Year: 2019

The freezing waters underneath Antarctic ice shelves and the underside of the ice itself are of great interest to scientists… but who wants to go down there? Leave it to the robots. They won’t complain! And indeed, a pair of autonomous subs have been nosing around the ice for a full year now, producing data unlike any other expedition ever has.

The mission began way back in 2017, with a grant from the late Paul Allen. With climate change affecting sea ice around the world, precise measurements and study of these frozen climes is more important than ever. And fortunately, robotic exploration technology had reached a point where long-term missions under and around ice shelves were possible.

The project would use a proven autonomous seagoing vehicle called the Seaglider, which has been around for some time but had been redesigned to perform long-term operations in these dark, sealed-over environments. ne of the craft’s co-creators, UW’s Chris Lee, said of the mission at the time: “This is a high-risk, proof-of-concept test of using robotic technology in a very risky marine environment.”

The risks seem to have paid off, as an update on the project shows. The modified craft have traveled hundreds of miles during a year straight of autonomous operation.

It’s not easy to stick around for a long time on the Antarctic coast for a lot of reasons. But leaving robots behind to work while you go relax elsewhere for a month or two is definitely doable.

“This is the first time we’ve been able to maintain a persistent presence over the span of an entire year,” Lee said in a UW news release today. “Gliders were able to navigate at will to survey the cavity interior… This is the first time any of the modern, long-endurance platforms have made sustained measurements under an ice shelf.”

You can see the paths of the robotic platforms below as they scout around near the edge of the ice and then dive under in trips of increasing length and complexity:

They navigate in the dark by monitoring their position with regard to a pair of underwater acoustic beacons fixed in place by cables. The blue dots are floats that go along with the natural currents to travel long distances on little or no power. Both are equipped with sensors to monitor the shape of the ice above, the temperature of the water, and other interesting data points.

It isn’t the first robotic expedition under the ice shelves by a long shot, but it’s definitely the longest term and potentially the most fruitful. The Seagliders are smaller, lighter, and better equipped for long-term missions. One went 87 miles in a single trip!

The mission continues, and two of the three initial Seagliders are still operational and ready to continue their work.

Sequoia India is going deep into early-stage investing after it announced an accelerator program, Surge, which is focused on fledging startups in India and Southeast Asia, the two regions that it covers.

It’s been nearly six months since Sequoia India closed its newest $695 million fund — its fifth since its establishment 12 years ago — and with over 200 deals under its belt, it is going earlier than ever before. The Surge program is designed to work with a mix of companies; that could include founders with just an idea, to those at pre-launch or pre-seed, businesses with an existing product-market fit or even startups intending to pivot, Sequoia India managing director Shailendra Singh told TechCrunch.

“It’s a bold attempt to try to create a better program for seed to Series A,” Singh said in an interview. “We think founders are underserved. There is quality early-stage talent but we are trying to find a way to serve them better.”

Singh explained that the program is a result of extensive research. He said Sequoia India talked to startups, founders and investors, and that a series of Twitter polls he conducted last year show founders in India and Southeast Asia are too frequently under-capitalized, over-diluted and forced to spend too much time on the fundraising trail.

“We decided there is a better way,” Singh said.

So what is the Sequoia India solution?

Surge is aiming to recruit 10-20 companies per batch, with two cohorts running each year for four months each. Perhaps the most notable feature is that selected companies will receive a $1.5 million investment from Sequoia, with the option to raise more from the firm and other co-investors in a final “UpSurge” demo week that concludes the program. Participants will, however, need to pay a “program fee” although that is being waived for the first cohort.

On its website, the firm describes Surge as being designed to give founders an “unfair advantage, right out of the gate.”

That first program is scheduled to run in March and applications are open now, although Sequoia has already picked a small selection for the first program. While the focus is local startups, China-based startups looking at India and Southeast Asia and U.S. startups seeking an Asia will also be considered, the firm said.

Singh said equity will be negotiated on a company-by-company basis, but he anticipates that valuations will be will be in the range of “high single-digit to high-teens” pre-money. There’s no obligation for a Sequoia follow-on, and Singh stressed that a “curated” selection of investors will be invested to invest in the post-program round and even alongside the initial $1.5 million check.

