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News: Electrify America to double number of EV chargers as wave of electric vehicles come to market

• July 13, 2021
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Electrify America, the entity set up by Volkswagen as part of its settlement with U.S. regulators over its diesel emissions cheating scandal, said it will double the number of its electric vehicle fast charging stations in the United States and Canada by the end of 2025. The commitment, if successful, means 1,800 fast charging stations

Electrify America, the entity set up by Volkswagen as part of its settlement with U.S. regulators over its diesel emissions cheating scandal, said it will double the number of its electric vehicle fast charging stations in the United States and Canada by the end of 2025.

The commitment, if successful, means 1,800 fast charging stations — or 10,000 individual chargers — will be installed and operational by that time. The vast majority (some 1,700 stations) will be installed in the United States with the remainder in Canada. This will build off of EA’s plans to have about 800 charging stations and about 3,500 individual chargers in the U.S. by the end of 2021.  As of today, Electrify America has installed 635 charging stations in the United States.

The plan is part of parent company VW Group’s announcement Monday to increase public charging infrastructure in North America, Asia and Europe. The expansion aims to increase the number of 150 and 350 kilowatt chargers, or fast chargers. VW nor EA disclosed how much money would be spent to meet this new plan. However, an EA spokesperson did confirm that the company would be spending more than the $2 billion it previously committed to invest into clean energy infrastructure over a 10-year period that kicked off in 2017.

The decision to double its charging infrastructure in North America was prompted by the rapid growth expected of electric vehicles by virtually all the auto manufacturers, according to a statement by Electrify America president and CEO Giovanni Palazzo.

The EV market was once the primary domain of Tesla, the Nissan Leaf and GM’s Chevrolet Bolt EV. And while the majority of vehicles on the road today are gas and diesel-powered, an increasing number of other EV models have, or are about, to come to market, including the Ford Mustang Mach-E, Porsche Taycan and the Cross Turismo variant, Hyundai Kona Electric, Jaguar I-Pace, Rivian R1T pickup truck and R1S SUV and the VW ID. 4.

Electrify America’s initial plan was to invest more than $2 billion over a 10-year period into clean energy infrastructure and education. Of that funding, some $800 million was earmarked for California, the largest EV market in North America. This latest boost will be used to increase chargers in established EV regions in the U.S. such as California as well as push into new states, including Hawaii, North Dakota, South Dakota, West Virginia, Wyoming and Vermont.

The company is also adding chargers to a stretch of highway in the upper Midwest, following similar efforts to promote cross-country travel. The subsidiary Electrify Canada will expand its network to nine provinces, including Saskatchewan, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. Electrify Canada will also add more stations to British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and Quebec, the four provinces where it already has a presence.

News: Apple introduces a $99 MagSafe Battery Pack for the iPhone 12

• July 13, 2021
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The addition of MagSafe to the iPhone 12 line introduced all manner of fun avenues for accessory makers, but there’s a strong case (so to speak) to be made that a snap on battery pack might be the most useful of all. A number of third-parties (notably Anker and Mophie) have introduced their own versions,

The addition of MagSafe to the iPhone 12 line introduced all manner of fun avenues for accessory makers, but there’s a strong case (so to speak) to be made that a snap on battery pack might be the most useful of all. A number of third-parties (notably Anker and Mophie) have introduced their own versions, and now Apple’s getting in on the action.

The simply-named MagSafe Battery Pack went up for pre-order on Apple’s site today for $99, with an estimated arrival of July 19. The new pack comes in white (with a subtly gray Apple logo on the back to let people know you went first-party) and provides up to 15W of wireless charging, per the company.

Other details are scarce at the moment, including  precisely how many phone charges you’ll get out of the pack. Eagle-eyed viewers noticed on the rear of the device, fine-print noting the 1,460 mAh size. The pack itself charges via Lightning port, and users can plug it in with the phone attached to get a quicker charge to both the pack and battery at once.

The price is a premium, compared to Anker and Mophie’s products, which run around the $45-50 range for a 5,000 mAh battery.

News: Here are 3 things you should do with your stock options

• July 13, 2021
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The best way you can get ahead is just by understanding how your stock options work, being prepared, and knowing what questions to ask your tax or financial professionals.

There’s a reason startup compensation packages usually include equity, or stock options. For one, it’s a way for startups to remain competitive in the job market and attract top talent. But it’s also a way to reward those employees who join early and give them a tangible reason to stay incentivized to grow the company.

