Year: 2019

At the tail end of Tesla’s earnings call today, Elon Musk dropped a surprise bit of news: the company’s CFO, Deepak Ahuja, will be retiring.

“There is no good time to make this change,” said Ahuja, but noted that after two back-to-back profitable quarters, now might be the best time.

Ahuja first served as Tesla’s CFO from 2008 to 2015, then again from February 2017 on. Zach Kirkhorn, currently Tesla’s VP of Finance, will take over the role moving forward.

Elon notes that Ahuja’s retirement “won’t be immediate,” but didn’t give a specific timeline. He also says that he plans for Ahuja to stay on as a senior advisor “for probably years to come.”

As Tesla ramps up production and gets more cars on the road, the company is still working out a few speed bumps when it comes to service. When something goes wrong, getting it fixed tends to take longer than many owners are willing to wait.

In September of last year, Elon Musk promised to make fixing service times a priority. On an earnings call today, he outlined two ways they’re working on it: more spare parts at service centers, and giving Tesla cars the ability to automatically get the process started by calling a tow truck as soon as it detects an issue.

Said Elon on the call:

“The next thing we want to add is if a car detects something wrong — like a flat tire or a drive unit failure — that before the car has even come to a halt, there’s a tow truck and service loaner on the way”

False alarm? Don’t want a tow truck to show up? You’ll be able to cancel it through the in-dash display.

If they can get it to work, it sounds great — but it’s not an easy challenge. Pulling it off in one or two major cities? Simple enough. But nationwide, or worldwide? That’s a much bigger logistical problem.

Elon didn’t give a timeframe for when such a feature might roll out.

Tesla is building a pickup truck. We’ve known that for a few years now. But when?

In an earnings call this afternoon, Elon Musk said that he’s hoping to unveil the truck this summer.

“It will be… unique,” he added.

Note, of course, that “unveil” doesn’t mean “ship”. That presumably won’t happen for a while. The company is still knee deep in Model 3 production, finishing its Gigafactory in Shanghai and its long awaited Semi truck, and is actively working on getting its SUV (tentatively called the “Model Y”) into the tooling stage. The company has a lot on its plate right now.

The Criterion Collection’s streaming service has a launch date: April 8.

The company had previously made its library of classic art-house and international films available through streaming partners — first Hulu, then FilmStruck. However, FilmStruck shut down last fall, apparently a victim of its corporate parent WarnerMedia’s bigger streaming plans.

Criterion subsequently announced that it would both make its movies available through the yet-to-launch WarnerMedia service and launch a streaming service of its own, called The Criterion Channel.

Today, Criterion announced the channel’s launch date and started taking signups from “charter” subscribers. In exchange for signing up early, you’ll get a discounted subscription fee of $9.99 per month or $89.99 annually (compared to the regular price of $10.99 per month or $99.99 annually), and even before the launch, you’ll be able to watch films as part of the channel’s Movie of the Week series.

The Criterion Channel will be available in the United States and Canada, and should work on desktop, Apple TV, Amazon Fire, Roku, iOS and Android devices.

At the end of last year, Grand Central Tech announced plans to work with the Milstein real estate family to transform a midtown Manhttan high-rise into a tech hub called Company. And startups remain an important part of the mix — in fact, Company is unveiling a list of 20 startups participating in this year’s GCT Startup-in-Residence program.

What does Startup-in-Residence mean? Well, Company CEO Matthew Harrigan said the program will continue to offer what it’s always offered — desk space, as well as access to events and amenities, for a select group of early-stage entrepreneurs. And participants don’t have to give up equity or pay rent.

The deal might seem too good to be true, but Harrigan argued that the startups make Company more appealing to its enterprise tenants: “We are retrofitting this building to look and feel and operate like a brand new building … but the one amenity that cannot be simply rolled out is people.”

He also said the program is only taking up 15,000 square feet of the building’s 150,000 square foot total.

“It sounds like an exceptionally generous offering and it isn’t,” he said. “It sounds like it doesn’t make a ton of business sense but that’s actually wrong … Fifteen thousand square feet of space to great early-stage founders helps establish a truly remarkable program and campus in New York City. Those are resources are well spent.”

In the past, we’ve written about Grand Central Tech as an accelerator program, but Harrigan said, “We weren’t and aren’t an accelerator” — it just used “the nomenclature that’s known.” Now the program is taking on a more fitting name, though it sounds like the operations won’t be changing too dramatically.

