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News: Tiger Global leads $42M Series B in Nigerian credit-led neobank FairMoney

• July 2, 2021
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Neobanks have led the charge as regards venture capital funding for consumer fintech startups. But while they have collectively dominated the fintech space, they don’t operate a monolithic model. There are five distinct models, and the one adopted by Nubank, the $30 billion behemoth, is the credit-led model. Neobanks operating this model start by offering

Neobanks have led the charge as regards venture capital funding for consumer fintech startups. But while they have collectively dominated the fintech space, they don’t operate a monolithic model.

There are five distinct models, and the one adopted by Nubank, the $30 billion behemoth, is the credit-led model. Neobanks operating this model start by offering credit via cards or on an app and subsequently offer bank accounts as a gateway to other services.

Nigerian fintech startup FairMoney operates this model. Today, it is announcing a $42 million Series B raise to diversify its offerings and expand to “become the financial hub for its users.” 

Tiger Global Management led the round. Existing investors from the company’s previous rounds, DST Partners, Flourish Ventures, Newfund, and Speedinvest, participated. The investment comes after FairMoney raised €10 million Series A two years ago and €1.2 million seed in 2018.

Founded in 2017 by Laurin Hainy, Matthieu Gendreau, and Nicolas Berthozat, FairMoney started as an online lender that provides instant loans and bill payments to customers in Nigeria.

When CEO Hainy spoke to TechCrunch in February, the company was six months into its expansion to India. One of the highlights of that discussion was FairMoney’s impressive numbers in 2020. Last year, the company disbursed a total loan volume of $93 million to over 1.3 million users who made more than 6.5 million loan applications. 

The company also made some progress on the India front, processing more than 500,000 loan applications from over 100,000 unique users.

So what has changed since then? For one, Hainy says FairMoney ticked one of the goals which was acquiring a microfinance bank license. The license allows FairMoney to operate as a financial service provider in Nigeria.

“We have received our MFB banking license which now enables us to open current accounts for our users, and we’re doing that on quite a big scale,” Hainy said to TechCrunch. “We opened accounts for our repeated and new customers, which I think is quite a unique company strategy because we don’t need to burn millions of dollars of customer acquisition cost on users like other competitors. I think all of that has enabled us to become sort of the largest digital bank in Nigeria.”

Quite the claim but behind it are figures to back it up. Of the company’s current 3.5 million registered users, 1.3 million are unique bank account holders. The company says it is projecting to disburse $300 million worth of loans to them this year. How will it finance that? By raising bonds. FairMoney’s loan book is grown by its capital markets activity and has convinced some investment banks to invest a substantial amount in its unlisted bond. 

The credit-led neobank offers loans to individuals from ₦1,500 (~$3) to ₦500,000 (~$1,000) ranging from days to six months. Small business loans have become a prominent service most digital banks have begun to offer in Nigeria’s retail sector, and FairMoney sees an opportunity there. Hainy states that from now on, the company will start servicing loans to registered SMEs in Nigeria. In the works also is the issuance of cards. However, unlike the credit cards operated by Nubank, FairMoney is shipping debit cards, the more prevalent one in the Nigerian market.

“The ambition is that by the end of the year, the customer has the full-fledged banking experience from P2P transfers and lending to debit cards and current accounts. In addition to that, we are working on a number of additional services from savings products, stock trading, and crypto-trading products potentially depending on where regulation is heading,” Hainy continued. 

Image Credits: FairMoney

Most African companies, after completing a Series B raise, think about expansion, it’s a different case for FairMoney. Hainy calls this a ‘focus round’ and says FairMoney wants to consolidate its position in Nigeria and India; therefore, it is not considering any expansion to other markets.

“We feel that with India and Nigeria, we have tons of work to do and tons of problems to solve. We are doubling down on the Nigerian opportunity, which is building out more banking services and becoming one of the commercial banks in the country. And then India by building a large credit book there,” the CEO combined.

African fintech startups have attracted a lot of capital this year and they continue to do so. So far, the continent has seen three nine-figure raises, all from fintech companies Flutterwave, TymeBank and Chipper Cash. There’s also one reportedly in the works from OPay.

