Month: August 2018

President Trump’s time in office has been punctuated by rising tension with China on a host of economic issues. He’s received bipartisan criticism for the impact of tariffs on Chinese goods and the resulting retaliation against American exports.

Democrats and Republicans have also unified over concerns about how Chinese state-associated actors are using minority investments in critical technology companies to gain sensitive information — like IP and know-how — about startups, many of them VC-backed.  Policymakers are worried this technology is being used to propel Chinese advancement in emerging technology like artificial intelligence and robotics.

These concerns led to passage of the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act (FIRRMA), which was signed into law by the president on August 13. NVCA has been at the table during FIRRMA’s consideration because it stands to have a significant impact on the venture and startup ecosystem.

Who in our industry needs to understand FIRRMA going forward? Many more than you might think. VCs with foreign LPs, VCs with foreign co-investors, or startups contemplating taking foreign capital are the prime examples, but given the shifting startup landscape in recent years, FIRRMA will leave a broad mark.

FIRRMA expands the power of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS) to scrutinize foreign investments into ‘critical technology’ companies for national security implications. Few in the startup world have dealt with CFIUS, but those who have understand its power and implications. It’s the opaque government entity that blew up the Broadcom – Qualcomm transaction for national security reasons and has been called the ‘ultimate regulatory bazooka.’

Before FIRRMA, CFIUS reviewed foreign investments for national security considerations when the investment resulted in foreign control of a U.S. entity. But minority investments used to obtain sensitive information about a company have been outside the scope of CFIUS because those investments generally don’t deliver control to the foreign investor. FIRRMA is intended to address this blind spot by greatly expanding the transactions that must be disclosed to CFIUS.

NVCA secured hard-fought changes to FIRRMA to lessen the impact on our industry. The bill has come a long way from when it was introduced. For example, under the original version we were concerned foreign LPs might need to file with CFIUS because they would not meet the exemption for passive investment. Furthermore, a sizeable chunk of foreign direct investments into startups would be picked up by the bill. Fortunately, key changes were made in the end.

Ultimately under FIRRMA the government will now be able to review—and potentially reject—any investment by a foreign entity in a critical technology company that gives the foreign entity:

• access to any material nonpublic technical information of the company;
• membership or observer rights on the company’s board or equivalent governing body; or
• any involvement in substantive decision-making of the company, other than through voting of shares

Under this approach, the typical venture fund ought to be able to avoid a CFIUS filing because its foreign LPs won’t meet the above factors.  And many direct investments into startups will also avoid filing with CFIUS unless they’re leading to board seats, non-public information about the company, or decision-making capability.

Still, VCs, LPs, and startups raising capital will need to navigate FIRRMA going forward to make sure they don’t get tripped up by the new law. Doing so will likely trigger a CFIUS filing, leading to delay and expense. The fast-moving startup ecosystem will not welcome the uncertainty that comes with a 45-day initial review that is fraught with uncertainty and costs. And that expense is no small sum, as FIRRMA sets the CFIUS filing fee at 1 percent of the value of the transaction or $300,000 — whichever is less. And that doesn’t include legal fees.

It is imperative the venture industry remain vigilant on FIRRMA and related national security issues. The government is increasingly interested in how our world operates because emerging technology is impacting society and foreign capital is sometimes used to launch high-growth companies.

At NVCA, we are embracing this conversation and will hold a conference named “Emerging Technology Meets National Security” on November 14 in DC.

The NVCA will remain deeply engaged in FIRRMA as regulations are written that will define terms and set practices that affect the thrust of the bill. These issues are happening whether or not the venture industry is part of the conversation, but we only get a chance to impact decisions if we’re in the room.

Battle Royale mode is taking over the gaming sphere. Alongside Fortnite, PUBG and H1Z1, a number of big titles are adding Battle Royale to their popular games, including CoD: Black Ops IV and Battlefield V.

In fact, EA DICE just released a new trailer for Battlefield V that seems to show a glimpse of the Battle Royale mode.

The Devastation of Rotterdam trailer shows loads of in-game footage, cutscenes and general action on the Rotterdam map. But at the end, the trailer goes to an aerial shot of a ring of fire, and inside a small number of soldiers continue to battle it out.

