During this week’s roundtable, we had two startups pitching. Both show excellent execution. ShipSafe Up first we had Andrews Chand from Noida, India, pitch ShipSafe, a marine vessel audit system that...
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Welcome to this week’s transcribed edition of This is Your Life in Silicon Valley. We’re running an experiment for Extra Crunch members that puts This is Your Life in Silicon Valley in words – so you can read from wherever you are.
This is your Life in Silicon Valley was originally started by Sunil Rajaraman and Jascha Kaykas-Wolff in 2018. Rajaraman is a serial entrepreneur and writer (Co-Founded Scripted.com, and is currently an EIR at Foundation Capital), Kaykas-Wolff is the current CMO at Mozilla and ran marketing at BitTorrent. Rajaraman and Kaykas-Wolff started the podcast after a series of blog posts that Sunil wrote for The Bold Italic went viral. The goal of the podcast is to cover issues at the intersection of technology and culture – sharing a different perspective of life in the Bay Area. Their guests include entrepreneurs like Sam Lessin, journalists like Kara Swisher and politicians like Mayor Libby Schaaf and local business owners like David White of Flour + Water.
This week’s edition of This is Your Life in Silicon Valley features Mike Isaac, whose upcoming book about Uber – ‘Super Pumped’ – is sure to generate controversy. Isaac conducted hundreds of interviews for the book, and answers some pointed questions about his research during this podcast. Isaac also talks about press leaks, Facebook hacks and more during this interview.
If you want to hear what Mike would ask Travis Kalanick if he had the opportunity for a sitdown, you don’t want to miss this transcript.
For access to the full transcription, become a member of Extra Crunch. Learn more and try it for free.
Sunil Rajaraman:
Welcome to season three of This is your Life in Silicon Valley, a podcast about the Bay Area, technology, and culture. I’m your host Sunil Rajaraman, and I’m joined by my cohost, Jascha Kaykas-Wolff-Wolff. This is your Life in Silicon Valley is brought to you by The Bold Italic.
Sramana Mitra: If you look at the 2018 deal flow, how many deals do you look at in a year? What are the trends in that deal flow? Swapna Gupta: We have a three-member India team. Between us, we end...
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Startups are but one species in a complex regulatory and public policy ecosystem. This ecosystem is larger and more powerfully dynamic than many founders appreciate, with distinct yet overlapping laws at the federal, state and local/city levels, all set against a vast array of public and private interests. Where startup founders see opportunity for disruption in regulated markets, lawyers counsel prudence: regulations exist to promote certain strongly-held public policy objectives which (unlike your startup’s business model) carry the force of law.
Snapshot of the regulatory and public policy ecosystem. Image via Law Office of Daniel McKenzie
Although the canonical “ask forgiveness and not permission” approach taken by Airbnb and Uber circa 2009 might lead founders to conclude it is strategically acceptable to “move fast and break things” (including the law), don’t lose sight of the resulting lawsuits and enforcement actions. If you look closely at Airbnb and Uber today, each have devoted immense resources to building regulatory and policy teams, lobbying, public relations, defending lawsuits, while increasingly looking to work within the law rather than outside it – not to mention, in the case of Uber, a change in leadership as well.
Indeed, more recently, examples of founders and startups running into serious regulatory issues are commonplace: whether in healthcare, where CEO/Co-founder Conrad Parker was forced to resign from Zenefits and later fined approximately $500K; in the securities registration arena, where cryptocurrency startups Airfox and Paragon have each been fined $250K and further could be required to return to investors the millions raised through their respective ICOs; in the social media and privacy realm, where TikTok was recently fined $5.7 million for violating COPPA, or in the antitrust context, where tech giant Google is facing billions in fines from the EU.
Suffice it to say, regulation is not a low-stakes table game. In 2017 alone, according to Duff and Phelps, US financial regulators levied $24.4 billion in penalties against companies and another $621.3 million against individuals. Particularly in today’s highly competitive business landscape, even if your startup can financially absorb the fines for non-compliance, the additional stress and distraction for your team may still inflict serious injury, if not an outright death-blow.
The best way to avoid regulatory setbacks is to first understand relevant regulations and work to develop compliant policies and business practices from the beginning. This article represents a step in that direction, the fifth and final installment in Extra Crunch’s exclusive “Startup Law A to Z” series, following previous articles on corporate matters, intellectual property (IP), customer contracts and employment law.
Given the breadth of activities subject to regulation, however, and the many corresponding regulations across federal, state, and municipal levels, no analysis of any particular regulatory framework would be sufficiently complete here. Instead, the purpose of this article is to provide founders a 30,000-foot view across several dozen applicable laws in key regulatory areas, providing a “lay of the land” such that with some additional navigation and guidance, an optimal course may be charted.
