It is about to become much more difficult to watch porn online if you're in the UK.

From July 15, porn sites will need to check that their British viewers are over 18, thanks to the UK government's decision to implement a "porn block."

The argument is that it's too easy for children to watch porn online and it's affecting their sexual and mental health — so now anyone who wants to watch porn on the internet will have to prove that they're old enough.

There is backlash from critics who say that the ban amounts to censorship, and ultimately that a ban won't have the desired effect. The UK is pressing ahead anyway.

The law makes it incumbent on the porn providers to put in place a "robust" age-verification system, or else face having their sites blacked out in the UK.

Read more: Porn is being age-blocked across all of the UK in July. Here's why people think it's a terrible idea.

And how will the ban work in practice? The police won't be knocking on people's houses to snoop through their internet histories.

The government has been woolly on the detail, but it has placed the burden of verifying people's ages on porn site operators. The system will be policed by the the British Board of Film Classification, an organisation that has historically decided what films are suitable for particular age groups. It isn't clear how the BBFC will detect sites that don't implement an age-verification system.

Now porn sites must come up with a way of verifying people's ages.

Various solutions have been proposed by multiple companies, but many involve uploading a form of ID, such as a driving license or a credit card.

One solution has a particularly analogue feel to it.

Its official name is the Portes Card, although it has been popularly dubbed the "porn pass." The idea is that people will be able to go to a shop where the person behind the till will check their ID, and then provide them with a pass which can then be uploaded via an app to give them access to pornographic content without handing over any personal data.

Business Insider spoke to Serge Acker, CEO of the company behind Portes, to discover a bit more about how this will work in reality.

Portes' musical roots

OCL, the tech startup which created the Portes Card, was not originally geared around letting over-18s watch porn.

Its focus was on the music industry and how to get more money for artists whose work is being used on apps like TikTok and Snapchat. When Acker came onboard, the company was focused on micro-licensing for music.

"TikTok, Snapchat, all those companies have grown on the ability for their users to create user-generated content, that very often requires the use of third-party content — music typically. And none of that music is really paid for."

TikTok started life as a lip-syncing app. Getty

The music industry itself leant a helping hand in setting up OCL. Indie record label Beggars Group provided the startup with roughly $100,000 in seed money.

OCL's microlicensing business is still active, but following the UK government's announcement in 2017 that it would be bringing in the porn block, the company expanded its operations to age-verification. It named this arm of the company Portes.

"When the UK government brought in the Digital Economy Act, we thought it was an interesting problem to solve because at the time the only game in town in terms of age-verification relied on identity," said Acker.

What will the "porn pass" look like?

The Portes Card won't be a plastic card. Instead it's more of a printable voucher, which works in tandem with Portes' bespoke app.

Portes sent Business Insider an image of a prototype.

A prototype of the 'porn voucher' OCL

The process of buying a pass will be a little like paying for your gas bill or mobile top ups at the newsagents.

Portes has partnered with two payment companies,PayPoint and ePay, which are collectively installed in around 90,000 retailers. That includes newsagents and major supermarkets such as Tescos — although it is not certain yet which outlets will choose to make the pass available in their shops.

Anyone wanting the pass will need to download the Portes app first. This features a barcode, which the retailer will scan. They will then ask for proof of your age and payment. For use on a single device, the pass will cost £4.99 ($6.50), and £8.99 ($11.80) across multiple devices. Once you've paid, you will have a printed voucher with a 16-digit code.

That code can then be entered via the Portes app. For use on a laptop or desktop, the user visits the porn site of their choice where they can hit a "Portes" logo, then enter the code, and wait for verification from the app.

Read more: Snapchat admits its age verification safeguards are effectively useless

To prevent under-18s from simply obtaining a code from an older person— a sibling for example — Acker says parents will be able to install the app on their kids' devices and then activate a "lock" it so that any code entered on that device is immediately burned.

The biggest online porn company in the world has partnered with Portes

Portes has also partnered with AgeID, an age-verification company owned by MindGeek, the conglomerate which owns PornHub, YouPorn, and RedTube.

AgeID itself will offer a few options to users apart from Portes, including verifying their age via SMS, credit card, passport, or driving licence.

As the subsidiary of an umbrella company with a dominant market position in online porn, AgeID has drawn a lot of ire from privacy activists claiming it shouldn't be trusted with reems of personal data. Portes saw this as an opportunity.

Pornhub, a popular pornography site, is one of the most visited websites in the US. Shutterstock

"AgeID at the time and still now is seen as the 800-pound gorilla, that... because it is the emanation of a porn company it's hard to trust that they will do the right thing," OCL's Acker said. "Whatever you do can never be enough to misspell people's mistrust [namely] the minute you create an account, that creates a point of weakness."

He said Portes' pitch gave AgeID the "perfect solution" for giving an option for accessing a website without having to create an account. "For them it's an additional opportunity to prove to people that they're not in this game to collect data," he added.

Acker said that Portes' deal with AgeID is not exclusive, so it will be able to partner with other, smaller sites.

Most people still don't know there's a porn ban coming

The UK porn block will kick in on July 15, more than a year later than it was supposed to — it was originally slated for April 2018.

Acker says Portes' tech is ready to go, but notifying people about the block will be another challenge entirely. A YouGov poll from March 2019 showed 75% of Brits weren't aware that the porn block was on the way.

