Year: 2019

“The OA” is ending after two seasons on Netflix .

The series premiered in December 2016 with eight “chapters” that veered pretty far from traditional TV storytelling — the opening credits didn’t roll until nearly the end of the first episode, and episode length varied from 30 minutes to one hour and 10 minutes. Then, after that first season, fans had to wait two-plus years for the show to return in March 2019.

Created by Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij, “The OA” begins with the reappearance a young woman named Prairie Johnson (played by Marling), who disappeared several years earlier. The ensuing story goes in some pretty wild directions to explain where the previously-blind Johnson has been for the past few years, how she regained her sight and why she now calls herself The OA.

I’ve only seen the show’s first season, but it sounds like there was more story to tell after season two. In an Instagram post, Marling said, “While we cannot finish this story, I can promise you we will tell others.” (She also expressed “profound gratitude” to Netflix for allowing her and Batmanglij to make the show.)

“We are incredibly proud of the 16 mesmerizing chapters of The OA, and are grateful to Brit and Zal for sharing their audacious vision and for realizing it through their incredible artistry,” said Netflix head of originals Cindy Holland in a statement. “We look forward to working with them again in the future, in this and perhaps many other dimensions.”

This announcement comes just a couple weeks after Netflix also canceled “Tuca & Bertie,” “Designated Survivor” and “She’s Gotta Have It.” And while the streamer has revived beloved shows after they were canceled by other networks, it recently found itself at the other side of that equation — it canceled “One Day at a Time,” which was subsequently picked up by Pop.

There are few topics as hot right now in the enterprise as customer experience management, that ability to collect detailed data about your customers, then deliver customized experiences based on what you have learned about them. To help understand the challenges companies face building this kind of experience, we are bringing Segment CEO Peter Reinhardt to TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise on September 5 in San Francisco (p.s. early-bird sales end this Friday, August 9).

At the root of customer experience management is data — tons and tons of data. It may come from the customer journey through a website or app, basic information you know about the customer or the customer’s transaction history. It’s hundreds of signals and collecting that data in order to build the experience where Reinhardt’s company comes in.

Segment wants to provide the infrastructure to collect and understand all of that data. Once you have that in place, you can build data models and then develop applications that make use of the data to drive a better experience.

Reinhardt, and a panel that includes Qualtrics’ Julie Larson-Green and Adobe’s Amit Ahuja, will discuss with TechCrunch editors the difficulties companies face collecting all of that data to build a picture of the customer, then using it to deliver more meaningful experiences for them. See the full agenda here.

Segment was born in the proverbial dorm room at MIT when Reinhardt and his co-founders were students there. They have raised more than $280 million since inception. Customers include Atlassian, Bonobos, Instacart, Levis and Intuit .

Early-bird tickets to see Peter and our lineup of enterprise influencers at TC Sessions: Enterprise are on sale for just $249 when you book here; but hurry, prices go up by $100 after this Friday!

Are you an early-stage startup in the enterprise-tech space? Book a demo table for $2,000 and get in front of TechCrunch editors and future customers/investors. Each demo table comes with four tickets to enjoy the show.

Indifi, a Gurgaon-based startup that offers loans to small and medium-sized businesses and also operates an online lending marketplace, has raised 145 Indian rupees ($20.4 million) in a new financing round to expand its business in India.

The Series C round for the four-year-old startup was led by CDC Group, a UK-government-owned VC fund. Existing investors Accel, Elevar Equity, Omidyar Networks, and Flourish Ventures also participated in the round, the startup announced on Tuesday (Indian Standard Time).

Indifi, which has raised about $34 million in venture capital to date, has also used debt to grow and finance loans on its platform. Currently, it’s in about $21 million in debt, Alok Mittal, cofounder and managing director of Indifi, told TechCrunch in an interview.

Indifi itself offers loans as well as serves as a marketplace for banks and non-banking financial companies to participate in funding loans to small and medium-sized enterprises, said Mittal. Both the businesses are equally growing and contributing to its bottom line, he said.

A typical loan processed by Indifi is of about $7,000 in size. Overall, the startup offers between $1,400 to  $70,000 to businesses.

Unlike banks and many other online lenders, Indifi works with an ecosystem of companies to assess risk factors before granting loan to a business, Mittal said. For instance, Indifi works with food-delivery startups Zomato and Swiggy and checks a restaurant’s past history, feedback from their customers before issuing a loan.

