The venture capital industry has a dismal track record funding black founders, but a recent flurry of specialized funds devoted to underrepresented entrepreneurs risks creating a segregated startup landscape, according to a prominent VC investor.

As protests rage across the country over the death of George Floyd, numerous venture capital firms have issued statements condemning racial injustice and police brutality. Some have gone further and rolled out new programs.

 SoftBank and Andreessen Horowitz, for example, announced new venture and donor-advisory funds this week that will be charged with backing startups founded by African-Americans or people from other under-invested communities.

But at a gathering hosted by BLCK VC on Thursday, venture capitalist Monique Woodard cautioned against a venture firm establishing such a fund as a substitute for committing money to black founders from its existing funds — in other words, only setting aside a small sum of money and resources to avoid dealing with systemic issues in the firm pipeline.

Such thinking, she warned, could lead to a "separate but equal" mentality in the VC industry. 

"Black entrepreneurs don't need a separate water fountain," Woodard said."You have to fix the systemic issues in your funds that keep black founders out and keep you from delivering better returns."

Andreessen Horowitz has already pushed back against similar criticisms, and pointed toward a track record of funding diverse founders as proof that the new fund simply compliments those efforts.  

Just 3% of venture capital partners and 1% of startup founders are black, statistics that are being used to illustrate a damning lack of opportunity for startup founders and VCs outside Silicon Valley's traditional networks. 

Woodard, a former partner at 500 Startups who has actively tried to grow diversity in the industry for years, noted that the push to donate to charities or commit money to donor-advised funds was helpful.

But venture capitalists could drive even more meaningful change by acting in their capacity as investors, and writing checks for often-overlooked black founders who enter the startup ecosystem with more barriers to accessing seed capital from family and friends. 

"Not having startups led by black founders in your portfolio is a failure that can't be donated away," said Woodard, who now leads Cake Ventures.

Venture capitalists opening up their calendars for office hours with black founders should also be ready to offer more than their time, Woodard added. 

"Black founders are often overmentored and underinvested. Check your desire to open up office hours and mentor exclusively, versus your ability to write a check," Woodard said. 

With the same token, Woodard said that LPs should also seek out black venture fund managers, who often choose to start their own funds because partnerships at a blue-chip VC firm aren't often available. Putting money in those funds could be an invaluable boost to the community, Woodard said. 

Someday, your packages might be delivered by a robot that stands, walks, and hands things over to you.

Agility Robotics announced its newest model, Digit, in 2019. Digit has legs, a torso, and arms, designed to complete many of the same tasks human workers do in warehouses and factories. Agility says that it specifically envisions Digit being part of last-mile deliveries.

Ford became Digit's first buyer, with plans to use it for package delivery. Researchers are working on ways for Digit and Ford vehicles to communicate with each other. Adding arms is a major improvement over Agility's last bipedal robot, Cassie, according to the company. "Arms are simultaneously a tool for moving through the world — think getting up after a fall, waving your arms for balance, or pushing open a door — while also being useful for manipulating or carrying objects," CTO Jonathan Hurst explained. 

Digit will start shipping later this year, for a price in the "low-mid six figures."

Take a look at how it works. 

In the past four months, Discord's app has become faster and its engineers have been able to write code more efficiently, too.

How? It's all thanks to a programming language called Rust. 

After first using the language to build a game downloader tool in early 2018, Discord decided earlier this year to completely ditch the Google-created programming language Go to embrace Rust, instead.

"When people want to play a game, they want to play it as quickly as possible," Jesse Howarth, staff software engineer at the gaming chat company, told Business Insider. "When you're developing something, you want to develop as quickly as possible."

That's where Rust comes in. Rust is known for being easy to write, secure, and memory efficient, and developers see it as an alternative to Go or legacy programming languages like C++ and C.

"You can get the performance, but it is easier to write code without having bugs," Howarth said, comparing Rust to C++. "You don't have the mental burden of thinking about memory management and pointers that turn people off of C++."

Discord is only one of many companies that have picked up Rust in the past few years, which Mozilla originally developed for its Firefox browser. It's widely used by companies like Amazon Web Services, Dropbox, Fastly, Microsoft, Facebook, and more. Facebook is even using it to build its new cryptocurrency project, Libra, and Rust's adoption grew 235% in the past year, according to data from Microsoft's GitHub, making it one of the fastest growing programming languages. 

"It's by developers, for developers," Fastly CTO Tyler McMullen told Business Insider. "Rust is clearly one of the most loved programming languages out there. We're pretty jazzed to be supporting it."

As McMullen says, developers are not only using Rust more, they adore it too: Rust topped Stack Overflow's list of favorite programming languages, according to its recent survey of 65,000 developers — for the fifth year in a row.

And knowing how to code in Rust pays well, too: According to the same survey, Rust developers in the US make a median salary of $130,000. 

How Rust began

Mozilla first launched Rust in 2010 when it was building a new browser core for Firefox. Most browsers, including Google Chrome, Safari, and Microsoft Edge are written in C++, but Mozilla was dissatisfied with it, and wanted to build a completely new programming language that was more efficient. But Mozilla didn't want to just keep a budding language to itself or create it for a single purpose: It also wanted to build a community.

"We didn't want Rust to only be a language for building browser engines," Nicholas Matsakis, principal research engineer at Mozilla, told Business Insider. "We knew if we wanted to build a new language, it had to be widely usable."

Initially, Matsakis says the team thought of Rust as a more efficient replacement for C++. Most browsers, including Google Chrome, Safari, and Microsoft Edge are written in C++. However they also put careful consideration and focus into figuring out how to solve another major pain point for developers: that they spend a disproportionate amount of time weeding out bugs. 