He said that Portes is engaging in a fair amount of online marketing ahead of time. "We're trying to be as guerilla as we can, being a startup," he said. He also said that ideally MindGeek will flash up some information on its various sites warning people ahead of time.

"Obviously Mindgeek control their user experience, but I think we both recognise the need to get people ready and not be caught out," he said.

Excited to announce Toyota, Denso and the SoftBank Vision Fund are making a $1B investment in @UberATG, as we work together towards the future of mobility. pic.twitter.com/JdqhLkV7uU

— dara khosrowshahi (@dkhos) April 19, 2019

Uber files for IPO

First AIM. Then Yahoo Messenger. Now BBM.

The messaging service that was once was a beloved feature of BlackBerry phones is going away, becoming the lastest in a line of formerly popular chat apps to get the ax.

Emtek, the company that runs the former BlackBerry Messenger service, will shut it down on May 31, the firm announced in a blog post on Thursday. Despite investing in new features, Emtek wasn't able to jump start usage of the service, it said.

"Three years ago, we set out to reinvigorate BBM consumer service," the company said in the post.

"We poured our hearts into making this a reality, and we are proud of what we have built to date," it continued. "The technology industry however, is very fluid, and in spite of our substantial efforts, users have moved on to other platforms, while new users proved difficult to sign on."

After Emtek shuts down the service, BBM users will no longer be able to open the app to view old messages, photos, or other files, the company said on a page offering answers to frequently asked questions. Users will be able to download photos, videos, and files before May 31. But they won't be able to keep any stickers they've purchased or personalized emoji they may have created with the company's BBMoji service, it said.

Last decade, when BlackBerry devices were among the most popular smartphones, BBM served a similar role for the devices as iMessage plays on iPhones today. It was the default messaging service for BlackBerry devices and, because it was only available on Blackberry handsets, it was one of the primary reasons customers stuck with them.

But usage of BBM started to be overtaken by iMessage and other services after the iPhone and Android-based devices took over the smartphone market. Smartphone messaging leaders now include not just iMessage, but Facebook-owned WhatsApp and Messenger, and WeChat.

Read this:Google is shutting down its Allo messaging app for good

To court users on other devices, BlackBerry later opened up BBM to owners of iPhones and Android phones. As recently as 2015, it said it had 140 million registered users on those non-BlackBerry devices. Emtek acquired the rights to BBM from BlackBerry in 2016.

BlackBerry held on to the enterprise version of BBM that it offers to corporate users. The enterprise BBM is still alive.

Got a tip about a tech company? Contact this reporter via email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., message him on Twitter @troywolv, or send him a secure message through Signal at 415.515.5594. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

Karl Jacob was riding high.

The former Facebook advisor had just started LoanSnap, an AI-powered platform for mortgage lending, and was kiteboarding in the summer of 2018 on Necker Island, one of the sport's premier locations owned by billionaire Richard Branson. Jacob was on the island for an entrepreneurs' retreat, courtesy of an invite passed along by a friend. When Jacob climbed out of the crystal clear waters for lunch, he noticed Branson off by himself.

"It's something I've learned if you see an opportunity like that you take it," Jacob tells Business Insider. "We started talking about our sessions and our tricks and jumps and he eventually asked what I did. When I told him I started a mortgage company, Richard turns to me and with a big smile and says, 'Interesting, I own four of those. We should talk.'"

Read More:Google's AI venture fund is leading a $3.85 million round into a startup that's trying to reinvent the industry for homeowners insurance

According to Jacob, kiteboarding has many parallels with starting a business. There are plenty of risks and anything can go wrong at any moment. People who succeed in both environments share many qualities: they are adventurous, open to risk, and comfortable with failure.

"It's a more natural way for people to meet," says Jacob. "My conversation with Richard started around the sport and ended around business, and our first impressions of each other were about the sport. You know this person is competitive and adventurous and overcame their fear, which is a big part of being a good entrepreneur."

Jacob explains that he is more prone to taking risks now than when he was younger. He emphasized the importance of having investors aligned with longer term goals and bigger risks, and pointed to Pinterest's public offering Thursday as evidence of those risks paying off.

"If you are going after a big space with game changing idea, you better have patient investors that understand you will fail and you will fail a lot before you make it," Jacob says. "Pinterest is one of the best examples of that. It took [Pinterest cofounder and CEO] Ben [Silbermann] seven years to get Pinterest to work. People who have the discipline to fail and try again, they ultimately win."

In the weeks following Jacob's serendipitous kiteboarding trip, he closed LoanSnap's $8 million Series A led by True Ventures. Branson was among the company's backers.

When Zoom priced its IPO on Wednesday evening, the video conferencing platform garnered a valuation of $9.2 billion, and founding CEO Eric Yuan saw a huge windfall. Collectively, Yuan and his family now own 20.5% of the company's common stock, as well as 20.1% of its high-vote stock.

But another big winner was Emergence Capital Partners, a venture capital firm that invested in Salesforce, Box and Veeva before the companies went public.

Emergence's investment in Zoom's 2014 Series C was worth $1.1 billion with the IPO. Despite selling nearly 1 million shares in the IPO, Emergence still owns 12.7% of Zoom's high-vote stock.

Emergence General Partner Santi Subotovsky took a seat on Zoom's board, and he's been working closely with Yuan ever since.

