Year: 2018

France’s Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire held a press conference earlier today to announce that France will tax big tech companies starting on January 1st, 2019.

This has been a long-rumored tax reform, and it looks like France is changing the scope of the new tax. After a couple of years of negotiations at the European level, France and other European countries have failed to convince everyone that tech companies have been optimizing their tax structure for too long.

The main issue is that a new tax model requires a unanimous vote — every European Union member country needs to vote for the reform. While countries with big local markets were in favor of the move, many smaller countries have yet to support the new tax.

So the French government is trying something new. Le Maire thinks it’s better to start taxing tech companies in France now and find European support later.

Le Maire wants to target big tech companies in particular — think Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon. He thinks the new tax could represent around €500 million for 2019 alone ($565 million).

And it’s true that Apple, Amazon and Google have all had issues at some point. They’ve all been accused of illegal tax benefits and other tax evasion schemes. In many cases, those companies have reported ridiculously low profits in most European countries as they’ve been wiring all profits to a tax-friendly country.

It’s still unclear how the French tax is going to work. But Le Maire says that France will look at advertising revenue, marketplace revenue and revenue based on personal data.

If you are a mother who has taken a break from full-time employment to raise kids, you may have also experienced the challenge that is jumping back into the working world after your break.

You may find you need more time flexibility; you have been out of the job market for years and so your confidence is knocked; your skills are no longer as relevant as they were before; or you just want to rethink your career; plus many employers — whether they say it or not — seem less interested in you because of all of the above, and no level of burnishing your resume on LinkedIn will help. It can be tough (and I say that from first-hand experience).

Now, Chicago-based startup The Mom Project, a platform specifically built to help female knowledge workers find jobs after pausing to raise kids, has raised a little egg of its own to take on this challenge. It’s picked up a Series A of $8 million that it plans to use to bring its job marketplace to more cities — it’s currently in Chicago, Atlanta and San Francisco — and to expand the kinds of services it offers to make the challenge of juggling work and parenthood easier.

The funding is being led by Grotech Ventures and Initialized Capital, with another new investor, Aspect Ventures, and previous backers Atlanta Seed Company, Engage Ventures, OCA Ventures, BBG Ventures, IrishAngels and Wintrust Financial also participating.

This brings the total raised by The Mom Project to $11 million, and with 75,000 registered moms and 1,000 companies including Procter & Gamble, BP, Miller Coors and AT&T, the startup claims it’s now the largest platform of its kind in the US.

From selling diapers to changing diapers

Allison Robinson, the founder and CEO of The Mom Project, said she came up with the idea for the startup in 2016, when she was on maternity leave from a strategy role at Pampers.

“I started realising a lot about moms before I became one,” she says about her last role before striking out as an entrepreneur. “But what I hadn’t understood until I was on maternity leave myself was that your priorities can change after having a child.” (She’s pictured up above with her son.)

Citing a study she’d seen in the Harvard Business Review that estimated 43 percent of skilled women exit the workforce after having children, Robinson realised there was a gap in the market for those among them who had timed out from returning to their previous roles, but still wanted to make the leap back into working at some point.

And she has a point: not only do people who decide they want to return to work face all of the usual issues of newly needing more time flexibility, wondering whether their skills are still current enough, general confidence, and so on; but the average recruitment process, and job sites overall, do not really have ways to account for any of that very well.

And the gap exists on the employer side of the marketplace, too. Businesses — both large corporates very much in the public eye as well as smaller businesses that are not — are rethinking how they hire and keep good people in the overall competition for talent. (Just this week, the UK’s Office of National Statistics said that the number of unfilled positions in the information and communication technology sector rose by 24.3 percent compared to last year in the country, a shortage that’s reflected in other markets.)

Having a diverse workforce — including more women and women from different walks of life — is key not only to helping counteract that, but to contribute to better overall work culture. That’s a fact that many employers have realised independently or have simply been thrown into the spotlight unwittingly and now are trying to repair.

And yet, there haven’t been many opportunities for them to pursue more diverse hiring practices.

LinkedIn recently made a tiny move into exploring diversity in hiring by at least allowing recruiters to search their job candidate results by gender, but this is a far cry from actually addressing the specific predicaments that particular segments of the working population have, and how to help them connect better with employers who might be keen to bring more of them on through recruitment.

