Yearly Archives: 2021

News: Daily Crunch: T-Mobile confirms ‘highly sophisticated cyberattack’ affecting 47M customer accounts

• August 18, 2021
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Hello friends and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here.

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for August 18, 2021! Good news up top: A big welcome to Kate Park, who recently joined the TechCrunch family. She’s helping expand our coverage of Asia, with a special eye on South Korea. Make sure to follow her on Twitter and say hello.

Now let’s talk Apple and crypto and startups! — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Apple under fire: Apple’s not having the world’s best day, retreating on a controversial browser design choice while also coming under fresh criticism for its anti-CSAM system that, it turns out, suffers from hash collisions. Not sure what that means? Our own Zack Whittaker has you covered.
• Good news from crypto: In the wake of Coinbase’s direct listing, we’ve seen global venture capitalists invest in a number of crypto exchanges. Raising money is never a bad sign for any technology niche. But the good news from cryptoland is more extensive than just venture activity. TechCrunch explores.
• T-Mobile hacked: The possible T-Mobile hack that we shared in Daily Crunch recently is real — and impacts tens of millions of customers. As TechCrunch notes, this is the “fifth time that T-Mobile was hacked in recent years.” Not good.

Startups/VC

Our newest TechCruncher has been hard at work, which means we can highlight some of her reporting already. Here’s Park on South Korean secondhand marketplace Danggeun Market and its recent $162 million round that values the company at $2.7 billion.

Before we dive into the funding round rundown, Mayfield investor Navin Chaddha wants to know what happened to risky venture capital bets. His essay is a response to a particular piece from The Information. We’ve explored the concept before, but Chaddha’s notes are well worth reading.

Now, the rest of today’s key startup news:

• APIs are big business: So big in fact, that API-delivered startups aren’t the only companies raising money off the model of building developer-friendly services. Postman just raised $225 million at a $5.6 billion valuation to help other developers build APIs. So that other developers can more easily plug into technology products. Postman competes with Stoplight and Kong, among others.
• Worm protein cometh: Food tech is neat. Who doesn’t like that startups are working on all sorts of alternative proteins, right? Raising cows is trash for the environment, and we all know it. But what about insects? Beta Hatch just raised $10 million for its insect-focused protein work. Perhaps the future is crunchy.
• KaiPod bets on tiny schools: One piece of the 2020 and 2021 boom in edtech startup activity involves pods, or “micro-schools.” Per our own Natasha Mascarenhas, Boston-based KaiPod is betting that the model is here to stay and is focusing on the homeschool market to start.
• Middle-income fintech? One neat element of the world of fintech has been the use of financial technology to reduce the cost of financial services and bring more money-management tooling to underserved communities. One is not doing that. Instead, the company is building fintech for the middle class. The startup wants to build an “all-in-one” solution, Mary Ann Azevedo reports.
• Planning for a wet future: That’s what FloodMapp is doing, per Danny Crichton. The startup, based in Australia, “is aiming to wash out the old approaches to hydrology and predictive analytics and put in place a much more modern approach to help emergency managers and citizens know when the floods are coming.” Once you know what is coming, you can prepare, goes the idea.
• More venture wagers on no-code: The latest service hoping to take no-code app development mainstream is Stacker. You may have heard of them. Ron Miller reports that the company just landed $20 million from a16z in its Series A round. As with some other services, Stacker lets users turn spreadsheets into apps. (Some startups are taking the opposite approach, notably.)
• Today in great startup names, RaRa Delivery just raised $3.25 million. The Indonesian startup wants to bring same-day delivery to its home market. Sequoia Capital India’s Surge program and East Ventures led the round.

How to establish a health tech startup advisory board

Most startups could use an advisory board, but in health tech, it’s a core requirement.

Founders seeking to innovate in this area have a unique need for mentors who have experience navigating regulations, raising capital and managing R&D, to name just a few areas.

Based on his own experience, Patrick Frank, co-founder and COO of PatientPartner, shared some very specific ideas about who to recruit, where to find them and how to fit them into your cap table.