In the hours after Zoom started trading, Subotovsky spoke to Business Insider about what first drew him to the company and why Yuan reminds him of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs — but nicer.

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.

Becky Peterson: You're in New York right now? How did everything go today?

Santi Subotovsky: It was exciting. It was great to see a lot of the Zoom employees, even a lot of the early employees that were there back in 2014 when we first invested in the company. It was great to see a number of customers there celebrating with us. And it was also great to see a lot of investors celebrating.

It was like one of those big family reunions. We're just celebrating a milestone without thinking that this milestone is the ending.

Peterson: Have you taken a portfolio company public before?

Subotovsky: No, this was my first experience. Hopefully not the last one.

Peterson: You invested in Zoom back in 2014. How did you first meet Eric, and what drew you to the company?Subotovsky: I had a pain point that other people didn't have, because I'm from Argentina and I wanted to connect with people in Argentina. So I tried every technology out there to figure out what was going to be the next communication platform.

Zoom not only worked incredibly well but it also started spreading virally, and I started getting invites from friends of friends. That's when I reached out to Eric and we started building a relationship.

I tried to understand why the technology worked so well, what his vision was, and then I got it. He was rebuilding the entire architecture for this modern cloud environment and that's what enabled him to deliver incredibly high quality to each of the participants. And that's why we decided to partner with him.

And he saw that given our experience with companies like Salesforce and Bosch, we could help with go to market, and going from the SMB business that he was targeting early on and into mid-market and enterprise.

Read more: Billion-dollar startup Zoom filed to go public — and shares of a totally unrelated company also called called Zoom shot up 1,100%

Peterson: How big was the company when you first invested?

Subotovsky: We invested when the company had about 30 people and had a few hundred thousand dollars in monthly recurring revenue.

Peterson: As an investor, were there any indications early on that Zoom would get as big as it did? It went public with a $9.2 billion valuation.Subotovsky: We looked at the market and we saw that it was going through a major transformational change.

The way we thought about it was that in the early days people were building relationships exclusively in a face-to-face meeting setting. And then we tried to shortcut that process and started using email and phones, and those were technology crutches. It wasn't as good as face-to-face meetings.

What we saw is that people were spending a lot more time on Zoom, even though they could have had face-to-face meetings. So that's why this notion that video is the way people are going to communicate gave us the sense that this was going to be a big opportunity.

Peterson: Was there ever a point since your first investment when you thought the company might fail?

Subotovsky: It's a good question. We had hurdles along the way; it's never a straight line. But overall, the culture never failed. We never twisted the culture just to make things work or because the market wanted us to do this or the customer wanted to do that. We only stayed true to the culture.

It was a culture of care: care for employees, care for customers, care for investors, and care for partners.

Eric is an incredible leader. He's a visionary. It sounds like describing a version of Steve Jobs that is much nicer. He has that visionary focus of what people need and what's going to make people's lives better, but he actually cares about people, and that's why he's the nicer version of Steve Jobs.

Peterson: How did you and the rest of the board decide it was time for Zoom to go public this year?

Subotovsky: It was more about how can we get to more customers and how can we expand our footprint. It was a natural progression for the company.

We saw this as a milestone, a graduation. It's like a high school graduation. But now we're going to college and we're still going to work incredibly hard to graduate from college and move on.

Peterson: Recode reported on Wednesday that Zoom was previously approached by Microsoft, which wanted to buy the company. Did Zoom decide categorically not to sell or is it something the team considered?

Subotovsky: Eric wants to run a company and wants to have full control of the culture, and he wants to have full control of how employees and customers feel about the product.

Right now he he feels he's delivering happiness all around, and if that changes he might change his mind. But for now, he's obsessed with this culture of happiness, both internally facing and externally facing.

Right now I don't think that's in the cards fo Eric and the company. We just want to keep doing what we're doing.

Peterson: As an investor, what do you plan to do with your proceeds? What happens next for you?

Subotovsky: We haven't had that conversation. I personally hope to help Eric build the company as he continues working on it. For us at Emergence, it's not about taking the company public, it's helping founders build iconic companies. Even though this is a great company, we still have a lot to do and we're excited to go back to work after this week.

A day after Atlassian reported earnings, its stock slid 8%, and analysts say it's because Atlassian is still feeling the after-effects of its price increase.

While Atlassian beat Wall Street's expectations on revenue and saw its revenue spike 38% from last year, its guidance for earnings per share next quarter was lower than Wall Street's expectations. The company forecast EPS of $0.16, while Wall Street was expecting $0.19.

Analysts drilled Atlassian's leadership team about the low guidance during the earnings conference call as the stock slid. However, some analysts say this is just a "blip," and that as Atlassian matures, it's natural that Atlassian's performance will vary from quarter to quarter.

"We are encouraged by the measures the company is taking to scale inside large customers and gain footholds in IT and we feel that their ability to make the right strategic choices will shine in the long-term," Joel Fishbein, Jr., managing director at BTIG, wrote in his note.

"Last quarter was perfect"

Pat Walravens, director of technology research and senior analyst at JMP Securities, which does business with Atlassian, says there are three main reasons for the stock's drop: the impact of its pricing changes, increased operating expenses, and investors' lofty growth expectations.

