Apple is planning to hold a special event on March 25 during which it's expected to share details on its rumored subscription news service, according to a new report from BuzzFeed.

The event would mark Apple's first major product announcement for 2019. Although the company has unveiled new iPads during events held in March in years past, the report indicates a subscription news service will be the focus of the event. Other rumored products like a new iPad mini and second generation Air Pods are not expected to make an appearance at this event.

The report comes hours after The Wall Street Journal reported that Apple has run into resistance during negotiations with top news publishers over the terms of its subscription news service. Apple is looking to partner with publishers on a subscription news service that would allow readers to pay around $10 per month to read content that is usually paywalled, but Apple's proposed 50% revenue split with publishers has not gone over well, according to the Journal.

Apple CEO Tim Cook recently teased that "new services" from Apple are coming in 2019 during an interview with CNBC's Jim Cramer. "On services, you will see us announce new services this year," Cook said. "There will be more things coming, I don't want to tell you what they are."

The launch would be Apple's latest push to grow its services revenue with a goal of hitting $50 billion by 2020. Services revenue will be an important metric for Apple moving forward as it grapples with slowing iPhone sales in China. Since Apple announced in November that it would no longer break out iPhone sales in its quarterly earnings reports, investors will likely be looking to the growth of its services business moving forward, which reached an all-time high of $10 billion during the holiday quarter.

Apple declined to comment on or confirm a March 25 event.

Startup:SambaNova Systems

Total raised: $61 million

What it does: The point of artificial intelligence is that the computer is continuously learning and changing on its own.SambaNova is building new chips, hardware and a platform for AI, machine learning and big data analytics that can change and adapt to support this type of computing.

VC who selected it: Dave Munichiello, GV

Relationship to the startup: Investor

Why it's hot in 2019: The tech is based on the research of its two former Stanford professor cofounders. The third cofounder is a chip pioneer. One of the co-founders, Chris Re, previously founded Lattice, a GV-backed company acquired by Apple.

"Huge market. A+ team and founders. Tremendous interest from customers," says Munichiello. "AI and learning approaches are powering tremendous enterprise gains and will require new platforms to keep up."

Helios and Matheson Analytics, the parent company of movie-ticket subscription service MoviePass, has been kicked off the Nasdaq, it disclosed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday. It will now trade over the counter under the same ticker, HMNY.

Helios had failed to meet the Nasdaq's listing standards by trading under $1 per share since July. In December, the Nasdaq sent Helios a warning that the company would delisted, but Helios appealed the decision. The effort failed.

"The Company timely appealed the delisting notice and appeared in front of the Panel on January 31, 2019," Helios wrote in the filing. "The Panel issued a decision on February 11, 2019, and determined to delist the Company's common stock from The Nasdaq Capital Market. The suspension of trading in the Company's common stock on the Nasdaq Capital Market will be effective at the open of business on February 13, 2019."

Helios raised its profile in the summer of 2017 when it acquired MoviePass and lowered the service's monthly subscription price to $9.95 a month to see one movie in theaters per day. The move led to millions of new subscribers, but also hundreds of millions of dollars in losses. Helios has primarily used the selling of billions of new shares to cover its losses, and has seen its stock lose over 99% of its value.

Despite this, the company said in a statement to Business Insider that "HMNY's delisting has no effect on the day-to-day business operations of HMNY or its subsidiaries, including MoviePass and MoviePass Films."

Read more: A MoviePass product manager resigned and blasted its leadership in a scathing letter to all staff

In January, Helios announced that it had sent a registration statement to the SEC to make MoviePass a separate public company. In a statement Tuesday to Business Insider, Helios said that effort would continue.

"HMNY will consider applying to be listed on an exchange again should it meet the applicable listing criteria in the future," the company also noted.

Helios had a complicated history as a Nasdaq-listed company before getting kicked off.

Before the MoviePass era, the New York outpost of Helios and Matheson was controlled by an Indian company (Helios and Matheson Information Technology), which stands accused of defrauding at least 5,000 creditors in India, including banks and senior citizens.

Here is Helios' full statement on its delisting:

"HMNY's delisting has no effect on the day-to-day business operations of HMNY or its subsidiaries, including MoviePass and MoviePass Films. HMNY expects that its common stock will begin trading on the over-the-counter market on Wednesday, February 13, 2019. HMNY will consider applying to be listed on an exchange again should it meet the applicable listing criteria in the future. In the meantime, HMNY is proceeding with its planning efforts to effectuate a partial spin-off of MoviePass Entertainment Holdings Inc. ("MoviePass Entertainment"), which would take ownership of HMNY's film industry related assets, including its shares of MoviePass Inc., membership interest in MoviePass Films and MoviePass Ventures and the Moviefone entertainment information service. The spin-off remains subject to numerous conditions, as previously described in HMNY's SEC filings."

Apple is trying to line up big publishers to participate in its planned subscription service, but it's facing pushback from outlets that are balking at the terms, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The phone giant reportedly plans to keep half the subscription revenue it makes from the so-called "Netflix for news" service, which could cost about $10 a month, and share the rest of the revenue with publishers.

