Year: 2018

Sandra Bullock’s star power can still sell a movie, apparently. Though reviews for Netflix horror film “Bird Box” have been lukewarm – the movie has a respectable, but not outstanding, score of 65% on Rotten Tomatoes – it has still managed to break records for the streaming service, Netflix said this afternoon.

The company announced in a tweet that over 45 million Netflix accounts have now streamed “Bird Box,” which set a new record for the best ever first week for a Netflix film.

Of course, many Twitter users then proceeded to joke that means well over 45 million have actually watched the movie because of Netflix password sharing.

Netflix doesn’t tend to reveal its streaming numbers for its movies or its TV shows, except in cases like this when they’re worth sharing.

But for comparison’s sake, Nielsen’s third-party measurement service estimated that Netflix’s original movie “Bright” starring Will Smith saw 11 million viewers in its first three days – less than “Stranger Things” Season 2’s first three days, which pulled in 15.8 million viewers. Meanwhile, “The Cloverfield Paradox,” which Netflix acquired first-run rights to from Paramount, saw 5 million viewers in its first week.

“Bird Box” is doing much better.

Netflix, however, has always disputed Nielsen’s figures, because they don’t count mobile devices or computers, and only measure data in the U.S. But they’re all the industry has to go on for now.

As another less direct point of comparison, Netflix said this June that its Oscar-winning film “Mudbound,” released in November 2017, had been streamed for 20 million hours. And in October, Netflix said that more than 80 million subscribers watched at least one of its summer rom-coms over the past few months, like “Kissing Booth” or “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before.”

“Bird Box’s” setting of a new Netflix streaming record is likely due to a combination of factors, none of which have much to do with it being a great film, in the traditional sense.

For starters, audiences seemed to like the film more than critics did, with a 74% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. The film is boosted by the star talent of Sandra Bullock, who can still draw a crowd. The cast includes other known names, too, like “Get Out” star Lil Rel Howery, along with “Moonlight”‘s Trevante Rhodes and John Malkovich.

“Bird Box” is also riding a wave of high concept horror movies. The film has been compared to the successful thriller “A Quiet Place,” which had monsters that hunted by sound while “Bird Box” monsters are a threat only if they’re seen – hence all the blindfolds.

The film has benefited from word-of-mouth recommendations, too, including one from Stephen King who suggested horror fans should ignore the critics‘ bad reviews. And it has been the subject of numerous memes, which made it something of a viral, cult sensation across social media. That could have prompted more people to watch just to get in on the joke.

Plus, the movie is a holiday release – it dropped on Netflix on December 21 – a time when many people are off work and have the time to stream.

It seems someone took Every Frame a Painting literally: The Very Slow Movie Player is a device that turns cinema into wallpaper, advancing the image by a single second every hour. The result is an interesting household object that makes something new of even the most familiar film.

The idea occurred to designer and engineer Bryan Boyer during one of those times we all have where we are sitting at home thinking of ways to celebrate slowness.

“Can a film be consumed at the speed of reading a book?” he asked himself, slowly. “Slowing things down to an extreme measure creates room for appreciation of the object… but the prolonged duration also starts to shift the relationship between object, viewer, and context. A film watched at 1/3,600th of the original speed is not a very slow movie, it’s a hazy timepiece. A Very Slow Movie Player (VSMP) doesn’t tell you the time; it helps you see yourself against the smear of time.”

The Very Slow Movie Player is an e-paper display attached to a Raspberry Pi board; you load a movie onto the latter, and it processes and displays a single frame at a time, updating the screen with a new one every two and a half minutes.

That adds up to 24 frames per hour, as opposed to the usual 24 frames per second — 3,600 times slower than normal viewing, and producing a (perhaps) 7-or-8,000-hour tableau you view over the course of a year or so.

“It is impossible to ‘watch’ in a traditional way because it’s too slow. In a staring contest with VSMP you will always lose,” writes Boyer in a post explaining the project. “It can be noticed, glanced at, or even inspected, but not watched.”

He compares it to the work of Bill Viola, whose super-slow-motion portraits are similarly impossible to watch from start to finish (unless you’re very, very patient) and therefore exist in a sort of limbo between motion picture and still image.

The image itself leaves something to be desired, of course: e-paper is essentially 1-bit color depth — black and white. So the subtleties of color you might see in any film, color or no, will be lost to dithering.

