Verizon (TechCrunch’s parent company) just released its earnings report for the fourth quarter of 2018. The company generated $34.3 billion in revenue with an adjusted EPS of $1.12 that excludes special items.
Verizon’s actual EPS for this quarter is 47 cents. The reason why the company had to adjust its EPS is that the company wrote down $4.6 billion in Q4 2018 for the value of its media division, Verizon Media, formerly known as Oath. The company also took a $2.1 billion charge following a voluntary redundancy program.
Wall Street analysts had expected earnings per share of $1.09 and $34.44 billion in revenue. In other words, earnings per share are slightly above expectations, revenue is slightly below. Revenue is up 1 percent year over year.
Verizon shares (NYSE:VZ) are currently trading down 0.13 percent in pre-market trading compared to yesterday’s closing price of $55.07.
Growth has been strong on the mobile front in particular. The company added 1.2 million postpaid wireless subscribers during the quarter.
“Verizon finished 2018 by delivering solid financial and operational performance, as evidenced by our strong wireless service revenue and earnings growth,” Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg wrote in the release. “2018 was a remarkable year full of 5G firsts, including being first in the world to commercially deploy 5G with our 5G Home product. As we head into 2019 and the 5G era, we’re beginning a period of transformational change. We are laser focused on delivering customers a best-in-class and game-changing experience on our networks.”
In case Verizon’s priorities aren’t clear, Vestberg managed to say “5G” four times in just one sentence. On the media front, Verizon Media generated $2.1 billion during Q4, down 5.8 percent compared to Q4 2017. But revenue is up by $200 million compared to the previous quarter (Q3 2018).
When it comes to outlook, Verizon expects to generate “low single-digit percentage growth” in 2019 on the revenue front. EPS should be more or less stable.
WeChat isn’t the only one doubling down on lite apps. Ever since China’s messaging titan introduced “mini programs” two years ago, a handful of its peers including Alibaba and Baidu have followed with their own manifestations.
Alipay, the payments solution affiliated with China’s ecommerce juggernaut Alibaba, today announced it surpassed 230 million daily active users and 12 million lite apps. For some context, Tencent’s WeChat said it topped 200 million daily users and one million mini apps last November.
These stripped-down apps run within an all-in-one platform, or what some call the “super app,” allowing users to bypass the App Store. But not all native apps are replaceable by mini programs for the former support more functionalities and give developers more control in aspects like monetization and access to user insight.
Like WeChat, Alipay added a swipe-down menu on the app’s homepage for mini programs to enhance their visibility. The redesign boosts user revisits to lite apps by 20 times over the past month, Alipay claims.
The Chinese super apps are each bringing their own strengths to the mini-app play. Alipay is a digital wallet at heart, with 1 billion monthly active users around the world many of whom also consume its slew of third-party financial services. The top categories of Alipay’s mini apps, unsurprisingly, are services that see high-frequency transactions like retail, paying for utility bills and travel booking.
WeChat, on the other hand, is fundamentally a messenger and as such developers rush to leverage the social graphs from its 1 billion monthly users. Group-buying site Pinduoduo, for example, started as a mini program and effectively used WeChat’s social networks to grow its group-buying business. Eventually, millions of Pinduoduo’s core users migrated to its native app, setting the Tencent-backed ecommerce startup up against Taobao . Similarly, video games, especially casual ones, embrace mini programs for their smaller file size and ability to be shared across family members and friends.
Security researchers have traced a recent spike in FormBook infections to a new file-hosting service that’s been billed as a place for hackers to host their malware.
Deep Insight analysts say in new findings out Tuesday that the resurgence in FormBook malware, used as part of password and information stealing campaigns currently targeting the retail and hospitality sectors, can be traced back to the newly discovered malware-friendly site that hosts the second-stage dropper used to infect a computer with malicious code after the user opens a booby-trapped document.
The researchers say the site, DropMyBin, was created just over a week ago, and is protected by Cloudflare, masking its real-world location.
“Within days of going live it became a hornets nest of malware,” said Shimon Noam Oren, head of threat research at Deep Instinct, in an email to TechCrunch.
FormBook goes back to 2016 when it was first used to target aerospace and defense contractors in the U.S. and South Korea. Since then, the malware has continued to infect sporadically but has remained largely under the radar.