Shailendra Singh, Sequoia India managing director

The program is quite unusual in being globally distributed. That’s to say that it is split into five ‘modules,’ each of which is hosted in a different city which taps into Sequoia’s global presence. That’ll include Singapore, China, India and Silicon Valley. Singh said each module will require founder presence for a week, when they will work together with Sequoia — including the firm’s AMP program — Surge mentors and others, before taking the learnings back to their company for the remainder of the month. The only exception is the final month, which will include an additional week for the demo segment.

Sequoia India has tapped its portfolio companies and other Sequoia investees to pull an initial list of mentors that include Nadiem Makarim (Go-Jek), Rajan Ananadan (Google), Byju Raveendran (Byju’s), Neeraj Arora (WhatsApp) and Kunal Shah (Freecharge and now Cred). Singh said more will be added after the public launch.

He added that Sequoia India is hiring dedicated Surge staff to work exclusively on the program. For now, the budget for the program will come from the India fund but, in the long term, Singh said a dedicated Surge fund could be created. That could be necessary given the potential costs from the program.

The focus is fairly vertical agnostic, Sequoia said, with a focus on the teams behind companies.

“The single biggest focus is on being founder-centric,” Singh told TechCrunch. “We want to assemble a group of founders who are quite special. We expect founders to learn a lot from each other.”

When I put it to Singh that Sequoia’s move into early stage puts it into competition with the very up-stream, seed investors that it works with to get Series A deal flow, he argued that Sequoia is already very present in that segment.

Pointing to a recent LinkedIn post — which reads like a precursor to today’s announcement — Singh said one-quarter of its deals have been with startups valued at $5 million or lower, with 64 percent at $10 million or lower.

“We’ve made seed investments and collaborated with other firms in the past. We’ve already spoken to a few friendly firms and they are excited to be involved,” Singh said.

“We’ve already spoken to a few friendly firms and they are excited to be involved,” he added.

Sequoia is well known for later-stage deals, but Sequoia’s Singh shared data showing that it is well invested in early-stage deals, too

That may well be true for some firms, but I can’t help but feel that others may be intimated at a deep-pocketed investor playing in their backyard. In such a case, there’s little more than you can do other than play along. That said, Singh seems genuinely keen to build links between Surge and other VCs at all levels.

“It’s not about us or them but what’s good for founders,” he explained, adding that Sequoia will “actively” work with firms to involve them in the program.

It’s definitely a fascinating move, and it is certainly one of Sequoia’s boldest strategies worldwide. It is too early to say if it will be replicated by Sequoia other global funds, but they will certainly be watching, as Singh himself admitted.

You can find more information about Surge here.

In 2019, we still don’t really know what to do about fake news. With nothing to disincentivize viral hyperpartisan headlines and other exercises in confirmation bias, online misinformation seems to run as rampant as ever. It’s a tricky problem, particularly because it’s one that requires the readers most drawn to too outrageous to be true news to challenge their beliefs. In other words, without some kind of technical solution or massive cultural shift, the fake news dilemma won’t be solving itself any time soon.

That being said, Microsoft’s mobile Edge browser is taking a modest swing at it. On Android and iOS, the Microsoft Edge app now installs with a built in fake news detector called NewsGuard. The partnership is an extension of Microsoft’s Defending Democracy program and NewsGuard for Edge was first announced earlier this month.

While NewsGuard isn’t on by default, anyone using Edge can enable it with a simple toggle in the settings menu. When I downloaded the app to test it, Edge actually nudged me to the Settings menu and then to an option called News Rating (this enables NewsGuard) with a small blue dot. The dot wasn’t an alarm-red notification but would probably be notable enough to pique my interest and point me to the setting, even if I wasn’t writing this story.