"That was the problem we were trying to solve," Matsakis said. "Could we get a level of control while protecting ourselves from those kinds of bugs so developers can focus on building the thing they're building?"

Besides Firefox, Mozilla also uses Rust for projects like Stylo, used for designing web pages, and its monitoring server.

Mozilla made Rust an open source language, meaning it was free for anyone to use, download, or modify. As more developers began experimenting with it and learning to use it, the positive reviews started spreading and companies like Facebook, Dropbox, and AWS started adopting it. 

Why companies like using Rust: 'Things kind of just work'

Discord decided to start using Rust because the company had issues with memory and speed when using Go.

Go, like many other programming languages, uses a memory management process called "garbage collection" that systematically runs through a program to free up memory that's not currently being used. Rust does not use garbage collection. Instead, it allows developers to encode "ownership" to keep track of memory. When memory is no longer being used, it's immediately freed up, which is faster and more efficient than waiting for a garbage collector to check that it's free. 

After Discord switched over to Rust, Howarth says that its app worked faster, and its engineers are able to develop more quickly as well.

The memory efficiency drew Dropbox to Rust as well. Since 2016, Dropbox has used it for building file uploading features, storage, code libraries, back end servers, and more. Dropbox software engineer Sujay Jayakar says that Rust has been a "huge success" for Dropbox and "a delight to program," because it gives programmers more control. Rust combines the best pieces of many long standing programming languages like C++, but adds innovations of its own, he says. 

"The benefits of Rust have been a huge, huge win for us," Jayakar said. "We've been able to move quickly. We don't need to spend as much time hunting down bugs."

Why the decrease in bugs? 

Beyond its memory management model, developers like that Rust's type system — how programming languages assign properties to different software components — prevents variables from being null (or having no value attached to them). This avoids the dreaded null pointer exception which occurs when a program references something that doesn't have a value — and has been referred to the "billion dollar mistake." Null pointers often crash programs, and Rust prevents them.

"You've heard of the 'billion dollar mistake' before," Facebook software engineer Mark Thomas told Business Insider. "Rust doesn't have that."

Facebook first started using Rust two and a half years ago with projects called Mononoke and Mercurial, which help engineers at the company track and monitor code changes. Facebook software engineer Thomas Orozco estimates that it made Facebook's programs about 10 times faster. 

"Things kind of just work when you do them in Rust," Orozco told Business Insider. "You can do the simplest thing you can do, and you get good performance out of it."

Most recently, Facebook picked Rust to implement core features for its new cryptocurrency Libra because of its security features – something that's especially crucial for that project. 

Rust has a steep learning curve, but it pays off 

One challenge of Rust is that it has a steep learning curve, developers say. However, once engineers understand it, it pays off quickly. 

"Over the past year, we've found that even though Rust has a high learning curve, it's an investment that has paid off," Ben Maurer, tech lead for the Libra-focused Facebook subsidiary Calibra, told Business Insider. "Rust has helped Libra build a clean, principled blockchain implementation."

Dropbox's Jayakar echoed that once a few people became proficient, they could make quick progress. 

"It paid off very very quickly," he said. "We were able to get our server in production and in our performance budget with a very small team at a very accelerated schedule." 

Another challenge, according to Cloudflare CTO John Graham-Cumming, is that since it's a newer language, some libraries — which include code needed to support and run an application — are not as developed. Engineers need to stay on top of new updates as the language matures. Still, he adds, these challenges are minor. 

"I think it's going to be one of the major languages that people use to write fast, safe code," Graham-Cumming told Business Insider. "I think it will coexist with other languages like Go for a very long time."

Why Rust has grown so fast

Rust has been able to grow in large part because of its open source developer community.

That's what originally drew AWS to it. 

AWS started toying with Rust in 2012, and it got more serious about it in 2015 and 2016 because more of its customers were talking about it as their preferred language, says Peder Ulander, general manager of open source at Amazon Web Services. 

"It's a way for us to go after that developer community early on," he said. "While it started within our infrastructure, it started to make its way into other teams."

Today, AWS uses Rust for its storage and compute platform, as well as its serverless product Lambda, which allows developers to run and scale their code without having to manage the servers. Rust is also core to AWS's open source virtualization-technology project Firecracker. 

"It's a very friendly and safe programming language," Ulander adds. 

Since Rust is open source, developers have also built a plethora of tools to help support Rust. It's still maintained by Mozilla, and other companies have said that the Mozilla team is especially supportive.  

Discord, for example, has a symbiotic relationship with Mozilla's Rust team. The Rust team itself uses Discord, so Discord's team can hop on their shared chat if they have any questions about Rust. 

"One thing worth noting is the Rust community is really doing a great job," Howarth said. "There's a lot of community libraries out there that people are working hard to work really well and a lot of thought that goes into it."

Fastly's McMullen agrees that the developer community around Rust is very welcoming. 

"It doesn't matter if you don't know C: The Rust community is welcoming to people of all these different backgrounds," McMullen said. "The community around the languages are indicative of the people who started the language."

Mozilla's Matsakis works with the Rust open source community, and he says one of the first things the team did was create a process for submitting changes and improvements to the language. Today, he sees developers using it for servers, embedded systems, cryptocurrency, and more.

"The community drives and helps us steer and ensure the language and meeting people's needs," Matsakis said. 

Finally, developers say Rust has grown so fast simply because developers love it.

"Rust is growing very fast to a large degree because people really enjoy writing it. It shifts the mental model in how you program," Armin Ronacher, director of engineering at Sentry, told Business Insider. "People that start working with the language, they develop a new sense of how to write code and it's very appealing."