“We wouldn’t be surprised to find more info-stealers and spyware there,” said Oren.
DropMyBin, a hosting service that threat actors are using to host malware (Screenshot: TechCrunch)
The researchers say the site offers reliability for threat actors where traditional file-sharing sites often nix or delete malware from their systems when it’s detected as malware. DropMyBin was advertised and promoted on Hack Forums, a popular hacker forum, as a “high quality” site that offers “direct downloads” — ideal for linking to malware. They said that the site’s functionality has a “clear invitation to use the service to host malware,” according to the researchers, even though malware is expressly forbidden on the site. DropMyBin promises to keep “all works” for “at least 30 day [sic],” the FAQ reads, and the site doesn’t “collect or log any data of our users in respect for privacy.”
Anyone who wants to use the service for sharing malware can upload their malware, “no questions asked,” the researcher said.
“We strongly suggest employing a zero-trust policy with respect to the service DropMyBin until other information becomes available,” the researchers said.
British startup venture builder Entrepreneur First is eying additional expansion in Asia, where its operation is now as large as it is in Europe, as it expands its reach in 2019. But, despite serving a varied mixture of markets, the company said its founders are a fairly unified breed.
The Entrepreneur First program is billed as a “talent investor.” It matches prospective founders and, through an accelerator program, it encourages them to start and build companies which it backs with financing. The organization started out in London in 2011, and today it is also present in Paris and Berlin in Europe and, in Asia, Singapore, Hong Kong and (soon) Bangalore. To date, it says it has graduated over 1,200 founders who have created more than 200 companies, estimated at a cumulative $1.5 billion on paper.
Those six cities cover a spread of unique cultures — both in general life and startup ecosystems — but, despite that, co-founder Matthew Clifford believes there’s actually many commonalities between among its global founder base.
“It’s really striking to me how little adjustment of the model has been necessary to make it work in each location,” Clifford — who started EF with Alice Bentinck — told TechCrunch in an interview. “The outliers in each country have more in common with each other and their fellow compatriots… we’re uncovering this global community of outliers.”
Despite the common traits, EF’s Asia expansion has added a new dimension to the program after it announced a tie-in with HAX, one of the world’s best-known hardware-focused accelerator programs, that will see the duo co-invest in hardware startups via a new joint program.
“We saw early that hardware was a much more viable part of the market in Asia than it is traditionally seen in Europe [and] needed a partner to accelerate the talent,” Clifford said.
Already, the first four beneficiaries of that partnership have been announced — AIMS, BOPSIN, Neptune Robotics and SEPPURE — each of which graduated the first EF cohort in Hong Kong, its fourth in Asia so far. Going forward, Clifford expects that around three to five startups from each batch will move from EF into the joint initiative with HAX. The program covers Asia first but it is slated to expand to EF’s European sites “soon.”
Entrepreneur First held its first investor day in Hong Kong this month
“We’ll continue to grow by adding sites but we are not in a rush,” Clifford said. “The most important thing is retraining quality of talent. It may be six months until we add another site in Asia but there’s no shortage of places we think it will work.
“We operate a single global fund,” he added. “We’re a talent investor and we believe there are strong network effects in that. The people who back us are really betting on the model… [that it’s] an asset class with great returns.
Still, with hundreds of companies in the world with EF on the cap table, Clifford said he is bullish that his organization can target an international-minded breed of entrepreneur worldwide. The impact he sees is one that will work regardless of any local constraints placed on them.
“With our global network of capital, we always want capital, not talent, to be the limiting factor. Our goal is to make being ‘an EF company’ more relevant to your identity as a startup regardless of your location,” he told TechCrunch
Open Banking and PSD2 — groundbreaking regulation from the U.K. and European Union, respectively — set out to fix what politicians and civil servants perceived as a malfunctioning financial services market, evidenced most prominently by the banking crisis in 2008. It is also closely linked to the EU’s privacy directive GDPR, which aims to ensure citizens are given better access and use of their own personal data.
Central to Open Banking is a requirement that banks open up the data they hold and offer an API to let customers optionally share financial information with third-party providers. The idea, amongst other more innovate use-cases, is to make it easier to shop around for financial services or to switch banks accounts entirely.
In addition, a second aspect of Open Banking, which arguably targets the Visa-Mastercard duopoly, stipulates that banks offer an API to let customers authorise payments directly from their bank account as an alternative to other types of payments, such as card payments or manual bank transfers.
