From the venue and the flashy event website, Waterloo, Ontario’s True North conference (in its second year) doesn’t seem all that distinct from a laundry list of other major tech events that take place each year across North America. But from the moment its main stage programming kicked off on the first day, it was clear this wasn’t your typical gathering place for the tech industry faithful.

The main stage track kicked off with Communitech CEO Iain Klugman. The event is produced by Communitech, an entrepreneurial support and resource organization founded in 1997 to foster the Waterloo region’s technology industry. Communitech sprung out of BlackBerry and the University of Waterloo and the world-class innovation community that surrounds both.

Klugman, a former communications executive and current board member at a number of Communitech-fostered startups and academic institutions, sounded a cautionary and urgent note that continued throughout the day.

Tech conferences, in general, tend to dwell on optimism and enthusiasm, with brief forays into dark alleys of negative consequences. Not this one.

Klugman’s talk touched on opportunity, but it was the opportunity to discuss among a group of peers with influence in the technology industry how they should undertake together “to set things right.” Last year’s event had a similar outcome, resulting in the “Tech for Good Declaration,” which True North describes as “the Canadian tech industry’s living document,” and includes a number of principles designed to help guide technology development with community good in mind.

Rather than changing focus for year two, True North’s organizers seem to have doubled down: Klugman’s opening talk included references to surveillance capitalism and breaches of trust, and included this cheerful analogy: “Technology is like fuel. It can warm our homes or it can burn them to the ground, so we decide which one it will do.”

As a whole, the event is about the “tough choices” faced by the collective “we” of the tech industry, according to Klugman.

True North’s official keynote perfectly took the baton from the intro, as New York Times columnist and longtime political commentator Thomas Friedman took the stage. Friedman, a somewhat controversial figure owing to some of his past political stances, launched into a talk informed by his most recent book, “Thank You for Being Late,” and talked about what we’re seeing now in human history as a moment of intersection of three different forces accelerating in a “nonlinear manner” all at once, including technological development outpacing humanity’s ability to adapt to those changes.

Friedman’s talk ended with him positing that humans spend most of their time today in the essentially “god-less” realm of “cyberspace,” a realm “where we’re all connected but no one’s in charge,” while at the same time we’ve achieved better than ever ability to act with god-like power to control and manipulate our environment. He chided the essential disconnect of powerful forces that act with supreme mastery over technology but with no grounding in sociopolitical understanding (specifically naming Mark Zuckerberg) and those who have the inverse problem (the U.S. Congress, in Friedman’s view).

Overall, Friedman’s views are grounded in what he describes as a place of optimism. But the takeaway is more that humanity is currently at a state where it’s overwhelmed on a number of fronts and out of its depth in terms of having a capacity to cope.

In the afternoon, Robert Mazur (longtime undercover agent and the subject of biopic “The Infiltrator”) discussed his experience tracking down and prosecuting money launderers operating more or less with the blessing of large financial institutions, precisely because their systems were designed around incentive systems that encouraged them but didn’t have protections in place to prevent bad actors from taking advantage. Mazur further elaborated that current telecom industry structure actually makes it even easier than ever to launder large sums relatively unchecked. In essence, it was a warning to be mindful of how the products you build can be exploited by the most malicious actors.

Former Information and Privacy Commissioner for Ontario and creator of the concept of “Privacy by Design” Ann Cavoukian came next, decrying the current state of data “centralized in huge honeypots of information,” including Google (her example).

This centralization, she noted is a huge risk in terms of presenting opportunities for tracking, misuse, leaks and more. It’s “taking away our agency as individuals,” she said, and the solution is moving to true decentralization of data.

“Privacy […] is freedom, and is about you making decisions relating to your personal information; not the state, not corporations — you,” she said. “It’s not about secrecy, it’s about control [and] privacy is a necessary condition for societal well-being.”

Cavoukian wrapped her talk by noting the sheer volume of privacy breaches that have leaked consumer information to date, and about the importance of encryption in keeping this safe. Overall, her talk was a blueprint for tech companies looking to incorporate data privacy and good stewardship into the DNA of their products from day one.

Kelsey Leonard, Tribal Co-Lead on the Mid-Atlantic Regional Planning Body of the U.S. National Ocean Council, provided a talk on the implications of digital rights and the continued digital divide as it pertains to Indigenous communities globally. Leonard pointed out that Indigenous nations in North America are the least connected in the world, something she noted continues the ongoing colonialism, and even can potentially contribute to “ongoing genocide of Indigenous peoples.”

Indigenous people are also systematically disenfranchised from data ownership and data control, by virtue of their being left out of advanced STEM education and formalized degrees, she said. Leonard also noted that platforms contain reinforcement of what she calls “digital colonialism,” in that Indigenous names are often flagged as fake by algorithms designed to enforce real-name policies, and Indigenous languages are often mistranslated (specifically as Estonian, she said).

This worsens existing Indigenous language and culture erasure. Leonard said a language is lost every two weeks on average, according to recent research. What’s required then is to add protection measures specific to digital platforms to help counter this institutional digital colonization and enforce Indigenous Sovereign Data.

To close day one, Recode founder and legendary Silicon Valley reporter Kara Swisher summarized a lot of her recent work as a New York Times columnist. Basically, that means she called on the industry to stop messing around and start fixing stuff.

Swisher said we’re coming to a “reckoning” for tech in terms of media coverage, and the overwhelmingly positive coverage it’s received over the past many years. She emphasized that we’re only at the beginning of the impact technology will have on society, and laid out a number of current areas of innovation and investment that will continue to upset societal norms, including autonomous driving, artificial intelligence and more.

