Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Jishnu Battacharjee was recorded in November 2019....
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Among our list of the Top 20 Cloud Stocks for 2020, Atlassian (NASDAQ: TEAM) is the top mid-sized player for PaaS. Last week, it reported a strong second quarter that beat estimates. Atlassian’s...
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Jason Mendelson and I recently published the 4th Edition of Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist.
The book now has three forewords â one by each of Fred Wilson (USV), James Park (Fitbit), and Dick Costolo (now 01 Advisors, then Twitter).
The 1st edition had 13 chapters. We are now up to 19.
The PlayersPreparing for FundraisingHow to Raise MoneyOverview of the Term SheetEconomic Terms of the Term SheetControl TermsOther Terms of the Term SheetConvertible DebtThe Capitalization TableCrowdfundingVenture DebtHow Venture Capital Funds WorkNegotiation TacticsRaising Money the Right WayIssues at Different Financing StagesLetters of Intent: The Other Term SheetHow to Engage an Investment BankerWhy Do Term Sheets Even Exist?Legal Things Every Entrepreneur Should KnowThe new chapters in this edition are 11. Venture Debt (with help from SVB), and 17. How to Engage an Investment Banker (with help from Golding Partners).
We also significantly updated Chapter 2: Preparing for Fundraising and Chapter 19: Legal Things Every Entrepreneur Should Know (with help from Cooley).
As with each edition, we cleaned up stuff throughout the book.
Finally, we updated the website which is now at VentureDeals.com.
For everyone who has read the book, given us feedback, used it in a course, or recommended it to someone, thank you!
Jvion applies AI to avoidable healthcare problems in patients inside and outside hospitals. Read on for more on a very interesting application. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience...
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Bizongo, one of the largest business-to-business online marketplaces for packaging needs in India, has raised $30 million in fresh funding round as it looks to widen its footprint in the nation and expand to more categories.
The new financing round, Series C, was led by Switzerland-based hedge fund Schroder Adveq, which manages assets worth $10 billion. Existing investors B Capital, Accel, Chiratae Ventures, and IFC also participated in the round, the startup said.
Mumbai-based Bizongo has raised about $56 million to date. It was valued at about $96 million in its Series B financing round in 2018, according to an analysis of its regulatory filings.
The five-year-old startup serves as a marketplace for businesses to identify, buy, and sell material packing solutions across industries. It also offers in-house packing design, development, and procurement solutions.
Sachin Agarwal, chief operating officer and co-founder of Bizongo, said the startup offers a unique value proposition of promising a “100% availability of packaging material and no-stock-outs at very low inventory.”
“This helps clients to reduce their packaging material procurement cost by 2-5% and at the same time ensures better production planning for our supply partners. This creates a strong value proposition for all stakeholders across the value chain,” he said in a statement.
Bizongo did not reveal how many customers it has, but said they span across some of the nation’s leading e-commerce, retail, FMCG, FMCD industries. On its website, it mentions that it works with over 750 manufacturers in India, and has delivered 290 million packaging units to date. It also claims to have served over 350 brands.
In a statement, Aniket Deb, chief executive and co-founder of Bizongo, said the startup has witnessed a “significant improvement in operating metrics since the last round of financing and the current round will further help us grow the business in a sustainable way.”
The fresh fund will be deployed to ramp up technology infrastructure and to expand to newer sectors such as pharma packaging. Deb said the startup also plans to work on expanding its presence in the country.
“We believe in the vision of the founders who are transforming and digitising the highly fragmented B2B packaging marketplace by leveraging technology and a unique supply chain efficiency solution. Bizongo has demonstrated strong momentum by continuing to add marquee clients and we have been impressed with the company’s rapid growth trajectory over the past year,” said Kabir Narang, General Partner at B Capital Group, in a statement.
Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Monday.
A number of state attorneys general will meet with Justice Department lawyers this week to discuss various concurrent investigations into Google, according to the Wall Street Journal. The meeting is reportedly seen as the start of a periodic dialogue that could expand into more formal cooperation as the probes continue. Tech and business giants are mourning the unexpected death of NBA legend turned investor Kobe Bryant, who was known for his 'obsessive' work ethic and used to call leaders like Tim Cook for advice. Tech and business executives have expressed shock, sadness, and respect for his legacy.YouTube has secured the rights to stream multiple major esports leagues, Bloomberg reports. This includes the rights to broadcast the Overwatch League, which had been broadcast on Amazon's Twitch.Google is walking back changes to its search design that blurred the lines between ads and regular results after user backlash. The tech giant said it had heard users' feedback and that it would begin testing different designs for desktop search results.Monzo is in talks with SoftBank about further expansion funding, according to The Telegraph. The fintech's CEO Tom Blomfield reportedly met senior Vision Fund executives as the company aims to raise up to £100 million ($131 million).Some YouTube content moderators are reportedly being told they could be fired if they don't sign 'voluntary' statements acknowledging their jobs could give them PTSD. There's a well-documented history of content moderators reviewing graphic and disturbing content, leading to psychological trauma and PTSD.British police will scan people's faces to see if they're criminals, and critics say it's a massive expansion of surveillance. UK police will use a new facial recognition system across London to catch criminals.12 teams have reportedly paid $25 million each to join a new 'Call of Duty' esports league. The league's kick-off weekend has just taken place in Minneapolis, Minnesota.Facebook executive Sir Nick Clegg has been criticized for his response to the Jeff Bezos phone hacking controversy. Clegg was criticized after claiming that WhatsApp's encrypted messages could "not be hacked into," BBC News reports.Salesforce encouraged employees to buy and expense co-CEO Marc Benioff's latest book to boost sales. According to Bloomberg, the company sent a memo to its employees late last year saying that it would consider the book to be business material.Have an Amazon Alexa device? Now you can hear 10 Things in Tech each morning. Just search for "Business Insider" in your Alexa's flash briefing settings. You can also subscribe to this newsletter here â just tick "10 Things in Tech You Need to Know."