The regulatory areas highlighted here include: (a) Taxes; (b) Securities; (c) Employment; (d) Privacy; (e) Antitrust; (f) Advertising, Commerce and Telecommunications; (g) Intellectual Property; (h) Financial Services and Insurance; and finally (i) Transportation, Health and Safety.
Of course, some regulations may touch on multiple regulatory areas, for example, the “Fair Credit Reporting Act” is a law ultimately about privacy, but it impacts many financial and employment-related services as well. Certain laws may therefore be cross-listed in more than one regulatory area. Also, since we can’t look at every U.S. state and city, this article will focus primarily on the federal and California state laws.
After you focus on the particular regulatory areas that may implicate your business, next reference the short quotations and links to relevant primary and secondary sources below, then work to identify the specific compliance risks you face. This is where other Extra Crunch resources can help. For example, the Verified Experts of Extra Crunch include some of the most experienced and skilled startup lawyers in practice today. Use these profiles to identify attorneys who are focused on serving companies at your particular stage and then seek out any further guidance you need to address the regulatory matters pertinent to your startup.
With that as context, the Startup Law A to Z – Regulatory Compliance checklist is below:
Before diving into further detail, it may be helpful for some readers to note the distinction between a law and a regulation. Simply put, regulations provide more detailed direction on how certain laws should be followed. So regulations are not technically laws, but they carry the force of law (including penalties for violation), since they are adopted by governmental agencies under authority granted by statute. Beyond that, understanding how laws and regulations are actually enacted is helpful to illustrate the extent to which the process is politically driven.
In the U.S., a bill must first pass both legislative branches of government, then, if signed by the executive branch, it will be codified in statute as law (Schoolhouse Rock anyone?). Once codified, the legislative branch will authorize the relevant executive department or agency to determine whether specific regulations are necessary to give the law effect. If so, those executive departments or agencies will determine what further rules are needed, and in turn, work to enforce them.
At the federal level, for example, proposed regulations are developed first through a “Notice of Proposed Rulemaking,” listed in the Federal Register and filed in the corresponding executive agency’s official docket (available at Regulations.gov). This affords the public an opportunity to comment on the regulations. After receiving comments, the filing agency may revise the proposed regulation before final rules are issued, which again will be published in the Federal Register and then filed in the agency’s official docket at Regulations.gov, before they are codified in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR).
At nearly every step in this process then, institutions, government, and interest groups are working – sometimes at cross purposes – to shape what the law will be and how it will impact your startup.
The Startup Law A to Z – Regulatory Compliance reference guide is below:
Sramana Mitra: The reason I’m asking is for a little bit of specifics. For example, one of the trends that I’m observing right now is there’s an increased emphasis on blending of...
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Tonal is today announcing its Series C financing that it hopes will allow the company to bring its at-home gym to even more homes. The funding round shows investors’ excitement around the new generation of personal exercise equipment that combines on-demand training with smart features. Tonal, like Peloton, offers features previously unavailable outside of gyms, and with this injection of capital, the company expects to build new personal features and invest in marketing and retail experiences.
L Catterton’s Growth Fund led the $45 million Series C round, which included investments from Evolution Media, Shasta Ventures, Mayfield, Sapphire Sport and others. This financing round brings the total amount raised to $90 million.
Tonal is based out of San Francisco and was founded by Aly Orady in 2015. The company launched its strength-training product in 2018. The wall-mounted Tonal uses electromagnetism to simulate and control weight, allowing the slender device to replicate (and replace) a lot of weight-lifting machines.
The Tonal machine costs $2,995, and for $49 a month, Tonal offers members access to personal training sessions, recommended programs and workouts. Since launching, CEO Orady tells TechCrunch there have been virtually no returns. He says their customer care teams proactively work with members to ensure a good experience.
Orady is excited to have L Catterton participating in this financing round, saying their deep network and unparalleled experience building premium fitness brands globally is an incredibly exciting new resource for the company. The Connecticut-based investment firm helped fund Peloton, ThirdLove, ClassPass and The Honest Company.
“As the fitness landscape continues to evolve, we have seen a clear shift toward personalized, content-driven, at-home workout experiences,” said Scott Dahnke, Global co-CEO of L Catterton in a released statement. “Tonal is the first connected fitness brand focused on strength training and represents an opportunity to invest behind an innovative concept with tremendous growth potential. We look forward to leveraging our deep knowledge of consumer behavior and significant experience in the connected fitness space to bring Tonal’s dynamic technology and content platform to more homes across the country.”
Tonal shares a market with Peloton, and Orady says a significant amount of Tonal owners also own Peloton equipment. Yet, feature-by-feature, Peloton and Tonal are different. While they’re both in-home devices that offer on-demand instructors, Peloton targets cardiovascular exercises while Tonal is a strength-training machine. Orady states his customers find the two companies offer complementary experiences.
