Month: July 2018

Ride-hailing giant Uber is officially relaunching in Finland today, a year after suspending its primary service in the market — when it said it would wait for taxi laws to be deregulated.

Among the changes it was waiting for are the removal of taxi permit caps and fare restrictions. Most parts of the Act came into effect on July 1.

The Finnish government said its intention is to modernize the rules to “significantly enhance the implementation of new technology, digitalisation and new business concepts”, promoting competition and working towards the creation of what it dubbed “seamless, multimodal travel chains” — thanks also to a push in the act for data and systems interoperability and open interfaces.

“This Act will give us a genuine opportunity to make mobility a comprehensive service for customers,” said transport minister Anne Berner last year.

From 3pm CET today Uber says two services that use professional drivers — uberX and UberBLACK — will operate in the Helsinki capital region in Finland, which it notes will includes Helsinki, Espoo, Vantaa and Kauniainen.

Uber is not restarting its unlicensed peer-to-peer service (UberPOP) in the market.

That unlicensed driver option has essentially been outlawed in Europe after the region’s top court ruled in December that Uber is a transport service, not a platform, thereby locking its business into being regulated by existing taxi licensing regimes.

And locking Uber into lobbying city authorities to ‘modernize’ and deregulate taxi rules in its favor — such as by removing permit caps and making it easier for more people to become taxi drivers.

“In the vast majority of the European countries we have been operating under existing transportation laws for years now and were able to scale our business with licensed drivers,” an Uber spokesman told us.

Blogging about the Finland relaunch, Uber talks up the different course it says it’s seeking to chart under new CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, writing: “We’ve set a course for more responsible growth with a new approach to building long-term partnerships with cities and regulators.”

In truth Uber has had its course reset after a series of scandals rocked the company and, in Europe, after myriad legal challenges led to regulatory blowback and ramped up public and political pressure on the company to change.

Those external forces are continuing to reconfigure Uber’s business — and in Europe at least to make it better mesh with local civic values.

For example in London, the company has made a series of changes to how it operates — such as introducing safety caps on the hours drivers can work — changes it made following a shock decision by the transport regulator to withdraw its license to operate in September 2017.

Last month the company won an appeal against TfL’s withdrawal of its license based on changes it had made since September 2017, though the judge only granted it a provisional 15-month license — with UK regulators set to continue to scrutinize its conduct closely.

Another example of Uber’s regional reconfiguration: An announcement in May that it would expand accident insurance cover for its drivers and delivery workers across Europe.

Last month the company also said it will bring its Jump e-bike service to Europe — with Khosrowshahi claiming the company wants to help cities tackle traffic-related problems such as air pollution and congestion by increasing access to “cleaner transportation solutions”.

In Helsinki, Uber had intended to keep its UberBlack service going for the past year but a spokeswoman told us it did not have enough drivers to provide a reliable service — so UberBlack has not been operational since the suspension. But will restart later today.

Since last August, Uber says more than 250,000 people in the Helsinki area have opened its app despite there being no service in operation — which it touts as showing “clear demand” for its service.

It also notes that Finnish Uber users have taken more than 200,000 Uber trips abroad during the local market pause.

“We’re excited to use our technology to complement existing public and private transport options and to offer an affordable, safe and reliable alternative to personal car ownership. We hope that other countries, where local people are not currently able to use apps like Uber either to get around or to make money on their terms, will soon follow suit,” Uber adds.

Wikipedia’s Italian and Spanish language versions have temporarily shut off access to their respective versions of the free online encyclopedia in Europe to protest against controversial components of a copyright reform package ahead of a key vote in the EU parliament tomorrow.

The protest follows a vote by the EU parliament’s legal affairs committee last month which backed the reforms — including the two most controversial elements: Article 13, which makes platforms directly liable for copyright infringements by their users — pushing them towards pre-filtering all content uploads, with all the associated potential chilling effects for free expression; and Article 11, which targets news aggregator business models by creating a neighboring right for snippets of journalistic content — aka ‘the link tax’, as critics dub it.

Visitors to Wikipedia in many parts of the EU (and further afield) are met with a banner which urges them to defend the open Internet against the controversial proposal by calling their MEP to voice their opposition to a measure critics describe as ‘censorship machines’, warning it will “weaken the values, culture and ecosystem on which Wikipedia is based”.