Apple sees the service as a way to help shore up sales of its iPhones.

The report lists The New York Times and Washington Post as major outlets that haven't agreed to be part of the service, while talks between Apple and The Journal are ongoing.

Those publications all get substantial revenue from selling subscriptions directly to consumers, and risk giving up revenue and a direct relationship with readers by being part of a subscription bundle. On the other hand, the subscription service represents a potentially huge audience of Apple device owners to be put in front of subscription publishers.

The strained relationship speaks to an ongoing tension between tech giants and publishers that depend on these tech companies for distribution but are wary of their control of the revenue, data, and publishers' brand.

After being burned by Facebook, which has cut the amount of traffic it's sending publishers, many publishers have found a welcome traffic source in Apple News, the news aggregation app that's baked into Apple's mobile products.

Apple News also represents a safe, hand-picked environment for quality news publishers.

Publishers also have groused that despite helping send readers to their stories, Apple News doesn't do much to help them sell advertising on those pageviews because of Apple's historic anti-advertising stance.

House hunters in Bellevue, Washington, have a new option to choose from — and this one's historic.

A new home on the market is the very same one that Jeff Bezos was renting when he started Amazon in 1994. It's a nearly 1,600-square-foot three-bedroom ranch house in Bellevue, Washington, just outside of Seattle.

The home looks very different from how it did in Bezos' days thanks to a rebuild that happened in 2001, according to the Seattle Times. It does retain some of his additions, however, like a large mailbox that was meant to receive catalogs. The famous garage was also redone.

The house, on sale for $1.49 million, isn't more expensive due to its historical significance.

"We didn't price any of that historical significance into it," Pat Sullivan, who is hosting the listing with John L. Scott Real Estate, told the Times.

That relatively low price for the region puts it in the range of many Amazon workers who may purchase it for "bragging rights," Sullivan said.

Warren Washington has been in the climate game a long time.

The 89-year-old was the second African American ever to receive a doctorate in meteorology, earning his PhD from Pennsylvania State University in 1964, and he developed one of the first computer models of Earth's climate.

Before models like Washington's, scientists' understanding of the planet's climate was based on theory and observation alone; now, experts can study weather patterns, make long-term projections about climate change, and simulate what the climate looked like tens of thousands of years ago.

For this work, Washington was just awarded the 2019 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, a prestigious award that's sometimes called the "Nobel Prize for the environment." Washington is sharing the prize with another climate scientist, Michael Mann.

Although Washington started his prize-winning work in the 1960s, it's more relevant today than ever. In an era of unprecedented warming, Antarctic melting, and sea-level rise, the ability to model Earth's future is vital.

"Keep in mind that we're the first generation that actually sees climate change in human history," Washington told Business Insider. "Most climate change has been us going in and out of ice ages over thousands of years. Now we're seeing things happen over tens of years."

A career in climate modeling

Washington started working at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in 1963.

Over the next decade, he created one of the world's first climate models in collaboration with his NCAR colleague Akira Kasahara.

Climate models leverage fundamental laws of physics to simulate how heat energy, water vapor, and chemicals move between Earth's oceans and the atmosphere. Supercomputers use the models' mathematical equations to calculate how matter and energy get exchanged between different parts of the environment. The models then yield predictions about what the planet's atmosphere will look like in the future.

"Dr. Washington literally wrote the earliest book on climate modeling," Shirley Malcom, director of education and human resources at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said in a press release. Malcom was referring to Washington's seminal book, "An Introduction to Three-Dimensional Climate Modeling," which he co-wrote with climatologist Claire Parkinson.

Washington's models were also critical in the landmark 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which concluded that the "warming of the climate system is unequivocal." The assessment named the cause of global warming directly: an increase in greenhouse gases resulting from the burning of fossil fuels.

Washington, his NCAR coworkers, and colleagues around the world shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for their role in the IPCC work. President Barack Obama recognized Washington's achievements in 2010 by awarding him the National Medal of Science, the highest scientific honor bestowed by the US government.

President Obama presented Warren Washington with the National Medal of Science at the White House in Washington, Wednesday, Nov. 17, 2010. J. Scott Applewhite/AP

But when he started out, Washington was not thinking about the human-driven causes of climate change.

"The objective wasn't to observe climate change at that point in the early 1960s. It was to see if we could duplicate what we were seeing in terms of temperatures, precipitation, and El Niño events," Washington said.

Models are better now, but the predictions are still troubling

As technology has improved, so have climate models' capabilities.

With more supercomputing power, Washington started incorporating additional elements into his models, like the melting and movement of sea ice, as well as levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

"For example, what we're able to do now that we couldn't earlier is examine hurricanes and see how they could change with time," he said. "Now we see that the hurricanes are much stronger and spinning faster, thanks to the feedback between warming ocean and atmospheric temperatures and hurricane strength."

Observations of hurricanes had suggested this was true before the models could analyze the data, he said, but early computers just didn't run fast enough to confirm that feedback loop.