“The common thread with our members is that they understand the value of investing in their fitness and overall health,” said Aly Orady, “All of our members are looking to take their fitness to the next level with strength training. Tonal offers the ability to strength train at home by providing a comprehensive, challenging full body workout without having to sacrifice quality for convenience.”
This is an enormous market he says the company can rely on for years to come. The majority of Tonal’s customers are between 30 and 55 years old and live in, or adjacent to, the top 10 major metro U.S. markets. There’s an even split, he says, between male and female members.
Tonal is similar to Mirror, another at-home, wall-mounted exercise device that costs $1,495. While Tonal focuses on strength training through resistance, Mirror offers yoga, boxing, Pilates and other exercises and activities with on-demand instruction and real-time stats. Mirror also launched in 2018 and the company has raised $40 million.
Going forward, Tonal expects to expand its software to provide new personalization features to its members. The hope is to build experiences that motivate users while serving up real-time feedback. This includes building new workout categories and additional fitness experiences, even when users travel and don’t have access to their Tonal machine.
The company sees it expanding its retail and marketing presence. Right now, just eight months after the product’s debut, customers have very limited access to try the Tonal machine. It’s only on display at Tonal’s flagship San Francisco store and is coming to a pop-up store in Newport Beach, Calif.
Orady tells TechCrunch the company needs new talent to help the company achieve its mission. Tonal is hiring and looking to hire in hardware, software, design, video production and marketing.
At-home exercise equipment is a massive market, and Tonal offers a unique set of features and advantages that should allow it to stand apart from competitors. This isn’t just another treadmill. Tonal is a strength-training super machine the size of a thick HDTV. Challenges abound, but the company seemingly has a solid plan to utilize its latest round of financing that should allow it to reach more customers and show them why the Tonal machine is worth the cost.
Today’s 438th FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Thursday, April 4, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All are...
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Fresh from closing a notable investment from Airbnb, India’s OYO has expanded its footprint into Japan. The move comes through a joint venture with investor SoftBank — which led OYO’s $1 billion round last year through its Vision Fund — which will cover hotel-based accommodation and home rentals.
Financial details around the joint venture were not disclosed. An OYO representative declined to go into details when asked.
OYO started in India, where it initially aggregated budget hotels; it has since expanded into China, Malaysia, Nepal, the U.K., the UAE, Indonesia, the Philippines and — now — Japan. China, in particular, has shown promise, with OYO’s room inventory there reportedly double what it is in India.
The evolution has not just been a geographical one. Its business has moved from a laser focus on the long-tail of budget hotels to a broader “hospitality” play. It now includes managed private homes and, in India, wedding venues, holiday packages and co-working — while its hotel supply is a mixture of franchised and leased. It has also advanced its focus from budget-minded consumers to cover business travelers, too.
The Japanese JV will be led by Prasun Choudhary, whom OYO describes as a founding member of its team. Like OYO business elsewhere in the world, the company is appealing to small and medium hotel franchises and owners. On the consumer side, its prime segment is domestic and international travelers who seek “budget to mid-segment hospitality,” to use part of a statement from OYO founder and CEO Ritesh Agarwal, who is pictured in the image at the top of this post.
Agarwal is a Thiel fellow who started the company in 2011 when aged just 18. His original business, called Oravel, was an Airbnb clone that pivoted to become OYO. Today, that company is valued at $5 billion after raising more than $1.5 billion from investors.
SoftBank has previously struck joint ventures to bring other Vision Fund companies to Japan. Those include WeWork, Chinese ride-hailing firm Didi Chuxing and India’s Paytm, which launched a payment service in the country.
Today’s 438th FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, April 4, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All...
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French startup OpenClassrooms is announcing a new partnership for a masters-level online program. Students who enroll in this program will access a fully online program about artificial intelligence. Eventually, future graduates will join companies — Microsoft will likely hire some of them.
If you aren’t familiar with OpenClassrooms, the company started with basic massive open online course content for people willing to learn more about a particular topic. The startup then started offering full-fledged diplomas that require six months, a year or more.
OpenClassrooms is accredited to deliver official degrees in France — and the company plans to do the same in the U.S. and the U.K. It’s not 100 percent just you learning by yourself, as you get to talk to a mentor every week to discuss your progress. And it’s been working quite well for the company.
An online path generally costs less than a traditional degree, and you’re more flexible when it comes to hours, days and semesters. The startup is so confident that it guarantees you’ll find a job within six months of graduation.
