Valar Ventures, one of the three venture funds co-founded by Peter Thiel, has filed paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to raise $350 million across two new funds. The PayPal co-founder and billionaire investor in Facebook and SpaceX is also behind Founders Fund and Mithril Capital Management.
Valar, a New York-based firm, plans to raise $150 million for its fifth flagship venture fund and an additional $200 million for its first opportunity fund, presumably for follow-on investments in its most high-growth investments, according to the documents.
Led by general partners Andrew McCormack and James Fitzgerald, Valar tends to invest in financial services companies. Its portfolio includes fintech startups N26, which recently raised a $300 million round at a $2.6 billion valuation, banking application Even and peer-to-peer currency exchange TransferWise.
Valar closed its debut fund on $32 million in 2014 and has since set its sights on larger pools of capital. Valar IV, the firm’s largest fund yet, brought in $133.4 million in 2018. Founders Fund, Thiel’s San Francisco venture firm, closed on more than $1 billion for its last effort, and Mithril, his growth equity firm, secured more than $800 million for its sophomore fund in 2017.
Brud, the company behind the virtual celebrity Lil Miquela, is now worth at least $125 million thanks to a new round of financing the company is currently closing. Meanwhile, new venture-backed companies like the superstealthy Shadows, SuperPlastic, and Toonstar are all developing virtual characters that will launch via social media channels like Snap and Instagram, or on their own platforms.
It’s all an effort to test whether audiences are ready to embrace even more virtual avatars — including ones that don’t try to straddle the uncanny valley quite as blatantly as Miquela and her crew.
The investors backing these companies say it’s the rise of a new kind of studio system — one that’s independent of the personalities and scandals which have defined a generation of Vine, YouTube, and Instagram stars and it’s attracting serious venture dollars.
“The way I look at it… a lot of it is going to be like any kind of content studio,” says Peter Rojas, a partner at the New York investment firm, Betaworks Ventures. “In 2019 and 2020 we’re going to see a lot of these… we’re going to see a lot of people putting out a lot of stuff.”
Los Angeles-based Brud is by far the most established of this new breed in the U.S. (at least in terms of the amount of money it has raised). Last year the company scored at least $6 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, BoxGroup, and other, undisclosed, investors.
And the company has done it again, and is in the process of closing on somewhere between $20 million and $30 million at a pre-money valuation of at least $125 million (pre-money) led by Spark Capital, according to people with knowledge of the round. Miquela “herself” teased that the “she” had something to “share” with her roughly 1.5 million followers. Brud declined to comment.
If Miquela is arguably the most successful U.S. version of this new breed of entertainer, the collective behind the account is far from the only one.
Experiments in avastardom have been percolating in popular culture since at least the rise of the Gorillaz — the Damon Albarn assembled musical supergroup that released their first EP “Tomorrow Comes Today” in late 2000. Or, depending on your definition, perhaps as early as Space Ghost Coast to Coast, the mid-90s Cartoon Network series featuring an animated superhero interviewing real celebrities.
And that success spawned imitators like Hatsune Miku who’ve capture the imagination and hearts of audiences globally. In November, a Japanese fan named Akihiko Kondo spent $18,000 to wed the avatar. And he’s not alone. Gatebox, the company that manufactures hardware to display holograms of various anime characters in homes, has issued at least 3,700 marriage licenses to fans like Kondo.
At Betaworks, the firm is exploring the popularity of these virtual characters — and the role that artificial intelligence and new content creation technologies will play in reshaping entertainment and social media platforms. The company’s Synthetic Camp, which launches in mid-February, is around what Rojas calls “synthetic reality” including the rise of avatar-driven media like Miquela.
“We’re looking more broadly at the issues around manipulated or faked content and how do you address that,” says Rojas. “Algorithmically generated content and how things like generative adversarial networks are being used to create and synthesize new photo and video content.”
For Rojas, the development of powerful new tools which enable the creation of new characters in minutes that, in the past, would have taken humans hundreds of thousands of hours, can unlock all sorts of possibilities for entertainment.
“The celebrity part comes into play where we’re now at a point where you can create these photorealistic avatars and put them into videos and have them wearing clothes without having to spend millions of dollars on CGI,” he says.
Betaworks is betting on the content studio aspect through companies like SuperPlastic, a new startup launched by Paul Budnitz the founder of the alternative social network, ello and Budnitz Bicycles. But the company also believes there are opportunities in backing the content creation toolkits that can power this new kind of media star, like its investment in the media creation tool, Facemoji.
