So Altru CEO Alykhan Rehmatullah wondered: Why can’t businesses do something similar with recruiting?
And that’s what Altru is trying to accomplish, powering a page on a company’s website that highlights videos from real employees answering questions that potential hires might be asking. The videos are searchable (thanks to Altru’s transcriptions), and they can also be shared on social media.
The startup was part of the recent winter batch at Techstars NYC, and it’s already working with companies like L’Oreal, Dell and Unilever. Today, Altru is announcing that it’s raised $1.3 million in new funding led by Birchmere Ventures.
Rehmatullah contrasted Altru’s approach with Glassdoor, which he said features “more polarized” content (since it’s usually employees with really good or really bad experiences who want to write reviews) and where companies are often forced to “play defense.”
On Altru, on the other hand, employers can take the informal conversations that often take place when someone’s deciding whether to accept a job and turn them into an online recruiting tool. Over time, Rehmatullah said the platform could expand beyond recruiting to areas like on-boarding new employees.
Since these videos are posted to the company website, with the employees’ name and face attached, they may not always feel comfortable being completely honest, particularly about a company’s flaws. But at least it’s a message coming from a regular person, not the corporate-speak of a recruiter or manager.
Rehmatullah acknowledged that there’s usually “an educational process” involved in making employers more comfortable with this kind of content.
“These conversations are already happening outside your organization,” he said. “In the long-term, candidates expect more authenticity, more transparency, more true experiences.”
Facebook removed the event, “No Unite the Right 2-DC,” after discovering that one account connected to the event exhibited what Facebook calls “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” The company defines this activity as “people or organizations creating networks of accounts to mislead others about who they are, or what they’re doing.”
The Facebook page at the center of the controversy was called “Resisters.” TechCrunch confirmed that the Resisters page was created by “bad actors,” as defined by the company, who coordinated fake accounts to deceive users. Facebook ultimately removed the No Unite the Right 2-DC event due to its known interaction and engagement with the Resisters page and maintains that Resisters was an illegitimate page from its inception.
As the company explained in its blog post:
“The “Resisters” Page also created a Facebook Event for a protest on August 10 to 12 and enlisted support from real people… Inauthentic admins of the “Resisters” Page connected with admins from five legitimate Pages to co-host the event.”
The company also observed that a known Internet Research Agency (IRA) account joined the counter-protest event as an admin, though it only served as an admin for seven minutes. (The IRA has been assessed by the U.S. intelligence community as a content farm likely funded by a close Putin ally with ties to Russian intelligence.) On top of that, Facebook noted that an IRA account the company was aware of shared a Facebook event hosted by Resisters in 2017.
Here’s where things get even more tricky. The event that Facebook deleted had been taken over by a handful of real DC area activist groups. These groups, including Smash Racism DC, Black Lives Matter DC, Black Lives Matter Charlottesville and other local groups, worked together under the coalition name “Shut It Down DC” and their actions and plans were not inspired by the “No Unite the Right 2” event, they just happened to cross paths. (Since then, the coalition has recreated the Facebook event as “Hate Not Welcome: No Unite The Right 2.”)
We've since created a new Facebook event but we know real organizing comes from talking with our neighbors, and that this is a real protest in Washington, DC. It is not George Soros, it is not Russia, it is just us.
TechCrunch spoke with a handful of DC-based organizers including Andrew Batcher, a Washington DC-based activist involved with Shut It Down DC, to clarify how the local coalition of organizers became connected to an event and an account deemed illegitimate by Facebook.
“It was grassroots organizing from a lot of different groups who were interested in this,” Batcher said. “A lot of groups went down to Charlottesville last year. Charlottesville is only two hours south of DC.”
He explains that the group’s impetus was Kessler’s own event, not a Facebook event that organizers stumbled onto.
“When we started organizing we talked about making a Facebook page and saw that this already existed,” Batcher said. “It happens pretty regularly in DC knowing how many major events take a place here.”
“We asked to be made co-hosts of the event and we put our stuff up on it basically,” Batcher said. That included video calls to action, photos and other content, including the event description. “Everything that was taken down was ours.”
Beyond creating the initial placeholder page, Batcher says that the Resisters page had “absolutely no involvement” in the event.
“This is really outrageous for us,” Batcher said. “[It] makes it look like we’re Russian pawns. We know that we’re not, and we know that we’ve been doing this organizing.”