Nigerian fintechs are leading the crop as exciting startups keep coming from the country week in week out, gaining access to capital at an astonishing rate.

It is not news that while local investors are cutting checks at pre-seed and seed levels, and sometimes Series A, international investors control the continent’s latter stages. TymeBank cited U.K. and Philippines venture capital firms as investors. For Chipper Cash, it was SVB Capital, Ribbit, and Bezos Expeditions, while Avenir Growth Capital and Tiger Global invested in Flutterwave.

In FairMoney, Tiger Global has made a return to the continent. Per public knowledge, it is the first time the U.S. hedge fund is investing in two African startups in a year after backing Flutterwave in March. “We are excited to partner with FairMoney as they build a better financial hub for customers in Nigeria and India,” Scott Shleifer, partner at Tiger Global, said in a statement. “We were impressed by the team and the strong growth to date and look forward to supporting FairMoney as they continue to scale.”

Hainy calls the investment a great industry signaling for the continent. He believes Tiger Global decided to back FairMoney because the company has been able to scale tremendously and shown that it can operate banking and lending while running a profitable business when most of its counterparts are not.

“I think what most people have been discussing is the question of sustainability. How long can digital banks operate as financial service providers while making losses? So I think that’s another great signal for the market that we’ve actually managed to do that in a profitable manner, providing upside for our shareholders and also showing our clients that they can actually bank on us in the future,” Hainy added.

And to achieve its goal to become a financial hub for its customers’ banking needs, the CEO said the company is embarking on a hiring spree for top talent. “We are hiring worldwide, and there are 150 open positions out there right now that we’re trying to fill with strong talent to help us build the financial app for Nigerians.”

News: Branson aims to beat Bezos to orbit in final stretch of billionaire space race

• July 1, 2021
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Two billionaires are neck and neck in the final sprint to the Kármán line, but Richard Branson may clinch it with a July 11 flight on a Virgin Galactic spacecraft, narrowly beating out Jeff Bezos’s planned July 20 trip aboard a Blue Origin New Shepard capsule. Whoever wins, the real lesson here is that with

Two billionaires are neck and neck in the final sprint to the Kármán line, but Richard Branson may clinch it with a July 11 flight on a Virgin Galactic spacecraft, narrowly beating out Jeff Bezos’s planned July 20 trip aboard a Blue Origin New Shepard capsule. Whoever wins, the real lesson here is that with enough money, you truly can do anything.

The news came today in the form of an announcement from Virgin Galactic stating that the launch window for its next test flight opens at 6 AM Pacific time on July 11, and that the mission will be the first to carry a full crew: two pilots, three specialists, and one billionaire. (Blue Origin had its own announcement, of which below.)

Dave Mackay and Michael Masucci will pilot the VSS Unity spacecraft; Chief Astronaut instructor Beth Moses will oversee the flight; Lead Operations Engineer Colin Bennett will monitor cabin equipment and procedures; Vice President of Government Affairs and Research Operations Sirisha Bandla will be handling a University of Florida microgravity experiment; and lastly, Sir Richard Branson “will evaluate the private astronaut experience.” In other words, he’s the first plain old passenger.

“I truly believe that space belongs to all of us,” the billionaire founder and private funder of the space tourism company said in the company’s press release. “After more than 16 years of research, engineering, and testing, Virgin Galactic stands at the vanguard of a new commercial space industry, which is set to open space to humankind and change the world for good. It’s one thing to have a dream of making space more accessible to all; it’s another for an incredible team to collectively turn that dream into reality. As part of a remarkable crew of mission specialists, I’m honoured to help validate the journey our future astronauts will undertake and ensure we deliver the unique customer experience people expect from Virgin.”

The mission will, like others in the Virgin Galactic style, involve being flown by traditional means to what is normally considered a high altitude, after which the rocket-powered VSS Unity will detach from the plane and zoom up to above 80 kilometers, generally (though not universally) considered the edge of space. Branson will have gone through all the same training that future Virgin Galactic space tourists will go through, and will of course wear the same special blue suit.

If all goes according to plan, Branson will beat Bezos to space by a little more than a week, and probably win a long-running bet.

