Year: 2019

Just two years ago, investors were heavily pouring money into China’s dockless bike-sharing startups. Now that boom has busted with derelict bikes littering the streets of cities.

Meanwhile, a new race has started for two-wheelers with motors — and one of the main players is a survivor from the bike-sharing craze. Blessed with fundings from the world’s most valuable fintech company Ant Financial through its Series D to F funding rounds, Hellobike provides a range of mobility services such as shared e-bikes and rented electric scooters to its 230 million registered users.

Electric push

Hellobike first launched in 2016 by deploying shared bikes in smaller cities and towns — where Ofo and Mobike were largely absent early on — rather than large urban centers like Beijing and Shanghai. This allowed Hellobike to largely avoid the cash splurging competition against Ofo and Mobike.

Ofo is now battling a major financial crisis as it struggles to repay user deposits. Its archrival Mobike has slowed down expansion since it was sold to Hong Kong-listed local services giant Meituan. And Hellobike, which boasts about its operational efficiency, has begun an electric push.

“When the two major powers were at war, neither of them went after electric bikes. They were fighting over bicycles,” Hellobike’s chief financial officer Fischer Chen (pictured above) recently told TechCrunch at Rise conference in Hong Kong, referring to the feud between Mobike and Ofo. “As such, there was no price war for e-bikes from the outset. The competition is rational.”

Electric two-wheeled vehicles are in high demand in the country where nearly 1.4 billion people live. According to data collected by Hellobike, nearly 300 million rides are completed on analog bikes every day in China. What many don’t realize is that pedal-assist electric bikes and pedal-free scooters together more than double that number, generating 700 million rides per day.

As with bicycles, there are benefits to rent rather than buy an electric bike in China. For one, users don’t need to worry about getting their assets stolen. Second — and, this is specific to electric vehicles — finding a safe, convenient charging spot can be a challenge in China.

That’s why Hellobike put up charging stations as it went about offering shared ebikes in 2017. At these kiosks, riders swap their battery out for a new one without having to plug in and wait. They then have the option to pay with Alipay, Ant’s mobile wallet with a one-billion user base.

Hellobike’s bike (left and middle) and e-bike (right) models / Photo: Hellobike via Weibo

Of all the monthly two-wheeler electric bikes activity in China, Hellobike has captured 80% of the market share, Chen claims. For bike-sharing, it accounts for 60-70%. It’s hard to verify the share by looking at data compiled by third-party app trackers, for they don’t usually break out the user number for individual features. The Hellobike app is a one-stop-shop for bicycles, e-bikes, e-scooters as well as carpooling, a service complementary to its main two-wheeler business intended to “capture price-sensitive small-town consumers” according to Chen.

Similarly, Mobike has been folded into Meituan’s all-in-one service app. What further complicates the inquiry is some of Hellobike’s rides are accessed directly on Alipay rather than its own app.

When it comes to competition in electric two-wheelers, Chen maintained that other challengers are “relatively small” and that acquiring online users has become “very difficult.” For Hellobike, getting existing customers to try out new features takes as much effort as “adding a new tab to its app,” Chen suggested.

But other internet giants have also set their sight on plugged-in micromobility. Both Mobike and ride-sharing leader Didi Chuxing have their own e-bike sharing programs. It won’t be an easy game, as all contenders need to cope with China’s increasingly strict rules for electric bicycles.

Scooter rental is next

What’s for certain is that Hellobike has big ambitions for electric micromobility. While shared bikes and e-bikes are meant for one-off uses, Hellobike plans to rent out e-scooters for longer swathes of time as many people might want the powered-up vehicles for their daily commute.

Hellobike’s electric scooter. Caption: “App-enabled lock. Smart anti-theft. Real-time location tracking for checking the vehicle’s status.” / Photo: Hellobike homepage  

Hellobike founded a new joint venture last month to fulfill that demand. Joining forces with Ant — which is controlled by Alibaba founder Jack Ma — and China’s top battery manufacturer CATL, Hellobike is launching a rental marketplace for its 25 km/h e-scooters targeted at millions of migrant workers in Chinese cities.

“People might be able to afford an e-scooter that costs several thousand yuan [$1 = 6.88yuan], but they might be leaving the city after a year, so why would they buy it? So we come in as a third-party partner with a new rental model through which people pay about 200 yuan a month to use the scooter,” explained Chen. “By doing so, we convert people from buying vehicles to paying for services, renting the vehicles.”