Similarly, if an enterprise from the travel industry were to look for a loan, Indifi checks the volatility of the market. Some of its other business partners include Oyo Rooms, MakeMyTrip, Flipkart, FirstData, Travel Booking, and Riya Travel.

“We chose to invest in Indifi because of its advanced data-driven approach that enables it to reach [thousands] of underserved customers across India. By reducing the high cost of risk assessment and customer acquisition, Indifi helps formal and informal businesses to access growth finance that otherwise may not receive it,” Srini Nagarajan, managing director and head of CDC Group’s Asia business, said in a statement.

Despite its longer background check process, Mittal said Indifi has been able to finance nearly 50% of all the applications it gets, compared to 10% deals that materialize with banks and other lenders, he claimed.

Indifi, which spent first year-and-a-half of its existence building relationships with major companies and refining its products, has amassed more than 15,000 customers to date, Mittal said. In last one year, its client base has grown by 2.5 times, he said.

The startup will use the fresh capital to find new clients and lending partners to expand its marketplace business, Mittal said. It will also explore lending to businesses in more sectors including logistics (so fleet-owners could also get loan).

Indifi competes with a handful of businesses including Bangalore-based Zest Money, Five Star Finance, Capital Float, and in some capacity, with Drip Capital, which recently raised $25 million.

Our French startup Digicoop is a remote-first worker cooperative. We started the company in 2015, based on our shared values and passion for technology. The goal was simple: make good products that will have a positive impact on companies. The road to funding, not so simple.

Due to our unique business model, which focuses on building a sustainable company, we had to forego venture capital and convince lots of players to take a chance. The effort paid off. Here’s a look at why we chose to be a co-op, how we got the funding, and how it drives our product development.

Table of Contents

• Raison d’être
• SCOP: We’re all in this together
• Co-ops on the rise
• A new approach to management
• Sustainable growth
• Co-op funding, a tricky business
• Exit strategy? Not here
• Hitting roadblocks
• Round 1: Community help
• Round 2: Crowdfunding
• Vision of the future
• Last but not least: our products

Raison d’être

Unlike many startups, Digicoop wasn’t founded because of a particular product. Our story is a bit different. In 2015, a few friends and former colleagues came together to work on projects they were passionate about. Initially we didn’t know what those would be, but we quickly figured out the theme: collaborative work tools for teams. 

Making that our focus was no coincidence. We recognized that the workplace was changing: distributed teams were becoming more common, and with that more transparency and an increased cross-team collaboration necessary. We became frustrated with traditional work tools and processes, as they were no longer enough.

We saw an opportunity to develop products suitable for the digital future, but that wasn’t our only driver. Being passionate about technology and the impact it can have on the society, we set out to build tools that could make a positive difference. The idea was to empower employees, not only managers.

Our shared values and vision of the workplace were the reason we decided to go against the grain and structure Digicoop as a worker cooperative (called SCOP in France), giving each employee a real stake in the company.

SCOP: We’re all in this together

Privacy commissioners from the Americas, Europe, Africa and Australasia have put their names to a joint statement raising concerns about a lack of clarity from Facebook over how data protection safeguards will be baked into its planned cryptocurrency project, Libra.

Facebook officially unveiled its big bet to build a global digital currency using blockchain technology in June, steered by a Libra Association with Facebook as a founding member. Other founding members include payment and tech giants such as Mastercard, PayPal, Uber, Lyft, eBay, VC firms including Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital and Union Square Ventures, and not-for-profits such as Kiva and Mercy Corps.

At the same time Facebook announced a new subsidiary of its own business, Calibra, which it said will create financial services for the Libra network, including offering a standalone wallet app that it expects to bake into its messaging apps, Messenger and WhatsApp, next year — raising concerns it could quickly gain a monopolistic hold over what’s being couched as an ‘open’ digital currency network, given the dominance of the associated social platforms where it intends to seed its own wallet.

In its official blog post hyping Calibra Facebook avoided any talk of how much market power it might wield via its ability to promote the wallet to its existing 2.2BN+ global users, but it did touch on privacy — writing “we’ll also take steps to protect your privacy” by claiming it would not share “account information or financial data with Facebook or any third party without customer consent”.