“There’s no reason why you won’t see it across the board. Our appetite for fresh content and this stuff is kind of limitless,” says Rojas. “And I don’t see it as zero sum. YouTube didn’t kill television, it just became Netflix… Things can move in two different directions at the same time. More high brow and more complex and higher level and also more democratized and lowbrow and dumb. There’ll be avatar tools and apps and games and then we’ll see stuff that’s top of the pyramid stuff like Lil Miquela and Shudu.”
At Toonstar, co-founders John Attanasio and Luisa Huang went from developing a platform to developing a studio. The two met at the Digital Media Group within Warner Brothers and were tasked with trying to experiment with technologies at the intersection of media generation and distribution.
“Daily, snackable and interactive are the three things that you need to be successful in the world,” says Attanasio. “We saw the impact that the rise of mobile was having on linear. We sat through a lot of meetings where you looked at audience trends and you saw that going in the wrong direction in the wrong color.”
So the two founders began contemplating what a new, low-cost, high-touch media network might look like. “We looked at mobile and we saw the massive animation gap. Animation takes a long time and it’s expensive, the average season can cost $3 million to $5 million and bringing a new series to life can take three to four years.”
For Attanasio and Huang, those timelines were too slow to take advantage of the mobile content revolution. So the two built a platform which initially focused on letting user generated content flourish — a kind of YouTube for animated, avatar-driven storytelling that could be distributed on any social media platform or on Toonstar’s own site and app.
Since that launch, the company has refined its business model to become more of a traditional animation studio. “We do daily pop culture cartoons.. and partner with creators and influencers,” says Attanasio. “Our whole thing is driven by proprietary tech that allows us to do things really fast and at low cost… 50 times faster and 90% cheaper than typical animation.”
Attanasio also realized the importance of creative talent. “We had no shortage of content but it was shitty content,” Attanasio says. “That’s when you realize… what we’re doing… there’s three ingredients.. One is tech, one is process and the third is creative… if you have tech and process and you take away creative what you have is an ocean of shit.”
Now, they’re also experimenting with creating their own animated influencer. Leveraging the popularity of the Musical.ly app (now rebranded under its new owner, TikTok), Toonstar launched Poppy.tv.
“We launched a channel called poppy tv.. It was a blue chicken [and] she became musically famous,” Attanasio said. “Within three months Poppy had 300,000 followers and had an avid fanbase for Poppy and her cast of characters.”
The content was episodic and ranged from 15 seconds to 30 seconds — and it was based on cartoon music videos. “That validated the thesis of can you create a cartoon influencer and can you have a broad audience be super engaged… and the answer was ‘Yes,'” said Attanasio.
Then, taking a page from the early Cartoon Network playbook, Attanasio and Huang made the show interactive in a callback to the “Space Ghost” phenomenon. “We started doing cartoon livestreams and the founders of Musical.ly asked us to do a weekly show that they would feature,” Attanasio says. “It was Poppy the Blue Chicken and we would broadcast for an hour every week. Famous musers on musically come in with a facetime … And there were games and all of it was live, in real time.”
It’s hard to overstate the importance of working with virtual characters, according to Attanasio. “We understand how much money you can make from the IP. When we’re working with creators or influencers they understand that you have this shelf life as an influencer, but as IP, that can go on in perpetuity. There is something to be said about building a character. We’re all children of Saturday morning cartoons.”
And Toonstar is building an audience. Its show, the Danogs, has 4.5 million weekly viewers, and the company recently launched Black Santa — a show developed in partnership with the former NBA All-Star and tech investor, Baron Davis. The NBA star and studio analyst also committed capital to Toonstar’s recent seed funding; a round led by Founders Fund partner, Cyan Banister. In all, Toonstar said it has about 45 million weekly viewers for all of its shows.
Those kinds of numbers are music to the ears, fo Dylan Flinn, a former agent at the Los Angeles powerhouse Creative Artists Agency, who left to start his own company.
Flinn has partnered with the producers of BoJack Horseman on a new venture called Shadows, which has already launched two virtual avatars into the wild.
Flinn got exposure to the virtual media world while at Rothenberg Ventures, the now defunct fund that invested in virtual reality and augmented reality. “I still had that lens of looking at innovation and virtual worlds and I’ve always been fascinated by what social media is doing.”
