Original Content podcast: ‘Love is Blind’ adds a touch of reality to a silly premise

Even by the standards of romantic competition reality shows, “Love is Blind” has a doozy of a concept: A group of men and women “date” by talking in pods where they can only hear each other’s voices. In just a little over a week, they’re expected to start proposing marriage to someone who they’ve never seen.

On this week’s episode of the Original Content podcast, we’re joined by TechCrunch marketing director (and reality TV expert) Alexandra Ames to review the just-wrapped first season of the Netflix show. As we explain, the series actually moves beyond its initial high concept pretty quickly — after the first few episodes, the newly-engaged couples leave the pods and to see if their relationships can survive in the real world.

So the show prompted plenty of discussion about relationships and reality TV in general. At the same time, we’re happy to gossip about the most and least interesting couples, and about who left who at the altar.

And we also some thoughts about the choice of Nick and Vanessa Lachey as the hosts. (Hey, at least most of their material appears to have been left on the cutting room floor.)

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
0:59 “Love Is Blind” spoiler-free review
28:12 “Love Is Blind” spoiler discussion


Source: Tech Crunch

If we could see alternate realities, would we want to take a look?

Well, here we are. After many weeks (and a somewhat inconsistent publishing schedule), we have arrived at the final story of Ted Chiang’s Exhalation collection, number nine of nine. It has been a fun journey reading each of these speculative science fiction stories, and I do think they have much to tell TechCrunch readers. Even if you missed some of the discussions, these stories are timeless: What’s Expected of Us was first published in 2005. So jump in now, or jump in later — they will be waiting for you when you are ready.

Today, we have a fantastic work on the meaning of the choices in our lives and what happens when we have more information about ourselves in alternative timelines. It’s a story that combines quantum entanglement with freedom of the will, connecting technology to the very core of what makes us human. We will talk about Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom, and then some concluding thoughts on the whole *Exhalation *collection for those who have walked with us every step of the way.

Some further quick notes:

  • Want to join the conversation? Feel free to email me your thoughts at bookclub@techcrunch.com (we got a real email address!) or join some of the discussions on Reddit or Twitter (hashtag TCBookClub)
  • Follow these informal book club articles here: https://techcrunch.com/book-review/. That page also has a built-in RSS feed for posts exclusively in the Book Review category, which is very low volume.
  • Feel free to add your comments in our TechCrunch comments section below this post.

Reading Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom

This short story is a beautiful fusion of speculative science fiction and philosophy, punctuated with several plot turnabouts and rivulets of thrill.

The story centers around an invention called the prism, which is a quantum communications device. When triggered, a prism will cause a binary divergence in future timelines. In one timeline, the prism lights up its LED red, while in the other timeline it lights up blue. What’s critical is that the prisms in the now diverging timelines are connected together, and the device has a “pad” that allows for limited communications between the two timelines before the pad expires its capacity.

With the right prism, people can talk to themselves in other timelines to explore what might have happened if different decisions were made. For instance, someone could accept a marriage proposal if the prism’s LED turned red or reject it if the prism turned blue. Through the device, users can observe how their lives might have been lived — entailing all kinds of psychological consequences in the process.

It’s not surprising then that the plot partly revolves around a support group for people obsessed with prisms. One person, Jorge, struggles with the fact that he committed a violent act in this timeline, but then determines that he didn’t in any of the other timelines he was able to connect to. What does this say about his character? Does the fact he almost always doesn’t commit the violence show that he has a strong and stable character, who occasionally makes mistakes? Or does the evidence prove that there is a monster waiting beneath the surface, always just waiting for the right moment to strike?

Throughout the story, there is a latent question about how we use role models in our decisions. In our world, we can model ourselves off of celebrities or famous people, mentors and coaches, or even historical figures we’ve read about in biographies. Yet the prisms shrink this intrinsic distance — we can model ourselves after literally ourselves.

That opens up avenues for envy and jealousy. When our role models find success, we have the emotional distance to observe and reflect, and perhaps change our own actions in response. But when those models are ourselves, suddenly we can’t help but think that there must be something wrong with us if our counterparts in other timelines are doing well and we are not.

So we dwell on our choices, particularly on the major prophetic decisions that we feel our whole lives revolve around. Much like the prisms and the quantum split that happens inside the device, we ourselves have moments of binary decision-making. If we are angry, do we slash the tires of the car of the person who put us in that position? Do we pull the trigger on a gun?

