In June, TechCrunch Ethicist in Residence Greg M. Epstein attended EmTech Next, a conference organized by the MIT Technology Review. The conference, which took place at MIT’s famous Media Lab, examined how AI and robotics are changing the future of work.

Greg’s essay, Will the Future of Work Be Ethical? reflects on his experiences at the conference, which produced what he calls “a religious crisis, despite the fact that I am not just a confirmed atheist but a professional one as well.” In it, Greg explores themes of inequality, inclusion and what it means to work in technology ethically, within a capitalist system and market economy.

Accompanying the story for Extra Crunch are a series of in-depth interviews Greg conducted around the conference, with scholars, journalists, founders and attendees.

Below he speaks to two conference attendees who had crucial insights to share. Meili Gupta is a high school senior at Phillips Exeter Academy, an elite boarding school in New Hampshire; Gupta attended the EmTech Next conference with her mother and has attended with family in previous years as well; her voice and thoughts on privilege and inequality in education and technology are featured prominently in Greg’s essay. Walter Erike is a 31-year-old independent consultant and SAP Implementation Senior Manager. from Philadelphia. Between conference session, he and Greg talked about diversity and inclusion at tech conferences and beyond.

Greg Epstein: How did you come to be at EmTech Next?

Meili Gupta: I am a rising high school senior at Phillips Exeter Academy; I’m one of the managing editors for my school’s science magazine called Matter Magazine.

I [also] attended the conference last year. My parents have come to these conferences before, and that gave me an opportunity to come. I am particularly interested in the MIT Technology Review because I’ve grown up reading it.

You are the Managing Editor of Matter, a magazine about STEM at your high school. What subjects that Matter covers are most interesting to you?

This year we published two issues. The first featured a lot of interviews from top {AI} professors like Professor Fei-Fei Li, at Stanford. We did a review for her and an interview with Professor Olga Russakovsky at Princeton. That was an AI special issue and, being at this conference you hear about how AI will transform industries.

The second issue coincided with Phillips Exeter Global Climate Action Day. We focused both on environmentalism clubs at Exeter and environmentalism efforts worldwide. I think Matter, as the only stem magazine on campus has a responsibility in doing that.

AI and climate: in a sense, you’ve already dealt with this new field people are calling the ethics of technology. When you hear that term, what comes to mind?

As a consumer of a lot of technology and as someone of the generation who has grown up with a phone in my hand, I’m aware my data is all over the internet. I’ve had conversations [with friends] about personal privacy and if I look around the classroom, most people have covers for the cameras on their computers. This generation is already aware [of] ethics whenever you’re talking about computing and the use of computers.

About AI specifically, as someone who’s interested in the field and has been privileged to be able to take courses and do research projects about that, I’m hearing a lot about ethics with algorithms, whether that’s fake news or bias or about applying algorithms for social good.

What are your biggest concerns about AI? What do you think needs to be addressed in order for us to feel more comfortable as a society with increased use of AI?

That’s not an easy answer; it’s something our society is going to be grappling with for years. From what I’ve learned at this conference, from what I’ve read and tried to understand, it’s a multidimensional solution. You’re going to need computer programmers to learn the technical skills to make their algorithms less biased. You’re going to need companies to hire those people and say, “This is our goal; we want to create an algorithm that’s fair and can do good.” You’re going to need the general society to ask for that standard. That’s my generation’s job, too. WikiLeaks, a couple of years ago, sparked the conversation about personal privacy and I think there’s going to be more sparks.

Seems like your high school is doing some interesting work in terms of incorporating both STEM and a deeper, more creative than usual focus on ethics and exploring the meaning of life. How would you say that Exeter in particular is trying to combine these issues?

I’ll give a couple of examples of my experience with that in my time at Exeter, and I’m very privileged to go to a school that has these opportunities and offerings for its students.

Don’t worry, that’s in my next question.

Absolutely. With the computer science curriculum, starting in my ninth grade they offered a computer science 590 about [introduction to] artificial intelligence. In the fall another 590 course was about self driving cars, and you saw the intersection between us working in our robotics lab and learning about computer vision algorithms. This past semester, a couple students, and I was involved, helped to set up a 999: an independent course which really dove deep into machine learning algorithms. In the fall, there’s another 590 I’ll be taking called social innovation through software engineering, which is specifically designed for each student to pick a local project and to apply software, coding or AI to a social good project.

I’ve spent 15 years working at Harvard and MIT. I’ve worked around a lot of smart and privileged people and I’ve supported them. I’m going to ask you a question about Exeter and about your experience as a privileged high school student who is getting a great education, but I don’t mean it from a perspective of it’s now me versus you.

Of course you’re not.

I’m trying to figure this out for myself as well. We live in a world where we’re becoming more prepared to talk about issues of fairness and justice. Yet by even just providing these extraordinary educational experiences to people like you and me and my students or whomever, we’re preparing some people for that world better than others. How do you feel about being so well prepared for this sort of world to come that it can actually be… I guess my question is, how do you relate to the idea that even the kinds of educational experiences that we’re talking about are themselves deepening the divide between haves and have nots?

I completely agree that the issue between haves and have nots needs to be talked about more, because inequality between the upper and the lower classes is growing every year. This morning, Mr. Isbell from Georgia Tech talk was really inspiring. For example, at Phillips Exeter, we have a social service club called ESA which houses more than 70 different social service clubs. One I’m involved with, junior computer programming, teaches programming to local middle school students. That’s the type of thing, at an individual level and smaller scale, that people can try to help out those who have not been privileged with opportunities to learn and get ahead with those skills.

What Mr. Isbell was talking about this morning was at a university level and also tying in corporations bridge that divide. I don’t think that the issue itself should necessarily scare us from pushing forward to the frontier to say, the possibility that everybody who does not have a computer science education in five years won’t have a job.

Today we had that debate about role or people’s jobs and robot taxes. That’s a very good debate to have, but it sometimes feeds a little bit into the AI hype and I think it may be a disgrace to society to try to pull back technology, which has been shown to have the power to save lives. It can be two transformations that are happening at the same time. One, that’s trying to bridge an inequality and is going to come in a lot of different and complicated solutions that happen at multiple levels and the second is allowing for a transformation in technology and AI.

What are you hoping to get out of this conference for yourself, as a student, as a journalist, or as somebody who’s going into the industry?

The theme for this conference is the future of the workforce. I’m a student. That means I’m going to be the future of the workforce. I was hoping to learn some insight about what I may want to study in college. After that, what type of jobs do I want to pursue that are going to exist and be in demand and really interesting, that have an impact on other people? Also, as a student, in particular that’s interested in majoring in computer science and artificial intelligence, I was hoping to learn about possible research projects that I could pursue in the fall with this 590 course.

Right now, I’m working on a research project with a Professor at the University of Maryland about eliminating bias in machine learning algorithms. What type of dataset do I want to apply that project to? Where is the need or the attention for correcting bias in the AI algorithms?