Atlassian announced price increases in October and many of its customers stocked up to get ahead of the price hikes. As a result, Atlassian had a strong end of the year but it will sell less in the next two quarters, analysts say.

"Last quarter was perfect," Walravens told Business Insider. "Generally, Atlassian's products are really good, and really cheap, and that's their secret sauce. That being said, they do raise prices every couple of years...If you're a savvy customer, which most of Atlassian's customers are, you stock up."

Read more: Atlassian beats Wall Street's expectations yet again with 38% revenue growth, but the stock slips down over 9%

Analysts also say the low guidance is related to operations cost, such as product investments, increased hiring, and the AgileCraft acquisition. But for the most part, they're still optimistic about Atlassian.

"No company is bulletproof"

While Atlassian might incur high costs from hiring, it's a necessary step for a company to grow, Walravens says.

"Short term, that will hurt Atlassian stock price wise," Walravens said. "Longer term, you can't grow these businesses without adding employees, so the fact that they see lots of opportunity and they want to hire to address it is a positive."

In addition, analysts point to its recent moves in the IT operations space, with its acquisition of incident management company OpsGenie, as well as investing in Jira Desk, another IT product. This would position Atlassian to compete better against companies like ServiceNow.

On top of that, customers love Atlassian's products, says Richard Davis, managing director at Canaccord Genuity.

"Last week we spent 48 hours at Atlassian's customer conference and compared to other conferences, the interest, excitement and respect for Atlassian's products was easily in the top decile in terms of positivism," Davis wrote in his note.

With a combination of its growth in IT, customer loyalty, and its low-cost sales model, Davis says Atlassian will be in a "good place for several years to come."

"We have no fear that Atlassian's fundamental outlook has, or is about to, dim," Davis wrote in his note. "While no company is bulletproof, Atlassian comes about as close as any company we track."

That being said, Davis warns that this doesn't mean buying Atlassian stock poses no risks. If Atlassian raises its prices too much, competition could sneak in. But not all analysts have the same view -- back in February, Fishbein wrote that Atlassian could raise its prices with little to no customer complaints.

Facebook harvested 1.5 million users' email contact data without their consent, and experts say that in doing so the company may have violated American and European Union laws.

On Wednesday, Business Insider revealed that the California social network had since May 2016 been scraping some new users' email contact books after asking for their email passwords to "verify" their accounts. Around 1.5 million users ultimately had their data taken without permission; Facebook says this was done "unintentionally" and it is now deleting the data.

Experts speaking to Business Insider on Thursday said that they believed Facebook's actions had potentially violated multiple laws — including a US FTC consent decree, the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — the European Union's data privacy regulation — and while there would likely be a strong defence for Facebook, perhaps even the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), a US criminal statute involving computer fraud and abuse.

If their theories are accurate, and regulators ultimately decide to take action against Facebook over the issue, then it could further exacerbate the legal headaches facing the company, which has been battling scandals on multiple fronts for the past two years — from Cambridge Analytica's misappropriation of tens of millions of users' data to the social network's role spreading hate speech that fueled genocide in Myanmar.

A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment.

Facebook is already under investigation by the FTC

Since 2011, Facebook has been subject to a consent decree by US regulator the FTC (Federal Trade Commission), after it settled charges that alleged it had misled users over privacy issues. The FTC is now investigating Facebook over its subsequent privacy practices, namely the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The FTC is inquiring whether the incident violated the 2011 consent decree, and is reportedly close to negotiating a settlement with Facebook that may be in the billions of dollars.

Ashkan Soltani, a former chief technologist for the FTC, said he believed Facebook's actions with users' email contacts may itself have broken the terms of the consent decree if it was using the data. "In my opinion, Facebook's collection and use of users' address books would be another clear violation of the Consent decree and merit an investigation," he said.

"The FTC enforces unfair and deceptive trade practices. On its own, downloading and using users' address books under a deceptive pretext of 'security' would constitute a deceptive practice, even IF the company wasn't under order," he said, speaking in the abstract.

Dina Srinivasan, a Yale Law graduate who recently wrote a paper called "The Antitrust Case Against Facebook," argued that the company's behavior was potentially illegal "on the grounds that Facebook was deceiving consumers when it came to their data and privacy. This can be a violation of 3 things. (1) Federal antitrust laws. (2) Unfair competition laws which every state has a version of. (3) The FTC consent decree."

That said, it's not yet clear whether the FTC will ultimately attempt to take any action against Facebook on this issue, and a spokesperson for the organization didn't respond to a request for comment.

"There are so many different potential violations at this point that I don't know that FTC will investigate this latest ... particularly because it's under a lot of pressure to act on the Cambridge Analytica [incident]," said Sally Hubbard, the director of enforcement strategy at the Open Markets Institute, a research and advocacy group that focuses on issues around corporate power.

She explained that, even if this did constitute a violation, it would be difficult to investigate. "Once there's a revised consent decree in place, it will be hard for the FTC to go back and investigate any misconduct that came before it (depending on the terms of the negotiated agreement settling the claims — it likely will resolve all liability for violations up to the date it's agreed to)."

The Silicon Valley firm could face trouble in Europe too

In May 2018, the European Union started enforcing GDPR, its tough new data protection legislation. Facebook hasn't yet said if any of the affected users signed up in Europe after that data, but it seems extremely likely — in which case some believe Facebook may have fallen afoul of GDPR.