He and other activists on the left have expressed concerns that this depiction could undermine their efforts in the mainstream and even lead to conspiracy theories like Pizzagate that spill over into real life violence.
Facebook says that it reached out to the legitimate organizers of No Unite The Right 2-DC with the following message:
We haven’t been able to connect on the phone yet, but I did want to make sure you know that earlier today we removed a Facebook event that you are listed as a co-host of, “No Unite the Right 2 – DC”, because one the Pages that created the event, “Resisters”, has been removed from Facebook because [it] was created by someone establishing an inauthentic account that has been associated with coordinated inauthentic behavior.
“I understand this may be surprising or frustrating. We are reaching out to make sure you have the relevant information and understand that this has nothing to do with you or your Page. Later today, we’ll begin providing information about the event deletion to the approximately 2,600 users who indicated their interest in the event, and the 600 plus users that said they’d attend. If you are interested in setting up another event, we would be happy to include details about it in our public communications.”
According to Batcher, most of the event’s organizers with Shut It Down DC did not receive any correspondence and others received an email “two lines long” which he provided.
The group is dismayed that Facebook went ahead and removed the event before making contact with more of its real organizers. In interviews with TechCrunch, he and other organizers expressed a deep distrust of Facebook and a desire to see more evidence from company that supports its recent actions. One organizer connected to the DC groups expressed concern that Facebook might be flagging activists working together using VPNs for suspicious coordinated activity. When asked about that concern, Facebook explained that VPN use and common privacy measures would not be would not be sufficient, by Facebook’s standards, to cause an account or page to be removed.
“If there was an account that did something bad, get rid of that account. It doesn’t seem to me like it would have to spread to all of this legitimate organizing,” Batcher said. He added that Facebook did not show “any kind of care” for the potential damage to those involved in putting the event together in real life.
“What we would like is a public apology and them letting people know that we are real people doing real organizing.”
That distrust is reflected on both sides of the political spectrum. Concerns that Facebook is censoring content made by right-wing figures have bubbled up in Congressional hearings and been floated among many users on the right. While there is little evidence that Facebook is in fact censoring right-leaning content, the company does have a checkered history with left-leaning groups, including some Black Lives Matter supporters and parts of the LGBTQ community.
In some of those cases, Facebook users were abusing the platform’s reporting tools for targeted harassment, but the company was slow to address concerns or to change its policy. Facebook has also dragged its feet in confronting openly abusive, racist content on its platform and recently faced criticism for internal policies that allow white nationalism while forbidding white supremacism, drawing what is widely considered to be an artificial distinction between the two. These woes don’t just affect Facebook, but the platform does appear to be a perfect storm for anyone acting in bad faith.
While the counter-protest organizers have since created a new Facebook event and intend to continue their efforts, the situation is a fairly unsettling cautionary tale of a rising form of manipulation on the world’s biggest social platform. Recent revelations and those from 2017 show that a new breed of “blended” social media influence campaign — fake accounts leveraging the efforts of real, regular people — proves particularly insidious.
So-called “bad actors” are infiltrating legitimate causes, creating chaos and throwing everything into question. Even when these efforts are exposed, it’s a winning formula for anyone seeking to sow further discord and doubt in the U.S. political landscape. For everyone else, the odds aren’t looking good.
The Kroger Co. announced today the launch of its new e-commerce grocery delivery service, Kroger Ship, which will allow customers to shop online for their favorite Kroger brands and get deliveries as quick as the next day in certain areas.
Not to be confused with the grocer’s Kroger Delivery service, which partners with Instacart to home-deliver groceries to customers from local store locations within two hours, Kroger Ship will help shoppers stock-up on necessary non-perishables like toilet paper and peanut butter.
To start, the delivery service will launch in four cities across the Midwest and South: Cincinnati, Houston, Louisville and Nashville. That’s just a small selection of the grocery company’s 2,800 store fleet and 35-state reach. During the first phase of Kroger Ship’s implementation, customers will be able to choose from a “curated selection” of 4,500 Our Brands products, as well as a selection of 50,000 household essentials.
All Kroger Ship deliveries will be fulfilled through the company’s two fulfillment centers — located in Nevada and North Carolina — and will work in partnership with FedEx and USPS to ship deliveries, according to information provided to TechCrunch in an email by Kroger’s head of Corporate Communications and Media Relations. The company also has plans to break ground this fall on a new fulfillment center in Kentucky, with more centers possible in the future as Kroger Ship grows.
