YouTube managers have spoken to San Bruno city officials about beefing up office security at headquarters, David Woltering, the city's community development director, told Business Insider on Monday.

Woltering and his staff have had discussions with YouTube representatives "about various measures to better secure points of access to their facilities here in San Bruno," he said in a statement. "These measures include fencing, increased surveillance, and improved access controls."

Woltering was responding to questions posed to him last week when the city unveiled development plans for the area surrounding YouTube's headquarters. YouTube seeks to expand its office space, add thousands of workers, as well as build more parking facilities. The company hopes to break ground sometime next year, Woltering said. It's not yet clear if YouTube will make some of the sought-after security upgrades part of this expansion.

David Woltering (left), the community development director for the city of San Bruno, discusses plans to expand the area around YouTube's HQ. Greg Sandoval/Business Insider

YouTube was not immediately available for comment.

Woltering said that YouTube began bolstering security at the San Bruno campus in the form of adding larger numbers of "on-site security personnel," four months ago, immediately after Nasim Aghdam arrived there on April 3 armed with a 9 mm and opened fire on employees, wounding three. She later killed herself.

Aghdam's attack is believed to be the first shooting at YouTube but employees have received numerous death threats going back more than a decade, Business Insider reported after the shooting.

As YouTube's popularity has grown and as some video creators have become more dependent on the ad revenue their clips generate, the service is often accused of harboring a wide range of biases against one group or another. Police have said that Aghdam was a disgruntled YouTube video creator who believed the video service was discriminating against her because of her strong views on animal rights.

On Monday, fans of political commentator and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones took to online message boards to claim YouTube was part of a left-wing plot to silence conservative voices. YouTube had followed Facebook, Spotify and Apple in removing Jones content from its site for violating their terms of service.

"Alex Jones and Infowars are a national treasure!," wrote one Twitter user. "YouTube, Google, and Fakebook are cowardly leftist criminals."

Pinduoduo CEO Colin Huang. YouTube/Bloomberg

In just three and half years, Chinese e-commerce platform Pinduoduo grew from a burgeoning direct-to-consumer delivery service into a multibillion-dollar company with a successful IPO under its belt. When the Shanghai-based startup went public in late July, its stock soared to nearly $27 a share — 41% higher than the company originally anticipated — making Pinduoduo worth nearly $24 billion.

Its remarkable growth is the result of a confluence of factors, says Ron Cao, partner of Shanghai-based venture firm Sky9 Capital. Cao has helped oversee much of Pinduoduo's growth since his firm led the e-commerce platform's Series B funding round in 2015.

At the time of Sky9's investment, Cao said Pinduoduo was a fast growing e-commerce platform primarily focused on selling affordable, perishable fruits.

But with a fresh cash injection of $110 million from a number of investors including Lightspeed, Sequoia, and Tencent, Pinduoduo rapidly expanded its purview: Now, the site sells nearly every product imaginable ( breast enhancement cream, smartphones, mangoes, toilet paper, and men's loafers to name only a few) along with fashion goods, sports items, books, and electronics.

Pinduoduo's CEO, former Google engineer Colin Huang, has described his company as "a combination of Disneyland and Costco" that sells low-cost products to shoppers through bulk suppliers. Once a group of people opt in to buy an item, the platform ships it out directly from the supplier at a competitive price.

In an interview with Business Insider, Cao broke down how Pinduoduo became such an instant success:

Dave Bautista is taking his displeasure with James Gunn's firing to a new level.

The "Guardians of the Galaxy" actor told Short List that he would ask Marvel to release him from his contract on the third movie if it didn't use Gunn's script. Disney fired Gunn last month from "Guardians 3" over offensive tweets from years ago that conservative personalities resurfaced.

"Where I'm at right now is that if [Marvel] don't use that script, then I'm going to ask them to release me from my contract, cut me out or recast me," Bautista said. "I'd be doing James a disservice if I didn't."

He added that he spoke to costar Chris Pratt after Gunn was fired, but Pratt "wanted time to pray and figure it out."

"But I was more like: f--- this," Bautista said. "This is bulls---. James is one of the kindest, most decent people I've met."

