President Donald Trump says his administration was "looking at" antitrust proceedings against tech giants Amazon, Facebook, and Google.

In an interview with Axios' Jonathan Swan and Jim VandeHei on the news site's premiere HBO show Sunday night, Trump said the European Union's $5 billion fine against Google made him consider pursuing regulation.

"You look at the European Union, they fined I guess it was Google, billions of dollars, and frankly I don't like that they're doing that because that's an American company," Trump said. "I don't think it's good that they're doing that. But if anybody does that, it should be us doing it."

Swan asked if Trump would direct the Justice Department to look into the company as a monopoly, and Trump responded it was "certainly something we're looking at."

When asked if he would ever break the companies up, Trump said previous administrations had discussed it but the action never materialized.

"But you're in charge now," Swan interjected.

"I am definitely in charge, and we are certainly looking at it," Trump said, before clarifying he was talking about antitrust proceedings for all three companies.

Responsibility for such proceedings would fall to the Federal Trade Commission or the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division.

"That doesn't mean we're doing it, but we're certainly looking at it," Trump said. "I think most people surmised that."

Read more:It's become increasingly clear that Alphabet, Google's parent company, needs new leadership

These comments are the latest in Trump's public aims at the three tech giants, which he previously said could represent a "very antitrust situation."

Though he has called the companies "rigged" and warned Google specifically "better be careful," Trump has in the psat stopped short of commenting on breaking the companies up.

Year founded: 2003

Valuation: $9 billion

Amount raised: $910 million

Read more about Theranos on PitchBook.

Investors are betting big on companies that promise to fundamentally shake up TV advertising, and another startup just snagged a sizable round.

The TV-geared analytics and measurement company Edo has secured $12 million in series A funding, led by Breyer Capital. A handful of advertising players including Brian Sheth and Robert Smith (Vista Equity cofounders) and WGI Group (founded by Jonah Goodhart, Noah Goodhart, and Michael Walrath) also participated in the round.

The actor and filmmaker Edward Norton and Daniel Nadler founded Edo in 2015 to match up granular TV ratings with purchase-intent data through machine learning.

"We had seen that the legacy media companies were getting disrupted by Netflix and Amazon who were using organic data capabilities as significant advantages," Norton said. "At the same time networks were facing the assertion by Google and Facebook that digital advertising was more effective, and none of the legacy measurement players were really helping them challenge that with sophisticated data."

Edo's goal is to amass a huge library of data pulled from TV networks to help determine how likely someone is to buy a product after watching an ad, based on data about how similar ads have performed in the past.

The company claims to have a database with access to 47 million TV airings across 80 categories of advertising and 2,100 brands. Edo's clients include ESPN, Turner, NBCUniversal, Paramount, and Lionsgate.

Read more: Ad execs are deeply skeptical that TV measurement will ever catch up to digital — putting comScore and Nielsen on notice and billions on the line

"Our ultimate goal is to be an alternative currency to the way that TV advertising is bought and sold," Edo CEO Kevin Krim said. "We can run very advanced data-science models to develop expected norms of responses," Krim said. In other words, Edo can construct a baseline estimate to compare an ad's performance with.

According to Krim, after marketers run a few dozen airings of an ad, Edo can analyze how that piece of creative compares against its database and can determine whether it is overperforming or underperforming.

Movie marketers run lots of ads without a lot of data behind them

Film studios are an example of an entity that could benefit from measurement like Edo's. Movie marketers spend millions of dollars blasting commercials across multiple networks leading up to a film premiere.

"A Star Is Born" had a massive ad campaign behind it. Warner Bros

According to Krim, a movie marketer can run 4,000 to 6,000 TV ads weeks before a film premieres with dozens of creatives. Edo scores each of those ads to determine which creative and networks are most likely to increase the chance that a person will buy a movie ticket.

"They're a real crucible of invention because they have to deliver millions of consumers [to a movie theater] on a single weekend or their product will be an economic failure," Krim said.

Or take the example of an automaker launching a campaign for an SUV for the first time. Edo can dig through data to understand what types of creative and placements have worked well in the past for other automakers.

The TV measurement industry is rapidly changing

Edo is one of a handful of tech companies eyeing the $70 billion TV industry. As more ad budgets get funneled to digital, marketers are increasingly looking to plug data and technology into their ad buys to serve targeted TV ads and then measure how effective they are in getting people to take an actions like buying something or visiting a website.