Bezos, for his part, will be going up July 11 (again, delays notwithstanding) on in a more traditional launch vehicle, Blue Origin’s New Shepard, accompanied by his brother and a lucky ticket-holder — lucky and rich, that is, since the ticket ended up selling at auction for $28 million to an as yet unannounced party.

The company did however today announce that the fourth passenger on the first crewed flight will be Wally Funk, the first graduate of NASA’s Mercury 13 program that trained women astronauts in 1961 — but the mission was cancelled and Funk never went to space. After 50 years of waiting, it seems she’ll finally get her chance.

News: Twitter tests more attention-grabbing misinformation labels

• July 1, 2021
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Twitter is considering changes to the way it contextualizes misleading tweets that the company doesn’t believe are dangerous enough to be removed from the platform outright. The company announced the test in a tweet Thursday with an image of the new misinformation labels. Within the limited test, those labels will appear with color-coded backgrounds now,

Twitter is considering changes to the way it contextualizes misleading tweets that the company doesn’t believe are dangerous enough to be removed from the platform outright.

The company announced the test in a tweet Thursday with an image of the new misinformation labels. Within the limited test, those labels will appear with color-coded backgrounds now, making them much more visible in the feed while also giving users a way to quickly parse the information from visual cues. Some users will begin to see the change this week.

Tweets that Twitter deems “misleading” will get a red background with a short explanation and a notice that users can’t reply to, like or share the content. Yellow labels will appear on content that isn’t as actively misleading. In both cases, Twitter has made it more clear that you can click the labels to find verified information about the topic at hand (in this case, the pandemic).

“People who come across the new labels as a part of this limited test should expect a more communicative impact from the labels themselves both through copy, symbols and colors used to distill clear context about not only the label, but the information or content they are engaging with,” a Twitter spokesperson told TechCrunch.

Image Credits: Twitter

Twitter found that even tiny shifts in design could impact how people interacted with labeled tweets. In a test the company ran with a pink variation of the label, users clicked through to the authoritative information that Twitter provided more but they also quote-tweeted the content itself more, furthering its spread. Twitter says that it tested many variations on the written copy, colors and symbols that made their way into the new misinformation labels.

The changes come after a long public feedback period that convinced the company that misinformation labels needed to stand out better in a sea of tweets. Facebook’s own misinformation labels have also faced criticism for blending in too easily and failing to create much friction for potentially dangerous information on the platform.

Twitter first created content labels as a way to flag “manipulated media” — photos and videos altered to deliberately mislead people, like the doctored deepfake of Nancy Pelosi that went viral back in 2019. Last May, Twitter expanded its use of labels to address the wave of Covid-19 misinformation that swept over social media early in the pandemic.

A month ago, the company rolled out new labels specific to vaccine misinformation and introduced a strike-based system into its rules. The idea is for Twitter to build a toolkit it can use to respond in a proportional way to misinformation depending on the potential for real-world harm.

“… We know that even within the space of our policies, not all misleading claims are equally harmful,” a Twitter spokesperson said. “For example, telling someone to drink bleach in order to cure COVID is a more immediate and severe harm than sharing a viral image of a shark swimming on a flooded highway and claiming that’s footage from a hurricane. (That’s a real thing that happens every hurricane season.)”

Labels are just one of the content moderation options that Twitter developed over the course of the last couple of years, along with warnings that require a click-through and pop-up messages designed to subtly steer people away from impulsively sharing inflammatory tweets.

When Twitter decides not to remove content outright, it turns to an a la carte menu of potential content enforcement options:

• Apply a label and/or warning message to the Tweet
• Show a warning to people before they share or like the Tweet;
• Reduce the visibility of the Tweet on Twitter and/or prevent it from being recommended;
• Turn off likes, replies, and Retweets; and/or
• Provide a link to additional explanations or clarifications, such as in a curated landing page or relevant Twitter policies.

In most scenarios, the company will opt for all of the above.

“While there is no single answer to addressing the unique challenges presented by the range of types of misinformation, we believe investing in a multi-prong approach will allow us to be nimble and shift with the constantly changing dynamic of the public conversation,” the spokesperson said.