Except for when it admitted it would; the same paragraph states there will be “limited cases” when it may share user data. These cases will “reflect our need to keep people safe, comply with the law and provide basic functionality to the people who use Calibra”, the blog adds. (A Calibra Customer Commitment provides little more detail than a few sample instances, such as “preventing fraud and criminal activity”.)

All of that might sound reassuring enough on the surface but Facebook has used the fuzzy notion of needing to keep its users ‘safe’ as an umbrella justification for tracking non-Facebook users across the entire mainstream Internet, for example.

So the devil really is in the granular detail of anything the company claims it will and won’t do.

Hence the lack of comprehensive details about Libra’s approach to privacy and data protection is causing professional watchdogs around the world to worry.

“As representatives of the global community of data protection and privacy enforcement authorities, collectively responsible for promoting the privacy of many millions of people around the world, we are joining together to express our shared concerns about the privacy risks posed by the Libra digital currency and infrastructure,” they write. “Other authorities and democratic lawmakers have expressed concerns about this initiative. These risks are not limited to financial privacy, since the involvement of Facebook Inc., and its expansive categories of data collection on hundreds of millions of users, raises additional concerns. Data protection authorities will also work closely with other regulators.”

Among the commissioners signing the statement is the FTC’s Rohit Chopra: One of two commissioners at the US Federal Trade Commission who dissented from the $5BN settlement order that was passed by a 3:2 vote last month. 

Also raising concerns about Facebook’s transparency about how Libra will comply with privacy laws and expectations in multiple jurisdictions around the world are: Canada’s privacy commissioner Daniel Therrien; the European Union’s data protection supervisor, Giovanni Buttarelli; UK Information commissioner, Elizabeth Denham; Albania’s information and data protection commissioner, Besnik Dervishi; the president of the Commission for Information Technology and Civil Liberties for Burkina Faso, Marguerite Ouedraogo Bonane; and Australia’s information and privacy commissioner, Angelene Falk.

In the joint statement — on what they describe as “global privacy expectations of the Libra network” — they write:

In today’s digital age, it is critical that organisations are transparent and accountable for their personal information handling practices. Good privacy governance and privacy by design are key enablers for innovation and protecting data – they are not mutually exclusive. To date, while Facebook and Calibra have made broad public statements about privacy, they have failed to specifically address the information handling practices that will be in place to secure and protect personal information. Additionally, given the current plans for a rapid implementation of Libra and Calibra, we are surprised and concerned that this further detail is not yet available. The involvement of Facebook Inc. as a founding member of the Libra Association has the potential to drive rapid uptake by consumers around the globe, including in countries which may not yet have data protection laws in place. Once the Libra Network goes live, it may instantly become the custodian of millions of people’s personal information. This combination of vast reserves of personal information with financial information and cryptocurrency amplifies our privacy concerns about the Libra Network’s design and data sharing arrangements.

We’ve pasted the list of questions they’re putting to the Libra Network below — which they specify is “non-exhaustive”, saying individual agencies may follow up with more “as the proposals and service offering develops”.

Among the details they’re seeking answers to is clarity on what users personal data will be used for and how users will be able to control what their data is used for.

The risk of dark patterns being used to weaken and undermine users’ privacy is another stated concern.

Where user data is shared the commissioners are also seeking clarity on the types of data and the de-identification techniques that will be used — on the latter researchers have demonstrated for years that just a handful of data points can be used to re-identify credit card users from an ‘anonymous’ data-set of transactions, for example.

Here’s the full list of questions being put to the Libra Network:

• 1. How can global data protection and privacy enforcement authorities be confident that the Libra Network has robust measures to protect the personal information of network users? In particular, how will the Libra Network ensure that its participants will:

  • a. provide clear information about how personal information will be used (including the use of profiling and algorithms, and the sharing of personal information between members of the Libra Network and any third parties) to allow users to provide specific and informed consent where appropriate;
  • b. create privacy-protective default settings that do not use nudge techniques or “dark patterns” to encourage people to share personal data with third parties or weaken their privacy protections;
  • c. ensure that privacy control settings are prominent and easy to use;
  • d. collect and process only the minimum amount of personal information necessary to achieve the identified purpose of the product or service, and ensure the lawfulness of the processing;
  • e. ensure that all personal data is adequately protected; and
  • f. give people simple procedures for exercising their privacy rights, including deleting their accounts, and honouring their requests in a timely way.