Firms like VideoAmp, iSpot, and Simulmedia are also all working to innovate in TV advertising. VideoAmp, for example, uses software to help brands determine how they should divvy up ad budgets between TV and digital. And Simulmedia rolled out a marketplace this week aimed at helping small, digital-first brands buy TV placements through automated software.

For Edo, the company wants to work with both buyers and sellers.

"We've done a ton of research that allows us to give very high-fidelity views into how every creative that a TV marketer has on-air is effective at driving consumers to be more likely to buy the products that are being advertised," Krim said.

You haven't seen the last of Falcon and Winter Soldier in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The two may have vanished at the end of "Avengers: Infinity War" from the Thanos snap, but lets be real: They're coming back. And when they do, they'll reportedly star in a limited series on Disney's upcoming streaming service that is expected to debut late next year.

According to Variety, "Empire" executive producer Malcolm Spellman will write the series featuring Anthony Mackie's Sam Wilson/Falcon and Sebastian Stan's Bucky Barnes/Winter Soldier.

Disney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This isn't the first potential series spinning off of the MCU. Variety reported in September that Disney is developing big-budget Marvel shows starring Tom Hiddleston's Loki, Elizabeth Olsen's Scarlet Witch, and more.

READ MORE: Hulk actor Mark Ruffalo may have revealed the title of 'Avengers 4' in a censored interview

Just as the Loki and Scarlet Witch shows could raise questions about the future of the MCU, so too does this potential Falcon/Winter Soldier series. In both the comics and MCU, the two are Steve Rogers/Captain America's best friends, so it's intriguing that they would get paired together considering what Captain America's fate could be in next year's "Avengers 4."

Actor Chris Evans recently said goodbye to the role in a heartfelt message on Twitter after the movie wrapped filming, signaling that he is retiring from the franchise.

"Officially wrapped on Avengers 4," he said. "It was an emotional day to say the least. Playing this role over the last 8 years has been an honor. To everyone in front of the camera, behind the camera, and in the audience, thank you for the memories! Eternally grateful."

It fueled further speculation that Captain America will meet his end in "Avengers 4." The character briefly dies in the comics after the "Civil War" comic event, and Barnes takes his place as Captain America. More recently, Wilson took on the role as Captain America in the comics.

A series starring both of them could be a somber one if Captain America does actually die in "Avengers 4," as the two would be reeling from his death and grappling with their roles as superheroes going forward.

When Bob Muglia joined enterprise-technology company Snowflake Computing in 2014, the company was a small, 30-person startup that had yet to bring in its first dollar of revenue.

Four years later, Muglia, who became the company's CEO after working nearly two decades at Microsoft, has helped build Snowflake Computing into a multibillion-dollar enterprise with 650 employees and customers like Netflix, Adobe, and DoorDash.

Just last week, the company, which offers a cloud-based database to store software information, announced the closing of a $450 million funding round from investors including Sequoia Capital, Altimeter Capital, and Capital One. Its new valuation? $3.5 billion.

In an interview with Business Insider, Muglia said that Snowflake's success isn't what he would describe as a turnaround story.

"We've always been consistent," he said. "Since the very first day Snowflake was founded, we've been able to ride up a straight line."

The company's steady progression can be attributed largely to its underlying values, which Muglia said were instituted in a collaborative process early on.

"Our values come from our people, not from our founders," he said. "Really, they come from all of us."

In the company's first years, Muglia and Snowflake's founding team encouraged employees to contribute to an ongoing discussion regarding what they believed should be the company's core values.

After much deliberation, Snowflake settled on its primary beliefs: Put customers first, and value integrity.

"Our values are really straightforward," said Muglia. "Companies that have been around for a long time and understand the importance of putting the customer first are building on a solid foundation."

Muglia recalled a moment in recent memory when Snowflake's founding values clashed with its short-term profits. There'd been a error in the company's installment process for a client, and it wasn't clear who's fault it was. Over the course of several months, the error had racked up a growing sum of incremental costs, which now amounted to $350,000.

"There was a big debate over what we should do about that," said Muglia. "Ultimately, we absorbed the costs. We decided to put the customer first. It builds goodwill. Now, this customer is talking about this experience and how Snowflake resolved it."

While not everyone at Snowflake agreed with how the company handled the situation, Muglia said that any disagreements were resolved by referring to the company's fundamental value: put customers first.

In moments like these, Muglia said that it helps to think big picture and have a set of values to fall back on.

"In the end, that customer has the potential to be much a bigger benefit when you absolve these sort of costs short term," he said.

It's the steady adherence to these values that's paved the way for Snowflake's exponential growth, Muglia said.