The future of Rust

Today, developers use Rust in web applications, servers, game engines, operating systems, virtual reality, and other systems-intensive tasks. And now, Rust is increasingly being used for embedded devices – where before, the older programming language C has reigned supreme – as well as with WebAssembly, which is used for running modern web browsers.

Other languages have come and go, Facebook's Thomas says Rust is here to stay, thanks to its reliability, robustness, and ability to stop prevalent bugs. 

"You don't need to be on your toes when you're coding in Rust," Thomas said. "Rust is the first language in a long time that brings something new to the table. Other languages promise a lot but don't bring real improvement to the developer ecosystem."

AWS's Ulander predicts that companies will increasingly pick Rust as a default language for infrastructure projects. He says the last few years have been the "awkward teenage years" where more people are paying attention to it and starting to learn it. Now, Rust is in the middle of a "growth spurt."

"It's easy to use, extremely well put-together, the community is engaging and very easy to participate in, and you have all the needs of documentation that makes for a very good developer experience," Ulander said. "That's usually the biggest challenge. Rust gives them that sense of security and fun."

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Netflix's "Lucifer" is back on the audience demand charts this week.

The streaming giant had renewed the series for a fifth and final season, but TV Line reported this week that star Tom Ellis has signed a new deal that could lead to a sixth season.

Every week, Parrot Analytics provides Business Insider with a list of the nine most in-demand TV shows on streaming services in the US.

The data is based on "demand expressions," Parrot Analytics' globally standardized TV-demand measurement unit. Audience demand reflects the desire, engagement, and viewership weighted by importance. The list is ranked by how much more in demand the top series are than the average TV show in the US.

Below are this week's nine most popular original shows on Netflix and other streaming services:

Some programming languages are known to cause massive headaches for developers.

Sometimes it's because these languages hard to learn. Sometimes it's because they're older and more likely to have bugs in the code, or even crash. Or sometimes, writing in a certain language is simply frustrating. 

Stack Overflow, a Q&A site for developers with 50 million unique monthly visitors, is especially well-positioned to identify the top languages that developers are coding in. Last week, it released its annual survey where it asked over 65,000 developers about themselves and their programming habits. That included the languages they love the most, and the languages they dread.

To find out the "most dreaded" languages, Stack Overflow asked developers what language they use, but have no interest in continuing to use. 

Sadly for many developers with headaches, some of their most dreaded languages are also the most popular in terms of how widely they are used.

Notably, this survey was conducted in February, before the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak to be a pandemic. Different routines and challenges around remote work may have affected developers' choices, but we'll just have to wait until the next survey to see how, if at all. 

For now, here are the "most dreaded" programming languages, according to Stack Overflow, in descending order. You'll find the top source of dread at the bottom of the list.

Thousands of Americans are protesting police brutality and systemic racism across the nation following the police killing of Minneapolis resident George Floyd.

Of the precautions that protesters should consider to stay safe is how to prepare for your phone being broken or lost. It could also be confiscated by authorities, who could then potentially access information about you and those you communicate with. Scores of data are located in the apps on your phone, and your smartphone can also be used as a tracking device.

All of which is to say safeguarding your phone against external forces might be a good step to take before attending a protest.

Here's how to prep your phone before joining a demonstration.

1. Leave your phone at home if you can.

As Vice reports, perhaps one of the most surefire ways to prevent your phone from falling into the hands of someone you don't want it to is to participate in the protest without it.

You can instead coordinate with others by word of mouth. Establish meeting places and contingency plans for regrouping in case the crowd is dispersed and you lose track of each other. Familiarize yourself with the city grid and streets. 

You could also buy a burner phone to use solely for the demonstration, The Verge reports. They expire after a certain number of days and can cost anywhere between $1 and $100 — Digital Camera World rounded up some in February.

2. If you do take your phone, back up your photos, contact numbers, and other data beforehand.

Losing or breaking your phone could mean thousands of photos, notes, and other data could be lost. Consider backing up your phone's contents to a computer or to the cloud, according to Gizmodo.

As PC Mag notes, you can also temporarily delete apps from your phone and then reinstall them at a later date.

3. Encrypt your phone.

By using an encryption key, or password, to unlock your phone, you're creating a barrier between your phone data and anyone that could potentially take advantage of it.

For iPhone users, if you use a passcode to get into your device, then you're set — it's already encrypted.

4. But consider relying on a password to unlock your phone instead of a fingerprint or facial recognition.

If law enforcement asks you to punch in your password to unlock your phone, you retain your Fifth Amendment right to refuse, as Gizmodo reports.

But biometric methods, such as unlocking with your fingerprint or face scan, aren't as protected in case you're taken into police custody. Officers could still potentially hold your phone up to your face or press your finger to the device to unlock it.

Consider deactivating Face ID and use a strong password instead. 

5. Consider disabling WiFi, Bluetooth, and location services on your phone.

These functions can track your location, a feat that some companies and brands are able to take advantage of for advertising purposes, according to Consumer Reports.

If you don't need Wifi, GPS, or Bluetooth, you can switch them off to prevent your exact location from being monitored. As CR notes, some smartphones are designed to switch these settings back on by default, so be sure to keep tabs on whether or not they stay disabled.

You can read how to stop your iPhone from tracking your location here.

You can also put your phone in Airplane Mode to prevent tracking, which shuts off WiFi, Bluetooth, and cell data in one fell swoop. As The Verge notes, doing so prevents cellphone carriers from communicating with cell towers to locate you. It also shields against stingray attacks, which is when a device masquerades as a cell tower to connect and gain access to phone data. In 2018, the American Civil Liberties Union found 75 law enforcement agencies across 27 states in the US that owned these types of tools, as The Markup notes.

