Year: 2019

On Friday afternoon Chef CEO Barry Crist and CTO Corey Scobie sat down with TechCrunch to defend their contract with ICE after a firestorm on social media called for them to cut ties with the controversial agency. On Sunday, programmer Seth Vargo, the man who removed his open source components, which contributed to a partial shutdown of Chef’s commercial business for a time last week, responded.

While the Chef executives stated that the company was in fact the owner, Vargo made it clear he owned those pieces and he had every right to remove them from the repository. “Chef (the company) was including a third party software package that I owned. It was on my personal repository on GitHub and personal namespace on RubyGems,” he said. He believes that gave him the right to remove it.

Chef CTO Corey Scobie did not agree. “Part of the challenge was that [Vargo] actually didn’t have authorization to remove those assets. And the assets were not his to begin with. They were actually created under a time when that particular individual [Vargo] was an employee of Chef. And so therefore, the assets were Chef’s assets, and not his assets to remove,” he said.

Vargo says that simply isn’t true and Chef misunderstands the licensing. “No OSI license or employment agreement requires me to continue to maintain code of my personal account(s). They are conflating code ownership (which they can argue they have) over code stewardship,” Vargo told TechCrunch.

As further proof, Vargo added that he has even included detailed instructions in his will on how to deal with the code he owns when he dies. “I want to make it absolutely clear that I didn’t “hack” into Chef or perform any kind of privilege escalation. The code lived in my personal accounts. Had I died on Thursday, the exact same thing would have happened. My will requests all my social media and code accounts be deleted. If I had deleted my GitHub account, the same thing would have happened,” he explained.

Vargo said that Chef actually was in violation of the open source license when they restored those open source pieces without putting his name on it. “Chef actually violated the Apache license by removing my name, which they later restored in response to public pressure,” he said.

Scobie admitted that the company did forget to include Vargo’s name on the code, but added it back as soon as they heard about the problem. “In our haste to restore one of the objects, we inadvertently removed a piece of metadata that identified him as the author. We didn’t do that knowingly. It was absolutely a mistake in the process of trying to restore customers and our and our global customer base service. And as soon as we were notified of it, we reverted that change on this specific object in question,” he said.

Vargo says, as for why he took the open source components down, he was taking a moral stand against the contract, which dates back to the Obama administration. He also explained that he attempted to contact Chef via multiple channels before taking action. “First, I didn’t know about the history of the contract. I found out via a tweet from @shanley and subsequently verified via the USA spending website. I sent a letter and asked Chef publicly via Twitter to respond multiple times, and I was met with silence. I wanted to know how and why code in my personal repositories was being used with ICE. After no reply for 72 hours, I decided to take action,” he said.

Since then, Chef’s CEO Barry Crist has made it clear he was honoring the contract, which Vargo felt further justified his actions. “Contrary to Chef’s CEO’s publicly posted response, I do think it is the responsibility of businesses to evaluate how and for what purposes their software is being used, and to follow their moral compass,” he said.

Vargo has a long career helping build development tools and contributing to open source. He currently works for Google Cloud. Previous positions include HashiCorp and Chef.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was in Boca Chica, Texas over the weekend to oversee key construction activities in the assembly of the company’s newest Starship prototype. Musk will deliver an update on Starship, which will likely recap progress to date and provide a more detailed roadmap of SpaceX’s plans for the future of its next-generation spaceship and launch system.

Musk shared photos of the prototype construction in progress, with the so-called “Mk1” prototype getting its rear moving fins, which are located on the bottom half of the rocket and which work together with fins located on the yet-to-be-installed top half of the spacecraft to control its stability during entry and landing.

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The Starship Mk1 prototype will be the first to represent the final vehicle in its orbital-class configuration, after a ‘Starhopper’ prototype SpaceX produced initially accomplished the goal of testing one of the new Raptor engines and demonstrating low-altitude flight, control and landing capabilities. That stubbier version of Starship is retired after doing both a short and a longer ‘hop’ test flight over the past two months, and now SpaceX will look to test higher altitude and longer duration flights, using multiple Raptor engines, with the Starship Mk1 and Mk2 prototypes currently under development at Boca Chica, and in another SpaceX facility in Florida.

Musk has said that Starship Mk1 already has three Raptor engines installed on the vehicle, and the company has filed documents with the FCC required for it to receive permission for the communications components of its first test launches. We should find out more concrete details as of Saturday, and TechCrunch will have all the info here as it happens.