For Flinn, the virtual element of what’s being created is vitally important to the success of these ventures. “We’re not trying to create humans,” he says. “We look up to the Mickey Mouse’s and Looney Tunes and the Bugs Bunnies of the world. When I look at these 3D, [computer generated] human-based characters it’s so close the uncanny valley. We want to develop characters and we want to tell fictional stories rooted in reality.”
Like Attanasio at Toonstar, Flinn sees the speed at which digital content can be created and brought to market as a critical component of its success. “When I was at CAA you see how much money is wasted on development every year. This was an approach which was like, ‘What if you can develop in public and the best content can win?'” Flinn says.
Shadows already has two virtual avatars out in the wild, but he declined to identify which ones they were. Ultimately, he said, the goal is to have 20 characters a year, because once a couple of characters come to market and get traction with an audience, new characters can be introduced to old ones and the universe becomes a discovery engine of its own. That’s a strategy that Miquela and her crew are also employing, with varying degrees of success.
Ultimately, these types of entertainments aren’t going to go away — at least according to the investors and entrepreneurs who are creating the companies that are building them.
“People are totally fine with things that are artificial,” says Rojas. “People totally connect with Mario from Super Mario Bros. We always tell stories and have characters in whatever medium are available to us [like] Instagram and Snapchat and YouTube and Twitter. Thirty to forty years ago it was television and radio and movies. People are going to express themselves and avatars end up being a form expression.”
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In the coming weeks, Twitter’s going to launch a new beta program, where a select group of users will get access to new features, by way of a standalone app, and a way discuss new features with others. Twitter will then use data to decide how and if to turn those tests into full-blown product features for everyone else.
TechCrunch sat down with Sara Haider, Twitter’s director of product management, to take a closer look at the new app.
Apple said over the weekend that its smart speaker will be available in Mainland China and Hong Kong starting January 18, adding to a list of countries where it has entered including the US, UK, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Mexico and Spain.
In some cases, clicking on a simple link would have been enough for Paulos Yibelo, a well-known and respected bug hunter, to take over the accounts of anyone using five large hosting providers — Bluehost, DreamHost, Hostgator, OVH and iPage.
Wiliot makes semiconductors that harness ambient nanowatts of electromagnetic energy from cellular, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth networks to work without batteries or other traditional wired power sources. (The startup has yet to manufacture or commercialize its chips, but TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden has seen a demo.)
Samsung is currently trying to recover its lead in India, the world’s second-largest smartphone market behind China, after losing it to Xiaomi at the end of 2017.
The technology will initially target augmented reality apps, but also can be used to power applications in mobility, logistics and robotics. More broadly, Scape wants to enable any machine equipped with a camera to understand its surroundings.
Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com is announcing a new project called Newspack. While details are still thin, the company wants to help news organizations with an all-in-one solution to publish and monetize your content.
WordPress, the open-source project that lets you create websites on WordPress.com, is already a solid content management system (we use it at TechCrunch). But it becomes more difficult to use once you want to monetize your content using subscriptions, metered paywalls and user accounts. WordPress doesn’t have a native solution for that.
That’s why Automattic is working on a platform for news organizations — think about it as a version of WordPress specifically designed for news organizations. The company wants to help local news organizations more specifically as those media companies don’t necessarily have a ton of development resources.
Media organizations can already apply to work with Automattic on this new platform. The service will be free during the development phase, and you can expect to pay $1,000 to $2,000 per month after that.
Automattic, Spirited Media and News Revenue Hub have raised $2.4 million for this project. Google is spending $1.2 million through the Google News Initiative. The Lenfest Institute for Journalism, blockchain organization ConsenSys, Civil Media and The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation are also funding the project.
It’s an interesting move as Medium has been trying to monetize online content for a while with mixed results. Bigger players won’t necessarily move to Newspack. But many smaller websites covering a single topic or a small area could use multiple options on this front.
Alibaba’s long-term ambition to grow its business in the US is taking another step forward. To increase sales to US small businesses, the company has partnered with Kabbage, the Softbank-backed unicorn that provides loans to SMBs using big data and machine learning to determine eligibility faster than a traditional bank lender, to provide up to $150,000 of financing at the point of sale on Alibaba.com as part of a new program called Pay Later.
The move comes on the heels of an interesting, if slightly older, piece of news: Alibaba quietly made an acquisition in the US last year to further its interests in the country as it continues to face-off with homegrown competition, with Amazon leading the charge.