• 2. How will the Libra Network incorporate privacy by design principles in the development of its infrastructure?

• 3. How will the Libra Association ensure that all processors of data within the Libra Network are identified, and are compliant with their respective data protection obligations?

• 4. How does the Libra Network plan to undertake data protection impact assessments, and how will the Libra Network ensure these assessments are considered on an ongoing basis?

• 5. How will the Libra Network ensure that its data protection and privacy policies, standards and controls apply consistently across the Libra Network’s operations in all jurisdictions?

• 6. Where data is shared amongst Libra Network members:

  • a. what data elements will be involved?

  • b. to what extent will it be de-identified, and what method will be used to achieve de-identification?
    c. how will Libra Network ensure that data is not re-identified, including by use of enforceable contractual commitments with those with whom data is shared?

We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment.

The bottom-feeding forum 8chan, which grew popular by embracing fringe hateful internet cultures, is having trouble staying online. After Cloudflare dropped its protection of the site yesterday, 8chan adopted the services of Bitmitigate, but soon lost that too as the company providing Bitmitigate with services dropped them. Deplatforming works, but it can be complicated, so here’s a quick explanation of what these pieces are and why we’re witnessing this hot-potato act in the wake of the latest tragic mass shootings.

To put a website online, people generally need three things.

First, a name registrar. This is the company that officially owns and licenses to you the specific series of letters and numbers that make up your website’s name, like techcrunch.com.

Second, a domain name service. These do work in the background to turn requests, like putting facebook.com into their browser bar, into actions: finding the IP address where Facebook is and establishing a connection between that one and the user’s.

Third, an actual server. Your data has to physically be stored somewhere with a fat pipe to the internet so others can access it. Servers are usually “virtualized” in that you don’t really rent 5 computers somewhere but rather a certain amount of capacity on a huge shared server farm.

Increasingly a fourth piece is necessary: caching and denial-of-service attack protection. This is a service like Cloudflare’s, which sits in front of the website and sort of sifts the traffic so attacks are turned away and the website stays up even during other kinds of outages. It’s not required but highly recommended.

When 8chan lost Cloudflare, it was exposed to the full force of the internet, likely including DDoS and other attacks, and was brought offline. But it soon found a new caching service in Bitmitigate.

Bitmitigate is one of several related businesses that provide various hosting services, all flying under the banner of one Rob Monster. In a statement to TechCrunch, Monster said that his companies “fill the ever growing need for a neutral service provider that will not arbitrarily terminate accounts based on social or political pressure.”

As evidence of this, Monster’s Epik domain name and hosting service is the current refuge of Gab, the right-wing social network populated by those excommunicated from Facebook, Twitter, and other services with robust hate speech an abuse rules. Same for Daily Stormer, the white supremacist news site and forum. If they aren’t breaking the law, Monster said, it’s up to the provider whether to host them, and he chose to host. That may change, though.

“We have also not made a definitive decision about whether to provide DDoS mitigation or Content Delivery services for them. We will evaluate this in the coming days,” Monster wrote.

So 8chan went to Bitmitigate, but it wasn’t long before the forum had that rug pulled out from under them as well. Turns out that Epik and Bitmitigate were purchasing services from a larger service provider called Voxility.

If this sounds over-complicated, just think of it this way: A cafe needs to provide internet to its customers, so it buys a high speed connection from an ISP. Then it provides access to that connection to its customers using its own little portal or control method, maybe so you have to buy a coffee before you can get online. This is a bit like that: Epik was reselling the services of Voxility at a markup to a specific set of customers. It’s a common enough thing online, but as we saw today, a bit risky.

Turns out Voxility wants no part of hosting 8chan, and after being alerted (by former Facebook CSO Alex Stamos) that one of its clients had decided to do so, it simply pulled the plug on Epik’s services; right now Bitmitigate, Daily Stormer, and 8chan are all down. They deplatformed the platform.

See, the problem with bigger service providers is they like to limit their exposure to things like 8chan, which are bad optics waiting to happen. If you’re the host of a service to which mass murderers frequently post their pre-shooting screeds to an adoring audience of conspiracy theorists and incels, people might just take their business elsewhere. There’s no shortage of options.