Cloudflare is ratcheting up its fight against bots with a new “fight mode,” which it says will frustrate and disincentivize bot operators from their malicious activity.

Bots are notorious for scraping websites and abusing developer access to download gobs of user data. All too often bots try to game the system by scraping concert or airline ticket prices to buy in bulk at their lowest price and sell them off for higher. Worse, some imitate real users and brute-force their way into websites with lists of stolen passwords.

Cloudflare gets three billion bot requests each day. Now the company said it’s “decided to fight back.”

Its new “bot fight mode,” which Cloudflare today enabled as a free opt-in feature for all accounts, will detect and serve bots with deliberately computationally intensive challenges. As the bot tries to crunch the impossible puzzle — effectively a small bit of code only visible to the bot — the bot’s server will max out its processing power, churning up cloud resources and driving up costs for the bot operator.

While the company says its efforts will dissuade bot activities in the long run, it recognizes its efforts in the short term will result in cloud servers working overtime, thus consuming more electricity and requiring more cooling — all of which contribute to greater energy consumption.

“We loved the idea of frustrating bots,” John Graham-Cumming, Cloudflare’s chief technology officer, told TechCrunch. But he said the company was “mindful” of how the spike in bot resources — like electricity and cooling — are directly linked to carbon emissions. Some internally had initially objected to the plan if it would result in contributing to the use of natural resources, he said.

The company found a simple solution: to plant trees to offset the carbon emissions from the bot’s activity but also their takedown.

“By making bots do extra work we may be increasing carbon emissions from the [processor] usage and decided to offset through tree planting which will have a long term effect,” said Graham-Cumming. “In the long term our goal is simple: ending malicious bots as a viable practice.”

Each tree planted can absorb about a year’s worth of dual-core computing power. But given trees need time to grow, Cloudflare said its donations will result in the planting of 25 trees for each frustrated bot the company encounters and shuts down.

Planting trees will offset the carbon, Graham-Cumming said, but reducing the number of bad bots on the internet will have the greatest net benefit.

“If we’re successful in doing, that the environmental impact will be substantial and positive given how many internet resources are wasted by malicious bots today,” he said.

Frustrating bots isn’t Cloudflare’s only weapon. When it can, it will ask one of its industry partners to pull the bot offline. If the bot is hosted by a company that serves as a member of the Bandwidth Alliance, a group of some of the largest cloud and web hosts, Cloudflare will hand over the internet address in order to shut the bot down.

Cloudflare isn’t the only player in the anti-bot space. Earlier this year we profiled Kasada, a startup aimed at trolling bots in an effort to deter and disincentivize bot operators from targeting its customers’ websites. Cloudflare said its scale and reach — with coverage of more than 20 million internet properties — will help contribute to the faster demise of the so-called bot economy.

Graham-Cumming said although the feature is opt-in for now, the company is planning to push the feature out by default to its users before the end of the year.

Entrepreneur First (EF), the London-headquartered “talent investor” that recruits and backs individuals pre-team and pre-idea to enable them to found startups, has announced its plans to expand to Canada.

It marks the first time EF has entered North America. Along with London, EF currently operates in Berlin, Paris, Singapore, Hong Kong and Bangalore.

The new Canadian outpost, due to launch in early 2020, will be in Toronto and follows EF’s $115 million first closing of a new fund in February.

At the time of the fund announcement, the talent investor/company builder said it would use the capital to continue scaling globally — specifically, enabling it to back more than 2,200 individuals who join its various programs over the next three years.

This, we were told, should amount to around 300-plus venture-backed companies being created, three times the number of startups EF has helped create since being founded by McKinsey colleagues Matt Clifford and Alice Bentinck all the way back in 2011. Clearly, setting up shop in Toronto is part of the plan to achieve this.

Often – mistakingly – described as an accelerator, EF stands out from the many other startup programmes because of the way it backs individuals “pre-team, pre-idea”. This means that participants typically find their co-founder and found their respective companies on the programme, and that these startup may never have seen the light of day without EF.

It’s a new type of venture model that appears to be working so far — measured both in terms of exits and follow on funding — although question marks remain with regards to how scalable it can be, given that what works in one city and ecosystem with one set of EF staff may not be entirely replicable in another. Or, as one VC put it to me, “there’s only one Matt and Alice”.