Graph showing Hurricane Florence swirling over the Atlantic Ocean on Tuesday, September 11. The color scale on the right hand side shows the brightness temperature, which is a measurement of intensity.Tropical Tidbits

Yet even before computers became powerful enough to model hurricanes, they showed that the planet was undoubtedly warming.

"What's interesting to me as someone who's done modeling for some time," Washington said, "is that while early versions of models were quite crude compared to today's, we did capture global warming in our predictions."

In the 1970s and 1980s, Washington combined various climate models to see how much warming would occur if different amounts of carbon dioxide and other gases entered the atmosphere.

"Surprisingly, these early predictions were reasonably accurate in terms of how the climate system was changing," he said.

Today's models can also incorporate changes to glaciers and the melting of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, but the big picture has remained consistent.

"We've come a long ways," Washington said. "But the answer keeps coming out the same: the climate is changing."

The retreat of Alaska's Pedersen Glacier from 1917 (left) to 2005 (right). NASA

The future of climate-change action in the US

During his long tenure at NCAR, Washington advised six consecutive US presidents — from Carter through Obama — on climate change. Though he officially retired in July 2018, he still holds the title of distinguished scholar at NCAR, and said he continues to go into work a couple of days each week.

With that long view, today's public discourse about climate change is both heartening and frustrating to Washington. He said he has "a lot of difficulty with this administration," since President Donald Trump "doesn't cite anything — he doesn't know where his information comes from."

"I can't argue with someone who says an idea, but offers no data," Washington added, noting that his own models are available to the public.

"There's no secrets," he said. "Anybody in the world can download the models and carry out experiments and essentially contribute to what we're learning."

Read More:Greenland is approaching the threshold of an irreversible melt, and the consequences for coastal cities could be dire

But at the same time, Washington said he's encouraged by the new surge of interest in addressing climate change.

The Fitbit Versa smartwatch is $30 off at Amazon, Best Buy, and Fitbit until February 16, bringing it down to its lowest price since the holidays. It's one of our favorite Fitbits, thanks to its sleek design and great feature set.

Although it's about half the price of competitors like the Apple Watch, the Versa is a great buy. It combines some of the best features from popular smartwatches with top-notch fitness tracking to make a great all-around device.

Now that it's on sale, it's an even better deal for anyone who wants to try a smartwatch but doesn't want to pay a premium.

The Versa can track your steps, calories burned, heart rate, sleep, and more than 15 specific types of exercise, so you can get the most accurate assessment of your workout. This information is automatically logged in Fitbit's smartphone app, so you can watch for trends or track your progress.

Like any good smartwatch, the Versa gets notifications from your phone and you can download third-party apps on the device. Fitbit also lets you download up to 300 songs on the Versa, so you can listen to your music during your workout with just your watch and a pair of Bluetooth headphones— no phone needed.

One place where the Versa trounces its competition is battery life: Fitbit says it will last for four days or more on a single charge, which is way higher than the 18-hour estimate Apple gives its smartwatch.

The Fitbit Versa works with both iOS and Android, but things are a little more limited on the Apple side. All of the fitness features are identical, but Android users can send short responses to text messages right from the watch. If you're on an iPhone, you'll be able to see the texts, but won't be able to respond to them on the watch.

If you're looking for a fitness tracker, but wouldn't mind having a smartwatch, the Fitbit Versa strikes a good balance. For $169.95, you'll be able to track your fitness metrics, receive notifications on your wrist, and exercise with music without taking your phone with you. But this deal is only around until February 16, so don't wait too long to pick one up.

Fitbit Versa, $169.95 (originally $195.95), available at Amazon, Best Buy, and Fitbit [You save $30]

Read our full guide to the best Fitbits you can buy

Blizzard Entertainment, one of the biggest names in the video game business, has begun a significant round of layoffs, Kotaku reports. The move seems to confirm earlier new reports from Bloomberg.

Blizzard is responsible for flagship gaming franchises including "World of Warcraft," "Overwatch," "Hearthstone," and "Diablo." A spokesperson for the company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In a memo to staff obtained by Kotaku, Blizzard leadership promised an "comprehensive severance package" to affected employees. Kotaku reports that the job cuts could affect as many as hundreds of employees.

On Tuesday, Blizzard parent company Activision Blizzard is expected to report its earnings for the December quarter. The holiday quarter is traditionally the biggest of the year for the video game business, but Wall Street is projecting the company to show slowing revenue. Activision Blizzard stock has seen its value cut in half in recent months.

A person close to the company previously told Kotaku's Jason Schrier that the layoffs are expected to hit Blizzard's esports and publishing divisions especially hard. Blizzard, has spent the last several years supporting professional competition for its most popular games, including "Overwatch," "Hearthstone," and "Starcraft."

Notably, it seems that Blizzard esports head Amy Morhaime left the company in December, according to her LinkedIn. That came just months after Blizzard cofounder Mike Morhaime, her husband, announced that he would step down as president of the company. Morhaime is staying on as a strategic advisor to Blizzard through April.

Beyond Amy Morhaime and Mike Morhaime, Activision Blizzard has lost other key executives, including CFO Spencer Neumann. More recently, Activision Blizzard lost the rights to flagship online shooter "Destiny 2," as developer Bungie opted to split off and self-publish the title.

