Year: 2018

In a series of late night/early morning tweets, Elon Musk offered up engineers from Space X and the Boring Company to help the soccer team trapped in a Thailand cave.

Musk began by suggesting a potential solution to help rescue the team and their coach who went missing late last month. As he noted, the Boring Company in particular has quite a bit of experience digging holes and working with ground penetrating radar. He then announced that he would be offer up help in the form of engineers from two of his companies.

“SpaceX & Boring Co engineers headed to Thailand tomorrow to see if we can be helpful to govt,” Musk tweeted. “There are probably many complexities that are hard to appreciate without being there in person.”

A spokesperson for the latter confirmed the plan, writing,

We are speaking with the Thai government to see how we can help, and we are sending SpaceX/Boring Company people from the US to Thailand today to offer support on the ground.”Once we confirm what exactly will be helpful to send or do, we will. We are getting feedback and guidance from the people on the ground in Chiang Rai to determine the best way for us to assist their efforts.”

The attempted rescue from the Tham Luang cave complex has proven difficult and deadly. Just last night, it was revealed that a form Thai Navy SEAL diver died bringing tanks of air to the 12 boys and their coach.

Have you felt a disconnect with your Alexa and wished she could share more of your sense of humor or tell you an actually scary ghost story? Startup Storyline makes designing your own Alexa skills as easy and dragging and dropping speech blocks, and has just raised $770,000 in a funding round led by Boost VC to help grow its skill builder API.

The company launched in 2017 to help bridge the gap between creators and the tricky voice recognition software powering smart speakers like Alexa. With its new funding, CEO and co-founder  Vasili Shynkarenka says that Storyline is hoping to expand its team and its interface to other smart speakers, like Google Home, as well work on integrating monetization and third-party services into the interface.

Storyline’s user friendly interface lets users drag-and-drop speech commands and responses to customize user’s interactions with their smart speaker devices. Users can choose between templates for a skill or a flash briefing, and test the voice recognition and logic of the design live in their browser window.

Since its launch, over 12,000 Storyline users have published 2,500 skills in the Alexa Skills Store — more than 6% of all skills in the store. The interface has also been used by the grand-prize winners of Amazon’s developer Alexa Skills Challenge: Kids and the publication Slate.

For Shynkarenka, the creation of these skills is vastly different from the creation of a typical smartphone app.

“Most people think of Alexa as another software platform, like a smartphone or the web, and that’s not [actually] true,” he said. “The most popular apps on Alexa are not the apps that let you chat with friends or browse your social networks. The most popular apps are content apps — the apps that you can use to play trivia games with your family over dinner.”

Just as YouTube has video creators, Shynkarenka says he wants Storyline to become the home for smart speaker content across devices. The startup has already cultivated an active online community of 2,500 creators excited about creating and sharing this content.

Storyline is not alone in this space however, Amazon itself released Amazon Blueprints in April that allows users to create customized Amazon skills using several different available templates.

As the smart speaker space, and subsequent skill creation one, continue to heat up, the creation of your perfectly customized new smart speaker family member may be closer than you think.

Felicity Conrad and Kristen Sonday were on very different paths until three years ago. Conrad was an associate at the powerhouse law firm Skadden Arps. Meanwhile, Kristen Sonday, a Princeton grad and the first person in her family to go to college, was reflecting on the several years she’d spent with the U.S. Department of Justice in Mexico City, working to extradite fugitives.

As it happens, both were coming to similar conclusions about the U.S. legal system, including that it’s especially challenging for people who don’t speak English. For Conrad, an opportunity to litigate a pro bono asylum case would set her on a path of wanting to do more for people seeking persecution from their own countries. For Sonday, the experience of working with foreign governments had a similar impact.

Perhaps it’s no wonder that soon after they were introduced by a mutual friend, they decided to create Paladin, a New York-based SaaS business that today helps legal teams sign up for pro bono opportunities, enables coordinators to track the lawyers’ work, and which captures some of the stories and impact that the lawyers are making through their efforts. This last piece is particularly important as the software helps legal departments see their return on investment for their attorneys’ donated time.

The company’s offering is timely, including for legal departments like that of Verizon, which has 900 attorneys and a global pro bono program that it uses Paladin to help manage. (Verizon owns AOL, which owns TechCrunch.) Lyft, a newer client, has a 50-person legal department and recently launched its own pro bono team.

Given how quickly immigration and other policies are being changed under the Trump administration and uneven guidance from Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the need for legal help is growing by the day.