With that said, others, such as Greylock partner and co-founder of LinkedIn Reid Hoffman, are convinced EF can scale. Greylock is an investor in EF and Hoffman previously told TechCrunch he can see there being between 20-50 cities “where Entrepreneur First is integral to creating a set of interesting tech companies in those areas.”

Cue a statement from Matt Clifford: “By launching a programme in a third continent, we’re a step closer to achieving our goal of giving the world’s most ambitious individuals the tools to build a company wherever they happen to be… Toronto is one of the fastest growing tech ecosystems in North America in terms of capital and talent, and the city represents a great opportunity for EF to encourage the next generation of ambitious founders.”

Yahoo Mail is getting a mobile update, with new versions of the iOS and Android app launching today.

Many of you probably haven’t tried out Yahoo Mail in years, but Senior Director of Product Management Josh Jacobson noted that it’s one of the top productivity apps in the Apple App Store, where it has been rated 2.1 million times, with an average rating of 4.6 stars.

Jacobson also said that Yahoo Mail is trying to do something very different from the Superhumans of the world, because it’s not one of the many apps that “solve for essentially corporate use cases.” Instead, it’s “completely focused on the consumer email use case, solving the business of your life.”

For example, Jacobson said he joined Yahoo after the company acquired his previous employer, the smart inbox service Xobni. At the time, everyone assumed that when it came to helping users find things in email, “search is the way to go.” (Note: Yahoo, like TechCrunch, is owned by Verizon Media.)

Instead, he said it turns out “people just don’t know or want to have to figure out what to type into that imposing white box to find the thing that they’re looking for.”

So Yahoo Mail now offers a number of different views that should help you find stuff without searching, by focusing on specific types of content from your inbox.

If you’re looking for a photo or a file that someone sent you, there’s a view that just brings up all your attachments. Or if you’re looking for deals, there are three different views that you use— the overall Deals View, the currently iOS-only Location View (which shows you nearby deals on a map) and Grocery View (which shows you grocery discounts based on your loyalty cards).

Director of Product Management Shiv Shankar noted that while the app is sorting and prioritizing these offers, the deals themselves come from your inbox, not from Yahoo.

The new Yahoo Mail also includes a view for checking all your email subscriptions, and a button that allows you to unsubscribe from any of them with a single tap. And there’s an additional view (also iOS-only for now) focusing “active updates,” namely pressing and time-sensitive emails, such as package tracking and travel updates.

The Yahoo Mail team has also refreshed the app’s overall look. That includes adding a navigation bar at the bottom of the screen, which Shankar said will make “single-hand usage” possible again despite the fact that phone screens are getting bigger. The navigation bar is customizable — each user can decide which views to include.

And by the way, if you’re a little leery of sending email from a Yahoo address, Jacobson pointed out that use the Yahoo Mail app to access non-Yahoo email accounts, including Gmail and Outlook.

It’s often said that smaller businesses get the short end of the stick when it comes to technology solutions: they are more high-maintenance than consumers, but not as lucrative as larger enterprises, leaving them caught somewhere in an unsatisfying middle.

But today, two serial entrepreneurs who have already built one big startup catering to SMBs — loans platform Kabbage — are launching another effort to help fill that gap. Drum, billed as a marketplace for businesses both to source sales people and sell their goods and services, has raised $11 million in funding to launch its company and to — yes — drum up new business.

“We’re democratizing access to a physical salesforce by aggregating all the fractionalised or partial demand into a common platform and dispersing that to individuals in the gig economy,” said Rob Frohwein — the CEO of Kabbage who is co-founding Drum with his Kabbage co-founder and COO Kathryn Petralia and Troy Deus — said in an interview with TechCrunch.

The money comes from a group of investors, some of whom have previously backed Frohwein and Petralia. Deus himself is a longtime Kabbage employee whose most recent role there has been head of new venture sandbox Kabbage Labs. (Deus is CEO of the new venture, as Frohwein and Petralia are keeping their day jobs running Kabbage.) Backers include Propel Venture Partners (the investment arm of banking giant BBVA), Felicis Ventures, BlueRun Ventures, American Express Ventures, GroTech Ventures, Wildcat Venture Partners, BoxGroup and SV Angel.

“Drum unlocks a three-sided marketplace connecting any business to the customers they want through an on-demand network of salespeople,” said Harshul Sanghi, Managing Partner at American Express Ventures, in a statement. “This has the potential to dramatically accelerate new product introduction and customer acquisition for businesses. Amex Ventures is pleased to support Drum in its future growth.”