In one case, Dana, a therapist and a facilitator of the prism support group, harmed her best friend Vinessa in high school during a field trip. When a teacher enters their hotel room on an inspection and sees rows of pills, Dana blames Vinessa, sending her life in a different direction:

It was as if, before that night, Vinessa had been balanced on a knife’s edge; she could have become either what society considered a good girl or a bad girl. Dana’s lie had pushed her off the edge, onto the side of being bad, and with that label the course of Vinessa’s life had taken a different direction.

Yet, Chiang is deeply skeptical of these binaries. We start to see glimmers of this as he explains the quantum dynamics behind the prisms, arguing that even a single atomic difference in different timelines can lead to massive changes in weather patterns and ultimately the macro events that build each of those worlds. This butterfly effect means that our decisions have far more chaotic consequences than we can anticipate. As the author explains, “Many worried that their choices were rendered meaningless because every action they took was counterbalanced by a branch in which they had made the opposite choice.”

Yet, much like the last story we read, this story doesn’t jump to nihilism. Quite the opposite, it argues that our decisions are really reflections of our character, and therefore our character constrains the probabilities of our actions in future timelines. Nat, our main narrator, asks during a support group session:

“But when I have a choice to do the right thing or the wrong thing, am I always choosing to do both in different branches? Why should I bother being nice to other people, if every time I’m also being a dick to them?”

The facilitator Dana responds with:

“But if you act compassionately in this branch, that’s still meaningful, because it has an effect on the branches that will split off in the future. The more often you make compassionate choices, the less likely it is that you’ll make selfish choices in the future, even in the branches where you’re having a bad day.”

While all future possibilities are always present, our innate character determines the gravity wells that most timelines fall into. Vinessa is angry at Dana for her lie, but as we later learn, she would have been angry in pretty much every scenario that Dana might have selected. No matter how she handled the situation, Vinessa would have gone through her downward spiral, leading to the story’s core message: “If the same thing happens in branches where you acted differently, they you aren’t the cause.”

We can’t control the past, and we certainly can’t control alternative timelines. But we can control our actions today, and those actions are going to accumulate to affect every single diverging timeline in the future. Yes, sometimes our other selves might have gotten luckier, or may have faced an unexpected tragedy. Yes, if we knew this we might experience envy, jealousy or horror. But ultimately, all the possibilities in the world are ultimately circumscribed by ourselves. We can only ever really do what we choose to do.

Some concluding thoughts on Exhalation

We’ve come to the end of Exhalation, and in light of the book’s symbol, we can take a breath now to take a look at all that Chiang has put together with these various stories.

To me, the most prominent message that resonates throughout the book is that contingency has no control over our own actions. In many of the stories in this set, Chiang places a new technological object, whether it’s a time-travel gate, digients and virtual worlds, or the prisms in this last story, and shows how humans react to their fresh capabilities.

One would think that these technologies would immediately change who we are or how we react. After all, if we can time travel, communicate through timelines, or completely change our perspective in virtual worlds, shouldn’t that radically change our identities? Wouldn’t we be entirely different people?

And yet, Chiang makes his point stridently clear: no. The characters inside each of us are hardly fixed of course, but they absolutely affect how we use — for good and evil — these new technologies. Humans are going to do what they are going to do, and they are going to do it with whatever tools they have available to them. That’s not to say that technologies shouldn’t be held accountable for the actions they afford their users. But ultimately, it’s a reminder that we each have control over our own actions, and we have the right to judge others for the actions they take when confronted with new options.

We are ultimately all connected, and that means that our actions don’t just affect ourselves, but all people everywhere through the air, through quantum mechanics, and through the physical laws of our world. Trust yourself, but also understand how we can control our actions for a better world. If that isn’t a message for startups and technology in 2020, I don’t know what is.


Source: Tech Crunch

How the information system industry became enterprise software

If you were a software company employee or venture capitalist in Silicon Valley before 1993, chances are you were talking about “Information Systems Software” and not “Enterprise Software.” How and why did the industry change its name?

The obvious, but perplexing answer is simple — “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”

As befuddling and mind-numbingly satisfying as it is to your local office Trekkie, the industry rebranded itself thanks to a marketing campaign from the original venture-backed system software company, Boole & Babbage (now BMC software).