The three shareholders will also work to install more battery-swapping stations nationwide that not only recharge Hellobike’s shared e-bikes but also its e-scooters, that will be made by manufacturing partners.

“We function as a platform and won’t compete with traditional scooter manufacturers,” suggested Chen. “They still get to use their own designs and SKUs [stock keeping units], but we will put smart hardware into their models… so users know where their vehicles are… and they can unlock the scooters with a QR code just like they do with a shared bike or e-bike.”

Hellboke has raised at least $1.8 billion to date, according to public data compiled by Crunchbase. Bloomberg reported in April that it was seeking to raise at least $500 million in a new funding round. The company declined to comment on its fundraising progress.

When it comes to financial metrics, Chen, a veteran investment banker, declined to disclose whether Hellobike overall is profitable but said the company “performs much better than its competitors” financially. The most profitable segment, according to the executive, is the electric bike business.

As for bicycles, Chen noted that China’s main bike-sharing companies are “no longer burning money” since they’ve raised prices in recent times. Hellobike’s bike unit has achieved cash-flow positive during the warmer, peak seasons, Chen added.

“Point Blank,” a new Netflix original film, stars Frank Grillo and Anthony Mackie as a criminal and a nurse thrown together by circumstances — Abe (played by Grillo) is struck by a car while fleeing a murder scene, and he’s brought to the hospital where Paul (Mackie) works. Soon, Paul finds himself coerced into to breaking Abe out of the hospital.

Despite the presence of two Marvel stars (Grillo had a brief-but-memorable run in the Captain America movies as Brock Rumlow, while Mackie’s Falcon is about to become the new Captain America), “Point Blank” is a decidedly modest affair, focusing on these two men as they drive through the streets of Cincinnati, on the run from both the police and criminals.

There’s nothing wrong with trying to deliver a straightforward crime movie, but as we discuss in the latest episode of the Original Content podcast, we found ourselves underwhelmed by the results, largely because the film was so by-the-numbers.

Yes, there are moments when “Point Blank” tries to surprise the audience, but most viewers will see the twists coming a mile away. And while the movie (based on a French film of the same name) seems to owe a debt to buddy cop movies like “48 Hours” and “Lethal Weapon,” it lacks the finesse needed to balance its jokes with high-stakes violence.

We also discuss AT&T/WarnerMedia’s announcement that it’s taking “Friends” off Netflix, so that it can bring the show to its upcoming streaming service, now called HBO Max.

You can listen in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You can also send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)

f you want to skip ahead, here’s how the episode breaks down:
0:00 Introduction
0:39 HBO Max
13:27 Point Blank review
26:24 Point Blank spoiler discussion

The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) is set to run a historic launch later today, with the Chandrayaan-2 lunar mission, which will aim to put a rover on the Moon’s south pole to help study the celestial body’s origin. The launch is target for 2:51 AM India Standard Time (IST), which is 5:21 PM EST. The live stream above should begin around 2:30 AM IST, or 5:00 PM EST.

Chandrayaan-2 will carry lunar lander Vikram, which will deliver ISRO rover Pragyan to the surface at the pole, with a target landing zone of a plain that covers the ground between two of the Moon’s craters, Simpelius N and Manzinus C. The rocket used for the launch is the GSLV Mk-III, India’s most powerful launch vehicle ever, and the orbiter used for this mission will relay back information from the lander and rover to Earth via the Indian Deep Space Network, as well as make its own observations during its planned one-year mission lifespan.

The mission will seek to take a number of measurements of the lunar surface, including topographic, mineral makeup, seismographic, chemical analytics and more, with an eye to shedding more light on the Moon’s origins. If all goes to plan, the lunar orbiter will make its way to to Moon over the next couple of months and aim to soft land the Vikram at the South Pole target site on September 6, 2019.

This is a historic mission for a few reasons, including being the first ever soft-landing attempt at the Moon’s South Pole region, as well as being the first Indian mission to attempt a soft landing using all home-grown lander and rover technology. If successful, India will be only the fourth country ever to have soft-landed a vehicle on the lunar surface.

Chandraayan-1 was the first ever Indian lunar probe mission, and was launched by ISRO in 2008, with the mission coming to a successful end in August 2009. Chandrayaan-1 employed a controlled crash landing to deliver the probe, unlike the soft landing descent planned for Chandrayaan-2.