So the larger these services get, the more likely it is they will have something in place to give them carte blanche to kick off or refuse service to sites and actors they believe to be bad business. It’s a bit sad that deplatforming hate has to have a business case, but for now let’s just be happy that case exists.

A hate-promoting site doesn’t just have to find someone who will provide each of the critical services listed at the start, but will provide them to a high-risk client for a reasonable price. That’s getting to be rather difficult.

As of this writing 8chan is still down and Bitmitigate is still recovering from having its services yanked by Voxility. Who will host the hosts? Increasingly few internet services companies want to be involved with toxic internet subcultures and even real-life toxic cultures like white supremacy.

While as many have pointed out this does create new problems, it also does a pretty good number on some of the problems we’ve already got. I’ll take that over inaction any day.

SpaceX is expanding its launch offerings with a new, more affordable and consistent option for small satellite operators looking to but lighter payloads into orbit. The new service offering is designed to work for customers who can take advantage of a ‘rideshare’ launch, sharing space on a Falcon 9 with other small satellites being sent up.

The rideshare option will be offered on a regular, defined schedule, and SpaceX says that it’s designs for flexibility, offering customers the ability to pre-book a spot, and ensuring that if they’re ready to launch when their rideshare comes up, the rocket will indeed go up – with or without other payloads also booked that may not be ready in time.

One of the biggest issues with rideshare missions today is being reliant on the timing and readiness of the main payload customer. Typically, one or two big-ticket payloads foots most of the bill for the launch, even if there are smaller satellites also going up on the same ride. The issue is that if that large customer has to delay for any reason, the smallsat ride-alongs are basically at their whims.

SpaceX’s new service is designed somewhat like rideshare programs here on Earth: Passengers who are ready get to ride, and the company looks to intend to fill seats by offering bookings both in advance (12 or more months out) and much closer to launch time (between 12 and 6 months out) with a possibility of even tighter turnaround, though SpaceX hasn’t publicly posted pricing for that option which means it’ll probably be costly.

As for those with plenty of notice, they get the biggest price break: Launches start at just $2.25 million for payloads of up to 150 kg (330 lbs), or at $4.5 million for those weighing up to 300 kg (660 lbs). That sounds like a lot, but consider that the lowest cost for a current SpaceX launch is currently somewhere around $57 million.

The customers are responsibly for providing the deployer, which must be compatible with an ESPA adapter (pretty standard for payload launches on spacecraft) and they also could be responsible for a rebooking fee, should they cancel their launch close to its intended take-off date. Delays don’t mean you lose the whole cost of launch, however – because SpaceX is looking to employ a flexible model, it says that anyone who is delayed “can apply 100 percent of monies paid towards the cost of rebooking on a subsequent mission.”

This is a clever way to drum up more business for SpaceX. Based on all the conversations I’ve had with space tech startups and people working in the industry, the main cap right now on activities is securing launch services. By addressing this bottleneck, and doing so in a way that offers as much flexibility as you can when dealing with rocket launches, the company could potentially capture a lot more of the commercial space business revenue it’s currently leaving on the table.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. StockX was hacked, exposing millions of customers’ data

It looks like StockX wasn’t being entirely honest when it sent out a password reset email to customers last week citing “system updates.”

What was really going on? Well, a data seller contacted TechCrunch to say that more than 6.8 million records were stolen from the site in May (and we were able to review a sample of those records). StockX has since acknowledged the breach, but it still isn’t answering questions about why it wasn’t more forthcoming with customers.

2. Just Eat and Takeaway.com reach agreement to gobble each other

The two European food delivery companies had already said they were in talks, and now their boards have reached agreement on the terms of “a recommended all-share combination.”

3. Cloudflare will stop service to 8chan, which CEO Matthew Prince describes as a ‘cesspool of hate’

The decision was made after the suspect in this weekend’s mass shooting in El Paso posted a lengthy racist and anti-immigration “manifesto” to 8chan almost immediately before the attack.

4. Didi Chuxing’s autonomous driving unit is now an independent company

Didi’s autonomous driving team was created in 2016 and now has more than 200 employees in China and the United States. It seems that the two companies will still be closely linked, with Didi CTO Zhang Bo serving as CEO of the new autonomous driving company.

5. Samsung’s new Galaxy Watch still lacks the line’s best feature

Brian Heater misses the mechanical spinning bezel.