For now, NewsGuard’s ratings concentrate on US-based websites, but major sites abroad are included too. TechCrunch received a healthy green check on NewsGuard, indicating that we maintain “basic standards of accuracy and accountability.” Clicking the green badge next to the address bar presented an option to review TechCrunch’s full “nutrition label” — a rundown of pertinent information like our ownership and financing, content and credibility. The information was pretty nuanced, right down to the insight that “opinion pieces are not always clearly labeled” which is fair enough. It even included an example of a corrected story and how we handled it. As The Guardian noted, the Daily Mail didn’t fare quite so well.

The editorial deep-dives that influence NewsGuard’s ratings are impressive, though they do exemplify another issue that makes fighting fake news particularly tricky. Even if news sources are evaluated across a matrix of factors, there’s still some degree of subjective assessment necessary to make these decisions. While there are plenty of entities that could be making these calls, how do we reach a consensus on who should be doing it?

NewsGuard is co-led by Gordon Crovitz, former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, and Steven Brill. Like other editorially-minded news experiments, NewsGuard relies on a human team instead of algorithms. The company counts former CIA director General Michael Hayden and The Information founder Jessica Lessin among its advisors.

Edge isn’t a very popular browser, but it still makes an interesting case study in the intractable war against low quality information online. It also illustrates the central Catch 22 of the fake news era: The users who need a fake news detector the most are the least likely to use one. Microsoft’s Edge experiment with NewsGuard isn’t a solution to that issue, but baking some kind of news verification tool right into the browser does feel like a step in a compelling direction.

After spending eight months in an immigration facility in the United States, Abimael Hernandez made the tough decision to return to Mexico.

He had spent 14 years in Florida and was leaving behind his wife and three children to return to Mexico so that he could go through the process of returning to the United States legally.

Hernandez didn’t want to live in fear of being pulled over by police, he longed to own a car in his name and he didn’t want his immigration status to be illegal any longer.  

Upon his return to Mexico, Hernandez had worked in construction, call centers and sold CDs before finally being given an opportunity that made a return to the United States less appealing. Hernandez now works as a software developer at Ignite Commerce in Mexico and has integrated well into the country that he at first struggled to identify as home.

Hernandez’s struggle to adjust and adapt to life in a new country mirrors that of other migrants who are returning to Mexico. And ongoing U.S. government attempts to put an end to the DACA program instituted under President Barack Obama, an initiative which protected as many as 800,000 unauthorized migrants that had come to the United States as children,are pushing many others along the same path.

For the people facing an increasingly hostile environment for migrants who choose — or are forced — to return to Latin America, little support awaits.

What tends to lie in store for these deportees and returnees in Mexico is usually low paying service employment. For those with an undocumented status especially, no collateral in Mexico leads to problems in accessing finances, whilst having spent the majority of their lives in the United States, barriers in the Spanish language mean some returnees fail to be accepted into the Mexican education system. 

Though there are some government initiatives aimed at supporting deportees by providing shelter and food, this usually bilingual cohort is prone to unemployment, as well as the mental struggle assigned to the frustrations of reintegrating into a country that many can’t identify with.

It is the hardship of reintegration that inspired the foundation of Hola Code, the only Mexican startup of its kind that currently runs in the country. Founded by CEO Marcela Torres just last year, Hola Code is coined as hackers without borders and is a startup that offers a coding boot camp for migrants, ensuring that this young generation, new to Mexico, does not slip under the radar.

Geared at supporting the integration of deportees, the startup is prepping Mexicans to enter into a high-demand sector through an intensive five-month software development training programme that gives the students qualification, even though many have started from scratch.

‘‘We don’t know of any social enterprises or even regular startups that are actually tackling migration in Mexico,’’ Torres recently told TechCrunch. Although migration and deportations continue to make headlines, it appears that Hola Code might be the only Mexican startup trying to do anything about it.

Backed by San Francisco-based Hack Reactor, the Mexican organization costs nothing until graduates have secured a full-time job, and pays their students a monthly stipend without any bureaucratic red tape.

Collectively venturing into Mexican society with peers in a similar position, most Hola Code students also don’t plan to return to the United States and want to use their skill set in the ever-growing Mexican tech ecosystems. For former student Hernandez, he remains grateful for the support network that Hola Code became for him.