In a pitch during a recent meeting at Brinc’s Hong Kong headquarters, the Barcelona-based team behind Kibus Petcare was quick to point out that most millennials consider pets “a member of the family.” That sort of statement manifests itself in various ways, of course, but for many, that means preparing home cooked meals for their dogs and cats.

As a rabbit owner myself, that fortunately mostly just means rinsing off some arugula in the sink once a day. For those other pet owners, however, the prospect is a fair bit more complex, putting the same or even more work into prepping meals for their furry companions.

The pitch behind Kibus is an attempt to split the difference. The company’s appliance is designed to offer something like a home cooked meal for a dog or cat with a fraction of the required effort. The system accepts plastic cartons filled with freeze dried pet food. Pour in some water and the system will heat it up, cooking the foodstuffs in the process.

The company is going to be launching a Kickstarter campaign to sell the product, which is currently in prototype form. At launch, it will run around €199. That initial version will include user refillable pods, but in the future, they company plans to limit these to the pre-made variety, clearly going after a kind of ink cartridge approach to monetizing the system.

The pods will work out to around €1 a day, with the machine rationing out food to pets one to five times a day. Each should last about a week for an average pet, or somewhere in the neighborhood of three days for the largest dog. To start, the company is offering up five different food options (two for cats, three for dogs), with more coming down the road.

Users can monitor the system remotely and program in the sound of their own voice to call the pet over when it’s feeding time. The second version of the device will also include a camera for monitoring pets from afar.

The techlash is well underway. Blame Facebook! Blame Google! Blame Amazon! (Apple and Microsoft still seem relatively immune, for now.) And, I mean, there’s a lot of objectively blameworthy behavior there, especially in that first case. But I find myself wondering: why does the ire go beyond that, into irrational territory? What is it about the tech industry that makes it such a particular target?

There are a sizable number of people out there who think — no, who don’t just think, who take as a given, as something no right-thinking person would ever dispute — that the most recent US presidential election went the way it did purely because of Facebook. Russians! Cambridge Analytica! This is of course nonsense. (Hello, James Comey. Hello, Citizens United. Hello, mass media who trumped up Hillary Clinton’s email non-scandal for months.) Why is that?

I think it’s obvious that media treatment of Facebook and Google has grown much harsher since they have begun to realize that Facebook and Google are rapidly devouring the advertising money on which the media feed. I’m not suggesting that publishers are telling journalists to be critical; I’m suggesting that journalists are individually well aware of what’s going in their industry and are individually, but en masse, aligning against the threats to their collective livelihood.

But it’s not just that. There’s an odd tinge of betrayal, and also of hope, to the techlash. I say “odd” but it makes perfect sense. People are especially angry at the tech industry because they view it as the last engine of power which actually might change. It’s the old story about the drunk looking under the lamppost for his keys, writ large.

My theory is that people no longer believe that there is any hope of meaningfully changing the venal rentier systems of Wall Street or Washington. A learned helplessness has set in. It is understood that those titanic forces are beyond all hope; that the system which is meant to control them has been corrupted, by regulatory capture, gerrymandering, court-packing, and so forth.

No vitriol or protest will affect Goldman Sachs or Mitch McConnell. People vent fury, and come together to fight individual horrors like the border camps, but they don’t seriously think the overall system can meaningfully change.

Technology, though — we’re all about change. …Right? We’re the shapers of the future. We’re the hope for a meaningfully better world. …Right?

But as the tech industry has become more powerful, it has also grown more cautious, and more conservative. Over the last decade its influence has attracted an influx of the kind of people who in another era would have gone to Wall Street or Washington; establishment scions who may take on the mantle of subversion, because it’s fashionable in California, but don’t actually intend any.

(This is why I like the blockchain / cryptocurrency world; it’s full of people who want to change the established system, believe it’s possible, have a vision of a new and better order, and think they’re implementing it. Sure, this also means they attract all kinds of charlatans, cheats, and lunatic fringes — but whether they’re right or not, compared to the sclerotic mainstream, their approach is hugely appealing.)

I’m not saying mainstream change is impossible; just that the system has bred learned helplessness to that effect. I’m not saying tech is now a bastion of conservatism; just that it’s less quietly subversive than it used to be.

