Year: 2018

In light of the tech industry’s last year of one sexual harassment scandal after another, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield says the company has had active conversations about the issues. However, Slack has not made any specific policy changes at the company. While no overt cultural issues at Slack have hit the mainstream, Butterfield says he recognizes that Slack is not immune from them.

“As we get bigger and we exist for longer, the greater the likelihood that the actual problems of the world will be present in Slack too,” Butterfield told TechCrunch.

He added that he’s proud of what Slack has accomplished but that he also wants to be careful not have Slack put up on a pedestal.

“We exist in the actual world — if we all agree that this world has some systemic issues, and it’s sexist and it’s racist — that’s not going to stop when people walk into our office,” Butterfield told me. “I don’t mean there’s nothing we can do about it. There are things we can do about it but people are coming in here with their own life experiences.”

Part of that action is around continuing to release diversity reports, which Slack is doing for the third time today. Slack is still a predominantly white workplace, but the company has made some progress in the areas of global employment of women, women in technical and leadership roles, and representation of black and Latinx people.

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Slack’s workforce is now:

• 44.7 percent female, up from 43.5 percent last year
• 12.5 percent underrepresented minorities, up from 11.5 percent last year
• 6 percent underrepresented employees in leadership positions
• 8.3 percent LGBTQ
• 1.4 percent identify as having a disability
• .85 percent identify as veterans.

While Slack doesn’t break out intersectionality itself, a closer look at the EEO-1 report makes that possible. Slack says it didn’t break this out on its own due to the lack of statistically significant results. I, however, find it socially significant.

For example:

• Slack employs just 19 black women, 21 Latina women and 16 women who identify as two or more races
• White women make up 54.6 percent of Slack’s female employee base
• Black and Latina women each make up just .03 percent of Slack’s overall employee base.

Notably, Slack does not have a chief diversity officer nor anyone specifically tasked with overseeing diversity and inclusion. The company has considered bringing one on board, but Butterfield says he wants diversity and inclusion to be a “companywide responsibility that everyone is engaged in,” he said. Still, Butterfield said that could change in the future.

Meanwhile, Slack has been home to a number of outspoken diversity and inclusion advocates, so it’s notable that some of the more prominent ones are no longer there. The likes of Leslie Miley, Erica Baker and Leigh Honeywell — three people from underrepresented groups in technology — have gone their separate ways. They all said they were moving on as a progression of their careers, but it’s worth pointing out that Slack is not immune to some of the problems that exist in the wider world and the tech industry (as Butterfield mentioned to me). In Baker’s farewell Medium post, she hinted that upward mobility was a challenge at the company.

With that in mind, Butterfield says his job is to inspire people and reiterate that diversity and inclusion is important to him and “deeply baked into how we want to operate,” Butterfield said.

Slack tracks its attrition rates, and as a whole, Slack has an attrition rate of about 8.5 percent annualized, Slack VP of People Robby Kwok told me. Miley left last January, followed by Honeywell in April and Baker in June, but Slack says it does “not see anything that is out of the ordinary based on any one of those categories” (country, job level, job function), Kwok said.

“I think, more broadly, treating each other well, treating our customers and our contractors well, but basically setting the standard of behavior overall, that ideally will have a positive influence on businesses across the board to the extent that we’re successful,” Butterfield said. “Because when people see success, they copy what they think the ingredients are.”

Some of Slack’s more proactive measures include partnerships with Code2040 and the Transgender Law Center. Slack has partnered with Code2040 for the last few years around hiring, but this year it’s taking the partnership some steps further. Slack will continue to serve as an employment partner of Code2040 while also helping to create a curriculum to help their engineers be more successful once they get hired at any tech company. With Transgender Law Center, the idea is to create and deploy ally training specific to the transgender community.

“I think we’re a generation behind on policy and legal issues with respect to trans people versus where we are with the first couple of letters of LGBTQ in the U.S.,” Butterfield said. “There’s a lot of open policy questions.”

Transgender Law Center, Butterfield said, has the expertise while Slack is able to offer some of its employees to contribute to the curriculum’s development. Once the curriculum is developed, the idea is to share it with companies all over the world, Butterfield said.