Regarding media specifically, Swisher noted that she marked a significant shift when BuzzFeed started A/B testing to amplify and extend the attention-capture possible around specific “news” items, citing the famous Katy Perry Left Shark incident of 2015. This, combined with our “continuous partial attention,” which is tied to our inability to totally disengage from our smartphones, is combining to have effects on how we think and work in the world, Swisher said.

She added that, today, many of her new big concerns are around AI, and that “everything that can be digitized will be digitized.” Not only that, she continued, but “almost everything can be,” which will be massively disruptive to peoples’ lives, with effects including a future where most people will have a very high number of different jobs over the course of their lives, requiring continuous education and retraining. “We have to think really hard about what good AI is and what problematic AI is,” she said.

Across other stages, too, the themes of technology’s dangers and how to avert it prevailed across programming. Take Some Risk founder Duane Brown gave a talk on opting out of the always-connected lifestyle and becoming “digitally exhausted.” MedStack founder and CEO Balaji Gopalan talked about the risks inherent in dealing with private patient data in healthcare. Other topics included sustainable energy for Africa, using big data to counter human trafficking and ensuring we steer away from encouraging consumerization in this generation of connected kids.

The event’s central theme was the deceptively simple (and frankly over-uttered) phrase “tech for good,” but the programming and content revealed a level of sophistication and sincerity on the topic that exceeds the low bar often found in tech industry marketing materials and staged events. Overall, it felt introspective, contrite and contemplative — a self-reflection from a community genuine about shoring up its ethical shortcomings. In other words, refreshing.

Taylor Greene: I think the major shift over the last six years since I’ve been doing this full-time is in the nomenclature. Pre-seed is really akin to what would have been a seed round or angel round...

___

Recently, Big Data player Splunk (NASDAQ: SPLK) announced its first quarter results that surpassed market expectations. Splunk is focusing on transitioning its business model to a subscription-based...

___

Sramana Mitra: You have a very interesting investment thesis. What stage do you come in? Daniel Ibri: We normally invest early stage. It’s normally pre-A, A, or post-A. It’s normally around Series A...

___

Chances are you always look at photos before you order food in your favorite food delivery app, or before you book a hotel room. French startup Meero wants to make the web and mobile apps look beautiful by helping businesses get good photos. And the company just raised a $230 million funding round.

Eurazeo, Prime Ventures and Avenir Growth are leading today’s funding round. Existing investors include Global Founders Capital, Aglaé Ventures, Alven, White Star Capital and Idinvest. The company says it represents the largest Series C round in France.

At its core, Meero is a comprehensive marketplace of photographers all around the world. This way, companies can find a freelancer and get photos back in less than 24 hours. Essentially, getting professional shots becomes an on-demand process.

The company currently focuses on a few key industries, including real estate, food, experiences, retail and e-commerce. Maybe your favorite Instagram-native brand relies on Meero for their product shots.

But Meero knows that plenty of photographers don’t need leads. That’s why the startup is also providing many services to make their lives easier.

And it start with getting the basics right. Meero takes care of the paperwork. You don’t have to send a contract, you don’t have to collect money from your clients. Of course, Meero takes a cut on transactions.

The company has also been working on automatic photo editing algorithms. If a photographer wants to accept more photo shoots, they need to spend less time editing photos. So Meero is working on AI-powered technology to automatically improve raw shots.

There are currently 80 people on the tech team, and the company plans to grow the tech team to 300 people to go further on this topic.

In the future, Meero plans to launch masterclasses and documentaries for their photographers. There will be more meetups so that photographers can talk together. And the company also plans to unveil a magazine and a foundation to support photography.

But the bigger news is that Meero plans to open up the marketplace to individual customers. And yes, it means that your next wedding could be powered by Meero — that’s a lucrative industry.

Meero has managed to attract 31,000 clients in 100 countries. There are currently 58,000 photographers on the platform. 600 people work directly for Meero across five different offices.

San Francisco is getting closer to banning the sale of e-cigarettes in the city in a bid to prevent minors from accessing them—but the new legislation may also hurt adult smokers who are trying to quit cigarettes. The city’s Board of Supervisors today voted unanimously to approve two proposals: legislation that would ban the sale or delivery of e-cigarettes in San Francisco and a separate proposal that would prohibit the sale, manufacturing and distribution of tobacco products, including e-cigarettes, on property owned or managed by the city.

The bill to ban the sale of e-cigarettes at stores in the city, as well as the delivery of e-cigarettes purchased online for delivery to San Francisco addresses, still requires final approval. If it passes (a likely outcome since the board voted 11-0 to pass the ordinance), it will go into effect seven months after it is signed by the mayor. Juul, which is headquartered in San Francisco, has already started lobbying to stop the ban.

The second proposed ordinance to ban the sale of e-cigarettes on city property will require two readings and needs to pass a second vote next week before it can be put into effect. It seems designed to take aim at Juul, since the company’s headquarters are in city-owned buildings at Pier 70. (Juul recently bought an office tower on Mission Street, but says it plans to keep its headquarters at Pier 70.)

Many of the most serious concerns over vaping center on underage use. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s research shows the number of middle and high school students who use tobacco products grew from 3.6 million in 2017 to 4.9 million in 2018. The increase was driven in part by e-cigarette use, which rose from 2.1 million in 2017 to 3.6 million in 2018 among middle and high school students.

The use of e-cigarettes by minors is indisputably harmful, especially because nicotine, which is derived from tobacco plants, can harm brain development. Juul, which controls three-fourths of the U.S. e-cigarette market according to Nielsen, has also been accused of contributing to the increase in tobacco product use among teens by lowering the barrier to entry for nicotine addiction. It is currently trying to win favor with regulators by taking steps to prevent underage users from accessing their products.