Gunn had recently finished the script for the movie and was set to begin filming later this year before being fired.

Bautista has been the most outspoken out of the entire "Guardians" cast about Gunn's firing, and tweeted over the weekend that it was "nauseating" to work for Disney now.

Bautista, Pratt, and the rest of the "Guardians" cast released a letter last week in support of Gunn, but, according to Variety , Disney does not have any plans to re-hire him.

"Guardians of the Galaxy 3" is scheduled to come to theaters in 2020.

NASA launched its most powerful planet-hunting telescope to date on April 18, but it's taken the spacecraft months of maneuvering to reach a crucial sweet spot.

On July 25, TESS — short for Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite — finally slipped into a unique orbit between Earth and the moon. The telescope is now starting to scan 85% of the night sky , stare down distant solar systems, and hunt for small, rocky, Earth-like planets.

The two-year observation of about 200,000 stars may potentially reveal thousands of new planets within about 200 light-years of Earth — a cosmic stone's throw away from our world.

"[W]e know there are more planets than stars in our universe," Paul Hertz, NASA's director of astrophysics, said in a press release about TESS. "I look forward to the strange, fantastic worlds we're bound to discover."

Sara Seager , the deputy science director for TESS and an astrophysicist at MIT, told Business Insider that it may not take TESS long to find its first planet candidates.

"The first science orbit of data (13.7 days) is coming down tomorrow and the TESS Science Team will begin planet hunting soon after that," Seager said in an email on Monday.

Seager and others expect to find dozens of Earth-like worlds in the coming years, perhaps doubling scientists' inventory of potentially habitable exoplanets .

The research may also lead to the first looks at the atmospheres of small, rocky alien worlds , and maybe — just maybe — the first indirect evidence that extraterrestrial life could exist beyond our solar system.

Why TESS is NASA's most powerful search yet for alien Earths

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite at Kennedy Space Center in Florida before launch.NASA After SpaceX launched TESS, the car-size spacecraft spent more than two months winding out to an orbit between Earth in the moon. Researchers then checked out the spacecraft (and took some photos of a passing comet ) remotely before officially kicking off observations.

In many ways, TESS is an extension to the biggest boon in NASA's search for exoplanets, called the Kepler space telescope.

Kepler launched in March 2009 and stared at a small patch of space for more than three years. This enabled the telescope to record very subtle dips in the brightness of stars — a telltale sign that a planet is passing in front.

In two multi-year missions, Kepler has found nearly 4,000 planets . This led scientists to an astonishing realization: There could be about 2 trillion planets in our Milky Way galaxy alone, or some 10 per star.

Kepler also found about 50 rocky, Earth-size worlds that may be habitable. A Google artificial intelligence algorithm has since sifted through the data and possibly detected even more .

But Kepler is on its last leg, as it has nearly run out of fuel (though it did recently wake up from a potentially deadly nap to beam back new data).

TESS will use a technique to find planets that's similar to Kepler's approach, yet it will be an eminently more powerful mission. If Kepler's search area was like a shotgun blast, then that of TESS is an exploding grenade or bomb.

The TESS exoplanet search zone compared to that of the Kepler Mission.Zach Berta-Thompson/NASA

TESS will conduct its hunt by taking pictures of a different sector of the sky every 27 days. All of the sectors overlap, enough in some parts to provide about a year's worth of transit observations.

The spacecraft will use its unique vantage in space and four cameras to stitch together a huge map of about 200,000 stars — about 33% more than Kepler studied. The observation area for TESS will also be about 350 times as large as Kepler's and about 15 times as close.

"TESS will discover thousands of planets and is further specially designed to find a pool of small planets transiting small stars," a website for the project explains.

Researchers working on TESS expect to find at least 50 rocky, Earth-size worlds for scientists to scrutinize — about double what Kepler has found. However, TESS is likely find many more than that, as it is viewing more stars (and Kepler defied its creators' predictions).

However, Seager said it's "anyone's guess" when TESS' first newly discovered worlds will be confirmed.

"Finding planet candidates is just the first step in a lengthy follow-up process to discriminate between actual planets," she said.