During its launch, Kroger Ship will offer free deliveries for all purchases, as well as 15 percent off customers’ first orders with a one-time promotional code. Post launch, orders over $35 will ship for free ($4.99 shipping otherwise) and the service will offer exclusive promotional deals and codes to Ship users.
While Kroger has a pretty firm foothold when it comes to brick-and-mortar groceries (in 2016, the National Retail Federation named it the third largest retailer in the world behind Walmart and Costco), Kroger is joining a crowded online grocery delivery space.
Tesla reported wider-than-expected losses in the second quarter, but is sticking to a profitable and cash flow positive forecast for the second half of the year.
Tesla reported a quarterly loss of $717.5 million, compared with a $336.4 million loss in the same period last year. Tesla has had just two profitable quarters in its history, the last of which was reported in 2016. This is the company’s seventh consecutive quarterly loss.
When adjusted for one-time items, Tesla losses were $520 million, or $3.06 per share, compared with $220 million, or $1.33 a share, in the same period last year.
There were some bright spots in its second-quarter earnings, which were reported Wednesday after the market closed. Tesla’s negative free cash flow of about $740 million was lower than expected. The company ended the second quarter with $2.2 billion of cash.
Tesla also reported higher than expected sales of $4 billion in the second quarter, a 46 percent increase from $2.8 billion in the same quarter last year mainly due to Model 3 deliveries. Tesla reported sales of $3.4 billion in the first quarter.
Tesla’s automotive gross margin increased to 20.6 percent under generally accepted accounting principles. The company’s non-GAAP automotive gross margin increased to 21 percent.
Tesla said in its second-quarter earnings that it has hit its weekly production goal of about 5,000 Model 3 vehicles multiple times since it first managed to meet its target in the last week of June.
Tesla said it’s now aiming to produce 6,000 Model 3 vehicles per week by late August, and expects to increase production over the next few quarters beyond 6,000 per week, while keeping additional capital expenditures limited.
The company said it will meet those production targets by improving the use of its existing lines and making selective improvements to address bottlenecks rather than creating entirely new duplicated lines.
“We aim to increase production to 10,000 Model 3s per week as fast as we can,” the company said in its shareholder letter. The company said it expect to hit this rate sometime in 2019.
Siemens, the giant German technology company, today announced that it has acquired Mendix, the popular low-code application development platform, for €0.6 billion (or about $700 million). Mendix, which was founded in the Netherlands but now has its headquarters in Boston, will continue to operate as usual and keep its name, but Siemens notes that it will also use the company’s technology to accelerate its own cloud, IoT and digital enterprise ambitions.
“As part of our digitalization strategy, Siemens continues to invest in software offerings for the Digital Enterprise. With the acquisition of Mendix, Siemens continues to add to its comprehensive Digital Enterprise and MindSphere IoT portfolio, with cloud domain expertise, cloud agnostic platform solutions and highly skilled people,” said Jan Mrosik, CEO of Siemens’ Digital Factory Division.
Mendix’s service is already deeply integrated into IBM’s, SAP’s and Pivotal‘s cloud services. Mendix co-founder and CEO Derek Roos notes that his company and Siemens first discussed a strategic partnership, but as those talks progressed, the two companies moved toward an acquisition instead. Roos argues that the two companies’ visions are quite similar and that Siemens is committed to helping accelerate Mendix’s growth, extend the company’s platform and combine it with Siemens’ existing MindSphere IoT system.
“If you’ve ever wondered which low-code platform will have the viability to invest and win in the long term, you no longer have to guess,” Roos writes. “This commitment and investment from Siemens will allow us to accelerate R&D and geo-expansion investments significantly. You’re going to see faster innovation, more reach and an even better customer experience from us.”
Over the course of the last few years, “low-code” has become increasingly popular as more and more enterprises try to enable all of their employees to access and use the data they now store. Not every employee is going to learn how to program, though, so tools like Mendix, K2 and others now make it easy for non-developers to quickly build (mostly database-backed) applications.
Siemens also today announced a new company structure, dubbed Vision 2020+. The details of that aren’t all that interesting, but the company does note that it was to strengthen its growth portfolio through investments in fields like IoT integration services. The Mendix acquisition is part of that, but I’m sure we’ll see a few similar moves in the near future.