For example, Lyft  — which is among a long line of tech companies to speak out in support of immigrants’ rights — is committing some of its lawyers to reuniting families that have been separated at the Southern U.S. border, says Conrad.

One question is how scalable Paladin’s offering is. The biggest challenge for the outfit right now would seem to be that few corporate lawyers do the kind of pro bono work that’s often most needed yet which involves litigation matters outside the scope of what they practice, including around immigration laws, social security benefits, and criminal and domestic abuse matters.

Sonday says Paladin has the solution to that, adding that the seven-person company has raised $1.1 million from investors — Mark Cuban, Hyde Park Ventures, Backstage Capital, R2 Ventures, MergeLane and Chaac Ventures, among them — toward that end.

What it plans to build, exactly: infrastructure that connects with organizations on the ground with legal services and law firms all over the world, no matter their size. Basically, it will begin acting as a matchmaker for legal departments, helping lawyers find the pro bono work about which they can feel most passionately.

Ultimately, Conrad and Sonday are betting that anything that makes the process of finding pro bono work a lot easier than it is today will increase the numbers of attorneys who give back to society. They’re also think that when law firms can better track the impact their employees are making, we’ll see more, and bigger, pro bono programs.

Says Sonday, “Right now, just 10 to 20 percent of law firms have someone in-house to manage that pro bono work. If we can help the other 80 to 90 percent of lawyers” connect with the people who need them most —  and who they feel good about helping — it’s a win-win all around,

The Securities & Exchange Commission, the federal agency responsible for protecting investors and maintaining fair and orderly functioning of our securities markets, has 11 regional offices, including in Miami, New York, Boston, and Chicago,

None has quite the workload as the SEC’s San Francisco regional office, where a major area of focus in recent years has been investor fraud in pre-IPO companies, particularly the many startups that in an earlier era would have either have gone public or else out of business, but which today linger as privately held outfits because there’s so much money sloshing around.

Among the companies to find themselves in the SEC’s sights in recent years is HR software outfit Zenefits and its founder, Parker Conrad; they were fined $1 million last October as part of a settlement over charges that they’d misled investors. In March, the online personal finance company Credit Karma also settled SEC charges; it had been accused of unlawfully offering securities to its employees — then failing to provide them with timely financial statements and risk disclosures.

Of course, the best-known SEC case to date has centered on the blood-testing company Theranos, which was charged with massive fraud in March, along with company’s founder, Elizabeth Holmes, and its former president, Sunny Balwani.

Leading the charge in each of these cases and many more: Jina Choi, a graduate of Oberlin and Yale Law School who worked as a lawyer for the Justice Department in Washington before heading to San Francisco and the SEC’s enforcement division in 2000.

Five years ago, Choi was promoted to director of that office, where she has since overseen enforcement and examinations in Northern California and the Pacific Northwest, despite critics who believe the SEC should keep its eye on public companies alone. (“If no one is policing private markets, that’s a problem,” Choi said at a public forum in May.)

In an age of initial coin offerings, cryptocurrencies, and mushrooming numbers of blockchain-related projects, Choi and her colleagues have their hands particularly full, so you can imagine how excited we are that Choi is coming to Disrupt to discuss some of those challenges, as well as the agency’s victories. We’re also looking forward to learning more about how decisions are made in Choi’s office and back in Washington.

If you’re interested in learning more about the SEC’s ever-evolving approach to Silicon Valley startups — and why you shouldn’t expect its interest to dissipate any time soon — you really won’t want to miss this conversation.

You can buy tickets to the show, taking place in San Francisco September 5th through September 7th, right here.

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is the go-to place for buying and exchanging cryptocurrencies — as long as you’re fine sticking to Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash. But Coinbase is actively looking at adding support for additional cryptocurrencies, Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan said at TechCrunch Sessions: Blockchain today in Zug, Switzerland.

In June, Coinbase announced it would expand its support for just four cryptocurrencies to five, to include Ethereum Classic (ETC) “in the coming months.” Earlier this year, Coinbase also announced its intent to add some ERC 20 tokens. 

And more is coming. While Srinivasan wouldn’t say which other cryptocurrency support is on Coinbase’s horizon, he said to “look for a lot of announcements over the months to come.”

Srinivasan also compared Coinbase to the mullet hairstyle — business in the front, party in the back.

“Coinbase is a mullet in the sense we interface with banks and governments and then there’s the crypto space,” Srinivasan said.