This feature from CNBC covers the highlights of the 50th edition of World Economic Forum held at Davos last week. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links. Tech Posts Automattic...
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Tech and business leaders mourned the unexpected death of NBA legend Kobe Bryant, who died in a helicopter crash on Sunday in California at age 41.
Executives from Apple and Microsoft as well as high-profile investors expressed shock, sadness, and respect for Bryant's legacy in Twitter posts on Sunday.
During his storied career with the Los Angeles Lakers, Bryant became the fourth all-time high scorer in the NBA and won five NBA championships. While much of his fame may be defined by his accomplishments on the court, he also became an established presence in the business world.
He launched a $100 million venture capital fund with investor Jeff Stibel following his retirement from the NBA in 2016, but he delved into the business world long before then. In 2014, for example, he invested a 10% stake in the sports drink BodyArmor, which is now said to be worth $200 million after Coca-Cola purchased a stake in the firm.
Bryant even said that he hoped to be remembered for his investments just as much as his NBA career when speaking with CNBC in 2016. "If you really want to create something that lasts generations, you have to help inspired the next generation, right?" Bryant said to the network. "They create something great. And then that generation will inspire the one behind them. That's when you create something forever."
Among those who shared their reactions on Sunday were Apple CEO Tim Cook, former Microsoft CEO and Los Angeles Clippers chairman Steve Ballmer, and billionaire entrepreneur and "Shark Tank" TV personality Mark Cuban.
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Bryant was known to have a tireless work ethic. When speaking on Bill Simmons' podcast back in 2016, investor and former Shark Tank host Chris Sacca said Bryant would consistently text and call him with Ted Talks and other news while doing research for his business ventures.
"He was bringing the same obsessive work ethic to learning about startups that he does to training, to rehab, to his thousand makes a day, to everything," Sacca said. He also wasn't afraid to call other successful leaders for advice, as he told Alex Rodriguez and Dan Catz on an episode of "The Corp" in 2018, according to CNBC.
He said he learned a lot from Oprah Winfrey, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and former Nike CEO Mark Parker in particular, especially when it comes to handling mistakes. "We all make mistakes," Bryant said, according to CNBC. "We all make decisions. And you just continue to plow forward. You continue to figure it out."
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Finance editor Meredith Mazzilli here, taking the final turn as guest host while executive editor Matt Turner wraps up parental leave.Â
I'll get the shameless promotion for my own newsletter out of the way first â you can sign up here for Wall Street Insider to get a behind-the-scenes look at the finance team's biggest scoops and deep dives.Â
The world's most powerful leaders and execs (not to mention a sizable Business Insider contingent) flocked to Davos this week. Here are some interesting nuggets from the sidelines of this annual meeting of the minds:Â
A generation of private-equity leaders is getting ready to hand over the reins to successors. Dakin Campbell spoke with Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, who explained why he kept his next in line a secret for more than a year.Joe Ciolli chatted with Amy Webb, a quantitative futurist and professor of strategic foresight at NYU, who predicted that tech giants like Amazon and Apple will "completely dismantle the healthcare industry as we know it."Attention job-seekers: Andy Baldwin, the global managing partner of client services at EY, told Cadie Thompson that the firm wants to hire for more tech roles in the years ahead, and explained why it's changing what it looks for in candidates.Buzzwords are often maddening corporate-speak to soften the blow of big, unpopular decisions. And that's exactly why they're worth unpacking. As Joe reports, the word "upskilling" kept popping up during most of Business Insider's conversations with execs, investors, and strategists. Here's why.Spiked seltzer was everywhere in 2019. John Blood, the chief legal and corporate-affairs officer and corporate secretary for AB InBev, told Cadie how the company is thinking about the fizzy booze market now, and why it doesn't spend much time worrying about White Claw.ÂSpeaking of the rich and powerful â I'm a big fan of stories that sift through hundreds of pages of jargon and boilerplate in S-1 filings to uncover the juiciest stuff companies share before going public.
One of the fun things we get to learn is who's about to get richer.
Primary-care startup One Medical recently filed paperwork to go public, and Lydia Ramsey broke out the investors and execs with the biggest stakes, plus how much they stand to gain. Topping the list is The Carlyle Group, which led a $220 million private financing round for One Medical in 2018. The firm owns a nearly 27% stake that would be worth $450.5 million at the top of the IPO range.
Still, there's plenty of red ink: One Medical's net losses have been deepening for the membership-based platform even as users climbed (sound familiar?)Â
Going from fresh-out-of-college, brand-new analyst to running an investment team as a portfolio manager at Steve Cohen's Point72 isn't a linear path. Here are the different ways to rise the ranks.Â
Billionaire and Milwaukee Bucks co-owner Wes Edens was chairman of the firm overseeing one of America's largest newspaper chains, but skipped more than a quarter of its board and committee meetings in 2018.Â
Robert Kiyosaki, author of the #1 personal finance book of all time "Rich Dad, Poor Dad," thinks public-market investors are being duped.
AT&T has made no secret of its desire to lead the increasingly fractured media landscape through its newly acquired WarnerMedia entertainment properties and Xandr adtech division.Â
We asked a group of investors at successful venture capital firms to name the startups that will boom this year.Â
These brands have built lasting partnerships with creators on social media, and include names like SeatGeek, Sephora, and Chipotle.
MedMen, a flashy cannabis retailer with stores in Las Vegas, Los Angeles' Venice Beach neighborhood, and on New York's Fifth Avenue, has been punished by investors.