The problem is that while many employees do understand that their equity compensation could mean a big payday in the future — and, in 2021, that’s more likely than ever — they don’t often understand the inevitable complexities of their stock options. That puts employees at risk of not getting the most value after an IPO or, worse, losing them.

If you’ve ever been confused about your equity, or haven’t thought much about it, you’re not alone. That’s why I’m going to share three things all employees joining a startup should do with their equity:

Understand how to value your equity — and when it can change

While many startups are getting better at proactively communicating the value of your equity package upfront, some are still figuring out the best way to do it. That’s because, unlike the more straightforward number of a salary, stock options are more nuanced — they’re a living, breathing type of compensation.

The most important pieces of information to pay attention to are your 409A valuation, your strike price, the type of options you were granted and the preferred share price.

The 409A valuation is based on your company’s valuation. This is also referred to as the fair market value (FMV). The 409A valuation can, and does, often change — they have to be updated at least once a year by a third-party valuator in order to meet tax rules. The 409A also changes during a fundraising event. Investors involved in the funding round determine how they value the company and are given options, at that valuation, in exchange for cash.

Since the company has now been valued higher, the 409A changes for everyone. It’s also possible for the 409A to go down if, for any reason, the company is now valued at a lower amount. This is known as a “down round.” Airbnb had a notable down round during the pandemic, though it eventually recovered and went public.

Your strike price is the price at which you can buy your stock options (also known as exercising). Yes, buy. You are given the option to buy them, which is why they are called stock options. But know that your strike price will likely never change. However, if you’re ever given more stock options (perhaps as a future bonus), this would be a separate grant and the strike price could be different. Companies are legally required to issue stock options at the most recent 409A price (or higher).

News: WayUp merges with Yello to diversify recruitment

• July 13, 2021
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Despite studies, statistics and oh-so-many pledges, a vast number of companies continue to struggle with recruiting diverse talent. Some say that it’s not the pipeline problem, it’s an issue with how recruitment rounds and technical interviews are conducted. Others point to success with hiring entry-level diverse talent, but then companies fail to retain and reinvest

Despite studies, statistics and oh-so-many pledges, a vast number of companies continue to struggle with recruiting diverse talent. Some say that it’s not the pipeline problem, it’s an issue with how recruitment rounds and technical interviews are conducted. Others point to success with hiring entry-level diverse talent, but then companies fail to retain and reinvest in those individuals as they progress through their career.

While entrepreneurs continue to poke at the gap between talented, diverse individuals and scaled recruiting, a new merger today between two venture-backed companies paints an ambitious picture of what a promising solution could look like.

Today, WayUp, a sourcing platform for diverse candidates, announced that it is merging with Yello, a recruitment software company. The two HR tech companies will operate under Yello as a legal entity but continue to keep their independent branding with a now combined 200 employees.

“We can send all the diverse applicants into applicant tracking systems or CRMs, but if companies don’t have the automation workflow, and the tools and analytics that they need to make sure that those candidates are truly making their way through, then these candidates are sitting in a black hole,” Liz Wessel, co-founder and CEO of WayUp, said in an interview with TechCrunch.

Wessel’s realization of the “black hole” that candidates fell into soon turned into conversations with Yello, which she describes as the “most robust [candidate relationship management solution] in the market for early career.”

Now, by combining forces, the startups will be able to create an end-to-end recruitment tool that helps aggregate a group of diverse candidates, who have varied backgrounds from across core and non-core schools, ethnicity, majors, location, gender and ethnicity, and then place them with recruiters, into a software-powered job funnel.

Data-driven diversity

Wessel has spent the past seven years building up WayUp around the concept of “data-driven diversity.” The platform differentiates from other sourcing and job platforms by asking candidates to self-report race, ethnicity, gender and vetaran status. As a result, employers, which are WayUp’s clients, can prioritize diversity when hiring, while early-career professionals can explore curated opportunities based on their profiles.

More recently, WayUp launched a dashboard to help employers see where their recruiting process loses diverse candidates. While that dashboard was WayUp’s first foray into the world of candidate recruitment management, today’s merger with Yello suggests it was just foreshadowing the partnership to come.

Yello handles recruitment processes for companies, from top of funnel events such as career fairs through virtual candidate engagement and interview scheduling. The company has landed clients like Johnson & Johnson, Tableau, eBay and Adobe for its sourcing, engaging, and placing software.