News: Edtech startup Microverse raises $12.5M to bring income share agreements to the developing world

• July 1, 2021
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Edtech startup Microverse has tapped new venture funding in its quest to help train students across the globe to code through its online school that requires zero upfront cost, instead relying on an income-share agreement that kicks in when students find a job. The startup tells TechCrunch it has closed a $12.5 million Series A

Edtech startup Microverse has tapped new venture funding in its quest to help train students across the globe to code through its online school that requires zero upfront cost, instead relying on an income-share agreement that kicks in when students find a job.

The startup tells TechCrunch it has closed a $12.5 million Series A led by Northzone with additional participation from General Catalyst, All Iron Ventures and a host of angel investors. We last covered the company after it had closed a bout of seed funding from General Catalyst and Y Combinator; this latest round brings the startup’s total funding to just under $16 million.

The company’s vision has seen added pandemic-era traction as larger tech companies have embraced remote work that spans geographic boundaries and time zones. Microverse has now brought English-speaking students from over 188 countries through its program.

Since we last chatted, CEO Ariel Camus says the startup has landed some 300 early graduates in positions at tech companies including Microsoft, VMWare and Huawei. The company says its has above a 95% employment rate for its students within six months of graduation so far, pushing past one of the bigger issues that income-share-agreement-based schools have had stateside — getting graduates employed.

Microverse does have notably less generous terms than counterparts like Lambda School when it comes to when students begin loan repayment, the terms of both are actually quite different, as noted in my previous article:

While Lambda School’s ISA terms require students to pay 17% of their monthly salary for 24 months once they begin earning above $50,000 annually — up to a maximum of $30,000, Microverse requires that graduates pay 15% of their salary once they begin making more than just $1,000 per month, though there is no cap on time, so students continue payments until they have repaid $15,000 in full. In both startups’ cases, students only repay if they are employed in a field related to what they studied, but with Microverse, ISAs never expire, so if you ever enter a job adjacent to your area of study, you are on the hook for repayments. Lambda School’s ISA taps out after five years of deferred repayments.

The startup has made efforts to streamline their online program since launch to ensure that students are being set up to succeed in the full-time, 10-month program. Part of Microverse’s efforts have included condensing lesson segments into shorter time frames to ensure students aren’t starting the program unless they have enough free time to commit. Camus says the startup is receiving thousands of applications per month, of which only a fraction are accepted in an effort to ensure that the small startup isn’t overcommitting itself early on. The startup estimates it will usher 1,000 students through its program this year.

The startup has big plans for the future, including working more closely with tech companies to ensure that students have easier access to job placement once they graduate.

“We have data now that the day we launch a partner program — which we haven’t done yet but we will eventually — it opens up the market by 5x,” Camus tells TechCrunch. “To get 10,000 students per year in a world where 90% of the world’s population doesn’t have access to higher education — it’s not going to be that hard, to be honest, I’m not too worried.”

News: Daily Crunch: After quarters of explosive growth, a profitable Robinhood files to go public

• July 1, 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 July 1, 2021. It’s Robinood IPO day! That’s the headline, really. This afternoon the American consumer fintech company filed to go public in what will prove to be an early contender for the third-quarter’s most important IPO. We also have a metric ton of other startup news for you. And don’t forget that the next TechCrunch event is next week! Let’s go! — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Robinhood is going public: In our first look at the company’s IPO filing we observed a quickly growing consumer fintech company that made money in 2020. The company swung to a loss in the first quarter of 2021, but as TechCrunch reported, that loss is largely immaterial. Robinhood closed out Q1 2021 on an annual run rate of more than $2 billion. Hot dang.
• Apple’s software rollout continues: After dropping public betas for iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 yesterday, Apple released the public beta version of macOS 12.0 Monterey. You can download it now, if you are a brave soul who wants to do some testing. For the rest of us, yes that’s the sound of a required corporate update in our future.
• Articulate raises $1.5B in Series A: After bootstrapping for ages, corporate edtech company Articulate raised a $1.5 billion Series A round on a $3.75 billion valuation. The outsized, putatively early-staged round was the leading story of the day until Robinhood arrived and kicked it into third.