There's a reason lithium-ion batteries are in nearly every electronic device â they're energy-dense, lightweight, and don't degrade quickly. Where they fall short is in the storage of electricity on the grid for multiple days.Â
Walmart joining TikTok might just be the crossover event of the century. The nearly 60-year-old retailer is surprisingly active on the social media platform that has gained explosive popularity among young people, especially Gen Z.
Sony's "Bad Boys for Life" continues to have an amazing run at the box office.
Saturday the action/comedy starring Will Smith and Martin Lawrence crossed the $100 million mark at the domestic box office, then on Sunday it topped the domestic box office for a second-straight weekend, bringing in an estimated $34 million. That's just a 46% drop from its opening weekend.
And it's possible the movie has enough witchcraft left in it to stay on the throne for one more weekend.
Next weekend the only competition is Paramount's gritty revenge tale "The Rhythm Section," starring Blake Lively as an assassin and directed by Reed Morano ("The Handmaid's Tale"). There's a chance audiences will favor the "Bad Boys" for a third weekend rather than Lively learning to become a contract killer. Time will tell.
Universal's "1917" has also crossed the $100 million mark at the domestic box office and came in second place this weekend with a $15.8 million take. Over the weekend Sam Mendes won the best director prize at the DGA Awards, strengthening its frontrunner status for the Oscars. Because of that, audiences are heading to the multiplex to see what all the fuss is about.
Airbnb started in 2008 as a way for people to rent out spare rooms to strangers. Since then, it has grown into a global travel company valued by private investors at $31 billion by offering everything from bespoke trips to property management services, with seven million rental listings in more than 220 countries.Â
Last September, Airbnb announced its plans to become a publicly traded company in 2020, and some market watchers are speculating that the company could start that process in the first half of this year. It's also reportedly considering listing its shares directly rather than through a traditional initial public offering.
Airbnb's path to the public markets has been slower than some of its peers â a source of tension among both executives and rank-and-file employees. CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky has said the company is simply taking a long-term view of its business, or what Chesky has called an "infinite time horizon."
As Airbnb debated where a public offering should fit on that horizon, many of its fellow "unicorns" â companies valued at more than $1 billion â decided to take the plunge last year.
But Wall Street wasn't impressed. Companies like Uber, Lyft, and Slack have struggled to drive up stock prices, while WeWork abandoned its IPO entirely amid controversies surrounding its financials and governance.
It's against this backdrop â and amid fears of an impending economic recession â that Airbnb readies itself for public scrutiny. So, when investors finally get to kick the tires, they'll be paying especially close attention to these five things.
On January 1st, the California Consumer Privacy Act, or CCPA, officially went into effect â a landmark new privacy law championed by Governor Gavin Newsom intended to give consumers in the state more control over the personal data collected by websites, apps, and other online services.
While California's attorney general is putting finishing touches on the law and isn't expected to start enforcing it until July, companies are already starting to worry about getting into compliance. Indeed, companies are expected to spend $55 billion this year to get in compliance with California's law, according to the state's own estimate.Â
That's created a huge opportunity for tech companies, and perhaps especially startups, several Silicon Valley insiders have told Business Insider. The law requires companies to allow their customers to request a copy of all the data it's collected about them â and, furthermore, requires that data be deleted upon request.
That's a problem for a lot of companies, who may simply not have the tools to process all of their customer data across various systems and software and put it into a tidy report, let alone to delete all of it as required by the law. For tech companies that specialize in data management, then, this could be a boon.
"We want to be an enabler to companies being able to stay compliant with all of these new, emerging privacy laws. So for us, realistically, this is actually a tailwind to our business model, it's a positive trend for us," Aaron Levie, CEO of business cloud-storage company Box, told Business Insider.
That's good news for established companies like Box, for sure, but also for smaller startups. The scale of the problem is such that no single company can currently tackle it on their own, said Bart Willemsen, an analyst at Gartner.
There are lots of different pieces of the puzzle, here, he says: Not only how companies handle the data they've collected, but also the ways and tools they use to collect it in the first place, as well as the customer experience for making it easy and seamless for customers to access that data, as required by law. No one company can do all of it â and, indeed, it falls on the company itself to figure out the best combination of tools to get there.
"There are those that present themselves as the, 'we do everything for you with the one single silver bullet,' but I don't believe that. Nobody makes an organization compliant other than the organization itself," Willemsen told Business Insider.Â
Robert Cattanach, a lawyer who specializes in data regulations and data breaches, said right now most companies aren't equipped to deal with a request from a consumer asking what data they have on them.
"I see the biggest issue as understanding where data is and how to access that data...their data systems have not been developed with that kind of functionality in mind, so they're having to create it...so I think that response to consumer requests is going to be the biggest challenge," Cattanach said.Â
In-Sik Rhee, a partner at Vertex Ventures, said data privacy and compliance is a space where his firm is looking for investment opportunities in the next year. He adds that there's going to be a huge need for companies to organize and better manage their data.Â
"I think for a lot of companies they're not really selling your data or doing other things, but they are capturing the data. But those that have captured data, they now need to have better hygiene in terms of sorting it properly or protecting it," Rhee said. "So there's companies that are helping just manage the data as you've collected it."
And there are already many smaller companies being born with the goal of meeting those needs.
Very Good Security (VGS) is one such startup, which layers itself on top of a company's software and parses out which data is most sensitive. That data then gets shunted to VGS's own systems for safeguarding and processing, taking the burden of protecting it away from the customer while also making it easier to make sense of all of it. That approach got a vote of confidence from investors from Visa and Goldman Sachs.