"It is especially problematic because it was not just data of the user being verified that was ... processed, but the personal data of their contacts too," London-based data protection researcher and Alan Turing institute fellow Michael Veale said in an email.

"It might just have been 1.5m users that were directly affected, but considering the number of unique emails that were harvested and the network information linking them, the total number of individuals affected is likely in the hundreds of millions."

He suggested there may have been multiple breaches of the law, including not informing users, and processing people's data for advertising purposes without informing them. "This could be construed as a general security breach, as Facebook were not aware their system was effectively compromised," he added.

The Irish Data Protection Commission, which is responsible for regulating Facebook's data practices in the EU under GDPR, said it's now in contact with Facebook over the issue and is considering its next move.

"We are currently engaging with Facebook on this issue and once we receive further information we will decide what steps to take," said Graham Doyle, the head of communications at the Irish DPC.

The question of intent

Julian Sanchez, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, discussed the possibility that Facebook had potentially violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act — which would veer into criminal territory.

"It's an offense under 18 USC 1030 to, among other things, intentionally exceed authorized access to a protected computer. A 'protected computer' is, for practical purposes, any computer connected to the Internet," he said. "So with respect to Facebook's access to users' e-mail contacts, the relevant questions are whether there's any viable argument that it was 'authorized,' which seems like a very hard sell when it's represented as being specifically for the purpose of authentication, and if not, whether the access in excess of authorization was intentional."

He added: "If we were talking about a rapidly-corrected coding mistake that had removed language about scraping the user's contacts, you'd have a plausible case for saying this was access in excess of authorization, but not intentional. But that becomes more difficult to buy the longer they were doing it."

Facebook says that the action was purely unintentional — that it previously notified users that it would be accessing their contacts, but a change inadvertently stripped that warning out. Such an argument would be a defense under the CFAA.

"Can they plead incompetence? In principle, though boy is that embarrassing," Sanchez said. "You'd need to look through internal correspondence to see whether anyone noticed the issue and Facebook decided not to fix it."

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When the video-conferencing company Zoom went public on Thursday, shares skyrocketed 81%. But for Zoom, this is just day one of this milestone, and tomorrow, employees are back to work.

"We've got to go back to work," Zoom founder and CEO Eric Yuan told Business Insider. "I'm going to fly back to California. We have to double down on our execution and do what we were doing before. We've got to keep doing that to make sure we keep our customers happy."

Before going public, Zoom raised $517.5 million from investors, pricing its shares at $36 to achieve a $9.2 billion valuation. Zoom is entering the public markets with profitability on its side — making Zoom stand out in a landscape where tech companies often have redline-filled balance sheets as they go public.

"It's been something we've been striving for for a long time," Kelly Steckelberg, Zoom's chief financial officer, told Business Insider. "It's an amazing milestone ... Given the market conditions and our readiness, we felt now was the right time to do that."

3 post-IPO goals

Now that Zoom has reached its initial-public-offering (IPO) milestone, it has three key goals: sell to more enterprises, expand international sales, and push its new product Zoom Phone, a cloud-based phone system. In January, Zoom hired a head of international sales, and it's been hiring new enterprise sales representatives as well.

As it aggressively hires more engineers and sales reps, Yuan said a company can't succeed or grow without a healthy culture. This is reflected on the employee ratings site Glassdoor, where Zoom has 4.8 stars out of 5 and is ranked the No. 2 place to work in 2019.

When hiring, Yuan said the company cares more about whether candidates can build on the company culture and if they are willing to learn than the universities or companies the they come from. After all, if a company culture is broken, it can quickly cause a company to rot.

Read more: Video conferencing company Zoom prices IPO at $36 per share, giving it a $9.2 billion valuation — 9 times its last private valuation

Meanwhile, Zoom faces its share of competitors: Google Hangouts, Microsoft's Skype, and even Yuan's former company Cisco WebEx. But Yuan said Zoom doesn't focus on competitors.

"We really spend the time talking with our customers," Yuan said. "We try to be the first vendor to address customers' problems and try to be the vendor to come up with a better solution. If we focus on competitors, it's not sustainable."

Zoom's secret to profitability

Throughout the IPO roadshow, Yuan joined all of his meetings via Zoom. Steckelberg traveled for the meetings, while Yuan called in from his office in San Jose, California. As a joke, Yuan would change his video background to different scenes, such as a beach in Hawaii. He said shareholders were impressed.

"For the first two minutes, they were surprised," Yuan said. "They said, 'Wow I did not realize you can do that.' It's an awesome experience."

This also showed shareholders how Zoom grew so fast. Steckelberg said it's because it's viral in nature. If a host calls someone else via Zoom, the person on the other side has the potential to become a Zoom customer. Zoom does invest in sales and marketing, but it does it with "discipline."

"It has the opportunity to be shared by millions of people without having a sales team to do that," Steckelberg said.

What's more, Zoom has this philosophy: Employees should take a minute to think about how they're spending their own money and take two minutes to think about how they're spending the company's money. This frugal philosophy, Yuan and Steckelberg said, also helped make Zoom profitable.

"We're striving for how it helps people think about how people can be as efficient as possible," Steckelberg said. "We want them to be thoughtful about how they bring value to our customers."

That's because Yuan doesn't see venture-capital money as money. And every time managers or department heads want to spend money, they ask themselves if there's a workaround, why they're spending that money, and what they'll get as a result.