Startups/VC

Looping back to a few topics that TechCrunch has been covering extensively in recent weeks, there’s fresh news from Karat, a neobank aimed at the creator economy. Everyone wants to make money off creators starting to make money, it seems. And from the global startup market, TechCrunch has fresh notes on the future of European IPOs for those of you into such things.

Now, the day’s rounds:

• Nowports raises $16M to automate Latin American freight: Supply chain software startups are big business, and Nowports wants in on the boom. The startup’s latest round was led by Mouro Capital, with Nowports now backed by around $24 million in capital to date.
• Codat raises $40M to build the Plaid for companies: APIs are popular. Fintech APIs are super popular. And fintech APIs that connect individuals’ money to other companies are Plaid. Codat wants to build Plaid, but for SMB financial data. And Tiger is now backing it.
• Mercado Bitcoin raises $200M for its bitcoin market: In the wake of the Coinbase direct listing, and seemingly strong crypto trading volumes in the second quarter, it’s not a huge surprise to see fintech companies that facilitate consumer bitcoin purchases attract attention. Seeing Brazil’s Mercado raise such a huge check, then, is not a huge surprise.
• Good news for hungry Europeans: If you want groceries, and want them now, “Rohlik, a Czech startup that has built an online grocery ordering and delivery business selling grocery fare,” TechCrunch reports, has just raised €100 million in a round that values the company at €1 billion.
• Ghost raises $100M for crash prevention: How much money can self-driving car tech collect? At least nine-figures more we’ve learned thanks to the new Ghost round. Ghost is also the name of a web content CMS. This is not that. Instead, this Ghost is working on what TechCrunch called “universal collision avoidance technology” for autonomous driving systems.

To guard against data loss and misuse, the cybersecurity conversation must evolve

Locking down data centers and networks against intruders is just one aspect of an organization’s security responsibilities; cloud services, collaboration tools and APIs extend security perimeters even farther. What’s more, the systems created to prevent the misuse and mishandling of sensitive data often depend heavily on someone’s better angels.

According to Sid Trivedi, a partner at Foundation Capital, and seven-time CIO Mark Settle, IT managers need to replace existing DLP frameworks with a new one that centers on DMP — data misuse protection.

These solutions “will provide data assets with more sophisticated self-defense mechanisms instead of relying on the surveillance of traditional security perimeters,” and many startups are already competing in this space.

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

Big Tech Inc.

We revisited some themes we’ve seen before in our startup section. The same goes for our look at Big Tech. On the government-and-tech side of things:

• India doesn’t appreciate Big Tech companies, part 47: Manish Singh reports that “India’s central bank has identified Big Tech’s push into financial services as a challenge for banks in the South Asian market, saying the growing presence of these firms have prompted concerns about creation of an uneven playing field.” Recall that India is also irked at Twitter and has various other beefs with different tech companies.
• Paris fines Airbnb: Sticking to the government theme, Airbnb got hit with an €8 million fine today, a fee worth 0.14% of the company’s $6.6 billion in cash it held at the end of the first quarter, per its latest earnings report. The Daily Crunch would like to congratulate the City of Light on its auspicious regulatory victory.
• Lastly, from Pinterest, something that stood out while going back through the day’s news: A prohibition of weight-loss advertising. Lots of folks struggle with eating disorders, body image and related issues. So Pinterest is doing away with one type of advertisement that might harm those folks. With decisions like this we don’t want to be overly kind to the company in question as we don’t know how much money it is leaving on the table, but the move could hint at more active social media regulation of owned platforms in the future. At least when it comes to ads.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

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

We’re reaching out to startup founders to tell us who they turn to when they want the most up-to-date growth marketing practices. Fill out the survey here.

Read one of the recommendations we’ve received below!

Name of marketer: Amy Konefal

Name of recommender: Dan Reardon, formerly of vudu.com

Recommendation:  “Amy drove scale for us as we grew to a half-billion-dollar company. She identified and exploited efficiencies and built out a rich portfolio of channels.”