"We understand the intent of where and how you're receiving that data so that you can perform operations on it without necessarily having it. So you've shifted custodianship to VGS and all you have is a reference that looks like the real data, but it's useless," Mahmoud Abdelkader, co-founder and CEO of VGS, told Business Insider.Â
Indeed, Rehan Jalil â the founder of a company called Securiti.ai, formed by ex-Symantec employees â says that regulations like CCPR and Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) are going to require a rethinking of how data is handled, with a focus on making it as easy and automatic as possible to protect customer data. Jalil calls this approach "privacy ops."Â
"That's where I see the biggest opportunities and a lot of companies are working on it and will continue to work on it, how to operationalize privacy and automate privacy inside a company," Jalil said.
It also remains to be seen what new data privacy regulations come about in other states or nationwide.
Willemsen, the Gartner analyst, said tackling this long term means companies have to acknowledge that data privacy and management is an integral part of their organization, regardless of if laws require it. Those that already see that, and are taking moves to better protect and serve their customers, are further alone the curve than the rest, he says.
"Privacy in itself is infinitely more than just regulatory compliance," he said. "And if an organization gets it right and understands the principle here, you'll see that they are further ahead in terms of many different things compared to their opposition."Â
Got a tip? Contact this reporter via email atÂ
The Apple Watch has steadily grown to become one of the company's most important products, helping skyrocket the Cupertino-based tech giant to become the market leader in wearable technology. The company has unveiled a new model every September since 2014, when the first version made its public debut before launching in spring 2015.
Early versions brought crucial upgrades that boosted the value proposition of owning a smartwatch in the first place, like better performance and support for cellular connectivity. But while more recent models offer impressive technologies that have turned the Apple Watch into a more comprehensive health monitoring device, such features aren't necessarily critical to the overall Apple Watch experience. That's especially true considering several of the Apple Watch's most important new features are pushed through software updates and don't depend on the latest hardware. Â
The second generation Apple Watch, for instance, included several meaningful improvements over the first, such as water resistance and the inclusion of integrated GPS â two features that were substantial in establishing the Apple Watch as a viable fitness tracker that could compete with offerings from companies like Garmin and Fitbit. And the Apple Watch Series 3 that launched in 2017 brought cellular connectivity to the device, a capability that made the watch significantly more independent of your iPhone.Â
But as the smartwatch market has matured, the Apple Watch's progression has started to feel different. Some new features feel minor, like the Series 5's compass, while others are significant but only immediately useful under specific circumstances for targeted use cases.
Take the Apple Watch Series 4, for example, which was released in 2018 and started at $400. That release marked a milestone for the Apple Watch since it introduced more sophisticated health-oriented features that made it more than just a fitness tracker. The Series 4 was the first model capable of capturing an electrocardiogram, making it possible to use the watch to detect atrial fibrillation, or an irregular heartbeat. It also comes with a feature that offers the option to dial emergency services straight from the watch when it understands that the wearer has taken a hard fall.
Both capabilities are undoubtedly useful for those who need them. But potential buyers who just want an Apple Watch for viewing notifications on their wrist and measuring steps and activity would probably be happy to pay less for an Apple Watch with a standard heart-rate monitor. Apple could easily launch a "Pro" model that includes these more specialized features alongside a standard version with simpler capabilities.
A similar statement could be made about the $400 Series 5, which has many of the same features as the Series 4 but with an always-on display and a compass. The former enables the screen to show the time and other information even when the display isn't activated, while the latter allows for more precise location tracking.
Again, while these additions are appreciated and certainly make Apple's smartwatch better, I'm still able to get the biggest benefits the Apple Watch has to offer without them. I don't need these features to see if I've closed my Activity Rings for the day, or to view the text message I received while my phone has been tucked away in my bag. I don't need them to see the latest headlines from Apple News on my wrist.
And apparently I'm not alone in how I use my Apple Watch. When it comes to smartwatch functions that wearers use daily, notifications and text alerts, activity tracking, and news updates topped the list, according to a 2017 survey from market research firm NPD Group.
That's not to say features like ECG monitoring, fall detection, and always-on display technology aren't useful and innovative. They are, but the experience of using an Apple Watch wouldn't necessarily be hampered without them either. Some may argue that the same can be said for the earlier versions of the Apple Watch, but some of those advancements â like cellular connectivity support â at least helped answer the question as to why you may want to purchase a smartwatch in the first place.
One is ex-CIA, dubbed the 'real Jack Ryan, who's looking to stamp out modern-day slavery. The other, a tech entrepreneur from Moscow who hopes to deploy AI for noble causes.
Nic McKinley, founder and CEO of Deliver Fund, a Dallas nonprofit dedicated to fighting human trafficking, and Emil Mikhailov, founder and CEO of XIX, a San Francisco AI computer vision startup, have teamed up for an unconventional use of artificial intelligence: battling human trafficking.
McKinley's exploits as a CIA field agent were highlighted in a 2018 Vice News documentary which dubbed him "The Real Jack Ryan," referring to the fictional CIA analyst and operative in a popular TV series. (He says "the real Jack Ryan character doesn't exist, because you're either an operative or an analyst. You're not both.")
Deliver Fund uses XIX's AI-powered software to gather intelligence on criminal rings in a $100 billion global industry that coerces people to work in the illicit sex trade or other forms of forced labor. The partnership underscores how AI, now known mainly either as a powerful business tool or an Orwellian weapon against dissidents, is also being deployed by startups and advocacy groups against crime and exploitation.Â
In fact, Deliver Fund, working with law enforcers and using the XIX's platform, is gearing up for an event that's known to spark an uptick in sex trafficking: The Super Bowl, slated to be held on Feb. 2 in Miami.
"We're taking all the skills that we've learned in the fight against terrorism and applying that to the fight against human trafficking here in the United States," McKinley told Business Insider.