“We typically have very sophisticated founding teams, giving them an ideal environment in which to work,” Harrigan said. “By and large, our companies are left to their own devices — we don’t presume to create a curriculum or some series of programming. It’s a somewhat passive approach, but we make sure all people in the community are linked up with each other.”

Also worth noting: This year’s class consists of 40 percent women founders and CEOs, and it covers industries like energy, mental health, e-commerce, biotech, adtech and food.

Here’s a list of the companies, with descriptions provided by Company (and edited by me for clarity and length). We’ve also written about a number of them before, so I’m including links to past coverage when possible.

• Dandelion Energy​ ​is a geothermal energy company that’s building a scalable and cost-efficient geothermal heating solution for the U.S. residential housing market. The company is a spinout of Alphabet and GoogleX.

• Octave​ ​is a full-stack mental health provider, purpose-built to capitalize on evolving consumer habits and a new wave of interest in the space.
• Vowel ​is a multi-user enterprise voice platform operating in stealth. The company enables businesses to analyze, manage and drive actionable insights from audio data generated in the workplace/meetings.
• Nara Organics​ ​is a natural baby food company that is manufacturing the first biodynamic infant formula in the US.
• Twine Labs​ ​is a workforce analytics platform that’s creating a single source of truth on employee data across various disaggregated internal corporate databases. Data is then benchmarked against industry standards to help Chief People Officers gain vital, previously unavailable perspective.
• Taskade​ ​is a new workplace collaboration platform that enables more efficient team management and product workflows.
• Oova​ is a biomedical technology company for women’s health that uses smart connected devices to actively monitor hormone levels and help manage women’s fertility health. The company is a spinout of Mt. Sinai.
• Summer​ ​is a next-generation student loan management and repayment platform providing users with a comprehensive view of their debt and targeted recommendations on how to alleviate it which evolve based on their current life circumstances.
• Chartable​ ​is creating a new enterprise adtech and analytics platform for audio. It’s aiming to do something similar to what DoubleClick, AppAnnie, Flurry and others did when apps were first introduced.
• Particle Health​ ​is creating a new medical record data company, leveraging blockchain technology to enable a single health record tying together previously disparate information from a patient’s various doctors, and yielding valuable data insights in the process.
• Project OTC ​is a holistic new consumer brand targeting outdated over-the-counter brands and products such as antacids, Vitamin-C/immunity support and headache relief. The company is operating in stealth.

• Moved​ ​is building a new concierge layer on top of the disorganized, disaggregated moving services supply chain. A user calls Moved, shares details and is given a concierge who manages the move and coordinates across all the various service providers, including the landlord or real estate owner.
• Hydra​ ​is a ​new network of membership-based wellness spaces in metropolitan areas that complements the growth of small format fitness classes and provides its members areas to refresh, regroup and recharge.
• GoodTalk​ ​is a new consumer app meant to distill and amplify one of primary aspects of social platforms. For example, five experts on a given topic can form a chat thread, which other users of the app can view but not comment on.
• Otis​ is building a new investment platform to enable distributed ownership in fine art and collectibles.
• Snackable​ ​uses natural language processing to intelligently digest podcasts into “snackable” 30-60 second moments to enable easier social sharing of podcast content — something which has plagued the burgeoning podcast space.


Lolli allows users to receive Bitcoin for their online purchases

• Lolli​ ​is building a new ecommerce platform that allows customers to accumulate Bitcoin rewards through simple brand and retail purchases by capturing the rebate/coupon value already broadly distributed throughout ecommerce.
• RaisedByUs​ ​is a nonprofit workplace social good program for companies that already includes Casper, Squarespace, Shutterstock, Seatgeek, Sailthru, Birchbox, MongoDB, DigitalOcean among others. RaisedByUs helps teams do meaningful, team-building, vetted volunteer work easily.
• Nesterly​ ​i​s a home sharing platform that is working to bring affordable housing to the next generation by allowing senior homeowners to easily rent out their extra space.
• Bokksu​ ​is a subscription-based food company that curates exclusive artisan snacks in local markets and uses video and written storytelling to detail origin stories through an immersive customer experience.

Consolidation in the micromobility space has arrived — in Brazil, at least. A few months after Y Combinator-backed Grin merged its electric scooter business with Brazil-based Ride, it’s now merging with Yellow, the bike-share startup based in Brazil that has also expressed its ambitions to get into electric scooters.