That follow-up has to account for other factors that could skew the data, such as two-star systems or any peculiarities with the spacecraft's cameras.

Once TESS' discoveries are confirmed, however, they could prove vital to the work of NASA's upcoming and powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which is scheduled to launch after March 2021.

The next-generation observatory will rival the abilities of the Hubble Space Telescope and will be the largest observatory ever launched into space. JWST will take pictures in infrared light, which is invisible to human eyes yet perfect for studying planets through clouds of gas and dust in space that typically obscure distant worlds.

How TESS may lead to the discovery of life beyond the solar system

NASA

TESS' fresh catalog of nearby and likely Earth-size alien worlds will give JWST many compelling targets to study in detail.

JWST might even sample light from an exoplanet's atmosphere to look for indirect evidence of life.

The ability to study the air supply of a distant Earth-size planet is made more possible by yet another telescope: the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), one of the two largest ground-based observatories under construction today.

Slated to open in 2023, GMT is designed to resolve details four times finer than JWST. This may help astronomers study exoplanets in ways what they've been dreaming of since the first confirmed discovery of an alien solar system in 1992 .

"As a planet passes in front of its star, a large telescope on the ground, like the GMT, can use spectra to search for the fingerprints of molecules in the planetary atmosphere," Patrick McCarthy, a leader of the project, said in a previous statement to Business Insider.

Spectra refers to the blend of colors in starlight. When that light passes through a planet's atmosphere, chemicals absorb and remit certain parts — leaving a smoking-gun pattern of their presence.

Artist's representation of the seven giant mirrors installed in the Giant Magellan Telescope.Giant Magellan Telescope – GMTO Corporation

For example, if a planet's atmosphere were to have a mix of oxygen and methane gases — similar to Earth's atmosphere — that could be a "fingerprint" of life's presence on an exoplanet.

McCarthy also said large and powerful new telescopes like GMT might be able to deduce weather systems and surface features of planets located trillions of miles away.

With some luck, we might even be able to fly tiny, high-speed spacecraft past the most promising planets to get a closer look.

Gary Cohn, Donald Trump's former chief economic advisor and the president and chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs during the 2007-8 financial crisis, has some harsh words for Facebook and other social media companies.

The social network, Bloomberg reports Cohn said at an event on Saturday, is even less of a responsible citizen than the big banks were prior to the financial crisis.

"In '08 Facebook was one of those companies that was a big platform to criticize banks, they were very out front of criticizing banks for not being responsible citizens," the banker said.

"I think banks were more responsible citizens in '08 than some of the social media companies are today. And it affects everyone in the world. The banks have never had that much pull."

Facebook has been reeling these past few months, trying to recover from a chain of scandals — from political firm Cambridge Analytica's misappropriation of tens of millions of users' data, to the social network's role in the spread of disinformation and scandals. (Cohn's remarks were reportedly focused on election influence and fake news.)

The company is now trying to emphasise that it has turned a corner. CEO Mark Zuckerberg now holds the line that Facebook "takes a broader view of our responsibilities" than it has in the past, and it has made a number of changes to its features and products. But not everyone is convinced.

The remarks by Cohn, who was at the helm of Goldman Sachs between 2006 and 2017 and advisor to Trump between 2017 and 2018, illustrate that some people treading the corridors of power are viewing Facebook's public pledges to change with skepticism.

But it's worth noting that given his old job, Cohn might not be considered the most impartial judge of whether or not the banks were "responsible citizens" prior to the crash.

A Facebook spokesperson did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

A growing number of Californians are leaving the Golden State behind in search of cheaper living in Washington and Oregon — and locals aren't very happy about it.

A recent story from SF Gate highlighted how some Bay Area expats who relocated to Seattle, Portland, and Boise, Idaho, are experiencing unwelcoming gestures from locals.

"Bay Area expats we talked to say they've faced a range of backlash, from harmless jokes to threats of violence. One couple who transplanted to Portland in 2017 found their car and home spray-painted with messages like 'Go back to California,'" wrote SF Gate reporter Alix Martichoux.

A June survey from the Bay Area Council advocacy group found that 46% of residents say they plan to move away soon, up from 40% last year and 35% in 2016, reported Business Insider's Leanna Garfield. Home prices are a huge factor.