But Airplane Mode differs depending on what phone you have, so disabling it isn't always an airtight solution.

You can also simply turn your phone off and only use it when you need it. But that can make it more difficult to quickly take photos, record videos, or be able to quickly make an urgent call. 

6. Use anonymous messaging apps to communicate.

Phone message encryption has its limits, such as in the case of an iPhone user messaging with an Android user — the text automatically converts to SMS, which isn't encrypted. So experts have recommended using secure chat apps such as Signal or WhatsApp, according to The Markup.

Signal has seen a spike in user downloads as protests have been held across the US.

As Consumer Reports notes, the app provides a setting that deletes messages soon after the recipient reads it, which can help protect both parties on either end of the conversation in the event that one of them loses their phone.

7. You should also disable notifications.

If you don't do so, and your phone is lost or confiscated, others may be privy to the messages and alerts that appear on your home screen, as The Markup points out.

You'd be protecting both you and the people sending you messages by preventing their texts from appearing.

A renowned Silicon Valley futurist says Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's refusal to take any kind of action on President Donald Trump's aggressive posts is an omen of the decline of the iconic social network.

Paul Saffo, the veteran forecaster who has predicted major tech trends over the past three decades, said Zuckerberg's refusal to flag or delete Trump comments that many — including some of the social network's own employees — feel were inciting violence towards protesters has caused serious harm to the 16-year-old company. Facebook could not be reached for comment.

Saffo is well-known for predicting major trends in technology, including the expanded role of sensors and robotics, and the  transformation of the global economy. He predicted the rise of a world dominated by a company like Facebook. In 1994, a decade before the social network was born, he described a future dominated by "those who control the filtering, searching and sense-making tools we will rely on to navigate through the banal expanses of cyberspace."

Facebook quickly emerged as the dominant social media platform and a tech powerhouse now worth $645 billion. But the social network also became controversial as a massive platform notorious for spreading hate speech and misinformation.

Saffo compared Facebook to AOL. the once dominant portal at the dawn of the Internet age in the 1990s whose influence and reach subsequently shrank as it was overtaken by new players including Google and Facebook.

"This is Facebook's AOL moment," Saffo told Business Insider. "Its forward advance is going to be stalled."

'It's a complete mystery to me that he would do that'

President Donald Trump is better-known for his use of Twitter, though his tweets there are usually also posted on his official Facebook page. Twitter, however, recently began fact-checking some of the president's posts. That prompted Trump to issue an executive order intended to crack down on social networks.

Zuckerberg appeared to take Trump's side, slamming Twitter's decision and saying "that Facebook or internet platforms in general shouldn't be arbiters of truth."

That triggered a wave of criticism against Zuckerberg. "It's a complete mystery to me that he would do that," Saffo said. "It just totally puzzles me."

The controversy escalated on May 28th, when Twitter placed a label on a Trump tweet that threatened violence against George Floyd protesters in Minneapolis, requiring users to click through a warning that it was "glorifying violence" before viewing the post.

Facebook chose to leave the post alone entirely, prompting a backlash that included a virtual employee walkout. Late on Friday evening, Zuckerberg pledged to revisit Facebook's rules on posts related to state violence.

'We're right on the cusp'

This all comes amid growing worries about Facebook's role in the spread of misinformation and hateful content, and its impact on democracy in the US and other countries.  Last year, cofounder Chris Hughes said Facebook should be broken up as he criticized Zuckerberg's "unprecedented and un-American power."

Facebook, which now has 2.6 billion users, continues to expand although the pace of growth has slowed. Saffo says Facebook is wrestling with mounting criticism as new social platforms and technologies are emerging.

"We're right on the cusp," he said. "The current social media order is more or less 20 years old and we change social media about every 20 years."

Saffo predicts the rise of new immersive platforms based on virtual reality technologies. Facebook is pushing into that market with Oculus, its suite of virtual reality hardware and software products.

But Saffo said he doesn't see Facebook, given its internal turmoil and the controversial policies Zuckerberg has embraced, leading that trend.

"Can a company like Facebook cross over into that world?" he said. "I think the answer's no." He added: "I would say Facebook is going to start down the path of AOL, a long slow slide into oblivion."

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Yinka is a founding member of UK Black Tech and a director at Calla Success Systems. 

I feel the way many black people feel today – and have felt many times before, with the harrowing and traumatic deaths of so many posthumously famous black men and women in the US and the UK.

It's enraging and it's exhausting – but I reserve both my rage and energy for action, as that is the only way to make a difference.

The reaction to a police officer – a public servant appointed to protect and serve the public, treating anyone the way George Floyd was treated should be the same for all: one rooted in decency and basic humanity.

The murder and abuse of power should be a source of outrage for everyone, not just the "black community".

I don't think this will be a turning point in the way black communities are treated, because we've been here before.

Black men have been vilified, abused, killed, and murdered by the police before. Those killings have been documented and publicized before, those killings have sparked riots before – and we've had many long conversations about race before.

Hundreds of books and thousands of articles have been written, FAQs typed up, Lunch-and-Learns attended. Brands and politicians like to say: "We're listening."

My skepticism makes me ask: "How is this different?" All these things happened before, and it's happened again. So the event itself won't bring the change, but the follow-up actions will.

There is still such a stark level of ignorance about what racism is – and how it looks on a daily basis – that people will deny others' lived experiences.

Instead, people try to look like they are learning and changing, when in reality, it's worthless. This virtue signalling is almost mandatory to save face and ensure they look like they're on the right side of the debate.

