Month: November 2020

Revolution, the Washington, D.C.-based investment firm founded by AOL cofounder CEO Steve Case and former AOL senior exec Ted Leonsis, is raising $500 million for its fourth fund, shows a new SEC filing.

Asked about the effort earlier today, the firm declined to comment.

This new fund was was expected. It has been more than four years since Revolution announced its third growth fund, a vehicle that closed with $525 million in capital commitments. That’s a longer time between funds than we’re seeing more broadly across the venture industry, where teams have tended to raise new funds every two years roughly, but Revolution’s pacing could tie to its mission. The firm tends to invest primarily in what it long ago dubbed “rise of the rest” cities, where the cost of living and talent is less extreme and where checks go a lot further as a result.

The outfit is also investing out of more than one fund at a time. In recent years, it formed a seed practice and has since raised two Rise of the Rest seed funds, the most recent of which closed last year with $150 million in capital commitments.

Revolution is also having pretty good 2020, all things considered. Earlier this year, its Boston-based portfolio company DraftKings closed on a three-way merger and debuted on the Nasdaq. Meanwhile, BigCommerce, an Austin-based SaaS startup helping companies build, manage and market online stores, went public via a traditional IPO in early August and currently boasts a market cap of $4.2 billion. (Revolution provided the capital for the company’s Series C round in 2013 and continued to invest in subsequent rounds.)

Others of its notable investments include Orchard, a tech platform that helps users sell their current home while simultaneously purchasing their next one and whose $69 million Series C round was led by Revolution in September; TemperPack, a maker of thermal liners meant to address the longstanding plastic waste consumer issue and which raised $31 million in Series C funding this past summer, including follow-on funding from Revolution; and sweetgreen, the fast-casual restaurant chain that has endured some ups and downs owing to the pandemic but that closed on $150 million in funding a year ago and which first received backing from Revolution in 2013.

Last month, we talked at some length with Case, including about his involvement in the creation of Section 230 Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which helped create today’s internet giants.

We also talked at the time about whether COVID-19 will cause Silicon Valley to finally lose its gravitational pull. Said Case at the time:

“Obviously the jury is out. I think a lot of people who decided to leave Silicon Valley to shelter someplace else, most of those will end up returning. I don’t think you’ll see a mass exodus from the city, whether that be Silicon Valley or New York or Boston, which some have predicted.

I do think some of the people who decided to leave at least temporarily will decide to stay, and most of them will end up still working for their current company, in part because some of the tech companies like Facebook and Square and many others have have made it easier to work remotely. But some, once they get settled in another place, and their family is settled, will likely will decide to do something different [and] I think it could be a helpful catalyst in terms of these rise-of-the-rest cities that were showing some signs of momentum. This could be an accelerant.”

We had also talked with Case about data that suggests that women and other founders who are not in the networking flow of traditional venture firms are getting left behind as deals are being struck over Zoom. He’d also seen the data and was surprised by it. As he told us:

Yeah, that’s a concern. And it’s a concern about place. It’s also a concerned about people. If you just look at the the NVCA data, last year, 75% of venture capital went to just three states and more than 90% of venture capital went to men and less than 10% to women, even though women represent half our population. And last year, even though Black Americans are about 14% of the population, Black founders got less than 1% of venture capital. So if you just look at the data, it does matter where you live, it does matter what you look like, it does matter the kind of school you went to.

I would have thought that because of the pandemic and because suddenly, Zoom meetings for pitches were becoming increasingly commonplace . . .that that would open up the aperture for most venture capitalists. They would be more willing to take meetings with people in other places, and also be willing to get to reach out to some of the diverse communities that they haven’t traditionally have invested in.

Some of that has happened, for sure. We have seen more interest among coastal investors in opportunities in these in these rise-of-the-rest cities. I think the challenge more broadly, when you go beyond place toward people is what you hear from more of these venture capitalists. They say, ‘Yes, we understand that it’s a problem we need to be help solve. It’s also an opportunity we can potentially seize, because some of these entrepreneurs are going to build some really valuable companies. But we don’t really have the networks. We tend to be mostly situated where we live and have worked or went to school and also where we’ve previously made investments. So we just don’t have the networks in the middle of a country. We don’t have networks with Black founders,’ and so forth.