Community

The Pittsburgh City Spotlight was a huge success! Thank you to everyone who attended, as well as the over 80 companies that submitted to participate in our pitch-off. In case you missed the event, you can check out the interview with Pittsburgh’s Mayor, our chat with CMU’s President and the latest on Duolingo from their director of Engineering.

Cool things happening in your city? Drop us a tweet about where you’d like to see us spotlight next.

TC Eventful

Image Credits: Stephanie McCabe / Unsplash

We’re rolling into the long holiday weekend here in the States, and in true American style, we’re offering a Fourth of July sale on tickets to not just one but all FOUR TechCrunch events in 2021: TechCrunch Early Stage (July 8-9), TC Disrupt (Sept 21-23), TC Sessions: SaaS (October 27) and TC Sessions: Space (December 14-15).

Our 4th of July ticket sale kicks into gear starting today through July 6 where you can get two tickets for the price of one on any of these TechCrunch events coming soon to a virtual platform near you. You can find all of our events and lock in your two-for-one tickets at techcrunch.com/events.

News: The 2021 edtech avalanche has just begun

• July 1, 2021
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We are seeing a wave of private companies sweeping across parts of education and training that were previously overseen or funded centrally by governments. This is happening all across the world.

Last week was a good one for edtech in Europe.

GoStudent became Europe’s first edtech unicorn (IPO’d companies aside), raising its third round in 12 months and the biggest ever in the sector in Europe. Brighteye Ventures’ analysis showed that VC investments in European edtech had breached $1 billion in a calendar year for the first time, even without GoStudent’s mega-round, with six months left to go.

Edtech deal flow in 2021 looks set to match or even outpace 2020 levels, per the report: At $9.4 million, average deal size is triple 2020 levels; seven companies have raised $50 million in five different markets; and the U.K. has more than three times as many deals as the next individual market.

Deal-size progression in edtech over the years. Image Credits: Brighteye Ventures

It’s interesting that we are not seeing enormous increases in deal count. The $1.05-billion mark in the report is spread across 111 transactions — there were 237 in 2020, so we could expect a similar total this year. More funding and stable deal count of course means that we are seeing significant increases in deal size.

We can draw a few conclusions from this. We can construe that companies created last year and in previous years matured significantly during the pandemic due to increased demand. Moreover, this rapid natural selection process provided insights on verticals and possible winners.

Lastly, it seems generalist investors are recognizing that edtech investments can reap outsized returns, similar to sectors like deep tech, health tech and fintech.

This is contributing to larger early rounds than we have seen in previous years — investors can’t pick the winner, but they can slant the playing field instead. We therefore expect to see a surge in the number of pre-seed, seed and Series A rounds in the second half of 2021, as companies founded during the pandemic begin to raise meaningful funding.

Another reason that edtech is being taken seriously by generalist investors is that the true size of the market (and the extent of digitization to come) is becoming more conceivable.

Edtech spending is growing like media spending did in the 2010s. Image Credits: Brighteye Ventures

News: How Robinhood’s explosive growth rate came to be

• July 1, 2021
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Where does all that revenue come from?

This afternoon Robinhood filed to go public. TechCrunch’s first look at its results can be found here. Now that we’ve done a first dig, we can take the time to dive into the company’s filing more deeply.

Robinhood’s IPO has long been anticipated not only because there are billions of dollars in capital riding on its impending liquidity, but also because the company became something of a poster child for the savings and investing boom that 2020 saw and the COVID-19 pandemic helped engender.

The consumer trading service’s products became so popular and enmeshed in popular culture thanks to both the “stonks” movement and the larger GameStop brouhaha, that the company’s public offering carries much more weight than that of a more regular venture-backed entity. Robinhood has fans, haters, and many an observer in Congress.

Regardless of all that, today we are digging into the company’s business and financial results. So, if you want to better understand how Robinhood makes money, and how profitable or not it really is, this is for you.

We will start with a more in-depth look at growth and profitability, pivot to learning about the company’s revenue makeup, discuss a risk factor or two, and close on its decision to offer some of its own shares to its users. Let’s go!

Inside Robinhood’s growth engine

Before we get into the how of Robinhood’s growth, let’s discuss how big the company has become.