Many of these organizations hide their own toxic cultures, in which staff are terrorized through both covert and daily acts of racism, often dismissed as banter, or rejected when it's reported through the official channels.

What happens next will ultimately determine what changes, and that comes from some harsh truths being understood on all sides. No "white saviors" are needed here: No collective group of people would knowingly dismantle a system designed to favor them.

We need partners to work across society, and that's not the job of a few tweets and black squares, it's a much tougher job than many are prepared to take on. Change itself will not come from outside of our community – but from within.

Because the fact is that racism happens every day. It happens when young black boys are called 'youths' or described as being in 'gangs' when they are standing outside their school in their uniform talking to their friends.

It happens when black people are paid 60p for every £1 paid to white counterparts. It happens when black professionals are constantly called upon to talk about diversity instead of their area of career expertise or study, often when their white counterparts have already been paid in full.

I've experienced it innumerable times. It's been overt, it's been covert, It's been called out, it's been ignored. It's been fought, and I've won and lost. I have one life to live, and I am focused on doing the best for me and my family – and impacting upon what I can control, and no more. 

But the change in this situation begins with the realization that co-ordinated and systemic changes will only come from black economic empowerment, at all levels.

And, most importantly – to quote Bob Marley – wth the emancipation from mental slavery.

Education is critical: The truth about Empire, about white supremacy, and about the history of black peoples, so they can know they are descendants of greatness, not just slavery and trauma.

They need to be taught how the levers of power work, and the importance of economic and financial empowerment. Only through education will change come, and the inequalities that underpin these situations begin to be addressed.

It is up to us to make the changes we want to see.

I'm optimistic that change will come, at least in my slice of the world, because I know it starts with me, and I'm committed to doing my part.

LinkedIn's new CEO apologized to employees after the company allowed a meeting to address protests across the United States over police brutality and systemic racism prompted by the death of George Floyd to be taken over by "appalling," anonymous employee comments.

"We are not and will not be a company or platform where racism or hateful speech is allowed," he said.

Ryan Roslansky replaced Jeff Weiner as LinkedIn's CEO on Monday. On Wednesday, LinkedIn held a town hall meeting to discuss racial inequality and biases. During the meeting, first reported by the Daily Beast, staffers criticised the protests and LinkedIn's efforts to diversity its workforce by posting anonymous messages into the event's chat window.

"As a non-minority, all this talk makes me feel like I am supposed to feel guilty of my skin color. I feel like I should let someone less qualified fill my position," one anonymous staffer commented, per the Daily Beast. "I believe giving any racial group privilege over others in a zero sum game would not get any support by others. Any thoughts on hurting others while giving privileges with the rosy name called diversity?" another reportedly said.

Other LinkedIn staffers were outraged, according to the Daily Beast, and called the comments "disturbing and racist."

Roslansky said in his LinkedIn post that the comments evaded notice during the event because "those of us in presenter mode weren't able to track the comments in real time." The company will not allow anonymous comments at such events in the future, he said.

LinkedIn released a report last year showing just 3.5 percent of its workforce was Black, compared to 47.5 percent white, 40.3 percent Asian, and 5.9 percent Latino. Just 1 percent of the company's leadership was Black at the time. Rosanna Durruthy, LinkedIn's vice president of global diversity, inclusion, and belonging, at the time said hiring a diverse workforce was the company's No. 1 "talent priority."

"Many of you shared the hardest part was realizing that this company we love and hold to such a high standard still has a lot of work to do to educate ourselves and our colleagues on how to create a culture that is truly anti-racist," Roslansky said. "We will do that work."

LinkedIn declined to comment beyond the contents of Roslansky's post.

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As Apple employees gradually begin returning to the office, they'll have the option to receive COVID-19 nasal swab tests when they show up for work, Bloomberg reported on Thursday.

The company will also require that employees have their temperature checked upon arrival, wear masks, and limit their numbers in confined places like elevators, according to Bloomberg. Apple will also make modifications to its headquarters in Cupertino, California, like keeping break-room kitchens closed and reconfiguring open-office floor plans.

Apple, which was one of the first major tech companies to halt employee travel and close retail stores as the coronavirus began to spread outside of China earlier this year, has also been one of the first to start bringing employees back into the office.

In mid-May, Bloomberg reported that Apple began a phased return-to-work approach, initially allowing some hardware and software engineers to resume working out of its headquarters several days per week.

Apple, with a focus on building hardware and a secretive culture that has reportedly made it difficult for employees to work remotely, has taken a starkly different approach than rivals like Google and Facebook, which are allowing their employees to work remote until the end of 2020 (or even indefinitely if they choose, in Facebook's case).

Other companies that are charting more aggressive timelines, including Amazon, have also started building up capacity to test employees. CEO Jeff Bezos told shareholders in April that the company is aiming to test all employees, and Business Insider reported in May that the company has begun a pilot program for warehouse workers.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment on this story. 

After being crushed by the coronavirus crisis, the short-term rental market is bouncing back. But that's not necessarily good news for market leader Airbnb.

Much of the pick-up in activity is coming from vacation destinations within driving distances of major cities, Scott Shatford, CEO of AirDNA, an industry research firm, told Business Insider. Those kinds of areas have long been a stronghold of VRBO, Airbnb's chief rival, he said. By contrast, Airbnb's stronghold is in cities, which are not seeing nearly as much of an uptick in reservations, he said.

"It's just in the nature of who's booking travel," said Shatford. "I think VRBO, through this summer," he continued, "will perform better than Airbnb."

With states and countries lifting their coronavirus-related restrictions, people around the world are beginning to travel more and plan for future vacations.