6. A closer look at China’s smartphone market

In February 2013, China surpassed the United States to become the world’s largest smartphone market. More than half a decade on, it’s still an elusive target for international sellers. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

7. United Airlines CISO Emily Heath joins TC Sessions: Enterprise this September

Joining her to talk enterprise security will be a16z partner Martin Casado, DUO/Cisco’s head of advisory CISOs Wendy Nather and others.

8. This week’s TechCrunch podcasts

The latest episode of Equity looks at DoorDash’s $410 million acquisition of Caviar, while Original Content reviews the at-times terrifying HBO show “Years and Years.”

A recent validation study conducted by the David Geffen School of Medicine indicates that virtual reality could provide significant benefits to surgical training.

The study, which was financed by the virtual reality surgical training startup Osso VR, indicates that participants who used the company’s training methods improved their overall surgical performance by 230 percent.

That’s a huge number, but research into the efficacy of virtual reality training is still early.

Still, the “Randomized, Controlled Trial of a Virtual Reality Tool to Teach Surgical Technique for Tibial Shaft Fracture Intramedullary Nailing” takes the first step at providing evidence to back up the long-held assertions that learning in virtual reality has benefits that accrue in real world scenarios.

The promise of virtual reality training is its “anytime”, “anywhere” applicability according to Osso VR, and the results of this study indicate that in certain controlled scenarios, the company may be right.

UCLA performed its test to see whether the Osso VR technology was worth bringing into the school for additional testing, validation and potential rollout.

In the UCLA study, 20 participants were divided between a traditionally trained group and a group that underwent VR training to a specified level of proficiency. Each participant then performed a tibial intramedullary nailing on a sawbones simulation, graded by an observer who did not know which participant had been in which group.

Students who’d had the VR training completed the procedure 20 percent faster and completed more steps correctly according to the procedure-specific checklist that participants were scored against.

“As an orthopaedic surgeon, it’s critical to me that our technology is evidence-based. As we roll out a completely new way to train, we want our users and customers to continue to see this platform as effective and reliable,” said Justin Barad, MD, CEO and co-founder of Osso VR, in a statement. “These study results are just the beginning as we tackle one of the biggest challenges facing the healthcare industry today. Our goal is to unlock the value our providers and industry are working to bring to patients around the world.”

There’s nothing like having a pair of fresh, unique sneakers. Limited release culture facilitates some of that, but The Custom Movement hopes to make originality and self-expression via sneakers more accessible to the masses.

The Custom Movement, a custom sneaker startup backed by Y Combinator, enables independent artists to sell their one-of-a-kind sneaker designs to those who want highly unique Nikes, Vans, Timberlands or any other brand of shoe. Customers can shop by shoe brand, style, artist or price.

You can think of it a bit like an Etsy for custom sneakers. Right now, there are about 40 artists featured on the site that offer more than 5,000 different shoes. The platform is entirely open, meaning any artist can sign up to sell their shoes.

That means the prices can vary, but the cheapest shoe you can buy right now costs $110 and the most expensive one costs upwards of $1,000. The Custom Movement processes the payments but artists handle the shipping.

In exchange for the platform, The Custom Movement takes a 10% commission on the sales price of the shoe. Down the road, the startup wants to help artists more easily manage their inventory and shipping processes. And, in the event something goes wrong with the order, The Custom Movement fully protects buyers.

Growing up in the Philippines, The Custom Movement founder Akshar Bonu’s experience of sneaker culture was different from people who grew up in the United States, he told TechCrunch.

“I went to a high school where we had to wear uniforms, so the only real article of clothing we had control over was our shoes,” Bonu said. “It’s my form of self-expression that I had growing up. What was interesting in the Philippines and high school, there wasn’t this monoculture around what people should wear. I’ve always been interested in unique shoes that help me express myself.”

Design by Nate Rivera, one of the artists of The Custom Movement.

When Bonu came to the U.S. for college, he was introduced to limited release culture and “shoes defined by what everyone else wanted,” he said. “That was a huge contrast to my experience with sneakers back in the Philippines. I found the sneaker culture and limited release culture a bit problematic.”

That’s because, he said, it’s really hard to get the shoes and then if you get them, there’s some incentive to resell them at a price that is hundreds of dollars higher than what you bought them for. There are even sites like StockX and GOAT that are entirely dedicated to reselling sneakers.