"But this is only the beginning," said Muglia, who added that the company is considering going public in 2020. "We've had incredible, successful customers, and we're only just starting out."

Since journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed inside a Saudi Arabian consulate in early October, there's been increased scrutiny surrounding SoftBank's $92 billion Vision Fund which counts Saudi Arabia's crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, as its single largest contributor.

This has sparked a debate among tech investors about whether or not the identities of their funds' contributors should be disclosed to the companies they benefit. Typically, venture firms provide limited partner agreements which stipulate that they won't reveal the identity of their investors, who are known as "limited partners" or "LPs." In the majority of agreements, both the names and the size of the endowments the LPs contribute to the venture fund are treated as confidential.

It's unusual that a startup's founders would have a complete understanding of where the money that funded their company comes from, or that they would ask about the identities of a fund's limited partners, even after the checks are written.

On Sunday, prominent venture capitalist Fred Wilson wrote in a blogpost that, in nearly three decades of investing, he could not recall a single time an entrepreneur had asked him to reveal who his fund's limited partners were until last week, when a founder sent him an email which read: "I need to know if any of your LPs include...entities/interests."

Similarly, former Lightspeed general partner John Vrionis, tells Business Insider that in his ten years of investing experience, entrepreneurs seldom, if ever, inquired about where Lightspeed's funding came from. "They never asked," Vrionis said. "Entrepreneurs absolutely never asked who our investors were."

But now, with Softbank's funding causing the tech industry to carefully consider where it gets its money, investors say the conversation is changing.

"I expect to get more emails like this in the coming weeks as the startup and venture community comes to grip with the flood of money from bad actors that has found its way into the startup/tech sector over the last decade," wrote Wilson.

Jyoti Bansal and John Vrionis, who founded the early stage fund Unusual Ventures, say that entrepreneurs should ask their investors hard questions about who their limited partners are. Unusual Ventures

Vrionis, who recently founded a new fund, Unusual Ventures, along with serial entrepreneur Jyoti Bansal, said that he expects the conversation to shift course in the upcoming years.

"Entrepreneurs should absolutely ask where their money is coming from," he said. "They should know who their business is benefitting."

Vrionis's co-founder Jyoti Bansal said he believes that venture funds should provide greater transparency when it comes to disclosing their investors.

"Look at what's happened over the past year," said Bansal. "Look at how the conversation about diversity in venture capital has started. Now, people are saying, 'Let's look at the LPs. Is their money coming from Russian oligarchs that don't align with our values? Let's look for LPs who are aligned with our values.'"

At Unusual Ventures,Vrionis said that they'd made an intentional choice to disclose the identity of their limited partners from the get-go: some of the fund's investors' names are prominently displayed in the firms various conference rooms, and both Bansal and Vrionis said they encourage their entrepreneurs to ask questions about the fund's limited partners.

The best founders are picky when it comes to securing funding, and aren't afraid to ask tough questions, said Vrionis. "People are sanctimonious but hypocritical," said Vrionis. "To say you are mission driven but not to care that there are are human rights violations happening within the country that gave money to the fund that invested in you...Really? It's convenient to look the other way."

He continued: "Silicon valley is probably the biggest wealth creator in the world. As VCs, we work for our LPs, and as entrepreneurs, we are working for our investors. I would want to know who I'm working for: Who are my investors? Do I want to give them part of the biggest share of wealth creation in the world?"

42 years after Orson Welles was finally finished with his movie, "The Other Side of the Wind" (which took him 6 years to complete principal photography on), Netflix will release it on its streaming service Friday.

For movie lovers, it's the ultimate "lost movie," a work that the iconic director toiled over until his death on October 5, 1985, but never completed. For Welles fans, it's a glimpse into the evolution of their maestro. He will always be known for making "Citizen Kane," which many still regard as the greatest movie ever made, yet with this movie he proved he could make something as edgy and forward-thinking as the up-and-comers of the era like Dennis Hopper, Francis Ford Coppola, and William Friedkin.

But for those who have spent years (and in some cases decades) trying to get Welles' final film to the public, this weekend marks the time they can finally take a giant exhale.

"I'm thrilled to be done," producer Frank Marshall (behind the Indiana Jones and "Jurassic Park" franchises) told Business Insider with a laugh. He was also a production manager on "The Other Side of the Wind" when he was 25.

"It was a long and tortured road, at times," producer Filip Jan Rymsza said looking back. He worked the last nine and a half years trying to settle the copyright issues surrounding the movie.

In many ways, the story of how "The Other Side of the Wind" finally made it to audiences is as epic as Welles' ambitions for the movie itself.