Enter TrueLayer, the London startup that’s built a developer platform to make it easy for fintech and other adjacent companies, such as retailers, to access bank APIs and in turn ride the Open Banking and PSD2 gravy train. Today, the young company is launching a beta of its own Open Banking-based Payments API to enable businesses to start accepting payments through Open Banking.
By using the payment initiation process created by PSD2, TrueLayer says its new API offers a number of benefits over other payments options:
First is immediate settlement whereby cleared funds are received in just few minutes, as with any bank to bank transfer that uses “Faster Payments”.
Second is security, since the API requires active bank authentication before any money can leave the account. “This means high security and extremely low fraud rates,” claims TrueLayer. That’s not pure hyperbole: the nature of the payment initiation process, as stipulated by Open Banking, means the customer is required to sanction any payment request within their own bank’s app or website. The user journey (shown in the video below) goes something like, “hey my bank, please make this one-off transfer on my behalf to X”. The person or business receiving the payment never sees your bank details (or card details, for that matter).
Third is that it is cheaper as payments do not have the high fees of card transactions.
Lastly, the user experience is arguably more streamlined than some other payments options, including traditional bank transfers. For example, customers do not need to manually type in a business’ bank account number to transfer money to a business.
“Both businesses and consumers will benefit substantially, but I think the biggest winner will be merchants, application providers, and SMBs,” TrueLayer co-founder Francesco Simoneschi tells me when I ask him who the biggest benefactors will be.
“Faster Payments cuts the time it takes for a payment to come through from days to few seconds. This is a crucial factor for a lot of businesses where instant settlement and transaction risk are big concerns. Add to that the minimal costs involved to process a payment and our API will make a big difference in a short period of time. We think that many businesses will end up sharing these savings with their customers”.
Simoneschi won’t be drawn into saying who the biggest loser will be under the new payments directive, arguing that it isn’t a “zero-sum game”. “However, we do believe that payment initiation is disrupting the four-party model of the existing card networks,” he adds.
That’s because payment initiation is serviced via a direct relationship between the merchant and the customer’s bank. And although Simoneschi doesn’t think it will happen overnight, he believes that as merchants start to incentivise Open Banking payments for their customers, it is likely to quickly gain traction. One way for credit card companies to remain competitive, he says, is to embrace and enhance Open Banking payment initiation by adding services such as dispute management.
“It’s also worth noting that banks generate a substantial amount of revenue from the fees involved in credit and debit card transactions,” says Simoneschi. “These fees are paid for by merchants, and indirectly, by consumers. Reducing these transactions could sting the bottom line of some of the major banks. Another factor is how a few banks make money as the ‘acquirer bank’ — a bank that merchants use to receive and clear funds. PSD2 and Open Banking removes both parts of this equation, essentially making that role obsolete”.
Meanwhile, asked what use cases are initially best-suited to this new payment method, Simoneschi says the most obvious is any scenario where payment is normally done via manual bank transfer. For example, services that require you to top up your account, such as international money transfer apps, cryptocurrency exchanges (or even a pre-paid mobile phone account) are ideal candidates. He also thinks managing or facilitating B2B payments, such as payments requested by suppliers, is another extremely good fit.
Longterm, however, that’s barely scratching the surface. It’s not hard to see large merchants, such as Amazon, embracing Open Banking in a big way so that they bypass Visa and Mastercard as much as possible. For those merchants with less deep pockets, services like TrueLayer over time will likely help them do the same. In other words, the payments space is about to get interesting — again.
Apple’s status page shows that group calling via FaceTime is “temporarily unavailable” — that’s a stop-gap move while the company to deliver a more permanent fix to the problem this week. We were unable to set up a group call when we tried, having earlier been able to do and replicate the issue.
All being well, this fix means that users don’t need to completely disable FaceTime due to the bug, but it is understandable if some people are hesitant to switch it on again.
The vulnerability was unearthed on Monday and it is activated when a user initiates a group call but adds themselves as a participant, as we explained in our earlier post:
The bug relies on what appears to be a nasty logic screwup in FaceTime’s group call system. While we’re opting to not outline the steps here, the bug seems to trick the recipient’s phone into thinking a group call is already ongoing. A few quick taps, and FaceTime immediately trips over itself and inexplicably fires up the recipient’s microphone without them actually accepting the call.