Part of the strength of that list likely comes from the fact that Kabbage has been a strong growth story (pun intended), with the company and demonstrating that it can build products that speak to the needs of SMBs.

Kabbage’s loans platform — which uses AI to quickly determine an applicant’s suitability to get a loan — is now valued at more than $1 billion and is growing at more than 55% at the moment, Frohwein said, and is starting to branch out into a new range of other financial services such as marketing and payments. (Some of Kabbage’s growth has come through partnerships, for example it works closely with the likes of Alibaba in the US to provide financing for businesses on their platform; through white-label services; and through its own direct channels.)

With Drum, Frohwein said that this was about identifying another problem area for businesses that aren’t being met by current services, that SMBs have found to be a challenge in fixing themselves, but that sit outside of the kinds of problems that Kabbage itself is aiming to solve. Specifically, here it’s about pulling together sales teams — called “Drummers” on the platform — to help market their products, either locally or further afield by using digital channels and the sales expertise they bring to the table.

With the rise in internet usage, a lot of businesses have shifted their sales and marketing efforts to digital platforms, essentially managing the work themselves by way of Google AdWords campaigns, through Facebook and so on. One big reason for that has been because hiring sales people — much less having them on the payroll — has just felt like a financial and organizational step too steep.

The idea behind Drum is to provide these businesses with a platform that lets both salespeople who have time or want to work on a project basis connect with businesses that might not want to take the step of full-time hires, but could use the expertise and human power of people to help them with sales. It borrows from the concept of the on-demand, gigging model made popular by many other enterprises, from home services through to transportation and food delivery that have been built around contract-based work in specific fields.

While you can see some of the benefits of viewing the engagement of sales people in the context of an on-demand, gig economy model, it seems that there might also be drawbacks.

I noted to Frohwein that matching a driver to a particular delivery may be less personality-specific than matching a salesperson to a particular sales job. However, it’s a challenge that he believes is not as big as it seems because Drum will be able to size up the capabilities and experience of specific people to make them better matches for the businesses looking to retain their services (using AI-based tools). It’s less like finding a perfect cultural fit, it seems, than finding the people with the right experience and administrative skills.

“Most of the sales that happen won’t be for complex items,” he predicted. “They are products and services like floor refinishing or repairing roof, who are looking for a better way to sell what they do.”

Another potential issue might be the fact that some salespeople might prove to use approaches that are not ultimately the ones you would want to have for your own brand or business. Again, this is a problem Frohwein believes can be addressed. The platform will have ratings on it, and the idea will be that those that are not good at their jobs simply won’t get business in the future. (In that regard, this is not unlike something like Airbnb, which mostly seems to work very well for people, with a few troubling hiccups among the many success stories.)

The next step past connecting businesses and salespeople is the third side of this three-sided marketplace. Drum aims to provide providing a platform for the products and services themselves to get sold, whether they are concert tickets, or roofing supplies. This will be developed over time, Frohwein said, and will serve to complement the work of the Drummers who might be working in physical, real-world sales as well as across digital channels.

The main message is that it will be harnessing a large group of businesses that want to connect to customers, and salespeople who will be looking for platforms to sell their clients’ goods, and the platform will become one component of how that works — again, addressing the fact that some of these businesses have not make the leap to e-commerce in part because they’ve found the options out there today, which might include Amazon or eBay, not quite what they want.

“This is a huge opportunity to acquire customers and a huge number of direct brands that could use a physical last mile,” said Frohwein. “Today, they use things like email lists and Facebook but they could use boots on the ground and talking about their businesses and promoting them.” He says he envisions most of the sales and help to come in the form of human, in-person selling.

Automaker Hyundai is forming a new joint venture with autonomous driving technology company Aptiv, with both parties taking a 50 percent ownership stake in the new company. The goal of the new venture will be to develop Level 4 and Level 5 production-ready self-driving systems intended for commercialization, with the goal of making those available to robotaxi and fleet operators, as well as other auto makers, by 2022.

The combined investment in the joint venture from both companies will total $4 billion in aggregate value (including the value of combined engineering services, R&D and IP) initially, according to Aptiv and Hyundai, and testing for their fully autonomous systems will begin in 2020 in pursuit of that 2022 commercialization target.

In terms of what each is bringing to the table, Aptiv will be delivering its autonomous driving tech, which it has been developing for many years – originally as part of global automative industry supplier Delphi – as well as 700 employees working on AV tech. Hyundai Motor Group will provide a combined $1.6 billion in cash from across its subrands, vehicle engineering, R&D and access to its IP.