As a journalist, I would like to write a review summarizing what I’ve learned so other [Exeter students] can learn a little too.

What would be your biggest critique of the conference? What could be improved?

In June, TechCrunch Ethicist in Residence Greg M. Epstein attended EmTech Next, a conference organized by the MIT Technology Review. The conference, which took place at MIT’s famous Media Lab, examined how AI and robotics are changing the future of work.

Greg’s essay, Will the Future of Work Be Ethical? reflects on his experiences at the conference, which produced what he calls “a religious crisis, despite the fact that I am not just a confirmed atheist but a professional one as well.” In it, Greg explores themes of inequality, inclusion and what it means to work in technology ethically, within a capitalist system and market economy.

Accompanying the story for Extra Crunch are a series of in-depth interviews Greg conducted around the conference, with scholars, journalists, founders and attendees.

Below he speaks to two key organizers: Gideon Lichfield, the editor in chief of the MIT Technology Review, and Karen Hao, its artificial intelligence reporter. Lichfield led the creative process of choosing speakers and framing panels and discussions at the EmTech Next conference, and both Lichfield and Hao spoke and moderated key discussions.

Greg Epstein: I want to first understand how you see your job — what impact are you really looking to have?

Gideon Lichfield: I frame this as an aspiration. Most of the tech journalism, most of the tech media industry that exists, is born in some way of the era just before the dot-com boom. When there was a lot of optimism about technology. And so I saw its role as being to talk about everything that technology makes possible. Sometimes in a very negative sense. More often in a positive sense. You know, all the wonderful ways in which tech will change our lives. So there was a lot of cheerleading in those days.

In more recent years, there has been a lot of backlash, a lot of fear, a lot of dystopia, a lot of all of the ways in which tech is threatening us. The way I’ve formulated the mission for Tech Review would be to say, technology is a human activity. It’s not good or bad inherently. It’s what we make of it.

The way that we get technology that has fewer toxic effects and more beneficial ones is for the people who build it, use it, and regulate it to make well informed decisions about it, and for them to understand each other better. And I said the role of a tech publication like Tech Review, one that is under a university like MIT, probably uniquely among tech publications, we’re positioned to make that our job. To try to influence those people by informing them better and instigating conversations among them. And that’s part of the reason we do events like this. So that ultimately better decisions get taken and technology has more beneficial effects. So that’s like the high level aspiration. How do we measure that day to day? That’s an ongoing question. But that’s the goal.

Yeah, I mean, I would imagine you measure it qualitatively. In the sense that… What I see when I look at a conference like this is, I see an editorial vision, right? I mean that I’m imagining that you and your staff have a lot of sort of editorial meetings where you set, you know, what are the key themes that we really need to explore. What do we need to inform people about, right?

Yes.

What do you want people to take away from this conference then?

A lot of the people in the audience work at medium and large companies. And they’re thinking about…what effect does automation and AI going to have in their companies? How should it affect their workplace culture? How should it affect their high end decisions? How should it affect their technology investments? And I think the goal for me is, or for us is, that they come away from this conference with a rounded picture of the different factors that can play a role.

There are no clear answers. But they ought to be able to think in an informed and in a nuanced way. If we’re talking about automating some processes, or contracting out more of what we do to a gig work style platform, or different ways we might train people on our workforce or help them adapt to new job opportunities, or if we’re thinking about laying people off versus retraining them. All of the different implications that that has, and all the decisions you can take around that, we want them to think about that in a useful way so that they can take those decisions well.

You’re already speaking, as you said, to a lot of the people who are winning, and who are here getting themselves more educated and therefore more likely to just continue to win. How do you weigh where to push them to fundamentally change the way they do things, versus getting them to incrementally change?

That’s an interesting question. I don’t know that we can push people to fundamentally change. We’re not a labor movement. What we can do is put people from labor movements in front of them and have those people speak to them and say, “Hey, this is the consequences that the decisions you’re taking are having on the people we represent.” Part of the difficulty with this conversation has been that it has been taking place, up till now, mainly among the people who understand the technology and its consequences. Which with was the people building it and then a small group of scholars studying it. Over the last two or three years I’ve gone to conferences like ours and other people’s, where issues of technology ethics are being discussed. Initially it really was only the tech people and the business people who were there. And now you’re starting to see more representation. From labor, from community organizations, from minority groups. But it’s taken a while, I think, for the understanding of those issues to percolate and then people in those organizations to take on the cause and say, yeah, this is something we have to care about.

In some ways this is a tech ethics conference. If you labeled it as such, would that dramatically affect the attendance? Would you get fewer of the actual business people to come to a tech ethics conference rather than a conference that’s about tech but that happened to take on ethical issues?

Yeah, because I think they would say it’s not for them.

Right.

Business people want to know, what are the risks to me? What are the opportunities for me? What are the things I need to think about to stay ahead of the game? The case we can make is [about the] ethical considerations are part of that calculus. You have to think about what are the risks going to be to you of, you know, getting rid of all your workforce and relying on contract workers. What does that do to those workers and how does that play back in terms of a risk to you?

Yes, you’ve got Mary Gray, Charles Isbell, and others here with serious ethical messages.

What about the idea of giving back versus taking less? There was an L.A. Times op ed recently, by Joseph Menn, about how it’s time for tech to give back. It talked about how 20% of Harvard Law grads go into public service after their graduation but if you look at engineering graduates, the percentage is smaller than that. But even going beyond that perspective, Anand Giridharadas, popular author and critic of contemporary capitalism, might say that while we like to talk about “giving back,” what is really important is for big tech to take less. In other words: pay more taxes. Break up their companies so they’re not monopolies. To maybe pay taxes on robots, that sort of thing. What’s your perspective?

I don’t have a view on either of those things. I think the interesting question is really, what can motivate tech companies, what can motivate anybody who’s winning a lot in this economy, to either give back or take less? It’s about what causes people who are benefiting from the current situation to feel they need to also ensure other people are benefiting.

Maybe one way to talk about this is to raise a question I’ve seen you raise: what the hell is tech ethics anyway? I would say there isn’t a tech ethics. Not in the philosophy sense your background is from. There is a movement. There is a set of questions around it, around what should technology companies’ responsibility be? And there’s a movement to try to answer those questions.

A bunch of the technologies that have emerged in the last couple of decades were thought of as being good, as being beneficial. Mainly because they were thought of as being democratizing. And there was this very naïve Western viewpoint that said if we put technology and power in the hands of the people they will necessarily do wise and good things with it. And that will benefit everybody.

And these technologies, including the web, social media, smart phones, you could include digital cameras, you could include consumer genetic testing, all things that put a lot more power in the hands of the people, have turned out to be capable of having toxic effects as well.