“You want to leverage these individuals so you are able to focus on the full view of the company to ensure it is something that both the market and investors want at scale,” says Frank.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

• Twitter wants developers to build for its live-audio product: Twitter Spaces is no passing fad at the social media giant, it appears. Twitter is adding Spaces to its recently rebuilt API, allowing external developers to extend its capabilities. Frankly, we think Twitter Spaces are pretty neat, so this is a welcome piece of news.
• Amazon invests in India: In the form of a $40 million Series C for Bangalore-based financial services startup smallcase. When we think about tech megacompanies that are active investors, Amazon isn’t high on the list, making this transaction more notable than most corporate venture deals.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

TechCrunch wants you to recommend growth marketers who have expertise in SEO, social, content writing and more! If you’re a growth marketer, pass this survey along to your clients; we’d like to hear about why they loved working with you.

If you’re curious about how these surveys are shaping our coverage, check out this interview Anna Heim did with Ascendant co-founder Gus Ferguson and partner Alyssa Crankshaw, “For British agency Ascendant, growth marketing is much more than a set of tactics.”

Community

Join Danny Crichton on Thursday, August 19, at 2 p.m. PDT/5 p.m. EDT for a Twitter Spaces interview with Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, author of “Choose Possibility: Take Risks and Thrive (Even When You Fail).”

TechCrunch Disrupt 2021

It’s almost that time when startup followers from around the world gather at our annual conference, Disrupt, which will be held virtually again this year. Join the community September 21-23 to expand your horizons and your network with founders and CEOs of Coinbase, Dapper Labs, GitLab, Canva and more. Attend for less than $100, or you can get a free Innovator Pass if you are one of the first 10 people to register with promo code DAILYCRUNCHFREE. But you’ll want to hurry — it’s first come, first served, and once they’re gone, they’re gone!

News: VC Geoff Lewis on moving to Austin and popping Silicon Valley’s ‘self-referential’ bubble

• August 18, 2021
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“I don’t believe everyone should move to Austin. I don’t think it’s right for everyone, but I do think it’s right for us.”

Austin has made headlines over the past year for a number of reasons: It’s home to Oracle’s new headquarters. Tesla is building a massive gigafactory in the Texas capital. People, mostly tech workers, are leaving the Bay Area in droves to settle in the city, driving up home prices in the process.

But, it’s not just tech workers. A number of venture capitalists have set up shop in Austin, including Jim Breyer of Breyer Capital and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, who said last year he was moving his venture capital firm, 8VC, from Silicon Valley to the city.

The latest VC to call Austin home is Geoff Lewis, founder and managing partner of Bedrock Capital, a 4-year-old early-stage venture capital firm with $1 billion in assets under management. Lewis started his investing career at Founders Fund, where he was a partner for several years. He either serves or has served on the board of companies such as Lyft, Nubank, Vercel and Workrise.

Lewis also led early investments in Wish, Upstart, Tilray, Canva, Rippling, ClearCo, Flock Safety and a number of other unicorns. He’s largely credited with popularizing the phrase “narrative violation” to describe promising companies that are overlooked or underestimated because they are incongruent with popular narratives.

In making the move to Austin, the investor said he had grown disillusioned with Silicon Valley and the region’s continued lack of focus on solving what he described as real-world problems.

In a Medium post, Lewis said he was first introduced to Austin after backing Workrise (formerly called RigUp), a marketplace for skilled trade workers. In fact, he was the company’s first seed investor eight years ago and has gone on to invest in the company eight subsequent times. Today, Workrise is valued at nearly $3 billion.

Lewis said he was drawn to the company not just because it was “going to be huge” but also because it was “much more concerned with real people and real places than today’s Silicon Valley behemoths.”

“Put simply, it is a more humane technology company,” Lewis writes. “And it’s my search for this more humane genre of technological innovation that brought me to Texas. I’ve lived on the coasts and built my career as a Silicon Valley technology entrepreneur and investor, but I’ve never felt of the coasts or as an insider in Silicon Valley — I didn’t go to Stanford nor grow up rich.”