While the term “Enterprise” was used to describe complex systems for years before 1993, everything changed when Boole & Babbage signed a two-year licensing agreement with the then-highest-rated show in syndication history to produce an infomercial.

Star Trek fans have been talking about this crazy marketing agreement for years, and you can read the full details about how it was executed in TrekCore. But even Trekkies don’t appreciate its long-term impacts on our industry. In this license agreement with Paramount, Boole & Babbage had unlimited rights to create and distribute as much Star Trek content as they could. They physically mailed VHS cassettes to customers, ran magazine ads and even dressed their employees as members of Starfleet at trade shows. Boole & Babbage used this push to market itself as the “Enterprise Automation Company.”

Commander Riker says in the infomercial, “just as the bridge centralizes the functions necessary to control the USS Enterprise, Boole’s products centralize data processing information to allow centralized control of today’s complex information systems.” This seemed to scratch an itch that other systems companies didn’t realize needed scratching.

Not to be outdone, IBM in 1994 rebranded their OS/2 operating system “OS/2 Warp,” referring to Star Trek’s “warp drive.” They also tried to replicate Babbage’s licensing agreement with Paramount by hiring the Enterprise’s Captain Picard (played by actor Patrick Stewart) to emcee the product launch. Unfortunately, Paramount wouldn’t play ball, and IBM hired Captain Janeway (played by actress Kate Mulgrew) from Star Trek: Voyager instead. The licensing issues didn’t stop IBM from also hiring Star Trek’s Mr. Spock (played by actor Leonard Nimoy) to tape a five-minute intro to the event:

Outside of OS/2, IBM’s 1994 announcement list included 13 other “enterprise” initiatives. Soon, leading software companies began to rebrand themselves and release products using the term “enterprise software” as a valuable identifier. MRP software makers like SAP and Baan began embracing the new “Enterprise” moniker after 1993 and in 1995, Lotus rebranded itself as an “Enterprise Software Company.”

“Enterprise” was officially the coolest new vernacular and after industry behemoth IBM bought Lotus in 1996, they incorporated “Enterprise” across all of their products. And while Gartner’s 1990 paper “ERP: A Vision of the Next-Generation MRP II” by Wylie is the technical birth of ERP software, no one cared until Commander Riker told Harold to “monitor your entire Enterprise from a single point of control.” The ngram numbers don’t lie:

Almost 30 years later, we live in a world in which business is run on enterprise software and the use of the term is ubiquitous. Whenever I see a software business plan come across my desk or read an article on enterprise software, I can’t help but give Commander Riker a little due credit.


Source: Tech Crunch

What is the purpose of belief in a world of innovation?

We are reading the penultimate short story in Ted Chiang’s collection Exhalation. Omphalos questions what it means to believe: in our world, in alternative worlds, and in ourselves. Given that beliefs are crucial to everything we do in innovation and science, I thought the theme deeply dovetailed with a lot of what TechCrunch readers care about. I’m excited to talk about it more.

Tomorrow, I will post analysis on the final short story, Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom as well as some concluding thoughts now that we have cycled through all the short stories in this collection. What a journey!

Some further quick notes:

  • Want to join the conversation? Feel free to email me your thoughts at bookclub@techcrunch.com (we got a real email address!) or join some of the discussions on Reddit or Twitter (hashtag TCBookClub)
  • Follow these informal book club articles here: https://techcrunch.com/book-review/. That page also has a built-in RSS feed for posts exclusively in the Book Review category, which is very low volume.
  • Feel free to add your comments in our TechCrunch comments section below this post.

Reading Omphalos

Most of the stories in Exhalation have been pieces of deep imagination, filled with worlds that, while tethered to our experience on Earth, remain quite distant to it. Omphalos feels quite different: it very much is our world, but refracted just slightly at every point.

Chiang signals this to the reader right from the beginning, noting that the narrator is traveling to “Chicagou,” a city that is obviously recognizable to us, but just slightly off from our expectations. And indeed, as the story progresses, we learn that everything in the sciences are just a bit different from what we presume. Scientific discoveries that have happened in our world have yet to happen in this story (the discovery of DNA, for instance), while exciting fields in our world today like astronomy are essentially complete, with no further innovation to come.

The story’s central tension is between faith and science, but the tweaks that Chiang edits into this speculative world force us to observe our own world with new insight. The development of science as a human practice was highly contentious in our history, with Galileo and the fight over heliocentrism being one of many battlefields fought over the centuries.

