Month: July 2018

Half a decade after its founding, Peloton became a unicorn. During its short existence, the company has found tremendous success riding the wave of successful spin classes that includes the likes of SoulCycle and Flywheel.

Peloton offered a unique take on the space, harnessing technology to provide a state of the art version of the phenomenon from the comfort (and privacy) of the user’s home. Peloton’s pricey bikes live-stream spin classes, through a subscription based service.

Since its founding, Peloton has managed to double the size of its company, year over year, while raising $444.7 million, at last count. In a recent interview, CEO and co-founder John Foley called the company, “weirdly profitable.” 

The company released its first bike in 2014. Last year, it added a treadmill to its list of livestream devices, along with a more rugged version of its bike targeted at gyms and hotels.  Peloton has continued to expand its reach with the additions of showrooms, designed at bringing the experience closer to users who might otherwise not have an opportunity to interact with the company’s $2,000 devices.

Foley will join us Disrupt in San Francisco this September to discuss how the company has managed to grow so quickly, while avoiding the pitfalls of putting too much stock into the latest fitness trends.

The full agenda is here. Passes for the show are available at the Early-Bird rate until July 25 here.

Today’s the day, people. The door slams shut on early-bird pricing for Disrupt San Francisco 2018 as of midnight PST tonight. It’s time to stop procrastinating, time to dust off your credit card and time to invest in your professional future — at the best possible price. Magical connections can happen at Disrupt events, and you never know who you’ll meet. Don’t miss the opportunities. Buy your ticket right now.

Disrupt SF 2018 (the only Disrupt event happening in North America this year) unfolds on September 5-7 at Moscone Center West. With three times the floor space, more than 10,000 attendees, 400 media outlets, 1,200+ exhibitors and giant piles of cash waiting to be won, it promises to be our biggest, most ambitious Disrupt ever. Why wouldn’t you go?

Here’s a partial list of superb reasons to attend Disrupt SF 2018:

• An outstanding roster of speakers
• Startup Battlefield with a $100,000 cash prize
• Startup Alley featuring a stunning array of tech companies — including 50+ startups that earned a Top Pick designation
• A Virtual Hackathon with a $10,000 top prize, plus thousands more in cash and prizes from sponsored contests
• CrunchMatch, a free, business match-making service that helps connect founders and investors who share similar business goals

Disrupt San Francisco 2018 takes place on September 5-7, and our early-bird pricing disappears at midnight PST tonight. Get in under the buzzer and, depending on the type of pass you purchase, you can save up to $1,200. That’s some serious cheddar. Go buy your ticket now.

Christie Lagally spent half of a decade working on planes as an aerospace engineer — but now she’s trying to attack the food industry head-on with a hopeful attempt to change the way we eat chicken.

That’s the aim of Seattle Food Tech, which looks to create what effectively looks and feels like a chicken nugget out of plant-based food. That means trying to mimic it all the way down to the puff it gets in an oven, and while some companies like Impossible Foods go after the look and feel of a burger, Lagally wants to focus on the much lower-hanging fruit of more processed food — which makes up a significant chunk of chicken consumption. The company is coming out of Y Combinator’s 2018 summer class this year.

“We’ve continued to develop all sorts of systems to support [meat as a staple of the diet], with funding for farmers to support the meat industry, for food groups that push dairy and meat, and to support all that we developed the concept of factory farming,” Lagally said. “Chicken is very efficient, but I saw a lot of the direct impact of abuse of animals. In Washington State I saw chickens go up and down the highway every morning to my trip to Boeing. As someone who cared about animals, I felt that I needed to do something. We’ve never really been able to control the meat industry in terms of pollution runoff, and we’re barely making inroads on health claims.”

The first product is a processed chicken nugget equivalent which Seattle Food Tech tries to sell to larger food services companies (think something like Aramark). That’s the market that’s most useful given that a significant portion of the chicken consumed by the population comes through food services. There are other advantages to creating a breaded chicken nugget equivalent, such as not having to worry so much about the color change in the same way that raw chicken does when it’s cooked. But the plant-based nugget still has to plump up, get juicy, and feel like a normal piece of processed chicken would feel like if it’s going to compete.