Clicking on a button to ‘call your MEP’ links through to anti-Article 13 campaign website, saveyourinternet.eu, where users can search for the phone number of their MEP and/or send an email to protest against the measure. The initiative is backed by a large coalition of digital and civil rights groups  — including the EFF, the Open Rights Group, and the Center for Democracy & Technology.

In a longer letter to visitors explaining its action, the Spanish Wikipedia community writes that: “If the proposal were approved in its current version, actions such as sharing a news item on social networks or accessing it through a search engine would become more complicated on the Internet; Wikipedia itself would be at risk.”

The Spanish language version of Wikipedia will remain dark throughout the EU parliament vote — which is due to take place at 10 o’clock (UTC) on July 5.

“We want to continue offering an open, free, collaborative and free work with verifiable content. We call on all members of the European Parliament to vote against the current text, to open it up for discussion and to consider the numerous proposals of the Wikimedia movement to protect access to knowledge; among them, the elimination of articles 11 and 13, the extension of the freedom of panorama to the whole EU and the preservation of the public domain,” it adds.

The Italian language version of Wikipedia went dark yesterday.

While the protest banners about the reform are appearing widely across Wikipedia, the decisions to block out encyclopedia content are less widespread — and are being taken by each local community of editors.

As you’d expect, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has been a very vocal critic of Article 13 — including lashing out at whoever was in control of the European Commission’s Twitter feed yesterday when they tried to suggest that online encyclopedias will not be affected by the proposal — by suggesting they would not be “considered” to be giving access to “large amounts of unauthorised protected content” by claiming most of their content would fall outside the scope of the law because it’s covered by Creative Commons licenses. (An interpretation of the proposed rules that anti-Article 13 campaigners dispute.)

And the commissioners drafting this portion of the directive do appear to have been mostly intending to regulate YouTube — which has been a target for record industry ire in recent years, over the relatively small royalties paid to artists vs streaming music services.

But critics argue this is a wrongheaded, sledgehammer-to-crack a nut approach to lawmaking — which will have the unintended consequence of damaging free expression and access to information online.

Wales shot back at the EC’s tweet — saying it’s “deeply inappropriate for the European Commission to be lobbying publicly and misleading the public in this way”.

A little later in the same Twitter thread, as more users had joined the argument, he added: “The Wikipedia community is not so narrow minded as to let the rest of the Internet suffer just because we are big enough that they try to throw us a bone. Justice matters.”

The EU parliament will vote as a whole tomorrow — when we’ll find out whether or not MEPs have been swayed by this latest #SaveYourInternet campaign.

This is the moment that early-stage startup founders across Europe have been waiting. We’ve flung open the application window for Startup Battlefield, which takes place at Disrupt Berlin 2018 on November 29-30. No more reason to wait — take the plunge and apply today.

TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield is where Yammer, Mint, Dropbox, Cloudflare, and hundreds of others companies launched their products to the world. If you need a refresher, here’s how Startup Battlefield works.

Our experienced team of TechCrunch editors reviews every application in a highly competitive vetting process. Our acceptance rate is typically around 3%. Ultimately, we’ll choose around 15 early-stage startups to compete. Prior to their time on stage, each team receives expert pitch coaching from seasoned TechCrunch Startup Battlefield editorial team.

All competing teams have six minutes on the Disrupt Main Stage to pitch their company and demo their product to a panel of judges — consisting well-known investors, and entrepreneurs. Then they have 6 minutes to answer any follow-up questions the judges may have. Notable judges from last year’s Battlefield included Eileen Burbidge (Passion Capital), Sonali De Rycker (Accel), Roelof Botha (Sequoia Capital) and Carlos Eduardo Espinal (SeedCamp), and you can be sure that this year’s crop will possess equally impressive bonafides.

The judges winnow the field down to around five teams that go on to a second and final round of pitching. And from that elite group comes one champion who will hoist the Disrupt Cup, bag a $50,000 equity-free cash prize and become the investor-and-media darling of Disrupt Berlin.