This may very well be the first look we’re getting at Battlefield V’s Battle Royale mode, which was teased at E3 this year.

The game doesn’t come out until October 19, at which point it will be available on PS4, Xbox, and PC.

Check out the trailer below:

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week was a corker. We had Alex Wilhelm in-studio with our guest Minal Hasan, founder of K2 Global, and TechCrunch’s Danny Chriton jumped in from New York to help the crew dig through the biggest and best stuff from the last seven days.

It’s been busy, to say the least. First, we took a look at the Elon-Musk-taking-Tesla-private-situation, which has kept Markets Twitter in suspense for days. We didn’t really get to talk about the Grimes-Azealia Banks stuff, but, hey, stay in your lane and what not. Don’t forget that the latest Tesla upheaval comes on the heels of the firm’s pretty good earnings report.

Next, we took a look at earnings. Not of public companies, mind, but two unicorns that have become so large as to require regular financial disclosure. So, we took a peek into what Uber and WeWork had cooking. In short:

• WeWork loses a lot of money, and despite its impressive growth we have some concerns;
• Uber loses a lot of money, but due to its impressive growth our group was (on average) not too worried.

Put into simple terms, WeWork’s long-term lease situation has us worried, while Uber’s losses compared to its net revenue seem kinda alright given other financial metrics. Place your own bets, of course.

Moving along we took a dig into the NIO IPO, which you probably haven’t heard about yet. It’s another electric car company, but this time from China. And it’s raising a lot after having essentially zero history as a revenue-generating company. What could go wrong!

And finally, crypto and all that has happened to your favorite coin recently. Hasan was on hand with a grip of good points on the matter. She was a pretty damn great guest.

That’s it for this week, hang tight and come see us at Disrupt.

Production note: Alex’s mic was a bit whack until the 16-minute mark. Please forgive the issue, we noticed and fixed it as fast as we could. Hugs and love! 

Calling all entrepreneurs, techies, aspiring startup founders and anyone else who loves the thrill and excitement that comes from seeing innovative startups compete head-to-head. TechCrunch Startup Battlefield MENA 2018, our premier startup pitch competition, takes place October 3 in Beirut, Lebanon.

Come and watch as 15 of the region’s top early-stage startup founders vie for the title of the Middle East and North Africa’s best startup. Tickets to this event — our first in this part of the world — cost $29 (including VAT), and you can buy your tickets right here.

If you’ve never seen one of our Startup Battlefield competitions, this the perfect opportunity to learn what it’s all about and experience it up close and personal. Who knows? It might even inspire you to apply for the next Startup Battlefield. Here’s what you can expect to see onstage.

During three preliminary rounds, 15 teams — five startups per round — have only six minutes to pitch and present a live demo to a panel of expert technologists and VC investors. After each pitch, the judges have six minutes to grill the team with tough questions. Thanks to the free pitch coaching they received from TechCrunch editors, the founders will be ready to handle anything that comes their way.

Next, the judges confer, thin the herd and allow only five teams to move on to the next round — a new panel of judges, another pitch and more Q&A. After expending a lot of blood, sweat and maybe a few tears, one startup will emerge the winner of TechCrunch Startup Battlefield MENA 2018 — receive a US$25,000 no-equity cash prize and win a trip for two to compete in the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2019 (assuming the company still qualifies to compete at the time).

Now, pay attention, because this is where you come in. All of this “techcitement” goes down in front of a live audience. You and hundreds of other people, including entrepreneurs, distinguished technologists, eager investors and media will cheer them on to victory. Great exposure for them, a ton of fun — and maybe even a networking opportunity — for you.

TechCrunch Startup Battlefield MENA 2018 takes place in the Beirut Digital District in Lebanon on October 3. A mere $29 gets you in the door, so don’t miss your chance to watch 15 startups launch to the world. Buy your ticket here today.

When you think of e-commerce marketplaces, chances are that the first things that come to mind are storefronts built on websites and apps. But today an e-commerce startup that has never had either — and never plans to — has raised a fistful of cash to continue building out its shopping experience on the platform has been its growth engine: messaging apps.

London-based Threads has raised $20 million in funding for an operation that courts high-end, millennial, mostly female customers with tailored selections of luxury fashion, which it then sells to them on services like WeChat, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Instagram and Apple’s iMessage for their primary interactions with a team of human (not AI) shopping assistants.