“They provide a ton of automation workflow to make it so that companies can significantly, quickly, efficiently and easily get applicants through in a fair and equitable way,” Wessel said. “Companies often don’t struggle with, ‘how do I get more applicants’ at the early career stage, it’s really, ‘how do I get the most qualified, diverse talented candidates hired’.”

Yello’s been working on a sourcing arm for years in its campus recruiting solution. Now, with WayUp, the database will grow to over 6 million candidates, across 7,000 campuses. Candidates, while self-reported, are 71% Black, Hispanic or female, along with “tens of thousands” of veterans, a statement about the merger disclosed.

“In addition to offering a powerhouse of data, recruiters will benefit from the automation opportunities of two solutions from a single company,” said Corey Ferengul, CEO, Yello, in a statement announcing the merger,

Yello, which didn’t previously have an explicit diversity angle in its software product, is now adding WayUp’s database of talent to its suite of services. And WayUp, which didn’t previously have a candidate relationship management tool, now can offer one to its talent.

Handshakes

Even with 6 million early market professionals in its sphere, the companies have a billion-dollar competitor worth paying attention to. Handshake, which last raised money at a $1.5 billion valuation, is a networking and recruitment platform for college students. The job recruiting tool recently passed 18 million users across thousands of universities, including some 120 minority-serving institutions, which include Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and Hispanic Serving Institutions in the U.S., as well as community colleges. Handshake’s focus on diversity isn’t as marketed as WayUp’s, but its footprint, as well as a curated network that brings HBCUVcs into conversations with its 550,000 employer clients, shows its commitment to underrepresented groups. Canvas, another venture-backed startup in the HR tech world, similarly offers  recruiting platform that is based on self-reported data, aimed at helping diverse candidates land jobs.

With WayUp joining Yello’s brand, it is strengthening its competitive advantage over Handshake, Canvas and other competitors by adding software services to its recruiting tool. It’s been almost four years since both Yello and WayUp last raised venture capital money, but the move to merge doesn’t appear to be a lifeboat, as Wessel pointed out that her company beat sales expectations four quarters in a row.

“Yello isn’t competitive to Handshake at all,” Wessel said over e-mail. “I’ve never heard of one of them winning a deal over the other and we only compete with Handshake if a company isn’t prioritizing D&I as their main goal. [For what it’s worth], we’ve yet to lose an RFP for D&I sourcing.”

Long-term, it’s unclear what’s stopping more companies from combining CRM tools with talent tools, Handshake included.

“It’s really hard,” Wessel said. “We have both an Enterprise-grade software that took a decade to build to get it where it is today.”

News: Breach simulation startup AttackIQ raises $44M to fuel expansion

• July 13, 2021
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AttackIQ, a cybersecurity startup that provides organizations with breach and attack simulation solutions, has raised $44 million in Series C funding as it looks to ramp up its international expansion. The funding round was led by Atlantic Bridge, Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures (SAEV), and Gaingels, with existing vendors — including Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Salesforce

AttackIQ, a cybersecurity startup that provides organizations with breach and attack simulation solutions, has raised $44 million in Series C funding as it looks to ramp up its international expansion.

The funding round was led by Atlantic Bridge, Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures (SAEV), and Gaingels, with existing vendors — including Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and Telstra Ventures — also participating. The round brings the company’s total funding raised to date to $79 million. 

AttackIQ was founded in 2013 and is based out of San Diego, California. It provides an automated validation platform that runs scenarios to detect any gaps in a company’s defenses, enabling organizations to test and measure the effectiveness of their security posture and receive guidance on how to fix what’s broken. Broadly, AttackIQ’s platform helps an organization’s security teams to anticipate, prepare, and hunt for threats that may impact their business, before hackers get there first.

Its Security Optimization Platform platform, which supports Windows, Linux, and macOS across public, private, and on-premises cloud environments, is based on the MITRE ATT&CK framework, a curated knowledge base of known adversary threats, tactics, and techniques. This is used by a number of cybersecurity companies also building continuous validation services including FireEye, Palo Alto Networks, and Cymulate.

AttackIQ says this latest round of funding, which comes more than two years after its last, arrives at a “dynamic time” for the company. Not only has cybersecurity become more of a priority for organizations as a result of a major uptick in both ransomware and supply-chain attacks, the company also recently accelerated its international expansion efforts through a partnership with technology distributor Westcon.