Nearly 60% of Bay Area tech workers surveyed from companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Salesforce said they cannot afford to purchase a house there, reported Business Insider's Melia Robinson. That's not to say they're leaving their jobs — more and more companies are increasingly offering remote work options.

Seattle and Portland are the top two destinations for Bay Area transplants, according to data from LinkedIn.

"If you think of all these cities and just think, literally, 'What is the closest substitute to the Bay Area at a slightly lower cost?' Seattle tops the list," Guy Berger, an economist who works at LinkedIn, previously told Robinson.

Read more: The San Francisco housing market is so dire that people are leaving in droves — here's where they're headed

Some California transplants told SF Gate that locals are seemingly threatened by a "Californiacation" of the Pacific Northwest. Many claim California expats are bringing more traffic (and thus more air pollution) and driving up home prices, among other things.

A Boise native who lived in the Bay Area for 10 years recently moved back to Idaho and said locals yelled "They're coming! They're gonna buy it!" at her while she was viewing an "overpriced open house," reported SF Gate.

"We were in our car and we still have our California plates. They're happy to be more aggressive when you have California plates. We really need to get rid of these plates," she told SF Gate.

A 25-year-old Bay Area native who relocated to Vancouver, Washington, last year told SF Gate that while the people are "very nice and won't say anything directly to our faces," her and her husband have seen "F— California" and "California sucks" graffiti around town.

Though it may seem a bad trade-off to some, home prices in Seattle and Portland are a steal compared to the Bay Area, where the median home price has cracked $1 million and it's officially a better long-term deal to rent than become a homeowner.

A man who left Los Angeles, another overpriced California city, for Portland 40 years ago told SF Gate he's observed the impact of new residents to the city and it's eroding the character of the area: "Portland is becoming all I didn't like about LA."

Google is rolling out the latest version of its Android operating system — Android 9.0, officially codenamed "Pie" — on Monday, but only a few of the headlining features that Google announced back at Google I/O are included in the update.

The version of Android Pie that's rolling out on Monday includes Google's personalization features, powered by artificial intelligence (AI). Those features include Adaptive Battery , which uses AI to learn which apps you use at what time of the day, and prioritizes battery towards those apps.

There's also Adaptive Brightness, which learns how you adjust your brightness settings in different lighting situations and automatically changes the display's brightness. YouTube/Google

You'll also find App Actions in there, which predicts what you'll want to do based on what you're doing on your phone at any given time. If you're getting ready to commute, App Actions will suggest navigation with Google Maps, or perhaps that you start an audiobook.

There are new swiping gestures in Android Pie, essentially introducing a whole new way to use Android phones, that are also included in Monday's rollout. It's only an option, and you can turn it off if you prefer the old fashioned way of navigating around your Android phone.

What's not included in Monday's Android Pie rollout

In a strange twist, the version of Android Pie that's rolling out on Monday won't include some of the " Digital Wellbeing " features that Google announced at Google I/O, including a new Dashboard feature that Google says "helps you understand how you're spending time on your device."

A feature called App Timer , which lets you set a time limit on specific apps, is also coming out later this fall.

Google

And Wind Down is coming in the fall, too. It'll switch on the Night Light mode that limits your screen's blue light, fade the screen to grayscale (a sort of black and white), and even turn on Do Not Disturb mode before bedtime. Do Not Disturb is also getting smarter, which will mute visual interruptions on your screen in addition to sounds and vibrations.

Most of you probably won't get the update today...unless you have these three phones

Google's latest Android update is only rolling out to the company's own Pixel smartphones — that is, the original Pixel phone, as well as the newer Pixel 2. Those with the Essential Phone are also getting the Android Pie update, according to Essential , which could make it the first non-Google smartphone that gets an Android update on day one of the rollout.

It should be noted that both the Pixel 2 and the Essential Phone, while sporting solid, modern hardware, are also relatively smaller players in the market for Android devices.

Those with Android phones by companies like Samsung, LG, HTC, and pretty much any company that's not Google or Essential aren't getting the update on Monday. It's unclear when those users will get the update. If the past is anything to go by, it'll be months before non-Google smartphone users get the Android Pie update, if at all.