And I’m by no means saying that Silicon Valley doesn’t deserve criticism. I am, however, saying that raging at it for the absence of outcomes that only Wall Street and Washington can bring is pretty counterproductive. Better to remember that often the fault lies not in our social media, Horatio, but in our elected representatives; and if that system of representation itself has gone awry, there’s may not be a lot that technology itself can do about it.

Hello, weekend readers. This is Week-in-Review where I give a heavy amount of analysis and/or rambling thoughts on one story while scouring the rest of the hundreds of stories that emerged on TechCrunch this week to surface my favorites for your reading pleasure.

Last week, I talked about how Alexa wasn’t forgetting what you requested because that data was more valuable than one might think.

Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The big story

In thinking about what to highlight in this week’s newsletter, I was tempted to talk about Zoom and Apple and Superhuman and the idea that secure communications can get screwed up when consent is bypassed, and I’m sure that’s something I’ll dig more into down the road, but what intrigued me most this week was single factoid from Google’s self-driving unit.

Waymo’s CTO told TechCrunch this week that the company has logged 10 billion miles of autonomous driving in simulation. That means that while you might have seen a physical Waymo vehicle driving past you, the real ground work has been laid in digital spaces that are governed by the laws of game engines.

The idea of simulation-training is hardly new, it’s how we’re building plenty of computer vision-navigated machines right now, hell, plenty of self-driving projects have been built leveraging systems like the traffic patterns in games like Grand Theft Auto. These billions of logged miles are just another type of training data but they’re also a pretty clear presentation of where self-supervised learning systems could theoretically move, creating the boundaries for a model while letting the system adjust its own rules of operation.

“I think what makes it a good simulator, and what makes it powerful is two things,” Waymo’s CTO Dmitri Dolgov told us. “One [is] fidelity. And by fidelity, I mean, not how good it looks. It’s how well it behaves, and how representative it is of what you will encounter in the real world. And then second is scale.”

Robotics and AV efforts are going to rely more and more on learning the rules of how the laws of the universe operate but those advances are going to be accompanied by other startups’ desires to build more high visual fidelity understanding of the world

There are plenty of pressures to create copies of Earth. Apple is building more detailed maps with sensor-laden vehicles, AR startups like are actively 3D-mapping cities using crowd-sourced data and game engine companies like Unity and Epic Games are building engines that replicate nature’s laws in digital spaces.

This is all to say that we’re racing to recreate our spatial world digitally, but we might just be scratching the surface of the relationship between AI and 3D worlds.

Send me feedback
on Twitter @lucasmtny or email
lucas@techcrunch.com

On to the rest of the week’s news.

(Photo: by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Trends of the week

Here are a few big news items from big companies, with green links to all the sweet, sweet added context.

• Trump must unblock his Twitter critics
  Twitter is a consumer product, so politicians using it might feel like its their own personal account, but when they use it for political announcements it becomes an official communications channel and using features like blocking stifles national free speech. So says an NY-based appeals court this week of President Trump’s habit of blocking critics. It’s undoubtedly a ruling that’s going to have far-reaching implications for U.S. political figures that use social media. Read more here.
• Nintendo switches up the Switch
  The Nintendo Switch arrived on the scene with the bizarre notoriety of being a handheld system that was also a home console, but it’s not enough for the Japanese game co to capture the hybrid market, it’s looking to revisit the success it had back in the peak Nintendo DS days. The company announced the Switch Lite this week, which strips away a number of features for the sake of making a smaller, simpler version of the Nintendo Switch which is handheld-only and sports a longer battery life. Read more here.
• Google and Amazon bury the home-streaming hatchet
  At long last, one of the stranger passive aggressive fights in the smart home has come to a close. Amazon’s Prime Video is finally available on Google’s Chromecast and YouTube is now on Fire TV after a years-long turf war between the two platforms. Read more here.
• AT&T maxes out its HBO ambitions
  When AT&T bought HBO, via its Time Warner acquisition, execs made clear that they had acquired a premium product and planned to shift its standing in the market. The company announced this week that it will be launching a new service called HBO Max next year that will bring in new content including “Friends.” Read more here.

GAFA Gaffes

How did the top tech companies screw up this week? This clearly needs its own section, in order of badness:

1. Apple nips a security nightmare in the bud:
   [Apple disables Walkie Talkie app due to vulnerability]
2. Amazon warehouse workers plan strike:
   [Amazon warehouse workers in Minnesota plan to strike on Prime Day over labor practices]

Our premium subscription service had another great week of deep dives. My colleague Zack Whittaker revisited the WannaCry ransomware that hit in 2017 with a lengthy profile and interviews with the researchers that stopped the malware dead in its tracks. After you dig into that profile, you can check out his Extra Crunch piece that digs further into how security execs and startups can learn from the saga.