But a ban on the sale of e-cigarettes may also hurt adults who use vaping as a smoking cessation aid. While many vape juices contain nicotine, some are also available without the highly addictive chemical. Juul has drawn fire for only offering pods that contain nicotine, but vapers also use refillable devices to gradually transition to juices with lower levels of nicotine, with some ultimately weaning themselves off dependency.

While the negative impact of both nicotine and cigarettes have been well documented, vaping is a relatively new technology, so there is still little information available about how it affects health. A study by researchers at the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center found that urine from people who use e-cigarettes contained higher traces of lead, cadmium, pyrene and acrylonitrile than people who don’t smoke or vape.

On the other hand, some researchers support the use of vaping as a technique to help adult smokers quit or reduce their dependency on cigarettes. For example, the U.K. government recently launched a campaign to convince smokers to switch to vaping instead. From a health perspective, the ideal solution would be to not smoke or vape, but Public Health England, a government agency, claims vaping is 95% less harmful than smoking and said data from its smoking cessation program showed that 65% to 68% of smokers who used e-cigarettes with nicotine replacement therapies, like patches and gum, successfully quit.

Other places in the United States that are working on or have already passed legislation targeting vaping include Aspen City, which recently passed a ban on flavored e-cigarette products (vape juice comes in many flavors, including ones meant to mimic candy, and that has been blamed for making vaping more appealing to kids). In Maine, a bill is being sponsored that would essentially ban vaping by prohibiting the same of nicotine liquid containers. Many states also have laws in place that prohibit vaping wherever cigarettes are also banned.

Earlier this week, music lyrics repository Genius accused Google of lifting lyrics and posting them on its search platform. Genius told the Wall Street Journal that this caused its site traffic to drop. Google, which initially denied wrongdoing but later said it was investigating the issue, addressed the controversy in a blog post today. The company said it will start including attribution to its third-party partners that provide lyrics in its information boxes.

When Google was first approached by the Wall Street Journal, it told the newspaper that the lyrics it displays are licensed by partners and not created by Google. But some of the lyrics (which are displayed in information boxes or cards called “Knowledge Panels” at the top of search results for songs) included Genius’ Morse code-based watermarking system. Genius said that over the past two years it repeatedly contacted Google about the issue. In one letter, sent in April, Genius told Google it was not only breaking the site’s terms of service, but also violating antitrust law—a serious allegation at a time when Google and other big tech companies are facing antitrust investigations by government regulators.

After the WSJ article was first published, Google released a statement that said it was investigating the problem and would stop working with lyric providers who are “not upholding good practices.”

In today’s blog post, Satyajeet Salgar, a group product manager at Google Search, wrote that the company pays “music publishers for the right to display lyrics, since they manage the rights to these lyrics on behalf of songwriters.” Because many music publishers license lyrics text from third-party lyric content providers, Google works with those companies.

“We do not crawl or scrape websites to source these lyrics. The lyrics you see in information boxes on Search come directly from lyrics content providers, and they are updated automatically as we receive new lyrics and corrections on a regular basis,” Salgar added.

These partners include LyricFind, which Google has had an agreement with since 2016. LyricFind’s chief executive told the WSJ that it does not source lyrics from Genius.

While Salgar’s post did not name any companies, he addressed the controversy by writing “news reports this week suggested that one of our lyrics content providers is in a dispute with a lyrics site about where their written lyrics come from. We’ve asked our partner to investigate the issue to ensure that they’re following industry best practices in their approach.”

In the future, Google will start including attribution to the company that provided the lyrics in its search results. “We will continue to take an approach that respects and compensates rights-holders, and ensures that music publishers and songwriters are paid for their work,” Salgar wrote.

Genius, which launched as Rap Genius in 2009, has been at loggerheads with Google before. In 2013, a SEO trick Rap Genius used to place itself higher in search results ran afoul of Google’s web spam team. Google retaliated by burying Rap Genius links under pages of other search results. The conflict was resolved after less than two weeks, but during that time Rap Genius’ traffic plummeted dramatically.

Slack, the popular workplace messaging company, is expected to list on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday in the second major direct listing in the U.S. after Spotify introduced the concept to investors in April of last year.

At this point, plenty of industry observers think it makes sound sense for Slack to embrace the direct listing approach, wherein a company places its stock on a public exchange without raising any money or using underwriters. Though the company warned last week that its operating losses are widening as it chases new customers, it has $800 million on its balance sheet, meaning it doesn’t need to raise more right now.

Slack also doesn’t need underwriters who typically discount a company’s shares in order to ensure that they appreciate in value when they begin trading. It’s a known brand in the tech world, and that universe is broadening by the day. Put another way, Slack doesn’t need to be “sold” for investors to want to snap up its shares.

Still, we wondered about some of the thinking that has gone into preparing Slack for its move into the world of publicly traded companies, so we talked with a couple of people who are familiar with what’s happening behind the scenes to find out more. They asked not to be named, but here’s what we learned:

1) Unlike with the popular streaming music platform Spotify, which has more than 100 million premium subscribers and roughly twice as many active monthly users, Slack wasn’t as well-known to Wall Street as Silicon Valley might imagine. In fact, we’re told the bankers that were selected to advise Slack on its offering — Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Allen & Co., which are the same three that advised Spotify — had to provide more education to analysts and institutional investors this time around.

2) There will (hopefully) be enough shares to go around, while also not a glut of them. The big concern in a direct offering — which does not feature a lock-up period — is that too many people will dump their shares on the market, crushing the company’s share price, or else that too few will part with their holdings, turning the buying and selling of the company’s shares into a financial game of chicken. We’ll see what happens here, but we’re told the banks have spent the last six months trying to ensure that many — but not all — of the company’s institutional shareholders will be selling some of their stakes at the offering, Also worth noting is that unlike with Spotify, some Slack employees have restricted stock units that will vest upon its public listing and so be part of the supply of shares on its first day.