“We very intentionally didn’t build a website for consumers, just as we haven’t built an app,” founder and CEO Sophie Hill explained in an interview. “The idea behind Threads is curation and convenience. It’s a customer-centric business and it’s built on chat because that is where the customers wanted to be and transact. Chat may not have been used in the way we were using it in 2010” — when the company was founded — “but that was our problem to solve. We had to learn to serve through chat rather than create was for convenient for us as a business.”

The company says that it will be using the new funding — led by fashion and millennial-focused fund C Ventures, with participation from Highland Europe (which invests in Matches Fashion, among other related businesses) — to expand its business across the board: hiring more stylists, more engineers to build tech to help the operation run smoother, and other creative and other staff to bolster the 90 who already work for the business. But even before now, the company has been growing quite impressively.

With customers in 100 countries — 70 percent of them under the age of 35, with Asia one of its fastest-growing regions — Threads says that its average amount people spend in a shopping session (basket size) is a very unshabby $3,000. And because of its success in linking up expensive goods with people willing to buy it, it’s secured relationships with designers and brands like Dior, Fendi, Chopard and some 250 other luxury names to source key items for its clients. As a marketplace, Threads makes commissions from the suppliers when items are sold.

Threads materialised (sorry) as a business when founder and CEO Sophie Hill was still working as a buyer for Topshop owner Arcadia, her first job out of university (where she studied sociology).

The year was 2010, and even though messaging apps had yet to take off, and well before the ones you likely use today really had any functionality at all, with Instagram and the “stories” format nowhere on the scene, Hill started canvassing opinion among the people she hoped to target. She saw that they were already all avidly using messaging clients on their phones to chat to each other.

Messaging in the West was relatively feature-free, but Hill could see what was coming around the corner by looking at WeChat, the Chinese app that was well ahead of its time, and that — plus what her target audience was already using — was enough to convince her of how she needed to build her business.

Threads has a somewhat unconventional cost base as an e-commerce startup.

Without a site and app, its developer team instead is focused on ways of improving the processes that go into the selling that Threads does do: personalized, concierge style services. That means building tech to make tracking items more efficient for customers (that might come in the form of an actual chatbot at some point, Hill said); building a better search engine for the assistants to find specific pieces for Threads clients; and so on.

Another area where Threads’ costs are quite different from the typical e-commerce business is in customer acquisition. Hill says the startup company also has never really had a dedicated marketing budget (nor “someone leading the marketing function”). Instead, Threads has grown mainly by word of mouth among users, and later via social media platforms like Instagram as its own content and that of its customers gets attention.

On the other hand, one area where Threads has potentially weathered significantly more expense than the average e-commerce business is in how it connects clients with products.

Hill says that its chat-based shopping service fits into a wider world of busy activity and travel for a typical customer, who will nonetheless expect a high level of engagement as part of a five-star service, even if it originated in chat. So, Threads has been known to organise designers flying in from one city to another to show off a specific piece to a client, and also pulling together shopping to hand deliver it to a client in whatever location she happens to be, or even organising excursions to actual, physical boutiques when those customers take a trip to a city, either specifically to shop or for another reason.

“It is a complement to what they need and how they want to shop for luxury goods,” she said.

There is something about a business based fundamentally around a team of people serving users, versus a business that has built technology to do that job, which frankly feels very analogue. But Hill and her investors believe that there is scalability in Threads’ future, and tech will be what helps get it there (just as it has been what helped the startup materialise in the first place).

“Just because someone doesn’t have a website or app doesn’t mean we don’t have a direct purchase path,” Hill said. “We are going to be using technology to enhance that personalised experience. Using tech blended with human interaction will be the ultimate service for the luxury industry. We see it as a complement, a way to enhance the personal experience.

“Tech has moved quickly and we are starting to test and how we will integrate more AI,” she added. “You can see where the customers might be happy with that response versus talking to a person. It’s about us seeing how customers will react.”

The mix of a business born in the concept of high-touch customer service, with luxury boutique-style profit margins, but with roots in a very popular technology (messaging) and the potential to bring on even more tech to make it work more efficiently, is the crux of what caught investors’ attention.

