News: Is Washington prepared for a geopolitical ‘tech race’?

• May 1, 2021
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When Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan sat down with Chinese officials in Anchorage, Alaska for the first high-level bilateral summit of the new administration, it was not a typical diplomatic meeting. Instead of a polite but restrained diplomatic exchange, the two sides traded pointed barbs for almost two hours.

When Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan sat down with Chinese officials in Anchorage, Alaska for the first high-level bilateral summit of the new administration, it was not a typical diplomatic meeting. Instead of a polite but restrained diplomatic exchange, the two sides traded pointed barbs for almost two hours. “There is growing consensus that the era of engagement with China has come to an unceremonious close,” wrote Sullivan and Kurt Campbell, the Administration’s Asia czar also in attendance, back in 2019. How apt that they were present for that moment’s arrival.

A little more than one hundred days into the Biden Administration, there is no shortage of views on how it should handle this new era of Sino-American relations. From a blue-ribbon panel assembled by former Google Chairman Eric Schmidt to a Politico essay from an anonymous former Trump Administration official that consciously echoes (in both its name and its author’s anonymity) George Kennan’s famous “Long Telegram” laying out the theory of Cold War containment, to countless think tank reports, it seems everyone is having their say.

What is largely uncontroversial though is that technology is at the center of U.S.-China relations, and any competition with China will be won or lost in the digital and cyber spheres. “Part of the goal of the Alaska meeting was to convince the Chinese that the Biden administration is determined to compete with Beijing across the board to offer competitive technology,” wrote David Sanger in the New York Times shortly afterward.

But what, exactly, does a tech-centered China strategy look like? And what would it take for one to succeed?

Tech has brought Republicans and Democrats uneasily together

One encouraging sign is that China has emerged as one of the few issues on which even Democrats agree that President Trump had some valid points. “Trump really was the spark that reframed the entire debate around U.S.-China relations in DC,” says Jordan Schneider, a China analyst at the Rhodium Group and the host of the ChinaTalk podcast and newsletter.

While many in the foreign policy community favored some degree of cooperation with China before the Trump presidency, now competition – if not outright rivalry – is widely assumed. “Democrats, even those who served in the Obama Administration, have become much more hawkish,” says Erik Brattberg of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Trump has caused “the Overton Window on China [to become] a lot narrower than it was before,” adds Schneider.

As the U.S.-China rivalry has evolved, it has become more and more centered around competing philosophies on the use of technology. “At their core, democracies are open systems that believe in the free flow of information, whereas for autocrats, information is something to be weaponized and stifled in the service of the regime,” says Lindsay Gorman, Fellow for Emerging Technologies at the German Marshall Fund. “So it’s not too surprising that technology, so much of which is about how we store and process and leverage information, has become such a focus of the U.S.-China relationship and of the [broader] democratic-autocratic competition around the world.”

Tech touches everything now – and the stakes could not be higher. “Tech and the business models around tech are really ‘embedded ideology,’’ says Tyson Barker of the German Council on Foreign Relations. “So what tech is and how it is used is a form of governance.”

What does that mean in practice? When Chinese firms expand around the world, Barker tells me, they bring their norms with them. So when Huawei builds a 5G network in Latin America, or Alipay is adopted for digital payments in Central Europe, or Xiaomi takes more market share in Southeast Asia, they are helping digitize those economies on Chinese terms using Chinese norms (as opposed to American ones). The implication is clear: whoever defines the future of technology will determine the rest of the twenty-first century.

That shifting balance has focused minds in Washington. “I think there is a strong bipartisan consensus that technology is at the core of U.S.-China competition,” says Brattberg. But, adds Gorman, “there’s less agreement on what the prescription should be.” While the Democratic experts now ascendant in Washington agree with Trump’s diagnosis of the China challenge, they believe in a vastly different approach from their Trump Administration predecessors.

Out, for instance, are restrictions on Chinese firms just for being Chinese. “That was one of the problems with Trump,” says Walter Kerr, a former U.S. diplomat who publishes the China Journal Review. “Trump cast broad strokes, targeting firms whether it was merited or not. Sticking it to the Chinese is not a good policy.”

Instead the focus is on inward investment – and outward cooperation.

Foreign policy is domestic policy

Democrats are first shoring up America domestically – in short, be strong at home to be strong abroad. “There’s no longer a bright line between foreign and domestic policy,” President Biden said in his first major foreign policy speech. “Every action we take in our conduct abroad, we must take with American working families in mind. Advancing a foreign policy for the middle class demands urgent focus on our domestic economic renewal.”

This is a particular passion of Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, who immersed himself in domestic policy while he was Hillary Clinton’s chief policy aide during her 2016 presidential campaign. “We’ve reached a point where foreign policy is domestic policy, and domestic policy is foreign policy,” he told NPR during the transition.

This is increasingly important for technology, as concern grows that America is lagging behind on research and development. “We’re realizing that we’ve underinvested in the government grants and research and development projects that American companies [need] to become highly innovative in fields like quantum computing, AI, biotechnology, etc,” says Kerr.

“Rebuilding” or “sustaining” America’s “technological leadership” is a major theme of the Longer Telegram and is the very operating premise of the report of the China Strategy Group assembled by Eric Schmidt, former executive chairman of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, and the first chair of the Department of Defense’s Innovation Advisory Board. Those priorities have only become more important during the pandemic. It’s a question of “how do we orient the research system to fill in the industrial gaps that have been made very clear by the COVID crisis?” says Schneider of Rhodium.

While it hasn’t gone so far as to adopt a national industrial strategy, the Administration’s most ambitious officials are looking to prod along tech research in critical sectors. To that end, the National Security Council, which Sullivan runs, is reshaping itself around technology issues; Biden appointed the first deputy national security advisor focusing on technology issues as well as a high-profile senior director for technology. Their goal: to harness the same energy that drove the development of Silicon Valley during the Cold War into out-competing China.

That said, the ingredients to American (and Western) innovation aren’t exactly a secret: investment in education, research, and talent. “The West still has [most of] the universities, R&D and leading companies,” says Brattberg. “There’s still a lot of competitiveness and leverage.” Unsurprisingly, investing to retain that edge is a key theme of Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure plan, which includes funds for basic research, supply chain support, broadband connectivity, and support for the semiconductor industry.

As almost anyone in Silicon Valley will tell you, a functioning and welcoming immigration system is a crucial ingredient, too. “The U.S. is at its best when it welcomes talent from around the world and gives people the tools to succeed and thrive here,” says Gorman. Whether the Biden Administration can strike a deal with Senate Republicans on comprehensive immigration reform – or even funding basic research – remains an open question, though. And even if it can succeed, American ingenuity is no longer sufficient on its own.