For Mikhailov, sharing the XIX technology with McKinley's team is not about making money. "We don't sell it to Deliver Fund," he said. "We do it for free."
They're also applying XIX's AI-powered platform, which is able to quickly scan and analyze information on the web, specifically photos and images posted on social networks, porn and other sites where traffickers are known to look for customers.
"Those are very explicit imagery," Mikhailov told Business Insider. The XIX platform, he said, scans for "signals," or visual elements on images that are known to be associated with trafficking.
"Human trafficking has its own featured signals, meaning specific attributes," he said.
McKinley cited one example, tattoos.
"Human traffickers oftentimes will brand their victims as property," he said. "If you have a victim who has, say, a tattoo of a clown on her face and her trafficker's name tattooed right underneath it, we'll have the algorithm that can go out and find every other photo within the system that has that clown on it."
Deliver Fund shares the information they collect through the XIX platform and other methods with federal, state and local law enforcement agencies.Â
Their efforts have led to some dramatic successes. In 2018, they helped rescue a young woman in the southwest who was betrayed by a boyfriend by turning her over to a sex trafficker, who subjected her to horrific abuse. The girl escaped and went to the police who sought Deliver Fund's help in hunting down her traffickers. With the help of the XIX platform, Deliver Fund found them in days.
"A few days later, a SWAT team kicked in his front door and arrested him and freed the other girls that were in his custody," McKinley said.
A former CIA special agent and US Air Force pararescue instructor, McKinley said he launched Deliver Fund in 2014 after realizing a huge gap in the federal government's capabilities in fighting trafficking, McKinley said.Â
While there's a federal agency, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), dedicated to fighting the illicit use and sale of alcohol, tobacco and firearms, which are legal commodities, no such infrastructure exists to fight a worse, and totally illegal activity, human trafficking, he said.Â
"We have an entire government bureaucracy around fighting the illicit use and sale" of alcohol, tobacco and firearms, McKinley said. "You know, 100% of human trafficking is illegal, yet we don't have a single centralized brain for fighting the issue."
He started Deliver Fund with other veterans of the military and intelligence services, including the Navy SEALs and the National Security Agency.Â
"We equip, train and advise law enforcement and regulatory authorities for their fight against human trafficking," he said. "We're able to do that because most of us are coming from an intelligence background."
The Vice documentary on McKinley mentioned Deliver Fund's work which caught Mikhailov's attention. He was intrigued, thinking, "This is a very important problem to work on, interesting from a technological perspective."
He emailed McKinley who quickly became impressed with XIX's technology. "I get hit up by companies routinely wanting us to use their technologies," he said. "I saw what he was actually doing. I was like, 'Okay, there's something new here that I haven't seen before that we actually desperately need."
What was new was XIX's ability to analyze fast and on a massive scale images associated with sex trafficking. "They had cracked the nut on data collection and computer visualization coming through on the same platform," he said. "That was something we really needed."
The XIX platform was particularly effective in analyzing online advertisements for purportedly legal services, such as massages or escorts and sex chats, but which sex traffickers use to find customers.Â
"At the end of the day, the commercial sex advertisement is a starting point," he said. "It's not enough just to look at a commercial sex advertisement and and say, 'I believe this is human trafficking.' When you can start connecting those advertisements with other data coming out of social media or other databases, that's the true magic."
Other tools are able make those connections using text-based AI, he said. "But if you have a trafficker on Instagram, and he's just posting an Instagram photo, and there's no text, well, that becomes irrelevant data to those other platforms."
He said Mikhailov's team figured out how to "pull metadata that we'd never seen anybody pulling before and be able to use their algorithms to connect advertisements that we'd never seen anybody able to connect before."
Deliver Fund has also tried other tools that rely only on facial recognition technology, which is now commonly used by some law enforcement agencies in the search for known victims, McKinley said.Â
But "a lot of the human trafficking victims have their faces covered or blurred out, because the traffickers are on to the fact that law enforcement is using facial recognition," he said. "Facial recognition doesn't work in those instances."
Because it's able to analyze more elements of an image beyond a person's face, the XIX platform has proven to be a more powerful tool, giving Deliver Fund the ability to "pull other things out and connect them across platforms."
The XIX platform has proven to be a critical tool in what has turned into an annual major anti-trafficking operation.Â
As fans of the San Francisco 49ers and the Kansas City Chiefs gear up for Super Bowl LIV in Miami, McKinley's team will be working with law enforcement agencies, to take on a loathsome fallout from the yearly football showdown: sex trafficking.
"Wherever a Super Bowl or a large sporting event in particular is being held, it attracts a large number of people who are there for something more than the event itself,"Â McKinley said.
He used a military analogy to explain why the Super Bowl is an opportune time to target sex traffickers. "If you're in Afghanistan, and you have snipers on a hillside, you're not going to see them until they move, then that's when you see them. The Super Bowl is the incentive for these traffickers to move. And so it allows us to identify them."
The Super Bowl anti-trafficking operations actually highlighted the effectiveness of the XIX platform. The startup was not involved in the 2018 Super Bowl operation in Minneapolis which led to the arrest or identification of about 40 traffickers, McKinley said.Â
But XIX became part of the anti-trafficking operation's arsenal in the 2019 Super Bowl in Atlanta. The platform helped Deliver Fund and law enforcers identify and build cases on 50 sex traffickers. More importantly, they were able to do so faster and with fewer staff.
"That's the beauty of the XIX platform, is it reduces the man-hours needed to build one of these cases," McKinley said.
Ultimately, operations similar to the ones conducted in connection with the Super Bowl are just a small part of a bigger and longer campaign, McKinley said.Â
Human trafficking, which rakes in about $100 billion to $150 billion a year according to some estimates, is such a huge, global problem that it cannot be solved just by taking down individual traffickers.