What CISOs need to learn from WannaCry

“…There is a good chance that your networks are infected with WannaCry — even if your systems haven’t yet been encrypted. Hankins told TechCrunch that there were 60 million attempted “detonations” of the WannaCry ransomware in June alone. So long as there’s a connection between the infected device and the kill switch domain, affected computers will not be encrypted….”

Here are some of our other top reads this week for premium subscribers. This week, we talked a bit about the future of car ownership and “innovation banking.”

• The future of car ownership: cars-as-a-service
• Grasshopper’s Judith Erwin leaps into innovation banking
• How Roblox avoided the gaming graveyard and grew into a $2.5 billion company

Want more TechCrunch newsletters? Sign up here.

We met with a handful of Brinc’s top startups earlier this week, during a visit to the accelerator’s Hong Kong headquarters. The lion’s share of the demos involved hardware products, which has long been the organization’s core offering. Increasingly, however, food focused startups like Phuture Foods have become an important focus.

Whereas stateside companies like Beyond and Impossible largely work to approximate beef, the Malaysian startup has been pioneering on a plant-based pork substitute. The meat is in particularly high demand in the Asian market, where it’s targeting initial sales, beginning with Hong Kong in the next few months and then branching out into Singapore shortly after.

The foodstuff is designed to mimic the taste and texture of pork, using a variety of plants, including wheat, shiitake mushrooms and mung beans. The company has received support from Hong Kong-based angel investors, beginning with online sales, before rolling out to area super markets roughly five months from now.

Phuture’s primary value play is sustainability, and increasing important issue, particularly under the strain of population growth in areas like China. Price wise, it hopes to hit a target of at or lower than that of actual pork products, which could certainly add appeal among consumers for whom ethical and environmental concerns aren’t at top of mind.

The foodstuff is Halal, a key feature for markets like Malaysia and Singapore. The company is also exploring kosher certification, along with chicken and lamb substitutes.

The Roblox EC-1

Following in the wake of our deep profiles of Patreon and Niantic, we have our next EC-1 package, this time on children’s gaming platform Roblox . Extra Crunch writer Sherwood Morrison has covered gaming and startups for years, and he got an in-depth, behind-the-scenes look at the incredibly popular startup with interviews with many of the company’s principals. This is your weekend read.

How Roblox avoided the gaming graveyard and grew into a $2.5B company

In part one of this EC-1, Morrison looks at the origin story of Roblox, which has to be one of the most interesting I have read in some time. Founders Dave Baszucki and Erik Cassel first worked together on a physics simulation engine called Knowledge Revolution before founding Roblox in 2004 (then known as Dynablox).

Since those humble origins 15 years ago, Baszucki and his team have grown the company dramatically through a sequence of smart strategic moves that Morrison illuminates, eventually culminating in the company’s massive $150 million Series F venture capital round last year from Greylock and Tiger Global, valuing the company at a reported $2.5 billion. Roblox now has 90 million active users, tripling in just a few short years.

Digging into the Roblox growth strategy

Meanwhile, in part two of this EC-1, Morrison illuminates the challenges and opportunities facing Roblox in the years ahead as it looks to conquer a greater swath of the gaming market, or what Baszucki calls “human co-experience.”

First and foremost, Roblox has to expand internationally and capture a greater share of children’s entertainment. Then, the company wants to start to expand beyond its children’s gaming roots to reach other, older demographics. It has to do all this while also maintaining safety for its users and increasing the quality of its game engine against competitors like Unity and Unreal.

As Morrison writes:

If Roblox can continue to grow, it will serve as a guiding example for a whole new generation of companies. And if it continues to evolve, it may yet prove that human co-experience is more than a fever dream. A whole generation of companies failed to create immersive social environments — but in the space between games and chat, Roblox may yet prove that there’s a whole new social category waiting to be discovered.

Be sure to check out both parts, and if you haven’t already, be sure to read the Patreon EC-1 and the Niantic EC-1 as well for similar deep profiles of leading Silicon Valley startups.

Minimum investment for EB-5 investor green card expected to more than double

Immigrants make up a huge portion of Silicon Valley’s workers and investors. That’s why news that the Trump Administration is changing the eligibility for investor green cards is a huge story, particularly for immigrants from India.