‘‘If Mexico had more opportunities like Hola Code I think returnees would definitely think about not going back to the United States and other countries,’’ he said.

The question now remains as to how international policies will continue to affect Latin American families in the future.

‘‘You create the program in the hopes that one day that you will run out of work,’’ CEO and co-founder Marcela Torres ambitiously explained.

MISSION, TX – JUNE 12: A Central American immigrant stands at the U.S.-Mexico border fence after crossing into Texas on June 12, 2018 near Mission, Texas. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is executing the Trump administration’s zero tolerance policy towards undocumented immigrants. U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions also said that domestic and gang violence in immigrants’ country of origin would no longer qualify them for political-asylum status. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

The bittersweet reality is that Hola Code has, in fact, blossomed within the past year with now over 400 monthly applications from Mexicans and also Central American migrants that are seeking refuge in the country. Although the organisation celebrates the achievements of their alumni, who tend to quickly ascend into well-paid tech jobs across Mexico, the coding boot camp is never short of work and is now looking to open an office in Tijuana to be closer to the border.

The journey for the startup’s female founder, one of a small number of women in Mexican tech leadership, has also not been an easy feat.

‘‘It’s very difficult for a woman that has designed a business plan and has ideas to be taken seriously,’’ Torres explains. ‘’It took me a long time to find the original investors that would believe in my idea and in my capacity, as well, to run the organization because this is the first startup that I have executed.’’

The cultural burdens that still exist in Mexico is a reality that deters many women from entering into the entrepreneurial scene within the country. From finding investors to promoting an idea, it is the issue of being taken seriously which is most effective at stalling Mexico’s female entrepreneurs.

‘‘I think that it’s important for younger women to start seeing us out there trying to take risks and thinking that they can do it as well. Even if they’re not successful, that it’s something that is available and achievable for them.’’

Confronted by her own hurdles in becoming the tech leader of Hola Code today, however, her organization does much more than just in-depth coding. From encouraging young Mexican women to leap into business and tech, to helping each student find a job, Torres speaks of the hope, security, and routine that every Hola Coder gathers as they become immersed in Mexican life through this community.

‘‘Helping them navigate the expectations of  how to start a career in tech is one of the things that we work on and therefore it means that they develop the right skill set, and once they finish the program, to be able to successfully jump into big areas such as banking.’’

MCALLEN, TX – JUNE 12: Central American asylum seekers wait for transport while being detained by U.S. Border Patrol agents near the U.S.-Mexico border on June 12, 2018 in McAllen, Texas. The group of women and children had rafted across the Rio Grande from Mexico and were detained before being sent to a processing center for possible separation. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is executing the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy towards undocumented immigrants. U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions also said that domestic and gang violence in immigrants’ country of origin would no longer qualify them for political asylum status. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

Former student Miriam Alvarez is now a software engineer for SegundaMano. Growing up in the United States, Mexican Universities did not accept her US documents and she too began working in a call centre before hearing about the project, applying just days before the application deadline. ‘‘It’s ok to not know everything, but you should always be open to trying new things and learning something new,’’ Alvarez said, speaking of the broader messages that Hola Code delivers.

The overwhelming lessons that all Hola Code’s alumni praise is how the boot camp delivers more than just coding, but also important life skills that allow for the transition to Mexico to be easier. Through reasoning and problem solving, many are grateful for the structure and direction that Hola Code provides Mexicans new to the country.

Though many of their students had joined Hola Code feeling ‘American,’ the values that the group provides adds to the larger picture of Mexico’s growing tech scenes.

‘‘The biggest challenge for the tech sector in the country is access to human capital and the second one is retaining the talent.’’  By fine tuning the country’s coding talent pools with bicultural young developers that speak English, Spanish and also JavaScript, the organisation contributes to growing tech hubs such as Tijuana, Guadalajara and Mexico City which are increasingly gaining global attention.

Hola Code is one of just a few life-changing organisations filling the gap in an immigration story that is seldom covered by the media.

Providing social mobility to people that have been forced to return through education, employment and exposure to tech pioneers, Hola Code’s alumni are spreading the message of integration through education far and wide across the globe.