Activision Blizzard cited underwhelming sales for the "Destiny 2: Forsaken" expansion as one of the reasons the company underperformed during the third quarter of 2018. In that quarter, the video game publisher reported a 5% decline in earnings over the same period of 2017, and revenue over the same quarter declined by 6.6% to $1.151 billion.

Blizzard has reportedly been working to cut costs since early last year. Employees at Blizzard told Kotaku that they were repeatedly told to reduce spending by former CFO Amrita Ahuja, who left in January 2019. In December, Eurogamer reported that Blizzard negotiated buyouts for more than 100 customer service employees based in Ireland.

Do you work at Blizzard or have a confidential tip to share? Contact this reporter by email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., or via Twitter DM at @ForteK. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

Tesla's network of superchargers is now close to 12,000 — blowing other automaker's electrical infrastructure out of the water.

Morgan Stanley estimates that Tesla alone could account for up to 40% of the US' total charging outlets. That gives the company a huge "competitive moat" over other automakers, the bank said in a note to clients Tuesday.

"Growth in the charging footprint, while strong, is far slower than the growth in Tesla's car population, which we estimate increase by 83% last year," analyst Adam Jonas writes. "We calculate Tesla's car fleet per supercharger increased to 45 by the end of 2018 vs. 33 at the end of 2017."

But while the company has been successful in ramping production to get more cars on the road and increasing revenue, Tesla's next pain point could be in servicing vehicles if and when they encounter problems.

"Tesla's vehicle fleet has grown far faster than its physical store and service location network, raising investor concerns about strain on the system," Jonas said.

On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that many Tesla Model 3 buyers were facing long waits for service and parts, a pain point Tesla's chief executive Elon Musk acknowledged on the company's fourth-quarter earnings conference call. In one case, a Model 3 is still in the shop awaiting after an accident in September — nearly five months ago.

"I want to note that one of our major priorities this quarter is improving service operations," Musk told analysts and investors on the call.

"So really, from my standpoint, when I think about what my priorities are this quarter, it's improving service in North America. That's #1. And I think that there are some very exciting initiatives that we're going to roll out with regard to that," he continued.

Jonas, who has an equal-weight rating for Tesla stock, says Tesla has significant room to improve on the service front, especially when it comes to mobile service centers. Tesla currently has 411 vans that can be dispatched to fix cars at owners' homes.

The company estimates 80% of repairs can be done outside of its 85 service centers, according to the Wall Street Journal. And with more cars hitting the road every quarter, those vans may not be able to keep up.

For now, at least, it's got its charging network to attract new customers.

"Part of the strategic attraction to Tesla is its physical infrastructure footprint," Jonas said. "Which we believe, over time, can improve the customer experience, reduce friction points, and support the fleet management of many millions of Tesla vehicles on the road and in both captive and 3rd-party fleets."

Ever wonder why your iPhone's loading speed is slower than usual? Contrary to what you might think, it isn't necessarily because your phone is getting old or because your network is slow. It could be that your iPhone is bogged down by too many useless files and app data, which likely means it's time for you to clear out your cache.

Cached data encompass all the files and images that your phone has hidden away in its memory. That includes passwords and scripts from previously visited websites that your phone keeps handy for easy access.

In theory, the feature is supposed to make things easier and faster for you because your phone doesn't have to repeatedly ask you for your passwords and other information. While Apple hasn't confirmed it directly, the general consensus of the tech community is that when your iPhone gets backed up with too much data, your phone's cache can make the device run at slower speeds.

Clearing your cache can be a healthy habit to adopt to keep your phone operating at full capacity. Lucky for you, it's a quick and easy process that even those who aren't exactly iPhone-savvy can do themselves.

So if you feel your iPhone is in dire need of a spring cleaning, then follow these simple steps, starting with the app you probably use the most, Safari.

Clearing cache on Safari

In "Settings," find the "Clear History and Website Data" tab to clear the cache on your Safari app. Olivia Young/Business Insider

Clearing cache on third-party apps

Check out which apps are taking up the most space on your phone in the "iPhone Storage" section of your "Settings." Olivia Young/Business Insider

1. As for the third-party apps that you've downloaded — Facebook, Instagram, Google Maps, and the like — you can manage your storage in "Settings." In "Settings," go to "General" and click "iPhone Storage."

2. In "iPhone Storage," you'll find a list of your apps, with the ones holding the most data at the top.

3. If you tap any of these apps, you can see exactly how much space its "Documents & Data" is taking up.

Enable recommendations within the storage section for an app to clear space from it. Olivia Young/Business Insider

4. If your device is getting full, it will offer you recommendations for what to clean up on the "iPhone Storage" page. Just tap the "Show All" button next to "Recommendations" to read the each one's description.

5. If you would like to take any of the recommendations, simply tap "Enable."

6. If you'd rather clear out space manually, then go into the app and start clearing out unnecessary files, such as old text conversations, playlists, photo albums, emails, and the like.

Deleting and redownloading apps to clear cache

This post was originally published on Medium.