Weirder yet: if the recipient presses the volume down button or the power button to try to silence or dismiss the call, their camera turns on as well. Though the recipient’s phone display continues showing the incoming call screen, their microphone/camera are streaming.
Apple told us and other media that it plans to issue a more permanent solution in the coming days.
“We’re aware of this issue and we have identified a fix that will be released in a software update later this week,” a spokesperson said.
The bug is an embarrassing incident for Apple, which has long emphasized its focus on privacy as a business and within its products. That included a recent banner at CES which triumphantly proclaimed: “What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone.”
The rise of Starbucks in China, like that in the west, is closely linked to its function as a “third space” for people to hang out between home and work. In recent years, a bevy of coffee entrepreneurs are trying to topple the American giant’s dominance in China and lately, an unexpected contender — WeWork — has joined their camp.
This month, the office tenant and workplace service provider launched WeWork Go, a new feature that allows China-based users to rent a desk by the minute so they are no longer tied to long-term leases. While Starbucks provides free accommodation and charges for coffee, WeWork flips the equation to offer free coffee and paid space. Starbucks is already being squeeze in China by emerging rival Luckin Coffee, a well-funded startup that explicitly pledges to take on the Seattle-based giant with a model that focuses on coffee delivery.
WeWork Go works a bit like other shared services, with an app that lets users check the occupancy of a list of offices in real time before they travel over. Upon arrival, users scan a QR code at the gate, pop the door open, get seated in the common area and the billing begins.
WeWork Go available through a WeChat mini program. Screenshot: TechCrunch
The firm says it monitors traffic flow closely so the common space isn’t flooded with fleeting users. Booking private rooms require additional fees. Go claims to have picked up 50,000 registered users so far after piloting for three months across an inventory of 18 locations in Shanghai, where WeWork nestles its China headquarters.
Made for China
Instead of building a native app, WeWork Go operates via a WeChat mini program, a form of a stripped-down app that works within China’s largest social network. Mini programs are an increasingly popular way for startups to trial ideas thanks to their relative ease to develop. “[Go] is a key development of our China localization,” a WeWork spokesperson told TechCrunch.
Go is tailoring to the so-called “part-time users.” “These people would not purchase the monthly membership. They would work at home or a coffee shop, restaurant, or library,” Dominic Penaloza, who heads innovation and technology at WeWork China, told TechCrunch. He first conceptualized the on-demand workplace service at Naked Hub, a smaller local rival WeWork China bought out for $400 million last year. After the merger, the executive alongside his tech team joined WeWork and continued with the project that would later become Go.
The pay-as-you-go feature is also getting rolled out stateside at a new Manhattan location last week.
This week we launched Made by We, a space that showcases member products in our unique market and offers a place for anyone to book by the minute. #madebywe
Penaloza admits Go could be competing with coffee shops for it offers “an alternative type of the third space for freelancers, mobile workers, business travellers or those who want to briefly step aside from their offices for a mental break.” The obvious target is Starbucks, which commands a whopping 51 percent share of the country’s booming coffee market.
Made for WeWork
For WeWork, Go serves as a trial for those deciding whether to sign on monthly subscriptions. What they are weighing is the 1,830 yuan ($271) price tag for a hotdesk in downtown Shanghai. By comparison, Go starts at 15 yuan and goes up to 30 yuan an hour at more prime locations, offering the same perks as the full-time hotdesking plan, which includes access to common spaces, beverages and wifi.
Users can do their math. “If you started as a WeWork Go member, and if you use our service quite a lot, you will realize it’s much more economical to purchase monthly subscriptions. WeWork Go enables WeWork to reach an entirely new market segment,” suggests Penaloza.
The flexible pricing may help WeWork — which generates the bulk of its revenues from large corporations — reach a wider user base. The shared office industry in China has entered what real-estate researcher Jones Lang LaSalle calls the “second phase,” with big firms moving into premium workplaces like WeWork and local player Soho 3Q. Cash-strapped startups, on the other hand, increasingly turn to government-backed incubators for lower costs.