6 years of 'the poor man's process'

In 1970, Welles was back in Los Angeles after living in self-exile in Europe for more than a decade. Sensing the independent film wave that was building in America following the success of Dennis Hopper's "Easy Rider," Welles was ready for a comeback, and the project that would bring the auteur back into the zeitgeist would be the strangely titled "The Other Side of the Wind."

It's a tale that feels as if Welles bottled everything that happened to him in the latter half of his life and spilled it into a script — though he always claimed the movie wasn't autobiographical.

You can be the judge.

The movie follows the final day in the life of famed director Jake Hannaford (played by a famed director, John Huston). Celebrating his 70th birthday, Hannaford is trying to get the finishing funds to complete his comeback movie after being in Europe for years. Told mostly using handheld, faux-documentary footage (some in color, some in black-and-white), the bulk of the movie takes place at his birthday party, where Hannaford has brought financiers, critics, filmmakers, and film students to come and see the footage of his movie (which is shot on pristine high-quality film).

Welles cast the party with real film students, real filmmakers (Dennis Hopper, Henry Jaglom, and Paul Mazurksy all appear chatting about the craft), as well as his good friend and fellow filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich in the role of Brooks Otterlake, a rising-star director who owes his career to Hannaford. This very much mirrored the real-life relationship Welles had with Bogdanovich. In fact, during the making of the movie, Bogdanovich went and made "The Last Picture Show," which would give him auteur status like his mentor.

Oja Kodar in "The Other Side of the Wind." Netflix As depicted in Josh Karp's book, "Orson Welles's Last Movie: The Making of the Other Side of the Wind," the six-year process to make "The Other Side of the Wind" was filled with many starts and stops as Welles constantly was looking for enough money to continue shooting. The script was changed almost daily by Welles, location shoots were often done without proper permits (a lot of it was shot at Bogdanovich's home during the years Welles lived there), and scenes were pulled off in low-budget ways.

Read more: This book on iconic filmmaker Orson Welles looks at his infamous final movie

Take, for instance, one of the movie's most memorable scenes: the sex scene inside a car featuring Welles' collaborator and mistress Oja Kodar as the rain is pouring outside.

"It was the poor man's process," Marshall said of the scene, which he was on set for the shooting of. "We were just shaking the car to make it look like it was moving, would walk by with lights so it looked like cars were passing by, and had a garden hose for the rain."

With Welles pinching pennies to get the movie finished, it was impossible to fathom how he'd find the money for post production.

Let's make a deal

For years, Welles was very much like Hannaford, searching for deep pockets to finish his movie. Even when Welles was honored with the AFI Lifetime Achievement Award in 1975, a portion of his acceptance speech was him pitching "The Other Side of the Wind."

Sadly, by the time of his death, Welles only had a 40-minute cut of the movie to show for the six years of effort he put into making it. Left behind, along with the cut, were hours of footage, notes on how to shape it all into a feature film, and mass confusion about who really owned it all.

When Welles died in 1985, he left many of his assets to his estranged wife, Paola Mori, and following her death a year later, they were inherited by their daughter, Beatrice Welles. But Welles also left assets, like "The Other Side of the Wind" and other unfinished projects, to Kodar. Then there was a third party who claimed ownership, Mehdi Bushehri, the brother-in-law of the Shah of Iran.

In Welles' search for self financing on "The Other Side of the Wind," which gave him the artistic control he craved, the director found a French-based Iranian group headed by Bushehri. Through years of tension between Welles and Bushehri's company during production, things only got worse when funding became non-existent after the Shah was overthrown in 1979. However, Bushehri continued to have an ownership stake in the movie.

This was the mess Marshall found himself in starting in the 1990s, when he tried to help Bogdanovich and others finish what Welles started. Though there was the 40-minute Welles cut they could show potential investors, most of the movie was locked away in a Paris vault.

(L-R) Frank Marshall, Peter Bogdanovich, and Filip Jan Rymsza. Getty "I kept meeting with financiers — people from Canada, people from Europe, people from Malibu," Marshall said. "They all had an idea of how to do this and the more we talked about it the more riskier it got for them. And then they would not come back."

Then, when it seemed someone could pull it off and get the money needed, the three parties that needed to agree — Beatrice Welles, Oja Kodar, and Mehdi Bushehri — couldn't.

"Everyone wanted the film to be completed," Rymsza said, "they just wanted it done on their own terms. It was a minefield. And if you made an enemy with this group you made an enemy for life, so that was the tricky part."