Team America

Whether it’s for talent or partnerships, the U.S.-China tech competition will be won overseas. Allies are “the most salient and straightforward way Biden can bring leverage to the table compared to Trump,” says Schneider.

Biden, Blinken, and other senior administration officials have loudly and repeatedly pronounced their preferences to work with democratic partners on international challenges, particularly in the Indo-Pacific region. It is no accident that Blinken and Sullivan’s meeting in Anchorage was preceded by a trip to Japan and South Korea, two of America’s closest allies in the region, and that Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga was the first foreign leader to visit Biden at the White House. “If you add the U.S. to the EU, Australia, Taiwan, and South Korea, you tilt the balance of economic heft and technological prowess back toward us,” he adds.

The ground for Blinken and company is increasingly fertile. Chinese diplomats have been aggressive, if not downright condescending, to countries they perceive have slighted China. In one recent example, the Chinese embassy in Dublin sent a series of tweets targeting an Irish-British journalist couple who had been forced to relocate to Taiwan as a result of a harassment campaign over their critical coverage of China’s Uyghur policy in Xinjiang. This so-called ‘wolf warrior’ diplomacy (a reference to a jingoist action film) is prompting a backlash, and helping convince many policy elites in countries who had hoped to sit out a U.S.-China conflict that perhaps Washignton’s China skeptics have a point.

This perhaps explains the proliferating alpha-numeric soup of coalitions and alliances being floated to secure a free and democratic internet for the future. There’s the D10, a secure supply chain network floated by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, which adds Australia, India, and South Korea to the existing G7 countries (U.S., U.K., Canada, France, Italy, Germany, and Japan). Schmidt’s report calls for a T-12 (the D10 minus Italy plus Finland, Sweden, and Israel). Others look to expand existing technology-related groupings like the Five Eyes signals intelligence alliance of the U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, or harness burgeoning non-technical ones like the Quad. Gorman points to the significance of the news that the Quad itself – Australia, India, Japan, and the US – announced the creation of a working group on emerging technology at its first-ever (virtual) leaders summit in March.

Meanwhile, Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, has proposed a technology partnership to be run out of the State Department to coordinate with allies – including a $5 billion fund for research – with the explicit purpose of countering China.

International tech standards are increasingly not set by the West

Even if it can shephard its allies, the U.S. still faces stiff international headwinds. The Trump Administration’s decision to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal negotiated by the Obama Administration with ten other Pacific Rim countries with the intent of setting trade standards in the Asia-Pacific, was taken as a sign that perhaps the U.S. pivot to Asia was less ambitious than advertised. The pact, rebranded as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), has continued without the U.S.  – and now even China has expressed interest in joining.

Trump’s disdain for working within multilateral forums has also meant that Washington has essentially ceded the field of global technical standard-setting. Beijing has taken advantage, aggressively working the UN system so that Chinese officials now lead four of the 15 specialized UN agencies, including the two most focused on regulating technology: the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), which helps set global technical standards, and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), which is responsible for protecting intellectual property rights around the world.

China is also backing Russian efforts to rewrite internet governance. With Chinese support, Russia won a UN General Assembly vote in 2019 to start drafting a new cybercrime treaty. Their goal is to replace the U.S-backed 2001 Budapest Convention on Cybercrime, which was  created by democracies through the Council of Europe, with a treaty that one critic said would include provisions “likely to provide cover to authoritarian governments to persecute their political opponents.” Russia and China also unsuccessfully tried to use the (now Chinese-led) ITU to replace the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a private body of experts that governs internet domain names.

These efforts are all part of China Standards 2035, an explicit plan to internationalize standards to Chinese preferences in areas like 5G and the Internet of Things (IoT). As Emily de La Bruyère and Nathan Picarsic wrote on TechCrunch last year, “Beijing has spent the past two decades establishing influential footholds in multilateral bodies and targeted industrial areas. Now, it is using those footholds to set their rules – with them, to define the infrastructure of the future world.”

Hawks, doves, and U.S. divisions

Even within the new consensus on China, there are fissures on how to handle China itself.

On the hawkish side, the Schmidt Report concedes that “some degree of technological bifurcation is in U.S. interests.” But calibrating just how much is a difficult question. “It’s already a reality,” says Barker of the German Council on Foreign Relations. “The question is: how deep does the split have to be?”

Few argue for complete decoupling, Brattberg, the Carnegie scholar who has written extensively on tech diplomacy, says. After all, many are loath to concede completely separate ‘free’ and ‘authoritarian’ internets. There are other implications as well: a “bipolar, bifurcated internet … would have some very serious adverse implications in terms of cost [and] a slowdown in innovation,” one former UK intelligence official told me last year.

The key is to pinpoint which specific technologies are essential to produce domestically. “To the extent we [decouple from China], we have to do it in a smart way,” says Gorman. “There’s a risk of going too far and hurting potential innovation in the U.S. So the debate going forward is going to be: How do you address true national security vulnerabilities without emulating an authoritarian approach that might say ‘just ban everything from a certain country.’”

And even if we can form a consensus at home, America’s allies are no less divided as I wrote last year with regards to Huawei. While the debate over the Chinese company’s role in 5G has evolved, with both France and the U.K. (in a reversal) moving to phase out its kit, the debate over what role China should play economically and technologically in Europe is still very much alive.

The U.K. government is clear-eyed; in its Integrated Review of foreign and defense policy published in March, it acknowledged that China’s “growing international assertiveness … will pose an increasing risk to UK interests” and set an explicit goal for itself to be a third “science and tech superpower.” France, meanwhile, laid out an Indo-Pacific strategy backing the principle of a free and open Pacific, an explicit challenge to Chinese preferences.

But many are still equivocal. As Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong wrote last year in Foreign Affairs, “Asian countries do not want to be forced to choose between the two.” Berlin made clear in its Indo-Pacific strategy last year that it was also reticent to make an outright choice. New Zealand, conscious of its important trade with China, is reluctant to expand the use of Five Eyes beyond intelligence sharing. Meanwhile, Italy endorsed China’s infrastructure-focused Belt and Road Initiative in 2019 and called the country a “strategic partner” last year. And the European Union moved forward on a trade deal with China late last year despite very public lobbying against it from the United States.

A world of tradeoffs

The challenge for the Biden Administration will be to assemble practical coalitions without asking allies and partners to make impossible choices. They will succeed if they can reframe the question. “In Europe, they don’t like ‘decoupling’ but they do like ‘diversification’,” says Brattberg. They also don’t like the idea of joining a U.S.-led alliance. Instead, he says, Washington should frame cooperation as “coalitions among like-minded democrtaic partners.”