In this story though, science isn’t at war with religion, but in fact provides a path to deepening devotion to belief, undergirding the pursuit of purpose in a world of mystery. Our narrator, an archaeologist, describes why she does her work, and why the single miraculous creation of the human race is so important to belief.

I asked them to imagine what it would be like if we lived in a world where, no matter how deeply we dug, we kept finding traces of an earlier era of the world … then I asked, wouldn’t they feel lost, like a castaway adrift on an ocean of time? … this is why I am a scientist: because I wish to discover your purpose for us, Lord.

Indeed, the Earth itself is the very creation of God, and therefore is studied with an intensity that we would find unusual, while astronomy and the exploration of the celestial world is relegated to the side.

I admit, Lord, that I’ve never had much regard for astronomy; it has always struck me as the dullest of the sciences. The life sciences are seemingly limitless; every year we discover new species of plants and animals and gain a deeper appreciation of your ingenuity in creating the Earth. By contrast, the night sky is just so finite. All five thousand eight hundred and seventy-two stars were cataloged in 1745, and not another has been found since then.

Chiang has pulled a bit of a legerdemain — we are more interested in the possibilities beneath our feet, rather than what floats above us in the skies.

That setup delivers the story’s main thrust: an astronomer has discovered that another planet elsewhere in the galaxy is actually the stationary point of the entire universe, which means that Earth’s orbit around the sun demonstrates not intelligent design or a message of purpose, but rather pure nihilism. It likely serves no purpose at all.

Chiang refracts our massive historical conflict over heliocentrism, and in so doing forces us to confront the true challenges of modern life. The astronomer’s discovery forces our seemingly devout narrator to question her own faith — not in religion, but actually in science. For if conducing scientific experiments was about finding purpose in life, why should we continue doing them when we know they don’t have a purpose at all?

The title of the story, Omphalos, comes from Greek mythology and symbolizes the navel of the world, or the place where the world is centered on. The astronomer’s discovery dissolves what we thought was the Omphalos — Earth — and prods us to search for a new point to center us and our lives.

Our narrator’s loss of faith causes her to stop praying and live in a cabin for a few months, but she ultimately comes to the conclusion that the openness of choice around these events is actually empowering for humans, forcing us to confront our own actions and realize we have agency over them.

If we had no evidence for the miracle of creation, we might think physical law was sufficient to explain every phenomenon in the cosmos, leading us to conclude that our own minds were nothing more than natural processes. But we know that there is more to what we observe than physical law can encompass; miracles happen, and human choices are surely among them.

Chiang isn’t critiquing religion or believers, but rather those rationalists who believe deeply in the thesis that we are bags of atoms pre-destined to make the choices we already have made at conception. It’s a relatively oblique critique, one only really brought into relief in the story’s closing paragraphs.

Earlier in the story, our narrator asks God, “Let me always be inquisitive, but never be suspicious.” That’s ultimately a comment about cynicism and nihilism, that the purpose to everything is nothing and useless. Even in a secular world, there is meaning in every action and reaction, and physics doesn’t determine how we approach our lives. With refractive lenses, we can see that we are each our own Omphalos, architecting the meaning of what we observe.

Reading Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom

As you read the final short story in Exhalation, here are some questions to think about:

  • Would you use a prism? Who would you talk to on the other side? What would you want to know?
  • What does the short story say about envy and empathy? Are we destined to constantly compare ourselves to others?
  • Is having more information about our alternatives better or worse for us? Is there a path of contentment through more information?
  • Do we need role models to redeem ourselves?
  • What does the story say about choice and predestination?


Source: Tech Crunch

Crypto wallet app ZenGo launches savings mode

ZenGo is expanding beyond the basic features of a cryptocurrency wallet — letting you hold, send and receive crypto assets. You can now set aside some of your crypto assets to earn interests. In other words, ZenGo now also acts like a savings account.

The company has partnered with two DeFi projects for the new feature. DeFi means “decentralized finance”, and it has been a hot trend in the cryptocurrency space. DeFi projects are the blockchain equivalent of traditional financial products. For instance, you can lend and borrow money, invest in derivative assets and more.

If you want to learn more about DeFi, here’s an article I wrote on the subject:

But let’s come back to ZenGo. When you have crypto assets in your ZenGo wallet, you can now open the savings tab, pick an asset, such as Dai, and select what percentage of your holdings you want to set aside.