If Yellow sounds familiar to you, it may be because, in September, the company raised $63 million in a funding round led by GGV Capital. That was the largest Series A round for a Latin American startup. A month later, Grin raised a $45.7 million Series A round.

As part of the merger, Grin and Yellow are rebranding as Grow Mobility. Initially, however, both apps will maintain their apps and brands. Grow Mobility operates more than 135,000 micromobility vehicles across six countries and plans to more than double its fleet in the next few months across Latin America.

“The demand for these everyday services across Latin America is huge and, by combining strengths and resources, we will be able to move quickly to serve more users,” Grin co-founder and Grow CEO Sergio Romo said in a press release. “We look forward to building on Grin and Yellow’s strong relationships with local officials and other stakeholders who are eager to partner with us in creating long-lasting value for our region.”

Over in the U.S., there are countless electric scooter startups. As my colleague Kate Clark said in last month, it’s only a matter of time before we see some consolidation.

Roughly half of Instagram’s users 1 billion users now use Instagram Stories every day. That 500 million daily user count is up from 400 million in June 2018. 2 million advertiseres are now buying Stories ads across Facebook’s properties.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg called Stories the last big game-changing feature from Facebook, but after concentrating on security last year, it plans to ship more products that make “major improvements” in people’s lives.

During today’s Q4 2018 earnings call, Zuckerberg outlined several areas where Facebook will push new products this year:

• Encryption and ephemerality will be added to more features for security and privacy
• Messaging features will make Messenger and WhatsApp “the center of [your] social experiences”
• WhatsApp payments will expand to more countries
• Stories will gain new private sharing options
• Groups will expand to encompass new experiences
• Facebook Watch will become mainstream this year, Zuckerberg expects
• Augmented and virtual reality will be improved, and Oculus Quest will ship this spring
• Instagram commerce and shopping will get new features

Zuckerberg was asked about Facebook’s plan to unify the infrastructure to allow encrypted cross-app messaging between Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp, as first reported by NYT’s Mike Isaac. Zuckerberg explained that the plan wasn’t about a business benefit, but supposedly to improve the user experience. Specifically, it would allow Marketplace buyers and sellers in countries where WhatsApp dominates messaging to use that app to chat instead of Messenger. And for Android users who use Messenger as their SMS client, the unification would allow those messages to be sent with encryption too. However, Zuckerberg says this will take time and could be a “2020 thing”.

Facebook says it now has 2.7 billion monthly users across the Facebook family of apps: Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. However, Facebook CFO David Wehner says “Over time we expect family metrics to play the primary role in how we talk about our company and we will eventually phase out Facebook-only community metrics.” That shows Facebook is self-conscious about how its user base is shifting away from its classic social network and towards Instagram and its messaging apps.

It’s no secret that Google planned to pull life support from the consumer version of Google+, its failure of a social network, in April. Until now, though, we didn’t know the exact date. That date, Google announced today, is April 2.

On that date, Google will start deleting all content, including Google+ pages, photos and videos, and everything else on the site. If you were one of the last few Google+ users — or you just feel nostalgic about the stuff you posted there — now is the time to download all of that data.

If your company uses Google+ (and there must be some companies that do), then rest assured you will still be able to use it for the foreseeable future. Google is only shutting down the consumer version, as well as all Google+ APIs. Indeed, those APIs, which turned out to be major security liabilities, will shut down on March 7.

And there you have it. That’s the curtain call for Google+, the social network that could’ve been, from an era when Google desperately tried to catch up with Facebook and Twitter and integrated Google+ into every conceivable product. It even went so far as changing its sacred search results based on social signals (which really didn’t work all that well). The result was a bit of a disaster for Google and it took a while to right the ship.

PayPal revenues miss but strong growth from its recent iZettle and Hyperwallet acquisitions and booming business at Venmo point to a strong outlook for the payments giant.

In all PayPal saw revenues for the quarter of $4.23 billion against analysts estimates of $4.24 billion, according to data from Yahoo Finance. Earnings per share at the company were up to 69 cents versus analysts’ expectations of 62 cents on a non-GAAP basis.

For the full year, PayPal saw revenue hit $15.45 billion versus analysts estimates of $15.46 billion.

The addition of 2.9 million net new active accounts resulting from the acquisitions of Hyperwallet and iZettle show how those two deals are already adding value as PayPal moves to expand internationally and away from its core market in the U.S.

Payment transactions totaled 2.9 billion for the quarter, up 28 percent and the $164 billion in total payment volume was a 23 percent increase from the year ago period.