The company also, to that end, has to target municipalities if it’s going to actually get the kinds of operations rolling to start producing those plant-based substitutes. That’s an argument that happens at the level of a local community, and Lagally says that the production facility itself is as much the product as the actual end-nugget that might end up in the hands of someone picking up lunch from an office cafeteria. The nugget is a wheat-based product which is designed to perform like a Tyson chicken nugget.

“We can go to a municipality and say, we have a processing facility that won’t require you to raise taxes, we can offer similar or more jobs [than competitors], we can put out 1.3 million pounds of meat per month, which is huge,” she said. “We’ll be a really good economic booster of the area and be able to use plant-based proteins from local farmers. Our waste is almost nothing other than normal waste water from a facility, and we end up being a much more attractive addition to a small town in Nebraska or New Jersey.”

It’s certainly going to be an interesting space, especially given that a key ingredient for Impossible Foods got the OK from the FDA, which could make it more attractive as a burger patty substitute. So, there will be an interesting race to see which foods companies will end up taking over a key part of the consumption. Companies like Seattle Food Tech will also inevitably run into pushback from the same industries that they are trying to capture market share. But Lagally said that there should be plenty of room for a company like Seattle Food Tech to maneuver its way to success.

“The truth of the matter is most of these issues are decided at the state and local level,” Lagally said. “You can put a lot of money into lobbying in D.C., and money is influence at every level at the government. But when those come down to community choices, those are made at the council level. Farmers understand that they have to be a part of their community. A wheat farmer who processes our wheat into a wheat protein can sell to me for money money than selling it at a really low commodity cost.”

Facebook’s chief legal officer Colin Stretch has announced he’ll be out by the end of the year. 

In the inevitable Facebook post explaining why he’s moving on, Stretch writes that after he and his wife made a decision to move back to DC from California “a few years ago… we knew it would be difficult for me to remain in this role indefinitely”.

“As Facebook embraces the broader responsibility Mark [Zuckerberg] has discussed in recent months, I’ve concluded that the company and the Legal team need sustained leadership in Menlo Park,” he adds, saying he’ll stay to the end of the year to help with the transition.

Facebook has had a very awkward two years so far as politically charged scandals go. First revelations about the massive Kremlin-fueled election interference which it totally missed. Then the massive Cambridge Analytica data misuse debacle which Facebook also claims to have totally missed, even though it (still apparently) employs one of the academics whose quiz app was the vehicle used to suck out people’s data.

Since then a bunch of follow-on admissions have flowed from the company confirming that access to user data on its platform wasn’t as locked down as it’s historically liked to claim — albeit, despite masses of evidence to the contrary.

Nor, perhaps, as the FTC might have expected give a 2011 privacy settlement with the company. The regulator has now opened a fresh investigation. Meanwhile Facebook is carrying out a retrospective app audit — a not so tacit admission about its abject lack of enforcement of its own developer policy.

And yet there have not — at least publicly — been any heads rolling at Facebook despite all this failure.

Most likely because, as founder Mark Zuckerberg recently told Recode’s Kara Swisher during a podcast interview: “I designed the platform, so if someone’s going to get fired for this, it should be me.”

Of course Zuckerberg isn’t going to fire himself. Not when he doesn’t have to. Given the structure of the company he’s sitting pretty on his CEO throne, no matter how tarnished that crown now is.

Instead of firing himself — let’s not forget his 2016 attempts to dismiss the notion of Facebook-enabled election interference as a “pretty crazy idea” — Zuckerberg once again fired up his multi-year apology tour for privacy and data-related screw ups, rolling this through 2017 and  2018, as fresh scandals rocked the company’s reputation. And raised the specter of regulation to control damaging activity on the platform that the company has spectacularly failed to control.

Though you’d be hard pressed to read any of this scandalabra just by looking at the company’s earnings and stock price. Perhaps because investors view any regulation as likely to cement Facebook’s dominance, rather than upset the apple cart in a way that could allow a younger model to come in and disrupt its business.

Even so, 2018 has seen Zuckerberg, if not literally dragged but politically compelled to appear in front of US and EU lawmakers — where he faced a barrage of questions; some dumb, others cutting to the heart of the company’s contradictions and its contradictory claims.

Last year Facebook’s chief legal officer Colin Stretch was also in the Senate, alongside reps from Google and Twitter, fielding awkward questions about Russian election interference and the spread of extremist content on the platform.