In September 2018, with very little fanfare, Alibaba acquired a startup called OpenSky for an undisclosed amount to build out its business in North America.
Alibaba had originally taken a stake in OpenSky in 2015 as a part of a deal it struck for the startup to take over several sites it had tried to establish in the US, without much success.
Now, OpenSky runs Alibaba’s B2B business in North America (branded as Alibaba B2B and headed up by John Caplan, who had been the founder of OpenSky), and it is also the company’s main consumer face in the US, under the OpenSky brand, operating as a marketplace for various third-party merchants, and controlling a selection of the brands that Alibaba had offloaded back in 2015.
“Quietly” is the operative word with this acquisition. It seems the only announcement of the M&A was a post on LinkedIn, with the only media coverage being an edited version of the release on a small publishing blog. Meanwhile, there appears to be no reference whatsoever on OpenSky.com indicating Alibaba’s ownership of it.
While Alibaba is the undisputed king of commerce in Asia, its decision to work with Kabbage for financing in the US — despite loans giant Ant Financial being an affiliate of Alibaba’s — underscores the giant’s current softly, softly approach in North America in the wake of some setbacks.
After failing to create much of a stir — and then offloading — its group of US consumer-focused sites, in 2017 company made a big effort, led by CEO Jack Ma, to woo US businesses to do more on Alibaba, starting with a big event in Detroit and a promise to President Trump that doing business on his site would lead to 1 million new jobs.
Now Ma says that won’t be possible because of the ongoing trade war between the US and China. Meanwhile, its affiliate Alipay’s attempted acquisition of Dallas-based MoneyGram for $1.2 billion got blocked by the US government, citing national security concerns. And its ambitions to go head to head with AWS by way of Alibaba Cloud have also been scaled back.
But while the US has remained an elusive market, it’s nonetheless a huge one where Alibaba wants to be. Considering both the Kabbage deal and the OpenSky acquisition, it seems that Alibaba has decided to take a less direct approach to growth in the US, tapping US-built businesses to do it.
For Alibaba, offering a way to finance purchases is an essential component of courting small and medium businesses, who may not always have a large amount of working capital at hand to reinvest in equipment and other business services. The high $150,000 limit is a signal that this is not about buying small office supplies but making larger purchasing commitments.
“We recognized an opportunity to give our customers a convenient financing solution that allows them to improve their cash flow at competitive rates, so they can have the cash they need to grow their businesses,” said Caplan in a statement. “We are delighted to be partnering with Kabbage to empower our SMB customers to source at greater volumes, or improve their cash flow to invest in other areas of their businesses.”
On the part of Kabbage, appearing as a option at the point of sale is an obvious next step for a loans company, as it helps Kabbage connect directly with businesses looking access to cash (one of the key reasons for loans being to buy goods for a business to run). The loans are constructed to be repaid over six months with interest rates starting at 1.25 percent.
Point of sale financing services like Pay Later aim to compete against other options that SMBs have when they are making larger purchases. In the case of Alibaba, other options include paying by credit cards, money transfers, and e-checking. Pay Later will be the only one of these that is free to use (in that Alibaba itself won’t charge a transaction fee) after March of this year. It’s also potentially one of the faster options for completing the transaction if you don’t have immediate access to cash.
“When you are at the point of sale, you’re not going to stick around 48 hours waiting for a loan approval,” said Kabbage CEO and co-founder Rob Frohwein about the service.
Frohwein added that it had been working on a pilot of the service since the middle of last year and that Kabbage is Alibaba’s only partner for the service.
We asked and he confirmed Alibaba has not invested in Kabbage as part of the deal — both have a common investor in the form of Softbank — and that they are not disclosing any financial terms of the arrangement. He also confirmed that Kabbage is likely to seek further equity funding in the near future.
If you’re down in ///joins.slides.predict you may want to visit ///history.writing.closets or, if you’ve got a little money to spend, try the Bananas Foster at ///cattle.excuse.luggage. Either way, don’t forget to stop by ///plotting.nest.reshape before you fly out.
If things go what3words way, that’s how you’ll be sending out addresses in the future. Founded by musician Chris Sheldrick and Cambridge mathematician Mohan Ganesalingam, the company has cut the world into three meter boxes that are identified by three words. Totonno’s Pizza in Brooklyn is at ///cats.lots.dame while the White House is at ///kicks.mirror.tops. Because there are only three words, you can easily find spots that have no addresses and without using cumbersome latitude and longitude coordinates.