Silicon Valley has many dreams. One dream — the Hollywood version anyway — is for a down-and-out founder to begin tinkering and coding in their proverbial garage, eventually building a product that is loved by humans the world over and becoming a startup billionaire in the process.

The more prosaic and common version of that Valley dream though is to join an early-stage company right before its growth kicks into high gear. Sure, those early employees might only have a smidgen of equity, but that equity could be worth a whole heck of a lot if they join the right startup.

Every startup has a window of opportunity, a timeframe in which early employees can join while the stock option strike prices are low and the equity grants are high. Join before the big uptick in valuation, and suddenly what might have been an otherwise nice couple of hundred K dollars in the coming years becomes actually, well, in the Bay Area, a reasonably-sized domicile.

Yet, that opportune window seems to be shrinking in size, making it harder for potential startup employees to nail the timing necessary to garner their own best financial return.

For every Roblox, which as we profiled in-depth this week, took almost two decades to reach its current apotheosis, there is a Brex, which seems to reach unicorn status in no time at all. And such stories — while certainly anecdotal — seem to be more commonplace than ever.

Part of the reason for that fast early valuation growth is that Silicon Valley has simply learned how to grow even faster, even earlier. As venture capitalist Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh discuss in their book Blitzscaling, there are now frameworks and tried-and-true techniques to not just grow a startup, but to grow it at a dizzying rate. Through better marketing channels, growth strategies, and product development, we have indeed made progress at cutting at least some of the time to better valuations.

That rapid transformation from nothing to everything though gives very little time for early employees to discover a startup through the grapevine when the financial conditions are still interesting.

Half a decade ago, I wrote about the plight of early employees in an article I entitled “The Problem with Founders.” I wrote then that:

The secret of Silicon Valley is that the benefits of working at a startup accrues almost entirely to the founders, and that’s why people repeat the advice to just go start a business. There is a reason it is hard to hire in Silicon Valley today, and it isn’t just that there are a lot of startups. It’s because engineers and other creators are realizing that the cards are stacked against them unless they are the ones in charge.

My reasoning then was simple: early employees take on pretty much just as much risk as their founders do, but for a fraction of the equity. Now, with startups jumping to unicorn status in sometimes as short as a handful of months, that risk-reward ratio seems to be even more off-kilter for those early employees.

And it doesn’t just have to be a Brex -scale transformation either. The rapid increase in the size and valuation of series A rounds of financing the past three years means that engineers and salespeople who might have an employee number in the low double digits are suddenly seeing their options struck at a couple of hundred million in valuation. Exits, meanwhile, aren’t suddenly getting richer to compensate.

I started to notice this pattern over the past few weeks in the course of several conversations with software engineering friends of mine who had gotten excited about very early-stage companies — say, just a handful of employees — but who walked away from their offer letters due to already sky-high company valuations.

Now, there is an argument to be made that joining these sorts of companies is precisely where the best opportunities lie. Sure, the valuations are already high, but these are startups with the financial resources and the backing that might allow them to compete effectively. So maybe the equity is smaller and more expensive, but ultimately, if the startup is more likely to be successful, the expected value function might actually be favorable.

Maybe. Yet it is also hard to see how these startups, which despite their rich valuations have barely laid any foundation for success, are a safer bet than a similarly-valued startup with years of experience under its belt and a growth strategy based upon dependable results. Even worse, early employees are perhaps taking even more financial risk, since the preference stack of the venture capital could mean that smaller exits are particularly unfavorable to them.

Plus, the shrinking opportunity window for leading startups means that the difference in financial outcome between two early employees — what could be millions of dollars upon an exit — could have been decided based on who joined the week before the other. That doesn’t seem fair or right, but is increasingly widespread in our industry.

As with most macroeconomic structural changes, there’s not much for anyone to do. Founders aren’t going to take lower valuations or less money just to make the lives of their early employees a bit more rosy, and certainly venture capitalists aren’t going to lowball their offers in a hyper-competitive investment environment. Indeed, the very excitement of a sudden unicorn may be the best attraction for candidates to hear a startup’s pitch and ultimately join.

But when it comes to that Silicon Valley dream of a nice house from a decent return on exit, it’s getting narrower and less widely-distributed. Blitzscaling is making a lot of people a lot of wealth, but early employees? Not so much.