There Stretch made an unfortunate slip of the tongue during his introductory remarks — seemingly saying “keeping people unsafe on Facebook is critical to our mission” but quickly correcting himself to stress he’d meant to say “keeping people safe”. As Freudian slips go it’s a doozy.

But it’s certainly not a great time for Facebook to be losing its general counsel. Not with so much ongoing political and legal risk. Although if Zuckerberg isn’t going to go then perhaps other Facebook veterans will feel compelled to leave on his behalf.

With the usual departing platitudes, Stretch writes: “This has not been an easy decision. Companies are made up of people, and the people here are talented, caring, and most of all committed to doing the right thing. Even now, eight-and-a-half years after I started, I often stop myself and ask how I got so lucky to be a part of this.”

“There is never a ‘right time’ for a transition like this, but the team and the company boast incredible talent and will navigate this well,” he adds.

In March it also emerged that Facebook would likely be parting ways with its long-time chief security officer, Alex Stamos, this summer — after the New York Times reported on internal disagreements between the CSO and other  execs, saying Stamos had wanted Facebook to be more public about the misuse of its platform by nation states.

This week BuzzFeed News obtained an internal memo sent by Stamos in March, days after he had confirmed his plans to leave the company, in which he writes: “I was the Chief Security Officer during the 2016 election season, and I deserve as much blame (or more) as any other exec at the company.”

Though he demurs on confirming whether he has actually quit for real at that point — but does admit to having had “passionate discussions with other execs”, including, seemingly, about Facebook’s approach to sharing public data on Russian disinformation.

“The world has changed from underneath us in many ways. One change has been the thrusting of private tech companies into the struggle between nation-states,” he writes on this. “Traditionally, the standard has been to report malicious activity by adversary nations to US law enforcement. We are moving into a world where the major platforms are going to be expected to provide our findings, attribution and data directly to the public, making us a visible participant in the battle between cyberwarfare titans.”

“This is an uncomfortable transition, and have not always agree with the compromises we have struck in the process. That being said, I believe my colleagues have all approached the process in good faith, and together we have sorted through legitimate equities that needed to be weighed,” Stamos adds.

Stamos goes on to implore colleagues to make major changes “to win back the world’s trust” — including rethinking the metrics Facebook fixes itself to as a business; being more adversarial in its thinking when building products and processes; and — in what looks very much like a swipe at the company’s use of dark pattern design in its consent flows — re-engineering how it gathers user data to be more honest and minimize (rather than maximize) data collection.

On that it’s worth noting that privacy by design is a core plank of Europe’s new data protection framework, GDPR — which Stamos is seemingly describing at one point in the memo, without giving it a literal name-check.

“We need to build a user experience that conveys honesty and respect, not one optimized to get people to click yes to giving us more access. We need to intentionally not collect data where possible, and to keep it only as long as we are using it to serve people,” he writes [emphasis his]. “We need to find and stop adversaries who will be copying the playbook they saw in 2016. We need to listen to people (including internally) when they tell us a feature is creepy or point out a negative impact we are having in the world. We need to deprioritze short-term growth and revenue and to explain to Wall Street why that is ok. We need to be willing to pick sides when there are clear moral or humanitarian issues. And we need to be open, honest and transparent about challenges and what we are doing to fix them.”

Waymo, Google’s former self-driving project that’s now an Alphabet company, announced today a new series of partnerships aimed at giving more people access to its autonomous vehicles. Through deals with Walmart, AutoNation, Avis and others, Waymo will pick up customers and drive them to businesses in the Phoenix area.

The company already had existing relationships with AutoNation and Avis Budget Group. The former helps Waymo to service and maintain its vehicles in Phoenix, while the latter helps to charge, refuel and clean its cars. So it made sense to bring these two on board in a more expanded role as partners, who can now benefit from the technology to serve their own customers.

AutoNation will now begin to offer customers a Waymo vehicle instead of a loaner, while their own car is serviced. Meanwhile, Avis customers in Phoenix will be able to get into a Waymo when dropping off or picking up their rental car, starting with Avis’ two Chandler locations.

Walmart is another high-profile partner. Starting later this week, the two will begin a test pilot that offers members of Waymo’s early rider program grocery savings when they shop from Walmart.com. The riders will be able to take a Waymo car to their nearby Walmart store for grocery pickup, when the order is ready.