TechCrunch talked with Lewis to get more details around his decision to move his firm to Austin, learn more of his views on why Silicon Valley is too much of “a bubble” (spoiler alert: they may not be popular with many of you!) and how he plans to invest in more of Texas’ nexus of startups.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I understand that you grew up in Canada. How did you first get involved in the tech industry to begin with?

I started off as an entrepreneur myself, building a SaaS company in the travel space [Topguest]. I founded that business in New York City, and in 2009 ended up moving my team to San Francisco. I spent most of my career from 2009 to 2021 bouncing between New York and SF. We ended up selling that company in 2011 and it was a reasonably OK outcome. I joined Founders Fund in 2012, where I just fell in love with investing. I ended up really having a special trajectory there and 2012 was a great time to be a young VC in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. I ended up specializing in marketplaces, both consumer and enterprise, backing companies like Lyft and Canva early. I also did the firm’s first fintech investment in Latin America, backing Nubank, and now that company has a $30 billion valuation.

I grew up with pretty modest means and by 2017, I figured I had done well enough as a VC and I should strike out on trying to get back to what I wanted to do, which was more entrepreneurial. So we founded Bedrock in late 2017. We’re on Fund III now and it’s been consistent with the investment philosophy I pursued — trying to find what we call narrative violations, or these counternarrative companies that are being overlooked or underestimated. We were very early investors in Cameo, which is now obviously a pretty well-known business, for example.

You initially chose to base Bedrock in New York. Why?

When I was at Founders Fund I had a home in both cities (SF and NYC), so I was the kid who grew up in Calgary, Canada and wanted to live on the coasts and be in the center of the action. But we decided to actually headquarter Bedrock in New York in 2017 because we had an inclination that Silicon Valley was becoming a little bit overly self-referential and wanted to be a bit outside of the noise. New York is less of a one-horse town, so we decided to base the firm there, but really invested in, and continue to invest, everywhere across the country and quite honestly around the world. We invested in WordPress in the early days and more recently in Argyle and Lambda School.

News: Would the math work if Databricks were valued at $38B?

• August 18, 2021
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Databricks, the open-source data lake and data management powerhouse has been on quite a financial run lately. Today Bloomberg reported the company could be raising a new round worth at least $1.5 billion at an otherworldly $38 billion valuation. That price tag is up $10 billion from its last fundraise in February when it snagged

Databricks, the open-source data lake and data management powerhouse has been on quite a financial run lately. Today Bloomberg reported the company could be raising a new round worth at least $1.5 billion at an otherworldly $38 billion valuation. That price tag is up $10 billion from its last fundraise in February when it snagged $1 billion at a $28 billion valuation.

Databricks declined to comment on the Bloomberg post and its possible new valuation.

The company has been growing like gangbusters, giving credence to the investor thesis that the more your startup makes, the more it is likely to make. Consider that Databricks closed 2020 with $425 million in annual recurring revenue, which in itself was up 75% from the previous year.

As revenue goes up so does valuation, and Databricks is a great example of that rule in action. In October 2019, the company raised $400 million at a seemingly modest $6.2 billion valuation (if a valuation like that can be called modest). By February 2021, that had ballooned to $28 billion, and today it could be up to $38 billion if that rumor turns out to be true.

One of the reasons that Databricks is doing so well is it operates on a consumption model. The more data you move through the Databricks product family, the more money it makes, and with data exploding, it’s doing quite well, thank you very much.

It’s worth noting that Databricks’s primary competitor, Snowflake went public last year and has a market cap of almost $83 billion. In that context, the new figure doesn’t feel quite so outrageous, But what does it mean in terms of revenue to warrant a valuation like that. Let’s find out.