The way it’s done helps highlight the contrasts and zones of a scene, though if you really want to appreciate Rear Window as cinema, you can watch it any time you like. But if you want to appreciate it as a process, as a relationship with time, as an object and image that exists in the context of the rest of the world and your life… for that, you have the Very Slow Movie Player.

Sensor data platform Samsara confirmed this morning that it had closed a new round of funding from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst that values the startup at $3.6 billion.

The news was first reported by Cheddar, which spotted a filing with the state of Delaware on December 21 disclosing Samsara’s intent to raise a $100 million round at more than double the valuation it garnered upon its $50 million Series D this March.

“Our growth comes from bringing transformational new technologies to solve the problems of operational businesses, a massive segment of the economy that has long been underserved by the technology industry,” wrote Kiren Sekar, Samsara’s vice president of marketing and products, in the funding announcement. “Today, the advent of inexpensive sensors, high-bandwidth wireless connectivity, smartphones, and cloud computing enable these businesses to fully reap the benefits of 21st century technology.”

Founded in 2015, Samsara supports the transportation, logistics, construction, food production, energy and manufacturing industries with its internet-connected sensor systems, which helps businesses collect data and derive insights to improve the efficiency of physical operations.

The company’s co-founders are Sanjit Biswas and John Bicket, who previously launched Meraki, an enterprise Wi-Fi startup acquired by Cisco in an all-cash $1.2 billion deal in 2012.

Samsara’s latest financing brings the company’s total raised to $230 million. According to PitchBook, Andreessen Howoritz and General Catalyst are the only two private investors in the company, with Marc Andreessen and Hemant Taneja of General Catalyst representing the venture capital firms as lead investors on several Samsara deals.

San Francisco-based Samsara says revenue grew 250 percent in 2018 as its customer base swelled to 5,000. As for how it will deploy the new capital, the company plans to hire 1,000 employees, double down on AI and computer vision technology and open its first East Coast office in Atlanta.

The startup has yet to spend a dime of its last financing round, evidence it, like many other venture-funded startups, is pulling in capital before a market downturn strikes the industry and makes it increasingly difficult to raise hefty sums at impressive valuations.

“While the company already had a healthy balance sheet – we hadn’t dipped into our previous round of funding – the new capital enables us to accelerate long-term product investments and expand into new markets while continuing to maintain a strong balance sheet over the long term,” wrote Sekar.

Calendaring and note-taking apps have never really filled the void left behind when we moved away from our old, paper-based daily planners to digital devices. But a newly launched iOS app called Capsicum may help to change that. Like real-world daily planners from years ago, Capsicum lets you not only track your events and to-dos, it also offers a place to track other things not tied to a specific date and time — like your larger, longer-term goals, journal entries and even your daily habits — like whether you made it to the gym, or remembered to take your vitamins. 

The idea for the app comes from U.S. software engineer Ish ShaBazz, who was featured in the 2017 documentary “App: The Human Story,” and Australian designer Heidi Helen Pilypas. Both love beautiful planners and iOS apps, so around three years ago, they decided to work on a project that has now become Capsicum. 

The app’s name refers to a bell pepper, which is why it’s in the logo.

However, the name was chosen because the Latin root “capsa” means “box.” And the app uses individual boxes — components — throughout its design for things like the weather, your events, to-dos and more.

There are three main use cases for Capsicum, each with their own tab at the bottom of the home screen.

The daily planner section offers a home to your monthly, weekly and daily to-do lists.

This feels like a more natural way to plan things, in some cases — especially for writing down things that don’t have an exact time, like a reminder to make a doctor appointment or return your library books, for example. But you still need to slot those in around other events, like meetings or scheduled calls. Calendaring apps don’t have this sort of flexibility, which means we today turn to other apps — like to-do lists, Apple’s Notes or Reminders.

Capsicum, on the other hand, lets all these to-dos coexist in one place. Plus, you can sync Capsicum with Apple’s Calendars so you won’t miss your scheduled events. 

As you complete your daily to-dos, you can check them off just as you could a list in Apple’s Notes.

However, if you don’t get them done, they can be moved over to another day.

Another section of the daily planner lets you jot down free-form notes. This can be used for journaling or just writing down other things you need to remember — like your thoughts, moods or health concerns, perhaps.