Two other partnerships involve DDR taking shoppers to the Ahwatukee Foothills Towne Center in Chandler and the Element Hotel in Chandler offering select guests – like business travelers – access to Waymo cars for commuting during their hotel stay.

Waymo says it decided on these partnerships after seeing how early riders were using its vehicles. Many of its riders were taking Waymo cars in order to run errands, grocery shop, commute to work, go to dinner, or while having their own vehicles repaired. The resulting partnerships represent eight of the top ten activities Waymo riders do, it says.

The company also hints that the partnerships in the Metro Phoenix area could be expanded further if all goes well, given that its partners operate across the U.S.

The launch of the partnership program follows last week’s news that Waymo cars are now driving 25,000 miles per day, and have completed 8 million miles on public roads to date.

After years of observation and analysis, researchers announced today that they have identified liquid water on Mars — a ton of it. It’s a mile underground and is likely only liquid because it is briny and under great pressure, but nevertheless, this groundbreaking discovery could change both our understanding of the Red Planet and our plans to one day go there ourselves.

The discovery was made by Italian researchers from a variety of institutions, led by Roberto Orosei at the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica in Bologna; the paper describing their work detecting and characterizing the water was published today in the journal Science.

How did they do it? The study used data from the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding, or MARSIS, aboard the European Space Agency’s Mars Express Orbiter. It’s a ground penetrating radar that has already contributed to the story of water on Mars, with its readings suggesting basins and other features indicating there were once oceans there.

The researchers looked at data from 2012 and 2015 covering an area of Mars adjacent to its geographic south pole. Although this area “does not exhibit any peculiar characteristics,” as the paper puts it, it has been theorized for decades that the polar ice caps may hide liquid water deposits.

The theory was that not only would surface ice insulate inner layers from the sub-freezing surface temperatures, but that the pressure exerted by those millions of tons of ice and rock would substantially lower the melting point of water so that it remains liquid even at several degrees below zero Celsius. Not only that, but minerals mixed into the water and making it briny can further lower its melting point, and these minerals are known to exist in Martian soil.

But whether the conditions necessary are actually present on the planet in our time has been a matter of debate — debate that is settled with today’s findings.

MARSIS captured 29 radar profiles while passing over a certain 200-kilometer stretch of Planum Australe, and found that while much of the region has a “weak and diffuse” reflection from the radar, but “but in some locations, it is very sharp and has a greater intensity (bright reflections) than the surrounding areas and the surface.”

“This condition on Earth only happens when you observe subglacial water like in the Antarctic or over places like Lake Vostok,” explained Orosei in a video accompanying the paper. “We were, for a long time, debating if this was also the case on Mars. It was a long investigation which required a lot of effort, but after several years — which it took — we were able to demonstrate that this was indeed the case.”

In a supplementary text they detail the work they did to eliminate other options, primarily layers of CO2 or pure water ice. These options required “very specific and unlikely physical conditions” or simply wouldn’t produce the type of reflection they had seen.

“We found, in fact, that any other explanation for these very strong echoes was not really tenable in the light of the evidence that we had available,” Orosei said.

As the paper concludes: “We interpret this feature as a stable body of liquid water on Mars.”

The watery area in question is about 20 kilometers in diameter, and while depth can’t be determined, the deposit would likely have to be at least a meter thick to produce the reflection observed. So at a bare minimum we’re probably looking at a serious quantity of water, on the order of millions of liters.

It’s not anything you’d want to swim in — negative 80 degrees Fahrenheit, or negative 60 Celsius, and probably more of a thick sludge subsiding here and there into “brine pools.” If I’m not mistaken you’d probably also be crushed like a bug if you weren’t inside some kind of pressure vessel. Still — it’s liquid water. On Mars. Today.

Not only that, but the researchers suggest this water may not even be that unusual. MARSIS is a broad surveying instrument, not a precise scanner, and this area was spotted because it’s such a huge deposit.

The large size required for a meltwater patch to be detectable by MARSIS (several kilometers in diameter and several tens of centimeters in thickness) limit the possibility of identifying small bodies of liquid water or the existence of any hydraulic connection between them. Because of this, there is no reason to conclude that the presence of subsurface water on Mars is limited to a single location.