In fact, the idea of providing improved job search for knowledge workers in specific cases is actually a very interesting one that shows there is definitely still room for innovation in the world of recruitment: Handshake earlier this year raised $40 million for its own take on this, which is providing a better LinkedIn-style platform to connect minority university graduates with interesting job opportunities at companies keen to make their workforces more diverse.

“Companies have started to realize the value in building a diverse workforce, but we still have a long way to go in achieving equal representation and opportunities,” said Julia Taxin, a partner at Grotech and new Mom Project board member. “Allison and her team have built an incredible marketplace of diverse talent for companies and I look forward to working with The Mom Project to execute on their vision of helping to close the gender gap in the workplace.”

The Mom Project, Robinson said, is tackling the challenges at both ends of the spectrum.

On the employer side, she said there is a lot of educating going on, talking to HR people and getting them to understand the opportunity they could unlock by hiring more parents — which tend to be almost entirely all-women, but sometimes men, too.

“We want to provide more data to these companies,” she said, pointing out that it’s not just a matter of providing a job opportunity, but also giving parents options in areas like childcare, or flexible working schedules. “We want to showg them ‘here is where you are doing well, and here is where you are not. Fixes don’t cost a lot of money, but a lot of companies are just not aware.”

“We’ve got 75,000 women on our platform, and currently around 1,000 companies posting jobs,” she said. “The goal is to have 75,000-plus jobs. We want to make sure that all the moms signing up on the platform are getting work.”

“The Mom Project is determined to create a future where women aren’t forced to choose between their families and their careers,”said Alda Dennis, partner at Initialized Capital and new Mom Project board member, in a statement. “There is a huge pool of experienced talent, parents and non-parents, that is sometimes overlooked because companies haven’t created the kind of diverse, flexible workplace culture that attracts and retains them. Initialized wants to be part of making this cultural shift happen.”

On the parent side, not only is it also about making the platform known to people who are considering a return to work, but it’s also about some fundamental, but very important basics, such as giving would-be jobseekers the flexibility to go to interviews. Robinson said that one campaign it’s about to launch, in partnership with Urban Sitter, is to provide free childcare credits to Mom Project jobseekers so that they can get to their interview.

“Sometimes you have to go to an interview with 24 hours notice, and lining up a sitter can be stressful,” she said. “We want to alleviate that.”

Parents also know that this isn’t just an issue for the interview: many towns and regions have what Robinson called “childcare deserts,” where there is a scarcity of affordable options to replace the parent on a more daily basis.

Contract work is king (and queen)

For now, Robinson said that the majority of jobs on the platform are focused on fixed-term employment — that is, not permanent, full-time work.

This is due to a number of reasons. For example, parents coming back to working after a break may be more inclined to ease in with shorter roles and less long-term commitment. And employers are still testing out how this demographic of workers will work out, so to speak. Equally, though, we have seen a huge swing in more general employment trends, where businesses are hiring fixed-term workers rather than full-time employees to account for seasonality and to give themselves more flexibility (not to mention less liability on the benefits front).

While Robinson said that the aim is definitely to bring more full-time job opportunities to the platform over time, this has nonetheless presented an interesting business opportunity to The Mom Project. The startup acts like Airbnb, Amazon and a number of other marketplaces, where it not only connects job-seekers and employers, but it then also then handles all the transactions around the job. When the job is fixed-term, the Mom Project essentially becomes like the job agency paying the employee, and that is how it makes a cut. And it also becomes the provider of benefits and more.

In other words, while there is an immediate opportunity for The Mom Project to compete against (or at least win some business off) the likes of LinkedIn to target the specific opportunity of providing jobs for women returning to work, there is potentially and equally big one in becoming a one-stop employment shop to handle customers other needs as employers or workers, providing a range of other services, from payroll through to childcare listings and more.

 

Fintech startup N26 recently launched in the U.K. with a single product offering. You could sign up to a free account that gives you free payments around the world but no insurance and no free withdrawals in foreign currencies.

The company just added a second tier to its lineup in the U.K. And N26 is choosing to focus on N26 Metal in the U.K. You can now sign up to a Metal account for £14.90 per month (€16.59).