After that, all you have to do is wait. You get an overview of your savings “accounts” at any time. This way, you can see your total earned interests. Interests are automatically reinvested over time. You can move your money from those DeFi projects back to your wallet whenever you want.

Behind the scene, ZenGo uses the Compound protocol, a lending DeFi project. It works a bit like LendingClub, but on the blockchain. Some users send money to Compound to contribute to liquidity pools. Other users borrow money from that pool.

Interest rates go up and down depending on supply and demand. That’s why you currently earn more interests when you inject DAI or USD Coin in Compound. But that could change over time.

ZenGo also uses Figment in order to stake Tezos. This time, it isn’t a lending marketplace. When you lock some money in a staking project, it means that you support the operations of a particular blockchain. Few blockchains support staking as they need to be based on proof-of-stake.

For the end user, it looks like a savings account whether you’re relying on Compound or Figment. There are other wallet apps that let you access DeFi projects, such as Coinbase Wallet and Argent. But ZenGo thinks they’re still too complicated for regular users.


Source: Tech Crunch

The first SpaceX Dragon capsule is taking its final flight

Last night, SpaceX launched its first generation Dragon capsule on its twentieth — and final — resupply run to the International Space Station.

The launch marks the Dragon’s last mission as the capsule makes way for SpaceX’s updated and improved Dragon 2 capsule, which will begin making resupply runs to the space station in October.

Alongside cargo to resupply the ISS, the Dragon will be bringing along payloads for experimental research aboard the space station. Including an Adidas experiment to see how it can manufacture midsoles in space; a project from the faucet maker, Delta, to see how water droplets form in zero gravity; and Emulate is sending up an organ-on-a-chip to examine how microgravity affects intestinal immune cells and how heart tissue can be cultured in space.

It’s been twelve years since SpaceX first won a $1.6 billion contract to resupply the space station, and over that time, the space industry has changed dramatically.

The company’s technical innovations around manufacturing and reusing rocket components revolutionized the space industry and created an environment where entrepreneurs believed in the possibility of competing with industry giants like Aerojet Rocketdyne, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin.

Since SpaceX first emerged to challenge those longtime government contractors, which had a lock on government space missions, a wave of commercial activity has emerged around the International Space Station, supporting the creation of new industries.

Earlier this week, Axiom Space announced that it would be using SpaceX to ferry the first entirely private crew of passengers to the International Space Station for a ten-day trip (albeit at a cost of $55 million). Axiom’s vision of building a private orbiting space station off of the existing International Space Station is a bold step forward for the commercialization of space — and one which would be less likely if not for SpaceX’s work and the success of the first Dragon.


Source: Tech Crunch

Startups Weekly: Remote-first SaaS products boom as workers stay home

Silicon Valley companies had already been going remote-first when the coronavirus became a global pandemic. This means there are lots of great software tools already on the market, that are seeing a huge amount of new usage now. And not just Zoom. Alex Wilhelm checked in with HiveIO, FridayFreeConferenceCallBrandliveKentikBluescapeLogMeIn, and other remote-oriented SaaS startups large and small to get the freshest data for Extra Crunch. Here’s what FreeConferenceCall reported back, for example:

  • United States and United Kingdom: +6%
  • India: around +10%
  • France and South Korea: +20%
  • Italy: +170%
  • China: +524%
  • Hong Kong: +1576%
  • Vietnam: +3836%

Next, check out Ron Miller’s look at what experts recommend right now (EC) if you’re trying to make the transition for your team or company.

We’ll have more analysis of great remote-first companies and investment areas coming up soon, as the working world goes through this abrupt transition to an already inevitable future. In the meantime, be sure to check out our existing coverage:

How to work during a pandemic (TC)

How we scaled Seeq by being remote first (EC)

How to make remote work work (EC)

Essential tools for today’s digital nomad (EC)

Remote workers and nomads represent the next tech hub (EC)

One final note: wondering why there’s no vaccine yet? Connie Loizos caught up with long-time healthcare investor Camille Samuels for TechCrunch. “The reason you hear about cancer and orphan diseases so much is that you can price high in those areas,” the Venrock partner explains. “In therapeutic areas where you can’t price high because there are already a bunch of generics on the market — pain, depression, other huge unmet needs — you don’t see as much innovation. It’s a matter of [businesses] following the incentives. With infectious disease, you’ve got this problem that maybe someone even a year ago predicted might become a problem, but when it’s a potential and not an actual problem, it’s hard to get investors to fund something like that.”