That took everybody by surprise. And the reason that has raised a conversation around tech ethics is that it also happens that a lot of those technologies are ones in which the nature of the technology favors the emergence of a dominant player. Because of network effects or because they require lots of data. And so the conversation has been, what is the responsibility of that dominant player to design the technology in such a way that it has fewer of these harmful effects? And that again is partly because the forces that in the past might have constrained those effects, or imposed rules, are not moving fast enough. It’s the tech makers who understand this stuff. Policy makers, and civil society have been slower to catch up to what the effects are. They’re starting to now.

This is what you are seeing now in the election campaign: a lot of the leading candidates have platforms that are about the use of technology and about breaking up big tech. That would have been unthinkable a year or two ago.

So the discussion about tech ethics is essentially saying these companies grew too fast, too quickly. What is their responsibility to slow themselves down before everybody else catches up?

Another piece that interests me is how sometimes the “giving back,” the generosity of big tech companies or tech billionaires, or whatever it is, can end up being a smokescreen. A way to ultimately persuade people not to regulate. Not to take their own power back as a people. Is there a level of tech generosity that is actually harmful in that sense?

I suppose. It depends on the context. If all that’s happening is corporate social responsibility drives that involve dropping money into different places, but there isn’t any consideration of the consequences of the technology itself those companies are building and their other actions, then sure, it’s a problem. But it’s also hard to say giving billions of dollars to a particular cause is bad, unless what is happening is that then the government is shirking its responsibility to fund those causes because it’s coming out of the private sector. I can certainly see the U.S. being particularly susceptible to this dynamic, where government sheds responsibility. But I don’t think we’re necessarily there yet.

In June, TechCrunch Ethicist in Residence Greg M. Epstein attended EmTech Next, a conference organized by the MIT Technology Review. The conference, which took place at MIT’s famous Media Lab, examined how AI and robotics are changing the future of work.

Greg’s essay, Will the Future of Work Be Ethical? reflects on his experiences at the conference, which produced what he calls “a religious crisis, despite the fact that I am not just a confirmed atheist but a professional one as well.” In it, Greg explores themes of inequality, inclusion and what it means to work in technology ethically, within a capitalist system and market economy.

Accompanying the story for Extra Crunch are a series of in-depth interviews Greg conducted around the conference, with scholars, journalists, founders and attendees.

Below, Greg speaks to two academics who were key EmTech Next speakers. First is David Autor, one of the world’s most prominent economists. Autor’s lecture, Work of the Past, Work of the Future, originally delivered as the prestigious 2019 Richard T. Ely Lecture at the Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association, formed the basis for the opening presentation at the EmTech Next conference.

Susan Winterberg, an academic who studies business and ethics, was a panelist who brought important, even stirring insights about the devastating impact automation can have on communities and how companies can succeed by protecting people against those effects.

Greg Epstein: Who do you see as the audience for your work — is it more labor or management, and how do different audiences engage with it differently?

David Autor: My primary audience, it can be argued, is other scholars. But I am aware of and pleased that my work has reached beyond that narrow group. I’m aware that it is discussed by policymakers and others and I’m sort of driven by trying to understand what is changing, who is affected, what are the opportunities, what are the challenges.

Could you help me to get a sense to the best of your knowledge of some of the key ways your ideas about the “Work of the Past, [and the] Work of the Future” of work” have been discussed by corporations or sort of those in management and business ownership roles and also by labor organizations or unions, etc.?

I met twice with President Obama. I have spoken with many people in senior governmental policy positions. I’ve spoken to a lot of private sector audiences as well, including private sector research corporations like McKinsey and so on.

I have spoken with labor people. Labor folks were initially quite hostile to my work. I got a huge amount of pushback and have throughout my career, for example, from EPI, the Economic Policy Institute, which is sort of a union shop in DC. The guy who was their chief economist for a long time, Larry Mishel, started attacking my first papers before they were even published, and it’s never stopped.

But I mean increasingly, and I find that super irritating.

In the last couple of years, I think there’s been a lot more receptivity to this discussion from many sides. I’m increasingly of the view that organized labor needs to have a more constructive role, that it’s become too marginalized. There might have been a time in the U.S. when it was too powerful, but now it’s too powerless.

I think organized labor accepted that the world’s changed in ways that are not just because of mean bosses and politicians, but there are underlying economic forces that impact the work people do. So they find the work illuminating.

What is your relationship with some of the more socialistic folks on the Democratic side?

I’m not into that. I believe in the value of the market system. I believe that it has a lot of rough edges, but I don’t think there’s a better system available that I know of. I’m very sympathetic towards market economies like Sweden and Norway and so on. I think the U.S. should move more in that direction. But those are all just variants of market economies. And actually, I think even what’s most often called socialism in the U.S. is actually, just really asking for a different variant of the market system.

That’s why I’m curious: if somebody from the camp of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders or even Elizabeth Warren were to call your office and say, all right, we want your perspective on how right are we getting it, or where would you advise us to course correct in our economic message? What would you say?

I met with Elizabeth Warren. I think some of what she has to say is great and some of it is dumb. I’m strongly in favor of more or better antitrust regulation, more consumer protections, more transparency, of the government doing more of certain things and getting the private sector out of it.

I think her idea, on the other hand, of paying off everyone’s student loans is a terrible idea, just a huge transfer to the affluent. So you know, she’s on the spectrum. She’s not calling for the overthrow of the state. She’s just calling for another variant of a market economy.

I take very strong issue, for example, with Bernie Sanders and his condemnation of charter schools, which I think shows how totally out of touch he is, that he doesn’t realize how much good charter schools have done for poor minority inner-city kids. He’s probably never met one. And so his white liberal teacher’s union view of, you know, charter schools are harming the public school system is just utterly, utterly misguided.

Are you familiar with a guy named Nick Hanauer? Do you consider yourself to be in his camp in some way?

I don’t know if I’m in his camp. I think he’s really concerned the level of inequality is unsustainable, and I’m concerned about that too. But again, other market economies don’t have the same level of inequality as the United States. But you could have a lot less inequality and then you’d be Germany or you could have still less and then you’d be Sweden. Right? But you’d still be a market economy.

So just to be clear. I mean, I consider myself a progressive. And before I came to MIT, before I even went to grad school I spent several years working in nonprofits doing skills education for the poor. A lot of my work has been driven by that.

What kind of skills education were you doing?

I did computer skills training for the poor at a black Methodist church in San Francisco for three years, and then I did related work as a volunteer in South Africa.

Zebra Fuel, the London-based startup that delivered fuel directly to your vehicle — backed by Robin and Saul Klein’s LocalGlobe, Brent Hoberman’s Firstminute Capital and Zoopla founder Alex Chesterman — has told customers it is “no longer” delivering fuel in London. However, it is unclear at this stage if the company has ceased operations entirely.

In an email informing customers on Tuesday, Zebra Fuel gave no further details, except to express “sincere apologies for any inconvenience this causes you and hope that you have enjoyed using our services”. That sounds ominous, to say the least.