While we’re talking about companies like Apple getting alarmingly close to a $1 trillion market cap, both of Jack Dorsey’s companies — Twitter (at least before its earnings last week) and Square — have been on considerable runs, and it looks like the latter won’t be coming to a major halt after today’s quarterly report.
The company reported its second-quarter results today, which were somewhat mixed compared to what Wall Street was expecting but didn’t appear to raise the kinds of significant red flags Twitter raised last week that sent its stock into a tailspin. The company outpaced what analysts expected for its earnings results, while it brought in slightly less revenue than was expected, as its core gross payment volume continued to rise and its net losses narrowed when compared to its second quarter last year. In a year that’s included some evolution in its hardware products and a bet on Bitcoin, Square has seen its stock more than double in the past 12 months and rise 90% since the beginning of the year.
The stock is down around 2.5% this afternoon after the company posted its report, but for the most part, it isn’t the kind of substantial trip-up that would have been a major setback amid an otherwise high-velocity year.
Square’s additional bets beyond its core business, including subscriptions and what it calls “services-based revenue” also more than doubled year-over-year on an adjusted basis, which was driven by its ancillary products like Caviar, Square Capital, it Cash Card, and its Instant Deposit service. The company said Square Capital facilitated more than 60,000 loans totaling $390 million, which is quickly becoming one of its big businesses to run alongside its typical payments system as it looks to snap up adoption of the entire operational stack for small businesses.
The company also had two other lines of revenue that are showing some growth: its hardware business, which while small, is also growing quickly as a result of Square Register and its other hardware products; and Bitcoin, another play it’s making when it comes to its Cash products. Bitcoin generated $37 million in the second quarter, while its hardware division generated $18 million. All of these are part of a way for Square to diversify beyond just being a transaction tool for businesses and look to crack into all the other operational layers of how money generally moves across different surfaces, primarily focusing on the flow in and out of businesses.
Fitbit’s stock price jumped in after-hours trading and is currently trading around $6.00 a share, off its 52-week intraday high of $7.79.
The company today announced its latest quarterly numbers, which saw the average selling price of its wearables increase 6 percent year-over-year to $106 a device. New devices introduced within the last year represented 59 percent of the company’s revenue.
Smartwatches were a high-point for Fitbit this quarter. The company stated that its higher-priced smartwatch wearables outsold Samsung, Garmin and Fossil smartwatches combined in North America. Smartwatch revenue grew to 55 percent of revenue, up from 30 percent on a sequential basis.
“Our performance in Q2 represents the sixth consecutive quarter that we have delivered on our financial commitments, made important progress in transforming our business, and continued to adapt to the changing wearables market. Demand for Versa, our first ‘mass-appeal’ smartwatch, is very strong. Within the second quarter, Versa outsold Samsung, Garmin and Fossil smartwatches combined in North America, improving our position with retailers, solidifying shelf space for the Fitbit brand and providing a halo effect to our other product offerings,” said James Park, co-founder and CEO.
Fitbit’s stock price rallied earlier this summer, hitting 7.79 — its highest selling price since early 2017. The stock has been slipping since, though this quarterly release could cause the price to jump again.
Tech news aggregator Techmeme is trying out a new way to make money — ad units that are directly tied to the stories on the front page.
The idea is that advertisers can specify company names or news categories that they want to target, then Techmeme will automatically include their message below relevant news stories.
Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera tweeted that this could be a good way to “antagonize a particular company” or “hijack all news concerning that company on Techmeme to insert your rebuttal.” Or you could do something that’s a little less confrontational, like crypto wallet company BRD, which will run ads alongside cryptocurrency news.
The idea of using advertisers to take on your competitors or hijack their message isn’t new — for example, it’s a normal tactic to target competitors’ brand names and other keywords in search campaigns. But this allows advertisers to do so in a way that’s both automated and centered on the latest headlines.
“Why is Techmeme the right venue for ads that react to news in this way? Because it’s where readers go to see ideas in conflict,” Rivera wrote in his announcement. “Techmeme is, after all, the arena where industry-driven news meets critical reaction and analysis. So by letting companies speak out and confront issues in this manner, we provide an additive, even entertaining experience for readers.”
Of course, it can be hard to predict when or how a company or topic will pop up in the news (and to be clear, Rivera said the editorial news mix on Techmeme won’t be affected by who’s purchasing ads). The idea, though, is to keep running the ads alongside relevant stories until Techmeme has delivered the placement hours committed to the advertiser.