All of this non-stop action takes place in front of a live and riveted audience — filled with thousands of startup fans, media outlets and potential investors and customers. What’s more, we live-stream the entire event around the world (and make it available later on-demand) on TechCrunch.com, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

Winning certainly has its privileges, but you don’t even have to win to reap significant rewards. Take Aircall for example. This French startup — a cloud-based call center solution — competed in the first round of Startup Battlefield San Francisco in 2015. Even though the company never made it to the finals, it just received a second round of funding. We’re talking $29 million. In the three years since it competed in Startup Battlefield, Aircall has raised a total of $40.5 million. That’s a mighty fine consolation prize.

Plus, all Startup Battlefield teams join the ranks of the Startup Battlefield alumni community. This community consists of nearly 800 companies that have collectively raised more than $8 billion in funding and produced more than 100 exits and IPOs. Companies like Mint, Dropbox, Yammer, TripIt, Getaround and Cloudflare. Imagine the networking possibilities that await you in this elite group.

This is as good a time as any to remind you that applying to and competing in Startup Battlefield is 100 percent free. TechCrunch does not charge any fees or take any equity from startups.

Startup Battlefield goes down at Disrupt Berlin 2018 on November 29-30 at Arena Berlin. This is your chance to launch your early-stage startup to the world. It could be a life-changing event. What are you waiting for? Apply today.

Chinese search engine giant Baidu have partnered with Softbank subsidiary SB Drive and manufacturer King Long to deploy a self-driving mini bus service to Japan early next year.

The agreement was announced at Create Baidu, the company’s annual AI developer conference in Beijing. Under the agreement, a version of Baidu’s Apolong autonomous mini bus will be exported to Japan from China in early 2019. This agreement, which for now includes an order of 10 buses, marks the first time autonomous vehicles will be exported from China.

Apolong, co-developed with King Long, is outfitted with Baidu’s Apollo autonomous driving system, which is capable of Level 4 operations, a designation by automotive engineering association SAE International that means the vehicles take over all driving in certain conditions. The buses, which will initially deployed in tourist spots, airports, and other controlled, or geo-fenced areas.

Baidu announced earlier at the conference that it has started volume production of the autonomous mini buses in partnership with King Long. The buses are being produced at King Long’s manufacturing facility in Xiamen, in southeastern China’s Fujian province.

Baidu plans to launch the autonomous bus service in several Chinese cities including Beijing, Shenzhen, Pingtan and Wuhan.

Baidu is preparing to launch a driverless service in China — and elsewhere — with another update to its Apollo autonomous driving platform and the mass production of Apolong, an autonomous mini bus that seats up to 14 people.

Baidu made the announcements at Baidu Create 2018, the company’s annual AI developer conference. Baidu has started volume production of the autonomous mini buses in partnership with Chinese manufacturer King Long. The buses are being produced at King Long’s manufacturing facility in Xiamen, in southeastern China’s Fujian province.

Baidu’s Chairman and CEO Robin Li introduced the milestone while livestreaming the 100th bus rolling off of the production line to more than 6,000 attendees at Baidu Create 2018 in Beijing.

Baidu plans to launch the autonomous bus service in several Chinese cities including Beijing, Shenzhen, Pingtan and Wuhan. But the company has aspirations beyond China. Baidu is partnering with SB Drive, the  autonomous driving subsidiary of SoftBank Group, to bring Apolong autonomous mini buses in Japan early next year.

Apolong is outfitted with Baidu’s Apollo autonomous driving system, which is capable of Level 4 operations, a designation by automotive engineering association SAE International that means the vehicles take over all driving in certain conditions. The buses, which will initially deployed in tourist spots, airports, and other controlled, or geo-fenced areas.

“2018 marks the first year of commercialization for autonomous driving. From the volume production of Apolong, we can truly see that autonomous driving is making great strides, taking the industry from zero to one,”Robin Li said during his keynote address.

The autonomous buses are the physical embodiment of Baidu’s Apollo program, an open source autonomous driving platform that has been under development for years. Baidu isn’t interested in making the actual car—just the software that drives it. Baidu has focused its effort on delivering services, like data and high-skilled computing. Baidu is betting that its tech will help it become China’s leading developer of self-driving vehicles.

And it wants as many companies as possible to use its Apollo platform. Some 116 partners are now on the Apollo platform, including new partners Jaguar Land Rover, Valeo, Byton, Leopard Imaging and Suning Logistcs.

The latest upgrade to the Apollo platform —also announced at Baidu’s developer conference — aims to better support autonomous driving in geo-fenced areas. Apollo 3.0, as it’s being called, includes new solutions to support valet parking, autonomous mini buses, and autonomous microcars. The aim is for this update to help its dozens of partners deploy volumes of autonomous vehicles, not just one or two.