Meanwhile, a tweet posted by an employee at Zebra Fuel, which has since been deleted, seemed to suggest that the company may have closed its doors. “Last night at @Zebra Fuel we did amazing – onto the next opportunity,” the tweet read.

I’ve reached out to Zebra co-founder Reda Bennis and have yet to hear back. I’ve also contacted the PR agency the startup had previously used, and will update this post should I hear back.

Founded in 2016 by Bennis and Romain Saint Guilhem, Zebra Fuel was attempting to bring the convenience of on-demand delivery (or, more accurately, book ahead delivery, since it isn’t really on-demand) to refuelling your car. Via the startup’s smart phone app, Londoners could book a time-slot to have one of Zebra Fuel’s mini-vans and trained personnel come to their location to dispense fuel to their vehicle.

The idea, Bennis told me when Zebra Fuel announced its seed funding, is to eliminate the need to ever queue at a gas station again, which is not only inconvenient and time-consuming, but often sees a driver make an additional roundtrip journey and have to leave the engine running while in situ waiting for a pump to become available.

By bringing fuel to you and others in your neighbourhood, a proposition like Zebra at scale could help cut emissions and reduce congestion. Or so the pitch perfect pitch went.

Despite bring fuel to you, Zebra claimed to be price competitive with inner city gas stations — offering fuel at prices on a par with or cheaper than central London — because it sources fuel from the same wholesale suppliers as the leading petrol stations and doesn’t have to soak up the high costs of rent for each premium gas station location.

In turn, the Zebra Fuel mini-vans themselves didn’t need to travel to the wholesale supplier, but were refuelled by the Zebra Fuel “mother ship,” a much larger tanker able to restock multiple Zebra Fuel delivery vehicles.

Here’s the email sent to customers in full:

Dear Zebra Customer,

With great regret, we must inform you that Zebra Fuel will no longer be delivering fuel in London.

We would like to express our sincere apologies for any inconvenience this causes you and hope that you have enjoyed using our services.

Warmest regards,

The Zebra Team

French startup Foodvisor has raised a $4.5 million funding round after generating 2 million app downloads. Agrinnovation is leading the round and various business angels are also participating.

I covered Foodvisor last month, so I’m not going to describe the app once again. In a few words, the startup uses deep learning to enable image recognition to detect what you’re about to eat. It can detect the type of food and it also tries to estimate the weight of each item.

Foodvisor calculates the distance between your plate and your phone using autofocus data from the camera. It then calculates the area of each item in your plate. You can manually correct information before you log it.

With today’s funding round, the startup plans to improve the app and hire 15 more persons. The app recently launched in the U.S. and the company thinks it represents a good market opportunity.

Fintech startup Bunq is launching a metal card called the Green Card. While some banks offer a cashback program with premium cards, Bunq is offering a special kind of “cashback”. For every €100 spent, Bunq plants a tree. The company has partnered with Eden Reforestation Projects to finance reforestation around the globe.

Manufacturing a metal card isn’t particularly environmentally friendly. That’s why the Green Card expires after six years instead of four years. It is also made of recyclable material (even though I’m not sure it’s that easy to recycle a metal card with a chip, a magnetic stripe and an NFC antenna after it expires).

Other than that, the Green Card works more or less like the Travel Card. While Bunq offers traditional bank accounts, you can order a Travel Card or a Green Card and keep your existing bank account.

The Green Card is a Mastercard without any foreign exchange fee. The company uses the standard Mastercard exchange rate but doesn’t add any markup fee.

While the Green Card is a credit card, it doesn’t work like normal credit cards. You don’t get a direct debit on your bank account once a month to cover your credit line. Instead, you have to open the Bunq app and top up your Bunq account — topping up your account with another card may incur some fees, more details here. If you don’t have enough money on your account, the transaction gets rejected like a debit card.

The Travel Card costs €9.99 to order the card. There’s no monthly fee after that. The Green Card costs €99 per year. Bunq charges €0.99 per ATM withdrawal but you get 10 free withdrawals with the Green Card.

The company is selling a limited edition today with “Founders Edition” engraved in the top right corner but the first batch is nearly sold out:

Fintech startup Revolut is adding a key feature for users who want to replace their traditional bank account altogether. You can now pay with GBP direct debits. Revolut already added EUR direct debits last year.

While most people use cards to pay for goods and services in the U.K., some businesses require you to pay with direct debit. It can be a utility bill, a gym membership or a phone contract for instance.

Compared to card transactions, direct debits pull money directly from your account and transfer it to the recipient’s account. It doesn’t go through Mastercard or Visa. Some businesses love direct debits because it’s usually cheaper than card processing fees. Direct debits also don’t have an expiry date, unlike cards.

Customers from the European Economic Area can now share their GBP account details for direct debits in the U.K. Direct debits are protected against some fraud and payment errors by the U.K. Direct Debit Guarantee.

Revolut has partnered with Modulr for this feature as it uses Modulr’s API. Business customers will also be able to take advantage of direct debits. You can now pay suppliers with your account details, which could be convenient for large sums of money for instance.

We have a lot of dinner parties.  Our circle of friends is quite broad and all political views are represented in our midst. Far right. Far left. And everything in between.  Diversity of...

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A new app called Fabric aims to make it simpler for parents to plan for their family’s long-term financial well-being. The goal is to offer parents a one-stop-shop that includes the ability to ability for term life insurance from their phone, create a free will in about five minutes, and collaborate with a spouse or partner to organize key financial accounts or other important documents. In addition, parents are able to coordinate with beneficiaries, children’s guardians, attorneys, financial advisors, and others right from the app.

Fabric was originally founded in 2015 by Adam Erlebacher, previously the COO at online bank Simple, and Steven Surgnier, previously the Director of Data at Simple. The company last year raised a $10 million Series A led by Bessemer Venture Partners, after having sold life insurance coverage to thousands of families.

Since launch, Fabric has expanded beyond life insurance to offer other services, like easy will creation and the addition of tools that help families organize their financial and legal information in one place. The idea, the company explained at the time, was to offer today’s busy parents a better alternative to meetings with agents to discuss complicated life insurance products. Instead, the company offers a simple, 10-minute life insurance application and the option to connect with a licensed team if they need additional help, as well as a similarly simplified will creation workflow.

As with the founders’ earlier company, Simple, which offered a better front-end to banking while actual bank accounts were held elsewhere, Fabric’s life insurance policies are issued by “A” rated insurer, Vantis Life, not Fabric itself.

However, until now, Fabric’s suite of services were only available on the web. They’re now offered in an app for added convenience. The app is initially available on iOS with an Android version in the works.

“Money can be especially stressful when you’re trying to build a family and a career,” said Fabric co-founder and CEO Adam Erlebacher. “In one survey by Everyday Health, 52% of respondents said financial issues regularly stress them out, and people between the ages of 38 to 53 were the most stressed out financially. Parents want to have more control over their families’ long-term financial well-being and today’s dusty old products and tools are failing them,” he added.