And to provide a little extra incentive, Rivera noted that Techmeme won’t allow anyone to buy negative ads targeting current advertisers.
“Gabe has kept Techmeme mostly free of advertising since its inception,” BRD VP of Global Marketing Spencer Chen told me via email. “Despite his Twitter persona, the man actually loves his readers. So anytime he rolls out a new ad product, there’s always a buzz to get in early to reach Techmeme’s highly influential and elevated audience.”
This summer’s wedding season required me to buy a new suit. I vowed to be adventurous and buy a color I normally never would have considered. Alas, I opted for a little more movie-theater usher and a little less Jidenna. Had I known about it at the time, I probably would have used Eison Triple Thread, a company that specializes in creating made-to-order suits.
Working with someone to create a suit can be a hard enough task. You have to consider the occasion the suit is for, body type, taste and other relevant factors. And what other suit company or department store doesn’t already do that? To differentiate itself from the crowd, Eison Triple Thread launched FITS, a web application that creates tailored looks based on clients’ lifestyles and musical preferences.
Eison founder and CEO Julian Eison was the fly kid on the playground and says his parents instilled in him a sense of presentation and to be his best when he was out and about.
“In terms of style and color I was super deliberate about what I wore,” he says. “I was the kid who collected Jordans and wanted to be fashionable because I just cared. I think through that process, and as I grew, I just started to embrace it.”
After six years in private equity, where he says he was able to see tech’s flow from the buy side and the sell side, Eison decided to combine his love of fashion and interest in tech. In 2014, he launched Eison Triple Thread from the garage of his San Francisco home to try his hand at creating an alternative to suit-buying at conventional big-box department stores.
“When we first launched the business, it was about visualization,” Eison says. “How can you visualize your body and think about something going on your body that fits you well?”
But Eison Triple Thread isn’t the only suit company that wants to outfit its customers in sleek styles in a made-to-order fashion. The likes of Indochino, Bonobos and Stitch Fix, all of which came before Eison Triple Thread, ultimately have the same goal. So what’s a suit company do to strike a difference between its competitors? Why, integrate artificial intelligence and Spotify data, naturally.
“Music is at the core of a lot of everyday life; it knows no boundaries or color, and it reveals something about us that we may not know that we kind of project onto people,” Eison says. “So we’re trying to get to the core, the unadulterated piece, and that’s music, and it drives a lot of our decisions, selections, identities and moods.”
During the onboarding process, users first log in to the FITS system with their Spotify credentials and take a lifestyle quiz. Questions include in which industry you work, how you dress for work, what your work commute is, how you spend your free time and which word best describes you. Eison says they can start generating data from this basic information.
“We’ve turned that into a lifestyle quiz that aims to reveal as much about a person in terms of their fashion, their interests, their preferences and how they typically like things to fit. That goes into our analysis and allows us to home in on this fit and this style.”
While you’re busy thinking about yourself to the best of your ability, FITS is trolling Spotify through its API to gather data about your musical tastes: genre, when you tend to listen to music and for how long. The process from beginning to end takes only about 15 minutes — unless, like me, you have a hard time selecting just one word from a list of four to describe yourself. Reflective, intense, upbeat, energetic: I am all of these things.
Once you complete the quiz, the web app returns a list of “looks,” as Eison calls them, based on data gleaned from your best answers to these questions. The looks come from a collection of images that Eison and product director Dario Smith curate regularly from the internet based on styles they deem worthy. Eison tells me they currently have 3,000 images in their database and curate additional ones seasonally to kick back to customers on a regular basis.
They pull the metadata of photos, including color pairing, assumed cloth texture and other similar data, which the algorithm uses, Eison says. In the next release, he said the company will be able to identify skin tone for those who upload the required photos. In addition, the company uses available photo metadata to understand geography of fashion. When available, Eison says, they are able to gain insight into local fashion and trends to further tune the algorithm.
“If there are X amount of styles, we want to make sure we have representation,” Eison says. “We can aggregate all these images and then serve those periodically based on how important or relevant they are.”
For my part, I answered the questions while Spotify worked in the background to make sense of my musical predilections: showtunes (your Hamiltons, your Ragtimes, your Cabarets), Jidenna, Calle 13, selections from Moana (yeah, that’s right), Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats and a smattering of old R&B.