A previous update, announced in January at CES 2018, included support for new computing platforms, new reference vehicles and more HD mapping services. At the time, Baidu also said it would offer support for the four main computing platforms: Nvidia, Intel, NXP and Renesas.

Baidu is preparing to launch a driverless service in China — and elsewhere — with another update to its Apollo autonomous driving platform and the mass production of Apolong, an autonomous mini bus that seats up to 14 people.

Baidu made the announcements at Baidu Create 2018, the company’s annual AI developer conference. Baidu has started volume production of the autonomous mini buses in partnership with Chinese manufacturer King Long. The buses are being produced at King Long’s manufacturing facility in Xiamen, in southeastern China’s Fujian province.

Baidu’s Chairman and CEO Robin Li introduced the milestone while livestreaming the 100th bus rolling off of the production line to more than 6,000 attendees at Baidu Create 2018 in Beijing.

Baidu plans to launch the autonomous bus service in several Chinese cities including Beijing, Shenzhen, Pingtan and Wuhan. But the company has aspirations beyond China. Baidu is partnering with SB Drive, the  autonomous driving subsidiary of SoftBank Group, to bring Apolong autonomous mini buses in Japan early next year.

Apolong is outfitted with Baidu’s Apollo autonomous driving system, which is capable of Level 4 operations, a designation by automotive engineering association SAE International that means the vehicles take over all driving in certain conditions. The buses, which will initially deployed in tourist spots, airports, and other controlled, or geo-fenced areas.

“2018 marks the first year of commercialization for autonomous driving. From the volume production of Apolong, we can truly see that autonomous driving is making great strides, taking the industry from zero to one,”Robin Li said during his keynote address.

The autonomous buses are the physical embodiment of Baidu’s Apollo program, an open source autonomous driving platform that has been under development for years. Baidu isn’t interested in making the actual car—just the software that drives it. Baidu has focused its effort on delivering services, like data and high-skilled computing. Baidu is betting that its tech will help it become China’s leading developer of self-driving vehicles.

And it wants as many companies as possible to use its Apollo platform. Some 116 partners are now on the Apollo platform, including new partners Jaguar Land Rover, Valeo, Byton, Leopard Imaging and Suning Logistcs.

The latest upgrade to the Apollo platform —also announced at Baidu’s developer conference — aims to better support autonomous driving in geo-fenced areas. Apollo 3.0, as it’s being called, includes new solutions to support valet parking, autonomous mini buses, and autonomous microcars. The aim is for this update to help its dozens of partners deploy volumes of autonomous vehicles, not just one or two.

A previous update, announced in January at CES 2018, included support for new computing platforms, new reference vehicles and more HD mapping services. At the time, Baidu also said it would offer support for the four main computing platforms: Nvidia, Intel, NXP and Renesas.

You might think that the main selling point of an influencer marketing startup like Captiv8 is to help marketers find influencers and creators to work with. Maybe so, but that isn’t stopping the company from making its creator discovery product available for free.

“We felt that we really wanted to just open up that ecosystem, to provide brands access to find and research influencers without having to pay for it,” co-founder Krishna Subramanian told me.

Through the free product, marketers can look through the 1 million-plus influencers indexed on the platform — in some cases, those profiles are based entirely on public data, but influencers can also claim them and provide additional data.

Marketers can then search based on filters like personality archetype, content type, location, representation and much more. Plus, Captiv8 is offering demographic and brand affinity data about an influencer’s audiences.

Until now, Subramanian said that if you weren’t paying for a service like Captiv8, you could only find influencers in scattershot, ad hoc ways, like reading articles about the top influencers in various categories.

On Captiv8, meanwhile, marketers are apparently spending two hours per day on creator discovery, saving them 60 percent of the time they would have spent on the process.

So why make it available for free? While brands like Dr Pepper, Snapple, StubHub and Honda already use Captiv8, Subramanian said the goal is to “widen the funnel,” turning this into “the default place” where marketers go to learn about influencers.

And then, of course, the company can upsell you on Captiv8’s entire “end-to-end SaaS platform,” charging for additional audience data, as well as tools like campaign management, measurement and social listening.