In 2011 I left my job as the second employee at Pinterest — before I vested any of my stock — to work on what I thought would be my life's work.

Gumroad would become a billion-dollar company, with hundreds of employees. It would IPO, and I would work on it until I died. Something like that.

That didn't happen.

Now, it may look like I am in an enviable position, running a profitable, growing, and low-maintenance software business with customers who adore us. But for years, I considered myself a failure. At my lowest point, I had to lay off 75% of my company, including many of my best friends. I had failed.

I no longer feel shame in the path I took to get to where I am today. It took me years to realize that I was misguided from the outset. This is that journey, from the beginning.

A weekend project turned VC-backed startup

The idea behind Gumroad was simple: Creators and others should be able to sell their products directly to their audiences with quick, simple links. No need for a storefront.

I built Gumroad that weekend, and launched it early Monday morning on Hacker News. The reaction exceeded my grandest aspirations. Over 52,000 people checked it out on the first day.

Later that year, I left my job as the second employee at Pinterest — before I vested any of my stock — to turn it into what I thought would become my life's work.

Almost immediately, I raised $1.1M from an all-star cast of angel investors and venture capital firms, including Max Levchin, Chris Sacca, Ron Conway, Naval Ravikant, Collaborative Fund, Accel Partners, and First Round Capital. A few months later, in May 2012, we raised $7M more. Mike Abbott from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), a top-tier VC firm, led the round.

I was on top of the world. I was just 19, a solo founder, with over $8M in the bank and three employees. And the world was starting to take note.

We grew the team. We stayed focused on our product. The monthly numbers started to climb. And then, at some point, they didn't.

To keep the product alive, I laid off 75% of my company — including many of my best friends. It really sucked. But I told myself things would be fine: The product would continue to grow and no one far from the company would ever find out.

Then TechCrunch published Layoffs Hit Gumroad As The E-Commerce Startup Restructures. All of a sudden my failure was public. I spent the week ignoring my support network and answering our customers' concerns, many of whom relied on us to power their business and wanted to know if they should look for an alternative after reading the news; some of our favorite, most successful creators left. (It hurt, but I don't blame them for trying to minimize the risk in their own businesses.)

So what went wrong, and when?

Failing in style

Let's start with the numbers. This is our monthly processed volume, up until the layoffs:

Sahil Lavingia/Medium

It doesn't look too bad, right? It's going in the right direction: up.

But we were venture-funded, which was like playing a game of double-or-nothing. It's euphoric when things are going your way-and suffocating when they're not. And we weren't doubling fast enough to raise the $15M+ Series B (the second major round of funding) we looked for to grow the team.

For the type of business we were trying to build, every month of less than 20% growth should have been a red flag.

But at the time, I thought: "It's okay." We had money in the bank, we had product-market fit. We would continue to ship product and things would work out. The online creator movement was still nascent; it wasn't our fault. It always looked like change was right around the corner.

But now, I realize: It doesn't matter whose "fault" it is, we hit a peak in November 2014 and stalled. A lot of creators absolutely loved us, but there weren't enough of them who needed our specific product offering. Product-market fit is great, but we needed to find a new, larger fit to justify raising more money (and then do it again and again, until acquisition or IPO).

In January 2015, after our final double-or-nothing hail-mary, when our bank balance dipped below 18 months of runway, I told the twenty-person team: the road ahead was going to be a tough one. We didn't have the numbers to raise a Series B, and we would have to work really hard over the next nine months to get even close to them. To that end, we deprioritized everything except features that would directly "move the needle." Many were not core to our business, but we needed to try everything we could to get our monthly processed volume to where it needed to be.

If we succeeded, we would raise money from a top-tier VC again, hire more people, and start the journey again. If we didn't, we would have to drastically downsize the company.

In those nine months, when the whole team knew that we were fighting for our company's life, not a single person left Gumroad. From "this is gonna be hard," to "yep, turns out it was," every single person worked harder than ever.

We launched a "Small Product Lab" to teach new creators how to grow and sell. We shipped a ton of features, including weekly payouts, payouts to debit cards, payouts to the UK, Australia, and Canada, various additions to our email features, product recommendations and search, analytics to see how customers are reading/watching/downloading the products they've purchased, and add-to-cart functionality. And that was just from August to November.

Unfortunately, we didn't hit the numbers we needed.

Slim down or shut down?

Looking back, I'm glad we didn't hit those numbers. If we doubled down, raised more money, and appeared in the headlines again, there was a very real possibility it would only lead to a more spectacular failure.

With that off the table, our options were:

Some of my investors wanted me to shut down the business. They tried to convince me that my time was worth more than trying to keep a small business like Gumroad afloat, and I should try to build another billion-dollar company armed with all of my learnings-and their money.

I tended to agree with them, to be honest. But I was accountable to our creators, our employees, and our investors — in that order. We helped thousands of creators get paid, every month. About $2,500,000 was going to go into the pockets of creators  —  for rent checks and mortgages, for student loans and kids' college funds. And it was only growing! Could I really just turn that faucet off?

And if I sold the company, it would be mostly for our stellar team, which means I would no longer be able to control the destiny of the product. There were too many acquisition stories that promised exciting journeys and amazing synergies to come — and ended with a deprecated product a year later.