In other words, there could be ponds and rivers all over the place and we wouldn’t be able to see them — at least, not with MARSIS. We’ll need something more precise.

What does this say about the possibility of life on Mars? Well, liquid water seems to be the one thing that all forms of life that we know of require in some form or another. So finding it on Mars satisfies that major requirement.

Orosei and his team have no official input on the question, but he did say that the Martian lake could be similar to certain environments on Earth where extremophile single-cell life is known to exist. Again, however, whether such a form of life existed in the past on Mars or is currently at large is not a question we can answer right now.

Indeed, we can’t even be 100 percent sure that it is liquid water until we send a robot to bore through the ice and test it directly — but it’s safe to say that we’re about as sure as we can get today that there is in fact water on Mars. Future missions may focus on this area and probe more closely, or observe the rest of the planet systematically to locate similar watery deposits.

Grubhub announced this morning that it’s agreed to acquire LevelUp for $390 million cash.

Founder and CEO Matt Maloney told me that while previous Grubhub acquisitions like Eat24 were designed to give the company’s delivery business more scale, “This is kind of a different acquisition. It’s a product and strategic positioning acquisition.”

LevelUp is based in Boston, offering a platform to manage digital ordering, payments and loyalty, with customers like KFC, Taco Bell and Bareburger. Maloney said that buying the company allows Grubhub to deepen its integration with restaurants’ point-of-sale systems. That, in turn, will allow them to handle more deliveries.

At the same time, Maloney said LevelUp can help Grubhub build a restaurant platform that goes beyond delivery, for example by managing their customer interactions across mobile and the web.

“We want to help restaurants actively engage with their diners,” Maloney said. “This is a huge step in that direction.”

Once the regulatory waiting period is over, the entire LevelUp team will be joining Grubhub, with founder and CEO Seth Priebatsch reporting to Maloney — who said that in the short term, he plans to change very little, aside from the POS integrations. Even in the long term, he suggested that LevelUp could continue to operate as its own brand within the larger Grubhub platform.

“They’re doing something really well and we don’t want to screw that up,” he said. “We want to make as little change as possible, until we all understand how we’re better working together.”

The LevelUp platform was launched in 2011, and the company has raised around $108 million in total funding, according to Crunchbase. Investors include Highland Capital, GV, Balderton Capital, Deutsche Telecom Strategic Investments, Continental Advisors, Transmedia Capital and U.S. Boston Capital.

“For the last seven years, we have worked to provide restaurant clients with a complete solution to engage customers, and this agreement is the biggest and most exciting step in achieving that mission,” Priebatsch said in a statement provided by Grubhub. “After close, the entire team will remain in Boston and our office will become Grubhub’s newest center of technology excellence.”

The announcement came as part of Grubhub’s second quarter earnings release, which saw the company grow active diners by 70 percent year-over-year, to 15.6 million, while revenue increased 51 percent, to $240 million.

ClassPass today announced the close of an $85 million Series D financing round led by Temasek, the same firm that led the startup’s Series C financing. L Catterton, a private equity firm that has also invested in the likes of Peloton, Equinox, and Pure Barre, also participated in the round.

As part of the deal, L Catterton’s Michael Farello will join the ClassPass board.

It’s also worth noting that CEO Fritz Lanman confirmed that the share price dropped as part of the $70 million Series C round, but that the valuation didn’t. Both share price and valuation went up during this latest round. That said, Lanman stayed mum on any actual numbers around valuation.

This latest round brings ClassPass’s total funding to $255 million.

ClassPass first launched in 2012 out of TechStars. Back then, it was called Classtivity, and it operated under a very different business model. Users could search for a la carte classes from dance and fitness studios, book an appointment and complete the transaction all from their website.

Turns out, gym memberships exist for a reason. Without a monthly up front investment, most people don’t have the motivation to go workout.

After a number of iterations, ClassPass rebranded and switched up the business model to become the subscription studio fitness plan we have come to know today.

But that didn’t mean the startup was done adapting.

In 2016, ClassPass ditched its unlimited tier and raised prices to produce healthier margins. Before this, some casual ClassPass users were subsidizing the unlimited users who were going to classes four or five times a week. Though it caused a bit of an uproar, and ultimately lost ClassPass around 10 percent of its userbase, the move gave the company much stronger unit economics to allow for further expansion.