As long as the fragility of migration continues to be tested, however,  Torres and her team have work to do in their mission to produce Mexico’s next pioneering coding generation.

Oracle says the racial discrimination lawsuit filed by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs is “meritless.” This comes after Oracle declined yesterday to comment on the OFCCP’s filing that alleges Oracle withheld $400 million in wages from underrepresented employees.

“This meritless lawsuit is based on false allegations and a seriously flawed process within the OFCCP that relies on cherry picked statistics rather than reality,” Oracle EVP and General Counsel Dorian Daley said in a statement to TechCrunch. “We fiercely disagree with the spurious claims and will continue in the process to prove them false. We are in compliance with our regulatory obligations, committed to equality, and proud of our employees.”

In a filing yesterday, the OFCCP alleged Oracle withheld $400 million in wages from racially underrepresented workers (black, Latinx and Asian) as well as women. The department argues that Oracle’s “stark patterns of discrimination” started back in 2013 and continues into the present day. More specifically, the OFCCP alleges Oracle discriminated against black, Asian and female employees. This has all ultimately resulted in the collective loss of more than $400 million for this group of employees, the suit alleges.

The Verizon division formerly known as Oath is laying off 7 percent of its workforce, which amounts to roughly 800 employees.

Oath was created after Verizon acquired AOL, followed by Yahoo, bringing them together two years ago as a combined digital media entity with a new name. However, it seems that the organization hasn’t performed as well as Verizon executives had hoped, with layoffs, the departure of AOL CEO Tim Armstrong and Verizon’s recent $4.6 billion writedown on the media business — it announced a “voluntary redundancy” program, a.k.a. buyouts, at the same time.

Plus, Verizon decided to retire the Oath brand at the end of last year. (TechCrunch was part of AOL, then Oath, and is now part of Verizon Media Group.)

“Our goal is to create the best experiences for our consumers and the best platforms for our customers,” a Verizon spokesperson said in a statement. “Today marks a strategic step toward better execution of our plans for growth and innovation into the future.”

In an email to employees, Verizon Media Group CEO Guru Gowrappan also positions the cuts as part of a broader strategy, with the company focused on three core areas in the first quarter of this year: growing the “member-centric ecosystem,” increasing usage/spending on its B2B products and increasing video supply and distribution.

“I want to be clear that we will continue to scale, launch new products and innovate,” he wrote. “We are an important part of Verizon and the $7+ billion in revenue we generate through our member-centric ecosystem puts us among the top tech/media companies in the world. Now is the time to go on the offensive, go deep on our big priorities and do everything we can to advance the business.”

You can read the full email below.

Team –

Last quarter, our leadership team worked to create the strategy that will propel Verizon Media. We honestly assessed where we are and outlined ambitious but achievable goals that poise us for growth. We shared it broadly with you, and together committed to deliver on our OKRs with meticulous planning, collaboration and rigorous execution.

As hard as it may have felt at times, we’ve made some great strides to serve our customers globally – from consolidating ad platforms, to expanding the Microsoft partnership, growing live programming and content offerings for our Supers, and prioritizing and launching 8 new or substantially updated products at Build It 2018.

In Q1, we’ll have 3 priority areas: first, grow our member-centric ecosystem with must-have mobile and video products and stem desktop declines; second, increase usage and spends flowing through B2B platforms; third, expand our video supply and overall distribution through partnerships. As we work to deliver on both short-term objectives to stabilize our business, we are also focused on long-term strategies that will accelerate distribution, growth and innovation as part of Verizon.

This week, we will make changes that will impact around 7% of our global workforce across the organization, as well as certain brands and products. These were difficult decisions, and we will ensure that our colleagues are treated with respect and fairness, and given the support they need. Resources and other career support will be provided to help our team members navigate the transition.

In addition, we’ve completed an exhaustive review to prioritize the programs that are currently in our portfolio – consumer products, ad products, platform features, partnerships and data centers.