The Fourth of July will be a little different tomorrow at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, Calif. Instead of fireworks, 500 Intel Shooting Star drones will take to the sky to perform an aerial routine in honor of the holiday and the base’s 75th anniversary.

These are the same drones that preformed at Disney World, the Super Bowl and the Olympics.

One person controls the fleet of drones thanks to a sophisticated control platform that pre-plans the route of each drone. Intel engineers told me that the system can control an unlimited amount of drones. In the version I saw, the drones used GPS to stay in place and the drones lacked any collision detection sensors.

It’s an impressive show of technology. I was in attendance for the first show at Disney World and the drones are a wonderful alternative to fireworks. Sure, fireworks are a Fourth of July tradition, but they can’t do the things these drones can do, plus, because they’re much more quiet, more people can enjoy the show.

Facebook is becoming a marketplace for enterprise apps that help Group admins manage their communities.

To protect itself and its users in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook locked down the Groups API for building apps for Groups. These apps had to go through a human-reviewed approval process, and lost access to Group member lists, plus the names and profile pics of people who posted. Now, approved Groups apps are reemerging on Facebook, accessible to admins through a new in-Facebook Groups apps browser that gives the platform control over discoverability.

Facebook confirmed the new Groups apps browser after our inquiry, telling TechCrunch, “What you’re seeing today is related to changes we announced in April that require developers to go through an updated app review process in order to use the Groups API. As part of this, some developers who have gone through the review process are now able to access the Groups API.”

Facebook wouldn’t comment further, but this Help Center article details how Groups can now add apps. Matt Navarra first spotted the new Groups apps option and tipped us off. Previously, admins would have to find Group management tools outside of Facebook and then use their logged-in Facebook account to give the app permissions to access their Group’s data.

Groups are often a labor of love for admins, but generate tons of engagement for the social network. That’s why the company recently began testing Facebook subscription Groups that allow admins to charge a monthly fee. With the right set of approved partners, the platform offers Group admins some of the capabilities usually reserved for big brands and businesses that pay for enterprise tools to manage their online presences.

Becoming a gateway to enterprise tool sets could make Facebook Groups more engaging, generating more time on site and ad views from users. This also positions Facebook as a natural home for ad campaigns promoting different enterprise tools. And one day, Facebook could potentially try to act more formally as a Groups App Store and try to take a cut of software-as-a-service subscription fees the tool makers charge.

Facebook can’t build every tool that admins might need, so in 2010 it launched the Groups API to enlist some outside help. Moderating comments, gathering analytics and posting pre-composed content were some of the popular capabilities of Facebook Groups apps. But in April, it halted use of the API, announcing that “there is information about people and conversations in groups that we want to make sure is better protected. Going forward, all third-party apps using the Groups API will need approval from Facebook and an admin to ensure they benefit the group.”

Now apps that have received the necessary approval are appearing in this Groups apps browser. It’s available to admins through their Group Settings page. The apps browser lets them pick from a selection of tools like Buffer and Sendible for scheduling posts to their Group, and others for handling commerce messages.

Facebook is still trying to bar the windows of its platform, ensuring there are no more easy ways to slurp up massive amounts of sensitive user data. Yesterday it shut down more APIs and standalone apps in what appears to be an attempt to streamline the platform so there are fewer points of risk and more staff to concentrate on safeguarding the most popular and powerful parts of its developer offering.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal has subsided to some degree, with Facebook’s share price recovering and user growth maintaining at standard levels. However, a new report from The Washington Post says the FBI, FTC and SEC will be investigating Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and the social network’s executives’ testimony to Congress. Facebook surely wants to get back to concentrating on product, not politics, but must take it slow and steady. There are too many eyes on it to move fast or break anything.

Tech CEOs and founders are disrupting everything from travel to food, to space, to sleep. Now it’s time to disrupt a process that so many of us have relied on to get where we are today: immigration. According to a study by the National Foundation for American Policy, immigrants have founded more than half of U.S. startup companies that are valued at more than one billion dollars.

With all that is happening around us, now is the time for entrepreneurs to use their playbook for disrupting markets and apply it to immigration as a space — not for a financial upside, but for a more social, human upside.

• Turning a Problem Into an Opportunity

One of the most important lessons you learn as an entrepreneur is outlining the problem you are trying to solve and turning it into an opportunity.