The team created this system after finding that travelers found it almost impossible to find some out-of-the-way places. Tokyo, for example, is notoriously difficult to traverse via address while other situations – renting a Yurt in Alaska, for example – require constantly updated addresses that do not lend themselves to GPS coordinates. Instead, you can tell your driver to take you to ///else.impulse.broom and be done with it.
The team has raised £40 million and is currently working on systems to add their mapping API to industrial and travel partners. You can browse the map here.
“I organized live music events around the world. Often in rural places. HeIfound equipment, musicians and guests got lost. We tried to give coordinates but they were impossible to remember and communicate accurately,” said Sheldrick. “This is the only address solution designed for voice, and the only system using words and not alphanumeric codes.”
Obviously this will take some getting used to. The three words might get mispronounced, leading to some fun problems, but in general it might be good to way to get around the world in a post-modern way. After all, some of the spot names sound like poetry and if you don’t like it you can always just go to ///drills.dandelions.bounds.
Volkswagen will spend $800 million to expand a U.S. factory that will produce the automaker’s next generation of electric vehicles.
The factory in Chattanooga, Tenn. will be the company’s North American base for manufacturing electric vehicles, VW CEO Dr. Herbert Diess said during a presentation at the Detroit Auto Show on Monday. The expansion is expected to create 1,000 jobs at the plant.
VW’s Chattanooga expansion is just a piece of the automaker’s broader plan to move away from diesel in the wake of the emissions cheating scandal that erupted in 2015. Globally, VW Group plans to commit almost $50 billion through 2023 toward the development and production of electric vehicles and digital services. The Volkswagen brand (so not including its Audi or Porsche brands) alone has forecasted selling 150,000 EVs by 2020 worldwide, increasing that number to 1 million by 2025.
The company is also building a European facility in Zwickau, Germany set to begin EV production in 2019 and adding EV-production at facilities in Anting and Foshan, in China, in 2020, and in the German cities of Emden and Hanover by 2022.
The Tennessee factory (along with the other new facilities) will produce EVs using Volkswagen’s modular electric toolkit chassis, or MEB, that was introduced by the company in 2016. The MEB is a flexible modular system—really a matrix of common parts—for producing electric vehicles that VW says it make it more efficient and cost effective.
Electric vehicle production at the Tennessee site will begin in 2022. However, Volkswagen of America says it will offer the first EV based on the MEB platform to customers in 2020.
This EV will be a series-production version of the ID. CROZZ SUV concept that was first shown at the North American International Auto Show last year. This vehicle will have the interior space of a midsize SUV in the footprint of a compact SUV. Volkswagen of America will also offer a multi-purpose EV based off the ID. BUZZ concept.
Volkswagen builds the midsize Atlas SUV and the Passat sedan at the Chattanooga factory, which opened in 2011. A five-seat version of the Atlas, the Atlas Cross Sport, is slated to begin production in Chattanooga later this year.
“Volkswagen is continuing to invest in the US to broaden its manufacturing and R&D footprint,” Diess said. “Projects like the electric car production announced today and changes in our sourcing decisions are in line with the current direction of trade policy including the USMCA.”
Facebook wants to make it easier for users share events and coordinate with friends before the event’s start. The company this morning said it will test a new feature that lets users share those events they’re interested in attending to their Story, then make plans to meet up with friends who also plan to attend.
The test will involve a new option to “Share to Your Story” that appears when you visit an event’s page on Facebook. If shared, friends will see a tappable sticker within your Story that includes the event details, and lets friends respond that they’re also “interested” right from the Story itself.
Friends can also tap on the sticker in the Story to visit the event page.
In addition, the new feature will offer a list of friends who plan to attend the event, so you can easily create a group chat with those users.
While the feature is available to all in the test markets, it seems particularly targeted towards younger users.
It arrives at a time when Facebook has been losing its younger users at an even faster pace than previously expected. According to a 2018 report from eMarketer, for instance, last year was the first time when less than half of U.S. internet users ages 12 to 17 would use Facebook at least once a month.
Instead, Facebook’s monthly user growth was coming from older demographics, the report said. It predicted Facebook would lose 2 million users age 24 and younger during the year.
Those users would be migrating to other social networks, including Instagram and Snapchat.