Three cofounders is the magic team number for pre-seed investors

What are the main characteristics of successful pre-seed fundings these days? Docsend, the document management company that thousands of founders use to share decks with investors, has a new report out that surveys recent pre-seed fundings to determine what success is looking like these days. Resident former VC Danny Crichton dug into the data — based on an anonymized survey of founder-users — and highlighted some surprising trends on TechCrunch. Here’s one: companies with larger founding teams were able to raise with fewer meetings, but the companies that averaged the largest raises per number of meetings have three cofounders.

CEO and TechCrunch/Extra Crunch columnist Russ Huddleston also said that the quality bar for products appear to have gone up. “We used to say you could get funding with an MVPP (minimum viable PowerPoint),” he said, “but VCs are spending a significant amount of time looking at the product pages of successful decks, and really expect a level of product readiness that we didn’t see five years ago.”

A16z general partner Connie Chan talks the future of consumer tech (including remote-first bets) 

With a recent investment in virtual conferencing startup Run the World, Connie Chan is at the forefront of consumer investing trends as we know them today. She sat down with Connie (Loizos) for a wide-ranging interview on Extra Crunch, here are a few highlights:

  • On D2C: “It’s less specific almost about what the product is, but the market they’re going after, and what kind of margins you have to play with from a marketing standpoint.”
  • On remote-first trends in China right now: “People are spending more time at home, so whether it’s games or streaming or whatever they’re doing at home is doing well. Lots of my counterparts in China are also taking all their pitches via video conference. They’re still doing work, but they’re all just working from home.”
  •  On the potential for a ‘super app’ like WeChat: “WeChat started as a communications platform, so naturally you would think communication is a great place. But the other big ingredient of a super app is the payments layer, or some kind of connection to either your credit card credentials or your bank account. So in that sense, anything else that powers transactions also has a really good shot of doing it right. Like, if I’m using DoorDash to order food, why not also use it to order X and Y and Z that also requires a credit card checkout or also requires some kind of logistical delivery. If you look at GoJek or Grab in Southeast Asia, that’s exactly what they’ve done. They started in transportation, but they also do grocery, they do food, they do loans, they do fintech. They do everything in one place.”

TechCrunch Senior Editor Alex Wilhelm

Who is Alex Wilhelm?

Alex is a long-time writer, editor and analyst who fully rejoined TechCrunch recently to write prolifically on topics including but definitely not limited to a daily finance column for Extra Crunch about the $100m ARR club, unicorn IPOs, business models, investing trends and other topics that are most dear to our startup audience. He is also the host of the popular Equity podcast, a real mensch, and like me, from Corvallis, Oregon. Given how popular he is with our core readers, we decided to get him talking about himself a little more in this Q&A on TechCrunch.

Across the week

TechCrunch

New AngelList data set sheds light on the signaling risks of seed-stage investments

SXSW cancels its 400K-person conference due to coronavirus

SF poised to pass Prop E, which could significantly reduce new supply of startup office space

Startup Battlefield applications for TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2020 are now open

Why you can’t overlook the small details in the pursuit of innovation

Extra Crunch

Oyo layoffs, Airbnb’s delayed IPO and the long-term quandary of investing in travel startups

Understanding 2020’s early-stage fundraising market

Break-even ads can generate free brand awareness

Inside the effort to turn startups into zebras, not unicorns

Lerer Hippeau’s Ben Lerer shares his priorities for scouring seed deals

Dear Sophie: I live in India and run a startup

#EquityPod

Here’s what’s in the latest episode, via Alex:

  • Kleiner has more money, again. About a year after raising a $600 million vehicle, Kleiner Perkins raised a new, larger fund. Now flush with $700 million, the longstanding venture group has more money to play with than it has in recent memory. For early-stage deals, that is.
  • Atrium shut down after raising $75 million. Investors got some of their money back, but the company had to lay off its 100 employees. The lesson here is that famous backers and tenured founders can’t will something into existence that doesn’t work.
  • OYO is laying people off. Again. The major SoftBank Vision Fund-backed Indian hotel brand was supposed to be a massive hit. Now, with novel coronavirus and other challenges, it and global tourism are hitting snags.
  • We also poked at the Robinhood downtime that came during a period of sharp trading swings. The company has a lot of work to do to recover user trust, and continue to grow into its valuation. (More on that here.)
  • Zoom was the day’s good news, posting strong earnings (here), possibly indicating that remote-work companies are seeing demand for their products.