“People who are Threads’ customers clearly like to transact like this,” Tony Zappala, a partner at Highland Europe, said. “And both Threads and those customers are getting more responses. It’s much harder to achieve that on a website these days.”

The next stop for Threads will be expanding to more product categories beyond fashion and jewellery — although Hill would not say what — and adding more offices to provide services closer to its customers on both sides of the marketplace. New York and Hong Kong are first on the list.

When you think of e-commerce marketplaces, chances are that the first things that come to mind are storefronts built on websites and apps. But today an e-commerce startup that has never had either — and never plans to — has raised a fistful of cash to continue building out its shopping experience on the platform has been its growth engine: messaging apps.

London-based Threads has raised $20 million in funding for an operation that courts high-end, millennial, mostly female customers with tailored selections of luxury fashion, which it then sells to them on services like WeChat, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Instagram and Apple’s iMessage for their primary interactions with a team of human (not AI) shopping assistants.

“We very intentionally didn’t build a website for consumers, just as we haven’t built an app,” founder and CEO Sophie Hill explained in an interview. “The idea behind Threads is curation and convenience. It’s a customer-centric business and it’s built on chat because that is where the customers wanted to be and transact. Chat may not have been used in the way we were using it in 2010” — when the company was founded — “but that was our problem to solve. We had to learn to serve through chat rather than create was for convenient for us as a business.”

The company says that it will be using the new funding — led by fashion and millennial-focused fund C Ventures, with participation from Highland Europe (which invests in Matches Fashion, among other related businesses) — to expand its business across the board: hiring more stylists, more engineers to build tech to help the operation run smoother, and other creative and other staff to bolster the 90 who already work for the business. But even before now, the company has been growing quite impressively.

With customers in 100 countries — 70 percent of them under the age of 35, with Asia one of its fastest-growing regions — Threads says that its average amount people spend in a shopping session (basket size) is a very unshabby $3,000. And because of its success in linking up expensive goods with people willing to buy it, it’s secured relationships with designers and brands like Dior, Fendi, Chopard and some 250 other luxury names to source key items for its clients. As a marketplace, Threads makes commissions from the suppliers when items are sold.

Threads materialised (sorry) as a business when founder and CEO Sophie Hill was still working as a buyer for Topshop owner Arcadia, her first job out of university (where she studied sociology).

The year was 2010, and even though messaging apps had yet to take off, and well before the ones you likely use today really had any functionality at all, with Instagram and the “stories” format nowhere on the scene, Hill started canvassing opinion among the people she hoped to target. She saw that they were already all avidly using messaging clients on their phones to chat to each other.

Messaging in the West was relatively feature-free, but Hill could see what was coming around the corner by looking at WeChat, the Chinese app that was well ahead of its time, and that — plus what her target audience was already using — was enough to convince her of how she needed to build her business.

Threads has a somewhat unconventional cost base as an e-commerce startup.

Without a site and app, its developer team instead is focused on ways of improving the processes that go into the selling that Threads does do: personalized, concierge style services. That means building tech to make tracking items more efficient for customers (that might come in the form of an actual chatbot at some point, Hill said); building a better search engine for the assistants to find specific pieces for Threads clients; and so on.

Another area where Threads’ costs are quite different from the typical e-commerce business is in customer acquisition. Hill says the startup company also has never really had a dedicated marketing budget (nor “someone leading the marketing function”). Instead, Threads has grown mainly by word of mouth among users, and later via social media platforms like Instagram as its own content and that of its customers gets attention.

On the other hand, one area where Threads has potentially weathered significantly more expense than the average e-commerce business is in how it connects clients with products.

Hill says that its chat-based shopping service fits into a wider world of busy activity and travel for a typical customer, who will nonetheless expect a high level of engagement as part of a five-star service, even if it originated in chat. So, Threads has been known to organise designers flying in from one city to another to show off a specific piece to a client, and also pulling together shopping to hand deliver it to a client in whatever location she happens to be, or even organising excursions to actual, physical boutiques when those customers take a trip to a city, either specifically to shop or for another reason.

“It is a complement to what they need and how they want to shop for luxury goods,” she said.