For that to work, the U.S. will have to work out the bilateral issues it has with its allies first. “We need to be much more savvy on engaging directly with the EU on resolving issues like data transfers, digital taxation, and data privacy,” he said. “Digital sovereignty shouldn’t come at the expense of partnership with like-minded partners.”

Nimbleness will be key – multiple experts told me it will be far better to create ad hoc coalitions on particular issues than to create a single fixed democratic tech alliance. This would have the benefit of keeping groupings tight without excluding countries with key expertise in particular areas (think Sweden and 5G or Taiwan and semiconductors). Washington should also take a collegiate approach, recognizing and respecting that its allies will not always be in lock-step on every aspect of the relations with China. In other words, the U.S. shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, as agreement most of the time on most issues is probably sufficient to create the momentum Washington needs.

The U.S. can still compete globally and widen the circle of like-minded countries, Gorman, the scholar at GMF, tells me, but it has to invest in them if they are going to build out their tech sectors in a way that is aligned with democratic values and standards. “It’s really about providing an attractive counteroffer,” she said.

Even if the United States retains its technological edge for the near future, Americans should start adjusting to a future where Silicon Valley’s dominance is no longer inevitable. Chinese technologists are pulling ahead in areas like 5G while Chinese firms are competing on price (mobile phones) and increasingly on quality (e-commerce) and innovation (see: TikTok). China also exerts enormous clout through its control of supply chains and rare earth metals as well as its vast customer base.

Perhaps China’s greatest leverage point is its looming presence over Taiwan. As long as Taiwan remains one of the leading manufacturers of semiconductors (chip giant TSMC manufactures 90% of the world’s most advanced chips), the world’s technology industry will be vulnerable to the precarity of cross-Strait relations.

Will technology become just another chip in the geopolitical game the U.S. and China are playing, then? The Biden Administration is more prepared than its predecessor to weigh the tradeoffs, Barker of the German Council on Foreign Relation retells me. But it’s unclear how Washington, so early in this administration, will prioritize technology issues if faced with the prospects of Chinese cooperation on other priorities.

After all, at any given moment, the U.S. (and its allies) must weigh a host of priorities vis-à-vis China. And for all of the downsides to its bellicosity, the Trump Administration’s fixation on a handful of issues gave it leverage: it was willing to ignore Uyghurs and other human rights abuses in order to get a trade deal (even if it was deeply flawed).

The Biden Administration, on the other hand, has not yet articulated any priorities at all. If the rhetoric from Washington can be believed, the White House thinks it can make progress on climate, Taiwan, trade, human rights, and any number of other areas, all at once. This on its own creates a vulnerability. As historian Niall Ferguson reminded us in a recent Bloomberg column, then National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger was outmaneuvered when he went to China in 1971 with a multi-issue agenda and China singularly focused on Taiwan.

Beijing’s diplomats, despite their wolf-warrior missteps, are still savvy negotiators. If they are allowed to do so, they will once again try to play different parts of the Administration against each other, conditioning progress on climate, for example, on a softening over geopolitics, as the Brookings scholar Thomas Wright has warned. In that light, it simply strains credulity that an ‘all of the above’ approach will work, especially when Biden’s wish list keeps the issues Trump cared about, like trade, 5G, and Taiwan, and adds those he ignored, like human rights, democracy, and climate change.

This is where America’s alliances may prove to be Biden’s hidden ace. If Biden can forge a common-enough front with a wide-enough spectrum of allies, the U.S. will be better able to withstand Chinese pressure to trade progress on one issue against another. Instead, forcing China to negotiate with the U.S. and its allies on an issue-by-issue basis may put Washington in a better position to succeed.

Of all the issues in America’s China portfolio, though, the tech race provides one extra advantage: for all the talk of industrial strategy, alliances, and diplomatic maneuvers, Washington is not the only or even primary actor involved. The Biden Administration can help set the rules, invest in basic research, and defend American interests abroad, but American innovation depends on its innovators – and there are still bountiful numbers of them tinkering away.

News: The most disastrous sales cycle in the world

• May 1, 2021
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Startups constantly talk about being mission-oriented, but it’s hard to take most of those messages seriously when the mission is optimizing cash flow for tax efficiency. However, a new generation of startups is emerging that are taking on some of the largest global challenges and bringing the same entrepreneurial grit, operational excellence, and technical brilliance

Startups constantly talk about being mission-oriented, but it’s hard to take most of those messages seriously when the mission is optimizing cash flow for tax efficiency. However, a new generation of startups is emerging that are taking on some of the largest global challenges and bringing the same entrepreneurial grit, operational excellence, and technical brilliance to bear on actual missions — ones that may well save thousands of lives.

ClimateTech has been a huge beneficiary of this trend in general, but one small specialty has caught my eye: disaster response. It’s a category for software services that’s percolated for years with startups here and there, but now a new crop of founders is taking on the challenges of this space with renewed urgency and vigor.

As the elevator pitch would have it, disaster response is hitting hockey stick growth. 2020 was a brutal year, and in more ways than just the global COVID-19 pandemic. The year also experienced a record number of hurricanes, among the worst wildfire seasons in the Western United States, and several megastorms all across the world. Climate change, urbanization, population growth, and poor response practices have combined to create some of the most dangerous conditions humanity has ever collectively faced.

I wanted to get a sense of what the disaster response market has in store this decade, so over the past few weeks, I have interviewed more than 30 startup founders, investors, government officials, utility execs and more to understand this new landscape and what’s changed. In this four-part series on the future of technology and disaster response, to be published this weekend and next, we’ll look at the sales cycle in this market, how data is finally starting to flow into disaster response, how utilities and particularly telcos are dealing with internet access issues, and how communities are redefining disaster management going forward.

Before we get into all the tech developments in disaster response and resilience though, it’s important to ask a basic question: if you build it, will they come? The resounding answer from founders, investors, and government procurement officials was simple: no.

In fact, in all my conversations for this series, the hell of the emergency management sales cycle came up repeatedly, with more than one individual describing it as possibly the toughest sale that any company could make in the entire world. That view might be surprising in a market that easily runs into the tens of billions of dollars if the budgets for procurement are aggregated across local, state, federal, and international governments. Yet, as we will see, the unique dynamics of this market make almost any traditional sales approach useless.

Despite that pessimism though, that doesn’t mean sales are impossible, and a new crop of startups are piercing the barriers of entry in this market. We’ll look at the sales and product strategies that startups are increasingly relying on today to break through.

The sale from hell

Few will be surprised that government sales are hard. Generations of govtech startup founders have learned that slow sales cycles, byzantine procurement processes, cumbersome verification and security requirements, and a general lassitude among contract officers makes for a tough battlefield to close on revenue. Many government agencies now have programs to specifically onboard startups, having discovered just how hard it is for new innovations to run through their gauntlet.