"We are not going to arrest our way out of this problem," he said. To have a meaningful impact, he said, they need to focus on the tools and institutions used by the traffickers, such as banks and hotel chains.
Major human trafficking rings typically rely on banks and hotels to operate. Greg Switzer, vice president of Deliver Fund's commercial operations, said the organizations is also working with and sharing information on confirmed human trafficking groups with major financial institutions and hotels that may be inadvertently offering services to criminal organizations.
"They may be looking for a tool that meets some regulatory compliance needs," he told Business Insider. "They may want to protect their company from brand damage once association is made with their products and services involved with human trafficking."
McKinley said Deliver Fund has helped open money laundering investigations on 20 suspected human trafficking organizations.
"The way that we're going to solve this problem," he said, is to "permanently disrupt this market."
"If a human trafficker can't rent a hotel room, if they can't rent a car, if they can't open a bank account, then you know how difficult we just made it for them to make money," McKinley said.Â
For Mikhailov, working with Deliver Fund, while not a money-making partnership, has been valuable in terms of developing its technology and defining the startup's direction.
Working with McKinley's team has given his team an opportunity to develop XIX's computer vision technology based on a real-world dynamic application. The startup, which has raised $2 million from angel investors, aims to be a leading AI-powered computer vision platform.Â
One of their first investors is Arjun Bansal, founder of the AI startup Nervana, which was acquired by Intel in 2016Â and who recently launched a new AI startup, XOKind.Â
"Purely from a social good aspect, that's amazing what they're doing," Bansal told Business Insider. "I'm really happy as an investor to support that kind of work. With this product, it's always about keeping yourself open to finding where the product market fit is going to happen. So I think that continuing to explore that in a bunch of different domains and I think the outcome that they've seen with this engagement is really, really great."
XIX does have paying clients. One is a company that uses the tool to filter out "not-safe-for-work" images on its site. Another client is a fintech company that uses the tool to verify account holders to comply with anti-money laundering regulations.
XIX is a rare example of a startup deploying AI for social causes. Another is Hatebase, a Toronto-based startup which uses AI to monitor hate speech online, which has been used by the Sentinel Project, a nonprofit to assist vulnerable communities that are potential targets of violence and genocide. In 2017, the Sentinel Project, which is based in Canada, used other tools, including a heat map, to monitor false reports that a gang was about to attack some slum communities in Kenya.
Working with McKinley's team also speaks to how Mikhailove hopes to build XIX as an AI company.Â
AI has also been used by federal agencies, such as ICE, or the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to hunt down undocumented immigrants and refugees. Mikhailov said it's an area that his startup hopes to avoid. "It's not something that we feel comfortable with," he said.
Mikhailov also hopes XIX can go beyond the typical business uses of AI is now commonly deployed to generate leads or sales faster and more effectively.
XIX is aiming higher, Mikhailov said. His big hope for XIX, he said, is to "actually build a metric that translates to saving lives."
Got a tip about XIX or another tech company? Contact this reporter via email at
Amazon is known as one of the most difficult companies to interview with. The e-commerce giant is known for asking tough questions and quizzing candidates on 14 core leadership principles that prioritize behavioral traits over job qualifications.
But as its expected $17 billion advertising business grows, Amazon has become one of a few companies that is rivaling Facebook and Google as destination for job-seekers, said two insiders familiar with Amazon's hiring practices.
Advertising in particular is a big focus, where Amazon has more than 1,000 openings across seven teams. While hiring activity can widely vary by time of the year, that figure is well above the 130 roles that were open in June.
"They are actually working on genuinely cool problems in the space," said one source who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person is interviewing at the company. "There is a bit of prestige of having Amazon on the resume."
Business Insider spoke to current and former employees, one job applicant, and a recruiting firm for tips on getting a job at Amazon and what to expect.
A referral will give candidates a leg up, and employees get a bonus for making a successful referral, but Amazon doesn't lean on referrals as much as other tech companies, according to Glassdoor. 12% of reviewers on Glassdoor said that they got an interview at Amazon this way. To compare, 15% of Netflix employees come from referrals, and 25% of Facebook employees come from referrals, according to Glassdoor.
An Amazon spokesperson said that while referrals can give candidates a boost, the company's full interview process plays a bigger role.
Amazon is known for tough interview questions. Instead of asking about people's background or resume, candidates are asked behavioral-based questions. The goal is to find people who align with the company's culture, and it's normal to only be asked a few questions during an hour-long interview, sources said.
Connor Folley, CEO of Amazon-focused adtech firm Downstream and a former Amazon employee, said that he prepared for interviews by scouring Glassdoor and compiled all of the questions into a word document.
"You'll find that people with no marketing experience are hired into a marketing manager role," he said. "More important is your proclivity towards these leadership principles than having experience in the role itself."
Here are some examples of typical interview questions, according to Amazon's Glassdoor page:
Tell me about a time that you disagreed with a manager or team member.Describe a time when you went above and beyond the scope of your job.Tell me about a time that you handled a crisis.What is an example of a time you had to make a high-impact business decision with little data or time. ÂAmazon's 14 leadership principles are at the core of the interview process. The principles include "customer obsession" and "learn and be curious."
Applicants are encouraged to memorize the principles and provide examples of how they embody the values.
Amazon also uses the STAR method, which stands for Situation, Task, Action, and Result, in interviews. Candidates are first asked to describe a situation where they were faced with one of the leadership principles. They are asked to detail the problem and how they solved it. Data-based answers can make a candidate stand out, sources said.
The Amazon employee estimated that more than half of successfully answering interview questions comes from being able to quantify an experience and explain it well. For example, Amazon may ask an advertising job candidate about how they helped a brand with its ad-targeting strategy. A good answer would include specific controls and measures the candidate used to tweak the strategy, the employee said.