The app’s center tab allows you to get a better handle on your habits. This is a particularly handy feature for anyone with a list of New Year’s resolutions in search of a tracking app. Here, you can log when you complete a habit — like working out, hydrating, reading, etc. — which you can do with a tap or a Siri Shortcut.

You also can add notes to your habits and look back at patterns over time to see if you’re meeting your goals.

The other main tab in the app is “Loose Leaf,” which offers a larger page than the one in the daily planner’s notes section, for writing long-form journal entries or anything else you want to remember. This can be a place for personal writing, or a place to make lists that don’t belong on a particular day — like your bucket list, travel ideas, redecorating plans or others that aren’t immediate “to-dos.”

In time, the team says the Loose Leaf section will also include a sketch pad, too.

Capsicum can be personalized with beautiful covers, decorative tapes and headings to match your style, to make it feel more like your own notebook and not a generic app. And you can create more than one notebook in the app — in case you want to maintain separate notebooks by year or for work and personal life, for instance.

The app is well-designed and feels like it fits somewhere in-between the simplicity of jotting down an item in Notepad and the structure of adding events in Calendar. That said, it’s still hard to abandon a history of notes and reminders from other apps, which makes it hard to switch. Plus, the search feature is a time travel option where you have to put in a date — which means you may not want to use it for things you need to pull up by keyword.

Capsicum is a subscription-based app, offered at either $1.99 per month or $19.99 per year. 

The app provides a 14-day trial, but unlike all other subscription apps, it doesn’t immediately begin charging you when the trial ends. If you decide you want to continue with Capsicum, you can choose to subscribe at any time. 

Calendaring and note-taking apps have never really filled the void left behind when we moved away from our old, paper-based daily planners to digital devices. But a newly launched iOS app called Capsicum may help to change that. Like real-world daily planners from years ago, Capsicum lets you not only track your events and to-dos, it also offers a place to track other things not tied to a specific date and time — like your larger, longer-term goals, journal entries and even your daily habits — like whether you made it to the gym, or remembered to take your vitamins. 

The idea for the app comes from U.S. software engineer Ish ShaBazz, who was featured in the 2017 documentary “App: The Human Story,” and Australian designer Heidi Helen Pilypas. Both love beautiful planners and iOS apps, so around three years ago, they decided to work on a project that has now become Capsicum. 

The app’s name refers to a bell pepper, which is why it’s in the logo.

However, the name was chosen because the Latin root “capsa” means “box.” And the app uses individual boxes — components — throughout its design for things like the weather, your events, to-dos and more.

There are three main use cases for Capsicum, each with their own tab at the bottom of the home screen.

The daily planner section offers a home to your monthly, weekly and daily to-do lists.

This feels like a more natural way to plan things, in some cases — especially for writing down things that don’t have an exact time, like a reminder to make a doctor appointment or return your library books, for example. But you still need to slot those in around other events, like meetings or scheduled calls. Calendaring apps don’t have this sort of flexibility, which means we today turn to other apps — like to-do lists, Apple’s Notes or Reminders.

Capsicum, on the other hand, lets all these to-dos coexist in one place. Plus, you can sync Capsicum with Apple’s Calendars so you won’t miss your scheduled events. 

As you complete your daily to-dos, you can check them off just as you could a list in Apple’s Notes.

However, if you don’t get them done, they can be moved over to another day.

Another section of the daily planner lets you jot down free-form notes. This can be used for journaling or just writing down other things you need to remember — like your thoughts, moods or health concerns, perhaps.

The app’s center tab allows you to get a better handle on your habits. This is a particularly handy feature for anyone with a list of New Year’s resolutions in search of a tracking app. Here, you can log when you complete a habit — like working out, hydrating, reading, etc. — which you can do with a tap or a Siri Shortcut.

You also can add notes to your habits and look back at patterns over time to see if you’re meeting your goals.

The other main tab in the app is “Loose Leaf,” which offers a larger page than the one in the daily planner’s notes section, for writing long-form journal entries or anything else you want to remember. This can be a place for personal writing, or a place to make lists that don’t belong on a particular day — like your bucket list, travel ideas, redecorating plans or others that aren’t immediate “to-dos.”

In time, the team says the Loose Leaf section will also include a sketch pad, too.

Capsicum can be personalized with beautiful covers, decorative tapes and headings to match your style, to make it feel more like your own notebook and not a generic app. And you can create more than one notebook in the app — in case you want to maintain separate notebooks by year or for work and personal life, for instance.