It was certainly tempting. I could say I sold my first company, raise more money, and do this all again with a new idea. But that didn't sit right with me. We were responsible to our creators first. That's what I told every new hire and every investor. I didn't want to become a serial entrepreneur, and risk disappointing another customer base.

We decided to become profitable at any cost. The next year was not fun: I shrunk the company from twenty employees to five. We struggled to find a new tenant for our $25,000/month office and focused all of our remaining resources on launching a premium service.

In June 2015, a few months before our layoffs, our financials looked like this:

A year later, in June 2016, our monthly numbers looked like this:

It hurt, but it meant creators would keep getting paid, and that we were in control of our own destiny.

Skeleton crew to lifestyle business

It got worse from there.

Gumroad was no longer the venture-funded, fast-growing startup our investors and employees signed up for. As everyone else found other opportunities, the skeleton crew fizzled from five to one.

I was basically alone. I didn't have a team, nor an office. And San Francisco was full of startups raising gobs more money, building amazing teams, and shipping great products. Some of my friends became billionaires. Meanwhile, I had to run a "measly" lifestyle business. It wasn't what I wanted to do, but I had to keep the ship from sinking.

Now, I understand some people would dream to be in that position. But at the time, I just felt trapped. I couldn't stop, but there was only so much I could do as an army of one.

I shut off the rest of the world. I didn't tell my mom about the layoffs — she had to read the article and tweets herself to find out. My friends were worried, but I assured them I was neither depressed nor suicidal. I left San Francisco for long stretches at a time, thinking that some travel would give me adequate distance. It only made me more lonely.

Every day, I woke up and took care of all of Gumroad's support queries. I tried to fix all of the bugs I could. Often, I had to ask for help from former Gumroad engineers. They were all employed now, but they always found time to help. Once all things Gumroad were taken care of, I tried to go to the gym, and if I had the willpower, work on a side project (a fantasy novel). Most days, I failed.

To me, happiness is so much about an expectation of positive change. Every year before 2016, there was an improvement in my expectations — in the team, the product, or the company — and this was the first time in my life when the present year felt worse than the last.

Living in San Francisco was already a struggle, and when Trump won the election, I ended up leaving for good.

New beginnings

Then one day, everything changed. Again. I'm wary about sharing this part of the story, because I don't know if there is anything to learn from it. But it happened, so here it is.

On November 27, 2017 I got this email from KPCB, our lead investor:

Mike had left KPCB to start a new company, and KPCB didn't want the operational headache of appointing a new board member. Plus, it helped their taxes. In one fell swoop, our liquidation preferences (how much we would have to sell for before dollars started going to employees) went from about $16.5M to $2.5M. All of a sudden, there was a light at the end of the tunnel. Small, dim, and far away, but present. There was a path to an independent business, not beholden to the go-big-or-go-home mentality I signed up for when I raised money.

One investor joined them. We've bought back a couple more, since then. I keep the rest of the investors up-to-date with a brief email every few months.

The future came into focus: I could grow a small team, slowly buy back our investors, and build Gumroad into a meaningful business focused on our creators. We would never become a billion-dollar company, and that started to feel okay. Certainly, the thousands of creators selling on Gumroad wouldn't mind.

Finding new forms of impact

The eight years I worked on Gumroad were full of personal ups and downs. There were months where I worked 16 hours a day. But there were also some months where I worked four hours a week. Here's one way to picture that time:

Sahil Lavingia/Medium

Can you tell which is which? I can't. We had a sales team for a few years, then we didn't. Can you tell when we made the switch? I can't.

It doesn't matter how amazing your product is, or how fast you ship features. The market you're in will determine most of your growth. For better or worse, Gumroad grew at roughly the same rate almost every month because that's how quickly the market determined we would grow.

So instead of pretending to be some sort of product visionary, trying to build a billion-dollar company, I'm just focused on making Gumroad better and better for our existing creators. Because they are the ones that have kept us alive.

Creating and capturing value

At a CEO Summit many years ago, my all-time hero, Bill Gates, was on stage. Someone asked him how he dealt with failing to capture so much value? Microsoft was huge, sure, but tiny compared to the total impact it has had on the world and on humanity.

Similarly, I am now more focused on creating value than capturing it. I still want to have as large an impact as possible, but I don't need to create it directly, or capture it in the form of our revenue or our valuation.

For example, Austen Allred, who's raised $48M for his startup Lambda School, got his start selling a book on Gumroad.

Startups have been founded by former Gumroad employees, and dozens more companies have been massively improved by recruiting our alumni.

On top of that, our product ideas, like our credit card form and inline-checkout experience, have proliferated the web, making it a better place for everyone — including those that have never used Gumroad.

While Gumroad, Inc may be small, our impact is large. There is, of course, the $178,000,000 we have sent to creators. But then there's the impact of the impact, the opportunities that those creators have taken to create new opportunities for others.

Opening up

I've found other ways to create value, too. After the layoffs, I didn't talk to anyone about Gumroad. Not even my mom. And after moving away from San Francisco, I felt pretty disconnected from the startup community.