Emergency management sales share all the same problems as other govtech startups, but then they deal with about a half dozen more problems that make the sales cycle go from exhausting to infernal hell.

The first and most painful is the dramatic seasonality of the sales in the emergency space. Many agencies that operate on seasonal disasters — think hurricanes, wildfires, winter storms, and more — often go through an “action” period where they respond to these disasters, and then transition into a “planning” period where they assess their performance, determine what changes are needed for next season, and consider what tools might be added or removed to increase the effectiveness of their responders.

Take Cornea and Perimeter, two startups in the wildfire response space that I profiled recently. Both of the teams described how they needed to think in terms of fire seasons when it came to product iteration and sales. “We took two fire seasons to beta test our technology … to solve the right problem the right way,” Bailey Farren, CEO and co-founder of Perimeter, said. “We actually changed our focus on beta testing during the [2019 California] Kincaid fire.”

In this way, disaster tech could be compared to edtech, where school technology purchases are often synchronized with the academic calendar. Miss the June through August window in the U.S. education system, and a startup is looking at another year before it will get another chance at the classroom.

Edtech might once have been a tougher sale to make in order to thread that three-month needle, but disaster response is getting more difficult every year. Climate change is exacerbating the length, severity, and damage caused by all types of disasters, which means that responding agencies that might have had six months or more out-of-season to plan in the past are sometimes working all year long just to respond to emergencies. That gives little time to think about what new solutions an agency needs to purchase.

Worse, unlike the standardized academic calendar, disasters are much less predictable these days as well. Flood and wildfire seasons, for instance, used to be relatively concentrated in certain periods of the year. Now, such emergencies can emerge practically year-round. That means that procurement processes can both start and freeze on a moment’s notice as an agency has to respond to its mission.

Seasonality doesn’t just apply to the sales cycle though — it also applies to the budgets of these agencies. While they are transpiring, disasters dominate the eye of the minds for citizens and politicians, but then we forget all about them until the next catastrophe. Unlike the annual consistency of other government tech spending, disaster tech funding often comes in waves.

One senior federal emergency management official, who asked not to be named since he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly, explained that consistent budgets and the ability to spend them quickly is quite limited during “blue sky days” (i.e. periods without a disaster), and agencies like his have to rely on piecing together supplementary disaster funds when Congress or state legislatures authorize additional financing. The best agencies have technological roadmaps on hand so that when extra funding comes in, they can use it immediately to realize their plans, but not all agencies have the technical planning resources to be that prepared.

Amir Elichai, the CEO and co-founder of Carbyne, a cloud-native platform for call handling in 911 centers, said that this wave of interest crested yet again with the COVID-19 pandemic last year, triggering huge increases in attention and funding around emergency response capabilities. “COVID put a mirror in front of government faces and showed them that ‘we’re not ready’,” he said.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, next-generation 911 services (typically dubbed NG911), which have been advocated for years by the industry and first responders, is looking at a major financing boost. President Biden’s proposed infrastructure bill would add $15 billion to upgrade 911 capabilities in the United States — funding that has been requested for much of the last decade. Just last year, a $12 billion variant of that bill failed in the Senate after passing the U.S. House of Representatives.

Sales are all about providing proverbial painkillers versus vitamins to customers, and one would expect that disaster response agencies looking to upgrade their systems would be very much on the painkiller side. After all, the fear and crisis surrounding these agencies and their work would seem to bring visceral attention to their needs.

Yet, that fear actually has the opposite effect in many cases, driving attention away from systematic technology upgrades in favor of immediate acute solutions. One govtech VC, who asked not to be named to speak candidly about the procurement process his companies go through, said that “we don’t want to paint the picture that the world is a scary and dangerous place.” Instead, “the trick is to be … focused on the safety side rather than the danger.” Safety is a much more prevalent and consistent need than sporadically responding to emergencies.

When a wave of funding finally gets approved though, agencies often have to scramble to figure out what to prioritize now that the appropriated manna has finally dropped from the legislative heaven. Even when startups provide the right solutions, scrying which problems are going to get funded in a particular cycle requires acute attention to every customer.

Josh Mendelsohn, the managing partner at startup studio and venture fund Hangar, said that “the customers have no shortage of needs that they are happy to talk about … the hardest part is how you narrow the funnel — what are the problems that are most meritorious?” That merit can, unfortunately, evolve very rapidly as mission requirements change.

Let’s say all the stars line up though — the agencies have time to buy, they have a need, and a startup has the solution that they want. The final challenge that’s probably the toughest to overcome is simply the lack of trust that new startups have with agencies.

In talking to emergency response officials the past few weeks, reliability unsurprisingly came up again and again. Responding to disasters is mission-critical work, and nothing can break in the field or in the operations center. Frontline responders still use paper and pens in lieu of tablets or mobile phones since they know that paper is going to work every single time and not run out of battery juice. The move fast and break things ethos of Silicon Valley is fundamentally incompatible with this market.

Seasonality, on-and-off funding, lack of attention, procurement scrambling, and acute reliability requirements combine to make emergency management sales among the hardest possible for a startup. That doesn’t even get into all the typical govtech challenges like integrating with legacy systems, the massive fragmentation of thousands of emergency response agencies littered across the United States and globally, and the fact that in many agencies, people aren’t that interested in change in the first place. As one individual in the space described how governments approach emergency technology, “a lot of departments are looking at it as maybe I can hit retirement before I have to deal with it.”

The strategies for breaking out of limbo

So the sales cycle is hell. Why, then, are VCs dropping money in the sector? After all, we’ve seen emergency response data platform RapidSOS raise $85 million just a few months ago, about the same time Carbyne raised $25 million. There are quite a few more startups at the earliest phases that have raised pre-seed and seed investment as well.

The key argument that nearly everyone in this sector agreed on is that founders (and their investors) have to throw away their private-sector sales playbooks and rebuild their approach from the bottom up to sell specifically to these agencies. That means devising entirely different strategies and tactics to secure revenue performance.

The first and most important approach is, in some respects, to not even start with a company at all, but rather to start learning what people in this field actually do. As the sales cycle perhaps indicates, disaster response is unlike any other work. The chaos, the rapidly changing environment, the multi-disciplinary teams and cross-agency work that has to take place for a response to be effective have few parallels to professional office work. Empathy is key here: the responder that uses paper might have nearly lost their life in the field when their device failed. A 911 center operator may have listened to someone perish in real-time as they scrambled to find the right information from a software database.

In short, it’s all about customer discovery and development. That’s not so different from the enterprise world, but patience radiated out of many of my conversations with industry participants. It just takes more time — sometimes multiple seasons — to figure out precisely what to build and how to sell it effectively. If an enterprise SaaS product can iterate to market-fit in six months, it might take two to three years in the government sector to reach an equivalent point.