The app is well-designed and feels like it fits somewhere in-between the simplicity of jotting down an item in Notepad and the structure of adding events in Calendar. That said, it’s still hard to abandon a history of notes and reminders from other apps, which makes it hard to switch. Plus, the search feature is a time travel option where you have to put in a date — which means you may not want to use it for things you need to pull up by keyword.

Capsicum is a subscription-based app, offered at either $1.99 per month or $19.99 per year. 

The app provides a 14-day trial, but unlike all other subscription apps, it doesn’t immediately begin charging you when the trial ends. If you decide you want to continue with Capsicum, you can choose to subscribe at any time. 

911 emergency services in several states across the U.S. remain down after a massive outage at a CenturyLink datacenter.

The outage began after 12pm ET on Thursday, according to CenturyLink’s status page, and continues to cause disruption across 911 call centers. Some states have seen their services restored. CenturyLink has not said what caused the outage, but said in its latest update — around 11am ET on Friday — that the company said that it was “seeing good progress, but our service restoration work is not complete.”

In a tweet, CenturyLink added that it was “working tirelessly” until it gets its affected systems back up and running.

CenturyLink, one of the largest telecommunications providers in the U.S., provides internet and phone backbone services to major cell carriers, including AT&T and Verizon. Datacenter or fiber issues can have a knock-on effect to other companies, cutting out service and causing cell site blackouts.

In this case, the outage affected only cellular calls to 911, and not landline calls.

Some residents of affected areas were sent emergency warnings to their cell phones, warning of the outage.

Among the areas affected include Seattle, Washington and Salt Lake City, Utah. Several other states, including Idaho, Oregon, Arizona and Missouri, are also affected, local news has reported.

Police in Boston, Massachusetts tweeted that their service was restored this morning.

We’ll have more when it comes in.

We already know Alexa had a good Christmas – the app shot to the top of the App Store over the holidays, and the Alexa service even briefly crashed from all the new users. But Alexa, along with other smart speaker devices like Google Home, didn’t just have a good holiday — they had a great year, too. The smart speaker market reached critical mass in 2018, with around 41 percent of U.S. consumers now owning a voice-activated speaker, up from 21.5 percent in 2017.

According to a series of reports from RBC Capital Markets analysts released in December, the near doubling of the adoption rate for smart speakers in the U.S. was driven by growth in both Alexa and Google Home devices, while Apple’s HomePod played only a small role.

The firm found that U.S. penetration of Alexa-enabled devices reached 31 percent this year, compared with 41 percent overall for smart speakers.

It also forecast that Alexa would generate $18 billion to $19 billion in total revenue by 2021 – or ~5 percent of Amazon’s revenue –  through a combination of device sales, incremental voice shopping sales, and other platform revenues. In the U.S., there are now over 100 million Alexa-enabled devices installed – a key milestone for Alexa to become a “critical mass platform,” the report noted.

RBC additionally called out Amazon’s progress with Alexa’s development, with launches like Alexa Guard, which listens for break-ins and smoke detector alarms; plus new features like local voice control for when the internet is down; location-based reminders; advanced routines; email integrations; expanded calling options; and many others.

Alexa’s third-party app ecosystem also grew in 2018, with 150 percent year-over-year growth in skills to reach over 60,000 total Alexa skills by year-end. That’s up from 40,000 skills in May; 25,000 in Q3 2017; and just 5,000 two years ago.

Google Home also gained traction in 2018, with U.S. penetration for Google devices growing to 23 percent, up from 8 percent in 2017. Each household owns around 1.7 devices, which leads a Google Home install base of around 43 million in the U.S., and around 9 million in other Google Home markets, the forecast said.

However, the report doesn’t see as much revenue coming in from Google Home over the next few years, compared with Alexa. Instead, it estimates that Google Home generated $3.4 billion in revenue this year, and will grow that to $8.2 billion by 2021.

But combined with Google’s other hardware products like Pixel, Nest, and Chromecast, the hardware suite will have generated approximately $8.8 billion in 2018, and will grow to $19.6 billion in 2021.

This is the first year the analysts asked about Apple’s HomePod in the consumer survey, and they found its share of the U.S. smart speaker market remains small. Amazon has a 66 percent share to Google’s 29 percent. HomePod had 5 percent, it said.