Coinbase’s general strategy with adding new cryptocurrencies to its platform is to maintain good relationships with banks, governments, and those in the crypto and blockchain spaces. In a sentence, Srinivasan said, Coinbase’s goal is “to mainstream cryptocurrency, to mainstream blockchain.”

In order to achieve that, he said, that requires maintaining good relationships on all sides. So before Coinbase begins support for a new cryptocurrency, he said, there needs to be notable growth and adoption.

“We’ll never be the earliest adopter, but we will be early adopters,” he said.

Ultimately, Srinivasan envisions Coinbase operating more algorithmically so that it will be easier to duplicate its processes for adding additional cryptocurrencies.

Srinivasan joined Coinbase in April as the cryptocurrency exchange’s first CTO following Coinbase’s $120 million+ acquisition of Earn.com, a blockchain-based paid email service co-founded by Srinivasan. Srinivasan is also a board member at Andreessen Horowitz.

Before selling to Coinbase, Srinivasan led Earn.com to profitability after turning it into a service that rewards people for answering emails and completing tasks. At the time of the acquisition, Earn.com was profitable with revenues at an eight-digit annual run rate.

As CTO, Srinivasan is also focused on educating the masses about cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. That’s because there’s no formal K-12 or undergraduate education around this space that’s totally revolutionary, he said.

In terms of core fundamentals, Srinivasan said, he’s very bullish on blockchain technology. He noted how it’s ten times better than gold, international wire transfer and crowdfunding, and ten times better for the incorporation of a company and more.

“Combine all of those 10xes and you’ve improved these fundamental primitives and made them programmable and automatable.”

Once a mainstay of the service, Netflix’s user reviews are going away. The movie streaming giant has shifted away from the feature over the last few years, and by the end of the summer, they’ll be gone from the site altogether.

If you still got something to get off your chest about the new season of Kimmy Schmidt, you’ll still be able to do so through the end of the month. It won’t do much good, however — by the middle of August, no one will actually be able to read the thing.

A spokesperson for the company acknowledged as much in an email this week, stating, “We have notified members who have used the feature recently.”

Netflix has been weaning users off of the crowdsourced rating system for a while now, of course. Back in April of last year, the site dumped the familiar five-star rating system in favor of the more straight forward thumbs up/down, in an attempt to offer a more personalized recommendation system.

“A thumbs-down lets us know you aren’t interested in watching that title and we should stop suggesting it to you,” Netflix wrote at the time. “You can still search for it, but we’ve heard what you were trying to tell us — you aren’t a fan — and it will no longer show up on your homepage. In either case, using thumbs helps us learn even more about your unique tastes so we can do a better job suggesting stories we think you’ll love.”

The review system has only been available via the desktop version of the service — and from most accounts, it’s been fairly under used of late. Once it’s gone, however, the thumbs up/down will remain in tact. If you still need to world to know what you thought about that powerful new Hannah Gadsby standup special, on the other hand, that’s what social media is for, I guess.

Smart speaker maker Sonos has filed to go public.

In the filing, the company says it’s aiming to raise up to $100 million in the IPO. However, that number may simply be a placeholder, or it could change as the IPO approaches.

Sonos says that as of March 31, it’s sold a total of 19 million products to 6.9 million households, with customers listening to 70 hours of content each month.

Revenue is growing — in the six months ending on March 31, the company brought in $655.7 million, up 18 percent year-over-year. In its most recent full fiscal year (2017), it brought in $992.5 million in revenue, an increase of 10 percent from 2016, while its net loss shrank from $30.9 million to $15.6 million.

Looking at the broader landscape, Sonos emphasizes its role as an independent player that can work with music streaming services like Apple Music, Pandora, Spotify and TuneIn.

It also points to the opportunity presented by growing interest in voice assistants — Sonos released its first voice-enabled speaker, the Sonos One, last year, but rather than building its own assistant, it integrates with Amazon Alexa and has plans to add support for Apple’s Siri (via Airplay 2) and Google Home this year.

“Our system is not — and never will be — an entry gate into a walled garden,” writes CEO Patrick Spence. “We’re deeply committed to keeping Sonos open to every voice assistant, streaming service and company that wants to build on our platform. This approach is unique in our industry, and it requires substantial investment and long-term thinking.”

In terms of risk factors, the company points to its history of losses, the unpredictability of its revenue growth and the fact that it operates in “highly competitive markets” and is “dependent on partners who offer products that compete with our own.”

Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin talked about a wide range of topics during an interview with Jon Evans at TechCrunch Sessions: Blockchain. He was surprisingly balanced and stated multiple times that everyone has different needs and it’s hard to live in a world where everything is centralized or decentralized.

“Back in 2013, when GHash had 51 percent everybody freaked out. It's happening a second time and people aren't really talking about it this much,” Buterin said. And it’s true that if you look at Bitmain alone, the company is edging toward 51 percent of network hash rate.

In addition to potential 51 percent attacks, it causes issues due to concentration. Buterin mentioned the Sichuan flood that are potentially affecting mining operations over there.

So it’s clear that Buterin wants to make Ethereum as decentralized as possible by design. But what he wants and what the community wants might be different. Buterin is fine with that.

“The Ethereum Foundation tries very hard to be a decentralized organization,” he said. “We try very hard not to have a very hard divide, such as you're on the inside and you're on the outside.”

One of the big challenges to overcome to make Ethereum truly decentralized comes down to user authentication. Sure, it’s possible to generate a private key and a public key to manage your wallet yourself. Sending ETH is all about signing a transaction so it’s not that complicated.

But what happens if you lose the keys? What happens if you lose your password? “If all user authentication methods end up failing it's going to be hard to reach mainstream adoption,” Buterin said.

“I'm interested in social recovery, multi-key schemes,” he added. Buterin then explained WeChat’s social recovery system. If you lose your password, WeChat asks you to select people in your contact list within a big list of names. You can also imagine some sort of offline validation.

“If all fails we'll all use Coinbase — that'll be less fun,” he said. That remark led to a bigger discussion about decentralized exchanges.

“I definitely hope centralized exchanges go burn in hell as much as possible,” Buterin said. In particular, he thinks there’s no reason some projects need to pay $10 to $15 million in listing fees to let people trade their tokens on centralized exchanges.

According to him, centralized exchanges exist because they serve as an interface between the fiat world and the cryptocurrencies. “And the fiat world only has centralized gateways,” he said.

As for crypto-to-crypto exchanges, Buterin says that it’s still early days. But there are already clear advantage from a user’s point of view. For instance, you don’t need to sign up or login. You can send money to a wallet and define an output address. This way, exchanges only act as input/output tunnels, transferring tokens from one address to another in two different currencies.

Buterin also talked about private blockchains and other projects inspired by Ethereum. “A lot of these projects ended up not going very far. Some of them ended up being not decentralized at all,” he said.

For instance, some companies spun up 7 nodes, but they were all controlled by the same company. So it’s not exactly decentralized. “With the public network, you have a network of 16,000 computers,” Buterin said.

Once again, Buterin also said that he can’t blame them entirely. “In a lot of industries, I understand that it comes down to compromises,” he said. Sometimes you have regulatory obligations that force you to centralize at least a bit.

“Even Plasma chains are a better way to make that compromise,” Buterin said. “You get the efficiency of a centralized server, almost the same code of a centralized server, but a public blockchain fallback in case the centralized server ends up failing.”

At some point, Buterin also made fun of Bitcoin’s endless disagreements. The issue is that you have multiple groups of people who truly believe they’re right and that you should do something to ‘move forward’.

During a previous panel, Karl Floersch from the Ethereum Foundation said that Buterin was pretty good at compromising. And Buterin has a say in the culture of the Ethereum community.

“Growth of the communities definitely depends on what the earliest members believe. I think it is something where we do make a deliberate effort to basically promote the right values and attract the right people both in an inclusive sense and in an exclusive sense,” he said.

“It also means that we make a culture that is hostile to people who take themselves to seriously.”

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Watch my panel on scaling Ethereum:

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

This week we were back in the studio with Connie Loizos and myself hanging out with Jai Das, a managing director at Sapphire Ventures. Our beloved Matthew Lynley was off this week, but he’ll be back for the next episode.

This week we had an excellent list of things to get to, first of which was Lyft’s latest shopping run. This time Lyft accreted to itself Motivate, a bike-sharing company that operates various programs in cities like New York City, and San Francisco.

The context for the transaction is threefold. First, Lyft just raised a bundle of money for effectively diddly dilution. Second, Uber bought Jump and there is no FOMO in the market today like ridesharing FOMO. And third, scooters, which now lurk in the background of any and every ridesharing conversation so the big shops are on a bit of defense.

The sum is that Uber and Lyft now own bike companies, which feels a bit 2017.