Valuation math

Let’s rewind the clock and observe the company’s recent valuation marks and various revenue results at different points in time:

• Q3 2019: $200 million run rate, $6.2 billion valuation
• Q3 2020: $350 million run rate, no known valuation change
• EoY 2020: $425 million run rate, $28 billion valuation (Q1 valuation)
• Q3 2021: Unclear run rate, possible $38 billion valuation

The company’s 2019 venture round gave Databricks a 31x run rate multiple. By the first quarter of 2021, that had swelled to a roughly 66x multiple if we compare its final 2020 revenue pace to its then-fresh valuation. Certainly software multiples were higher at the start of 2021 than they were in late 2019, but Databricks’s $28 billion valuation was still more than impressive; investors were betting on the company like it was going to be a key breakout winner, and a technology company that would go public eventually in a big way.

To see the company possibly raise more funds would therefore not be surprising. Presumably the company has had a good few quarters since its last round, given its history of revenue accretion. And there’s only more money available today for growing software companies than before.

But what to make of the $38 billion figure? If Databricks merely held onto its early 2021 run rate multiple, the company would need to have reached a roughly $575 million run rate, give or take. That would work out to around 36% growth in the last two-and-a-bit quarters. That works out to less than $75 million in new run rate per quarter since the end of 2020.

Is that possible? Yeah. The company added $75 million in run rate between Q3 2020 and the end of the year. So you can back-of-the-envelope the company’s growth to make a $38 billion valuation somewhat reasonable at a flat multiple. (There’s some fuzz in all of our numbers, as we are discussing rough timelines from the company; we’ll be able to go back and do more precise math once we get the Databricks S-1 filing in due time.)

All this raises the question of whether Databricks should be able to command such a high multiple. There’s some precedent. Recently, public software company Monday.com has a run rate multiple north of 50x, for example. It earned that mark on the back of a strong first quarter as a public company.

Databricks securing a higher multiple while private is not crazy, though we wonder if the data-focused company is managing a similar growth rate. Monday.com grew 94% on a year-over-year basis in its most recent quarter.

All this is to say that you can make the math shake out for Databricks to raise at a $38 billion valuation, but built into that price is quite a lot of anticipated growth. Top quartile public software companies today trade for around 23x their forward revenues, and around 27x their present-day revenues, per Bessemer. To defend its possible new valuation when public, then, leaves quite a lot of work ahead of Databricks.

The company’s CEO, Ali Ghodsi, will join us at TC Sessions: SaaS on October 27th, and we should know by then if this rumor is, indeed true. Either way, you can be sure we are going to ask him about it.

News: Two senators urge the FTC to investigate Tesla over “Full Self-Driving” statements

• August 18, 2021
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Two Democratic senators have asked the new chair of the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Tesla’s statements about the autonomous capabilities of its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving systems. The senators, Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), expressed particular concern over Tesla misleading customers into thinking their vehicles are capable of fully autonomous driving. “Tesla’s

Two Democratic senators have asked the new chair of the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Tesla’s statements about the autonomous capabilities of its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving systems. The senators, Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), expressed particular concern over Tesla misleading customers into thinking their vehicles are capable of fully autonomous driving.

“Tesla’s marketing has repeatedly overstated the capabilities of its vehicles, and these statements increasingly pose a threat to motorists and other users of the road,” they said. “Accordingly, we urge you to open an investigation into potentially deceptive and unfair practices in Tesla’s advertising and marketing of its driving automation systems and take appropriate enforcement action to ensure the safety of all drivers on the road.”

In their letter to new FTC Chair Lina Khan, they point to a 2019 Youtube video Tesla posted to its channel, which shows a Tesla driving autonomously. The roughly two-minute-long video is titled “Full Self-Driving” and has been viewed over 18 million times.

“Their claims put Tesla drivers – and all of the travelling public – at risk of serious injury or death,” the Senators said.

When it comes to Tesla and formal investigations, when it rains, it pours. The letter was published just two days after the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration said it had opened a preliminary investigation into incidents involving Teslas crashing into parked emergency vehicles.