While every business unit has to manage their P&L, these decisions are being made to streamline resources and invest in opportunities that will help us grow. You all know by now that I deeply believe in an owner mindset and focus as a key ingredient for success – going deep on fewer, key things that will have the greatest impact on our customers and business, and doing them exceptionally well.

I want to be clear that we will continue to scale, launch new products and innovate. We are an important part of Verizon and the $7+ billion in revenue we generate through our member-centric ecosystem puts us among the top tech/media companies in the world. Now is the time to go on the offensive, go deep on our big priorities and do everything we can to advance the business. We will talk more about this and answer questions Friday at Open House.

Our world continues to evolve at a faster pace, and we need to leap ahead of consumer trends. We are reimagining our future, and building new products that will become invaluable to consumers today and in the years to come. That’s the spirit of our company and the spirit we all embody as its Builders.

Best,
Guru

I wanted to love the new Aibo. Really, I did. But once I aactually spent some time with it, it turned out that it was a $3,000 dog with only a handful of tricks. It seems the days of buying true robot dog companionship are still a long ways away.

A few months after bringing the pup to market, Sony’s announced a few updates that should rekindle some interest. First, there’s a new paint job. Aibo now comes in Choco Edition — a dark brown and bronze edition that makes it look a bit more like a real dog. That version is going to cost the same as its white coated counterpart.

More importantly, Aibo’s finally set to learn a few new tricks. Most notable among them is the addition of a security package that utilizes on-board sensors to keep your home safe. It’s one of the features the company suggested early on, making use of the dog’s face tracking and 3D mapping technology.

In Japan, the deal comes courtesy of a partnership with home security firm, Secom. Like everything else in Aibo land, however, it will cost you — in this case, an additional $13.50 a month for paw patrol. All of this likely isn’t enough to get too many people on board with the robot, given the price point, but at least Sony’s big sticking to its promise of supporting the pup. 

Facebook today announced changes to the way it handles the removal of content from Facebook Pages that’s in violation of the social network’s Community Standards, as well as when the Page has posted items that are rated false by a third-party fact checking service. It says it will also make it harder for those whose Pages have been shut down for violations from returning with new Pages featuring the same, duplicated content by proactively banned other Pages and Groups, in some cases.

To address the first two issues, Facebook says it’s introducing a new tab on Facebook Pages – the “Page Quality” tab – which will inform those who manage the Page which content has been removed for violating standards and what was rated “fake news.”

The section will explain if content was removed for being “hate speech, graphic violence, harassment and bullying, and regulated goods, nudity or sexual activity,” or being “support or praise” of people and events that are not allowed to be on Facebook, the company explained today in a blog post detailing the upcoming changes.

The “people or events” not allowed on Facebook are those associated with real-world harm. This could include people associated with hate groups, terrorist activity, mass or serial murder, human trafficking, or organized crime or violence. Facebook also removes any content that expresses praise or support for those involved in such activities.

The tab will also inform Page managers which content may have been demoted by Facebook algorithms, if not removed entirely. This includes content that has been found to be false news by independent fact-checking organizations. Facebook began taking action against clickbait several years ago, then later began to flag and down-rank fake news, as that essentially became the new clickbait.

But those who distributed fake news headlines weren’t necessarily aware that their content’s distribution was being reduced as a result. This tab will now inform them.

Facebook says it will identify several types of down-ranked news items, including content recently rated “False,” “Mixture” or “False Headline” by third-party fact-checkers.

However, it won’t actually show those items it deemed “clickbait,” or those that it removed for being spam or due to an IP violation.

In other words, the new Page Quality tab isn’t a full window into everything being removed or down-ranked, only those areas that are today of utmost importance to Facebook to get under control.

“We hope this will give people the information they need to police bad behavior from fellow Page managers, better understand our Community Standards, and, let us know if we’ve made an incorrect decision on content they posted,” the company explained in its announcement.

Proactive Bans

Related to this, Facebook says it’s seen an increase in people using their existing Pages to duplicate the content that had been pulled down from Pages that were banned for violating Facebook’s Community Standards.

While it’s had policies that prohibited people from creating new Pages (or groups, events, accounts, etc.) for this purpose, it hadn’t yet been policing the use of existing Pages – and that, effectively, became a loophole for the violators to abuse.