3) In establishing guidance around how Spotify’s shares should be valued, the banks advising the company looked almost entirely to its private market trades, of which there were many. There has been less secondary activity with Slack’s shares, so the banks are likely to rely on these sales but also to use other inputs. We’ll learn soon enough what they settle on, but based on the latest prices at which its shares have traded in the private market, Slack’s presumed valued right now is at $16.7 billion, or 36 times trailing 12-month sales.

4) You might imagine that banks hate direct listings because of the rich underwriting fees they aren’t collecting, and they probably do. Still, even with a direct listing, they get paid pretty well, thanks to both advisory fees and also because investors often trade through the banks named as advisers in the prospectus. There are also fewer mouths to feed on a deal with a direct listing. In Slack’s case — as happened with Spotify — Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Allen & Co. will reportedly reap almost all of the spoils — or a reported 90% of the $22 million in fees earmarked for all the advisers involved in the deal. In a traditional IPO, a longer number of banks that promise research coverage are given shares to sell, which eats into lead underwriters’ allotment.

5) One risk that Slack shouldn’t necessarily run into but that may have adversely impacted Uber’s IPO is its investor base. According to Slack’s S-1, its biggest outside shareholders include Accel (it owns 24% sailing into the offering), Andreessen Horowitz (13.3%), Social Capital (10.2%) and SoftBank (7.3 %). Why it matters: Slack doesn’t have to worry about less traditional private company backers like mutual funds not wanting to buy up its shares because they’re too busy trying to offload some.

6) Direct listings may well become a more popular product for consumer companies because companies can avoid further dilution, and there’s no lock-up on their shares, creating a shorter path to liquidity for the company and its employees and its investors. Still, Slack is probably anomalous as an enterprise company with a high enough profile to pull one off. The listings are really for companies that don’t need money any time soon and whose shares are already of interest to investors, who don’t need inducements to pay attention.

7) This is the second direct listing of a highly valued privately held company and, for the second time, it’s happening on the NYSE, with the same market maker, Citadel Securities, charged with ensuring orderly trading; the same bank, Morgan Stanley, selected to advise Citadel; and even the same law firms that worked on Spotify’s direct listing pulled back into service.

It’s nice if you’re part of this particular club, and no one can blame Slack for not wanting to reinvent the wheel. But one wonders how nervous it makes Nasdaq, as well as other banks and law firms, to be shut out of this process a second time.

How best to untangle the Gordian knot that is navigating your own healthcare? It’s a tricky question, and one that seems to have become only more complicated as technology improves, in many regards — systems don’t necessarily speak to one another, and it’s still hard for an ordinary patient without specialist knowledge to make sense of everything. Careteam is a Canadian startup hoping to address that, looking to replicate the kind of advances made possible by technology in industries like e-commerce and enterprise software.

Careteam co-founder and CEO Dr. Alexandra Greenhill has experienced the frustration of being a tech-savvy person in a world of healthcare that can seem technologically inept — both as a practicing GP and as someone who depends on the healthcare system as a patient and a relative of patients with more sophisticated medical needs.

“I spent more than 15 years innovating within the healthcare system,” Greenhill told me in an interview. “I computerized hospitals, helped doctors adopt electronic medical records and other types of innovation practices. And then for the last eight years, I’ve been in tech, trying to figure out how to build the kind of technology we need in health, and especially digital health.”

All that experience led Greenhill to the realization that while there were many companies building specific solutions for real, but relatively narrow problems, that didn’t reflect how most people experienced care. Greenhill and her team of three other co-founders (Jeremy P. Smith, Robert I. Atwell and Kevin Lysyk) had all had unfortunate, but eye-opening experiences with family members in need of treatment for major diseases.

“You step in and you discover that cancer care, palliative care, post-surgical care — there’s so many things that would have gone wrong if we didn’t have the expertise ourselves,” Greenhill said. “But in the meantime, you end up being sort of pulled into multiple directions and saying ‘this makes no sense.’ You know, I can purchase stuff online in my private life; I can use all kinds of tools in the business world, and yet it’s back to paper and voice in health, which matters most.”

What Careteam provides is collaboration for care — true collaboration, designed to span patients, their doctors and other healthcare pros, their families and anyone who matters to them in the course of pursuing their care. It provides the ability to communicate instantly, build care plans that integrate all aspects of their tailored health plans, receive custom-configurable notifications and measure progress toward specific goals set by patient and healthcare providers.

Part of the reason this process has become opaque or difficult is precisely due to innovation: Greenhill takes issue with the prevailing narrative that the healthcare industry is somehow allergic to innovation.

“There’s this sort of perception that healthcare doesn’t innovate, but it’s also almost insulting to the healthcare system, because we have innovated — we save people from cancer, where we couldn’t,” she noted. “We cure HIV, in some cases, and we prevent it from being transmitted to unborn babies of mothers with full-blown AIDS and things that in my working lifetime were impossibilities; it was science fiction to help someone with HIV. And, and we’ve managed to do all of that, and it’s a success story. We’ve created complexity, we’ve created people who live with 12 conditions for many, many years and take complicated drug regiments.”

In addition to advances in treatment, Greenhill notes that she and her team couldn’t have build Careteam five years ago, because cloud storage wasn’t secure and everything had to be done on a site-specific instance, and that would’ve been cost-prohibitive to build. In other words, technology has been applied to, and vastly improved, healthcare overall, regardless of the general perception of the industry as an innovation laggard.

That’s why Greenhill’s startup doesn’t shy away from complexity — they embrace it. Careteam is designed not to try to normalize and standardize the varied and highly specialized landscape of healthcare solutions and providers through anything like a one-size-fits-all API. Instead, the company’s tech development is cleverly designed to be flexible when it comes to integrations.