There is something about a business based fundamentally around a team of people serving users, versus a business that has built technology to do that job, which frankly feels very analogue. But Hill and her investors believe that there is scalability in Threads’ future, and tech will be what helps get it there (just as it has been what helped the startup materialise in the first place).

“Just because someone doesn’t have a website or app doesn’t mean we don’t have a direct purchase path,” Hill said. “We are going to be using technology to enhance that personalised experience. Using tech blended with human interaction will be the ultimate service for the luxury industry. We see it as a complement, a way to enhance the personal experience.

“Tech has moved quickly and we are starting to test and how we will integrate more AI,” she added. “You can see where the customers might be happy with that response versus talking to a person. It’s about us seeing how customers will react.”

The mix of a business born in the concept of high-touch customer service, with luxury boutique-style profit margins, but with roots in a very popular technology (messaging) and the potential to bring on even more tech to make it work more efficiently, is the crux of what caught investors’ attention.

“People who are Threads’ customers clearly like to transact like this,” Tony Zappala, a partner at Highland Europe, said. “And both Threads and those customers are getting more responses. It’s much harder to achieve that on a website these days.”

The next stop for Threads will be expanding to more product categories beyond fashion and jewellery — although Hill would not say what — and adding more offices to provide services closer to its customers on both sides of the marketplace. New York and Hong Kong are first on the list.

Coinbase has added a new buying option for its customers after the crypto exchange introduced Ethereum Classic to its collection.

The addition was first announced in July but Coinbase took its time to implement its newest addition following criticism over the way it added Bitcoin Cash last year. Allegations of insider trading led the company to investigate the incident which saw service outages and wild price fluctuations for Bitcoin Cash right after its addition to the exchange. It later introduced a framework for adding new tokens.

Nonetheless, Ethereum Classic’s value spiked 20 percent on last month’s news. Today, though, it is down two percent over the last 24 hours, according to Coinmarketcap.com.

Coinbase has taken a conservative approach to adding more crypto. Today’s addition takes it to five tokens — Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash are the others — but that’s likely to change this year. Last month, it announced it is “exploring” the addition of another five tokens while CTO Balaji Srinivasan hinted that the selection would grow further when I interviewed him at the recent TechCrunch blockchain event in Zug.

“We hear your requests, and are working hard to make more assets available to more customers around the world,” Dan Romero, who heads Coinbase’s consumer business, said in a blog post published today.

A note on Ethereum Classic — it was created in June 2016 following a major hack on The DAO, a fundraising vehicle for the project. In short: the Ethereum Foundation created a new version of Ethereum — known today as Ethereum — that rescued the lost funds, while those who opposed continued on with the original chain which was known as Ethereum Classic.

Note: The author owns a small amount of cryptocurrency. Enough to gain an understanding, not enough to change a life.

This post has been updated with a comment from Tesla and to indicate that a single employee was allegedly involved in the drug trafficking ring. 

Employees at Tesla’s Nevada gigafactory were allegedly involved in a massive drug ring, stole $37 million worth of precious metals and equipment and illegally spied on former employees at the behest of chief executive Elon Musk, according to a new whistleblower complaint filed against the company.

First reported by Jalopnik, the complaint is only the latest in a string of damaging news stories that have erased millions in value for Tesla shareholders and could cast the future of the company’s celebrity chief executive, Elon Musk, into doubt.

It’s also the second whistleblower claim filed against the company this summer.

This time the whistleblower is Karl Hansen, a former member of Tesla’s internal security department and investigations division.

The complaint from Hansen, a former special agent, member of the US Army’s Criminal Investigation Command, and senior investigator for the Federal Maritime Commission, reads like a weird mashup of Sons of Anarchy, Silicon Valley and Scandal.

Hansen claims that Tesla failed to disclose a recent internal investigation the company made into a tip it received from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency and Storey County Sheriff’s Office that one of its gigafactory employees were part of “a narcotics trafficking ring involving the sale of significant quantities of cocaine and possibly crystal methamphetamine at the Gigafactory on behalf of a Mexican drug cartel from Sonora Mexico.”

According to a statement from Hansen’s legal counsel (Meissner Associates — the firm also representing Tesla’s other whistleblower, Martin Tripp), Hansen claims that he corroborated connections between the named employees and alleged members of the Mexican drug cartel, but Tesla refused to investigate the matter further and said it would hire “outside vendors” to follow up. Hansen says the company never did.