“Because that was one of the conversations we had really early on with Ina Fried, that there wasn’t a playbook,” he said. “If you were a business owner or executive and you wanted to do a better job supporting trans people, there wasn’t any kind of resource to turn to to learn how to do that, so I think that will be a really impactful effort.”

Slack has also confirmed equal pay and promotion rates across gender and race. Based on Slack’s analysis, Kwon said the company did not have to make any changes to compensation or promotions.

Since its inception, Slack’s goal has always been to not be “one of the places where people fall out of the industry,” Butterfield said. “This is not a complaint about the pipeline, but there are fewer experienced black software engineers in the hiring pool than there are black people in the population. The only way that’s going to change is if people land in environments where they can thrive and they can be successful and can bring people in from their networks — they can act as mentors.”

Today, April 17th at 2:00 PT, TechCrunch is bringing you IndieBio‘s Demo Day.

IndieBio is a four-month accelerator focusing on biotech companies. Early-stage companies are given mentorship, 24/7 access to biosafety level 1 and 2 labs on-site, insights from industry experts and $250,000 in funding.

The 2018 batch of 14 companies range from innovations in non-opioid pain management medication to synthetic wood generation and even using AI to limit antibiotic resistance.

Watch them demo here:

Antibiotic Adjuvant: Delivering AI-powered decision support software designed to monitor and reduce antibiotic resistance.

BeeFlow: Developing smart and strong bees for crop pollination. With their technologies, farmers can increase crop yields up to 90 percent, target specific crops for pollination and substantially reduce bee population decline.

Dahlia Biosciences: Leading the next generation of multiplexed in situ single-cell RNA analysis tools for research and diagnostic applications.

Jointech Labs: Pioneering access to high-quality fat grafts, fat-derived stem cells and cell therapies. Their device enables doctors, clinics and hospitals to provide safe and cost-effective non-surgical treatments for patients.

Lingrove: Creating “wood” without the tree. Their formable, natural fiber and resin replicates the performance, look, feel and re-usability of premium wood from scalable, carbon negative materials.

MezoMax: MezoMax enables faster bone fracture healing, improved osteoporosis treatment and stronger bones in elderly patients with their novel calcium gluconate stereoisomer, which regulates calcium and mineral metabolism.

Neurocarrus: Developing long-acting non-opioid chronic pain medications. Its novel delivery system eliminates addiction potential and side effects that are seen across all opioids.

Nivien Therapeutics: Nivien Therapeutics is developing the first small molecule drugs to enhance both chemo and immunotherapies. Their compounds overcome multiple resistance mechanisms across 15 cancers to increase efficacy and decrease toxicity of treatments.

Nuro: Nuro enables instant communication and computing for millions of incapacitated patients in ​post-surgeries and ICUs, ​nursing homes and rehabilitation​​ by using brain signals.

Onconetics Pharmaceuticals: Onconetics Pharmaceuticals develops gene therapies that target tumor cells with specific gene expression profiles. The effector arm of the therapy involves a genetic switch that activates an apoptotic inducer to kill the cancer cell and spare healthy tissue.

sRNAlytics: sRNAlytics has developed a novel bioinformatics platform to identify error-free, small RNA biomarkers. Their Proof-of-Concept work in Huntington’s Disease validated eight biomarkers that are 100 percent accurate for classifying early versus late-stage disease, and disease progression.

Sun Genomics: Sun Genomics is a microbiome health company focused on curing dysbiosis through personalized probiotics. Their platform enables the highest-resolution profiling of customer gut makeup, empowering them to make and track changes over time.

Terramino Foods: Terramino Foods is reimagining seafood, using fungi and algae to make healthy, affordable and toxin-free products.

Vetherapy: Vetherapy creates novel stem cell therapies for cats, dogs and horses. Their most innovative product speeds up wound healing and treats autoimmune and inflammatory diseases.

Today, April 17th at 2:00 PT, TechCrunch is bringing you IndieBio‘s Demo Day.