Using the Fabric app, parents can take advantage of any of its offerings, including the option to apply for life insurance from the phone and get immediate approval. The app also makes it possible to share the policy information with beneficiaries, so it doesn’t get lost.

Another feature lets you create your will for free, and share that information with key people as well, including the witnesses you need to coordinate with in order to finalize the will, for example. And a spouse can choose to mirror your will, which speeds up the process of creating a second one with the same set of choices.

Fabric also helps to address an issue that often only comes up after it’s too late or in other emergency situations — organizing both parents’ finances in a single place. Many working adults today have not just a bank account, but also have investment accounts, 401Ks, IRAs, and credit cards, or a combination of those. But their partner may not know where to find this information or where the accounts are held.

The app, which we put through its paces (but didn’t purchase life insurance through), is very easy to use. It starts off with a short quiz to get a handle on your financial picture. It then delivers you to a personalized homescreen with a checklist of suggestions of what to do next. Naturally, this includes the life insurance application, as this is where Fabric’s revenue lies. And if you’re lacking a will and have other fiances to organize, these are featured, too.

The online forms are easy to fill out, despite the smartphone’s reduced screen space compared with a web browser, and Fabric has taken the time to get the small touches right — like when you enter a phone number, the numeric keypad appears, for example, or the integration of address lookup so you can just tap on the match and have the rest autofill. It also saves your work in progress, so you can finish later in case you get interrupted — as parents often do. And it explains terms, like “executor,” so you know what sort of rights you’re assigning.

Given its focus, Fabric protects user information with bank-grade security, including 256-bit encryption, two-factor authentication, automatic lockouts, biometrics, and other adaptive security features.

Fabric isn’t alone in helping parents and others financially plan wills and more from their iPhone. Other apps exist in this space, including will planning apps from Tomorrow, LegalZoom, Qwill, and others. Plus many insurers offer a mobile experience. Fabric is unique because it puts wills, insurance, and other tools into a single destination, without complicating the user interface.

Fabric’s app is a free download on the App Store. 

Are you considering selling your company as a potential exit? Now? A year from now? Five years from now? 

In more than 20 years of startup, with over a dozen acquisitions under my belt as an entrepreneur, advisor and investor, I can assure you that an acquisition is always a massive and complex transaction that you’re never 100% prepared for. In fact, the one regret I hear over and over again from my peers is that they got less than what they should have when they signed the deal.

Whether you’re a founder or just have some equity, there’s a bunch of stuff you need to know before you decide to sell your startup, stuff that you won’t actually learn until you’ve been through it.

I sat down with a friend last week who is in the position to seriously consider selling her company. It’s her first startup, so we went over a high-level outline of the process. Then I added a bunch of notes from my own experience for this post. 

How to know when it’s time to sell

There are basically four reasons to sell your company.

Things are going poorly. This obviously isn’t good, and unless you’re in a position where you have to sell, I would recommend against it. Instead, I’d do everything in my power to stabilize and reconsider later.
Things are going extremely well. On the other side, this is the best position to be in, but it’s also the time when the founders are least interested in selling. The deal has to be outstanding.
An external factor. Something has happened outside of the company that has made selling an attractive option. For example, I wound up running two companies at the same time, and decided to get out of the small one to focus on the big one.
You’ve taken it as far as you can. This is most often the primary reason why founders choose to sell their company. They see a lot of opportunity down the road, and decide that a specific acquirer can take much better advantage of that opportunity.

Usually, the decision to sell is based on a combination of these reasons.

How to make the decision to sell

There are basically three ways to get acquired.

A larger company. This is someone in your space or close to it. To them, your company represents either an advance in innovation or just a bunch of new customers. This is the most popular option.
Private equity. These firms usually buy out all of the existing owners and investors and may put company leadership on a profit plan to keep them around and motivated. These transactions usually happen at high levels of valuation, like approaching the billions.
A new investment round. At lower levels of valuation, the same kind of transaction can take place where a new investor or group of investors buys out all of the current owners and investors.

There are two things you need to do before you decide to sell. First, consider your negotiating position from strongest to weakest. 

Ideally, you should already have at least one offer on the table, or have rejected one or more offers in the recent past. This is the strongest position, as one offer usually attracts more offers.

If you don’t have a solid offer, you should at least be investigating one or more implied offers. These hints and clues will come from partners, customers, competition, even investors and advisors with connections to other investors and PE firms. 

If you have none of these, selling the company is going to be a lot more difficult, but not impossible. In this case, acquisition is a lot like fundraising. If you don’t have any offers or leads, you need to build connections and relationships. You’re basically putting together a pitch deck and going door to door. If you’re not patient, you’ll end up giving up a lot of value on your equity.

You might also consider bringing in a fixer, an experienced person who will come in as CEO for a large chunk of equity and get your company into a better position to sell, both operationally and in terms of connections. I rarely see this work, but I have indeed seen it work. Here, you’re trading shares for the hopes of increased value of those shares. 

Finally, you might find private money that just wants to take over your company. These transactions happen at much lower valuations. Kind of a fire sale.  

The second thing you need to do before you make the decision to sell is talk to your board, your current investors, your executive team, and your advisors. Everyone has to be in line, on board, and the proper expectations need to be set and agreed upon. 

Preparing the company to be sold

There are basically three ways to calculate the sale price of your company.

A service-based company is usually valued at 1x to 2x annual revenue. In cases where the company is a hybrid of product or intellectual property that may be spun off, this can creep to 3x or maybe a little more.
A product company is usually valued at 2x to 10x annual revenue, depending on the market for the product, the protected unique differentiators, the higher the tech, and a number of other things, usually related to opportunity.
In cases of extreme opportunity and innovation, a product company can be sold for 20x to 50x.

There are two things you’ll have to do to sell your company: Show you’re worth the sale price and prove the legitimacy of your operation.

To show your worth, if your company is taking in $10 million in revenue and your valuation comes out at 10x, or $100 million, you need to be able to show the acquirer the path to $100 million within a three- to five-year time frame. The more objectively you can show that return, the more likely you’ll get your asking price.

There are a number of ways you can do this, but spreadsheets and hockey-stick charts probably aren’t enough to open the checkbook. For example, in one case we had to actually conduct a one-month experimental project and hit certain milestones dictated by the acquirer. In another, we went through a three month period where we pushed the accelerator to the ground to show 100% month over month growth for three straight months. 

To prove your legitimacy, you’re going to have to go through due diligence. This will happen after an offer sheet has been put together and hopefully there’s a penalty clause if the buyer pulls out. 

During due diligence, you’ll have to show that the structural integrity of your company is clean. This means you’ll need to: 

Show a clean cap table, with all the equity in the company past, present, and future accounted for.
Open your books so they can audit your financials.
Sit your lawyers with their lawyers to sniff out liability and risk, and also make sure your intellectual property is properly protected.
Interview and background check your management team to uncover skeletons in anyone’s closet. And also make sure everyone important will stay on.