The result was a list of 25 photos of men of varying ages, races and sizes in a wide range of suits pulled from the Eison database (see five of them below). I was excited about most of them, although there were a few too many double-breasted ones for my liking. That’s on me, I suppose, but I don’t think that’s a look I can pull off. Or maybe that’s the point of a system like this: To present something to someone that he or she might not think they’d ever look good in or visualize themselves even wearing.
Once you select the look you want, there might be further details to tend to, such as number and style of jacket buttons, button-hole color, the color and fabric of the jacket lining, waistband style on the pants and anything else you can possibly think of. One thing I could see in the future is the ability to place these looks on a picture of myself.
Once you make all of these very permanent decisions, you then have to be measured. Or measure yourself if you opted to do this at home. I was in the Eison studio, so Smith did the honors, measuring me in places I never thought needed to be measured. For instance, they noted posture, as well as the way my arms rest on the side of my body. Suddenly I realized why the clothes I’ve worn my entire adult life never fit me very well.
About two weeks later, you have a suit that you picked out not from a rack but one suggested for you based on your lifestyle and musical tastes. And it will fit only you. My suit fits. But because it’s tailored with my measurements, I’m not so surprised by that. The treat here is the unique application of Spotify and machine learning. Having the FITS system tell me to avoid buying a light gray suit is the permission I needed to step outside of my fashion comfort zone and don a look I most likely never would have otherwise.
Not bad for a music-streaming platform and a little AI-style effort.
Rachel Moore, the former Director Of Product at computer vision startup Pilot.AI is suing its co-founders CTO Robert Elliot English and CEO Jonathan Su for sexual harassment, discrimination, retaliation, and wrongful discharge. Pilot.ai’s Human Resources provider Trinet and its Series A investor NEA are also named in the suit filed in San Francisco Superior Court today. The plaintiff, a 24-year-old Master’s graduate of Stanford University, is seeking a trial by jury.
The suit alleges that Su and English created a hostile work environment colored by sexually inappropriate comments, including discussions of pornography, English’s sexual exploits, and that he “participated in an anal sex workshop at Burning Man led by a famous porn star.” Only when Moore agreed to participate in the crude comments was she awarded more status in the company and a $20,000 raise.
English allegedly later invited Moore into his office, closed the door, dropped his pants while talking about his ex-girlfriend, and initially refused to let Moore leave. For rejecting his advance, he then began to retaliate against her in the workplace according to the suit. It states that Moore reported the incident to Su who dismissed the allegations as English being “sexually frustrated.” Su is said to have encouraged Moore to ask English out on a dinner date to resolve the issue, which she eventually declined out of fear for her safety.
Su later urged Moore not to file a formal report about the incident in English’s office because it could “end the company”, according to the suit. She did, prompting an investigation by law firm WilmerHale. Moore agreed to participate only if the law firm remained neutral and did not act as counsel for Pilot.ai. NEA’s Rick Yang, who sits on the board, is said to have overseen the investigation.
The suit calls the investigation “an utter sham and a cover up”. NEA allegedly took the position of refusing to disclose the investigation report claiming attorney-client privilege. Yang is said to have eventually disclosed a summary of the report that confirmed the pants-dropping incident, but found there was nothing sexual about it, and there were no repercussions for the founders. After the investigation, Moore allegedly requested a leave of absence rather than returning to the office where she would have to report to the defendents. When additional leave requests were ignored, she inquired about her employment status, and allegedly ceased to be paid or have access to company systems, and concluded she had been terminated.
The charges filed include quid pro quo sexual harassment, hostile working environment harassment, discrimination based on gender, retaliation, failure to prevent or correct harassment, aiding and abetting harassment, wrongful discharge, intentional infliction of emotional stress, failure to pay wages, waiting time penalities, and violations of labor and business codes.
Requests for comment from English, Su, Pilot.ai, NEA, and Trinet were not returned before press time. Moore’s law firm Arena Hoffman LLP issued this statement to TechCrunch from its attorney’s Ron Arena:
“As alleged in the complaint, Ms. Moore contends that she was subjected to a sexually charged workplace, where Pilot AI’s founders discussed anal sex workshops, boasted of sexual conquests on Tinder, named a server ‘Deep Head,’ and let executives drop their pants in a meeting and call Ms. Moore’s footwear ‘fuck me boots.’ Ms. Moore alleges that her complaints were ignored, then swept aside in a sham investigation – after she declined the CEO’s direction to meet her pants-dropping supervisor alone on a dinner date.”
We’ll have more info as it becomes available and will update with comments from the parties involved.