More recently, OpenClassrooms has been partnering with companies to offer apprenticeship programs. The idea is that you work for a company several days a week and study when you’re not working. It’s a win-win, as some companies struggle to find the right candidates, and some students want to start working right away and don’t want to pay for their studies. And OpenClassrooms gets paid by companies directly. Uber, Deliveroo, Capgemini, BNP Paribas and dozens of others participate in the apprenticeship program.
Microsoft will help OpenClassrooms design a new degree around data science, machine learning and all things artificial intelligence. The company will provide content and projects. OpenClassrooms will recruit 1,000 candidates in France, the U.K. and the U.S. as part of this program.
A recently published Gartner Magic Quadrant report estimates that within the next three years, 90% of IT leaders will no longer purchase premises-based unified communications infrastructure, compared...
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Zaver, a Swedish fintech that has built a payments platform to facilitate peer-to-peer trades and more, has picked up just over $1.2 million in seed funding. Backing the burgeoning startup are VC firms Inventure and Inbox Capital, as well as a number of relatively well-established angel investors.
They include Joen Bonnier (partner at Atomico), Tom Dinkelspiel, Pontus Hagnö, Fabian Hielte (owner of Ernström & C:o and a previous investor in Spotify and iZettle), Bo Mattsson (founder of Cint), and Fredrik Österberg (founder of Evolution Gaming).
Aiming to disrupt the market for p2p payment solutions, Zaver is developing a SaaS and accompanying apps to bring together buyers, sellers and merchants with the promise of “secure payments on your terms”. The fintech startup aims to facilitate trades between peers by enabling the use of flexible payment methods such as direct payments, “buy now, pay later” and instalments.
To support this, Zaver’s platform claims to embed “intelligent fraud detection” algorithms in tandem with the automatic creation of “verified digital agreements” between transacting parties.
“The Zaver app is the first platform independent checkout solution for p2p transactions,” says Amir Marandi, who co-founded Zaver alongside Linus Malmén — both former engineering students at KTH Royal Institute of Technology.
“With Zaver’s intelligent fraud prevention, automated and immediate credit decisions and cryptographically signed digital receipts, peers can do safe payments on their own terms with people they really don’t know that well,” he says. “We try to make p2p trades as safe as possible for all parties involved and offer flexible payment options, without compromising on the user experience”.
In addition, Zaver for Business enables merchants to utilise the platform to increase conversion and reduce transaction costs. “Our mission with this product is to reduce the need of a physical card reader,” adds Marandi.
Zaver’s typical user is described as a young student who wants to sell their iPhone on a classified site in a secure way, or a plumber who wants to buy a used VW Golf today, and pay later. Meanwhile, the typical customer of Zaver for Business is a company with omni-channel sales, selling products/services online and offline.
“Our main competitors are not the kind of business you might expect,” explains Marandi. “It’s not the banks, but rather upcoming startups wanting to innovate the payment industry. The most ‘direct competitor today I would say is the credit card industry”.
To that end, Zaver makes money from the transaction fees it charges merchants (which it says are up to 70 percent cheaper than traditional payment services), and on interest charged when someone chooses to pay via instalments.
Adds Marandi: “Using automated systems for the entire customer journey we are able to offer individualised interest rates at the point of sale. The system automatically chooses an interest rate for you, based on your creditworthiness”.
Less than a decade ago IPOs, acquisitions and global expansion by African startups were more possibility than reality. March saw all three from the continent’s tech scene.
Pan-African e-commerce company Jumia filed for an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange, per SEC documents and confirmation from chief executive Sacha Poignonnec.
In an updated filing, (since the March 12 original) Jumia indicated it will offer 13,500,000 ADR shares, for an offering price of $13 to $16 per share to trade under the ticker symbol “JMIA.” The IPO could raise up to $216 million for Jumia.
Since our first story (and reflected in the latest SEC docs), Mastercard Europe agreed upfront to buy $50 million in Jumia ordinary shares.
With a smooth filing process, Jumia will become the first African startup to list on a major global exchange. The company is incorporated in Germany, but maintains its headquarters in Nigeria, and operates exclusively in Africa, with 4,000 employees on the continent.
The pending IPO creates another milestone for Jumia. The venture became the first African startup unicorn in 2016, achieving a $1 billion valuation after a funding round that included Goldman Sachs, AXA and MTN.
Founded in Lagos in 2012 with Rocket Internet backing, Jumia now operates multiple online verticals in 14 African countries. Goods and services lines include Jumia Food (an online takeout service), Jumia Flights (for travel bookings) and Jumia Deals (for classifieds). Jumia processed more than 13 million packages in 2018, according to company data. The company has started to generate annual revenues over $100 million, but like many burn-rate startups, has done so while racking up big losses.