Another switch came in the fall of 2017 when ClassPass moved to a credit-based payment system, allowing the company to offer variable pricing to its studio partners to account for peak times and high-quality classes.

It took a hell of a lot of tweaking, but ClassPass CEO Fritz Lanman believes that the company is finally in a place where it can worry first, second, and last about expansion.

“[Founder and Chairman Payal Kadakia] and I are most excited about this round because it validates what we did months ago,” said Lanman. “We went through a huge business model evolution and a number of iterations, but this round was led by the same firm who led our Series C and includes one of the most prominent private equity firms in the studio fitness and consumer space.”

In May, ClassPass announced its intention to launch in nine international cities by the end of this year, with a focus on Southeast Asia. The company already has a strong foothold in the U.S., with operations in Canada, Australia, and a strong and growing market in the UK.

“It feels like we can take over the world,” said founder and Chairman of the board Payal Kadakia. “We’ve seen people compete and replicate our model, but we own our category, and we have the ammunition and the right model to tackle the world. Now, our focus is to make sure ClassPass works everywhere. Once we get the behavior working for customers in other markets, we earn the right to offer new categories.

The first category on the list? Wellness. But first, the company is focused on owning every market where studio fitness is already present.

As far as the funding is concerned, it will be used to continue adding to the team — ClassPass currently has 335 employees, and plans to add over 100 in the coming months — as well as fuel international expansion. The funding will also be used, in part, to start marketing ClassPass Live, a live at-home video workout akin to Peloton’s product. ClassPass Live was first launched in March, but the company has spent the time since then working out the bugs and making small iterations to ensure the service is ready for primetime.

Netflix is giving its profile icons a long overdue makeover. The company announced this morning it’s replacing the icons it launched five years ago with a new set of updated icons – including those from Netflix’s own shows. Unfortunately, Netflix hasn’t entirely abandoned its old icons, which were never really all that fun. If you still want to be a masked superhero lady or a frowning guy with glasses, have at it. These have just been updated with a little more color. What’s more appealing is being able to choose an icon of a character from one of your favorite Netflix shows.

Shows like Orange is the New Black, Luke Cage, Queer Eye, Stranger Things, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and others are represented among the over 100 new icons rolling out soon.

The change isn’t just about Netflix updating a key feature of its app – it’s also a way for the service to subtly promote its own original programming to users, and help them feel more connected with the shows they do like. After all, when you make your own profile image Eleven from Stranger Things, you’ll be regularly reminded how much you like that show – and watching Netflix in general.

The company regularly experiments with new ways to promote its programming like this – just recently, it begin testing full-screen images from its shows instead of the black background on the login screen, for example. (At the time, we had noted that updated profile icons would be a better choice. Score!)

Netflix also rolled out screensavers last year, and introduced Stories-inspired mobile previews this spring to help better showcase its originals.

Netflix may spend up to $13 billion on original programing this year, according to Fortune. So it makes sense that it would look for any means to introduce its shows to Netflix users in order to get then hooked on its exclusive content, and then keep them subscribed.

The new profile icons are rolling out on the website, mobile, and TV devices over the next few weeks.

SpaceX confirmed on Twitter this morning that it recovered the booster from the latest Falcon 9 launch. Shortly after launching from Vandenberg Air Force Base in Southern California at 7:39AM ET this morning, the booster stage landed on the Just Read The Instructions drone ship. The company will now try to catch the rocket’s fairing with a giant net attached to the ship Mr. Stevens.

SpaceX has become more adept at landing its booster rockets but it’s still a spectacle every time it happens. This landing is extra special as the winds were gusting around the time of the launch.

The rocket company has so far been less successful with catching the payload shrouds. SpaceX’s high-speed recovery boat Mr. Steven took to the seas this time around with a larger net in the hopes of recovering the fairings. Reusing as much as possible is critical to SpaceX’s mission to lower the cost of space flight.

Today’s launch was SpaceX’s seventh mission for the company’s client Iridium who contracted with SpaceX to launch 75 satellites into orbit. According to SpaceX, today’s payload of Iridium satellites so far deployed without an issue. SpaceX is contracted for one more launch with Iridium.

This was SpaceX’s 14th launch of 2018.

Developing…