For its part, the Drug Enforcement Agency issued a statement to BuzzFeed saying that it would not inform any “non-law enforcement entities” of ongoing or pending investigations.

Drug smuggling may not be the wildest allegation in Hansen’s complaint. According to the summary from Meissner, Hansen also claims that Tesla installed eavesdropping and wiretapping equipment at its facilities and was illegally listening to conversations and scanning messages from Tripp at the behest of the company’s chief executive, Elon Musk .

Here’s the relevant section from the complaint:

According to Mr. Hansen, following Tripp’s departure from Tesla, Tesla went so far as to install specialized router equipment within its Nevada Gigafactory designed to capture employee cell phone communications and/or retrieve employee cell phone data. The Meissner firm recently released police reports relating to this past June’s GigaGate incident indicating that Tesla security personnel may have unlawfully accessed Mr. Tripp’s cell phone long after he was fired by Tesla. Mr. Hansen states that he was told these tactics were specifically authorized by CEO Elon Musk and were implemented by members of Tesla’s internal investigations/security/IT units.”

Finally, Hansen has said that the company never disclosed the theft of $37 million in precious metals and materials used in making the company’s batteries.

The release today follows disclosures from Tripp, the original gigafactory whistleblower, of damaged Tesla batteries that allegedly made their way into actual vehicles.

These disclosures, coupled with allegations of erratic behavior from Tesla chief executive Elon Musk, and the (apparently fictitious) nebulous plans to take the company private, have caused Tesla’s share price to slide over roughly $40 over the last two weeks, erasing nearly $6 billion in value from the company.

The full text of Meissner’s summary of the complaints their client is making is below. Mr. Meissner said that Hansen would not be conducting interviews. The Storey County Sheriff’s Department said they would issue a statement on the Meissner report this evening.

“Mr. Hansen’s allegations were taken very seriously when he brought them forward. Some of his claims are outright false. Others could not be corroborated, so we suggested additional investigative steps to try and validate the information he had received second-hand from a single anonymous source,” a spokesperson for Tesla wrote in an email. “Because we wanted to be sure we got this right, we made numerous attempts to engage further with Mr. Hansen to understand more about what he was claiming and the work that he did in reaching his conclusions. He rejected each of those attempts, and to date has refused to speak with the company further. It seems strange that Mr. Hansen would claim that he is concerned about something happening within the company, but then refuse to engage with the company to discuss the information that he believes he has.”

Client Revised FinaL to Be Released UPDATED by Jonathan Shieber on Scribd

It looks like Amazon may be gearing up to make more moves in the brick-and-mortar world. Bloomberg reports that the e-commerce behemoth is putting itself in the running to acquire Landmark Theatres, which claims to be the United States’ largest chain of movie theaters focused on art house (indie and foreign) movies, with a network of 56 cinemas, covering 268 screens in 27 markets.

Bloomberg’s sources say that Amazon is going up against other potential acquirers in purchasing the business from Wagner/Cuban Cos., but that no final decisions have been made.

The companies aren’t publicly commenting on the reports, but it’s an interesting scenario to consider because of all the ways that it seems to fit into Amazon’s wider strategy. 

The company has done an incredible job of making it easy (and cheap) to buy virtually anything you want from it in the digital world, whether it’s necessities like toiletries, books, groceries, clothes and electronics, or digital products like movies, music and cloud storage space for your app or game, in as little as one click. Through its marketplace model — where it is both a middleman between consumers and sellers, and the seller itself of different goods and services — Amazon wants to be wherever people want to spend money.

But there are certain forms of retail that may never translate to the online world. Experiential retail — dining out at restaurants, going to a bar or event, picking a melon that you can smell before you pay for it and, of course, going to the movies — requires that you get up and go somewhere to do it.

Amazon knows this, and so it’s slowly, quietly amassing selective assets that will let people engage in the more physical side of commerce. These have included book stores, and its own futuristic, checkout-free food shops. And of course it spent $13.7 billion to gobble up the natural food leviathan Whole Foods.