So, as a way to re-engage with the community, I thought about sharing our financials publicly. Founders starting their own companies could learn from our mistakes, utilizing our data to make better decisions.

It was scary: What if we don't grow every month? It could scare off prospective customers. It's something I would never expect a startup seeking venture capital to do. It makes sense to hold those cards as close to your chest for as long as possible when you must raise money, hire people, and compete for customers with other venture-seeking startups.

But, since we were not any of those things anymore, it was easier to share that information. We were profitable, and a no-growth month won't change that. So in April 2018, I started to release our monthly financials publicly.

Ironically, more investors have reached out (we're just interested in raising money from our customers for the moment, thanks!), more folks want to contribute to Gumroad, and our shift in focus has brought us closer to our creators.

Instead of freaking out about how 'small' Gumroad actually is (like I thought they would), our creators have grown more loyal. It feels like we're all in this together, trying to do earn a living doing what we love.

Soon, we will also open-source the whole product, WordPress-style. Anyone will be able to deploy their own version of Gumroad, make the changes they want, and sell the content they want, without us being the middle-man.

In 2018 we donated over $23,775 (8% of our profits) to different causes. We raised money for the hurricane relief efforts in Puerto Rico and the floods in Kerala. We helped fund the Presence-of-Blackness project in speculative fiction, and a Mexicanx publication.

Seeking the non-binary

For years, my only metric of success was building a billion dollar company. Now, I realize that was a terrible goal. It's completely arbitrary, and doesn't accurately reflect impact.

I'm not making an excuse or pretending that I didn't fail. I'm not pretending that it feels good. Even though everyone knows that the failure rate in startups, especially venture-funded ones, is super high, it still sucks when you do.

I failed, but I also succeeded at many other things. We turned $10 million of investor capital into $178 million and counting for creators. And without a fundraising goal coming up, we are just focused on building the best product we can for them. On top of all that, I'm happy creating value beyond our revenue-generating product, like these words you're reading!

I consider myself "successful" now. Not exactly in the way I intended, though I think it counts. Where did my binary focus on building a billion-dollar company come from in the first place?

I think I inherited it from a society that worships wealth. I don't think it's a coincidence that Bill Gates was my all-time hero and was also the world's richest person.

Since I can remember, I equated "successful" solely with net worth. If I heard someone say "that person's really successful," I didn't assume they were improving the well-being of the people around them, but that they had found a way to make a lot of money.

Wealth can be a measure of success, as seems to be in the case of someone like Bill Gates, who has invested heavily in philanthropy. But it's not the only way to measure success, nor is it the best one.

There's nothing wrong with trying to build the next Microsoft. I personally don't think billionaires are evil. And there's a part of me that wishes I was still on that path.

But for better or worse, I'm on this one now. This has been my path to not building a billion-dollar company. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

—

Let me know if you have any questions. I'm happy to help, or at least to listen.

Gumroad is a product of many people's hard work, including our alumni: Leigh McCulloch, Sidharth Shanker, Anish Bhayani, Kathleen Warner, Heather Whiles, Benjamin Nguyen, K. Tighe, Steve Kaye, Tuhin Srivastava, Avinash Ananth, Joel Packer, Katsuya Noguchi, Matan-Paul Shetrit, Amir Haghighat, Ian Atha, Emmiliese von Clemm, Kate Yu, Sri Raghavan, Ryan Delk, Al Hertz, Travis Nichols, Maxwell Elliott, Phil Howes, Ben Reynolds, Michael Klocker, Bryan English, Laura Biester, Jake Heimark, Aaron Relph, Ben Walsh, Greg Terrono, Donald Huang, Paul McKellar, Francisco Gutierrez, Kyle Doherty, and Jessica Jalsevac. Thank you.

Sahil Lavingia is the founder and CEO of Gumroad, an e-commerce startup that has helped more than 40,000 artists and creators earn over $180,000,000. In his free time he writes and paints. You can follow him on Twitter.

This post was originally published on Medium.

Amazon has a habit of taking free software created by other companies and selling it on its cloud. But Google Cloud isn't like that, new CEO Thomas Kurian says.

At his inaugural appearance as the new CEO of Google Cloud on Tuesday, Kurian spoke about how Google Cloud allows customers to use a variety of open source tools to build applications on its cloud.

Many of these tools are developed by other startups and made available as open source, meaning that they are free for anyone to use, download, modify — and even sell, something that Amazon Web Services frequently does.

Kurian, a former Oracle executive who replaced Diane Greene as CEO, said that Google Cloud takes a "different approach" from its competitors when it comes to open source.

"If you look at the open source community, we're taking the approach of partnering with the open source community, as opposed to taking their technology and selling it on our platform," Kurian said onstage at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference.

AWS, Google Cloud's biggest competitor, is known for repackaging and selling other startups' open source software on its cloud — and igniting resentment from these startups. Some companies, like Redis Labs and Confluent, even fought back by with the controversial move of changing their licensing.