And as more and more potential financiers went to the wayside, the legend of "The Other Side of the Wind" only grew.

While writing the book, Karp was told stories of footage from the movie having been seen all over the world. The movie's cinematographer, Gary Graver, kept footage of the movie in his refrigerator. Karp even remembers one of the directors who made a cameo in the movie, Paul Mazurksy, telling him that one day at a farmers' market someone walked up to him and whispered, "Hey, you ever seen 'The Other Side of the Wind?'" and that he was given an address and a time to see it.

"The stories were just crazy," Karp said. "There was also stories of this mythical three-hour cut of the movie that people told me they saw that Welles was very close to completing."

However, Karp could never prove that such a print existed. It's just another story that elevated the myth of "The Other Side of the Wind."

Thanks Netflix, now open the vault

What finally led to the vault in Paris being opened so the movie could be completed and released was Netflix.

One of the biggest challenges a potential investor had to take, outside of the cost for the rights all three parties would agree on, was the unknown price tag for competing the movie. Both Marshall and Rymsza said they drew up separate budgets for the cost to complete post production, but without seeing the footage and its condition, they had one hand tied behind their backs.

"I didn't know it would be 100 hours of material," Rymsza said. "I had done a paper inventory and so I knew the amount of film elements but it's difficult to foresee how much material there is and a lot of these factors would drive the cost of post."

Behind the scenes on the set of "The Other Side of the Wind." Netflix Rymsza would not divulge how much his original budget was, only saying it was a "significant price tag" and that they did go over budget to complete the movie.

Netflix announced in August it would give the funds needed to compete the movie (it also greenlit the documentary, "They'll Love Me When I'm Dead," in which director Morgan Neville looks back on the making of the movie).

Along with a score being made for the movie, and special effects done to complete the drive-in movie scenes, there wasn't any sound for three weeks of shooting, so that was a major undertaking. Also, a team of negative cutters had to come in to reconstruct the original negative of the movie, which took months. However, Netflix never wavered in backing the project. "Netflix supported us above and beyond," Marshall said. "They were basically like, 'We know you bought an old house and you're going to have old house problems,' which is exactly what happened. And we would go in and explain what we needed and they would say, 'Okay.'"

So what is the movie really about?

"The Other Side of the Wind" is a fascinating look at a legend trying to get back on top. But is it autobiographical? It's hard to not come to that conclusion after watching the movie, which seems to also explore Welles' complicated relationship with Bogdanovich.

The most compelling moments of the movie are when Hannaford and Otterlake are having conversations about their work and their friendship. And on set, it was more than obvious to those who were there that Welles was putting his relationship with Bogdanovich on screen.

Take, for example, at the end of the movie in the drive-in, when Otterlake is speaking to Hannaford and at one point says to his mentor, "What did I do wrong, Daddy?"

"Huston wasn't there that day for that scene," Marshall recalled. "Peter was playing it to Orson. Orson was also directing him and his direction to Peter for that scene was, 'It's us.'"

Orson Welles. Netflix Bogdanovich didn't just drop everything to be in "The Other Side of the Wind" whenever he was called upon by Welles, or let him live in his home with his then-girlfriend Cybill Shepherd, he also invested money in the movie to keep it going. Welles was grateful, but had a weird way of showing it sometimes, like the time he went on "The Tonight Show" and made fun of Bogdanovich with guest host Burt Reynolds.

But despite all that, Bogdanovich has never faltered in trying to accomplish his mentor's final request: finish "The Other Side of the Wind" if he died.

"Peter became a much more heroic figure to me in just how much he cared about Orson," Karp, who is also a producer on the documentary, said about talking to Bogdanovich for the book. "Welles took a lot from Peter and Peter got a lot from Welles. Welles truly loved him but in a way that probably didn't feel like he was being very appreciated at the time. But Peter is a true believer, and there's a lot to be said about that."

"The Other Side of the Wind" and "They'll Love Me When I'm Dead" are both available Friday on Netflix.

Apple is selling refurbished units of the iPhone 8 starting at$500 from its certified used device store — one of the best-kept secrets in tech. That price reflects a $100 discount over the normal $600 starting price tag for an iPhone 8.

At the time of writing, the refurbished iPhone 8 Plus is, unfortunately, not in stock. If you're interested in the iPhone 8 Plus, I'd keep checking Apple's refurbished storefront regularly.

If my experience with buying a refurbished MacBook Pro is anything to go by, Apple's refurbishment process is top-notch, and it's well worth your consideration. It's so good, in fact, that you should consider getting the refurbished iPhone 8 even if you were planning on buying it new, just so you can save yourself $100.