Now, Facebook says when it removes a Page or Group for policy violations, it may also remove other Pages and Groups – even if the other Pages and Groups haven’t “met the threshold to be unpublished on its own.”

In other words, if Facebook believes the other Pages and Groups will be used as the new home for the content found to be in violation, it will proactively remove them…before they actually do so. (That’s likely to cause some debate.)

Facebook says it will make this determination based on a broad range of factors – like if the other Pages or Groups have the same admins or a use similar name, for example.

The new “Page Quality” tab will launch tomorrow, while the proactive removals will begin in the weeks ahead.

News is exhausting. Mexican murders are sky-high. Ebola is ravaging the eastern Congo. China is erasing an entire culture of Islam from its Western hinterlands. That news — negative and intense though it is — can easily occlude the many positive, longer term stories that are fundamental drivers of the world. Africa is reaching new levels of prosperity. Violence around the world is in retreat. Famine is down, a lot.

These trends are present, but getting high-quality data around them and correctly interpreting them can be challenging. How do you piece all these disparate threads together and start to make sense of the whole?

Enter Our World in Data. The non-profit startup, which started as a research project at Oxford University, builds datasets on human progress around the world and then uses visualizations and deep, clear explanations to allow people to grok exactly what’s happening as well as how to think about it.

Our World in Data is backed by YC in its current batch, and is one of three non-profits this cycle (we profiled another one of them, Upsolve, which is helping consumers file for bankruptcy). The portal has been receiving about a million users per month and two citations a day in major newspapers, and the team is hoping to scale those metrics up as part of the YC program.

Max Roser, the founder and program director, officially organized the firm as a non-profit a few weeks ago, but has been working on it with a team of researchers over many years. “It began kind of slowly as a research project in around 2012,” he said. It was “a fairly small-scale project in the evenings and weekends in the beginning and got bigger and bigger over time.”

He points out that the progress we have seen in human society has happened at a blistering fast rate. “Even in today’s richest and happiest places, the changes have happened very recently. […] Just two hundred years ago, a huge majority of the population lived in extreme poverty.”

Roser sees an opportunity to revolutionize how academic research is disseminated with Our World in Data. “Our mission is to get research out of institutions,” he explained. “We come from this millennium-old institution with University of Oxford … and they have published research in exactly the same way since the invention of the printing press. […] In the communication of research, we haven’t adopted the technologies available with the internet at all … and we are trying to bring these two worlds together.”

Hannah Ritchie, a researcher with the project who holds a PhD in GeoSciences from the University of Edinburgh, said that “our top priority is reaching as many people as we can” and she sees the project becoming the “really credible go-to reference.”

Our World in Data may not be a conventional startup, but it is hitting a thesis close to home here. Arman and I have been doing a dive into the world of societal resilience startups – companies that are trying to protect humanity from itself by building self-healing systems, improving the climate, making our traffic more on time, improving the speed of construction and much, much more. But before we can do all that, we first need to understand what’s even going on with our world in the first place, and that is where Roser, Ritchie and the rest of their research team here can be hugely helpful.

Share your feedback on your startup’s attorney

We want to help startup founders work with attorneys who are right for them. My colleague Eric Eldon wrote a piece today describing our methodology and a little bit more of why we are doing this project.

We have had hundreds of founders give us their recommendations. If you have worked with a great early-stage startup attorney that you recommend, let us know using this short Google Forms survey and also spread the word. We will share the results and more in the coming weeks.

Stray Thoughts (aka, what I am reading)

Short summaries and analysis of important news stories

Startup socialism with capitalist characteristics

Robert P. Baird does a great job describing the rise of Jacobin, the socialist magazine startup that has become a linchpin in leftist politics. It’s a story of a college founder who hustled his way to financial independence and growth. From the article:

Sunkara, for his part, told me that there’s no contradiction between his entrepreneurial enthusiasm and his socialist ideals. “The market logic of creating a publication,” he says—attracting readers, getting them to subscribe, finding competitive advantages that will keep them on the rolls—“is politically pure.”