A separate report from Pew Research Center released in fall 2018 confirmed this trend, saying that 44 percent of younger users (ages 18 to 29) had deleted the Facebook app from their phone over the past year.
Meanwhile, the younger demographic has begun to organize events on Instagram, a report from The Atlantic recently noted.
Teens are creating private Instagram accounts for their events. The account will include the date and handles of the organizers, in some cases. If the account follows you, it’s your invite. If you send a follow request and are approved, you’re also invited.
Of course, Instagram wasn’t designed for events the way that Facebook is, but it can be popular because the party account can remain private and anonymous – helpful for staying under the radar of snooping parents, for instance.
With the Stories feature, the company now hopes that a different way to share and track events on Facebook itself will offer a similar ability to rally friends that appeals to younger users.
To use the new feature, you’ll go the Events page, click “Share” below the date and time of the event, then tap “Share to Story.” Friends tap “interested” to say they may attend, and you’ll be able to see these responses. To kick off the group chat, tap on the circle next to the friends in the list.
The test is rolling out now to users in the U.S., Mexico and Brazil, Facebook says.
This weekend, I finished reading Oliver Morton’s The Planet Remade (thanks to reader Eliot Peper for recommending it). Morton has a multitude of goals with the book, but there were two I think are deeply valuable. First, geoengineering is a plausible approach to solving our climate problems this century, and second, engineering the climate generates tough policy challenges, but also opportunities to make the planet more equitable.
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First and foremost: the book is mind-expanding in the best way possible. Morton confronts an extremely contentious issue with judicious facts and supreme insight gleaned over many years of studying geoengineering. Whether you are a dedicated acolyte of cloud seeding and veils or a committed opponent to any tampering of earth’s environment, he has developed a book that forces us to think about our actions and ultimately what the consequences of those choices are.
Frankly, those choices offer stark consequences. Morton describes the challenge of climate this century:
The world’s population is expected to grow from seven billion today to more or less ten billion by 2100. By that time the number of people enjoying rich-world energy privileges should also reach ten billion. So the challenge is to achieve for an extra eight billion people in the twenty-first century what was achieved for two billion in the twentieth century. Meeting that challenge implies a lot more energy usage.
Morton is a staunch environmentalist and deeply concerned about environmental justice and the inequities of the planet. But he is also a “climate realist” — he understands that our current solutions to climate change are not really solutions at all, since they either lack the scale required to solve the problem, or will continue to exacerbate existing inequities between different people of this planet.
For example, take emissions-free nuclear power, which is brought up as a panacea to our fossil fuel-driven economy. Morton writes:
If the world had the capacity to deliver one of the largest nuclear power plants ever built once a week, week in and week out, it would take 20 years to replace the current stock of coal-fired plants (at present, the world builds about three or four nuclear power plants a year, and retires old ones almost as quickly).
Sure, nuclear power plants are a literal solution, but most definitely not a pragmatic one since the scale required is just not there.
He also spends significant time deconstructing recent climate negotiations, finding that the focus on carbon has been something of a red herring (many other emissions are far worse than carbon and less directly connected to the modern industrial economy). Instead, they have been driven by the alignment of different environmentally-concerned parties:
Carbon dioxide suited scientists because it seemed like a straightforward measure of the problem. It suited greens because it was a pretty good proxy for the industrial society against which their movement was a reaction. The international negotiations that set up the UNFCCC showed that it suited developing countries because it was primarily a developed-country issue; at the time of Rio, the vast majority of all the industrial emissions since the the eighteenth century had come from Europe and America.
Carbon is of course a problem, but it has become a tagline, a brand, a cri de coeur of the international climate movement. Yet the challenges facing the planet are so much deeper than just carbon.
To avoid that narrow focus, Morton argues for a complete reframing of the climate debate toward solutions that can actually repair the climate, and even improve it for diverse populations around the world.
Now, the term “geoengineering” brings with it a bag of Hollywood-induced imagery of nuclear winters and globe-spanning hurricanes. Morton addresses those risks across his chapters, noting that geoengineering can indeed go wrong.
Even so, he convincingly argues that there are geoengineering techniques designed around key climate processes that can be high leverage, reversible, testable, and that have the scale required to actually solve climate challenges in a sustainable way. These processes aren’t speculation — we (mostly) understand the science today, and have pathways toward the technology required to execute a strategy.