IndieBio is a four-month accelerator focusing on biotech companies. Early-stage companies are given mentorship, 24/7 access to biosafety level 1 and 2 labs on-site, insights from industry experts and $250,000 in funding.

The 2018 batch of 14 companies range from innovations in non-opioid pain management medication to synthetic wood generation and even using AI to limit antibiotic resistance.

Watch them demo here:

Antibiotic Adjuvant: Delivering AI-powered decision support software designed to monitor and reduce antibiotic resistance.

BeeFlow: Developing smart and strong bees for crop pollination. With their technologies, farmers can increase crop yields up to 90 percent, target specific crops for pollination and substantially reduce bee population decline.

Dahlia Biosciences: Leading the next generation of multiplexed in situ single-cell RNA analysis tools for research and diagnostic applications.

Jointech Labs: Pioneering access to high-quality fat grafts, fat-derived stem cells and cell therapies. Their device enables doctors, clinics and hospitals to provide safe and cost-effective non-surgical treatments for patients.

Lingrove: Creating “wood” without the tree. Their formable, natural fiber and resin replicates the performance, look, feel and re-usability of premium wood from scalable, carbon negative materials.

MezoMax: MezoMax enables faster bone fracture healing, improved osteoporosis treatment and stronger bones in elderly patients with their novel calcium gluconate stereoisomer, which regulates calcium and mineral metabolism.

Neurocarrus: Developing long-acting non-opioid chronic pain medications. Its novel delivery system eliminates addiction potential and side effects that are seen across all opioids.

Nivien Therapeutics: Nivien Therapeutics is developing the first small molecule drugs to enhance both chemo and immunotherapies. Their compounds overcome multiple resistance mechanisms across 15 cancers to increase efficacy and decrease toxicity of treatments.

Nuro: Nuro enables instant communication and computing for millions of incapacitated patients in ​post-surgeries and ICUs, ​nursing homes and rehabilitation​​ by using brain signals.

Onconetics Pharmaceuticals: Onconetics Pharmaceuticals develops gene therapies that target tumor cells with specific gene expression profiles. The effector arm of the therapy involves a genetic switch that activates an apoptotic inducer to kill the cancer cell and spare healthy tissue.

sRNAlytics: sRNAlytics has developed a novel bioinformatics platform to identify error-free, small RNA biomarkers. Their Proof-of-Concept work in Huntington’s Disease validated eight biomarkers that are 100 percent accurate for classifying early versus late-stage disease, and disease progression.

Sun Genomics: Sun Genomics is a microbiome health company focused on curing dysbiosis through personalized probiotics. Their platform enables the highest-resolution profiling of customer gut makeup, empowering them to make and track changes over time.

Terramino Foods: Terramino Foods is reimagining seafood, using fungi and algae to make healthy, affordable and toxin-free products.

Vetherapy: Vetherapy creates novel stem cell therapies for cats, dogs and horses. Their most innovative product speeds up wound healing and treats autoimmune and inflammatory diseases.

Facebook today announced a partnership with a Mumbai-based fact checking organization called Boom, to help the social network fight the spread of fake news in the Indian state of Karnataka ahead of the elections being held there next month. The social network announced the fact-checking pilot program with Boom in a company blog post, where it briefly explained how the fact-checking process on Facebook currently works.

This is not the first time Facebook has partnered with third-party fact checkers – it has similar deals with fact checking groups in the U.S., France, Italy, the Netherlands, Indonesia, and the Philippines. However, the launch in India is notable because Facebook, along with others, has been accused of not doing enough to prevent the influence of fake news in India, notes a report from BuzzFeed. India is also a large market for Facebook with over 240 million users.

Like other Facebook fact-checking partners, BOOM is certified through the International Fact-Checking Network, a non-partisan international fact checking network at Poynter. It will be able to review the English-language stories shared on Facebook, and rate their accuracy.

When stories are rated by fact checkers as false, they are shown lower in the News Feeds to limit their distribution. This helps hoax stories from spreading, Facebook says. In addition, those Facebook Pages and domains that repeatedly share fake new will also see their distribution lowered, limiting their ability to monetize and advertise. This is important because some publishers were taking advantage of the fact that clickbait sells – even if the story is completely false. And they were profiting from it.