There will be no time between the initial interest from the acquirer and microscope time, so you’ll need to have all your ducks in a row before you put your company on the market.

Timeline

Your guess is as good as mine, so make your best guess, then double it.

The fastest I’ve ever been through an acquisition deal was four months, the longest was seven months. Again, it’s like raising a funding round, so the shape your company and the strength of your negotiating position will determine a lot of the timeline, but there will always be external factors to deal with. 

For example, one time we had the buyer just drop off the face of the earth for 45 days. At about day 30 we resigned ourselves to the fact that it wasn’t going to happen. Then it did.

Think 1–2 months to prepare and line up suitors, 2–3 months to get a solid offer in place, 1–2 months of due diligence. It is not quick, but it should not drag. Regardless of my anecdote above, both sides have an incentive to move quickly, it just takes time. 

Preparing yourself for life after startup

The last thing my friend and I talked about was what she was going to do once her startup was folded into a new company. Even from her early vantage point, in almost all outcomes, she was looking at a comfy VP position at a nice salary. She could do that. The question, of course, was for how long.

The last time my company was acquired was the first time I planned to stick around to hit the next milestone. I didn’t make it. Two years in, I hit a wall that I never recovered from, even after a few more months of soul-searching. It was a mix of internal changes, external factors, and me just being done. I felt like I was dragging a bag of bricks to work every morning. 

I’d try to stick around again. I’ve never been one to hop from startup to startup, and I’ve been immersed enough in the corporate world to know I can navigate it. But there’s a reason they usually lock the executive team in for two years. That’s about all either side can take of the other. 

The thing is, because it was the first time I planned to stay put after the acquisition, I never developed a contingency plan going into the acquisition, and I paid for it afterwards. When I did leave, it took three months just to find my feet. 

I’ve seen other folks take way longer to decompress, and I’ve seen some of them do some crazy stuff along the way, like start that folly of a company they always wanted to start and now that they had the means to start it and no one to tell them no… disaster. 

So whether your plan is to stick around or run away screaming, make sure you build in time to think about what’s next. You can do whatever you want after that time, maybe start a new project, maybe take a new position. What you do might not even be startup-related at all.

But chances are it will be. Entrepreneurs are like addicts; we don’t know when to quit.

Today’s 467th FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Wednesday, November 27, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/5 p.m. CET/9:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All are...

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Love it or hate it, networking is a necessary part of business — especially for early-stage startup founders searching for investors, customers and collaborators. When you head to Disrupt Berlin 2019 this December, you can relax a bit because we have a networking tool to help you make the most of two very full days. More on that in a moment.

Shameless plug meets helpful tip: Late registration pricing ends 10 December at 11:59 p.m. (CEST). If you haven’t already done so, buy your late registration pass to Disrupt Berlin before the deadline and you can save up to €200.

That tool we mentioned? We’re talking about CrunchMatch, of course. Our free business match-making service — available to all Disrupt Berlin attendees — takes the pain out of networking and helps you zero in on the people who can help you advance your business interests. Das ist gud! Seriously, with thousands of people and hundreds of startups, CrunchMatch gives you both room to breathe and viable leads.

Plenty of founders and investors rely on CrunchMatch to find each other, but every attendee can use it to their strategic advantage. Whether you’re looking for developers, new customers, service providers, mentors or marketing help, CrunchMatch delivers the goods. Here’s how it all works.

After you register for Disrupt Berlin, we’ll send you an email to explain how to access the platform. You create your profile with specific business criteria, goals and interests. The CrunchMatch algorithm kicks into high gear to find and suggest matches. With your approval, CrunchMatch proposes meeting times and sends out meeting requests.

Last year alone, CrunchMatch facilitated more than 3,000 meetings — and 97 percent of the people who used it said they’d use it again. Here’s what Michael Kocan, managing partner at Trend Discovery, told us about his experience using CrunchMatch.

“If I see an interesting company pitch at Startup Battlefield, CrunchMatch lets me quickly schedule a meeting with them for later that day. It makes vetting deals extremely efficient.”

Disrupt Berlin 2019 takes place on 11-12 December. Don’t waste your valuable time talking to the wrong people. Let CrunchMatch do the heavy lifting while you enjoy networking the way it should be — easy and efficient.

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

Chefclub hasn’t attracted a lot of headlines over the years as it has only raised $3.5 million. But it is slowly building a major media brand on social media platforms as it now competes directly with Tastemade and Tasty.

Compared to more traditional recipe websites and brands, Chefclub focuses exclusively on the intersection of food and entertainment. If you’ve watched a few Chefclub videos, your reaction is probably something along the lines of “oh no they didn’t.”

You’ll see a lot of melted cheese, and somehow cooking often involves deep frying all the things. Some people around me are obsessed with those videos even though they’d never consider watching a cooking show on TV.

“We are normal people, we don’t have the same cooking skillset that you can see on TV and in books. We opened up the kitchen cabinet and used everyday ingredients. That positioning has always been there and hasn’t changed,” Chefclub co-founder Thomas Lang told me.

And it’s been working incredibly well. The company now has 75 million followers across multiple social media platforms. It generates a billion video views per month and reaches 200 million people. The startup has never spent a cent in paid media to grow this user base.

Due to its lean culture, there are “only” 50 people working for Chefclub. The entire team is based in Paris, with one third of them who are not French. Despite this very French DNA, Chefclub has noticed that you don’t necessarily have to adapt all your content to different geographies. 70% of videos work well across the globe.

Chefclub optimizes its content for Facebook first and foremost. As many publishers told me, it has become increasingly harder to work around Facebook’s algorithm to reach a large audience on Facebook. But the startup has been through all the ups and downs of Facebook’s algorithm. Those relentless efforts have been key to the company’s growth as many media brands simply gave up on Facebook.

Other social networks seem way easier when you compare them to Facebook. Chefclub is now also active on YouTube, Snapchat (Discover partnership in France and Germany), Instagram and TikTok. The startup says that it is the leader in Europe and Latin America. In the U.S., the company is still in the growth phase — it is close to reaching 1 billion views in the U.S. in 2019.

So how do you turn a successful media strategy into a business? Chefclub is betting heavily on the Direct-to-Consumer wave. The company first started with a recipe book. You can scan QR codes in the book to play the video on your phone. It has sold half a million cookbooks directly on its website.

More recently, Chefclub has introduced Kiddoz, a cooking kit for kids. There’s a book with 20 recipes, easily identifiable measuring cups and an app.

Up next, Chefclub wants to partner with retailers to license its brand and sell branded products. You could imagine buying Chefclub-branded appliances and toys in the near future.

“We have another revenue source that we call ‘the cherry on the cake,’” Thomas Lang said. Chefclub generates revenue from preroll ads on YouTube and other social platforms with revenue-sharing deals. While this is not a focus, Chefclub gets $200,000 in ad revenue per month with no additional effort.