In other N26 markets, people can currently subscribe to N26 Black for €9.90 per month or N26 Metal for €16.90 per month. It’s interesting to see that N26 is using its fresh start in the U.K. to simplify its offering and target premium customers. The startup can still change its mind and launch N26 Black later down the road.

Basic customers can pay anywhere in the world without any foreign fee. The company uses Mastercard’s foreign exchange rates and doesn’t add anything on top. But ATM withdrawals in a foreign currency still cost 1.7 percent of the total amount.

Metal customers get the same perks in the U.K. and other European countries, such as foreign ATM withdrawals with no fee, a travel insurance package from Allianz and dedicated customer support.

N26 also provides partner offerings for N26 Metal subscribers. For instance, you can work from a WeWork office for free one day per month. Deals very from one country to another, and British customers get airport lounge access thanks to LoungeKey.

Your milage may vary depending on your favorite airport as LoungeKey doesn’t have a lounge in all terminals in all airports around the world. Now let’s see if N26 users outside of the U.K. will get a similar service in the future.

RightHand Robotics announced a $23 million Series B this week. That brings the pick and place robotic arm manufacturer’s total funding up to around $34 million, including last year’s $8 million Series A.

The robotics startup has impressed investors with the dexterity and speed of its robotic picking system, having recruited some big VC names along the way. This latest round is led by Menlo Ventures, along with investments from GV (nee Google Ventures) joining the likes of existing investors, Playground Global, Dream Incubator and Matrix partners.

Picking and placing has been a difficult robotics problem and one that’s only become more pronounced with the growth of fulfillment centers from the likes of Amazon. the online mega-retailer purchased logistics robotics company Kiva Systems for $775 million, back in 2012 and has been rumored to be working on its own pick and place system.

As part of this round, former Kiva CEO Mick Mountz will be joining RightHand’s board of directors.“RightHand is picking up where we left off,” he said in a press release tied to the news. “Customers saw products coming directly to operators for picking and packing and would ask: ‘Why don’t you also automate this step with a robotic arm and gripper?’ But that was a difficult problem that we knew would require years of research and technical breakthroughs.”

RightHand will be using the funding to build out its technical and business teams.

Late last week, on lookers captured video and images of a Kiwi delivery robot moments after catching fire on the U.C. Berkeley campus. The startup has been piloting the robots on the University campus for around two years now (we profiled them back in May), largely without incident, but this is no doubt not how it wanted to gain national recognition.

Kiwi confirmed the incident in a blog post Saturday, working to minimize negative PR, noting that challenges “have impacted less than 0.6% of our robot fleet.” The challenge in this case apparently stemmed from the pint-sized delivery robot’s battery, which wasn’t replaced in time.

[Caution: dirty words above.]

The battery ignited with “some smoke and minor flames,” causing a student to grab a nearby fire extinguisher before the Berkeley Fire Department arrived to make sure that it wouldn’t reignite. Kiwi says it pulled all robots out of service as it investigated the issue, switching to hand delivery for food.

“We learned that the root cause was human error when replacing the batteries, where a defective battery was put in place of a functioning one,” the company writes. “This caused an exceedingly rare occurrence of the battery experiencing thermal runaway.”

Kiwi adds that it’s putting a new battery review process in place to help avoid similar incidents in the future.

Intel’s loss, it seems, is North’s game. As first noted by The Verge, the startup has picked up the “technology portfolio” behind Vaunt, the AR glasses shuttered by the chipmaker in April year after a couple of glowing previews.

North (nee Thalamic Labs) debuted its own take on the category around six months after Intel abandoned its efforts. Focals have been positioned as a kind of Warby Parker-esque take on the category. They’re essentially customizable glasses with a built-in head’s up display looking to finally deliver on the unfulfilled promise of Google Glass.

Intel’s own tech works in a similar matter, reflecting a laser projection back into the wearer’s eye. For Intel, however, Vaunt always felt like a pet project from a company that generates most of its revenue supplying components for other brands. Notably, Intel Capital has invested in North, so this deal could finally help some of its own vision finally come to fruition.