“We collectively spent $1.9 billion in Canada, to try and digitize the healthcare system, create standards and create some exchange between data,” Greenhill said. “The NHS tried the same, big U.S. hospital systems have created their own little sort of islands, including Kaiser and Mayo and others. And the conclusion of all of that is standardization in healthcare just doesn’t seem to catch on.”

Careteam’s approach has been instead to integrate specific clinics, and let practitioners and patients derive benefits and help spur the adoption of the platform to their companion organizations and clinics. It’s a sort of rhizomatic approach that starts with a node central to a patient’s care and spreads through the healthcare professionals and members of the patient’s support network that the product helps. And integration is made possible without technical demands on the part of partners thanks to the work of CTO Lysyk, according to Greenhill.

The Vancouver-based startup is working with the Centre for Aging + Brain Health in Toronto, Ontario in a validation program announced last year, and also raised a seed round of funding this time last year, led by BCF Ventures with participation from Right Side Capital, Globalive Capital, Atrium Ventures, and angels Barney Pell and Ajay Agarwal .

IOActive may not be a household name but you almost certainly know its work.

The Seattle-headquartered company has been behind some of the most breathtaking hacks in the past decade. Its researchers have broken into in-flight airplanes from the ground and reverse engineered an ATM to spit out gobs of cash. One of the company’s most revered hackers discovered a way to remotely shock a pacemaker out of rhythm. And remember that now-infamous hack that remotely killed the engine of a Jeep? That was IOActive, too.

If it’s connected, they will bet that they can hack it.

IOActive has made a name for itself with its publicly reported findings, but its bread and butter is helping its corporate customers better understand how they approach security.

Since its founding more than two decades ago, the penetration testing and ethical hacking company now serves customers mostly in the Global 1000 largest companies to help assess and test their security posture.

“You can have the absolute most sophisticated alarm in the entire world, and I guarantee our team can break in,” said Jennifer Steffens, IOActive’s chief executive, in a call with TechCrunch. “But if you left your front door unlocked lock, hackers are going to walk right through”

“Don’t pay us to show you how to break into the alarm before someone learns how to lock the door,” she said.

Children on the autism spectrum often suffer from other medical conditions. As many as one-fifth of those diagnosed with the neurodevelopmental disorder, which affects communication and behavior, have epilepsy, for example, according to research on the subject.

Probably Genetic, which recently graduated from the startup accelerator Y Combinator, wants to test the DNA of children with autism to provide them early diagnoses of more than 15 severe genetic diseases that are often grouped under the initial autism diagnosis. Using machine learning and direct-to-consumer DNA tests, Probably Genetic hopes to provide families of children on the spectrum with more complete and correct diagnoses and a path to appropriate treatment and therapy.

“There is really low awareness still in the medical community for a lot of these diseases,” Probably Genetic co-founder and chief executive officer Lukas Lange tells TechCrunch. “The actual testing happens really really late in the process … Even once you decide that you want to get your kid genetically tested, that process itself is really difficult because if you don’t have a physician in favor of it, patients spend months lobbying to get the test done.”

The startup, which plans to launch this summer, is backed with venture capital funding from Khosla Ventures, TenOneTen Ventures, the Oxford Angel Fund and angel investors. Lange, a current PhD candidate in bioinformatics and genetics at the University of Oxford, said the company is keeping the precise amount of capital they’ve raised private, citing a focus on building the best service for special needs families.

“We measure ourselves by how many families we’ve helped, as opposed to how much money we’ve raised,” Lange said.

Unlike 23andMe, which similarly provides genetic testing direct-to-consumer, Probably Genetic is patient-initiated physician-ordered testing, meaning a physician is in the loop throughout the entire process and a DNA test must be deemed “medically necessary” by a Probably Genetic physician — the company partners with several doctors — before it can be ordered.

Probably Genetic performs whole-exome sequencing, a process that can cost upwards of $5,000, to test for genetic disorders in children already diagnosed with autism. Lange said the team is still determining the price of its genetic tests, but assures it will fall under $1,000, or significantly less than other options on the market. Unfortunately, the tests will not be covered by insurance.

The company doesn’t perform genetic sequencing in-house, rather, it partners with a U.S.-based clinical sequencing provider accredited by the College of American Pathologists (CAP) and certified through Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA). Probably Genetic also partners with a bioinformatics service provider that’s plugged into the lab for data analysis purposes.

Parents of children with autism oftentimes have difficulty having their children tested, as Lange mentioned. Not only are these tests costly and infrequently covered by insurance, but they are also not offered by general care practitioners. A family has to receive a referral from their doctor to visit a specialist who will then have the test ordered. Using Probably Genetic, Lange and his co-founder, chief technology officer Harley Katz, hope to create a one-stop shop for complete and early diagnoses, access to genetic counseling services, and information and resources for families of people on the spectrum.

The genetic counseling services, which exist to help families better understand the results of their genetic tests, will be offered through an external service provider initially. In the long-term, Lange said, Probably Genetic will consider hiring their own full-time counselors.

Lange met Katz, a PhD in theoretical astrophysics from the University of Cambridge, six years ago. The pair quickly realized a common interest in accurate diagnosis, or lack thereof, before they decided to focus on autism and its associated conditions.

“We initially thought we are going to build a catch-all for 7,000 different rare diseases,” Lange said. “Pretty quickly we realized a whole lot of people coming to your door have undiagnosed diseases but not all are genetic in nature so if you try to build a catch-all you wouldn’t be able to help a lot of people. So we decided let’s focus on one area that has a much higher likelihood that the patients that come through your door actually have something genetic.”

According to a 2018 report from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, one in 59 children is diagnosed with autism. Boys are four times more likely to be diagnosed than girls.