Michael Martin of RapidSOS said “There is no shortcut to doing customer discovery work in public service.” He noted that “I do think there is a real challenge between the arrogance of the Silicon Valley tech community and the reality of these challenges“ in public safety, a gap that has to be closed if a startup wants to find success. Meanwhile, Bryce Stirton, president and co-founder of public-safety company Responder Corp, said that “The end user is the best way to look at all the challenges … what are all the boxes the end user has to check to use a new technology?”

Mendelsohn of Hangar said that founders need to answer some tough questions in that process. “Ultimately, what are your entry points,” he asked. “Cornea has had to go through that customer discovery process … it all feels necessary, but what are the right things that require the least amount of behavior change to have impact immediately?”

Indeed, that process is appreciated on the other side as well. The federal emergency management official said, “everyone has a solution, but no one asked me about my problem.” Getting the product right and having it match the unique work that takes place in this market is key.

Let’s say you have a great product though — how do you get it through the perilous challenges of the procurement process? Here, answers differed widely, and they offer multiple strategies on how to approach the problem.

Martin of RapidSOS said that “government does not have a good model for procuring new services to solve problems.” So, the company chose to make its services free for government. “In three years, we went from no agencies using our stuff to all agencies using our stuff, and that was based on not making it a procurement problem,” he said. The company’s business model is based on having paid corporate partners who want to integrate their data into 911 centers for safety purposes.

That’s a similar model used by MD Ally, which received a $3.5 million seed check from General Catalyst this past week. The company adds telehealth referral services into 911 dispatch systems, and CEO and founder Shanel Fields emphasized that she saw an opportunity to create a revenue engine from the physician and mental health provider side of her market while avoiding government procurement.

Outside of what might be dubbed “Robinhood for government” (aka, just offering a service for free), another approach is to link up with more well-known and trusted brand names to offer a product that has the innovation of a startup but the reliability of an established player. Stirton of Responder said “we learned in [this market] that it takes more than just capital to get companies started in this space.” What he found worked was building private-sector partnerships to bring a joint offering to governments. For instance, he noted cloud providers Amazon Web Services and Verizon have good reputations with governments and can get startups over procurement hurdles (TechCrunch is owned by Verizon Media, which is owned by Verizon).

Elichai of Carbyne notes that much of his sales is done through integration partners, referencing CenterSquare as one example. For 911 services, “The U.S. market is obviously the most fragmented” and so partners allow the company to avoid selling to thousands of different agencies. “We are usually not selling direct to governments,” he said.

Partners can also help deal with the problem of localism in emergency procurement: many government agencies don’t know precisely what to buy, so they simply buy software that is offered by companies in their own backyard. Partners can offer a local presence while also allowing a startup to have a nimble national footprint.

Another angle on partners is building out a roster of experienced but retired government executives who can give credibility to a startup through their presence and networks. Even more than in enterprise, government officials, particularly in emergency management, have to work and trust one another given the closely-coupled work that they perform. Hearing a positive recommendation from a close contact down the street can readily change the tenor of a sales conversation.

Finally, as much as emergency management software is geared for governments, private sector companies increasingly have to consider much of the same tooling to protect their operations. Many companies have distributed workforces, field teams, and physical assets they need to protect, and often have to respond to disasters in much the same way that governments do. For some startups, it’s possible to bootstrap in the private sector early on while continuing to assiduously develop public sector relationships.

In short, a long-term customer development program coupled with quality partnerships and joint offerings while not forgetting the private sector offers the best path for startups to break through into these agencies.

The good news is that the hard work can be rewarded. Not only are there serious dollars that flow through these agencies, but the agencies themselves know that they need better technology. Tom Harbour, who is chief fire officer at Cornea and formerly national director of fire management at the U.S. Forest Service, notes that “These are billions of dollars we spend … and we know we can be more efficient.” Government doesn’t always make it easy to create efficiency, but for the founders willing to go the distance, they can build impactful, profitable, and mission-driven companies.

News: This Week in Apps: EU rules Apple’s a monopoly, Spotify and Facebook team up, ATT arrives

• May 1, 2021
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Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy.

The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020.

Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices alone. And in the U.S., app usage surged ahead of the time spent watching live TV. Currently, the average American watches 3.7 hours of live TV per day, but now spends four hours per day on their mobile devices.

Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re also a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus. In 2020, investors poured $73 billion in capital into mobile companies — a figure that’s up 27% year-over-year.

This week we’re looking at the launch of Apple’s ATT, the Facebook and Spotify team-up and the latest from the EU’s antitrust investigation against Apple.

This Week in Apps will soon be a newsletter! Sign up here: techcrunch.com/newsletters

Top Stories

Here Comes ATT

Apple’s public debut of App Tracking Transparency, or ATT, is the news of the week and possibly of the year. Through a small pop-up message asking users if the app can track them, Apple has disrupted a multibillion-dollar adtech industry, altered the course of tech giants like Facebook and drawn possible lawsuits and antitrust complaints, all in the name of protecting consumer privacy. Apple does believe in privacy and user control — you can tell that from the way the company has built its technology to do things like on-device processing or permissions toggles that let people decide what their apps can and cannot do.

But Apple will also benefit from this particular privacy reform, too. Its own first-party apps can collect data and share it with other first-party apps. That means what you do in apps like the App Store, Apple News, Stocks and others can be used to personalize Apple’s own ads. And the company is prepared to capitalize on this opportunity too, with the addition of a new ad slot on the App Store (in the Suggested section on the Search tab.) If it wants to roll out more ads over time to other businesses — perhaps, those podcasts it got newly interested in after Spotify did? Or in its streaming TV service or fitness solution? Perhaps the ads it sells in Apple News? — then it would have access to valuable data it could use. Oh and the next time you open the App Store or Apple News, you won’t be bothered with one of those pesky warnings! Nope — that’s only for third-parties, a very important distinction! If you want to turn off Apple’s own ability to track you across its growing number of apps, that’s at the VERY bottom of iOS’s Privacy Settings.

We heard you like Spotify, so we put Spotify in your Facebook app

Facebook and Spotify expanded their partnership this week. The companies had earlier announced their plans to make it easier for Facebook users to stream music and podcasts from the Facebook app. On Monday, this integration began rolling out in the form of a miniplayer experience that allows Facebook users to stream from Spotify through the Facebook app on iOS or Android.

The feature is available to both free and paying Spotify users and will allow them each to hear the full song or podcast episode being shared. However, free users will then be moved into “shuffle” mode if they continue to listen after the song plays.

What’s interesting about this integration is that it’s not actually streaming Spotify through Facebook. The miniplayer activates and controls the launch and playback in the Spotify app — which is how the playback is able to continue even as the user scrolls on Facebook or if they minimize the Facebook app altogether. This gives the appearance of Facebook doing the streaming. (Songs on social! Cue Myspace vibes!)