Is Surveillance Capitalism a thing?

Nicholas Carr wrote a deep dive review for the LA Review of Books of Shoshana Zuboff’s hot new book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.” There has been a ton of discussion triggered here, particularly in light of France’s record $57 million fine against Google over GDPR violations earlier this week, and Carr wrote what is probably the best review and context piece available. Still, the question to me remains the same: does anyone actually care that their devices monitor them? Judging by device and services sales, I think much less than privacy advocates appreciate.

Why are investors still investing in Apple’s supply chain?

Bloomberg has an interesting conundrum to discuss: why are investors still standing behind companies like Han’s Laser Technology Industry Group Co., which have seen huge valuation losses over the slowdown in iPhone sales? It’s a bit of a complicated story, but basically investors still believe that high-end manufacturing will drive excess profits even in a chaotic, slower growing, and competitive world. An interesting discussion worth reading.

What’s next & obsessions

• I have a lot of short books on my desk to read.
• Arman is reading Never Lost Again by Bill Kilday, a history of mapping at Google and beyond.
• Arman and I are interested in societal resilience startups that are targeting areas like water security, housing, infrastructure, climate change, disaster response, etc. Reach out if you have ideas or companies here <danny@techcrunch.com>

The rise and fall of Theranos, the blood-testing company whose technology never worked despite its promises otherwise, has already been covered extensively. Most notably, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who broke open the story of Theranos’s secrets and lies, John Carreyrou, went on to author a best-selling book about the saga in Bad Blood.

Still, with Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes continuing to face criminal charges that she knowingly defrauded investors, along with Theranos’s former president and COO (and Holmes’s longtime lover) Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, the company and the pair’s trajectory remain a point of fascination for many.

A new documentary produced by ABC’s “Nightline” airing tonight — along with a six-part podcast series whose first episode is being released today (the others will be pushed out every Wednesday through February’s end)  — will undoubtedly stoke even more questions about how investors and customers like Walgreens bought the act in the first place.

So we gathered after speaking yesterday with Rebecca Jarvis, ABC News’s chief business, technology, and economics correspondent, who led a three-year investigation into Theranos and Holmes, a Stanford drop-out who would go on to win acclaim as the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world before everything, very slowly, crashed down around her.

Some outtakes from our chat with Jarvis follow, edited lightly for length.

TC: You’ve been covering this story for years. Given all that you’ve seen in the depositions that “Nightline” plans to air as part of this documentary, and everything you’ve learned in your reporting, who was the worse actor in all of this, Holmes or Balwani? John Carreyrou certainly painted him as a kind of Svengali figure.

RJ:  Most of what we’ve seen publicly to this point have been official statements, or statements made in very nurturing environments, or interviews don’t don’t explicitly look at the technology itself. When we got access to these depositions — and it’s thundreds of hours of footage — we couldn’t believe our eyes, watching Elizabeth Holmes’s deposition. It was just remarkable, hearing her having to answer to questions in a way that she’d never had to previously.

As for [the way Holmes and Balwani operated], Tyler Schultz [a former employee who later became a whistleblower] has said, for example, that he was flagging things that were wrong to Elizabeth, and after he would flag a concern, she would react with a non-response. It was Sunny who became known as the enforcer, telling Tyler to watch himself and not to continue to raise these issues.

TC: Are they open about their romantic relationship in the footage being aired?

RJ: Yes. We’ve never heard of them speak of it before, and viewers will see them talking about this relationship.

TC: What was something in the many depositions you pored over that really took your breath away?

RJ: One of the things that we heard over and over again, talking with various parties, including customers of Theranos, is that Elizabeth Holmes had told them that these Theranos-manufactured devices had been deployed in hospital rooms, emergency rooms and medevac helicopters among other places, and she’s asked if this is accurate, and in every single case, the answer is no.

Naturally, too, this whole thing was predicated on being able to run tests on a few drops of blood, and for the first time, you see Elizabeth having to answer questions about what the devices were really capable of. A lot of what comes up is how much of this was aspiration versus reality, and the great divide between those two things.