“There’s a big opportunity here to focus on a category that we know already genetics plays a huge role but still an opportunity to find kids who don’t ‘just have autism’ but where there is actually something bigger at play and autism is only a part of their disease presentation.”

 

William Hockey, co-founder, chief technology officer and president of the fast-growing fintech business Plaid, will step down next week, TechCrunch has learned.

The former Bain associate (pictured above left) co-founded the startup in 2012 alongside chief executive officer Zach Perret. Today, the San Francisco-based company employs 300 with additional offices in Salt Lake City and New York.

Plaid has confirmed the news, stating that Hockey will remain on the company’s board of directors.

“This conclusion was neither a rash nor a recent decision,” Hockey writes in a blog post shared with TechCrunch. “Over the past couple of years, I have known that there would come a point at which I would choose to move to a purely strategic and advisorial role.”

Plaid builds infrastructure that allows consumers to interact with their bank account on the web, powering a number of third-party applications, like Venmo, Robinhood, Coinbase, Acorns and LendingClub. It rose to prominence recently, closing a $250 million Series C investment at a $2.65 billion valuation late last year. The deal was led by famed venture capitalist and author of the Internet Trends report Mary Meeker, who’s joined the startup’s board of directors.

In total, Plaid has secured $310 million in venture capital funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Coatue Management, Goldman Sachs, NEA, Spark Capital and others.

Plaid has integrated with 15,000 banks in the U.S. and Canada and says 25% of people living in those countries with bank accounts have linked with Plaid through at least one of the hundreds of apps that leverage Plaid’s application program interfaces (APIs) — an increase from 13% last year. Last month, the company launched its fintech platform in the U.K.

“As we’ve done in the U.S., Plaid will become the foundation for that growth by providing access to a financial network that allows developers to deliver the experience users expect from their financial apps,” the company wrote in a blog post.

TechCrunch participated in a panel discussion with Hockey and Brex CEO Henrique Dubugras last month, in which Hockey gave no indication of impending plans to leave the business. In fact, taking off just as Plaid amps up its global expansion efforts and accelerates growth is strange timing for a founder to depart.

Oftentimes, when a startup co-founder steps down from the C-suite, it’s to make room for a more experienced executive to lead the company through periods of fast growth. Recently, for example, Lime announced its co-founder Toby Sun would transition out of the CEO role to focus on company culture and R&D. Brad Bao, a Lime co-founder and longtime Tencent executive, assumed chief responsibilities.

Other times, it comes amid turmoil. Mike Cagney’s departure from SoFi, of course, is an example of this. One month after reports of a sexual harassment and wrongful termination lawsuit against the online lending business surfaced, SoFi announced Cagney would step down.

In Hockey’s case, the move was planned and calculated, he said. Plaid chief operating officer Eric Sager, who joined earlier this year, Perret and other executives will take over engineering and product reports, among Hockey’s other responsibilities.

“In tech, it has historically been taboo to talk about founders or executives transitioning to different roles inside companies,” Hockey writes. “Leadership transitions need to become a bedrock of any company that desires to endure across decades.”

Startup SafeAI, powered by a founding talent team with experience across Apple, Ford and Caterpillar, is emerging from stealth today with a $5 million funding announcement. The company’s focus is on autonomous vehicle technology, designed and built specifically for heavy equipment used in the mining and construction industries.

Out the gate, SafeAI is working with Doosan Bobcat, the South Korean equipment company that makes Bobcat loaders and excavators, and it’s already demonstrating and testing its software on a Bobcat skid loader at the SafeAI testing ground in San Jose. The startup believes that applying advances in autonomy and artificial intelligence to mining and construction can do a lot to not only make work sites safer, but also increase efficiencies and boost productivity — building on what’s already been made possible with even the most basic levels of autonomy currently available on the market.

What SafeAI hopes to add is an underlying architecture that acts as a fully autonomous (Level 4 by SAE standards, so no human driver) platform for a variety of equipment. Said platform is designed with openness, modularity and upgradeability in mind to help ensure that its clients can take advantage of new advances in autonomy and AI as they become available.

“We have seen and experienced deploying autonomous mining truck in production for last 10 years,” explained SafeAI Founder and CEO, Bibhrajit Halder in an email. “Now it’s time to take it to next level. At SafeAI, we are super excited to built the future of autonomous mine by creating autonomous mining equipment that just works.”

While SafeAI doesn’t have product in market yet, it is running its software on actual construction hardware at its proving ground, as mentioned, and it’s working with an as-yet unnamed large global mining company to deploy SafeAI in a mining truck, according to Halder. The company’s plan is to focus its efforts entirely on deploying fully Level 4 autonomy as its first available commercial product, with a vision of a future where multiple pieces of mining equipment are working together “seamlessly,” the CEO says.

Today’s $5 million round includes investment led by Autotech Ventures, and includes participation from Brick & Mortar Ventures, Embark Ventures and existing investor Monta Vista Capital.

When a company hires talent away from a competitor, onboarding the new employee can pose significant legal risks for both the company and the new employee. A fundamental aspect of Silicon Valley is that employees are generally free to move between competitors.

This unrestricted movement of talent facilitates the robust competition that helps drive the Silicon Valley economy. While this is no doubt positive, unfettered employment mobility also creates unique challenges when it comes to protecting a company’s trade secrets, which are the lifeblood of many Silicon Valley companies.

Because of California’s policies regarding free employment mobility, unlike in most other states, California companies cannot protect their trade secrets with non-compete contracts. So, they instead rely heavily on trade secret laws for protection.

And, of course, when trade secret theft occurs, it is often when an employee transitions from one company to another. Thus, when a key employee gives notice that he or she is leaving for a competitor, it sets off alarm bells for the soon-to-be former company.