“In 2018 we set new benchmarks for the company for revenue, net new active accounts and engagement across our platform. We launched new products, strengthened existing relationships, and entered into new strategic partnerships with some of the biggest and most influential global brands in technology, retail, and finance,” said Dan Schulman, President and CEO of PayPal. “We greatly expanded our global reach, serving 267 million customer accounts, including 21 million merchant accounts. We believe 2019 will be another strong year for us, and we intend to build on our strengths to extend our leadership as the leading open digital payments platform.”

Other than the additions from the new acquisition the other bright spot for PayPal was the volume coming in from its Venmo business. In all, volume of Venmo transactions hit $19 billion, growing by 80 percent, in the fourth quarter. For the year, nearly $62 billion changed hands on the Venmo platform.

Mobile payments were also up for the company. Roughly $67 billion was transacted through mobile devices for the quarter, a 40% boost on year ago numbers.

For the year ahead the company projected

Despite the generally positive outcomes, PayPal’s stock was down 4.4 percent to $88.11 in after hours trading on the Nasdaq.

In November, AT&T opened up about its plans for its forthcoming WarnerMedia streaming service, which aims to leverage the entertainment properties AT&T gained by way of its Time Warner acquisition last year. The company said the service will have three tiers — an entry-level, movie-focused service; a premium tier with original programming and blockbusters; and a bundle that includes them both. Today, AT&T revealed another detail: Some of the service’s content will be supported by advertising.

Speaking to investors this morning on its Q4 earnings call, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said the new service will have what he referred to as a “two-sided business model.”

That is, the service will include subscription-based, commercial-free programming on the high-end — like HBO or Netflix offers. But it seems the entry-level portion of the service will be ad-supported, according to the exec’s comments.

“Customers have become accustomed to advertising-free subscription services,” Stephenson noted. “And we think HBO and a lot of the Warner Brothers content, that’s really premium content, will fit into that mold,” he said. “But there are other elements where advertising-supported models are going to be important to keep prices down, to keep costs for the consumer down and actually fund additional content acquisition and purchasing,” Stephenson added.

He said the model for the new service would be “heavy” on the subscription side, with “some” ad-supported elements to it. The latter would be enabled by AT&T’s ad tech called Xandr.

The exec acknowledged, too, the challenge of entering the market at this point with yet another streaming offering, but seemed optimistic about AT&T’s chances.

“We have really high expectations for our streaming service. We don’t think there is going to be a proliferation of these that will succeed over time, but those who have very, very strong IP — deep libraries of IP — are the ones that we think are going to succeed over time,” he said.

What was less clear is whether the ad-supported elements to the WarnerMedia service would actually involve any of its content streaming for free to consumers, or whether it will just make the service more affordable — like Hulu’s core TV package, which just dropped its pricing to $6 per month. (AT&T currently owns a stake in Hulu, but it has been weighing putting it up for sale to pay down debt. That’s still on the table, the company said today.)

If WarnerMedia’s service goes the ad-supported route for its entry-level tier, it will face a lot of competition. Today, there are a number of ways to stream free movies and TV on demand, thanks to advertising-supported offerings from a host of major players.

For example, there’s free content on The Roku Channel; Walmart’s ad-supported video on Vudu; Amazon-owned IMDb’s new service Freedive; Viacom’s new acquisition, Pluto TV; Sinclair’s local broadcaster-focused service Stirr; and sometime this year, media center software maker Plex will offer free movies. Comcast will also launch a free streaming service for its pay TV customers in 2020.

If, however, WarnerMedia chooses to charge a small amount for its ad-supported content, then it will have to go up against Hulu’s core package — which looks more compelling as it includes original programming.

On the subscription side of things, the service will be up against paid services like Netflix, Time Warner’s own HBO NOW (and the other ways to get HBO over-the-top), plus the forthcoming launches from Apple (presumably) and Disney.

What’s more is that the company doesn’t plan on entirely cutting off access to its content by bringing it all in-house. As Stephenson mentioned today, AT&T recently extended its license for “Friends” to Netflix, instead of cutting them off.

“We said exclusivity is probably not that critical on that type of content, but it’s critical to have on our platform,” he explained. “So we did license it to Netflix as you saw, but on a non-exclusive basis. And so each of these decisions on significant content like that are going to be evaluated in terms of how critical is it to our platform to have it as exclusive, versus the economics of licensing it to others.”