The fintech unicorn’s revenue grew from $277.5 million in 2019 to $958.8 million in 2020, which works out to growth of around 245%. Robinhood expanded even more quickly in the first quarter of 2021, scaling from year-ago revenue of $127.6 million to $522.2 million, a gain of around 309%.

Those are numbers that we frankly do not see often amongst companies going public; 300% growth is a pre-Series A metric, usually.

News: Twitter considers new features for tweeting only to friends, under different personas, and more

• July 1, 2021
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Twitter has a history of sharing feature and design ideas it’s considering at very early stages of development. Earlier this month, for example, it showed off concepts around a potential “unmention” feature that would let users untag themselves from others’ tweets. Today, the company is sharing a few more of its design explorations that would

Twitter has a history of sharing feature and design ideas it’s considering at very early stages of development. Earlier this month, for example, it showed off concepts around a potential “unmention” feature that would let users untag themselves from others’ tweets. Today, the company is sharing a few more of its design explorations that would allow users to better control who can see their tweets and who ends up in their replies. The new concepts include a way to tweet only to a group of trusted friends, new prompts that would ask people to reconsider the language they’re using when posting a reply, and a “personas” feature that would allow you to tweet based on your different contexts — like tweets about your work life, your hobbies and interests, and so on.

The company says it’s thinking through these concepts and is looking to now gather feedback to inform what it may later develop.

The first of the new ideas builds on work that began last year with the release of a feature that allows an original poster to choose who’s allowed to reply to their tweet. Today, users can choose to limit replies to only people mentioned in the tweet, ony people they follow, or they can leave it defaulted to “everyone.” But even though this allows users to limit who can respond, everyone can see the tweet itself. And they can like, retweet or quote tweet the post.

With the proposed Trusted Friends feature, users could tweet to a group of their own choosing. This could be a way to use Twitter with real-life friends, or some other small network of people you know more personally. Perhaps you could post a tweet that only your New York friends could see when you wanted to let them know you were in town. Or maybe you could post only to those who share your love of a particular TV show, sporting event, or hobby.

Image Credits: Twitter

This ability to have private conversations alongside public ones could boost people’s Twitter usage and even encourage some people to try tweeting for the first time. But it also could be disruptive to Twitter, as it would chip away at the company’s original idea of a platform that’s a sort of public message board where everyone is invited into the conversation. Users may begin to think about whether or not their post is worthy of being shared in public, and decide to hold more of their content back from the wider Twitter audience, which could impact Twitter engagement metrics. It also pushes Twitter closer to Facebook territory where only some posts are meant for the world, while more are shared with just friends.

Twitter says the benefit of this private, “friends only” format is that it could save people from the workarounds they’re currently using — like juggling multiple alt accounts or toggling between public to protected tweets.

Another new feature under consideration is Reply Language Prompts. This feature would allow Twitter users to choose phrases they don’t want to see in their replies. When someone is writing back to the original poster, these words and phrases would be highlighted and a prompt would explain why the original poster doesn’t want to see that sort of language. For instance, users could configure prompts to appear if someone is using profanity in their reply.

The feature wouldn’t stop the poster from tweeting their reply — it’s more a gentle nudge that asks them to be more considerate.

These “nudges” can have impact. For example, when Twitter launches a nudge that suggested users read an article before they amplify it with a retweet, it found that users opened articles before sharing them 40% more often. But in the case of someone determined to troll, it may not do that much good.

The third, and perhaps most complicated, feature is something Twitter is calling “Facets.”

This is an early idea about tweeting from different personas from one account. The feature would make sense for those who often tweet about different aspects of their lives, including their work life, their side hustles, their personal life or family, their passions, and more.

Image Credits: Twitter

Unlike Trusted Friends, which would let you restrict some tweets to a more personal network, Facets would give other users the ability to choose whether or not they wanted to follow all your tweets, or only those about the “facet” they’re interested in. This way, you could follow someone’s tweets about tech, but ignore their stream of reactions they post when watching their favorite team play. Or you could follow your friend’s personal tweets, but ignore their work-related content. And so on.