The startup says it’s planning to use these new funds to further expand internationally through its newfound partnership with Atlantic Bridge, which will also see Kevin Dillon, the company’s co-founder and managing director, join the AttackIQ board of directors. 

“AttackIQ has established itself as a category leader with a formidable enterprise customer base that includes four of the Fortune 20,” said Dillon. “We believe deeply in the company’s vision and potential to become the next billion-dollar cybersecurity software company and look forward to helping the company turn early traction in Europe and the Middle East into robust, long-term expansion.”

Brett Galloway, CEO of AttackIQ, said the round “reaffirms the strength” of its platform.

As well as enabling organizations to review the robustness of their security defenses, the startup also runs the AttackIQ Academy, which provides free entry-level and advanced cybersecurity training. It has accumulated 17,200 registered students to date across 176 countries.

News: Javier Soltero, Google’s head of Workspace, will join us at TC Sessions: SaaS

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When it comes to big SaaS products, few are bigger than Google Workspace (formerly known as GSuite). So it’s maybe no surprise that one of the first people we contacted to speak at our SaaS conference on October 27 was Google’s Javier Soltero. Today, Puerto Rico-born Soltero is Google’s VP and GM in charge of

When it comes to big SaaS products, few are bigger than Google Workspace (formerly known as GSuite). So it’s maybe no surprise that one of the first people we contacted to speak at our SaaS conference on October 27 was Google’s Javier Soltero.

Today, Puerto Rico-born Soltero is Google’s VP and GM in charge of Workspace, which has well over 2 billion users. Today, it consists of products like Gmail and Google Calendar, Docs, Sheets, Slide Meet, Chat and Drive. Currently, Workspace is going through what may be one of its most important periods of change, too, with extensive new collaboration features and, for the first time, a paid individual plan. All of this, of course, is happening against the backdrop of the pandemic, which made remote collaboration tools and video chat services like Meet more important than ever.

All of that would be enough to make Soltera a good conversation partner for a SaaS event, but his background goes much further than that. He actually started his career as a software engineer at Netscape in the late 90s and after a few other engineering positions, co-founded launched his first startup, the monitoring service Hyperic, in 2004. Hyperic then merged with SpringSource, which was acquired by VMware, landing Soletro in the position as VMware’s CTO for its SaaS and Application Services.

It’s likely his next startup, the mobile-centric email startup Acompli, though, that you remember. Founded in mid-2013, Microsoft quickly acquired Acompli in late 2014 and then essentially turned into Outlook Mobile. At Microsoft, Soltero rose through the ranks to become a corporate VP for its Office group and Cortana, before decamping to Google in 2019. Since then, he’s become the public face of GSuite/Workspace and we’ll use our time with him to talk about the joys and challenges of managing a massive SaaS product, but also about what he learned from building products from the ground up.

Register today with a $75 early bird ticket and save $100 before tickets go up. TC Sessions: SaaS takes place on October 27 and will feature the chats with the leading minds in SaaS, networking, and startup demos.

News: Instagram’s new test shows you stuff you’ve seen lately and lets you reshare it to Stories

• July 13, 2021
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Instagram is tinkering around with a new test feature that changes the way users reshare content they like to their Stories. The test, which will only appear for a subset of users, lets users see a collection of content they’ve viewed recently when they’re in the Stories section of the app. That content will be

Instagram is tinkering around with a new test feature that changes the way users reshare content they like to their Stories.

The test, which will only appear for a subset of users, lets users see a collection of content they’ve viewed recently when they’re in the Stories section of the app. That content will be collected under a new reshare sticker, which can be found in the sticker tray when creating a Story. Posts and Reels viewed in the last hour will appear here along with recently created posts.

“We know that people sometimes find reshared content less engaging, personal, and fun,” an Instagram spokesperson said of the test. “We hope that with this new test experience, people are encouraged to be more intentional and deliberate when sharing things that matter to them.”

Content reshared through the sticker will appear against the backdrop of an existing Story, which could encourage more personalization. As it stands now, when users add a post of Reel to their Story, that content generally stands alone against a plain background. The new reshare Sticker adds a new way for people to contextualize content they’re resharing and makes those posts feel a bit less static (think retweets with comment rather than straight up retweeting a stranger into your feed).