Lina Khan is the youngest person to ever chair the FTC. She’s widely considered the most progressive appointment in recent history, particularly for her scholarship on antitrust law. But should the FTC choose to investigate Tesla, the case would likely have nothing to do with antitrust law and instead fall under the purview of consumer protection. The FTC has the authority to investigate false or misleading claims from companies regarding their products.

This is not the first time prominent figures have called on the FTC to open an investigation into Tesla’s claims. The Center for Auto Safety and Consumer Watchdog, two special interest groups, also sent a letter in 2018 to the commission over the marketing of Autopilot features. The following year, the NHTSA urged the FTC to investigate whether claims made by Tesla CEO Elon Musk on the Model 3’s safety “constitute[d] unfair or deceptive acts or practices.”

Tesla charges $10,000 for access to a “Full Self-Driving” option at the point of sale, or as a subscription. The company is currently testing beta version 9 of FSD with a few thousand drivers, but the Senators take aim at the beta version, too. “After the [beta 9] update, drivers have posted videos online showing their updated Tesla vehicles making unexpected maneuvers that require human intervention to prevent a crash,” they write. “Mr. Musk’s tepid precautions tucked away on social media are no excuse for misleading drivers and endangering the lives of everyone on the road.”

News: How to establish a health tech startup advisory board

• August 18, 2021
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Three to five people is an ideal starting point for an advisory board, depending on the size and stage of your company.

When you enter the health tech industry as a new startup, an advisory board is a crucial foundational step. A board can guide you through industry-specific nuances, help you make important decisions and prove your legitimacy to investors looking for a strong industry background.

An advisory board will be able to give you strategic insights about both your company and the wider healthcare and technology industries.

In my experience of raising capital, the unpredictable financial situation at the beginning of the pandemic meant we nearly lost our $2 million round, but came through with a committed $250,000, which we used to bring in about $500,000 in revenue.

Something that helped this process was building our advisory board and starting small — we didn’t go for all of healthcare but instead focused on two healthcare verticals. This allowed us to prove our concept, build case studies and win contracts with specific teams in our customers’ companies.

It pays off to stay focused and prove your worth so that your advisory board members can champion you in niche markets, with the potential to expand in the future. For this reason, it’s important to identify the main intention behind your board, and exactly who should be on it.

Who to recruit

Three to five people is an ideal starting point for an advisory board, depending on the size and stage of your company. In health tech, you need more than just the healthcare perspective — you also need the insight of those who have already grown technology companies, perhaps outside of the industry. Our company’s board is an even split of two healthcare and two technology advisers, and, ideally, you want to find a fifth who is well versed in both industries.

An M.D., a Ph.D. from a respected institution or a thought leader in your relevant field of healthcare is the most important asset to an advisory board. These are the highly decorated physicians who have strong connections and act as a reference for their peers.

They provide instant credibility for your company, help you get into the minds of both patients and healthcare providers, and can outline how various health systems work.

News: Twitter adds support for Twitter Spaces to its rebuilt API

• August 18, 2021
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Twitter is rolling out changes its newly rebuilt API that will allow third-party developers to build tools and other solutions specifically for its audio chatroom product, Twitter Spaces. The company today announced it’s shipping new endpoints to support Spaces on the Twitter API v2, with the initial focus on enabling discovery of live or scheduled

Twitter is rolling out changes its newly rebuilt API that will allow third-party developers to build tools and other solutions specifically for its audio chatroom product, Twitter Spaces. The company today announced it’s shipping new endpoints to support Spaces on the Twitter API v2, with the initial focus on enabling discovery of live or scheduled Spaces. This may later be followed by an API update that will make it possible for developers to build out more tools for Spaces’ hosts.

The company first introduced its fully rebuilt API last year, with the goal of modernizing its developer platform while also making it easier to add support for Twitter’s newer features at a faster pace. The new support for Twitter Spaces in the API is one example of that plan now being put into action.