North is certainly viewing the application purchase as more a partnership than anything, referring to it as such in a tweet. “So proud to grow our business with such a great partner,” the company writes. “Stay tuned, this is just the beginning.”

Details of the deal haven’t been disclosed, but North notes that it contains “hundreds of patents and patent applications.” Given how closely the two companies appear to be working here, it seems like a pretty safe bet they got a sweetheart deal for the portfolio.

Just when you didn’t think there could be any more drama over the Pentagon’s decade long, $10 billion JEDI contract RFP, the plot thickened again last week when Amazon Web Services (AWS) joined the US government as a defendant in Oracle’s lawsuit over the Pentagon’s handling of the contract RFP process.

Earlier this month, Oracle filed a complaint in the United States Court of Federal Claims alleging that the JEDI RFP process unfairly favored Amazon, that the single vendor decision (which won’t be made until April), violates federal procurement rules and that two members of the JEDI team had a conflict of interest because of previous affiliations with Amazon Web Services.

AWS filed paperwork to join the case, stating that because of the claims being made by Oracle, it had a direct stake in the outcome. “Oracle’s Complaint specifically alleges conflicts of interest involving AWS. Thus, AWS has direct and substantial economic interests at stake in this case, and its disposition clearly could impair those interests,” the company’s attorneys stated in the motion.

The Motion to Intervene as a Defendant was approved by United States Court of Federal Claims Senior Judge, Eric G. Bruggink the same day.

Oracle filed a complaint alleging essentially the same issues with the Government Accountability Office earlier this year, but the GAO found no wrong-doing in a ruling last month. Oracle decided to take the case to court where it has had some high profile wins in recent years including its case against Google over its use of the Java APIs.

The JEDI contract RFP has attracted attention for the length, the amount of money at stake and the single vendor selection decision. This is a contract that every cloud company badly wants to have. Oracle has made it clear it’s not giving up without a fight, while Amazon Web Services intends to defend itself against Oracle’s claims.

I’ve been living for the past few years in a limbo between journalist and entrepreneur, trying to build startups the way I saw them being built on stage at Disrupt and discovering that my skill and will to win are no match against the world. That’s fine. These days I’ll take it.

But for a few minutes in Chicago last May, I couldn’t.

That day was normal for me. I woke up, went and met some folks at a cool startup, visited at great guitar store, and had a mediocre deep dish pizza. I then went to an event where I gave my usual rant (and pissed people off) about how smaller market cities are having huge trouble innovating, and then went out with some good people to talk about cool stuff.

Then, on my way back to the hotel, I looked both ways on a busy, dark street and thought long and hard about stepping in front of a Chicago city bus.

Why not? I wasn’t helping. My first startup had failed and everything else was a slow burn. I wasn’t thinking about my family. I wasn’t thinking about my existence on a global scale but on a local one. I could turn off this brain once and for all and I thought everyone would be happier.

I got help. I discovered I was anhedonic and chronically depressed – I couldn’t feel happiness. I had been traveling through life in a haze. I drank a lot to hide this from myself – after all, if you’re hosed you don’t worry about not feeling anything – and I traveled obsessively and spoke on stage so I could feel something, anything, better than the flat grey note that played constantly in my head.

I feel better now. I have a lot of digging to do. I wonder if you’re in the same position.

I’m noodling on this because of Colin Kroll. The specifics of Kroll’s specific story are unclear but an overdose is definitely in the mental illness wheelhouse. Maybe he was having a blast, flush on investor money and celebrating a win. I won’t judge.

But he’s dead. And I don’t want you to follow him.

Any of us could end up gone for any number of reasons associated with entrepreneurship. There is the stress, the overwork. There is the sense of failure even amid the greatest successes. There is deep frustration and deep anger. Entrepreneurs are high performers who are used to getting As in life. When that same life gives you a D- you feel that it’s your fault, that your dreams of success are gold foil over a rotten sweet.

This isn’t true. We all have to work to remind ourselves of this. A startup, like any creative endeavor, is doomed to fail but its very existence is a miracle. We do it not because we want to make millions but because we want to fix something broken in the world. I write to share cool things with you all. I make startups to help bring to the next level of innovation. But I let these efforts get in the way of life. I thought my failures were systemic, that I was proving that I was a failure over and over again and that I had visible proof through my failed efforts. My startup wasn’t me, but I didn’t know that.