Amazon, and particular AWS, has a reputation for not contributing as much to open source as would be appropriate from a company this size, furthering these tensions. That said, AWS has started introducing major open source projects of its own, which have been well-recieved by the community, in a move that could defrost that relationship.

Read more:The new CEO of Google Cloud explains the updated master plan for taking on Amazon Web Services

Microsoft and Google both have more employees contributing to more open source projects on GitHub. Kubernetes, one of the most popular open source projects, was started by engineers at Google.

Currently, Google Cloud supports popular third-party databases such as Redis, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, Hadoop, and Microsoft SQL Server.

Over the past several years, Amazon's Alexa virtual assistant has made its way to nearly every corner of the home —from smart microwaves to wall clocks, washing machines and televisions. Now, with its latest acquisition of mesh Wi-Fi router startup Eero, Amazon is further cementing its presence in the home.

Amazon and Eero announced on Monday that the two companies have entered into a merger agreement under which the online retail giant will acquire the Wi-Fi startup, although terms of the deal have not been disclosed. The announcement didn't include any details about how or if Amazon plans to integrate Eero's technology or devices into its own products at any capacity. But Dave Limp, Amazon's senior vice president of Amazon Devices and Services, said in a press release that the two companies "have a shared vision that the smart home experience can get even easier." Business Insider has reached out to Amazon for comment on more details regarding the deal and will update this story accordingly when we hear back.

The move makes sense for Amazon, which has emerged as a dominant player in the smart home space in recent years thanks to the popularity of its Amazon Echo devices. Limp recently told The Verge that more than 100 million devices with Amazon's Alexa assistant have been sold to date following the Echo's initial launch in late 2014. It's unclear exactly how that compares to Amazon's primary competitor Google, but the search giant recently said that it expected Google Assistant to be available on 1 billion devices by the end of January 2019.

Neither Amazon nor Eero have specified exactly what the deal means for either company's current or future products, but it's easy to imagine how having control over the Wi-Fi experience could benefit Amazon. The company has already been thinking about ways to simplify the process of connecting its Echo devices to other Internet-connected appliances, as evidenced by the Echo Plus device it introduced in September 2017. The Echo Plus has a built in smart home hub that makes it possible to connect compatible products by simply saying "Alexa, discover my devices" rather than going through the traditional set-up experience. With its acquisition of Eero, Amazon is no longer just a purveyor of smart home devices; it owns a part of the experience that's crucial to making them all work. It wouldn't be surprising to see Amazon leverage Eero's products in a way that makes setting up Wi-Fi-powered smart home appliances more seamless.

In addition to the potential this acquisition has to bolster Amazon's foothold in the home, it also gives the company another option for subscription revenue outside of its $119-per-year Prime service, which 62% of Amazon members pay for according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. Eero sells a $99-per-year Plus subscription that offers ad blocking, threat detection, and family-safe browsing options. While neither Amazon nor Eero has given an indication that there will be any changes to this service given Amazon's new ownership, it's worth noting that the online retailer began offering Whole Foods discounts for Prime members after it acquired the supermarket in 2017 for $13.7 billion. (A new report from The Wall Street Journal, however, indicates that may no longer be the case).

The Eero deal is the latest in a string of acquisitions that puts Amazon in nearly every corner of the home, from the kitchen to the front door. Last February news broke that Amazon would acquire video doorbell maker Ring for $1 billion in a move that was largely perceived as a means of furthering its dominance in the smart home and retail spaces. Before that, Amazon acquired Whole Foods, giving it a pipeline into consumers' kitchens.

Amazon's acquisition of Eero also provides the online shopping giant with a crucial piece of the smart home market that could prove necessary for maintaining its status as a leader in smart home technology. Both Google and Samsung, arguably Amazon's biggest rivals in the space, have long offered their own mesh Wi-Fi routers that work with their own respective smartphone apps. Through these apps, users can view connected devices, block certain websites and manage other features.

As such, this deal also raises a concern that's been brewing in recent years about whether companies like Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook hold too much power over our digital lives. For example, six out of the 10 most downloaded iPhone apps of 2018 are operated by Facebook and Google. Google's Android and Apple's iOS operating systems dominate the smartphone market, with Android accounting for 85.1% of the market and iOS claiming 14.8% according to a report from the International Data Corporation published in December 2018. Acquisitions like this only make it more difficult to purchase or use technology that isn't made or operated by one of the so-called "big five," further fueling the conversation about whether firms like Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook are becoming too powerful.

The acquisition also comes amidst rising privacy concerns over how large tech companies, particularly Facebook, are using the data they collect. Apple recently revoked multiple enterprise certificates from Facebook after TechCrunch reported that Facebook had been using Apple's Enterprise Developer Program to distribute an app that gathered data from the recipient's phones in exchange for payment. Before that in August, Apple banned the Facebook-owned Onavo internet security app because it broke the iPhone maker's data collection rules since it monitors app activity.

For those worried about whether the acquisition would give Amazon a window into Eero users' Internet activity, Eero's support account on Twitter issued the following response:

It's too soon to tell how the acquisition will impact products made by Amazon and Eero if at all. But it's yet another sign indicating Amazon will only become more ubiquitous in the home.