Unfortunately, because of the hypersensitivity to protecting trade secrets, many departing employees who have no interest in actually taking their former company’s trade secrets get accused of theft. This allegation can trigger a long, stressful, expensive legal process for both the employee and the new company, and sometimes cost the employee his or her reputation and new job.

This article explains how this situation arises and provides some practical considerations for how the employee transitioning jobs, and the onboarding company, can avoid an unnecessary legal fight.

1. California companies’ aggressive protection of trade secrets.

NoGood CEO Mostafa Elbermawy describes how they evaluate a client’s growth challenges by quoting Zen teacher Hunryu Suzuki: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are only a few.” Rather than deferring to in-house playbooks, NoGood adopts an open mind combined with a methodical, data-driven approach to find untapped growth opportunities for its clients. Learn more about how NoGood came to be and why they’re willing to say no to potential clients.

On NoGood’s approach to growth:

“Our work is methodical. It’s intentional. We have to talk about it. We are very transparent about what we do and it’s completely process oriented. Hacking is a misnomer. Growth is not about clever shortcuts. It has to be sustainable and repeatable, and if it’s not, we won’t do it.”

On NoGood’s proudest accomplishment:

“Our success in jumpstarting Steer’s business is one of our proudest accomplishments this year. Steer is an electric car subscription startup that asked us to increase their activations. Basically, our job was to generate new active members, which not only meant encouraging more users to download the app, upload a license, and get approved, but it also meant delivering a car to a member’s door, having them drive that car and leaving a review. We were able to demonstrate signup traction for Steer and help them launch in under three months.”

 

Below, you’ll find the rest of the founder reviews, the full interview, and more details like pricing and fee structures. This profile is part of our ongoing series covering startup growth marketing agencies with whom founders love to work, based on this survey and our own research. The survey is open indefinitely, so please fill it out if you haven’t already.

Interview with NoGood CEO and Growth Lead Mostafa Elbermawy

Yvonne Leow: To kick things off, how did you get into growth?

Mostafa Elbermawy: Well, I went to school for archaeology, but hieroglyphics weren’t paying the bills, so I taught myself how to code and started a web design studio after college. I started building websites for clients, and they started asking me how to drive more users to their sites to help grow their business.

I started tinkering with growth out of curiosity, and eventually joined the digital experience team at American Express. That job helped me gain some marketing and growth experience, and I ended up falling in love with that part of the job.

The concept of an IRL heads-up display has been a part of science fiction since basically the beginning. Big players have tried their hand at it with less than stellar results — most notably Google with Glass, and more recently Intel’s Vaunt. But North may have cracked the nut on smart glasses with Focals.

They are not perfect by any stretch of the imagination — they’re slightly heavy and don’t feel quite as seamless as science fiction promised they would — but this may be the best pair of smart glasses yet.

Who

Focals were created by North, a Canadian company backed by Intel Capital, Spark Capital and the Amazon Alexa Fund with nearly $200 million in funding. Around the time Google Glass was released, founders Aaron Grant, Matthew Bailey and Stephen Lake were working on a smart arm band. They were disenchanted, as were many, with Glass and sought to make something better.

Their first priority? Make a great pair of glasses, then outfit them with technology. In order to do that, they had to allow for prescription lenses, which means the lenses of their product had to be curved. This throws a huge wrench in the idea of lens-projected notifications and content, so Focals created its own special projector.

The company also felt that the touchpad on the side of Google Glass was overly cumbersome, leading them to build the Focals Ring to let users navigate the menu.

What

The Focals are technically AR glasses, but they’re not focused on gaming or content consumption. The product is designed to move notifications from your phone to your sightline. It’s a bit like an Apple Watch for your face.

These notifications include the date and time, the weather, text notifications, email, Slack, Apple News alerts, Uber notifications, sports scores, turn-by-turn navigation and more. Users navigate this content using the Ring, outfitted with a nub of a joystick, which is meant to be worn on the index finger of your dominant hand.

Users can proactively seek information by clicking the joystick and scrolling, but the headset also serves up information in a push notification, including incoming messages and emails.

Importantly, North implemented a smart response system to keep users from having to pick up their phone each time they get a notification. The system gives users two options: choose from a list of smartly generated responses, or use speech-to-text through Focals’ built-in Alexa integration (the system is listening via built-in mic — but wearers have to opt-in during set up).

However, one of the great advantages for the Focals is also one of its weaknesses. The company chose to build a custom pair of glasses that could work with Rx lenses. That also means that the eyebox (the surface where you can see the projection) is smaller than other AR gadgets, which often use waveguides. In other words, your Focals have to be positioned pretty near perfectly to see the image. The company works hard to make sure that’s the case, fitting the glasses to your specific face. But glasses shift and move throughout the day, which means there’s plenty of re-adjusting in order to see the picture.

All that said, the Focals look surprisingly good. In fact, passersby would be hard-pressed to detect that they’re smart glasses in the first place. They aren’t comfortable enough to wear all day — the extra weight on the front means they get a bit uncomfortable after a few hours. But overall, these are pretty discreet as far as smart glasses go.

How

It’s a relatively time-consuming process to get your hands on a pair of Focals. Because the fit and size are so important to usability, users interested in purchasing a pair must go to one of North’s two stores (there’s one in Toronto, and one in Brooklyn, NY).

The visit to the store is by appointment. Upon arrival, store associates will take you into a booth where you’ll sit before 11 cameras that will 3D model your head, determining where your eyes and ears sit relative to the rest of your face. The cameras also try to understand your gaze.

From there, you get a demo with a standard (not fitted) pair of Focals, during which you learn how to align the Focals and use the Ring. It takes a few weeks for your custom-fit Focals to be ready to pick up, at which point you go through a final sizing with an optician.