There’ll be a lot more to cover, analyze and debate pre and post Jumia’s NYSE bell toll — which could happen in coming weeks or months. For example, can Jumia generate a profit; is it really an African startup; will Jumia become an acquisition target for a big outside name or an acquirer of smaller startups in African e-commerce? Stay tuned for continuing TechCrunch coverage.
On the acquisition front, Lagos-based online lending startup OneFi bought Nigerian payment solutions company Amplify for an undisclosed amount.
OneFi is taking over Amplify’s IP, team and client network of more than 1,000 merchants to which Amplify provides payment processing services, OneFi CEO Chijioke Dozie told TechCrunch.
The purchase of Amplify caps off a busy period for OneFi. Over the last seven months the Nigerian venture secured a $5 million lending facility from Lendable, announced a payment partnership with Visa and became one of the first (known) African startups to receive a global credit rating. OneFi is also dropping the name of its signature product, Paylater, and will simply go by OneFi (for now).
Collectively, these moves represent a pivot for OneFi away from operating primarily as a digital lender, toward becoming an online consumer finance platform.
“We’re not a bank but we’re offering more banking services…Customers are now coming to us not just for loans but for cheaper funds transfer, more convenient bill payment, and to know their credit scores,” said Dozie.
OneFi will add payment options for clients on social media apps, including WhatsApp, this quarter — something in which Amplify already holds a specialization and client base. Through its Visa partnership, OneFi will also offer clients virtual Visa wallets on mobile phones and start providing QR code payment options at supermarkets, on public transit and across other POS points in Nigeria.
On the back of the acquisition, OneFi is in the process of raising a round and will look to expand internationally, considering Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, DRC, Ghana and Egypt and Europe for Diaspora markets.
On African startups expanding globally, FlexClub — a South African venture that matches investors and drivers to cars for ride-hailing services — announced it will expand in Mexico in a partnership with Uber after closing a $1.2 million seed round led by CRE Venture Capital.
The move comes as Africa’s tech-transit space continues to produce unique mobility solutions shaped around local needs.
FlexClub touts itself as a “gig economy investment platform” that is creating new asset classes in emerging markets, according to chief executive and co-founder Tinashe Ruzane.
That asset class, for now, is ride-hail vehicles. FlexClub allows investors to go on the site and purchase a car (ultimately managed and serviced by FlexClub). The startup then connects that car to an Uber driver who uses earnings to pay a weekly rental charge.
Those fees generate monthly fixed-rate interest income for the investor. The driver has the option of buying the car after 12 months, with a descending purchase price over time.
FlexClub’s platform manages the investment, rental income and disbursement of funds across all parties. The startup also handles insurance, maintenance and upkeep of the cars.
Ruzane envisions this as a model to finance multiple asset classes in emerging markets — where lending options are fewer for individuals who may not have credit histories.
“Our goal is to make this completely passive… where investors can invest in different kinds of assets on our platform, login to a dash, and see this is how my five cars in South Africa are doing, my vans in Mexico, my motorbikes in Indonesia — with a diversified portfolio around the world,” he explained.
FlexClub will begin work matching investors to cars and Uber drivers in Mexico in April. The startup sees opportunities to move into other mobility classes, such as Africa’s ride-hail motorcycle taxi and three-wheel tuk-tuk market, CEO Tinashe Ruzane told TechCrunch in this feature.
And finally, francophone Africa will see a boost in funds and support for startups. The Dakar Network Angels group launched last month, making its first investment to cleantech venture Coliba — an Ivorian startup that uses a mobile app to coordinate waste recycling
The deal is part of Dakar Network Angels’ mission of convening experts and capital to bridge the resource gap for startups in French-speaking Africa — or 24 of the continent’s 54 countries.
The organization — which goes by DNA for short — will offer seed fund investments of between $25,000 to $100,000 to early-stage ventures with high growth potential. These rounds will come with the entrepreneurial guidance of DNA’s angel network.
Launched in Senegal, the organization’s founder Marieme Diop — a VC investor at Orange Digital Ventures — named the goal of bridging VC disparities between francophone and non-francophone Africa as the primary driver for DNA. She pointed to funding data by Partech, indicating that 76 percent of investment to African startups goes to three English-speaking countries — Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa.
To gain consideration for DNA investment, startups must gain referral by a member. DNA will take a minority stake (less than 10 percent) in ventures that receive seed funds and provide program mentorship until exits, Diop told TechCrunch.
To become an angel, members must commit to investing a minimum of $10,000 a year (for those coming on as individuals), $20,000 (for corporates) and be on hand to support the portfolio startups, according to DNA’s Corporate Membership Charter.