The company claims these efforts have allowed Facebook to reduce the distribution of fake news by 80 percent.

In addition to limiting fake news’ visibility, Facebook combats fake news by showing the fact checker’s article in a Related Articles widget right below the fake story in the News Feed; and it alerts people and Page admins if they’re trying to share a story or have shared a story that’s been determined to be false.

The program in India is considered a pilot test, Facebook notes.

“We are beginning small and know it is important to learn from this test and listen to our community as we continue to update ways for people to understand what might be false news in their News Feed,” the company says.

 

 

Facebook today announced a partnership with a Mumbai-based fact checking organization called Boom, to help the social network fight the spread of fake news in the Indian state of Karnataka ahead of the elections being held there next month. The social network announced the fact-checking pilot program with Boom in a company blog post, where it briefly explained how the fact-checking process on Facebook currently works.

This is not the first time Facebook has partnered with third-party fact checkers – it has similar deals with fact checking groups in the U.S., France, Italy, the Netherlands, Indonesia, and the Philippines. However, the launch in India is notable because Facebook, along with others, has been accused of not doing enough to prevent the influence of fake news in India, notes a report from BuzzFeed. India is also a large market for Facebook with over 240 million users.

Like other Facebook fact-checking partners, BOOM is certified through the International Fact-Checking Network, a non-partisan international fact checking network at Poynter. It will be able to review the English-language stories shared on Facebook, and rate their accuracy.

When stories are rated by fact checkers as false, they are shown lower in the News Feeds to limit their distribution. This helps hoax stories from spreading, Facebook says. In addition, those Facebook Pages and domains that repeatedly share fake new will also see their distribution lowered, limiting their ability to monetize and advertise. This is important because some publishers were taking advantage of the fact that clickbait sells – even if the story is completely false. And they were profiting from it.

The company claims these efforts have allowed Facebook to reduce the distribution of fake news by 80 percent.

In addition to limiting fake news’ visibility, Facebook combats fake news by showing the fact checker’s article in a Related Articles widget right below the fake story in the News Feed; and it alerts people and Page admins if they’re trying to share a story or have shared a story that’s been determined to be false.

The program in India is considered a pilot test, Facebook notes.

“We are beginning small and know it is important to learn from this test and listen to our community as we continue to update ways for people to understand what might be false news in their News Feed,” the company says.

 

 

It’s been about 6 years since Boosted first showed up with its electric longboard and its oh-so-orange wheels, but the company is back with the next logical step: a cheaper, shorter board.

The company is also revamping its longboards, with two new models on the way in the coming months.

The Shortboards

First up, the shortboard(s). The company is planning on shipping two variations of its new shortboard: the $749 Boosted Mini S, and the $999 Mini X.

Both boards come in at 29.5″ long (versus the 38″ of their existing Dual+ longboard), with the primary differences being max distance and max speed: the Mini S caps out at 18 mph and can go up to 7 miles, while the slightly heavier Mini X can go a tick faster and a whole lot further with a max speed of 20 mph and up to 14 miles of range.

These shortboards aren’t quite as fast as the longboards, but 18/20 mph on a (generally less forgiving) shortboard is still terrifyingly fast. As with the longboards, you can limit the speed with the handheld remote while you’re getting comfortable with it.

The shortboard’s deck is more concave than the company’s previous boards, giving you a better sense of where your feet are on the board at any given time. It’s got a nice fat kicktail to help with pivoting it around in tight spots, or to let you lift those front wheels over a crack in the sidewalk. The wheels are big (80mm) and soft, which should help you avoid having your day(/bones) ruined by that little pebble you didn’t see.

The Mini S weighs 15 lbs, while the X comes in at just shy of 17 — both definitely heavier than a standard skateboard, but light enough to pick up and carry when you get to your destination.

The Mini S should start shipping this month, with the Mini X shipping in June.

The Longboards

As noted above, the company is also overhauling its longboard lineup. It’s retiring the existing Dual+ line, replacing it with two different long models: the $1399 Boosted Plus, and the $1599 Boosted Stealth.