Finally, Chefclub wants to open up content creation to community members. In order to scale its content, Chefclub wants to become a platform that broadcasts user-generated content to other community members.

According to a Valuates report, the global payments market is expected to grow 8% annually over the next few years to $2 trillion by 2025. The market is dotted by several financial services...

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Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

We had a lot to get through this week and may have ran over our time a little bit but it was worth it. First, we discussed Weekend Fund’s second effort, a $10 million vehicle targeting early-stage upstarts. Led by Product Hunt founder and CEO Ryan Hoover, Weekend Fund raised a smaller debut angel fund a few years ago. Now they’re back at it after deploying capital to Girlboss, TTYL, Headspin and more.

Next, we turned to some upsetting news, at least for the employees and venture capitalists behind the startup Omni. After raising a total of $35 million in VC funding, Omni announced this week it was shutting down, with 10 of its engineers moving over to Coinbase. It appears the company struggled to make the economics of equipment rentals and physical on-demand storage work out. It’s another victim of a venture capital-subsidized business offering a convenient service at an unsustainable price.

Far from shuttering, we also spoke about Cocoon, a new company that wants to help you stay in touch with those who matter most. The company graduated from Y Combinator and has since raised $3 million in venture funding. The startup was founded by former Facebook employees, hence the headline, and is hoping to create the dedicated software that you use for that most important group chat in your life. The iOS-only app is a bit of a cross between Life360, Slack and Path.

Finally, we closed the episode with some Airbnb news and the New York Stock Exchange’s interesting plans to alter direct listings.

Glad you guys came back for another episode, we’ll see you soon.

In 2017, I started a literary group focused on serious literary works. We call it Caravanserai Literati.  Here is the list of books for our Caravanserai Literati. Year Month Author Work Optional...

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LeanDNA builds software used by factories across the globe. With a deep focus on making inventory analytics automated, actionable, and collaborative, LeanDNA enables manufacturers to optimize...

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You may have heard the pitch before, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram aren’t homes for your real friends anymore because they’re too big, too commercial and too influencer-y, the result is that your most important relationships have been relegated to the lowest common denominator tool on your phones: your texting app.

Cocoon, a startup from a couple of ex-Facebook employees that went through YC earlier this year, is hoping to create the dedicated software that you use for that most important group chat in your life. The iOS-only app is a bit of a cross between Life360, Slack and Path.

While Life360 is the app for concerned parents, Cocoon wants to be the app for curious long-distance families who want to check on their family and closest friends more easily. The app is structured around a Slack channel-like feed where photo, text and location updates can be pushed alongside threaded replies. Like Life360, you can can also access a dashboard of a group’s users and see where they are located in the world and whether they’re at home or work based on group-designated locations. It’s the app’s focus on close friends that has drawn comparisons to Dave Morin’s oft-loved social networking app Path.

“I am always super open and welcome to comparisons to Path because I loved it and it was totally an awesome app,” co-founder Alex Cornell tells TechCrunch. “When you look at our narratives and what we’re trying to accomplish — the goals of supporting close friends and family — there is a lot of similarity there. But at the core, our solution is actually quite different.”

That core difference, the founders tell me, is that Cocoon isn’t a social network. People are signing up to be in this small group with a few close friends of family members but the groups are closed and users aren’t (currently) logging into multiple groups.

[gallery ids="1917079,1917078,1917080"]

“The main thing with a network is like that people aren’t necessarily all connected to one another, it’s asymmetrical so my friends aren’t friends with your friends and when I post a photo, you’re seeing comments from people you don’t know,” Cornell adds.

There are some clean parallels to other consumer apps, but the biggest competitor to Cocoon is what goes down in the small groups you have in iMessage or any of your other chat apps. Cocoon wants to be a properly-interfaced social network inside a group chat where everything is for the group’s benefit only. A lot is still in flux just one day after launch and the founders are hoping they can learn more about what people want from the app from its earliest users.

Like Path, the startup has a noble goal but a social app with dramatically lessened network effects certainly seems like it might have some sustainability issues. The app is currently free, but the founders say that they won’t be selling any user data or surfacing ads, hoping to add in a subscription pricing model to sustain the business. “It’s definitely top of mind and something that we want to do sooner rather than later,” CEO Sachin Monga tells us.

The company has a bit of cash to sustain things on their own for a while. Cocoon wrapped a $3 million seed round in May led by Lerer Hippeau with Y Combinator, Susa Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Advancit Capital, Foundation Capital, iNovia, Shrug Capital and SV Angel also participating.

The Valley’s affinity for robotics shows no signs of cooling. Technical enhancements through innovations like AI/ML, compute power and big data utilization continue to drive new performance milestones, efficiencies and use cases.

Despite the old saying, “hardware is hard,” investment in the robotics space continues to expand. Money is pouring in across robotics’ billion-dollar sub verticals, including industrial and labor automation, drone delivery, machine vision and a wide range of others.

According to data from Pitchbook and Crunchbase, 2018 saw new highs for the number of venture deals and total invested capital in the space, with roughly $5 billion in investment coming from nearly 400 deals. With robotics well on its way to again set new investment peaks in 2019, we asked 13 leading VCs who work at firms spanning early to growth stages to share what’s exciting them most and where they see opportunity in the sector:

Shahin Farshchi, Lux CapitalKelly Chen, DCVCRob Coneybeer, Shasta VenturesAaron Jacobson, NEAEric Migicovsky, Y CombinatorHelen Liang, FoundersX VenturesAndrew Byrnes, Micron VenturesLudovic Copéré Sony Innovation FundCostantino Mariella, Sony Innovation FundCyril Ebersweiler, SOSV & HAXPeter Barrett, Playground GlobalBruce Leak, Playground GlobalJim Adler, Toyota AI Ventures

Participants discuss the compelling business models for robotics startups (such as “Robots as a Service”), current valuations, growth tactics and key robotics KPIs, while also diving into key trends in industrial automation, human replacement, transportation, climate change, and the evolving regulatory environment.

Shahin Farshchi, Lux Capital

Which trends are you most excited in robotics from an investing perspective?

The opportunity to unlock human superpowers:

Increase productivity to enhance creativity leading to new products and businesses.Automating dangerous tasks and eliminating undesirable, dangerous jobs in mining, manufacturing, and shipping/logistics.Making the most deadly mode of transport: driving, 100% safe.

How much time are you spending on robotics right now? Is the market under-heated, overheated, or just right?

Three-quarters of the new opportunities I look at involve some sort of automation.The market for robot startups attempting direct human labor replacement, floor-sweeping, and dumb-waiter robots, and robotic lawnmowers and vacuums is OVER heated (too many startups).The market for robot startups that assist human workers, increase human productivity, and automate undesirable human tasks is UNDER heated (not enough startups).