More Africa Related Stories @TechCrunch
Seven Africa-focused startups present at Y Combinator’s Demo DayNigeria’s Gloo.ng drops consumer e-commerce, pivots to e-procurementWhy Warriors’ Andre Iguodala joined African unicorn Jumia’s boardNala has built a hassle-free, offline mobile money payment platform for AfricaAfrican Tech Around The Net
African tech startups raised over $1.2bn in funding in 2018 – Partech reportMicrosoft’s Azure cloud data centers expand to South AfricaApplications open for Jack Ma’s Africa Netpreneur Prize
The disgraced founder of Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes. Jeff Chiu/AP
Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Thursday.
More than 500 million Facebook users' personal data was left exposed on public servers by app developers. Researchers at security firm UpGuard found that the user data, which had been harvested from Facebook by third-party app developers, was sitting without any password protection on public Amazon servers it had been uploaded to. Ve rizon on Wednesday turned on its mobile 5G network, promising significantly faster speeds than the 4G LTE networks people have been using so far. For now, only one phone can connect to Verizon's 5G network: the Motorola Moto Z3, which needs a "Moto Mod" attachment to connect to it. Coming on the heels of Apple's second-generation AirPods announcement, Beats has announced a new pair of wireless earbuds, the $250 Powerbeats Pro. And while the two headphones bear some similarities, the pricier Powerbeats are a more premium choice that have more to offer when it comes to custom fitting options and audio quality. Linus Torvalds, who created the Linux operating system, said he detests social media, including the platforms Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. "I absolutely detest modern 'social media' â Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. It's a disease. It seems to encourage bad behavior," Torvalds said in an interview. WeWork has acquired Managed by Q, a platform for office tenants to hire on-demand service workers for office-management tasks like cleaning or staffing reception desks. Managed by Q was most recently valued at $249 million in a financing round in January and had raised $85 million since 2014, The Wall Street Journal reported. Facebook is paying The Daily Telegraph to run a series of positive sponsored stories about it. The British newspaper is running dozens of stories that defend Facebook on controversial subjects like terrorism, hate speech, and cyber-bullying. British AI startup Onfido raised $50 million led by SBI Holdings, an early spinoff from SoftBank. Onfido uses artificial intelligence to scan official documents such as drivers' licences and passports to confirm people's identities. Tesla produced 77,100 vehicles in the first quarter of 2019, the company said on Wednesday. Analysts polled by Bloomberg were expecting total production to be 64,400 vehicles. Two Theranos whistleblowers created a company to help tech startups avoid making mistakes and becoming the next Theranos. Erika Cheung and Tyler Shultz have launched an organization that teaches ethical practices and decision-making to entrepreneurs building their own companies. Apple is being sued over allegations of a defect in the Apple Watch Series 3 that causes the battery to swell and the screen to potentially pop off the watch's main body or crack. A woman says that Apple declined to replace her Apple Watch Series 3 under warranty after she experienced this problem, and instead quoted her an out-of-warranty repair price of $229.Have an Amazon Alexa device? Now you can hear 10 Things in Tech each morning. Just search for "Business Insider" in your Alexa's flash briefing settings.
The big question going into this year's CinemaCon, the annual movie theater convention currently taking place in Las Vegas, was how much of Disney's presentation would be about Fox?
Disney head Bob Iger has said publicly that some of the recognizable IPs that Fox possesses would continue, but would just the big blockbusters make the cut? Turns out that's a big NO.
On Wednesday, Disney and Fox executives took the stage to present the upcoming slate of Disney titles for 2019 and there is a wide range of features from Fox that will fill up that slate. In fact, the release schedule is so full for Disney since the deal to acquire 20th Century Fox (which also includes its independent film shingle, Fox Searchlight) became final, there will likely be release-date changes coming to some titles.
One of the most eye-popping moments of the presentation was when Disney's executive VP of theatrical distribution, Cathleen Taff, showed a graphic of the Disney slate for this year (which includes "Avengers: Endgame," "Aladdin," and "The Lion King"), and then that graphic changed to include the Fox titles ("Dark Phoenix," "Stuber," "The New Mutants," "Ad Astra"). It's a lineup that should have every executive in the other studios shaking in their boots.
One industry executive told Business Insider at CinemaCon that basically Disney now dominates the release schedule and all the other studios have to fight over the scraps.
"I'm still just trying to get my mind around this," Disney chairman Alan Horn told the audience following a sizzle reel that opened the presentation, which showcased past hits from both Disney and Fox, with the message being "one vision."
More "Deadpool" is definitely coming. 20th Century Fox Horn also made it clear to the audience made up of exhibitors from around the globe that theatrical is still "the cornerstone" of Disney going forward.