Heading up the new joint venture will be Karl Iagnemma, the President of Aptiv’s Autonomous Mobility group, and it’ll be headquartered in Boston and supported by additional technology centres in multiple locations in the U.S. and Asia.

Both companies have been demonstrating autonomous vehicle technologies for multiple years now, and Aptiv has been working with Lyft in Las Vegas on a public trial of autonomous robotaxi services since debuting the capabilities at CES in 2018. Aptiv’s Vegas pilot uses BMW 5-Series cars for its autonomous pick-up fleet.

This joint venture should help them with brining the technology to market with the scale of a global automaker, while Hyundai gains by being able to shore up its own work in self-driving with a partner who has invested in developing these solutions as a primary concern over many years.

Amazon must be pretty happy after tonight’s primetime Emmy Awards, where its shows “Fleabag” and “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” dominated the comedy categories.

“Fleabag” did particularly well, winning the big award for Comedy Series, as well as additional awards for Lead Actress in a Comedy Series (Phoebe Waller-Bridge, pictured above), Writing for a Comedy Series (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) and Directing for a Comedy Series (Harry Bradbeer).

Meanwhile, last year’s Comedy Series winner “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” won this year’s awards for Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series (Alex Borstein) and Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series (Tony Shaloub).

Netflix didn’t go home empty handed, either. “Ozark” won for Directing for a Drama Series (Jason Bateman) and Supporting Actress in a Drama Series (Julia Garner), while Jharrel Jerome was named the best Lead Actor in a Limited Series for his performance in “When They See Us.” And “Bandersnatch,” the interactive episode of “Black Mirror,” won for Television Movie.

This was also a big night for HBO, which retook the lead in Emmy nominations from Netflix, setting a new record for the most nominations in the process. And it went into the evening having already won 25 Creative Arts Emmy Awards (those are the technical awards that they don’t get included in the big ceremonies), compared to Netflix’s 23.

That included taking the best Drama Series award for “Game of Thrones” (yes, that’s for the show’s controversial final season), which also won Peter Dinklage his fourth Emmy for Supporting Actor in a Drama Series. “Chernobyl,” meanwhile won three awards, including Limited Series.

And for fans of HBO’s “Succession” (a.k.a. most of my Twitter feed), I’ll note that series creator Jesse Armstrong the drama writing award for the season one finale.

You can see the full list of winners here.

If you’re at all familiar with esports, chances are you’ve heard of 100 Thieves. The esports org, founded by Matthew “Nadeshot” Haag, has grown over the past couple years into an absolute powerhouse of esports and a household name for those who follow gaming.

Which is why we’re thrilled to have Nadeshot and 100 Thieves part owner Scooter Braun join us at Disrupt SF 2019.

Matthew Haag got his start as a pro gamer when esports were still in their infancy. He became one of the most decorated esports athletes in history, serving as Captain of the legendary Optic Gaming CoD team where he led the team to an X Games Gold Medal and a CoD World Championship.

In 2015, Nadeshot retired from competitive gaming and started some of the most-watched YouTube and Twitch channels in the gaming world. A year later, he founded his own esports org with 100 Thieves, which combines streaming content, competitive esports and apparel under a single brand name.

Scooter Braun is one of the biggest names in the entertainment industry, managing megastars like Justin Bieber and Arianna Grande. But Bruan is also the founder of SB Projects, which is a highly diversified media company that focuses on music management, film/TV, as well as Silent Labs, a tech incubator which holds investments in companies like Uber, Spotify, Songza, Casper, Waze, and Pinterest.

Braun is also at the helm of Ithica Holdings, which made waves this year with the acquisition of Big Machine Label Group (Taylor Swift’s former label). Ithica also owns Mythos Studios with Marvel Founding Chairman David Maisel, Atlas Publishing and has partnerships with various management companies.

In 2018, Drake and Scooter Braun became co-owners in 100 Thieves through a $25 million Series A investment.

At Disrupt SF, we’ll ask Braun and Nadeshot about the opportunities ahead in the esports industry, what it’s like to grow a brand and team from scratch, and how they see esports evolving over the next few years.

Nadeshot and Braun join an amazing list of speakers, including Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Will Smith and Ang Lee, Snap CEO Evan Spiegal, Zola CEO Shan Lyn Ma, and many more.

Disrupt runs October 2 to October 4 right in San Francisco. If you still need tickets, you can pick those up right here.