"I remind myself, the money from the investors is not money from our perspective," Yuan said. "That's trust. Every dollar is trust. Those investors trust us ... That's one reason that contributed to the profitability."

This, Yuan said, is an important aspect of Zoom's top company value: care.

"We care for our community, customer, company, teammates, and our ourselves," Yuan said. "Today, we added one more: shareholders."

Pinterest's IPO appears to have raised more than just money.

In the months leading up to Pinterest's trading debut on Thursday, the social media app saw a surge in users that propelled it to the top of the download charts.

Pinterest was one of the 20 most downloaded apps in the the U.S. in the first quarter of 2019, according to numbers from mobile data analyst Sensor Tower.

These first quarter results mark the end of Pinterest' yearlong hiatus from the list of most-downloaded non-game apps. The social platform's number of downloads flatlined in 2018, but it was able to recover in the beginning months of the 2019 fiscal year. Sensor Tower estimates Pinterest was installed by 32.5 million new users on iOS and Android devices around the world in the first quarter, a 16% increase from Pinterest's numbers in the beginning of the 2018 fiscal year.

Read more:Pinterest prices IPO at $19 per share, giving it a $10 billion valuation — lower than its $12.3 billion private valuation

Pinterest's growing audience mirrors other numbers the company has produced. According to its S-1 filings, Pinterest generated $755.9 million in revenue in 2018, up 60% from $472.9 million in 2017. Additionally, Pinterest cut down on its losses: it lost $63 million in 2018, down from $130 million the previous year.

In its first day of trading, Pinterest's shares opened 25% higher than where the company priced its IPO. The company started trading Thursday on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "PINS."

The company has been emphasizing to investors how it differentiates itself from Snap, a rival social platform whose valuation has shrunk drastically since it went public in 2017. Now, Pinterest and CEO Ben Silbermann are trying to position the company as a "visual discovery tool" instead of a social media platform.

It's safe to say that we're in the midst of a smart assistant revolution. Since Apple first released its smart assistant, Siri, in spring 2011, competitors like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google have followed suit with their own virtual assistants.

While there are a set of standard skills that you can safely find in nearly any smart assistant — such as searching the internet or setting a timer — not all smart assistants are the same.

And recent additions to Google's assistant may just give it a competitive edge that other smart assistants lack.

What is Google Assistant?

The latest evolution of the smart assistant Google originally launched in 2012 with Google Now, Google Assistant is the tech company's AI-powered smart assistant.

In a playful nod to their search engine, Google markets Google Assistant as a user's "personal Google"— built to help them navigate their own busy lives the way Google might help them navigate a busy web.

Native to most Android phones, as well as Google Home devices, Google Assistant allows users to use both voice and text commands.

How to use Google Assistant

Google Assistant will give a few recommendations of things you can ask it. Sarah Wells/Business Insider

What you can do with Google Assistant

Google Assistant will, in most cases, return its results in seconds. Sarah Wells/Business Insider

You can answer, decline, or screen the call right from your phone. Sarah Wells/Business Insider

How to optimize Google Assistant

Google Lens will search the internet for whatever you focus your camera on. Sarah Wells/Business Insider

Google Docs are some of the handiest tools on the Internet today, offering easy collaboration to people spread far and wide. Once it has been shared by its creator, a Google Doc can be worked on by multiple people simultaneously, allowing for real time additions, edits, and updates.

And as a Google Doc lives on a remote server, not on any one computer, it is safe from loss caused by a computer crash (or theft).

Sharing a Google Doc is as easy as a few clicks and entering email addresses, but make sure you take the time to use the advanced sharing settings if you want to set the document as read only, protecting it from unwanted edits, or even to restrict printing or downloads.

How to share a Google Doc — the basics

1. Go to Google's home page (while signed in) and click the box formed of nine little dots in the top right corner.

2. Scroll down through the apps, then click on the Google Docs app, which looks like a piece of blue paper with white lines.

Choose the "Docs" icon. Steven John/Business Insider

3.Create a document (usually blank) then type in its name in the top left corner, and add as much content as you like.

4. Click the blue button reading "Share" in the top right corner.

Click the "Share" button." Steven John/Business Insider

5. Type in the email addresses of people with whom you want to share the doc; note that they will auto populate if they are in your contacts list.

6. Click the pencil icon beside each name if you want to change the way the user can engage with the doc ("Can edit," "Can comment," or just "Can view").

Type an email address, then click this pencil to edit permissions for that address. Steven John/Business Insider

7. Click "Done."

How to share a Google Doc — advanced

If you want to limit how people will be able to engage with your Google doc, go through the steps above, but stop at step 5, then proceed as shown below.

1. Hit the word "Advanced" in the bottom right corner of the popup window.

Click the "Advanced" option after typing an address. Steven John/Business Insider

2. At the bottom of the next window, consider preventing other people from being able to share the document with others.

3. Consider limiting download, print, and even copy and paste options if you want to restrict the potential spread of the material.

Restrict document privileges in the boxes at the bottom or edit permissions for each shared address. Steven John/Business Insider

4. Set your desired privacy options by clicking "Change" next to any address in the middle of the above window.

5. Finally proceed to enter other email addresses and stipulate each person's level of engagement.

The tennis superstar Serena Williams has found time to pick up a side gig — on top of winning championships and taking care of her adorable daughter, that is.