Google did say that devices that participated in the Android Beta program — including Sony, Xiami, HMD Global (Nokia), Oppo, Vivo, and OnePlus — will receive the update this fall.

Still, on day one, Android 9.0 won't have some of its most-hyped features, and it may not come to your phone or most others for months. It's a little bit of a weird situation.

Chris Hondros/Getty Images

Despite headline-making plans to open a bitcoin trading desk earlier this year, Goldman Sachs still isn’t sold on the virtual currency.

In a midyear economic-outlook report, the bank’s investment strategy group says the price of bitcoin is likely to decline even further than the 45% it has in the first seven months of 2018.

"Our view that cryptocurrencies would not retain value in their current incarnation remains intact and, in fact, has been borne out much sooner than we expected," the team lead by chief investment officer Sharmin Mossavar-Rahamani said.

"We expect further declines in the future given our view that these cryptocurrencies do not fulfill any of the three traditional roles of a currency: they are neither a medium of exchange, nor a unit of measurement, nor a store of value."

Cryptocurrencies — and  especially the blockchain technology that underpins their distributed nature — have been heralded as disruptors to the global financial system, theoretically allowing for more efficient databases, quicker transactions, and more transparent operations. For now, at least, Goldman maintains they won’t have much of an impact on any other asset class.

"Importantly, we continue to believe that such declines will not negatively impact the performance of broader financial assets, because cryptocurrencies represent just 0.3% of world GDP as of mid-2018," the report said. "In fact, we believe that they garner far more traditional media and social media attention than is warranted."

In May, Goldman touted its plans for a bitcoin trading operation. Two of the planned executives for the unit sat down with the New York Times to discuss how the bank plans to get regulatory approval and calculate risks inherent to the nascent space. For now, at least, Goldman's bitcoin operations will be limited to institutional investors.

You can read the full mid-year investment outlook here.

Markets Insider

Even though the iPhone was introduced over 11 years ago, there are still some issues with the hardware and software that keep it from being the best it can be. Default apps, proprietary cables, and fast charging are just a few of the problems the iPhone still has. Senior tech reporter Antonio Villas-Boas breaks down a few areas where the iPhone could improve. Following is a transcript of the video.

Antonio: It's been 11 years since the very first iPhone has launched and the iPhone has improved tremendously over that time. However, there are a few things that still bother me, that just sort of don't really make sense.

The cables. Let's start with the cables. The new iPhones come with Lightning charging cables. Now, the weird thing is, only the iPhone and iPad use the Lightning cable. It doesn't work with anything else. Whereas, for example, a USB-C cable, that works with a lot of things. And the other weird thing is, the USB cable doesn't plug into the new MacBook Pros. I have an iPhone and out of the box, I cannot plug it into the new MacBook Pros. To me, this is absolutely nuts. It's mind-boggling.

Okay, this is an old one by now. The iPhones do not have a headphone jack. To be fair, not all of the Android phones have headphone jacks. Looking at you, Google, and your Pixel 2s. Say you've got wired headphones, what do you do? Well, you use the dongle, right? Okay, so, dongle. You lose a dongle, you gotta buy the dongle again. Say you wanted to charge your phone, while also listening to music. Also, not possible right? Unless you've got Bluetooth headphones, but if you have wired headphones, you can't charge your iPhone and listen to music at the same time. You've gotta buy another type of dongle, some sort of adapter. And that's just not a great experience, right?

Let's talk about fast charging. Finally, wow! It came with the iPhone, finally. The thing is, though, if you want fast charging with the iPhone, you gotta go out and buy more stuff. You gotta buy a whole new cable, at the very least. And then, you gotta buy a special kind of brick. Extra cost, extra things, more wires, more cables. Meanwhile, the cheapest of cheap Android smartphones come with some kind of fast charging. The Moto G6 for example, $250 smartphone. It comes included with a fast charging brick. Now, it's not really consumer friendly when you offer a feature but it also involves buying lots of other things for using that feature.