But moving along Unicorn Row we quickly found ourselves at the door of Airbnb which is prepping for a 2019-2020 IPO and a change to its personnel comp cadence, the latter due to its age and a market trend that Das noted concerned employee comp and shareholder dilution.

In other news, Airbnb needs a CFO, so if you are in the market that’s who to call.

Next up was Automation Anywhere’s epic $250 million Series A which brought the software process-automation company to a valuation of $1.8 billion. The firm helps companies execute repetitive software tasks at a fraction of the cost of having humans click the buttons.

And we wrapped with Juul, everyone’s favorite e-cigarette company that has simply beautiful financials. Whether it’s ethical is something that we spent a moment talking about.

So fire up your vape or just hit play and we’ll be right back in seven days.

Transportation-on-demand service Lyft, now valued at over $15 billion after raising another $600 million in June, is on the hunt to scale its business. One move it might not be making soon, however, is to expand operations into Spain and Latin America by way of an acquisition of one of the leading players in the region.

Cabify says it “categorically denies” that it is in conversations with Lyft for a full or partial acquisition: the two were reported by Spanish newspaper El Confidencial (and subsequently reblogged by others) to be in negotiations, with Lyft preparing to pay up to $3 billion for the company, although the two might partner in future to provide services to each other’s customers in their respective footprints.

“We categorically deny the rumors about alleged conversations in relation to the sale of the company,” the company said in a written statement (in Spanish originally… see Spanish statement at the bottom of this post). “[Cabify] has not been meeting with managers of this or other companies to negotiate a possible partial or full sale of Cabify. The company is in an unbeatable state of financial health and sustainable growth, and continues to establish itself in a leading position in the markets in which it operates.

“As we have previously said, the company remains committed to a plan for an IPO in Spain, potentially in the next 12 to 24 months.” The company was last valued at $1.4 billion after a fundraise of $160 million earlier this year.

Cabify’s spokesperson further said that the two companies have not been meeting for any kind of negotiation, and would not comment on whether the two might work together on any kind of ridesharing partnership, whereby customers of Lyft, for example, could use the Cabify app when travelling in the 38 cities in Latin America, Spain and Portugal where it operates.

“We have nothing to state about that either,” she said. “If we have news in the future, I will for sure let you know.”

A partnership between the two makes some sense, but might also be complicated, in equal measure.

On the one hand, the two companies share an investor, the Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten; and they also share a common competitor, the ridesharing behemoth Uber, and tying up their services, so that their loyal customers do not revert to using Uber when travelling, makes a lot of sense, since once they start they might simply jump to Uber when back home, too.

(We have also reached out to Rakuten and will be contacting Lyft when the West Coast wakes up to see if it would like to respond to the report too.)

On the other hand, one of Lyft’s investors, Didi, has acquired one of Cabify’s other big rivals in Latin America, 99, and so it makes less sense that Lyft would pursue a partnership that could increase business for a competitor of one of its biggest backers.

Then again, the current transportation market — bent as it is on finally becoming profitable after sustaining years of losses, built on collectively billions of VC dollars, to grow — is consolidating rapidly, and many of the fiercest rivals have suddenly started combining as a result. So anything can happen.

Lyft has raised more than ten times the amount of capital that Cabify has, respectively $4.9 billion versus around $407 million, and has yet to expand beyond its home market of the US. The company made some waves a couple of years ago when it announced a ridesharing partnership with Southeast Asia’s Grab, China’s Didi, and India’s Ola, nothing has really come of that deal to date, and now Grab is inching closer to an acquisition of Uber’s SEA business.

But Lyft clearly has its sights on expansion, one way or another. Just yesterday, my colleague Kristen reported that Lyft (along with Uber) was in acquisition talks with crowdsourced bus company Skedaddle.

Spanish statement: 

En relación con las noticias publicadas sobre la posible venta de Cabify queremos afirmar lo siguiente:

• Desde Cabify desmentimos de manera categórica los rumores sobre supuestas conversaciones en relación a la venta de la compañía.

• No se han estado manteniendo encuentros con los directivos de esta ni de otras compañías para negociar una posible venta parcial o total de Cabify. La compañía se encuentra en un inmejorable estado de salud financiero y de crecimiento sostenible, y continúa estableciéndose en una posición de liderazgo en los mercados en los que tiene presencia.

• Como ya anticipamos, la compañía sigue comprometida con la hoja de ruta natural marcada, con la salida a bolsa en España en los próximos 12 o 24 meses como objetivo.