Avi Bogart, managing director of recruitment at Three Pillars Recruiting, a firm that places talent at adtech and media companies, said this focus on specificity is meant to evaluate a candidate's credibility.
"When someone isn't being specific, chances are that something is missing â that's such an important thing for how Amazon candidates respond," he said.
The interview process lasts about a month, which sources described as quick for a hiring process. Hiring managers are expected to get back to candidates about next steps two days after a phone interview. Those who get an in-person interview can expect to hear back within five days, say people who are familiar with the system.
"Amazon has a rule to treat their candidates like customers," said the advertising employee. "They're not in to waste candidates' time. They want to be quick, transparent and over-communicate where they are in each step."
An hour-long phone interview is followed by in-person interviews with multiple people in what's known as Amazon's "loop" system.
It works like this: Candidates come in and interview with about six employees one at a time, with each employee asking questions about one or two of the leadership principles. Interviewers type detailed notes, which limits the amount of eye contact that they make with candidates. All in, the process can last six or more hours, according to sources.
Most of the interviewers are employees in the area the candidate is interviewing for. There's also a person called a bar-raiser from a different department. Sources said that candidates might not know which interviewer is the bar-raiser. These people are well regarded internally and undergo rigorous training to act as a neutral party whose role is to ask tough questions.Â
Bar-raisers are meant to make sure that the candidate is better than half of the employees who currently have the role. Both the bar-raiser and hiring manager have to agree to make an offer to a candidate.
"Their job is to dig deeper and probe you â they'll always ask 'Why?'" said Rina Yashayeva, VP of marketplace strategy at Stella Rising, an ad agency that specializes in Amazon and a former Amazon employee who worked there for three years. "Everything should be backed by data."
While Amazon's interview process is rigorous and specific to the company, Downstream's Folley said going through the process is a good way to get jobs elsewhere. Downstream's hiring system uses the same method as Amazon's.
"We find often times in our hiring that when presented with a rigorous hiring process, the right kind of candidate appreciates it, sees it as a challenge and feels comfortable aligning their personal brand and career with that organization," he said. "It's almost like the process of becoming a Navy SEAL. You see the challenge, want to prove that you can meet it, and become part of that team."
Kelsey Silver and her cousin dreamed of a train trip across the US ever since they saw a blog post that described how to do the trip for only about $200.
Four years later, they finally decided to take the trip in December 2019, although they opted to spend more for a more comfortable journey.
The two flew into San Francisco to catch the California Zephyr and start a three day trip to Chicago, where they spent the night before taking the Lakeshore Limited train the rest of the way to New York City. With private rooms on both trains, Silver told Business Insider that travel costs were about $2,000 total for her and her cousin.
"If you really want to see America, this is the way to do it," Silver said.
Amtrak offers a few routes for train enthusiasts looking for a trip across the country. In November, Business Insider transportation reporter Graham Rapier spent 96 hours traveling from New York to Seattle. He said he'd "do it again in a heartbeat."
Seeing the descriptor of 'fixer-upper,' paired with a million-dollar price tag, in not exactly uncommon in the San Francisco Bay Area's real estate market.
The demand for housing is so great, and prospective buyers' pockets are so deep, that inconsequential details like fire damage and outdated plumbing don't put off some home hunters.
But a stretch of land across the bay in West Oakland with a 960-square-foot, century-old dilapidated, yet historically relevant, Victorian home is more than a mere fixer-upper. It's more of a development project, listing agent Kevin Cunningham of Red Oak Realty told Business Insider. The listing at 1818 Adeline Street comes with city-approved architectural plans to build out the lot into five housing units total, two of which would be apart of the existing Victorian structure.
The ability to add five new housing units is a minor miracle in the San Francisco Bay Area, with its limited housing stock and growing population. San Francisco may make headlines the most often for its influx of professionals and for the city's myriad reasons for not being able to keep up with housing demand, but the effects are most certainly felt in Oakland and other Bay Area cities as well. There are many that live in Oakland and commute into San Francisco for work to avoid the city's sky-high rent.
And with the listing's location being near a BART station, the Bay Area's regional train system, it will likely attract workers looking to do just that.
If the prospective buyer pays $988,000 â working out to about $200,000 per future unit before development costs â they'll have an opportunity to develop housing units to lease out that could then provide a nice revenue stream.
All of which is to say, this isn't your run-of-the-mill, multi-million-dollar San Francisco Bay Area fixer-upper. This is more of a bargain, at least for those with the resources to pay to develop it.
"It seems pretty reasonable for whoever wants to get in and get going at it," Cunningham said.
Take a look at the West Oakland listing.
Microsoft is all about corporate customers and, under CEO Satya Nadella, the company has made its mission to go deep into the needs of specific industries instead of trying to make one-size-fits-all technology that works for everyone.
Crucial to that new focus is forging stronger ties with other companies, and Microsoft uses a category system to get customers and partners to think not just about what the company's technology can do now, but how they might work together to create new uses for the partners' or customers' needs.
When Microsoft is deciding how to work with a potential partner, it categorizes projects into what it calls "horizons" based on how ambitious the partnerships are, Microsoft executive Peter Lee told Business Insider this week. These horizons span everything from using the company's "bread and butter" tools like Office to the most aspirational projects that are intended to "change the game."
Lee said Microsoft uses the categories when it inks a "big partnership" with another company, but a Microsoft spokesperson said horizons are used generally to "help customers think about their technology deployment and goals."
Lee is a veteran of Microsoft Research who has transitioned to running the company's health care business at the behest of Nadella. Lee is responsible for finding new uses for technologies like artificial intelligence and cloud computing for Microsoft's health care customers and partners.