Photo: WeWork China
Several early users of Go told TechCrunch they found the service delivering a “quieter” and “more comfortable” vibe than most cafes, but distance is key when they are in a rush. WeWork currently has about 60 locations across a dozen major Chinese cities, whereas Starbucks reaches a dense network of 3,330 stores and is shooting for 6,000 by the end of 2022. WeWork China got a boost for locations with the Naked Hub acquisition last year and says it’s open to adding third-party spaces such as restaurants into its inventory, though it has not taken a solid step towards that vision.
“There is a very interesting opportunity in the really downtown area, where WeWork locations and Naked Hub locations are quite full starting from after lunch until 5 pm,” notes Penaloza. “What’s amazing is that restaurants around those locations are quite empty at exactly the same time, so there’s a fascinating opportunity there but we haven’t done anything about it yet.”
That’s because Grab is integrating video-on-demand service HOOQ — a local equivalent to Netflix — into its core ride-hailing app. The company, which is valued at $11 billion and raising a $5 billion round, already offers a range of services including food deliveries, payments, grocery delivery, travel deals and more. But, beyond utility, the focus is now shifting to entertainment, a category where Grab’s app currently sports only basic games.
Grab’s focus on these additional non-transportation services is designed to retain the attention of users and keep them engaged with its app even when they don’t need a ride. In that spirit, Grab announced a partnership platform last summer that’s aimed at helping companies in adjacent industries where it sees a fit to be integrated into its app. The benefit is potential access to Grab’s 130 million registered users which, aside from Western services like Facebook and Google, represents one of the largest digital platforms in Southeast Asia, where Grab is present in eight countries.
The rollout of HOOQ began earlier this month with Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s largest economy and the world’s fourth most populous country, the key focus initially.
The HOOQ ‘mini app’ doesn’t require a log-in, but existing HOOQ users can sign-in.
The companies didn’t disclose financial details, but HOOQ CEO Peter Bithos suggested Grab would receive a cut of revenue generated by subscription sign-ups generated by its app.
Leaning on Grab’s presence is certainly the appeal for HOOQ, which was started in 2015 by Singapore telco Singtel, Sony Pictures and Warner Brothers. Initially, a play to out-localize Netflix in Southeast Asia, HOOQ has recast its position somewhat in recent times — that’s included a free, advertising-supported tier launched last year and content deals with other on-demand services, including Hotstar in India.
Bithos, the HOOQ CEO, told TechCrunch that he believes Grab can support its growth and pivot from a cheaper but all-subscriber Netflix challenger to a freemium service that requires scale.
“Our strategy is around finding digital partners where we are complementary,” he explained in an interview. “We are building our tech and partnerships so that customers can easily bump into us without having to download an app or sign up to a different service.”
The HOOQ presence in Grab will include its full content library, Bithos confirmed.
“The deal is part of a much broader strategy for us,” he added. “We’re inverting the customer experience and putting HOOQ into other people’s products.”
With Go-Jek making the leap, it figures that Grab has followed with its own solution. Bithos said he is confident that the HOOQ-Grab tie-in is superior.
“Go-Jek hasn’t been able to get to anything like the scale or reach that we’ve got,” he said.
He suggested that the partnership allows Grab to focus on what it does best — rides — rather than other areas; that’s a concern that some sections of Grab’s user base have raised with its foray into other services.
“They don’t have to build video tech or focus on it,” he explained.
Sandbox’s magic happens in a largely empty room. The gear mounted onto the walls (VR headsets, PC backpacks, and tracked toy assault rifles) gives more than a little indication that there’s more afoot, but nothing really clicks until your team is strapped in and the headsets shove you into a fast-paced wave shooter.
The startup, which has seven locations in Asia and North America, has brought plenty of people through the sweat-inducing experience including quite a few high-profile investors who are ready to buy into Sandbox’s vision for VR.
Sandbox VR just closed a $68 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz with further participation from Floodgate, Stanford University, TriplePoint Capital, CRCM and Alibaba, as reported by Business Insider.
Andreessen Horowitz’s investment in Sandbox VR comes more that 5 years after the firm made a big bet on Oculus VR. At the time, Oculus helped stroke enthusiasm behind the idea that regular consumers would soon be strapping into their own VR gear. While the company has seen some major progress towards that vision beneath Facebook, it still hasn’t entirely kept pace with the white hot expectations that some investors had set towards that vision.
In 2019, Andreessen Horowitz’s Andrew Chen still sees plenty of opportunity in the home, but is excited about what can be enabled when VR can break free of some of its constraints.