This is an interesting idea, as Twitter users have always worried about alienating some of their followers by posting “off-topic” so to speak. But this also puts the problem of determining what tweets to show which users on the end user themselves. Users may be better served by the algorithmic timeline that understands which content they engage with, and which they tend to ignore. (Also: “facets?!”)

Twitter says none of the three features are in the process of being built just yet. These are only design mockups that showcase ideas the company has been considering. It also hasn’t yet made the decision whether or not any of the three will go under development — that’s what the user feedback it’s hoping to receive will help to determine.

News: Robinhood is going public and we’re very excited

• July 1, 2021
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It’s a sweltering day here in New York City, and that means Wall Street is on fire, and so is Robinhood, apparently. The popular stock trading app officially filed its Form S-1 with the SEC a few hours ago to go public, where it will trade under the ticker “HOOD.” Robinhood files to go public

It’s a sweltering day here in New York City, and that means Wall Street is on fire, and so is Robinhood, apparently. The popular stock trading app officially filed its Form S-1 with the SEC a few hours ago to go public, where it will trade under the ticker “HOOD.”

The Equity crew has been yammering about Robinhood for years now, and we have been chomping on the bit to see those S-1 results for what feels like ages. Well, we finally got the numbers, we chomped that bit (or at least Alex and Danny did, since Natasha went on vacation about 15 minutes before the IPO hit the wires), and so here’s a special Equity Shot to talk about all the highlights.

We talked about so much in an itsy-bitsy 15-minute episode: crazy revenue growth, crazy revenue concentration from two major sources, regulatory hurdles that the company has been clearing up, better financials with a bit of nuance on the company’s Q1 finances, and the company’s special plan for its IPO.

Wowza.

Here’s what we got up to:

• Historical growth and profitability.
• Revenue mix and revenue concentration, along with constituent concerns.
• The importance of options-related incomes for the company.
• Dogecoin.
• Why the company’s adjusted income may help it assuage investors who have their eyes pop out of their skulls when they see its GAAP Q1 2021 results.

And a lot more. Of course, if you hate Robinhood, we will be back with our normally-scheduled Friday episode of Equity tomorrow.

News: To guard against data loss and misuse, the cybersecurity conversation must evolve

• July 1, 2021
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People — not applications, networks or endpoints — have become the primary security perimeter in today’s cloud-first, choose-the-handiest-device, collaboration-obsessed world.

Data breaches have become a part of life. They impact hospitals, universities, government agencies, charitable organizations and commercial enterprises. In healthcare alone, 2020 saw 640 breaches, exposing 30 million personal records, a 25% increase over 2019 that equates to roughly two breaches per day, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. On a global basis, 2.3 billion records were breached in February 2021.

It’s painfully clear that existing data loss prevention (DLP) tools are struggling to deal with the data sprawl, ubiquitous cloud services, device diversity and human behaviors that constitute our virtual world.

Conventional DLP solutions are built on a castle-and-moat framework in which data centers and cloud platforms are the castles holding sensitive data. They’re surrounded by networks, endpoint devices and human beings that serve as moats, defining the defensive security perimeters of every organization. Conventional solutions assign sensitivity ratings to individual data assets and monitor these perimeters to detect the unauthorized movement of sensitive data.

Unfortunately, these historical security boundaries are becoming increasingly ambiguous and somewhat irrelevant as bots, APIs and collaboration tools become the primary conduits for sharing and exchanging data.

In reality, data loss is only half the problem confronting a modern enterprise. Corporations are routinely exposed to financial, legal and ethical risks associated with the mishandling or misuse of sensitive information within the corporation itself. The risks associated with the misuse of personally identifiable information have been widely publicized.

However, risks of similar or greater severity can result from the mishandling of intellectual property, material nonpublic information, or any type of data that was obtained through a formal agreement that placed explicit restrictions on its use.

Conventional DLP frameworks are incapable of addressing these challenges. We believe they need to be replaced by a new data misuse protection (DMP) framework that safeguards data from unauthorized or inappropriate use within a corporate environment in addition to its outright theft or inadvertent loss. DMP solutions will provide data assets with more sophisticated self-defense mechanisms instead of relying on the surveillance of traditional security perimeters.