In the dull, hot blush of a depressive episode, the embarrassing moment you look at yourself and see nothing but junk, we have to remember that we are making real efforts, building real things, moving way ahead of the pack. The world will catch up.

There are lots of ways to get help. Ask around. You’ll be surprised to hear that your friends and family know great shrinks who can help. You’ll be surprised that going to meetings or talking to someone on the phone can be a great way to assuage mental grief. You’ll be surprised to know that there are people out there for you. Email me if you need help: john@techcrunch.com

This shit is hard. Don’t make it harder by letting it fester.

Photo by Nik Shuliahin on Unsplash

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is a 24-hour, toll-free, confidential suicide prevention hotline available to anyone in suicidal crisis or emotional distress. It provides Spanish-speaking counselors, as well as options for deaf and hard of hearing individuals. It is only available in the United States. A 24-hour an Online Chat in partnership with Contact USA is also available.
The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline can be reached at 1-800-273-8255.
The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (ESP) can be reached at 1-888-628-9454
The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (Deaf & Hard of Hearing Options) can be reached at 1-800-799-4889

B-Social, a London fintech that currently offers a ‘social finance’ app and beta debit Mastercard, has raised £3.2 million in Seed round funding from undisclosed high-net-worth individuals. However, the fundraise is just the first step in a journey in which B-Social want to eventually become a fully licensed bank that reimagines banking around everyday social interactions.

As it exists today, the B-Social app and accompanying card enables users to have control over everyday spending, track expenditure, and create groups between friends to split bills and record settlements. It’s currently in the hands of a limited number of beta testers, spanning employees, investors, friends and family, with plans for a wider U.K. launch in February next year.

“We recognise that almost all financial transactions are inherently social,” B-Social co-founder and CEO Nazim Valimahomed tells me. “We want to change the relationship people have with money by helping them overcome the anxiety, awkwardness and wasted time when they engage with their social finances. We are doing that by building a digital bank that truly accommodates the way people live their lives and is dedicated to connecting a person’s finances to their social world”.

The idea was born in part out of Valimahomed’s own frustrations and is informed by his belief that individuals are often a bank themselves, lending and borrowing to friends and family by making shared purchases and then getting paid back.

“A simple example might be that you pay for flights for two or more people and then get paid back individually,” he says. “For multiple transactions, this becomes complex often resulting in the trip organiser having to create a spreadsheet to work out what people owe across multiple transactions”.

To simplify this problem, B-Social wants to let you to make purchases with your card, which are flagged as an expense on behalf of a group of individuals. From here the bank to be will enable all members of a group — and where groups can be ad hoc and temporary or more long-term — to continuously see who is owed how much and to get paid back easily within the app and record settlements.

Dubbing this future proposition as the seeds of a “social bank,” the B-Social CEO cites competitors as traditional high street banks that currently dominate the U.K. consumer market (the so-called big 5 have around 87 percent market share in the U.K.).

“We are aiming at winning a part of their market share by targeting customers looking for a bank as social as they are that offers a unique digital experience in order to help change the banking ecosystem forever,” Valimahomed tells me, although he also concedes that challengers such as Monzo, N26, Starling and Revolut have also built some basic social features into their apps.

“Our entire technology and product focus is to build a bank from scratch through a social lens,” he says.

The ride-hailing giant Careem is now in the delivery business as the company seeks new verticals in its ever-increasing fight against other services in the Middle East including Uber. Starting with food delivery in Dhabi and Jeddah, the company sees the delivery service expanding to pharmaceuticals according to a report by Reuters. Careem is investing over $150m into the service.

“We believe the opportunity for deliveries in the region is even bigger than ride-hailing,” Chief Executive and Co-Founder Mudassir Sheikha told Reuters. “It is going to become a very significant part of Careem over time.”

Called Careem Now, the service will operate independently from its ride-hailing business. It will have its own app and Careem is building the service a dedicated call center.

This comes as the company is trying to close a $500m funding round. Back in October, the company announced it had already raised $200m from existing investors. Prior to this announcement, rumors were swirling around the company that several companies including Didi Chuxing could acquire the company.