Spotify says users can’t upgrade to Spotify Premium from the miniplayer directly, so there’s no rev share there. It’s also paying the royalties on streams, as usual. But it’s getting massive distribution through Facebook, driving signups and repeat usage, while Facebook gets a way to keep users on its app longer. Win-win. Not coincidentally, both companies now share a common enemy with Apple, whose privacy-focused changes are impacting Facebook’s ad business and whose investments in Apple Music and Podcasts are a threat to Spotify.

Weekly News

Platforms: Apple

Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) fined Apple $12.1 million for alleged app market abuse, saying Apple gave its own products a competitive advantage.

The EU is charging Apple for its anticompetitive behavior this week, nearly two years after Spotify filed its first complaint about the App Store and Apple Music. The European Commission last year opened its antitrust investigation into Apple’s business, which is also now under fire in the U.S. for similar matters.

On Friday, the European regulators stated that Apple has “abused its dominant position” in the distribution of music streaming services on the App Store, and called it a “monopoly.” The EU doesn’t think Apple should be able to force developers to use its own in-app purchase mechanism nor should it be able to restrict them from telling users where else they can pay — like the developer’s own website, for example.

Spotify founder Daniel Ek seemed happy with the news:

Apple, however, did not:

Apple is correct in pointing out that Spotify has built a massive business — which to be fair, was built both on and off the App Store. But it’s claiming a pretty big hand in that. The EU’s belief, meanwhile, is that Spotify might have been even more successful if Apple hadn’t imposed the restrictions it did, and that other smaller, streaming competitors are being harmed, too, but don’t have the power to speak up.

Now that ATT is live, Apple warns developers that it will ban apps from its App Store that offer rewards to users that enable tracking. (But seeing how the App Store is being policed as of late [or not], it seems there could be a dark market established for this sort of thing.)

The Apple-Epic trial is set to start next week. Witnesses include Epic CEO Tim Sweeney and COO Daniel Vogel, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Microsoft Xbox executive Lori Wright, Adrian Ong from Match Group and other current and former Apple execs, including Matt Fischer (App Store VP), Michael Schmid (head of game biz dev for App Store) and Craig Federighi, Eddy Cue, Scott Forstall, Eric Gray, and Phil Schiller, plus many others.

Platforms: Google

Google says it’s updating its Google Play policies for app developers to improve app quality and discoverability. Now banned is keyword stuffing in the app’s title for ASO purposes. Titles will now be limited to 30 characters and can’t use keywords that imply store performance, or promotion in the icon, title or developer name. Icons that mislead users will also be banned. Emoticons and emoji can also no longer be used. The company is additionally cracking down on preview assets to ensure they accurately represent the game or app and give users enough information to make a decision to download. They can’t use words like “free” or best” either, and must be localized and legible.

Adtech

Advertisers told The WSJ that Apple’s ATT gives Apple’s own advertising system a competitive advantage. The adtech industry, which is reeling from Apple’s changes to tracking — it’s giving users the ability to opt-out of being tracked — is making the point that there’s something in it for Apple, too, when ATT goes live.

German advertisers filed an antitrust complaint over ATT, saying the changes will negatively affect their industry with up to a 60% fall in ad revenue. Nine industry associations were behind the complaint, representing other tech giants, like Facebook, and publisher Axel Springer.

Facebook warned investors of “increased ad targeting headwinds in 2021” during its earnings call this week, mainly because of the new version of iOS and its launch of ATT. It also sent a memo to advertisers that detailed how ATT would restrict the availability of ad targeting and analytics tools, and impact audience engagement.

Augmented reality

Apple updated its Clips app (ver 3.1) to allow users to scan spaces using the LiDAR Scanner on iPhone 12 Pro and iPad Pro models in order to apply video effects to their recordings.

Fintech

Google Pay announced a series of updates for its recently revamped payments app, which include new options for grocery savings, paying for public transit and categorizing your spending. With its redesign, the app is being positioned as a key way for brands and businesses to reach customers with offers at a time when Apple is cracking down on third-party tracking.

MetaMask, the Ethereum wallet app and browser extension, said its MAUs grew 5x since October 2020 to reach 5 million monthly active users.

Social

Facebook turns Instagram toward the Clubhouse threat. The company this week announced Instagram Live users could now mute their mics and turn off their videos, which gives the live experience a more casual — and yes, Clubhouse-like, appeal.

Social networking app for women, Peanut, adds live audio rooms. The feature is somewhat like Clubhouse, but without a “stage” or clout-chasing and with topics that appeal to women.

Snapchat now has more Android users than iOS, the company noted during earnings. In Q1 2021, Snapchat reached 280M DAUs, up 22% YoY.

TikTok said it’s opening a “transparency center” in Europe that will allow outside experts to see how TikTok approaches content moderation and recommendations, as well as security and privacy. The company opened a center like this in the U.S. last year following censorship allegations.

TikTok formally announced its new CEO and COO, in a strategic reorg. ByteDance’s CFO Shouzi Chew will now also become CEO of TikTok. Vanessa Pappas, who has served as interim CEO after Disney vet Kevin Mayer’s departure, will take the role of TikTok COO, and continue with her current responsibilities.

Messaging

Telegram says it will add group video calls next month. It has also now added the ability for merchants to natively accept credit card payments in any chat through integrations with eight third-party providers, including Stripe, as well as scheduled voice chats, mini profiles for voice chats and new web versions.

Facebook disclosed there are now 1 million businesses using WhatsApp’s “click to WhatsApp” ads, and announced a new feature that will allow businesses to turn items in the WhatsApp Business Catalogs into Facebook or Instagram ads, saving steps.

Streaming & Entertainment

Pandora finally has an iOS home screen widget. What took it so long? The widget comes in three sizes and lets users view and play as many as seven of their most-recently played songs, albums, stations, playlists or podcasts.

The Bally Sports app, which is replacing Fox Sports GO, has now arrived. The app offers livestreamed games, tracks scores, states and standings, and offers game previews and highlights from games.

Dating app S’More is pivoting to become more of a “lifestyle brand” by adding a new feature called S’More TV which will stream dating-related interviews with celebs, like WWE and reality TV stars. The video content could then serve as a conversation starter — something Tinder has done in the past with its interactive series “Swipe Night.”

Clubhouse partners with the NFL for draft week programming. This is the first sports partnership for the audio app and saw the NFL creating a series of draft-themed rooms throughout the week.

Spotify says it will rename Locker Room service (the live audio app and Clubhouse rival it just acquired) “Spotify Greenroom.” The company told investors live audio could mean more than spoken word content — it could also include early previews of new albums, too.