Let's move on to iOS for a little bit and I want to talk about default apps and your choice, basically. What kind of choice you have as an iOS user. Let's take email for example. So, you click the email link and it takes you to Mail, even though you have Gmail and that's your preferred email app. Well, when someone sends you, say, a link to a website, and you tap it, your iPhone will take you to Safari, even if you prefer using Chrome. I feel like I should be able to set whatever app I like for emails or anything.

Something that a lot of Apple people complain about with Android phones is it comes with all this bloatware, all the bloatware, all the apps, and too many apps, and all that stuff. And to a certain extent, that's true on certain phones, absolutely. But, hey, you know what, actually the iPhone has a bunch of apps too, that you can consider bloatware. The Watch app, TV app is there, the Home app - what if you don't have a smart home? I mean there's a lot of bloatware here, right? This is bloatware. Keynote, you know, when are you gonna do a presentation on your phone?

Android is just more efficient with the way you use it. It's just smarter, it's just like a better design. Say I wanna go into the Bluetooth settings, change something, switch to a new device, pair with a new device, I have to go into the Settings app. I've gotta find Bluetooth here, and finally, eventually get to Bluetooth. But with Android, you know, it's a quick swipe down and hard tap on the Bluetooth icon and you're there. It's not hard, I'm not saying this is like some crazy, terribly designed user interface. It's just harder than Android.

There's no such thing as a perfect device. At the end of the day, it just depends on what kind of user you are. But, if you want a little bit more control, if you like to customize more, Android is probably for you. But, if you're perfectly happy on your iPhone then, hey, stick with iPhone.

Or, can I move?

Facebook has been in talks with banks about accessing users' financial data and integrating it into its platform, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal on Monday .

The report has sparked immediate outrage from critics and privacy activists, who fear the Silicon Valley tech firm is attempting to gobble up ever-more information, mere months after an unprecedented crisis over how it handled user data in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

But Wall Street has taken a very different view, and Facebook's stock popped more than 3% on the news, with investors seemingly viewing it as another money-making opportunity for the company.

According to The Wall Street Journal's report, Facebook wants to get "detailed financial information" about users from American banks, and has talked to JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and US Bancorp. The same report says that the banks are largely reticent to share that data given data privacy concerns.

Facebook is reportedly considering showing users their bank balance or potential fraud alerts, as well as encouraging people to use its Messenger app more, if the partnerships ultimately go ahead.

Facebook did not immediately respond to request for comment from Business Insider. However, speaking to TechCrunch after the Wall Street Journal's report was published, a Facebook spokesperson said the company wasn't asking for "financial transaction data," but rather looking to improve Messenger with banking notifications, and that it was strictly opt-in.

The report comes as Facebook attempts to bounce back from a chain of scandals that has shaken the public's faith in the tech company, especially the fallout from the revelation that political research firm Cambridge Analytica had improperly obtained Facebook data from as many as 87 million users. The social network also faces broader concerns around misinformation and fake news.

The news has sparked a backlash from critics worried about the extent of Facebook's power and potential repercussions.

Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Open Markets Institute and an outspoken critic of Facebook and the power of the tech giants, said the news was further evidence of how "concentrated tech power is moving us towards a dystopian social credit scoring system."

Sociologist Beth Popp Berman said she was surprised that there isn't more widespread outrage over Facebook's business practices. "It continues to amaze me that the general reaction to pervasive, dystopian surveillance is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯" she tweeted, using an emoticon that conveys shrugging or apathy.

And Matt Ford, a reporter at the New Republic, simply joked: "What couldn't go wrong?"

Google, like many tech companies, has a habit of imposing its design language wherever it goes. Amazon does this, too, which is why its Prime Video app also looks and behaves the same on the Apple TV as it does on the PlayStation 4 and elsewhere.

Often times, having the same design language across multiple platforms is a good user experience. If you know how to use an app on just one device, you'll know how to use it on anywhere.

The problem is, not all devices are built the same. Some computers, like iPhones and Android phones, rely on touch controls; other computers, like PCs, rely on keyboard and mouse inputs; other computers, like streaming devices, rely on voice controls for the best experience.