The test isn’t guaranteed to make it into the full app, but Instagram will use feedback from the new reshare feature to see if it ups the quality of reshared posts. By letting people review what the’ve seen after the fact rather than just sharing on the fly, the feature could also encourage users to reshare more through their Stories — or at least reshare more thoughtfully.

Instagram tests new features all the time. And while test features don’t always make it into the final product, they do give an indication of what the company is thinking about when it comes to reshaping the app — and the behavior of the more than one billion people who use it on a regular basis.

Other recent Instagram tests have toyed with the idea of hiding Like counts and experimented with mixing algorithmic recommendations into the app’s main feed.

News: Sourcegraph raises $125M Series D on $2.6B valuation for universal code search tool

• July 13, 2021
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Sourcegraph, a late stage startup that wants to bring the power of search to code, announced a $125 million Series D investment today on a $2.625 billion valuation, a 3x growth from its previous valuation in December 2020, according to the company. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Insight Partners, Geodesic

Sourcegraph, a late stage startup that wants to bring the power of search to code, announced a $125 million Series D investment today on a $2.625 billion valuation, a 3x growth from its previous valuation in December 2020, according to the company.

The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Insight Partners, Geodesic Capital and other existing investors. The company has now raised almost $225 million, according to Crunchbase data.

Company CEO and co-founder Quinn Slack says that we know by now that every company is building software, and as they do, they are generating tons of code. “They’re all drowning in code, and we help solve that. Our product is universal code search, which helps developers search, understand and automate code,” Slack explained.

He says that companies use Sourcegraph to find problems and vulnerabilities they might not otherwise see. Developers and site reliability engineers may see that there’s a problem, but getting to the specific part of the code where it’s happening requires a specialized tool, he says. Some of the large companies might build their own tools for this purpose, but most companies don’t have the resources and this puts code search within reach of many more developers.

“Universal code search that we built — and we spent a lot of time building it — is the first kind of code search that actually understands code as code and all the connections, that graph of code. And that means that if you’re a developer, you can get to that answer of how do I do this thing or how do I fix this or if I change this what’s going to break, in way less time and that’s why you need a purpose-built code search tool,” he said.

He says that the company was founded in 2013, but it took almost five years to build a product of this sophistication. The startup was able to get funding initially based on the potential of a tool like this. Now investors are seeing the traction they envisioned early on.

Today they have 800,000 developers using the product over the last 12 months and Slack says that they have indexed over 54 billion lines of code. Paying customers include Plaid, Uber, GE and Atlassian. The company has around 160 employees and expects to increase that to 250 by the end of the year with all of this new capital.

The company made the fortunate decision to go fully remote in January of 2020 just a couple of months before offices shut down in the U.S., and his plan is to continue to be remote even after offices fully reopen.

Slack doesn’t shy away from the IPO question, saying it’s definitely something they think about. “We want to be a public company eventually, so that we can show that we’re going to be around forever. This funding certainly shows that we are growing, and that we are going to stick around and we’re going to be vendor independent, so you know that’s that’s definitely an important part of our strategy.”

News: Mighty Buildings lands $22M to create ‘sustainable and affordable’ 3D-printed homes

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Oakland-based Mighty Buildings, which is on a quest to build homes using 3D printing, robotics and automation, has raised a $22 million extension to its Series B round of funding. The additional capital builds upon a $40 million a raise the company announced earlier this year, bringing its total funding since its 2017 inception to

Oakland-based Mighty Buildings, which is on a quest to build homes using 3D printing, robotics and automation, has raised a $22 million extension to its Series B round of funding.

The additional capital builds upon a $40 million a raise the company announced earlier this year, bringing its total funding since its 2017 inception to $100 million.

Mighty Building’s self-proclaimed mission is to create “beautiful, sustainable and affordable” homes.

The company claims to be able to 3D print structures “two times as quickly with 95% less labor hours and 10-times less waste” than conventional construction. For example, it says it can 3D print a 350-square-foot studio apartment in just 24 hours.

Execs say the new capital will go toward making supply chain improvements and moving up research and development timelines. The money will also go toward helping it achieve a new goal of achieving Net-Zero carbon neutrality by 2028 – which it says is 22 years ahead of the construction industry overall. 

Since its launch, the company has produced and installed a number of accessory dwelling units (ADUs).