“I think we’ve run the experiment that in-home needs to actually have a kind of different form factor, you want the hardware to be more like $200 or the same as a console,” Chen tells TechCrunch. “I think we’re going to see location-based VR split off and be its own form factor with larger spaces that are intrinsically multi-social with real people there and premium hardware like motion capture and haptic vests.”
The Hong Kong-founded company is hardly the first VR startup to bet on premium experiences in retail locations; startups like The Void have also raised significant capital with high-profile partners like Disney thrusting them into highly-trafficked locations, but Sandbox’s investors see the company’s strengths in its scalability.
“We tried everything, what we really liked about [Sandbox] was that really though about archetyping this as modest-sized rooms that you could really put anywhere,” Chen said. “So it’s this really scalable thing that you could imagine putting inside of a mall or a boutique retail location. You could scale a single location to having 10 or 20 rooms the way a movie theater might have 12 screens.”
Sandbox’s $68 million round comes in the midst of a general market cool down around VR, but as more and more investors look to adjacent technologies like augmented reality, the startup’s backers see its strengths in terms of the bond with users. For Mike Maples, a partner at Floodgate, the investment represents his first in the virtual reality space.
“A lotofARstartupsaregettingmoreattentionbecausepeoplesay,ARcanbeonallthephones and ithasbroaderdistribution,” Maples said. “When I experienced this product I felt like people are going to say, ‘This product rocks my world.'”
You can read more about how Sandbox VR linked up with its investors in this Medium post from the company’s chief product officer (hint: the story involves In-N-Out).
Sandbox’s magic happens in a largely empty room. The gear mounted onto the walls (VR headsets, PC backpacks, and tracked toy assault rifles) gives more than a little indication that there’s more afoot, but nothing really clicks until your team is strapped in and the headsets shove you into a fast-paced wave shooter.
The startup, which has seven locations in Asia and North America, has brought plenty of people through the sweat-inducing experience including quite a few high-profile investors who are ready to buy into Sandbox’s vision for VR.
Sandbox VR just closed a $68 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz with further participation from Floodgate, Stanford University, TriplePoint Capital, CRCM and Alibaba, as reported by Business Insider.
Andreessen Horowitz’s investment in Sandbox VR comes more that 5 years after the firm made a big bet on Oculus VR. At the time, Oculus helped stroke enthusiasm behind the idea that regular consumers would soon be strapping into their own VR gear. While the company has seen some major progress towards that vision beneath Facebook, it still hasn’t entirely kept pace with the white hot expectations that some investors had set towards that vision.
In 2019, Andreessen Horowitz’s Andrew Chen still sees plenty of opportunity in the home, but is excited about what can be enabled when VR can break free of some of its constraints.
“I think we’ve run the experiment that in-home needs to actually have a kind of different form factor, you want the hardware to be more like $200 or the same as a console,” Chen tells TechCrunch. “I think we’re going to see location-based VR split off and be its own form factor with larger spaces that are intrinsically multi-social with real people there and premium hardware like motion capture and haptic vests.”
The Hong Kong-founded company is hardly the first VR startup to bet on premium experiences in retail locations; startups like The Void have also raised significant capital with high-profile partners like Disney thrusting them into highly-trafficked locations, but Sandbox’s investors see the company’s strengths in its scalability.
“We tried everything, what we really liked about [Sandbox] was that really though about archetyping this as modest-sized rooms that you could really put anywhere,” Chen said. “So it’s this really scalable thing that you could imagine putting inside of a mall or a boutique retail location. You could scale a single location to having 10 or 20 rooms the way a movie theater might have 12 screens.”
Sandbox’s $68 million round comes in the midst of a general market cool down around VR, but as more and more investors look to adjacent technologies like augmented reality, the startup’s backers see its strengths in terms of the bond with users. For Mike Maples, a partner at Floodgate, the investment represents his first in the virtual reality space.
“A lotofARstartupsaregettingmoreattentionbecausepeoplesay,ARcanbeonallthephones and ithasbroaderdistribution,” Maples said. “When I experienced this product I felt like people are going to say, ‘This product rocks my world.'”
You can read more about how Sandbox VR linked up with its investors in this Medium post from the company’s chief product officer (hint: the story involves In-N-Out).