With the current API update, Twitter hopes developers will build new products that enable users — both on and off Twitter — to find Twitter Spaces more easily, the company says. This could potentially broaden the reach of Spaces and introduce its audio chats to more people, which could give Twitter a leg up in the increasingly competitive landscape for audio-based social networking. Today, Twitter Spaces isn’t only taking on Clubhouse, but also the audio chat experiences being offered by Facebook, Discord, Reddit, Public.com, Spotify, and smaller social apps.

According to Twitter, developers will gain access to two new endpoints, Spaces lookup and Spaces search, which allow them to lookup live and scheduled Spaces using specific criteria — like the Spaces ID, user ID, or keywords. The Spaces lookup endpoint also offers a way to begin to understand the public metadata and metrics associated with a Space, like the participant count, speaker count, host profile information, detected language being used, start time, scheduled start time, creation time, status, and whether the Space is ticketed or not, Twitter tells us.

To chose what Spaces functionality to build into its API first, Twitter says it spoke to developers who told the company they wanted functionality that could help people discover Spaces they may find interesting and set reminders for attending. Developers said they also want to build tools that would allow Spaces hosts to better understand how well their audio chats are performing. But most of these options are yet available with today’s API update. Twitter only said it’s “exploring” other functionality — like tools that would allow developers to integrate reminders into their products, as well as those that would be able to surface certain metrics fields available in the API or allow developers to build analytics dashboards.

These ideas for other endpoints haven’t yet gained a spot on Twitter’s Developer Platform Roadmap, either.

Twitter also told us it’s not working on any API endpoints that would allow developers to build standalone client apps for Twitter Spaces, as that’s not something it heard interest in from its developer community.

Several developers have been participating in a weekly Spaces hosted by Daniele Bernardi from Twitter’s Spaces team, and were already clued in to coming updates. Developers with access to the v2 API will be able to begin building with the new endpoints starting today, but none have new experiences ready to launch at this time. Twitter notes Bernardi will also host another Spaces event today at 12 PM PT to talk in more detail about the API update and what’s still to come.

News: Apple’s CSAM detection tech is under fire — again

• August 18, 2021
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Apple has encountered monumental backlash to a new child sexual abuse imagery (CSAM) detection technology it announced earlier this month. The system, which Apple calls NeuralHash, has yet to be activated for its billion-plus users, but the technology is already facing heat from security researchers who say the algorithm is producing flawed results. NeuralHash is

Apple has encountered monumental backlash to a new child sexual abuse imagery (CSAM) detection technology it announced earlier this month. The system, which Apple calls NeuralHash, has yet to be activated for its billion-plus users, but the technology is already facing heat from security researchers who say the algorithm is producing flawed results.

NeuralHash is designed to identify known CSAM on a user’s device without having to possess the image or knowing the contents of the image. Because a user’s photos stored in iCloud are end-to-end encrypted so that even Apple can’t access the data, NeuralHash instead scans for known CSAM on a user’s device, which Apple claims is more privacy friendly as it limits the scanning to just photos rather than other companies which scan all of a user’s file.

Apple does this by looking for images on a user’s device that have the same hash — a string of letters and numbers that can uniquely identify an image — that are provided by child protection organizations like NCMEC. If NeuralHash finds 30 or more matching hashes, the images are flagged to Apple for a manual review before the account owner is reported to law enforcement. Apple says the chance of a false positive is about one in one trillion accounts.

But security experts and privacy advocates have expressed concern that the system could be abused by highly-resourced actors, like governments, to implicate innocent victims or to manipulate the system to detect other materials that authoritarian nation states find objectionable. NCMEC called critics the “screeching voices of the minority,” according to a leaked memo distributed internally to Apple staff.

Last night, Asuhariet Ygvar reverse-engineered Apple’s NeuralHash into a Python script and published code to GitHub, allowing anyone to test the technology regardless of whether they have an Apple device to test. In a Reddit post, Ygvar said NeuralHash “already exists” in iOS 14.3 as obfuscated code, but was able to reconstruct the technology to help other security researchers understand the algorithm better before it’s rolled out to iOS and macOS devices later this year.