Economists generally agree that immigration has net positive effects on both the sending and receiving countries. Contrary to popular belief, immigration doesn’t increase crime rates or take jobs awayfrom native workers. In fact, according to The Silicon Valley Competitiveness and Innovation Project Report, almost every major tech hub has more foreign-born workers than domestic ones.

Before solving a problem, we have to agree on the facts. Research shows that people in many western countries greatly overestimate the number of immigrants — in this case, Muslim immigrants — coming into their country. Misinformation makes it difficult to pursue effective solutions.

Source: The Guardian

There’s an opportunity to educate ourselves and instead highlight the economic and innovation opportunity that immigration offers. Immigrants provide access to more talent, more diverse thinking, and more creativity.

Dr. Adrian Furnham, a professor of psychology at University College London who studies immigrants and entrepreneurship said, “What I’ve found is that immigrants not only have the qualities that help any entrepreneurs succeed—including aggressiveness and creative thinking—but they get a big boost because many of the skills they picked up coping with a new world are transferable to the entrepreneurial world.”

• Rebranding the Word “Immigrant”

Another important step in an entrepreneur’s playbook relates to changing perceptions. Airbnb, for example, had to challenge people’s assumption that opening their home to strangers was a dangerous and risky endeavor. Now, facilitating these types of interactions is an act of hospitality and the beginning of a friendship.

More and more recently, the word “immigrant” has become a bad word. We have the responsibility to rebrand it to mean maker not taker. Look at Hamdi Ulukaya, the Turkish immigrant who created the Chobani yogurt empire. He employs 3,000+ people and has given them ten percent of the shares in the company.

When people research the word “immigrant” online, they need to find Ulukaya’s story. They need to find images of successful, eloquent, and positive entrepreneurs and leaders. That’s why it’s so important to speak as immigrants. To tell the story of how we came here and the challenges we’ve had to overcome. It’s tempting to try to blend in, but we have to infuse the word “immigration” with more positive visuals.

The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG) established the Center for New North Carolinians (CNNC), with the aim of supporting refugees and immigrants living in the local community. CNNC piloted a STEM club program for female refugees and immigrants using littleBits’ electronic building blocks. Photos from the CNNC STEM Club, courtesy of littleBits

• Taking [Commercial] Risks

In January 2017 when the Trump Administration’s travel ban was first implemented, littleBits posted a billboard in Times Square that said in English and Arabic: “We Invent the World We Want to Live In.” We wanted people to associate Arabic script with a positive, inclusive message. It was the first time I decided to speak to my background as an Arab and Muslim immigrant. The public response, the impact on our team culture, and the feeling of having stood up for what’s right made me bolder about using my platform to speak out.

That’s why, when the debate around immigration rose up again in response to family separation at the border, I knew I had to say something.

At littleBits, being from “another” place is a reality; we are a company built on diversity. We have close to 20 languages in the office, a multitude of religions, and about 20 percent of us have visas or green cards or were born in other countries. I myself know firsthand the struggle that immigrants face, I’ve had to flee my country of Lebanon three times for my own safety

So, last week I joined leaders from Facebook, Twitter, AirBnB, and Microsoft and I made my voice heard. I announced a donation program and wrote a blog post which opened with: “We at littleBits strive to separate politics from our work. But when something touches human rights, it is no longer about politics. It becomes about justice.”

And you know what? Like most things in America today, the reaction we received was polarizing. Some people said that speaking out was an “admirable move” and that it was clear we were focused on “making a big difference.” On the other hand, 27% of respondents explicitly told us they would be less likely to purchase littleBits products as a result of us speaking out. One loyal customer told us they would now “actively discourage” their children from buying or using our products. Another said they would “throw [their] Bits in the trash.”

And yet, I stand by our statement.

The business risks involved with speaking out are real. But to me, putting a flag in the ground is always worth it. One email, one blog post, one donation at a time, I protect the diversity of my team, my company, and the country in which I reside. History will judge us if we quietly allow our government to strip us of the diversity and innovation that make America so amazing.

As entrepreneurs, we have a platform. Despite the potential costs, we must use this platform to put ourselves out there, to speak out the issues that matter to our country, our businesses, and ourselves. There may be financial downside and yes, it will be more difficult to quantify the human upside, but I for one am willing to take a gamble that net net, it will be a positive.