About 13 years ago I faced an excruciating decision: whether to sell my company, Pinnacle Systems, to a private equity firm or to another large public company. I felt that both suitors would treat my employees well (and I negotiated hard to make sure that was the case), and both offered a good asking price well above our value on NASDAQ.

After raising what at the time felt like my first child, born in my living room and nurtured into a publicly traded entity, I was ready for it to take its next step and for me to take mine. I ultimately opted for the strategic sale, but I left the process intrigued by what was already an evolving dynamic between private equity firms and tech exits.

In years past, stigma often accompanied private equity sales. I know I felt that way, even under strong deal terms. Plus, private equity exits were only available to companies generating substantial annual revenues and often profits, making this exit option inaccessible for many startups. Today, private equity buyout firms can provide a solid (and on occasion excellent) exit route – as well as an increasingly common one, accounting for 18.5 percent of VC-backed exits in 2017.

Private equity firms are investing in a broad array of technology companies, including highly valued unicorns, but also early-to-mid stage profitable and unprofitable companies that a few years ago would have been unable to secure interest from these buyout firms.

In addition, the lines between venture capital and private equity are increasingly blurring, with more private equity investments in tech, and several late stage VC firms creating large, billion-dollar plus late stage growth funds. Further blurring the lines, some of the late stage VC firms are taking controlling interests in startups, a strategy typically associated with private equity. Recently, one of our portfolio companies received an investment from a late stage VC firm that acquired a majority stake by providing liquidity to some existing shareholders and investing in the company, utilizing a strategy typically associated with PE buyout firms.

The rise of private equity buyouts within the tech sector presents a viable exit option for founders, given the reality that most startups won’t ultimately IPO. (According to PitchBook, only 3 percent of venture-backed companies in the last decade eventually went public).

If an IPO is not a realistic long-term option, the remaining primary exit option has typically been a sale to another company (a strategic buyer, in venture parlance). However, in the past few years, private equity firms have become aggressive buyers of private companies, sometimes bidding as high as or higher than strategic buyers. With one of my portfolio companies, a private equity buyer placed the second highest bid ahead of all but one strategic buyer and helped raise the final price from the strategic buyer just by being in the bidding process.

Founders who find themselves in negotiations with strategic buyers should also reach out to PE firms to optimize the outcome. Silver Lake, Francisco Partners, Thoma Bravo, and Vista are a few technology-focused PE firms, and Pitchbook’s annual liquidity report lists other firms. Vista has been especially active, acquiring many technology companies, including Infoblox, Lithium and Marketo. Not all PE firms are the same, just like not all VCs and strategic buyers are the same.

Years ago, when private equity buyouts were typically only large deals, new management teams were almost always brought in to tweak the edges of already successful companies. Today, each private equity firm has its own strategy – some only buy large profitable companies, others focus on mid-size acquisitions, and some only buy early stage (typically unprofitable) companies, which brings us to the next point.

Even early-stage startups can explore a PE exit, especially if things are not going well

While most readers are familiar with private equity buyers at later stages, what’s new is the emergence of PE activity at early stages. These firms acquire majority stakes in startups that have only raised early stage investments but are having trouble scaling or raising the next round.

After a buyout, these private equity firms typically provide value by adding the missing elements, such marketing or sales know how, in order to kick start the business and achieve scale. Their goal is to increase the value of the underlying asset by augmenting founder teams with the buyout firm’s own operational experts, sometimes combining newly acquired assets with already existing assets to create a stronger whole, or doubling-down on promising products (while shedding less promising offerings) to unlock potential.

Typically, these PE firms then sell the company to another company (usually a strategic buyer) for greater value. In some cases, these early stage PE firms sell to another PE buyout firm further up market. In some of these acquisitions, founders can maintain minority ownership in the company (though not a controlling stake), which they can carry through to their “next exit.”

Unlike PE buyouts at later stages, PE buyouts at the earlier stages are not usually high-value exits; they are mostly an avenue to provide the founders some return for their hard work, rather than the disappointing returns they can expect from an acqui-hire or, even worse, a shut down. If negotiated correctly, a private equity deal can give founders an opportunity to play another hand to the next exit.

Few founders create companies in order to flip them. Strong entrepreneurs create companies to transform their missions into reality and positively impact the world. Steve Jobs said, “I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.” An acquisition — particularly to private equity — may not have been the original goal, but it may fuel the continued pursuit of the founder’s mission. Or, perhaps it will enable the pursuit of a new and worthy mission.