Are there startups that you wish you would see in the industry but don’t? Plus any other thoughts you want to share with TechCrunch readers.

I want to see more founders that are building robotics startups that:

Solve LATENT pain points in specific, well-understood industries (vs. building a cool robot that can do cool things).Focus on increasing HUMAN productivity (vs. trying to replace humans).Are solving for building interesting BUSINESSES (vs. emphasizing cool robots).

Kelly Chen, DCVC

Three years ago, the most compelling companies to us in the industrial space were in software. We now spend significantly more time in verticalized AI and hardware. Robotic companies we find most exciting today are addressing key driver areas of (1) high labor turnover and shortage and (2) new research around generalization on the software side. For many years, we have seen some pretty impressive science projects out of labs, but once you take these into the real world, they fail. In these changing environmental conditions, it’s crucial that robots work effectively in-the-wild at speeds and economics that make sense. This is an extremely difficult combination of problems, and we’re now finally seeing it happen. A few verticals we believe will experience a significant overhaul in the next 5 years include logistics, waste, micro-fulfillment, and construction.

With this shift in robotic capability, we’re also seeing a shift in customer sentiment. Companies who are used to buying outright machines are now more willing to explore RaaS (Robot as a Service) models for compelling robotic solutions – and that repeat revenue model has opened the door for some formerly enterprise software-only investors. On the other hand, companies exploring robotics in place of tasks with high labor shortages, such as trucking or agriculture, are more willing to explore per hour or per unit pick models.

Adoption won’t be overnight, but in the medium term, we are very enthusiastic about the ways robotics will transform industries. We do believe investing in this space requires the right technical know-how and network to evaluate and support companies, so momentum investors looking to dip their hand into a hot space may be disappointed.

Rob Coneybeer, Shasta Ventures

We’re entering the early stages of the golden age of robotics. Robotics is already a huge, multibillion-dollar market – but today that market is dominated by industrial robotics, such as welding and assembly robots found on automotive assembly lines around the world. These robots repeat basic tasks, over and over, and are usually separated by caged walls from humans for safety. However, this is rapidly changing. Advances in perception, driven by deep learning, machine vision and inexpensive, high-performance cameras allow robots to safely navigate the real world, escape the manufacturing cages, and closely interact with humans.

I think the biggest opportunities in robotics are those which attack enormous markets where it’s difficult to hire and retain labor. One great example is long-haul trucking. Highway driving represents one of the easiest problems for autonomous vehicles, since the lanes tend to be well-marked, the roads have gentle curves, and all traffic runs in the same direction. In the United States alone, long haul trucking is a multi-hundred billion dollar market every year. The customer set is remarkably scalable with standard trailer sizes and requirements for shipping freight. Yet at the same time, trucking companies have trouble hiring and retaining drivers. It’s the perfect recipe for robotic opportunity.

I’m intrigued by agricultural robots. I’ve seen dozens of companies attacking every part of the farming equation – from field clearing and preparation, to seeding, to weeding, applying fertilizer, and eventually harvesting. I think there’s a lot of value to be “harvested” here by robots, especially since seasonal field labor is becoming harder to find and increasingly expensive. One enormous challenge in this market, however, is that growing seasons mean that the robotic machinery has a lot of downtime and the cost of equipment isn’t as easily amortized in other markets with higher utilization. The other big challenge is that fields are very, very tough on hardware and electronics due to environmental conditions like rain, dust and mud.

There are a ton of important problems to be solved in robotics. The biggest open challenges in my mind are locomotion and grasping. Specifically, I think that for in-building applications, robots need to be able to do all the thing which humans can do – specifically opening and closing doors, climbing stairs, and picking items off of shelves and putting them down gently. Plenty of startups have tackled subsets of these problems, but to date no one has built a generalized solution. To be fair, to get to parity with humans on generalized locomotion and grasping, it’s probably going to take another several decades.

Overall, I feel like the funding environment for robotics is about right, with a handful of overfunded areas (like autonomous passenger vehicles). I think that the most overlooked near-term opportunity in robotics is teleoperation. Specifically, pairing fully automated robotic operations with occasional human remote operation of individual robots. Starship Technologies is a perfect example of this. Starship is actively deploying local delivery robots around the world today. Their first major deployment is at George Mason University in Virginia. They have nearly 50 active robots delivering food around the campus. They’re autonomous most of the time, but when they encounter a problem or obstacle they can’t solve, a human operator in a teleoperation center manually controls the robot remotely. At the same time. Starship tracks and prioritizes these problems for engineers to solve, and slowly incrementally reduces the number of problems the robots can’t solve on their own. I think people view robotics as a “zero or one” solution when in fact there’s a world where humans and robots work together for a long time.

The New York Stock Exchange filed paperwork this morning with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to allow companies to raise capital as part of a direct listing.

Direct listings are a way for companies to go public by selling existing shares held by insiders, employees and investors directly to the market, rather than the traditional method of issuing new shares. Direct listings have become increasingly popular since Spotify’s 2018 exit, which allowed its employees immediate liquidity, removed preferred access from bankers and allowed for market-driven price discovery. Companies, like Spotify, that opt to complete a direct listing are able to bypass the financial roadshow, thus avoiding some of Wall Street’s exorbitant fees. Historically, however, these companies have not been able to raise fresh capital as part of the process.

The NYSE’s new proposal seeks to change that. Specifically, the stock exchange plans to amend Chapter One of the Listed Company Manual, which outlines the NYSE’s initial listing requirements for companies completing initial public offerings or direct listings. If the amendment is approved—the NYSE is subject to the regulatory oversight of the SEC—companies going public on the NYSE will be permitted to raise capital through a direct listing.

The document states the proposed change “would allow a company that has not previously had its common equity securities registered under the Act, to list its common equity securities on the Exchange at the time of effectiveness of a registration statement pursuant to which the company will sell shares in the opening auction on the first day of trading on the Exchange (a “Primary Direct Floor Listing”). The proposal would permit a company to conduct a Primary Direct Floor Listing in addition to, or instead of, a Selling Shareholder Direct Floor Listing.”

The proposed hybrid model is likely to appeal to Silicon Valley tech startups, who’ve grown more familiar with the innovate route to the public markets following Spotify and Slack’s direct listings. On the backs of these exits, tech industry leaders have touted direct listings as the latest and greatest path to the public markets. Venture capitalist Bill Gurley, in particular, has encouraged companies to consider the method. Meanwhile Silicon Valley darling Airbnb, which has stated its intent to go public in 2020, is said to be considering a direct listing rather than a traditional IPO.

Gurley, who has expressed his discontent with bankers’ inability to adequately price IPOs, recently hosted a one-day conference focused on direct listings titled Direct Listings: A Simpler and Superior Alternative to the IPO. The event was attended by members of tech’s elite, including Sequoia Capital’s Mike Moritz and Spotify chief financial officer Barry McCarthy .