The tennis legend publicly shared on Wednesday the details of her investment firm, called Serena Ventures. The venture-capital firm has been quietly backing companies since 2014 and has invested in more than 30 companies already.

"I launched Serena Ventures with the mission of giving opportunities to founders across an array of industries," Williams said in her announcement on Instagram.

Serena Ventures was created to give opportunities to a diverse set of founders, the firm said, particularly women and people of color. Investments will go into early-stage companies that value "individual empowerment, creativity and opportunity," according to the company's website.

Additionally, the investment firm will work to mentor young founders and emerging entrepreneurs.

Read more: How Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian and tennis superstar Serena Williams met and fell in love

The website for Serena Ventures lists Alison Rapaport as the vice president of the firm, and the only other employee besides Williams. Rapaport, a former asset manager at JPMorgan, will oversee the fund's portfolio and new investments.

Serena Ventures' investments span numerous industries, including food, health and wellness, e-commerce, and fashion. Its portfolio includes female-centric companies such as the coworking startup the Wing and the razor brand Billie; the customized organic baby food-delivery subscription service Little Spoon and meal-delivery services Daily Harvest and Gobble; the online-course provider MasterClass; the in-home connected fitness company Tonal; and the tampon subscription service LOLA.

Analysts say that IBM delivered a "mediocre" quarter, but now all eyes are on its forthcoming $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat and whether IBM's big bet will pay off.

On Tuesday, IBM announced it generated $18.18 billion in revenue this past quarter, missing analysts' expectations of $18.51 billion. The following day, IBM's stock was down 4%.

IBM's multibillion-dollar acquisition got the company a lot of attention, but it hasn't resolved fundamental questions about its big-picture vision and strategy.

"IBM today, they go to a hockey game wearing a football uniform," Marty Wolf, the founder and president of the mergers and acquisitions advisory firm Martinwolf, told Business Insider. "They're growing slower, their margins are less. Their business model is too complicated. They need to deconsolidate. Our belief is, they're looking like a rhino in a field of cheetahs."

As IBM prepares to close its Red Hat acquisition in the coming quarters, the company has the benefit of a "wait and see" attitude from investors, Katy Ring, a research director for IT services at the 451 Group, said.

Namely, IBM is betting on hybrid cloud, which allows companies to run their workloads both on the public cloud and on on-premise data centers. While Red Hat might be an important part of doubling down on this strategy, that alone won't help IBM secure the cloud business, analysts say.

"I think IBM has got to make hybrid cloud work as a strategy in order to remain technically relevant in the longer term," Ring said. "It understands large enterprise IT better than any other cloud provider, and so, could potentially emerge as a much stronger 21st century service provider by taking open source software to its big blue heart."

'Everything in the kitchen sink'

IBM said its cloud business grew 10% year-over-year, generating revenue of $19.5 billion. However, analysts say that when IBM reports cloud business, it can also lump in other aspects that are not necessarily cloud applications and cloud services but are related to cloud, such as consulting and hardware.

Read more: IBM stock sinks 3% after hours after missing Wall Street expectations on revenue

And the growth still lags the performance of other cloud providers: Microsoft Azure grew 76% from a year ago, and Amazon Web Services grew 45%.

"They have an 'everything in the kitchen sink' approach to cloud," Andrew Bartels, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, told Business Insider. "They toss everything that might be related to cloud into that bucket. There's a lot of ambiguity and probably misdirection which is in their cloud numbers."

IBM's cloud and cognitive-software unit itself was down 2%, generating revenues of $5 billion, and analysts say this is because IBM is facing fierce competition from other cloud providers, even in artificial intelligence.

"I think this shows that companies like Microsoft and Google and Amazon are gaining more cognitive solution business," Maribel Lopez, the founder and principal analyst at Lopez Research, told Business Insider. "I think IBM needs to get ahead of that trend and make sure they don't lose that marketplace to the other big cloud providers."

Investing.com senior analyst Haris Anwar said IBM's turnaround strategy "remains very much a work in progress," as all its segments either declined or were flat.

"That was a little disappointing for investors," Anwar told Business Insider. "They were expecting they will see some clear improvements, but that's obviously not the case. They're still struggling to compete in this cloud-computing segment in which Amazon and Microsoft had a great run."

That being said, this lack of growth might not necessarily be specific to IBM, Bartels said. On the downside, it could be reflective of the market as a whole as other tech companies report earnings this month.

"It could well be that IBM is a harbinger of disappointing earnings to come of other vendors in the coming weeks," Bartels said.

And there's still some positives, John Roy, UBS's lead analyst, said. He expects cloud and cognitive services at IBM to grow, and the company will also benefit from getting rid of underperforming assets of the company that slow down the business.

"They are doing more work in artificial intelligence and hopefully I'll hear more about that," Roy said.

'Real question marks'

Analysts say the coming quarters will be crucial for IBM as it closes its acquisition of Red Hat. Analysts predict this will help IBM generate revenue.

Once the deal closes, IBM can focus on technical integrations and creating a product portfolio that includes Red Hat's offerings — not to mention that there will be a cultural adjustment.

Wolf said he has "real question marks" about this.