AirDNA reported last week that consumers worldwide made 2.1 million short-term rental bookings the week of May 18, which was up 127% from the nadir when the coronavirus crisis was raging at its worst. Some countries, including the United States, have even started to see booking reach levels that exceed what they were prior to the onset of the pandemic.

But the rebound is uneven. Bookings are skyrocketing in places such as Big Bear Lake, outside of Los Angeles; South Padre Island, Texas; and North Carolina's Carolina Beach. In each of those destinations, reservations were up more than 1,000% from the low point in April.

Big cities are seeing only a limited rebound

By contrast, big cities are seeing much more modest increases in bookings. New York was up only 40% from the April bottom. And San Francisco was up by less than 50%. And that was before widespread protests erupted im cities across the country, often resulting in government-imposed curfews.

The week of April 5, New York City saw 2,812 short-term rental bookings, according to AirDNA. That was more than three times the numbers seen in Gulf Shores, Alabama, that week, and more than five times that in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. But the week of May 18, both of those picturesque places saw at least 800 more bookings than the Big Apple did.

People who are going to those vacation destinations are typically older and looking for bigger places to rent, such as four-bedroom houses, Shatford said. Those kinds of spaces are right in VRBO's wheelhouse, but not in Airbnb's, he said.

"VRBO's always been this traditional leisure market," Shatford said. He continued: "That's where they started and that's where they still have ... dominance, in terms of that supply. And obviously, that supply has done better. That's what people are choosing."

Airbnb has already taken a big hit to its business. Company CEO Brian Chesky said last month he expects revenue to be down more than 50% from last year due to the pandemic. In response to its troubles, the company cut 25% of its workforce, laid off most of its contractors, and has slashed other expenses. It has also raised $2 billion in debt since the crisis began.

Airbnb's prospects are likely brighter in the longer term, Shatford said.

Airbnb will likely benefit from being guest-friendly

During and in the wake of the coronavirus crisis, people have been leaving big cities for health or safety reasons. There are indications that housing demand is falling in places like New York and San Francisco.

While people may again resume traveling to such cities, they're likely to want to stay on the fringes of those places, outside of their dense urban cores, Shatford said. It's in such places where hotels can be hard to come by that short-term rental accommodations of flourished, he said.

Meanwhile, the differing ways Airbnb and VRBO handled cancellations during the coronavirus crisis is likely to benefit the former, Shatford said. Both companies allow the property managers who use their services to set their own cancellation terms. But during the pandemic, Airbnb has allowed many travelers to cancel their bookings and get a full refund, regardless of what the host's policies would have provided. VRBO, by contrast, has stuck by its hosts, many of whom have refused to offer full refunds.

Some hosts have threatened to abandon Airbnb because it overrode their cancellation policies. But that same move likely earned the company the loyalty of travelers, Shatford said.

"I'm still am of this belief ... that guest loyalty will win this in the long run," he said.

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Andreessen Horowitz partner Naithan Jones took to Twitter to address a series of criticisms that have cropped up against the elite venture capital firm's new nonprofit 'Talent x Opportunity' fund, which was announced on Wednesday. 

"I want to clear up some misconceptions about TxO," Jones began, in the first of a 13-tweet-long thread. "A lot of the things being spread are only half truths with the blanks filled in the most cynical way possible. They are becoming accepted myths which could damper donations." 

The TxO fund's announcement made waves on Wednesday, as some entrepreneurs and VCs responded to the announcement with applause. Others criticized the fund's nonprofit structure, and the fact that it was kicking off with just $2.2 million in partner donations, an amount that pales in comparison to Andreessen Horowitz's total $12 billion in assets under management. 

Jones, who first began by responding to individual Twitter criticisms, told critics that he was responsible for the fund's donor advisory structure, and defended it as a way for "everyone from the community to be investors and entrepreneurs." He also said the structure would allow the nonprofit Tide, which will manage the fund, to hold Andreessen Horowitz accountable for the criteria around which it could invest in founders. 

"In this case we can decentralize the control of both the incentives and the oversight of money portion of this," Jones said. 

The fund's nonprofit status has been controversial, especially as it plays into the fund's relatively small starting size of $2.2 million — less than many of the firm's investments in individual startups like Clubhouse.

In a podcast on Thursday, Backstage Capital founder Arlan Hamilton addressed both SoftBank's $100 million fund and Andreessen Horowitz's nonprofit fund, noting that they were off to a good start but both firms — as well as a number of other firms in the industry — had the resources to do more.

"You owe black funders an apology. The billions and billions and billions of dollars under management that goes to other white men for over 75 years. You owe us an apology," Hamilton said. "I will not apologize for being offended and insulted by these people who have gotten and taken everything by way of economics from black and brown bodies, and then give us crumbs for a headline." 

Jones didn't directly address that critique in his thread, but noted that the fund's starting amount — all "generously awarded" donations from the fund's partners — had grown. A commitment from Ben and Felicia Horowitz to match donations of up to $5 million had allowed the fund to multiply in size, Jones said. 

To critics who noted that dedicating a separate fund for underserved founders was one way to give rejected founders "a side door" rather than opening up regular access to Silicon Valley's circles, Jones said that they were wrong. 

"This is not a program to lower the bar for who gets a check from us or a side door after rejection from the front door. ...It's a training program and fund for those talented people we would NEVER see without this program in the first place." he tweeted.

Founders provided with the firm's 10 month training program and Andreessen Horowitz's network would then be able to deliver "the same returns as the people from elite schools," Jones added, stressing, "THIS IS NOT A CHARITY."