The latter of these is very instructive when you consider how a movie theater chain might fit into the Amazon pantheon. Amazon’s Prime Fresh grocery delivery service gives busy users the convenience of skipping the grocery store, but Whole Foods also gives Amazon a way of capturing buyers who might prefer to make trips to a grocery store.

But that’s not all it does. It’s added Whole Foods discounts as yet another sweetener for Prime subscribers; it’s extending its formidable logistics muscle to Whole Foods ordering and delivery (first for Prime subscribers, naturally); and of course it has put in pop-up shops selling its other products, like the Kindle and the Echo, in prime spots when you enter a store.

Amazon owning a chain of theaters spells out a lot of opportunities for it in terms of expanding its interests in film; in experiential, physical commerce; and in leveraging the rest of the pieces in its commercial empire.

The world of movie theaters has been hobbling for years, with droves of consumers these days foregoing increasingly expensive tickets and snacks and opting to watch a slightly smaller screen in the comfort of their own home. But to the disruptive eye, that ageing business model is catnip, and so unsurprisingly, MoviePass has come along, seeing that there was an opportunity to try to revive the cinema experience by offering subscriptions for a flat rate to get more bums on those seats.

Yes, MoviePass is bleeding money, and it looks like a mess for many other reasons, but it’s had an impact, so much so that AMC has taken notice and launched its own competitor.

The world’s largest theater chain almost certainly won’t experience the same sort of pains that MoviePass has, because it both controls the means of distribution and has a sizeable support infrastructure, and of course owns the cinemas.

But if AMC has a safety net, then Amazon — one of the world’s most valuable companies — has airbags, collision sensors, seatbelts, automatic braking and maybe even an Alexa-powered predictive voice to tell you what to do next. If Amazon ran a loss-making chain of cinemas, it would be but a little drop in the bucket for it.

Amazon already has one of the biggest digital subscription businesses in the world, with more than 100 million Prime members, as of April 2018. Tacking a subscription to cinemas on to that, which either made going free or discounted, is a no-brainer.

But wait! You get more for the price of the Landmark Theatres! Amazon, as we know, also has a budding media business, offering movies, TV and music to Prime users. Included in that is its own original content machine, Amazon Studios, responsible for shows like Transparent and movies like Manchester by the Sea.

A theater chain acquisition would further open the distribution channels for Amazon’s own films, and give Amazon a much tighter grip on the costs for that distribution. And with a position covering theatrical, DVD and digital distribution windows, you can bet that will give Amazon more leverage when negotiating screen rights to films that it hasn’t produced itself.

Controlling distribution could also prove useful during awards season — the timing of a film’s release goes a long ways toward determining nominees. (And yes, those screens also become one more place where Amazon can run ads, too, in its budding advertising empire.)

And don’t forget the fact that theaters are, at the end of the day, also retail real estate.

It’s a long-known fact that cinemas make most of their money on concessions, and they have accordingly built out large lobby areas where people can mill about and spend money before and after sitting down in the darkened screening rooms. In addition to selling all the usual concessions (both made by Amazon and its marketplace partners), Amazon could use those spaces as they have with Whole Foods, creating retail experiences for products that might have nothing at all to do with what you came to the cinema for in the first place, but then suddenly seem like interesting places to try out something new.

Is it any wonder that even without Amazon or Landmark responding to Bloomberg’s report, theater chain stocks dropped on word of the news?

Food delivery startup DoorDash announced this afternoon that it has raised $250 million, just five months since the company announced a $535 million round.

Why raise more money so soon? CEO Tony Xu told Axios that he wasn’t actively looking for additional investment, but was open to investor interest because it could help the company expand more quickly. (Maybe he’ll have more to say about those plans at Disrupt SF next month.)

The new funding was led by Coatue Management and DST Global. It sounds like the terms were pretty appealing too, with the valuation growing from $1.4 billion to $4 billion.

In a blog post, the company said it’s had a good 2018, with deliveries increasing 250 percent year-over-year, restaurant chains like Chipotle and IHOP signing up and last week’s launch of the DashPass subscription service, where you can pay $9.99 per month to get unlimited free deliveries.

“As we grow, we will stay true to our values and our mission of connecting people with possibility  —  and, trust us, we’re just getting started,” DoorDash wrote.