group. Her first day at Zoox was February 26.

In California, Zoox has a permit to participate in the state’s Autonomous Vehicle Passenger Service pilot, which means Zoox can transport passengers with a safety driver behind the wheel, but not charge those passengers.

Zoox’s plan is to publicly deploy autonomous vehicles by 2020 in the form of its own ride-hailing service. The cars themselves will be all-electric and fully autonomous.

Evans joins other notable speakers including Will Smith and Ang Lee, Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson, Snap’s Evan Spiegel, and Marc Benioff. You can check out the agenda here.

Hear more about Zoox’s plan from the CEO herself at Disrupt SF. You can snag your tickets here.

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Source: Tech Crunch

Back in January, Blackstone — the investment firm whose assets under management surpassed a jaw-dropping half a trillion dollars earlier this year — quietly began piecing together a new, growth equity platform called Blackstone Growth, or BXG. Step one was hiring away Jon Korngold from General Atlantic, where he’d spent the previous 18 years, including as a managing director and a member of its management committee.

Step two has been for Korngold, who is responsible for running the new program, to build a team, which he has been doing throughout the year, bringing in “people who speak the language of Blackstone,” he says, including from TCV, Andreessen Horowitz, Carlyle, Vista Private Equity, NEA, and SoftBank .

Apparently, the group is now ready for business. It has already closed on two deals from existing pools of capital with Blackstone, including acquiring outright the mobile ad company Vungle. According to Korngold, two more term sheets “are being signed imminently.”

We talked with him last week for more information about what the group is shopping for, what size checks it is willing to write, and which firms it views as its biggest rivals for deals (and more). Our chat has been edited for length and clarity.

TC: You’ve been hiring throughout the year people who have large-scale growth equity backgrounds. Are many of them women?

JK: Blackstone is one of the most diverse organizations [in terms of] gender or ethnicity. In general, it’s a huge priority for the firm and within our group of 20 people, 40 percent are female, a number we hope to get to 50 percent. Hiring is still in process, but it’s a really healthy culture.

TC: How many people does Blackstone employ altogether?

JK: There are 2,600 altogether across 24 offices.

TC: Is your group investing a discreet pool of capital?

JK: At some point, we’ll have a dedicated pool of capital, but as a firm, we’ve been investing in growth equity for some time [so have relied on other funds within Blackstone to date].

TC: There’s no shortage of growth equity in the world right now. What is Blackstone building that’s so different?

JK: The sheer scale of the operation is different. We have nearly 100 operating professionals — employees of Blackstone — who were hired because they are functional experts — from pricing experts to process engineering experts to human capital and procurement and digital marketing experts — and who can advise our companies.

Also, Blackstone can holistically assist a company through [our] growth equity and real estate and procurement and debt [groups] and other related infrastructure support, enabling companies to fight way above their weight class.  We have 600,000 people across our portfolio, and that provides an interesting opportunity for our companies to cross pollinate [and to cross-sell to] one another.

Unlike most growth equity firms, we also have a significant number of data scientists who do three things: identify proprietary signals across asset classes to help instruct where we should be hunting; help our companies monetize their data; and help us in our diligence. They’ll access raw data feeds and almost see the matrix, if you will.

TC: How many data scientists are we talking about?

JK: A couple dozen [across Blackstone].

TC: Blackstone must be competing against fast-growing tech companies for data scientists. How do you convince them that work for an investing giant is the better gig?

JK: If you’re an intellectually curious individual, there are so many signals [coming through Blackstone] that it’s almost a proxy for the world. It’s like manna from heaven. It’s not like they’re doing a single-threaded approach. The nature of the challenges across our companies is so vast and so varying that whether you’re looking at a fast-growing retailer or a cell phone tower in another country,  the nature of the tasks is always changing.

TC: SoftBank seems to have shaken things up a bit when it came on to the scene, given the size checks it is writing. Your boss, Steven Schwarzman, who recently talked with us about this bigger new push into growth equity, made sure to note that there are few organizations that can write $500 million checks.

JK: [Laughs.] Everyone in Silicon Valley wants to talk about SoftBank. We celebrate a lot of what SoftBank has done. They’ve validated the thesis that there’s an opportunity for growth equity on a scale that hasn’t traditionally been available.

It’s similar to the way we’re set up. SoftBank was never meant to compete with the venture community; they’re competing with the capital markets, and as private companies look to stay private longer market, SoftBank wants to support their development.

TC: And . . .

JK: I think the reality is that a lot of businesses have unproven business models and unit economics, and they’re garnering massive amounts of capital from different constituents. It’s less about who is staying private longer but are they sustainable over the long run, whether public or private. I think a lot of companies right now now that have unproven business models have been flooded by cash at too small a scale where they aren’t ready to handle it, and it masks weaknesses.

TC: Where is that most acute, in your view?

JK: I see that at the smaller growth equity phase — the $25 million to $150 million [per firm per check] range — where most growth equity resides because you have every VC firm there now. Many of the growth funds that have moved downstream. You also have crossover funds like DST and Coatue and Tiger, along with corporate venture capital. That huge flood of capital has created these massive valuations and it has  compressed the due diligence involved.

If you look at Lyft and Uber — and Snap was in this category — the market is starting to speak. Public market shareholders are willing to give you the benefit of the doubt for a while but not indefinitely. You can’t feed the machine for growth’s sake.

TC: So what type of deals are you searching out?

JK: We won’t step into a situation where unit economics aren’t proven from day one. You won’t see us in a company that’s selling $1 for 80 cents and hoping someday that works. We’re Inherently more binary in profile. We’re capital-preservation minded while looking for asymmetric upside, and that’s where we have a disproportionate advantage. You’ll see us do deals where we can put our thumb on the scale, because of our real estate holdings or buyout assets or because [search across our] portfolio for help with procurement costs or insurance or R&D or a company’s go-to-market strategy.

TC: What have you done that proves all these bells and whistles make a difference? 

JK: We have a couple of signed deals, including [the mobile ad company] Vungle [for a reported $750 million-ish], though we’re more often looking for growth-equity minority ownership positions. [Think] companies that are looking for a partner and not an owner. We’ll do growth buyouts but the vast majority will be significant minority positions.

We have a couple of other deals that will be signed imminently that we can’t discuss just yet.

TC: Are you hoping to take these companies public? Flip them to another private equity firm? Relatedly, do you have any thoughts about the public market and whether more companies should be going out?

JK: We’ll only look to an IPO if there’s a reason for it. Oftentimes, companies shouldn’t be public; sometimes, they should be, including if they need an acquisition currency or [to better establish their] branding. But the idea of, let’s rush to the door [is not our style].

TC: Who are your most direct competitors? Not Vista Private Equity, since it seems to prefer buying companies whole.

JK: Vista is going exclusively for control buyouts, massive turnarounds. It descends upon a company and says, ‘This is the playbook you will follow.’ It also uses a lot of leverage, where the vast majority or our [deals] are un-levered. We don’t use much debt. Vista and Silver Lake are much more competitors with each other.

TC: KKR then? Carlyle? 

KR: They’re also multi-asset managers, but as it relates to growth equity, we’ve really found ourselves in slightly more rarefied air. Blackstone has demonstrated that it can use its scale to create an operational advantage, and virtually no other company — or few — can contemplate checks like we can.

TC: What do you want for these checks, other than a minority position? How involved are you and what size stake, exactly, are you aiming to buy?

JK: We want to have a relevant voice, so we want to be in the boardroom, but there is no target range. It can be 10 or 20 or 30 percent. It can be 80 percent. Ideally you want to be the main outside pool of capital along with management team.

Source: Tech Crunch