My refurbished MacBook Pro came in flawless physical and working condition, and there was no trace that my MacBook Pro had been used before. It also came with Apple's standard one-year warranty. I can't guarantee that a refurbished iPhone will come in equally great condition, but I at least had a positive experience with the store.

With the iPhone 8, you're not sacrificing that much over newer models, like the iPhone XR or XS. The iPhone 8 still has a great camera, and it runs the same chip as the iPhone X, which hasn't shown any signs of slowing down ever since the new iPhones came out. The main thing you're not getting with an iPhone 8 is the iPhone X-style edge-to-edge screen design, and Face ID facial recognition for unlocking the phone.

The iPhone 8 is also one of your only options to get an iPhone with a smaller 4.7-inch display, as it looks like Apple's flagship iPhone X-style phones are sticking with a minimum 5.8-inch display for the foreseeable future.

And if you're looking for the Apple experience for an even smaller price tag, there are also plenty of refurbished iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus units available, starting at $380 and $480, respectively. The iPhone 7 is still a fantastic phone with a great camera and a similar design as the iPhone 8, if you're not picky about having the latest and greatest.

First Alexa was playing music and turning on the lights. Then she helped you book appointments, put together grocery lists, and try on new clothes. Now she's letting you video chat with friends and family — and soon she'll be able to sense how you're feeling.

Business Insider Intelligence

And she's not alone. In the years since Amazon's 2014 introduction of the Echo, smart speakers have become one of the fastest-growing device segments in the consumer technology market, and other tech giants have been iterating hardware to develop their own flagship devices — most notably the Google Home powered by Google Assistant, the Apple HomePod powered by Siri, and the Galaxy Home powered by Samsung's Bixby.

These tech leaders aren't just releasing devices, either; they're building out entire ecosystems powered by AI, pairing first-party hardware, software, and even third-party apps to advance other business interests. And since smart home device ownership has a snowball effect, winning over customers now likely means locking in more of their business later.

Smart speaker adoption is still relatively low compared to the over-saturated smartphone and tablet markets, so tech companies have plenty of runway to get customers to buy into their distinct smart home visions — but the newcomers have a lot of ground to make up.

Here's how each of the major players is leaning into their strengths in the smart speaker market:

Want to learn more?

The Smart Speaker Report from Business Insider Intelligence looks at the state of the smart speaker market and outlines how each of the major device providers approaches the space. It focuses on the key factors affecting whether or not someone owns one of these devices, as well as why people don't own them.

Finally, the report looks at what consumers are actually doing with their smart speakers — specifically how the devices are used and perceived in e-commerce, digital media, and banking — to help companies determine how well they're publicizing their smart speaker services and capabilities.

For the past two years, a startup founded by two ex-Facebook employees has been lying low.

Since 2016, the employees at Rockset have been quietly working on a new kind of data platform. But on Thursday, the now startup has formally launched its product, and announced it had raised $21.5 million in seed and Series A funding from top-tier Silicon Valley venture firms Greylock Partners and Sequoia Capital.

Rockset's new cloud-based data platform is targeted at developers building data-driven applications and data scientists managing this data. Right now, software teams using traditional databases — like those from Oracle — have to take extra steps to prepare data to be read by software. Rockset aims to cut the middleman, speeding the process by which data and apps can "talk" to each other.

"There's nothing like this out there," Venkat Venkataramani, Rockset co-founder and CEO, tells Business Insider. "One of the challenges has been how quickly we can build for the market. We've been working very, very hard."

Before leaving to start Rockset, Venkataramani spent eight years at Facebook managing online data and search infrastructure, which supported Facebook's growth from 40 million up to a peak of 1.5 billion users at the time. He credits Facebook with much of the philosophy he learned and applies at Rockset.

For example, he says, Facebook is known for being fast and never going down (well, almost). And from Facebook, he realized that he wanted Rockset to make complex problems as simple as possible.

"I walked away thinking, the world [of data infrastructure] is way too complex," Venkataramani said. "It's not available for everyone. We started thinking, why does it have to be complex? What's the simplest product we can build?"

Read more:Facebook's product for businesses, Workplace, is taking a step to distance itself from the social network after a string of scandals

Leaving Facebook to start something completely new was a risk. Venkataramani left in 2015, but it still "feels like yesterday." Ultimately, he says, he settled into a groove to the point where things were "really comfortable" at Facebook, to the point where he "personally got uncomfortable."

"I didn't feel like I was learning as much as I used to. I wanted to make myself uncomfortable again."