Spotify redesigns “Your Library.” The new version ditches the big tabs at the top for “Music” and “Podcasts” each with their own subsections, for a scrollable horizontal row that places all the content sections on one screen. These work as dynamic filters, allowing you to narrow down your searches. There’s also a grid view available and better sorting options.

Health & Fitness

Uber is offering its app to allow customers to schedule their COVID-19 vaccine appointments at nearby Walgreens in the U.S. Uber had previously introduced free and discounted rides to vaccine appointments with the goal of getting essential workers inoculated.

Security

A popular Android app for writing JavaScript code, DroidScript, had its Google advertising suspended and was then removed from the Google Play Store for ad fraud. The founder of the nonprofit DroidScript.org behind the app asked Google for an explanation and got no response, he said. The app was used by over 100K developers, students and professionals.

Researchers said that hundreds of preinstalled apps on Android devices would have access to a log on users’ phones where the sensitive contract tracing information was stored. Google didn’t offer a reward payout for the finding, saying that system logs haven’t been readable by unprivileged apps since the early days of Android.

Funding and M&A

Mobile bank Current raised $220 million in Series D funding after growing its user base to nearly 3 million. The funding was led by a16z and tripled Current’s valuation from the end of last year to now $2.2 billion.

Teen banking app Step raised $100 million in Series C funding led by General Catalyst, after growing to 1.5 million users in six months post-launch. The company also announced Steph Curry as an investor.

Kid-focused fintech Greenlight raised $260 million in Series D funding, doubling its valuation to $2.3 billion. Its round was also led by a16z, which backed Greenlight’s rival, Current.

Vivid Money raised $73 million in Series B funding (€60 million) led by Greenoaks to build a European financial super app.

Snap acquired 3D mapping developer Pixel8earth for $7.6 million. The small team will build out tools that will work with Snapchat’s location-based augmented reality experiences.

Kaia Health raised $75 million in Series C funding led by an unnamed growth equity fund for its digital therapeutics service that offers virtual therapy via an app for musculoskeletal conditions, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and osteoarthritis.

Family tracking app Life360 will acquire wearable location device Jiobit for $37 million. The figure is primarily in stock and debt, but if Jiobit can maintain its existing triple growth rates over the next two calendar years following the deal’s close, the deal price could increase to $54.5 million. The wearable will be added to Life360’s service to allow tracking of those without phones, including pets.

Zynga, via its subsidiary Rollic, acquired Uncosoft, the Turkish game developer behind the hit title High Heels, which has been downloaded over 60M times since its January debut, thanks in part, to TikTok. Deal terms were not available.

Montreal-based Botpress raised $15 million in Series A funding from Decibel and Inovia Capital to help developers build more conversational apps.

Downloads

OnMail

The makers of a popular email app Edison Mail have now launched another email app, OnMail. This new iOS app is designed to solve more difficult email problems, like handling overloaded inboxes and mail that spies on you. The app will automatically block tracking pixels (read receipts), suggest emails to unsubscribe from, index your entire history for faster searches, stop ad targeting, and more. Like Basecamp’s Hey, users can also decide who can or cannot enter their inbox, too. And when you want to see your promotions, they’re provided in a visual feed that’s more engaging.

The service, which is also available on the web, works with OnMail email addresses, as well as other accounts like those from Microsoft, Google and others. It will later introduce an Android app, calendar support, Yahoo and Microsoft Exchange support, and two-factor. The company says your name and email is never shared, but it does use anonymized data as part of its Edison Trends (digital commerce) research — users are opted in, but an opt out is available.

News: Can speculative fiction teach us anything in a world this crazy?

• May 1, 2021
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There’s an old saw from Mark Twain about how truth is stranger than fiction, and I think it’s fair to say we’ve lived through a very strange reality this past year. With all the chaos and change, we’re led to a foundational question: what’s the purpose of speculative fiction and its adjacent genres of science

There’s an old saw from Mark Twain about how truth is stranger than fiction, and I think it’s fair to say we’ve lived through a very strange reality this past year. With all the chaos and change, we’re led to a foundational question: what’s the purpose of speculative fiction and its adjacent genres of science fiction and fantasy when so much of our world seems to already embody the fantastical worlds these works depict?

So I got our occasional fictional columnist Eliot Peper and the author of Veil, the three part Analog Series and other speculative fiction novels on the Gmail for an epistolary conversation on digesting 2020, the meaning of speculative fiction, and the future of art.

This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed.

Danny Crichton: I’m curious about the future of speculative fiction. We just went through a devastating year with the pandemic and a number of major climate disorders – the types of events that are among the fodder for this genre. How do you keep speculating when reality always seems to catch up with the amygdala of our imaginations?

Eliot Peper: Current events are a painful reminder that unlike fiction, reality needn’t be plausible. The world is complex and even the wisest of us understand only a tiny sliver of what’s really going on. Nobody knows what comes next. So while it may feel like we’re living in a science fiction novel, that’s because we’ve always been living in a science fiction novel. Or maybe speculative fiction is more real than so-called realist fiction because the only certainty is that tomorrow will be different from today and from what we expect. Depicting a world without fundamental change has become fantastical.

As a writer of speculative fiction, I’m an enthusiastic reader of history. And in reading about the past to slake my curiosity and imagine possible futures, I’ve learned that the present is exceedingly contingent, fascinating, and fleeting. For me, speculative fiction is less about prediction than it is about riffing on how the world is changing like a jazz musician might improvise over a standard. Accuracy only happens by mistake. The most interesting rendition wins because it makes people think, dream, feel. And thanks to technological leverage, to a greater and greater extent people are inventing the future – for better and for worse.

So I’m not worried about reality catching up with speculative fiction because speculative fiction is rooted in the human experience of reality. Every black swan event is simply new material.

Crichton: So this gets at a challenge that I think blurs the line between realist and speculative fiction and makes these works so hard to categorize. To me, the reality of the pandemic isn’t the black swan that a novel virus could take hold across the planet (after all, pandemics are actually quite common in history), but rather the black swan of the completely shambolic response that we witnessed, one that was not at all well-coordinated.

If I were designing a speculative fiction scenario, I don’t think I could come up with “we develop a cure extremely rapidly thanks to the progress of medical science, but the general day-to-day response of people is to massively inflate the death totals through their own actions.” When I think speculative, I think spectacular — something exceptional, but this particular black swan shows the power of the mundane actions of our lives to influence the course of events.

Peper: Speculative fiction is all about asking “what if?” What if a lone astronaut got stranded on Mars? What if genetic engineers resurrected dinosaurs and stuck them in an amusement park? What if we are all living in a simulation? The question that sparked my latest novel, Veil, is “what if a billionaire hijacked the climate with geoengineering?” These questions are hooks. They capture the imagination and pique curiosity. That’s all well and good, but it’s only a starting point.