Fox's vice chairman, Emma Watts, took the stage and along with showing footage from coming releases "Dark Phoenix" and the drama "Ford v. Ferrari" â starring Matt Damon and Christian Bale about Ford Motor Company's quest to build a car that could beat Ferrari at the Le Mans in 1966 â said that franchises like "Kingsman," "Alien," and "Planet of the Apes" will continue to get made. And yes, more "Deadpool," too.
"With the vast resources of the Walt Disney Studio behind us we are ready to write our next great chapter," Watts told the audience.
It seems very clear that Disney has no plans to shelve Fox or push it to its Disney+ streaming service. The studio is looking to increase its dominance in the theatrical space even more than it already has.
Tesla on Wednesday released total vehicle-production and delivery numbers for the first quarter of 2019, which ended on Sunday.
Here are the important figures:
Total production: 77,100 Total deliveries: 63,000 Model 3 deliveries: 50,900 Model S and Model X deliveries: 12,100.Wall Street analysts' average estimate for total production was 64,400 cars, according to Bloomberg.
Tesla had previously warned in its fourth-quarter update to investors that first-quarter numbers for Model S and Model X would likely come in "slightly below" the prior year's figures for the same period. In the first quarter of 2018, the company produced 24,728 Model S and Model X vehicles.
Tesla cited challenges it encountered with deliveries overseas.
"We had only delivered half of the entire quarter's numbers by March 21, ten days before end of quarter," Tesla said in a press release Wednesday night. "This caused a large number of vehicle deliveries to shift to the second quarter."
Like many other previous quarters, this deadline was also met with an all-hands-on-deck rush to meet internal targets by Tesla. Emails from CEO Elon Musk, which Business Insider obtained in March, to company employees highlighted how important this quarterly deadline was for the company.
Shares of the company fell $0.39, or slightly more than 0.1%, in after-hours trading following the production report, according to Markets Insider data.
Tesla is expected to report its first-quarter financials soon, but it has not yet confirmed a release date. Musk said in February that the company would likely dip back into the red for this quarter â a departure from his previous statements about the company's continued profitability â as it expanded into Europe and China.
The company did not provide an update on how many $35,000 Model 3 orders it received. The company began taking orders for the long-awaited base model in February.
Accenture Interactive's deal to acquire creative agency Droga5 is more than it might seem on the surface, say the executives behind the merger.
The planned acquisition, which Accenture Interactive announced Wednesday, will fill an obvious hole in its lineup. Despite Accenture Interactive's large and growing presence in the ad business, it hasn't had much of a traditional creative shop in-house, at least not one that primarily serves the giant US market. Droga5 will give it just that.
But Accenture Interactive isn't a traditional advertising firm, and it has bigger plans for Droga5 than to have the agency design ads for its clients, company CEO Brian Whipple told Business Insider. An arm of the giant Accenture consulting firm, which has deep expertise in technology, Accenture Interactive focuses on helping companies rethink and redesign how consumers are introduced to and interact with their products and services. The company plans to tap Droga5 CEO David Droga and his team to help clients reimagine those experiences, Whipple said.
"There are many experiences out there that have yet to be reinvented," Whipple said, pointing to areas ranging from health care to the way people board planes to the way they try on clothes in stores. "David and his team," he continued, "will be a tremendous benefit to us, in terms of just bringing creative ideas to our clients about their experiences."
Indeed, when evaluating Droga5, Accenture Interactive saw in it the potential for a broad definition of the word "creative," Whipple said. Sure, Droga5 could do for Accenture Interactive's clients what creative agencies traditionally do â create ads and marketing campaigns. But it also promised to augment the creative juices within Accenture Interactive, allowing it to be more imaginative in rethinking customer experiences, Whipple said.
"The ideas for reinventing experience are creative by nature," he said.
Droga5 has already been heading in that direction, Droga said. The agency no longer sees itself as just creating advertising messages or building brands â and its clients now expect it to offer more than just that, he said.
The company sees itself as being in the business of helping rethink the way customers come to and interact with their products, he said. For example, Droga5 might help a motorcycle company not just advertise its bikes, but figure out how to help persuade people who have never even thought about riding one before do so, he said.
"We are an ideas entity," Droga said, continuing, "We like to think of ourselves as creating solutions for our clients."
Teaming up with Accenture Interactive is going to allow Droga5 to head in that direction much farther than it could on its own, because of the former's massive size and capabilities, he said.
"They just give us the capacity to execute that far further upstream and downstream than we ever have," Droga said.
At the SXSW conference last month, Accenture showcased some of the work it's been doing on trying to reinvent the way consumers interact with brands. It showed off an augmented reality experience it built for DuPont Corian that allows customers to design their own virtual countertops with digital devices. It also demonstrated an interactive movie poster for Disney's new "Dumbo" movie that changes based on the emotions it detects in viewers' faces.
We are ... just beginning to scratch the surface with what I've referred to as the experience marketplace," Whipple said.