He and co-founder Dhruba Borthakur, another ex-Facebook employee, started talking to other developers about his vision, writing out the problems on a whiteboard. The two would ultimately team up to make Rockset a reality.

With the funding, Rockset plans to hire more employees as it grows its customer base. Rockset now has 16 employees, and they're about to add four more employees who have been hired but have not yet started.

"Product engineers should be bottlenecked by their creativity, not what the data infrastructure can do for me," Venkataramani said. "We value how much we can add to customers' lives. We take complex, hard things and make them as easy as possible."

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA — For years, Google employees felt the company's executives weren't listening to their complaints about sexual misconduct and gender discrimination at the tech giant.

They've got senior management's attention now.

Google employee Celie O'Neil-Heart helped organize Thursday's walkout.Troy Wolverton/Business InsiderThousands of Google employees at offices around the globe walked out of their offices on Thursday morning to protest the company's treatment of women and its handling of sexual harassment allegations. Among those who joined in the protest were hundreds of employees at the company's headquarters here.

On a bright and sunny day here, Googlers crowded a main plaza on campus and heard from numerous colleagues who talked about their experiences with sexual harassment and called for change. Many of those present wore teal ribbons in solidarity with those who had experienced sexual harassment. "Time's up," some shouted. "Enough is enough!"

"There are so many of these stories we've heard for so long," said Celie O'Neil-Heart, who helped organize the walkout. "It's time for action and change — real change."

In an appearance at a conference in New York, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said he shared protesters anger and frustration and echoed their call for change.

"Words alone aren't enough, you have to follow up with actions," he said.

Revelations about Andy Rubin's severance sparked the protest

Many Googlers brought signs to the Mountain View walkout protesting the company's handling of sexual misconduct allegations.Troy Wolverton/Business InsiderThe protests were sparked by a New York Times article last week that detailed the company's handling of sexual misconduct allegations against three prominent men. The report revealed that Google paid Andy Rubin, who helped invent the Android operating system, a $90 million severance package when he left the company, despite the fact that a sexual misconduct allegation had been made against him that the company found "credible."

The revelation of the payout to Rubin was "the $90 million straw that broke the camel's back," O'Neil-Heart said.

Organizers of the protest have been collecting stories from employees about sexual harassment and other issues they've faced at the company, some of which they shared during the protest here. They've also made a list of demands for company management. Among them: that Google should put together a report on sexual harassment at the company and publicly disclose its findings, and that it should end its policy of requiring employees in disputes over sexual harassment and discrimination to pursue them through binding arbitration rather than through the courts.

The demands aren't just coming from a core group of agitators, O'Neil-Heart said. Instead, they represent longstanding desires by "hundreds" of employees.

Read more: Google's recent behavior shows the troubling reality of an internet superpower that abandoned its vow to not 'be evil'

"We're all here representing movements that have been at Google for a long time, asking for these demands for a long time," she said.

Employees shared stories about their experiences with harassment

Google employees streamed in by the hundreds to the main plaza on its Mountain View campus to take part in the walkout.Troy Wolverton/Business InsiderThe protest officially got underway at 11:10 a.m., but employees started showing up well before then and continued to stream into the plaza to take part for even 30 minutes after it started. Some carried signs saying things such as, "Hey Google, WTF?" "Stand Tall, Stand Together, Stand For Change" and "Not OK, Google."

Employees generally avoided the press. The company's policy generally requires employees to go through its public relations department before talking to the media. But some did share their thoughts anonymously as they left the protest.

"It was great," said one female Googler. "It was the start of the movement."

The employees who came forward to share their stories touched a chord with many who were there. O'Neil-Heart, for one said she got "very emotional" listening to colleagues tell their stories.

"I'm proud of all the women who got up there to tell their stories," said a another female Googler, who declined to give her name. "It was moving."

Following the main protest in the plaza, several dozen organizers and employees marched from there to the public park area just off the company's campus where members of the press were standing. The protestors chanted slogans such as "Stand up! Fight back!" and "What's Googley? This is Googley!"

Organizers are demanding "urgency"

The walkout is the latest development in the movement to highlight and combat sexual discrimination in the tech industry and elsewhere. Silicon Valley firms have increasingly been called on to take action on allegations of sexual misconduct against executives, employees, and investors.

In the wake of the New York Times article last week, Richard DeVaul, whom the article revealed had also been the subject of a sexual misconduct complaint, resigned from his post at X, the research lab of Google parent company Alphabet.