Horizon One is the "bread and butter" of Microsoft, Lee said. Think of Microsoft's exiting tools, such as Office 365, Dynamics customer relationship management, and the Azure cloud. They require little customization.
Then there's Horizon Two, which involves custom engineering. This describes Microsoft's relationship with Walmart, Lee said, intended to take the company's "retail systems to the next level."
Microsoft and Walmart announced a partnership in 2018, which the companies describe as "a broad set of cloud innovation projects that leverage machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data platform solutions for a wide range of external customer-facing services and internal business applications," though they've been quiet about specifics.
Horizon Three is used to describe the most ambitious projects. Lee describes horizon three projects as a question Microsoft asks to potential partners, "What can we work on together uniquely in partnerships that would change the game and lead to real transformation?"
Microsoft's partnership with Swiss multinational pharmaceutical company Novartis is an example. The two companies are building an artificial intelligence laboratory intended to, among other things, improve research and gets drugs on the market more quickly.
Horizons fit in with Nadella's vision of "tech intensity," which is basically the potential for its customers to grow by adopting technology and then building their own on top of it.
Through the tech intensity pitch, Microsoft is encouraging companies in all industries to adopt Microsoft's latest technology platforms and tools and then train their workforce to be able to create their own uses for advanced technologies like artificial intelligence.
Meanwhile, analysts expect Microsoft will ink more large partnerships this year, particularly as the company tries to grow its cloud business.Â
Salesforce in November chose Microsoft Azure as the public cloud to power its cloud software for marketing professionals. The deal followed Microsoft's other recent cloud tie-ups with companies including SAP and Oracle.
The deals help Microsoft get Azure in front of more customers and help it gain market share faster than if Microsoft did it on its own.
One of the stars of last year's enterprise tech IPO market was PagerDuty, with an April debut on the NYSE that soared 60%.
Cofounder and original CEO Alex Solomon, who shepherded the company for its first 11 years, recently sat down with Business Insider's US editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell at the Ascent Conference to talk about those startup years.Â
Today the company is valued at $1.8 billion with most analysts bullish on its future, according to Yahoo finance. Revenues have grown from $79.6 million in 2018 to $117.8 million in 2019 under hired-gun CEO Jennifer Tejada who Solomon hired to replace himself in 2016. Solomon is now CTO.
But none of that might have happened if Solomon hadn't thwarted an employee revolt when the company was only 19-people.
Solomon told Shontell how a brilliant but "overly negative" early-hire engineer taught him a valuable lesson about who not to hire.
PagerDuty is known for its IT incident software that alerts IT pros when they have a system failure and helps them fix it. That product was the brainchild of Solomon's experience working as an engineer at Amazon, where engineers had to carry pagers which would go off if there was a problem with the software they were responsible for, he told Shontell.Â
Amazon built an in-house system for managing these alerts.
Solomon and his cofounders, Andrew Miklas and Baskar Puvanathasan, took that idea and built a product that did the same thing for other corporate IT teams, all of whom were, back in those days, on pager duty.Â
At first, they bootstrapped their company, with no plan to seek funds with VCs.
"Our dream was when we get to $20,000 a month in recurring revenue, we know we've would have made it and we're going to be sitting on a beach drinking champagne and smoking cigars," Solomon told Shontell. "Obviously that time came and went and we kept on growing."
With growth, they knew they needed help and applied to the famous startup accelerator Y Combinator, which meant moving the company and their families from Toronto to San Francisco. (It took them four tries to get accepted in the program).
Even after Y Combinator, they struggled to get an investor to bite. And just when they were finally on the cusp of getting a Series A term sheet, one of their key engineers threatened to quit. Not only that, two other engineers were threatening to go with him.
"We hired one engineer that was really, really smart but also very negative," Solomon recounted. "He actually ended up influencing two other engineers on the team. They basically ended up banding together."
The three of them wanted to launch their own startup based on an internal tool they had built at PagerDuty. "So they were basically taking something that they had built on company time and wanted to kind of spin it off," he said.
The company only had 19 people at time, so losing three people would have been like "losing one-third of our engineering team" and that, the founders feared, would have scared investors off "weeks before we closed our Series A," he said.
Solomon managed to convince the guy and his companions not to leave for a few months until investment money was in hand and they could hire replacements. But he never forgot that dicey time. "This led us to the 'no a--holes' rule because this person was candidly an a--hole," Solomon says. Another common name for this type of Silicon Valley engineer is the "brilliant jerk."
From then on, the founders focused as much on a job candidate's ability to work with their teammates as they did on technical skills. Someone "who complained about their previous coworkers and their previous boss a lot in the interview process, that's a big red flag that we learned along the way," he said.
SpaceX is poised to launch its first astronauts into space this spring: Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley.Â
Their flight on the company's Crew Dragon spaceship will mark the first time an American spacecraft has carried NASA astronauts since the Space Shuttle program ended in 2011.
Behnken and Hurley's liftoff is expected to launch a new era of US spaceflight, since it will allow NASA to stop relying on Russian launch systems to get astronauts into space. It will probably also make the two astronauts the first to ever fly a commercial spacecraft.
"Bob and I were lucky enough to be selected together," Hurley told The Atlantic in September. "As we get closer to launch, things in the last year have actually been pretty hectic. We've been spending increasing amounts of time in California, because that's where most of the work is being done for Dragon."
In preparation, they've run through emergency procedures, undergone extensive training the Crew Dragon's mechanisms, worn their new spacesuits, and met with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.
"People to a degree think it's pretty glamorous to be able to go into space, but it's actually like a messy camping trip," Hurley told Reuters in June.
Here's how the astronauts were selected and how they're preparing to fly Crew Dragon to the space station.
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