The real challenge — as it always is — are humans and their governments. Morton notes that climate change has a huge deleterious impact on nations such as Maldives, but that it can also benefit certain regions by transitioning them from colder to more temperate climates.
That means that any geoengineering solution is going to face the prospect of creating winners and losers. Any international agreement is going to have to contend with those politics, and design mechanisms to ameliorate their effects.
Much as Morton calls for a planet remade, he sees an opportunity for geoengineering to trigger reflection among governments on their own interests:
Much better, rather than treating geoengineering as a technocratic way of avoiding politics, to use it as a way of reinventing politics. Exploring the potential of geoengineering could spur and shape the development of a new way of making planetary decisions. The aim should not be the development of a thermostat alone; it should be the development of a new hand to use it.
Environmentalists may balk at the idea of allowing humans to have their hands on any part of the earth system. But we are here, all seven billion of us, and we already have our brutal hands on the system. The question is whether we can start to use our hands in a far more productive way that can make the earth sustainable for centuries to come. As Morton notes, “The planet has been remade, is being remade, will be remade.” Geoengineering technologies offer solutions, if we can agree in how to use them.
Share your feedback on your startup’s attorney
My colleague Eric Eldon and I are reaching out to startup founders and execs about their experiences with their attorneys. Our goal is to identify the leading lights of the industry and help spark discussions around best practices. If you have an attorney you thought did a fantastic job for your startup, 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
Why Gutenberg can still recognize the book
Craig Mod wrote a compelling piece in Wired on the future of the book, and why today’s books essentially look the same as when the printing press was first invented. Despite the prognosticators expecting books to have moving pictures, interactivity, and dynamic narratives, almost nothing in that direction has actually occurred as readers continue to enjoy the traditional format. Instead, where the real innovation has taken place is on the business side, where new models from crowdfunding to email subscriptions have transformed the economics of book publishing.
Automattic’s Newspack to drive revenue for smaller publishers
While content management systems have been around for decades, almost none of these systems are designed to create revenues for their users out of the box. WordPress doesn’t have any subscription features or advertising networks built-in, which means that sites that want to make money have to spend a lot of dollars just to get setup and started.
So the announcement this morning that Automattic, the owner of WordPress.com, is going to offer a new platform combining content management with revenue called Newspack is both interesting and definitely needed. It’s a proper extension of their existing platform, and a reminder for product managers that the sustainability of their customers is critical for long-term success.
Huawei sales executive arrested in Poland
We have been following Huawei’s travails in the West for some time. One major point of contention is whether the company spies on behalf of the Chinese government. Western governments have argued that it does, but as China has repeatedly noted, they have never provided any proof.
Silicon Valley’s (and much of California’s) gas and electric utility is going bankrupt following massive liability claims against the utility due to its equipment sparking wildfires over the past few years. California may lead the world in innovation, but it seems to always be on the precipice of disaster when it comes to infrastructure.
What’s next & obsessions
I am reading The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein
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.
In 2017, Apple announced the Qi-compatible AirPower Mat, a device that would charge multiple devices at once simply by placing them on the mat.
That product has been seriously delayed due to reported interference and overheating issues, with a whole year going by without hearing much about the availability of the product. In fact, Apple’s total silence on the matter led some to believe it may have been canceled altogether.
Today, however, a new rumor has breathed life back into hopes for an AirPower Mat.
Hong Kong website ChargerLAB tweeted that a credible source in the supply chain said Luxshare Precision (the same manufacturer that builds AirPods and USB-C cables) has started production on the AirPower charging pad.
Breaking: AirPower is finally coming. We just learned from credible source in supply chain that the manufacture Luxshare Precision has already started producing Apple AirPower wireless charging pad. Luxshare Precision is also the maker of Apple AirPods and USB-C cables. pic.twitter.com/UqgWIAh3sx
MacRumors took a look at the tweet and used Google Translate to translate the WeChat screenshot included in the tweet, saying that the conversation is consistent with the information in the tweet.
ChargerLAB went on to tweet that another manufacturer, Pegatron, would start production on January 21st alongside Luxshare Precision. A report from June said that Pegatron would also be involved in manufacturing, so these tweets at least line up with what we’ve already heard.
Respected Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said in October that the AirPower Mat could be released in first quarter 2019.
That said, this is just a rumor being passed along the Twitter grapevine for now.
It arrives at a time when Facebook has been losing its younger users at an even faster pace than previously expected. According to a 2018