Amazon Web Services and Slack announced on Thursday a partnership to use Amazon infrastructure for Slack tools including audio, video, and screensharing. As part of the deal, Amazon will start rolling out Slack to its employees, and Slack for the first time publicly proclaimed AWS as its "preferred cloud provider."

Securities filings reveal Slack upped its commitment to AWS to $425 million from $250 million. The company's annual committment to AWS increased to $75 million from $50 million and will increase by $5 million every year until 2025.

"We're both the innovators and leaders of our respective areas coming together," Slack's business development chief Brad Armstrong told Business Insider, adding that the partnership "illustrates the fallacy of the argument that only an integrated solution can come from a monolithic vendor that's providing all things. We are the best at what we do."

AWS and Slack said the partnership is not targeted at competing with any company in particular, but Armstrong's comments appear to refer to what's often said to be an advantage of Microsoft's chat and collaboration app Teams — which integrates tightly with Office 365, Microsoft's suite of ubiquitous business apps.

Microsoft recently said Teams has reached 75 million daily active users, up from 44 million in mid-March.

The partnership also comes after Zoom teamed up with Oracle to support a surge in users during the pandemic, although AWS CEO Andy Jassy during a recent virtual speech made sure to clarify "the vast majority of Zoom's cloud infrastructure runs on AWS and it will for foreseeable future."

Slack and AWS have worked together for years, but Armstrong said this is the first time Slack has made a public statement to "reveal we are designating AWS as our cloud provider."

Slack has relied on its own technology to power voice and video calls from within its app, but by its own admission falls short of the standards in teleconferencing set by apps like Microsoft Teams or Zoom.

Amazon has its own, lesser-known online meeting, videoconferencing, and chat app called Chime. As part of the deal, Slack will use the software development kit from Chime to power its audio, video, and screensharing capabilities in Slack calls. 

Analysts have also suggested that Amazon could turn to acquisitions to bolster its efforts in the collaboration space — and have named Slack as one of its most likely targets, should it go that route.

While Chime doesn't appear to be as widely used as Slack or Teams, the partnership shows interest in Chime as a developer service. Market share information isn't available for Chime, but as one analyst recently told Business Insider: "I cannot recall attending a Chime meeting that wasn't related to or hosted by Amazon."

Eron Kelly, general manager of AWS compute infrastructure and applications, told Business Insider that Chime will still be available to end users, but that Amazon has in the past six months seen a lot of interest in Chime's software development kit.

"Customers are really interested in taking advantage of the scale, reach, reliability that the AWS platform can provide, not only for compute, storage, and database services, but also for video and voice services," Kelly said. "We are seeing people want to have collaborative experiences like voice and video in the context of the work they are doing."

Amazon will start rolling out Slack to its employees. Kelly said, "We are now making it available as part of this partnership and we will be able to roll it out across the company but it's early stages."

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As protests against racism and police violence spread throughout the US, interest in TV shows that focus on race, such as Netflix's "When They See Us" and "Dear White People," has increased.

Every week, data company Parrot Analytics provides Business Insider with the top streaming originals that have seen the biggest week-over-week increase in audience demand in the US. Parrot Analytics measures demand expressions, its global TV measurement standard that reflects the desires, engagement, and viewership of a series, weighted by importance.

This week measured the increase in demand from the week of May 20 to 26 to the week of May 27 to June 2. These aren't necessarily the most popular titles in the US, but they are the ones gaining the most momentum among audiences.

HBO Max, which launched last week, has three shows on the list: the animated "Looney Tunes Cartoons," the third season of "Search Party," and "Legendary."

Below are the top 8 streaming original TV shows on the rise this week:

Against the backdrop of protests against racism and police brutality erupting across the country, Andreessen Horowitz has announced that it is launching a new nonprofit fund to invest in founders from underserved backgrounds. 

The Talent x Opportunity fund, which has already raised $2.2 million in donations from firm partners, plans to invest seed money into businesses selling both tech and non-tech products. Investment returns will all go back into the fund, to feed the next generation of startups, according to a blog post published by the firm. 

"We are looking for entrepreneurs who did not have access to the fast track in life but who have great potential. Their products can be non-tech or tech; they should be from underserved communities (all backgrounds welcome); and ideally, their business will have an interesting model, niche market, and/or a little traction to indicate the promise and potential," the firm said. 

Silicon Valley's venture capital industry has long been criticized for its approach to increasing diversity in both its investments and its workforce. Standard practices like scouting startups from a known network of elite institutions (an Ivy League education, or experience at a big tech firm like Apple or Google) have made it difficult for some startup founders to get an audience with Silicon Valley's blue-chip firms.

The new fund aims to crush those barriers for founders struggling to be seen. It's being spearheaded by Naithan Jones, a firm partner who broke into Silicon Valley's elite circles as a British-born Kansas-raised startup founder. Jones has previously written about how he got a foothold in venture capital as an "outsider" with no college degree, and stressed the need to recruit others from unique backgrounds. 

In addition to seed capital provided by the firm, Andreessen Horowitz said that it hoped to provide founders with the blue-chip firm's vast network, and give them the chance to get further funding like "an accelerator for the unseen."

The firm has said that it is not only open to outside donations to the fund, but that founding partner Ben Horowitz and his wife Felicia will devote $5 million to matching donations. The fund will also accept donations issued in cryptocurrency, Jones added in a tweet. 

The recent calls for racial justice in the country have put the spotlight on venture firms announcing commitments to growing diversity or announcing new initiatives. On the same day as Andreessen Horowitz's announcement, Japanese tech conglomerate SoftBank announced that it was launching a new $100 million fund to invest in companies led by black Americans and people of color.