And don’t miss the Equity Shot from this Tuesday, which Alex and Danny put together about activist fund Elliott Management. It has just bought a large stake in Twitter and is trying to remove founder and CEO Jack Dorsey(!).

Want Startups Weekly or any of the other great newsletters from TechCrunch in your inbox? Subscribe here


Source: Tech Crunch

GM reveals an EV for (almost) every purse and purpose

General Motors’ EV day didn’t just mark the launch of a new flexible battery architecture and an ambitious plan to deploy this underlying foundation across all of the automaker’s brands, including Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet and GMC.

It was a resurrection, albeit with a modern twist.

The company’s announcement this week gave new life to its brand ladder — a portfolio that ranges from the heights of luxury to the most basic utility — and tipped its hand about how it will bring EVs “across the chasm.

This game plan isn’t new. GM is bringing back a strategy that once defined its success and reshaped America’s automotive landscape. This strategy worked for GM until complacency crept in and the brand ladder collapsed. This time, GM is aiming to avoid these snares.

History lesson

Henry Ford’s moving assembly line birthed the early auto industry, but as American prosperity grew in the 1910s-20s, it was General Motors that laid the foundations of the modern car market. Under then-chairman Alfred Sloan, the amalgamation of once-independent automakers united under a strategy that would, in his words, create “a car for every purse and purpose.” From a value Chevrolet to a sporty Pontiac, from a discreetly plush Buick to a majestic Cadillac, and with countless brands in between, what became known as Sloanism birthed the idea that there should be a car to reflect every American’s self-image and social status.


Source: Tech Crunch

VCs warn coronavirus will impact fundraising for the next 2 quarters

As of this writing, COVID-19 has killed more than 3,400 people around the globe and the coronavirus has infected tens of thousands more. But its impact has gone much further, causing major disruptions in public markets and leading corporations to pull out of conferences and delay travel. Big tech companies are asking workers to stay home and investors are now urging startups to prepare accordingly.

Sequoia Capital sent a letter to its founders on Thursday warning that the coronavirus was a “black swan” event and startups should “brace themselves for turbulence” by considering if they have enough cash and preparing to face supply chain disruptions. The letter also warned they could have a harder time fundraising, similar to the market downturns of 2001 and 2009.

The coronavirus effect is rippling throughout the tech world. Seattle, which has seen a cluster of cases, seems almost a ghost town in some parts, according to entrepreneur and former Madrona Capital partner Shauna Causey. She told TechCrunch that many of the coffee shops and co-working spaces popular among VCs have gone empty in the last week and all of her fundraising meetings are conducted via Zoom.

And already there’s some chatter that funding might be drying up for early-stage startups, though Bloomberg Beta’s Roy Bahat tells TechCrunch that startups should always be fundraising as soon as they can to protect themselves from this type of calamity.


Source: Tech Crunch

This Week in Apps: Google I/O canceled over coronavirus, App Store gets updated rules, TikTok’s owner launches Spotify rival

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all.

The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads in 2019 and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019, according to App Annie’s recently released “State of Mobile” annual report. People are now spending 3 hours and 40 minutes per day using apps, rivaling TV. Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus.

In this Extra Crunch series, we help you keep up with the latest news from the world of apps, delivered on a weekly basis.

This week, we’re looking at the further impact of the coronavirus on the app industry, which is now leading to more major event cancellations — including, as of this week, Google I/O and SXSW. That begs the question, will WWDC be next? And what will that mean for developers who rely on the annual event to make those invaluable face-to-face connections? We’re also looking at the revised App Store review guidelines and what that means for developers, as well as Walmart’s plan to dramatically change its app strategy, Robinhood’s bad week, the launch of a new Spotify competitor from the makers of the world’s most viral app, TikTok and much more.

Headlines

Apple changes the rules

Apple this week alerted developers to a new set of App Store review guidelines that detail which apps will be accepted or rejected, and what apps are allowed to do. The changes to the guidelines impact reviews, push notifications, Sign in with Apple, data collection and storage, mobile device management and more, the company says. Some of the more high-profile changes include the ability for apps to now use notifications for ads, stricter rules for dating and fortune-telling apps and a new rule that allows Apple to reject apps that help users evade law enforcement, among other things.


Source: Tech Crunch