Organizers and employees felt like management heard their protest Thursday, O'Neil-Heart said. But that's just the start.

"We look forward to seeing action," she said, continuing, "We do expect urgency."

Now read:

Wall Street was unimpressed with Apple's quarterly earnings results, announced on Thursday— so much so, that shares plunged over 7% after the bell, putting Apple in danger of losing its much-vaunted market cap of $1 trillion.

At the time of writing, Apple stock is priced at $206.30 in after-hours trading, and still moving around. Should that price hold through the opening bell on Friday, Apple will have a market cap below that $1 trillion threshold. The threshold is $207.45; any Apple share price less than that will value the company below that line.

Notably, that threshold may actually move higher by the time markets open on Friday. Apple reported that it bought back a hefty number of its own shares in the previous quarter. That means on Friday morning, Apple will update the number of shares it has outstanding, which can and will have an effect on its market cap.

Apple made headlines earlier this year when it became the first-ever American company to reach a $1 trillion market cap.

While Apple's earnings beat Wall Street expectations on both the top and bottom lines, there appear to be two main sources for the investor negativity.

First, Apple whiffed on iPhone sales. In the quarter, Apple sold 46.9 million iPhones, well short of Wall Street expectations of 48.4 million. Apple also announced on Thursday that it will stop breaking out iPhone, Mac, and iPad unit sales entirely.

Second, Apple gave a lower-than-expected revenue forecast for the holiday quarter of this year. Apple projects that it will generate between $89 billion and $93 billion in revenue for the quarter ending in December. Wall Street was expecting Apple to project revenues of about $93 billion, placing the company's estimates on the low end.

Still, for better or for worse, nothing is going to happen to Apple's $1 trillion valuation until Friday morning: A company's market cap isn't affected by after-hour trading, and it all comes down to how investors are feeling by the time the opening bell rings.

Apple's sales figures are about to get a lot less transparent.

On Thursday, the company announced on its quarterly earnings call that it will stop breaking out the number of iPhones, iPads, and Macs it sells in each quarter.

The surprising news comes after Apple failed to hit Wall Street's expectations for iPhone sales in the most recent quarter, which sent the stock plummeting about 5%. The announcement from Apple CFO Luca Maestri sent the company's share price plunging even further, and as of writing it now hovers about 7% down from market close.

"As we have stated many times, our objective is to make great products and services that enrich people's lives, and to provide an unparalleled customer experience, so that our users are highly satisfied, loyal, and engaged," Maestri said.

"As we accomplish these objectives, strong financial results follow. As demonstrated by our financial performance in recent years, the number of units sold in any 90-day period is not necessarily representative of the underlying strength of our business."

Apple will still report the revenues brought in from the sales of each device type.

Apple sold 46.9 million iPhones in the quarter, barely growing 0.4% on the year prior, and well below analysts' expectations of 48.4 million. Quarterly revenues ($62.9 billion) and earnings per share ($2.91) both beat expectations, but the iPhone whiff — combined with a revenue forecast for the holiday quarter that was lower than some analyst expectations — seems to have spooked investors.

Meanwhile, iPad sales were down 6% on last year, to 9.6 million, which Mac unit sales were flat, at 5.3 million.

Notably, this move also comes just days after Apple unveiled new gadgets, including a revamped MacBook Air laptop and redesigned iPad Pro tablet.

Here are all the key numbers:

The tech world has responded to The New York Times report that the Trump administration is considering rolling back transgender rights.

On Thursday, more than 50 companies — including tech giants like Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Uber, and Airbnb — signed a letter opposing any actions by the administration to legally define sex as binary and determined upon birth, Axios reports.

The letter read, in part:

"We, the undersigned businesses, stand with the millions of people in America who identify as transgender, gender non-binary, or intersex, and call for all such people to be treated with the respect and dignity everyone deserves. We oppose any administrative and legislative efforts to erase transgender protections through reinterpretation of existing laws and regulations."

Read more: The Trump administration's reported proposal to make an 'unchangeable' definition of sex based on genitals isn't backed by science — here's why

Companies outside of tech, like Nike and Levi Strauss, signed the letter as well.

In a company blog post, Cisco's Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer, Francine Katsoudas said: "We must protect and advocate for the equality of transgender, intersex, and gender-expansive people inside and outside the workplace."

IBM's Vice President, Global Chief Diversity & Inclusion Officer, Tia Silas, said: "We believe no one should be discriminated against for being who they are."

The 56 companies that signed the letter on Thursday employ nearly 4.8 million people. According to the press release, more companies are expected to sign the letter in the coming days.