Both boards have a max range of 14 miles, making the last generation’s “extended range” battery (previously a $200 upgrade) the standard option. They both weigh roughly 17 lbs, and have big ol’ 85mm wheels.

The difference between the two? Boosted Plus tops out at 22mph, while Stealth bumps the max speed up to 24mph with a fifth riding mode built into the remote. It might not seem like a huge difference on paper, but 2 more mph feels like a whole lot when it’s happening to a piece of wood under your feet. The Stealth board also ghosts out the appearance a bit, with an all grey deck and grey wheels instead of the signature orange.

Worth noting: the hardware across all the boards is now made by Boosted; they’re making their own wheels, building their own custom decks from a new, lighter poplar/fiberglass composite, and CNC milling their own trucks out of aluminum for the sake of strength.

Boosted says the new longboards should ship by early June.

I’ll be helping build a larger meetup focused on pre-ICO companies in New York on April 23 and I’d love to see you there. It will be held at Knotel on April 23 at 7pm and will feature a pitch-off with eight startups – I will write about the best ones – and two panels with some yet-unnamed stars in the space.

I’d love to see you there so please sign up here. It’s free for early birds so hurry.

The event will be held at 551 Fifth Avenue on the 9th Floor and you can sign up to pitch here. I’ll have more information as we get closer to the event. This is still an experimental format so let’s see how it works.

Startups like Zillow and Trulia have reshaped the real estate market by giving consumers with their 24-hour covetable, clickable window into shoppable home sales — and the other players in the real estate marketplace are struggling to catch up.

This deluge of leads coming in to real estate agencies across the country from online sources is the inspiration for Agentology, a new startup which just raised $12 million in a round led by Defy.vc.

The investment was sourced through mutual work that Jenny Lefcourt, the investor at Freestyle Capital who led Agentology’s seed round, was doing at All Raise with Defy co-founder Trae Vassallo, who will join Lefcourt on the company’s board of directors.

For Vassallo, the deal is doubly rewarding because it came through All Raise. “Within the context of All Raise,” this is the first time I’ve been able to invest with a female GP,” Vassallo says.

Beyond its significant backing, and the speed with which Agentology managed to add additional capital, is an idea whose time has come, according to co-founders David and Avi Tal — the two brothers behind one of San Diego’s fastest growing startups.

The two men were both acutely aware of the challenges facing upstart or boutique real estate firms that could not keep up with the flood of leads that came in from mobile applications and the internet.

Basically, Agentology adds a rapid response service powered by automatically generated messages and a team of sales reps that can vet leads, and combines that with a referral network among real estate agents to hand off leads they don’t have the time — or inclination — to take.

As we wrote:

… conversations work towards qualifying the lead, and the full conversation around any lead is handed over to agents with full transparency, where those agents can check on all back-logged communication.

But even with a service that qualifies leads and keeps them warm right from the get-go, agents still can’t take on every single qualified lead that comes their way, either because they’re too busy or because that lead doesn’t fit into their wheelhouse.

That’s where Agentology really differentiates from other lead-gen services like Riley.

With Agentology, brokers are able to refer their leads to another broker with the click of a button. Agentology has more than 30,000 agents in their referral network.

Agents who refer leads get a 25 percent of the receiving agent’s commission once they close on that particular listing, which is essentially turning an interface button into a revenue model.

Of course, Agentology takes their own cut of the commission (10 percent), as well. The company also makes money on its core service, charging based on lead volume on a monthly basis, which turns out to be around $4 to $6 per lead.

“Technology needs to be leveraged to automate things that can and should be automated,” says chief executive David Tal. “Part of the reason the industry is broken is that the industry went from one extreme to another… You had to do all of these things face to face now you can do all of these things at their fingertips so people don’t have any loyalty to any provider or any service individual.”

“We like investing in what I’m still calling authentic founders… founders that have lived and breathed and struggled with the problem,” Vassallo says of the Agentology investment. 

“If you look at the agents themselves and the sets of tools that they have… they’ve been dragged online,” says Vassallo. “They have not had any help managing this business and they have no ability to deal with leads  effectively.” Agentology, she says, solves that problem. 