It didn’t take long before others tinkered with the published code and soon came the first reported case of a “hash collision,” which in NeuralHash’s case is where two entirely different images produce the same hash. Cory Cornelius, a well-known research scientist at Intel Labs, discovered the hash collision. Ygvar confirmed the collision a short time later.

Hash collisions can be a death knell to systems that rely on cryptography to keep them secure, such as encryption. Over the years several well-known password hashing algorithms, like MD5 and SHA-1, were retired after collision attacks rendered them ineffective.

Kenneth White, a cryptography expert and founder of the Open Crypto Audit Project, said in a tweet: “I think some people aren’t grasping that the time between the iOS NeuralHash code being found and [the] first collision was not months or days, but a couple of hours.”

When reached, an Apple spokesperson declined to comment on the record. But in a background call where reporters were not allowed to quote executives directly or by name, Apple downplayed the hash collision and argued that the protections it puts in place — such as a manual review of photos before they are reported to law enforcement — are designed to prevent abuses. Apple also said that the version of NeuralHash that was reverse-engineered is a generic version, and not the complete version that will roll out later this year.

It’s not just civil liberties groups and security experts that are expressing concern about the technology. A senior lawmaker in the German parliament sent a letter to Apple chief executive Tim Cook this week saying that the company is walking down a “dangerous path” and urged Apple not to implement the system.

News: What is happening to risk-taking in venture capital?

• August 18, 2021
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The irony is that there’s never been a better time to be an inception investor given lower capital needs of getting from idea to Series A milestones.

Sam Lessin’s post in The Information, “The End of Venture Capital as We Know It,” prompted heated debate in Silicon Valley. He argued that the arrival of new players with large amounts of capital is changing the landscape of late-stage investing for venture capitalists and forcing VCs to “enter the bigger pond as a fairly small fish, or go find another small pond.”

But there’s another important trend developing in venture capital that has even more significant consequences than whether VCs are being forced to fight with bigger, deeper pockets for late-stage investment opportunities. And that is the move away from what has always defined venture capital: taking risks on the earliest-stage companies.

The data indicates investing in early-stage companies is decreasing rapidly. According to data from PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association, as a percentage of total U.S. venture capital dollars invested, angel/seed stage has reduced from 10.6% to 4.9% over the last three years, early-stage has reduced from 36.5% to 26.1% during the same time period, while late-stage has drastically increased from 52.9% to 69%, coming (as Lessin pointed out) from new players such as hedge funds and mutual funds.

This is happening at a time when there has been a record rate of new business creation. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, seasonally adjusted monthly business applications have been around 500,000 per month from the second half of 2020 to June 2021, compared with 300,000 per month in the year preceding the pandemic.

This data should be a red flag. Venture capital is about investing in risk to help the most innovative, transformative ideas get from concept to a flourishing enterprise. But the VC industry at large, instead of taking risks at inception and in the early stages, is investing in later-stage companies where the concept is proven and companies have momentum.

Here, the skill is more about finance to determine how much to invest and at what valuation to hit a certain return threshold rather than having the ability to spot a promising founder with a breakthrough idea. There’s an important role for late-stage investing, but if that’s where too much of the industry’s focus is applied, we’ll stifle innovation and limit the pipeline of companies to invest in Series B and beyond in the future.

The irony is that there’s never been a better time to be an inception investor given lower capital needs of getting from idea to Series A milestones. Startup costs have been driven down with access to cloud, social, mobile and open-source technologies, allowing entrepreneurs to test ideas and build momentum with small pools of capital.

This has spawned a golden age of innovation and many new trends are emerging, creating a large pool of companies that need money and support to take an idea and turn it into a flourishing business.

It’s also ironic that when we are judged for our prowess as VC investors, the only question that has ever mattered is who was the earliest investor, who had the genius to recognize a brilliant idea. It is not who led the last round(s) before an IPO.

This is not some esoteric argument about venture capital; there will be real consequences for our ability to innovate and invest in areas such as the renaissance of silicon, biology as technology, human-centered AI, unleashing the power of data, climate-friendly investing, saving lives, re-humanization of social media, blockchain and quantum computing.