When it comes to the YouTube app on Apple TV, it's about time Google and YouTube embraced the Apple TV for what it is: an atypical streaming device with some nifty features that make life easier for users, like inertial scrolling and voice control.

Google and YouTube employ some of the best software engineers in the world, and they've done an excellent job at making Material Design consistent; now it just needs to be flexible.

In Silicon Valley, buying a home is out of reach even for the region's tech workers.

Blind , an app that lets (mostly tech) workers chat anonymously about the workplace, asked employees from 13 Bay Area tech companies if they can afford buying a home . A 59% majority said they cannot afford to purchase a house in the Bay Area.

At least 100 employees at each of the 13 companies — including Apple, Facebook, Google, Salesforce, Cisco, eBay, Intuit, Airbnb, Uber, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Intel, and Oracle — participated in the survey, with a total of 2,326 responses, according to Blind.

Tech is still the single biggest economic engine of the Bay Area, but the region is becoming increasingly unaffordable and unlivable for the software engineers and product managers who fill its coffers.

MoviePass has a new mission: "Reenergize the occasional moviegoer."

That's how the company's CEO Mitch Lowe described it to Business Insider on Monday after announcing that his company was keeping the price at $9.95 a month (and nixing surge pricing and ticket verification), but capping subscribers at three movies a month , beginning August 15.

The app gained millions of new subscribers beginning in August 2017 when it changed its monthly subscription price to $10 a month (to see one movie per day). But what MoviePass didn't realize was a small core group of its users would really take their viewing to the upper limits of the service, Lowe said.

15% of MoviePass subscribers see a lot of movies

A major reason MoviePass has been burning through an estimated $45 million a month is that it has to pay movie theaters the full ticket price for most of the millions of tickets its subscribers order.

"A small amount of our subscribers, that 15% that would go to four or more [per month], go to a lot of movies. A lot!" Lowe said. "It's almost half of our cost of goods, like 40% of our cost of goods are used by that 15%."

These subscribers went to everything from the biggest movies of the year like "Black Panther" and "Avengers: Infinity War" to hit indies like "Hereditary" and the documentary "Three Identical Strangers." Lowe said, initially the thought was that putting a surge price on the popular films would slow things down, however people were paying it.

MoviePass bought over 1.15 million tickets this summer to "Avengers: Infinity War." Marvel

Then MoviePass got more dramatic and announced the monthly plan would go up to $14.95 and the big Hollywood releases would no longer be available on the app. But that didn't work either.

"The e-ticketing theaters, which haven't been affected in this whole thing, have gone up almost 75% over the last couple of weeks," Lowe said. These e-ticketing theaters give MoviePass a discount in exchange for promotion in the app.

So to attract just the casual MoviePass users — who spend $40 to $50 a year at the movies — which Lowe said represent 85% of its subscribers, the monthly plan will stay at the attractive $9.95 monthly offer. (If you want to go to the movies more than three times a month, MoviePass will offer discounts of $2 to $5 a ticket if you book through the MoviePass app.)

Lowe said he was confident that would decrease the burn substantially and get Wall Street back on board.

"I have had billion-dollar VCs tell me, 'If you would only put a cap on your costs we would invest and be right behind you,'" Lowe said. "I never did it because my investors kept telling me, 'We're behind you, we know it's going to take a lot of time,' and then suddenly they stopped saying that."

The stock of MoviePass' parent company, Helios and Matheson (HMNY), plunged to 7 cents last Friday, an all-time low . This came after the company did a 1-for-250 reverse stock split to pull it out of danger of getting delisted from the Nasdaq starting mid-December. It didn't work. (The stock was trading around 8 cents on Monday).

Building new inroads with movie theaters and studios

With the pivot to focus on the occasional moviegoer, Lowe admitted it would be more of a challenge to get to his goal of 5 million subscribers by the end of the year. But it may be more important to build better relationships within the industry than focus on subscription numbers.

For some time, MoviePass has tried to make bulk price movie-ticket deals with theaters so it didn't have to pay full ticket price on the millions its subscribers order on the app. Lowe said the progress has been happening "really slowly" to get exhibitors on board. So Lowe said MoviePass now has a new plan.