Although SoftBank's fund is significantly larger than the Talent x Opportunity fund, Andreessen Horowitz also has other ongoing efforts to increase diversity within tech. The firm's Cultural Leadership fund, launched two years ago, sets out to increase diversity in tech by donating all its management fees and carried interest into non-profits dedicated to increasing diversity in technology. 

The Silicon Valley blue-chip firm's broader focus on drawing out founders from non-traditional backgrounds may also make it different from some of its peers' efforts. Jones has sent out a call for word about "founders of young companies you likely would not see in Silicon Valley" and asked people to sign up on a Google form. 

"Our firm culture is based on the idea that words by themselves are empty," the firm wrote, perhaps in a veiled reference to recent criticism that the firm had not immediately issued a statement in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. 

"We're venture capitalists, not activists," the firm added in the post. "We support the amazing work that people are doing to fix policing specifically... but our direct contribution will be doing what we do best: To help entrepreneurs be better entrepreneurs, so they can build great businesses that in turn create jobs and value for others."

Facebook has started to apply labels to state-run media outlets — news publishers it deems "wholly or partially under the editorial control of their government" — the company said in a blog post Thursday. 

"We believe people should know if the news they read is coming from a publication that may be under the influence of a government," the company said, "because they combine the influence of a media organization with the strategic backing of a state."

Facebook originally announced its plans to identify state-run media back in October 2019, but offered more details about its policy Thursday.

The company it had officially begun the process of adding the labels, which will start appearing this week in its "Ad Library Page view, on Pages, and in the Page Transparency section" for all users and on News Feed posts for US users. 

Facebook's criteria for determining whether a media outlet is state-run will include: the outlet's mission statement, whether its owners or leaders are government officials or appointees, its editorial guidelines, information about the outlet's staff, funding sources, accountability mechanisms, and country-specific factors like press freedom.

Publishers are allowed to appeal Facebook's decision, but the company said they'll need to point to laws, internal processes, or external assessments from a credible, independent organization that demonstrate their editorial independence.

Facebook also said Thursday that, starting later this summer, state-run media outlets will be blocked from running ads in the US.

While such publishers rarely advertise in the US, the company said the decision was made "out of an abundance of caution to provide an extra layer of protection against various types of foreign influence in the public debate ahead of the November 2020 election in the US."

Facebook has faced pushback for its policy around political ads, which bans profanity but exempts them from its third-party fact-checking program, and the company has long been criticized for its role in allowing misinformation to spread ahead of the 2016 election. 

In January, Facebook announced a tool that reduced the level of precision with which advertisers can target users, and also put the burden on users to tell the company if they want to see fewer political ads. More recently, Facebook has become embroiled in controversy after its decision not to take any action against posts by President Trump that spread false information about voting by mail and warned of "shooting" protesters.

The credit- and loan-management startup Credit Sesame laid off nearly 14% of its workforce on Wednesday as some fintech startups begin to stumble amid the coronavirus pandemic. 

The Mountain View, California, company confirmed that it cut 22 out of 160 employees in a statement to Business Insider. It also said that restrictions from credit suppliers amid the pandemic had squeezed its credit business, which allows customers to monitor credit scores.

"Due to restrictions by our credit suppliers as a result of COVID-19 and the effect it has had on our credit business, we made the decision to say goodbye to 22 of our 160 employees," a statement from Credit Sesame said. "This was an incredibly difficult decision for us, but one that was necessary to continue to serve our customers long term." 

Credit Sesame is a long-standing startup in the personal-finance space, competing alongside incumbents like Credit Karma and NerdWallet. It launched in 2010 with the goal of improving the financial health of its customers by helping them compare loans and keep track of credit scores. The company also issues recommendations for refinancing home mortgages. In addition, it launched a digital banking service in March that's focused on allowing customers to improve credit scores. 

The company has so far raised $135.4 million and counts Menlo Ventures and Capital One Ventures among its investors. Before the coronavirus pandemic hit the US, the startup said it planned to go public this year, TechCrunch reported.

Slack shares dropped up to over 17% after-hours Thursday as the company reported earnings that beat estimates but showed that it may not have benefited as much from the coronavirus-related remote work boom as Wall Street expected. 

Slack reported revenue of $201.7 million, which was above analyst expectations of $187 million. However, that represents only 50% growth from a year prior, barely above the 49% growth year-over-year that it saw in the previous two quarters. 

Analysts say it wasn't the blowout quarter they expected given how much Slack seemed to have benefitted from the world moving to remote work during the the quarter. Zoom, another company that has benefitted from the remote work boom, reported 169% revenue growth in its earnings on Tuesday and doubled its revenue guidance for the year.

"If Slack didn't grow exponentially during this period when will they?" said Dan Newman, an analyst at Futurum Research.

Rishi Jaluria, at D.A. Davidson agreed: "Stock has more than doubled since mid-March," he said, "While there's no doubt in my mind they're benefiting from WFH, it wasn't the blowout quarter that maybe others expected." 

Slack said it added 12,000 new paid customers in the quarter, which is more than double what it added in the previous two quarters. Earlier in the quarter CEO Stewart Butterfield said Slack had added more new paid customers halfway through the quarter as it had in the previous quarter.

It did not give an updated daily active user number, but said Slack has over 750,000 "organizations" on a free or paid subscription plan, which is an increase from 660,000 at the end of the previous quarter. Microsoft Teams, which is widely seen as Slack's biggest competitor has also grown in the last quarter, saying it reached 75 million daily active users in April. 

Here's what Slack reported:

Slack also withdrew guidance for calculated billings — a metric to project revenue growth — for the year. 

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