Tesla has added two independent directors to its board, Oracle founder and executive chairman Larry Ellison and Walgreens executive Kathleen Wilson-Thompson, as part of a settlement with U.S. securities regulators over CEO Elon Musk’s infamous tweets about taking the company private.

The pair joined the board as of December 27, Tesla said in an announcement early Friday morning. Kathleen Wilson-Thompson is currently executive vice president and global chief human resources officer of Walgreens Boots Alliance. She also sits on public boards at two U.S.-based manufacturing companies.

Tesla board, led by its Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee, said it considered candidates with a “wide range of skill sets” from across the globe who also hold a strong personal belief in Tesla’s mission of accelerating the world’s transition to sustainable energy.

Ellison purchased 3 million Tesla shares earlier this year. The Oracle founder also spent $1.9 million on a microgrid energy system from Tesla in 2017 for a greenhouse farming project in Lanai, according to a regulatory filing.

“In conducting a widespread search over the last few months, we sought to add independent directors with skills that would complement the current board’s experience. In Larry and Kathleen, we have added a preeminent entrepreneur and a human resources leader, both of whom have a passion for sustainable energy,” said Tesla’s Board of Directors.

The appointments closes a dramatic year for Tesla and Musk, who reached a settlement with the SEC in September that included he step down as chairman of the board and pay a $20 million fine. The SEC filed a complaint earlier this year alleging that Musk lied when he tweeted on August 7 that he had “funding secured” for a private takeover of the company at $420 per share.

Musk has remained CEO and still has a seat on the board. Tesla also agreed to name two independent directors to the board.

Tesla paid a separate $20 million penalty. The SEC said the charge and fine against Tesla is for failing to require disclosure controls and procedures relating to Musk’s tweets.

Tesla’s fulfillment of the agreement with the SEC marks the beginning of a new era of corporate governance for Tesla, which some shareholders have argued is too tightly controlled by Musk and others closely aligned to him such as his brother Kimbal Musk.

In 2017, Tesla diversified its board and added James Rupert Murdoch, the CEO of Twenty-First Century Fox Inc., and Linda Johnson Rice,Chairman and CEO of Johnson Publishing Company.

Other board members include: Robyn Denholm, who joined the board in 2014, Brad W. Buss, who has been on since 2009, Antonio Gracias, and Ira Ehrenpreis, one of longest-serving board members who joined in 2007. Denholm was named Tesla chairman in October.

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

As you know, typically, a few of us try cramming into the Equity podcast dungeon, including the nimble Alex Wilhelm, the scholarly Danny Crichton and, when we can lasso her, the razor-sharp Kate Clark, plus a guest from the investment world.

With everyone logging valuable family time this week and wondering if it’s worth returning that sweater, we decided to do something a little different and run a special holiday episode, one that features just me in conversation with Bradley Tusk, a venture capitalist, philanthropist, book author and, earlier in his career, a trusted aid to billionaire Michael Bloomberg, whose successful third run for mayor of New York — as first and only mayor to serve three consecutive terms — was managed by Tusk. In fact, one of Tusk’s first roles after moving on from politics was an early advisor to Uber, which sought out his know-how about both regulatory environments and upturning the status quo.

Perhaps because all of these interests, Tusk has become among the country’s most visible proponents of mobile voting, supporting — though not investing in — a app called Voatz that was first used in a small pilot project in West Virginia last spring that gave overseas citizens and members of the military the option of using it to cast ballots on their phones. Not a whole lot of attention was paid to the project at the time, though when the app was used again in 24 West Virginia counties in the mid-term elections, critics who worry about voter fraud were quick to call it an “horrifically bad idea.”

That isn’t stopping Tusk from getting behind more mobile voting efforts, which we chatted about recently for “Equity,” along with a bunch of other things, including the brow-raising valuation that Uber’s bankers have bandied about in conversations about its upcoming IPO, how important it is for Uber to beat Lyft to the public market (assuming they move forward despite the suddenly rocky markets), and what it means for fintech startups that Democrats are taking over control of the House in another week.

We always enjoy talking with Tusk; we hope you’ll enjoy our chat, too. In the meantime, a quick reminder that after this, we’re off for two weeks, then back in full force in the middle of January. Until then, all of us wish you very happy holidays and a terrific New Year. More soon!

Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Downcast and all the casts.