"We've learned that going to the exhibitors and looking for a discount is not the right approach, because that discount comes out of the studio share and then we expect the studios to pay us to promote the film and it's like double dipping, so we have changed our model," Lowe said. "We are just about to roll out to exhibitors that we'll continue to pay full price, but we want to negotiate with them a fair marketing fee."

MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe. MoviePass

So MoviePass wants to get a better marketing fee from exhibitors and studios on their movies it highlights on its app, social media, and other platforms. MoviePass boasts that it's responsible for 6% of the 2018 box office (which is up 8% from last year ) and believes with the inroads it has made on the marketing side with movie theaters and studios, that it can land a good deal, versus discounted tickets. (According to Helios and Matheson's most recent quarterly report, marketing and promotion made up $1.4 million of MoviePass' revenue in the first three months of 2018).

"I went in with a pay-for-performance approach to both the exhibitors and the studios, and I found it didn't work within the system and it caused all kinds of challenges," Lowe said. "So we think we now have a way to do this that fits in with how business is done."

Despite all the challenges MoviePass has faced, Lowe said he was optimistic, adding that new services like bring-a-friend, which allows MoviePass subscribers to pay for a non-subscriber ticket, and an option to order a ticket to a non-2D movie (like IMAX or Real 3D), would be available in the next month.

"We've got a couple of tricks up our sleeve," Lowe said.

At both Google and Facebook, job candidates may have to go through five or more interviews before getting a job offer. At Amazon, however, potential employees may only have to do one or two interviews.

Amazon

One or two interviews — 61%

Three or four interviews — 11%

Five or more interviews — 28%

Apple

One or two interviews — 53%

Three or four interviews — 30%

Five or more interviews — 17%

Facebook

One or two interviews — 40%

Three or four interviews — 36%

Five or more interviews — 24%

Google

One or two interviews — 34%

Three or four interviews — 27%

Five or more interviews — 39%

Microsoft

One or two interviews — 49%

Three or four interviews — 19%

Five or more interviews — 32%

Semil Shah recently wrote a post titled Investing Outside The Bay Area. In it, he talked about his own experience expanding his investment horizons beyond the bay area, but also mentioned some other folks, including us and USV, where he did a quick analysis of the location of our partner funds.

From Semil’s post:

“Another firm linked closely to USV — Foundry Group in Boulder — has also been investing with an eye for geographic diversity. While I don’t have portfolio level stats for them, their new endeavor Foundry Next (to invest in smaller funds and then follow-on into key investments) has built up an LP basket of 23 positions in a variety of new VC funds. Of the 23 funds listed here, 13 are in the Bay Area, 3 in NYC, 3 in Boston, 2 in LA, and one each in Detroit, Seattle, Toronto, Waterloo, Indianapolis, and Fargo, North Dakota. This is a very clever way of helping new funds get their footing and hearing about what is working before others may pick up the scent.”

That generated a fun email exchange between us and prompted me to do an analysis on the locations of the direct investments that we’ve made since we started Foundry Group in 2007. The geographic breakdown of our 123 direct investments follows:

Twelve years later, we were pretty close. When we started Foundry Group, we said that 33% of our investments would be in California (which, at the time, we thought of as equivalent to the Bay Area), 33% would be in Colorado, and 34% would be in the rest of the United States.

We have always believed that great companies can be created anywhere. While we don’t have a geographic allocation approach, we were willing to travel and invest everywhere in the US. We knew that some places, like NYC, Boston, and Seattle, where we already had deep networks, would be common places for us to invest. We’ve been pleasantly surprised with the expansion of our networks in other geographies, like Southern California (LA, San Diego, and Santa Barbara) and Portland.

It’s useful to note that in addition to our direct investing and partner fund investing, we are investors in Techstars, which has redefined seed stage investing all over the world. Currently, they are running accelerator programs in over 16 cities and 13 countries, in addition to Startup Weekend and Startup Week activity, which thoroughly covers the world.

As we start investing Foundry Group Next 2018, I expect we’ll add a few more states on both the direct and partner fund investing side. Hopefully, we will continue to help develop and expand existing and new startup communities.

Also published on Medium.