"Lots of people who work at Red Hat are not going to be that excited to work at IBM," Wolf said. "There's a combination thing. Red Hat looks like a small piece of IBM's business. Some of the reasons people like working at Red Hat is because it's not a big conglomerate."

However, analysts say, the question is whether the IBM salesforce can sell Red Hat and if IBM services can benefit from Red Hat being part of the company. It might take at least two quarters for that to happen.

Ring believes the market sentiment toward IBM is still positive, but the company will need to make "some bold moves."

"The Red Hat acquisition could be very good for IBM if it takes on board the open source culture that the business brings to IBM and its customers," Ring said. "It could be a disaster if IBM does not adapt its culture quickly enough to pull through this benefit for enterprise buyers."

For those with Google accounts, Google Forms provide a way to simplify their workload. And the potential of this tool is far-reaching for professionals.

You can use Google Forms to do things like: gauge your coworkers' (or employees') interest in a potential project, coordinate schedules for an upcoming meeting, RSVP for a company event, create an official channel to request time off, or get feedback on your work.

The key is recognizing the various opportunities to use them in real-time. And once you know where everything is, Google Forms are easy to use, customize, and edit. Here's how to start making a Google Form.

How to create a Google Form

1. Go to forms.google.com.

2. Click the plus symbol under "start a new form" (or select a template).

Click the plus sign design. Devon Delfino/Business Insider

3. If it's your first time making a form, you'll have the option to take a tour of the tool. Otherwise you can skip ahead to creating your form by giving it a title in the top header (you can also add a description below that).

4. Click the plus symbol on the vertical right-hand toolbar to add each question (you can also add things like images, videos, and additional sections from that tool bar). You'll need to select the question type (multiple choice is the default).

Click the small plus sign to start creating questions for your poll or quiz. Devon Delfino/Business Insider

5. Depending on the question type you go with, you may also have to provide answers to accompany each point for respondents to choose from, and you may want to turn on the "required" option by clicking the toggle button at the bottom of each question section.

You can pick from several different types of questions. Devon Delfino/Business Insider

6. To change the appearance, select a form theme by clicking the painting-palette icon on toolbar at the top-right of your screen. That allows you to customize the following elements:

You can redesign your Forms in many ways. Devon Delfino/Business Insider

7. Optional: Click settings (the gear-icon within that top toolbar) to further customize your form. Here are a few options included within the settings section:

Click the gear icon to open a settings menu. Devon Delfino/Business Insider

8. Preview your form by clicking the eye icon in the toolbar at the top of your screen to make sure everything looks good and makes sense (this will open in a new window).

9. Click "send" at the top right of the screen; this will open a pop up where you fill out the following:

This is also when you would add collaborators, get the form link and HTML embed code, and share it via Twitter or Facebook.

You can share your Form through email, or by copying and pasting a direct link. Devon Delfino/Business Insider

10. Click "SEND."

You can delete or duplicate questions as needed by clicking the trash can or layered rectangle icon, located below each question. If necessary, you can always re-order the questions by clicking and dragging the rectangle of six dots located above each question.

You can set up email notifications for the form by toggling over to the "responses" tab at the top. That's also where you can opt to see the results within Google Sheets, download them as a CSV file, and turn off responses once you've collected enough data.

Facebook has stored millions of Instagram users' passwords in an unencrypted format easily readable by its employees for years, the latest in a series of high-profile security missteps committed by the Silicon Valley giant.

The news came on Thursday by way of an update to an existing company blog post, which in March, announced that unencrypted passwords for hundreds of millions of Facebook and Facebook Lite users had been accessible on its internal servers. At the time, the company also said the same issue affected "tens of thousands" of Instagram users.

On Thursday, that number was updated to "millions."

Facebook said that since its previous post — on March 21 — it had discovered "additional logs of Instagram passwords being stored in a readable format," but that its "investigation has determined that these stored passwords were not internally abused or improperly accessed."

The company said it would notify affected users.

Back in March, Facebook said it discovered the vulnerability during a "routine security review" at the beginning of the year. The cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs said the issue existed as far back as 2012.

The incident adds to a long line of serious scandals and crises to wrack Facebook over the past two years — many of which have been security- or privacy-related. Just yesterday, Business Insider discovered that the tech giant had been harvesting the email contacts of 1.5 million new users without their knowledge or consent.

Read more: Facebook says it 'unintentionally uploaded' 1.5 million people's email contacts without their consent

Samsung's nearly $2,000 smartphone, the Galaxy Fold, is getting ready to ship next week.

There's a lot to say about this phone — like how the screens on several Galaxy Fold review units have broken in less than two days of use.

Samsung is now saying there's a protective film on top of the display that you shouldn't remove, but some reviewers, like former Business Insider reporter Steve Kovach, say the protective layer on top of the Galaxy Fold's screen was intact and the phone still broke. For what it's worth, Business Insider's Galaxy Fold unit is still working perfectly fine, and we have not removed the protective layer on top of the screen. Samsung says it's investigating the broken review units.

Anyway, that massive caveat aside, the Galaxy Fold is actually pretty cool!

One of its neatest tricks is the magnet system inside the phone, which gives a satisfying snap when you open or close the clamshell phone. To understand it, it's really best to see it in action. All of the visuals here come courtesy of Marques Brownlee from the MKBHD YouTube channel, who filmed the magnets inside the Galaxy Fold with his 8K camera rig.