To pay off a speculative setup, you need to keep the dominos falling as second-, third-, and fourth-order effects ripple out through the story. Momentum builds. Progressive complications tighten the ratchet. Unexpected reversals fling the reader forward. If an earthquake flattens San Francisco in your story, it’s easy to imagine potential physical consequences: the Bay Bridge collapsing, BART flooding, the power going out, gas leaks, fires, etc. It’s less obvious but at least as important to imagine the potential social consequences: Do people risk their lives to rescue their neighbors or fight over limited emergency supplies? How do the governor and the president respond given their particular personalities, incentives, and constituencies? How might such an event rework the social fabric of the Bay Area? (Also, crucially, where is Dwayne Johnson?) How people respond to events is integral to how events play out.

Published in April 2020, Lawrence Wright’s The End of October does an eerily good job extrapolating the messy, cascading social and political reactions to a global pandemic. Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos depicts an apocalyptic scenario driven by such mundane, shambolic human shortsightedness that it feels nearly absurd enough to be realistic. While some science fiction overindexes technological change, Ada Palmer’s brilliant Terra Ignota series imagines the cultural, political, and sociological aspects of a fictional future with extraordinary rigor. So often, human behavior is the X-factor that transforms and amplifies the impacts of the original scenario, shaping a new world in the process.

This hints at a deeper question though: What is fiction for?

When I write fiction, I am not trying to accurately depict or anticipate reality. I’m trying to create an experience, to take the reader on a journey that is compelling, surprising, and fulfilling. Even though part of the fun might be extrapolating a scenario rooted in a particularly intriguing facet of the real world, success isn’t getting things right. Success is a reader turning pages deep into the night to find out what happens next in a story they can’t put down and won’t soon forget.

Neil Gaiman likes to say that fairy tales are more than true – not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten. When it comes to speculative fiction, I love stories that reveal a deep emotional truth or illuminate an underlying force shaping the course of history even if they are wildly but entertainingly wrong about literal details. That doesn’t mean that striving for technical accuracy is bad, just that it isn’t always the point. The point might instead be to make you think, to make you feel, to make you imagine how the world might be different.

Crichton: So on that last point, I’m curious how you think about imagination and its power for change. Obviously, art has had a sustained and powerful impact on the imagination of people throughout history, and there are often artistic antecedents to large societal, cultural, and political changes. Part of its power historically though, at least from my perspective, was its rarity and its ability to surprise.

Today, we are just subsumed in imaginative worlds, from video games to movies to streaming television shows to books and graphic novels and on and on. If you read time-use studies, Americans are awash in imaginative contexts for potentially a majority of their waking hours. I feel like I’ve been increasingly seeing this gap between the extreme breadth of imagination available in our art, but the extreme narrowness for change in our daily lives. Is that a threat to the ability of art to provoke change? Is speculation still an activity that can lead to action?

Peper: Speculation is part of what it means to be human. Before we make a choice, we imagine the possible consequences. We simulate potential futures in daydreams before committing to them in reality. Our mental projections are often wrong, but they are also often useful. For better and for worse, thought experiment is foundational to our internal lives. This individual dynamic scales to the human collective: Imagining a better future is the first step toward building one.

Art is a vehicle for imagination. A filmmaker codifies their vision in a movie that others can watch and, in watching, exercise their respective imaginations – sometimes even sparking new creative endeavors that spin off into yet more projects that together form what we call culture. Technology has made more movies, books, songs, poems, photos, paintings, comics, podcasts, and games available and accessible to more people than ever before. Imagined worlds are an integral part of the real world as we experience it, layering meaning and possibility onto actual events. We are all interpreting reality for each other all the time, transforming it in the process. The increasing density and intensity of that process is the result of a growing population that is knitting itself together ever more tightly along ever more dimensions.

But technology hasn’t just made new artistic mediums possible and changed the ways in which people make, discover, and experience art. Technology amplifies the impact of human choices. Hippocrates couldn’t have invented an mRNA vaccine, Genghis Khan couldn’t have pressed a button to initiate a nuclear apocalypse, and Odysseus had to build his Trojan Horse out of wood instead of code.

Our tools give us superpowers our ancestors never imagined and the consequences of our decisions scale accordingly. Because technical ingenuity is morally neutral, technological development ratchets up the stakes for timeless questions of human agency – what does it mean to live a good life, to contribute to the greater good, to be a good ancestor? This is the moral geography to which artists offer diverse, imperfect, contradictory, and occasionally invaluable maps. So in a certain sense, the more technology empowers us, the more we need art.

News: Early bird extension gives you more time to save on passes to TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing and Fundraising

• May 1, 2021
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Startup life, especially in the early innings, is nothing short of hectic. Who wouldn’t love a clone or two to help get everything done? Well, we can’t clone you, but we can give you more time to sign up and save on a pass to TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing and Fundraising on July 8-9.

Startup life, especially in the early innings, is nothing short of hectic. Who wouldn’t love a clone or two to help get everything done? Well, we can’t clone you, but we can give you more time to sign up and save on a pass to TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing and Fundraising on July 8-9.

We’re extending the early bird deadline to Friday, June 4 at 11:59 pm (PT). Sweet! That should help calm the cray-cray and save you $100 on admission to our virtual two-day bootcamp experience. Of course, you don’t need to wait. Buy your pass now while it’s top-of-mind and feel the joy of having one less task on your to-do list.

Not familiar with TC Early Stage? It’s specifically designed to help new startup founders learn essential entrepreneurial skills to build a successful startup. We tap the very best experts in the startup ecosystem, and they deliver actionable insights you can put in place now, when you need them most.

At TC Early Stage 2021, top-tier investors, veteran founders and respected subject-matter experts will lead highly interactive sessions on topics ranging from fundraising and marketplace positioning to growth marketing and content development. Get answers to your burning questions.

Here’s just one example. Rebecca Reeve Henderson, founder and CEO of Rsquared Communication, will hold forth on how to create an effective earned media strategy for your startup. Talk about an essential skill. Want more examples?

• Mike Duboe, general partner at Greylock will share the latest growth trends in consumer and B2B technology.
• Sarah Kunst, founding partner at Cleo Capital, will focus on best practices and offer solid advice on how to get ready to fundraise.

We’re announcing more speakers every week, and we’ll share the event agenda soon, so stay tuned.

TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing and Fundraising takes place on July 8-9, and now you have an extra month to save $100. Calm the cray-cray and take one important, business-building task of your to-do list. Buy your early-bird pass to TC Early Stage 2021 before June 4. We can’t wait to see you there!

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Early Stage 2021 – Marketing & Fundraising? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.