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After two false starts, it seems data analytics startup Segment has finally found its sweet spot.
Going up against industry behemoth Salesforce, Segment offers what it sees as a more complete approach to customer data management and analysis. Its core service, Connections, takes data collected from each interaction from customers, and promises to delivers a consolidated view of customer behavior â going beyond the customer relationship management (CRM) tools that are such a big business in the industry today.
The company, which is currently around 350 employees, announced today that it raised $175 million in Series D funding. Existing investors Accel and GV (formerly Google Ventures) co-led the round with new investor Meritech Capital. Other existing returning investors include Thrive Capital, Y Combinator Continuity, and eVentures. Its valuation, according to a Bloomberg report, is estimated at $1.5 billion.
After two years of struggling to find product-market fit, Cofounders Peter Reinhardt and Calvin French-Owen submitted an open source library they were working on to popular engineering forum Hacker News. According to Reinhardt, "it just took off" from there. Now with over 19,000 customers, Segment has set its sights on some of the most recognizable names in tech: Salesforce and Oracle.
"The cloud suite providers have gone and gobbled up the leader or number two or number three player in every app category and are generating revenue by selling like crazy," said Reinhardt. "When we talk to customers, their biggest issue is not in making it easier to buy apps, the biggest problem is the unified holistic [customer] persona and good data to act on."
Segment's strength lies in its foundation, Reinhardt saysâby building in support for multiple data inputs from many outside sources, it can compete with the deeply-integrated offerings from its much larger rivals. Indeed, Reinhardt says, the larger companies can actually trip customers up with the sheer amounts of varied data they can provide across multiple products, making it hard to get one, unified picture of the business's situation.
"The cloud suites were built first around offline CRMs, and then acquired their way into a fragmented suite of marketing channels," Reinhardt explained.
Without naming names, Reinhardt points to the influx of acquisitions in the space as proof that entrenched players have it all wrong. In an example, he explains how a customer would interact with a bank 20 years ago. The teller knows the customer, he explains, because that customer interacts with the teller face-to-face, the bank's CRM system has a record of the customer's previous business with the bank.
Now, Reinhardt explains, this interaction is splintered across several points of contact. Between ATMs, mobile banking apps, and traditional branches, that customer is interacting with the business differently at each step. The teller can't provide the same personalized customer experience because his or her preferences are scattered across all these different channels.
"In a world where the CRM is only a small slice of the customer experience, it's much more strategic for the customer to have a better experience in the first place," said Reinhardt.
To his point, in January, Salesforce acquired griddable.io, an enterprise data analytics platform, for an undisclosed amount. The deal came on the heels of Salesforce's $6.5 billion acquisition of MuleSoft, the largest deal in company history, which was a play to bring more data together into its platform.
"The legacy players are trying to glue together acquisitions to make [their offerings] look like customer data infrastructure," said Reinhardt.
Among Segment's 19,000 customers, Glossier stands out as a particular success to Reinhardt. The online-first beauty brand has a cult following among customers across social media and offline activations. The company opened its first retail location in late 2018, adding yet another channel from which it could learn about its devoted customers. Segment has unified customer data across "dozens" of Glossier's owned channels to provide simple measurements and analysis without the complexity that typically comes with juggling dozens of tools.
After this "large but proportional" amount of funding, as Reinhardt called it, Segment is looking to grow internationally as well as expand its suite of services to include improved privacy and security offerings, in addition to entering new markets across the globe.
"We're making huge investments in those markets that have been completely un-served, and the cloud suites' legacy tools are struggling to close those holes. People are realizing the CRM is not enough."
What once seemed like the moonshot vision of tech billionaires and idealistic architects could soon become a concrete solution to several of the world's most pressing challenges.
At a United Nations roundtable on Wednesday, a group of builders, engineers, and architects debuted a concept for an affordable floating city.
Unlike instances in the past when these futuristic designs have been met with skepticism, the executive director of the United Nations Human Settlement Programme (UN-Habitat), Maimunah Mohd Sharif, said the UN would support and shepherd this project to fruition.
"Everybody on the team actually wants to get this built," said Marc Collins, the CEO of Oceanix, a company that builds floating structures. "We're not just theorizing."
The company believes a floating city project would address both dire housing shortages and threats from rising sea levels. The structures themselves would be designed to withstand all sorts of natural disasters, including floods, tsunamis, and Category 5 hurricanes.
Read more: Silicon Valley's largest city wants to house the homeless in floating apartments
The concept, known as Oceanix City, was designed by renowned architect Bjarke Ingels in collaboration with Oceanix. Though it still needs funding, it's essentially a toolkit for investors brave enough to take on the project.
Here's what the city might look like if it comes to life.
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