It’s tedious, and will be difficult for the company to scale, but it’s part of what gives Focals an edge in quality. Luckily for folks outside of Toronto and NY, Focals is heading off on a pop-up tour. You can check out the tour dates and locations here.

Why

“Why?” is perhaps the toughest question to answer when it comes to the Focals. The goal, as outlined by the company, is to keep you connected to the digital world without taking you out of the real world. In short, stop looking down at your phone.

That said, Focals also take away the option. When your phone rings, or even when your Apple Watch buzzes, you have a choice to make: look down, or ignore. When you’re wearing the Focals, that decision is eliminated.

For this reason, I feel like this product is meant for early adopters and folks who enjoy being ultra-connected to the digital world. If you’re already addicted to the sweet chime of your phone, the Focals may very well keep you more connected to the real world, and potentially save your neck from some stiffness. But if you do well to live in the real world and don’t appreciate the constant flow of notifications to your phone, the Focals likely won’t help you maintain that separation.

There are also some minor issues with the Focals themselves. The Ring isn’t super comfortable, particularly when typing on a computer (something most of us spend hours each day doing). The Ring also seems like something that would be very easy to lose or break — this hasn’t happened to me yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it did. (For now, North is replacing broken Rings for free.)

With the Focals themselves, I’d like to be clear when I say that I was pleasantly surprised with the overall experience. The UI is pleasant to look at, and the little chime of a notification that whispers in your ear is most certainly addictive.

However, I found my eyes getting tired after more than an hour wearing the Focals. Using the Focals means that you’re constantly changing the focus of your eyes from close to far away, which can be tiring. Moreover, if the glasses shift a bit on your face, the text of the notification can become fuzzy, making the experience even more tiring.

Plus, the glasses are built to bend halfway through the arms, as opposed to where the arms meet the frames. This means you can’t hang the Focals off the front of your shirt, which is an admittedly minor gripe, but it bugged me throughout the review process.

Add to that the fact that Focals start at $600 and this product is really for technophiles. For now.

North is on the right track. The company is constantly developing new features that are released each week — they recently launched Google Fit support to check your steps, as well as language lessons to brush up on your French during your walk to work. And they’ve started with the right priorities in mind. The Focals are fine looking glasses, and in general, the tech works. Now it’s about refinement.

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 447th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, June 20, 2019, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious...

___

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Taylor Greene was recorded in April 2019. Taylor...

___

We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming to bring you an important message: You have just four days left to buy your pass to Disrupt San Francisco 2019 before the super early-bird price expires on June 21 at 11:59 p.m. (PT).

There’s a pass priced for every budget (even yours), and you can spread your payments over time when you select the payment plan option during checkout. But once that deadline hits you can kiss up to $1,800 in savings goodbye. Disrupt SF 2019 offers fantastic ROI at any price, but why pay more? Buy your pass now to make the most of your investment.

Speaking of investments, we’re thrilled to partner yet again with All Raise, a startup nonprofit focused on accelerating female founder and funder success. Don’t miss this mini-series of 30 ask-me-anything sessions. You’ll connect with other entrepreneurs and have a chance to ask top investors, well, anything. You’ll find more details and sign-up information here.

Come to Disrupt ready to network with more than 10,000 attendees. If that sounds a tad daunting, fear not. CrunchMatch, our free business match-making service, takes the pain out of networking — and saves your aching feet, too. It helps you find and connect with the right people based on mutual business criteria, goals and interests. Search, find, schedule, meet. It’s that simple.

Nothing but opportunity awaits in Startup Alley. More than a thousand early-stage startups and exhibitors will fill the exhibit hall and showcase a wealth of tech products, services and talent. Want to exhibit there? We have two options for you.

Purchase a Startup Alley Exhibitor Package or you can apply to the TC Top Picks program and exhibit in Startup Alley for free. Applications for TC Top Picks close on July 19, and you have until September 13 to buy your Disrupt SF Startup Alley Exhibitor Package.

And of course don’t miss the crown jewel of every Disrupt: Startup Battlefield, TechCrunch’s epic pitch competition. You can watch it live and cheer on your favorites or you can apply to compete — just be sure to fill out the Startup Battlefield application by June 25th at 11:59 p.m. (PT).

So many great reasons to attend Disrupt San Francisco 2019 on October 2-4. Since you’re going, why not get the best ticket price possible? The super early-bird price expires on June 21 at 11:59 p.m. (PT). Buy your pass today, and we’ll see you in October!

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt San Francisco 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Not even two years into its existence, orbital fuel supply startup Orbit Fab has chalked up a big win — successfully supplying the International Space Station with water, a first for any private company. It’s a big deal, because providing water to the ISS involved a multi-day refueling process, done in microgravity, using processes and equipment Orbit Fab developed itself.

The key ingredient here, per ISS U.S. National Laboratory COO Kenneth Shields, which was the contracting agency for Orbit Fab’s refueling test, is that this method of resupply is totally out of spec in terms of how this process was designed to work on the ISS. By creating and successfully demonstrating a system that the ISS designers never conceived, Orbit Fab has shown that both private companies and NASA have the flexibility needed to build business models on existing space infrastructure.

The technology Orbit Fab developed and demonstrated has broader applications than just moving water around in space. Water was used in this example specifically because it’s one of the most inert propellants used in spaceflight thrusters, but the methods could extend to other common propellants, and make it possible to refuel satellites in orbit. Orbit Fab is working toward establishing standards for satellite refueling interfaces to be used in orbital hardware, which could go a long way toward making it common practice to develop reusable satellites, instead of sticking with the more or less disposable hardware model used today.

Startups like Orbit Fab are the key to unlocking true commercialization of space, by identifying points in the value chain where innovation or improvement can lead to cost or resource efficiencies and ensure that space business is actually also viable business, in terms of profit potential.