The VC industry cannot forget its roots. In its early days, it served as the catalyst for the success of iconic companies such as Genentech, Apple, Microsoft, Netscape, Google, Salesforce, Amazon and Facebook. Without these companies, we would not have a biotech industry, the internet, the cloud, social media and mobile computing, all of which have dramatically changed how we live, play and work.

We can’t know the future, but with AI, machine learning and a new generation of semiconductors and materials, we certainly know profound change lies ahead. But it won’t happen if venture capital doesn’t play a major role at a company’s inception. We have to step up and do more to change the discouraging statistics above.

And it’s not just about individual firm glory: If we want the U.S. to maintain its leadership as the innovation engine of the world, the venture industry has to do more to support bold ideas at the earliest stages to give them a shot at succeeding. Maybe it’s time, as Lessin suggested, for VCs to “go find another small pond” or rather swim deeper in the one some of us are already in: the one that is full of inception-stage companies looking for investors who will partner with them throughout their journey.

News: Waze with ‘PAW Patrol’ voices sounds like a chill car ride

• August 18, 2021
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Waze might have a way to keep your kids entertained during a drive without handing them a tablet: distract them with your navigation app. The company has added a PAW Patrol experience.

Waze might have a way to keep your kids entertained during a drive without handing them a tablet: distract them with your navigation app. The company has added a PAW Patrol experience to Waze that has the TV show’s Ryder guide you to your destination with help from Chase, Marshall and Skye. You can also switch your Waze Mood to replace the usual icon with Chase’s police car, Marshall’s fire truck or Skye’s aircraft.

The feature is available for a “limited time” to English users through the My Waze section in the app. It’s available on both Android and iOS.

This is a not-so-subtle plug for the upcoming PAW Patrol movie, but it could be helpful for keeping your young ones engaged. It might even encourage them to take an interest in the drive and the world outside the car window. Of course, it’s also easy to see this going very badly — the last thing you want is to have your kids shouting at the phone while you’re listening for directions. This might be best for children who tend to watch the show in raptured silence.

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on Engadget.

News: Planet Labs and Google Cloud join forces in data analysis agreement

• August 18, 2021
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Satellite operator Planet Labs is beefing up its existing partnership with Google Cloud. Under a new agreement, Planet customers can use Google Cloud to store and process data, and access Google’s other products such as its data analytics warehouse BigQuery. The two companies’ collaboration stretches back to 2017, when Google sold its satellite imaging business,

Satellite operator Planet Labs is beefing up its existing partnership with Google Cloud. Under a new agreement, Planet customers can use Google Cloud to store and process data, and access Google’s other products such as its data analytics warehouse BigQuery.

The two companies’ collaboration stretches back to 2017, when Google sold its satellite imaging business, Terra Bella, to Planet. As part of the sale agreement, Google also signed a multi-year contract with Planet to license Earth-imaging for its use. Planet also uses Google Cloud service for its own internal data processing and hosting.

This latest agreement will let Planet customers use products like BigQuery to analyze large volumes of satellite imaging data, reflecting “a growing demand for planetary-scale satellite data analysis, powered by the cloud,” Planet said in a news release.

“Planet customers want scalable compute and storage,” Kevin Weil, Planet’s president of product and business said. “Google Cloud customers want broader access to satellite data and analytics. This partnership is a win-win for both, as it helps customers transform their operations and compete in a digital-first world, powered by Planet’s unique data set.”

Planet operates a network of around 200 satellites – more than any government – and provides analytics services on the data it gathers. Last month, the company joined a slew of other space companies by announcing it was going public via a $2.8 billion merger with blank-check firm dMY Technology Group IV. The deal is anticipated to inject Planet with $545 million in cash, including a $200 million private-investment-in-public-equity from BlackRock-managed funds, Koch Strategic Platforms, Marc Benioff’s TIME Ventures and Google.