Sam Ruben, co-founder and Chief Sustainability Officer of Mighty Buildings, said the new funds will also go toward kicking off development of the startup’s multi-story offering. The multi-story efforts will likely initially focus on 2-3 story single family homes and townhouses with an eye towards expanding into low-rise apartment buildings.  The company hopes to have at least a prototype multi-story offering in late 2022 or early 2023, according to Ruben.

“Along with the sustainability improvements already captured by our new formula, this will allow us to develop our next generation material to get us even closer to our goal of being carbon neutral by 2028,” Ruben said. “It will also give us opportunities to implement improvements in our existing design by reducing the impact of our foundations and other, non-printed elements.” 

Specifically, Mighty Buildings plans to speed up its carbon neutrality roadmap by building “high-throughput, sustainable” micro factories, forming strategic supply chain partnerships, accelerating ”blue skies” technology research and developing new composite materials produced from recycled or bio-based feedstock. 

The micro factories, according to the company, will be able to produce 200 to 300 homes per year in locations where housing gaps exist. Mighty Buildings plans to create single family residential developments with its panelized “Mighty Kit System.”

Mighty Buildings has seen quarter over quarter growth in sales, Ruben said, with the company seeing a record of over $7 million in total contracted revenue in the second quarter. 

The company is also excited about its new fiber reinforced printing material, which is currently undergoing testing with certification expected to be completed later this year. Mighty Buildings claims that its new formula shows “over 50% improvement” in embodied carbon from its original material and a strength profile similar to reinforced concrete, with more than 4 times less weight.

The round extension was supported by a few new and existing investors including ArcTern Ventures, Core Innovation Capital, Decacorn Capital, Gaingels, Khosla Ventures, Klaff Realty, MicroVentures, Modern Venture Partners, Polyvalent Capital, Vibrato Capital and others.

News: Facebook adds a ‘Payout Time Bonus’ to help retain bug bounty hunters

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When it comes to bug bounties, Facebook lags behind the likes of Microsoft and Google in terms of overall payouts and volume of tips received: last year, Microsoft and Google respectively paid out $13.6 million and $6.7 million; Facebook meanwhile paid out just $1.98 million as of November. But on the other hand, Facebook’s a

When it comes to bug bounties, Facebook lags behind the likes of Microsoft and Google in terms of overall payouts and volume of tips received: last year, Microsoft and Google respectively paid out $13.6 million and $6.7 million; Facebook meanwhile paid out just $1.98 million as of November.

But on the other hand, Facebook’s a younger company and is working on improving its system to keep it on bounty hunters’ radar. In the latest development, Facebook today said that it would be adding a new set of bonus rewards when it pays out on a report if more than 30 days have passed since Facebook first received it.

The Payout Time Bonus, as Facebook is calling it, will work on a sliding scale, where payouts made between 30-59 days will get a 5% bonus; payouts made between 60-89 days will get a 7.5% bonus; and payouts made after 90 days or more will get a 10% bonus. Facebook doesn’t specify what the base amount is, but in its last round of bounties, its highest payouts per bug were as much as $80,000 and $60,000 with some $40,000 paid out in its existing bonus program. But payments might be as low as $500.

The extra money will work as a kind of incentive to bounty hunters who make a living from these tips, so that when delays happen with Facebook paying out for legitimate tips, the bug hunters know they’ll get a more lucrative reward for their work in the end — rather than get turned off from working on Facebook-property bugs altogether.

Bug hunting has become a big business for security researchers, with some making upwards of $1 million annually from the programs. But bounty hunting is a double-edged sword: it definitely focuses top minds on to specific platforms, but in doing so, they spend more time there than looking for vulnerabilities in some places than others. That leads the biggest platforms to ensure that they are making their bug-ridden environments more, or as, “attractive” as others to get people to contribute to their work.

Facebook says that it determines bounty amounts based on a variety of factors, including (but not limited to) impact, ease of exploitation, and quality of the report. “If we pay a bounty, the minimum reward is $500,” they told me.

“We reward researchers based on the maximum possible impact of their report that we find during our own internal investigation of each bug, rather than based on the impact reported initially by the researcher,” they continued. “Sometimes our impact investigations can lead tosignificantly higher bounties for researchers, but they can also sometimes take more time to complete. The Payout Time Bonus is meant to also reward our researchers for their patience during this process.

“Our ongoing payout guideline series, shares more details to help external researchers better understand our payout decisions. We have published three guidelines so far and will publish more in the future.”