The U.S. Army Research Laboratory has teamed up with the University of Minnesota to explore the wonders of soft robots. The teams have published a study describing their findings as they look to build invertebrate-inspired robotics able to squeeze into and maneuver around obstacles.

“Successful stealthy maneuvering requires high structural flexibility and distributive control to sneak into confined or restricted spaces, operate for extended periods and emulate biological morphologies and adaptability,” ARL researcher Ed Habtour said in a release tied to the study.

The work thus far includes a soft, elastic actuator created entirely on a 3D printer — making the entire creation flexible, unlike other robotics that only contain soft elements. Of course, the teams are far from the first to delve into the world of soft robotics parts.

Cephalopods like octopi and squid have long served as an inspiration in the robotics world, including, notably, the work of George Whitesides. The Harvard professor’s team created an uncanny valley inhabiting X-shaped robot capable of squeezing under tight cracks. It’s easy to see how such a creation would appeal to the military.

Of course, this is all still early stages for the Army, but down the road, the team is hoping some sort of fast-working, entirely mobile 3D printing platform will help them create soft robotics in the field.

“The research findings represent an important stepping stone towards providing the Solider an autonomous freeform fabrication platform – next-generation 3D printer, which can print functional materials and devices – to generate soft actuators and potentially tetherless soft robots on demand, on the fly and at the point of need,” Harbtour adds.   

That’s a kind of a perfect storm that will have to amass in order to really put the devices into practice, but surely the military won’t let anything stand in the way of creating a mobile army of flexible squid robots.

During yesterday’s earnings call, Netflix seemingly shot down a recent report that had claimed the streaming service was planning to make its move into the news business via a weekly TV show. In March, MarketWatch had reported Netflix was eyeing the news business, and was planning a news magazine show that would rival CBS’s “60 Minutes” or ABC’s “20/20.”

The source for the report was an unnamed TV exec who had previously worked with Netflix on a documentary series. Netflix had declined to comment at the time, giving the report some legs.

It wouldn’t be too unusual for a streaming service to tackle news programming. After all, access to news is still one of the holes facing cord cutters when they ditch their high-priced pay TV subscription for Netflix alone.

Plus, Netflix’s rivals already offer their viewers access to news programming. Hulu lets viewers watch news shows from ABC, NBC, and Fox; CBS All Access provides access to CBS news shows, including “60 Minutes,” “CBS Evening News,” “CBS This Morning” and “CBS Sunday Morning,” among others; and HBO, which steams to cord cutters via HBO NOW, has news content from VICE as well as the humorous take on current events provided by “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.”

In addition, Netflix seemed to be stepping closer to the news space in recent months, with things like David Letterman’s Netflix series, “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction,” where the talk show host has interviewed notable figures like Barack Obama and Malala Yousafzai. The New York Times also reported last month that Obama was in negotiations with Netflix to produce a series of high-profile shows – like one where he’d moderate conversations on hot button political issues, such as immigration or voting rights.

Certainly it didn’t seem like a stretch to think weekly news could be next on Netflix’s agenda.

But Netflix’s Chief Content Officer, Ted Sarandos, dismissed this idea straight out on yesterday’s call.

“Our move into news has been misreported over and over again,” he stated. “We’re not looking to expand into news beyond the work that we’re doing in short-form and long-form feature documentary.”

He also clarified that Netflix doesn’t consider the kind of work that Letterman is doing “news.”

“The topical interview shows….keep in mind that they’re entertainment. Those are a form of entertainment,” Sarados noted. “David Letterman is a great talk show host, not a newscaster. So we’ll definitely do more of that,” he said.

He also declined to comment on the report about the Obamas “or any other deals that would be in various states of negotiations right now,” which essentially confirmed that negotiations with the Obamas were, in fact, taking place.

The statement doesn’t mean that MarketWatch’s report is entirely wrong. It could just mean that the way Netflix classifies what it considers a “news series,” is different from how MarketWatch’s source perceived the program’s content. If Netflix were to launch a John Oliver-style show, for example, or something like “The Daily Show,” it likely would consider that entertainment, not news.