So that’s an area that we’re really focusing on now: how do we extend the networks. I do think most VCs realize they should be part of the solution, and not part of the problem.

Case mentioned during our call — ahead of the U.S. presidential election —  his longstanding friendship with now President-elect Joseph Biden. Case isn’t the only one at Revolution with ties to Biden, however. Ron Klain, an executive vice president at Revolution, previously served as Biden’s chief of staff when he was vice president and, as the world learned last week, Klain is again heading into politics after being chosen to serve as the White House chief of staff beginning in January.

It’s time for another episode of Mixtape, where we take a look at diversity, inclusion, equity and the human labor that powers tech. This week we spoke to Y-Vonne Hutchinson, the CEO of ReadySet, a consulting firm that works with companies to create more inclusive and equitable work environments.

Hutchinson tells us that the work she did for ten years in international human rights, labor rights law and advocacy helped prepare her for the work she does today.

“My last job was in Nicaragua where I was working with sugarcane workers who were dying of occupational illness,” she says. “And it was generational…that’s the power of structural violence. And work is like an incredible vector for that.”

She tells us she began to research international labor protection and pursue doctorate work, but instead decided to move to Silicon Valley in 2015 and pursue the future of work with ReadySet .

“Diversity, equity and inclusion was the future of work issue — who gets access to high opportunity employment and how people are treated at work and what that means for their own personal outcomes.”

Five years on from the launch of ReadySet, Hutchinson says she sees companies change the way they approach equitable workplaces. And it’s hard to avoid the fact that the pandemic, having locked us all in place to watch the video of police killing George Floyd, has had an impact on the way people navigate society’s structures of racism and policing.

“In terms of how our companies are responding, I definitely do see more of an emphasis on having a structural response, and thinking about their complicity and structurally exclusionary systems. What does that mean for them?” she says. “I think now there are some positive indications that companies are looking at that. They’re looking beyond just ‘let’s do an unconscious bias training,’ which is what they were asking for in 2015. And asking for more structural work — more work exclusively focused on anti-racism and really unpacking harm. But is that sustainable? Is that something that’s going to be continuing to the long term? You know, at this stage? I don’t know.”

More on this as well as an examination of what we can expect under a Biden administration. Click play above and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

 

Its long fruitful relationship with Apple may be sunsetting soon, but Intel’s still got a fairly massive footprint in the PC market. There’s never a good time to get complacent, though (a lesson the company learned the hard way on the mobile front).

This week the chip giant is debuting its own laptop, the NUC M15. More properly, the NUC M15 Laptop Kit; the device is actually a white-label system. It’s essentially a reference design so smaller device makers don’t have to commit to the long and expensive process of building a system from scratch.

It is, as The Verge notes, not the first time the company has created this sort of reference design. It recently created a gaming system to similar ends. But much like the recent MacBooks, the system is designed to offer high performance in a package designed more for productivity.

There are two configurations for the system, featuring either a Core i7 chip coupled with 16GB of RAM or a Core i5 with 8GB of RAM. That will, obviously, be complemented by Windows 10, which will take advantage of the 15.6-inch touchscreen.

Pricing and timing and all of that good stuff will likely depend on which vendors take the system across the finish line.

Sound Ventures, a fund co-founded by Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary, has filed paperwork indicating plans to raise a third fund at $150 million. Notably, the firm filed paperwork for the same total in 2018 for its second fund.

The firm did not immediately respond to a request for comment on its plans to raise a new fund. Sound Ventures was born to write bigger and later-stage checks, or at a minimum, be stage-agnostic. Despite Kutcher’s fame and high-profile stakes, the firm has operated somewhat quietly in the recent past.

On the firm’s website, it states that it has a fund dedicated to the “next generation of clean, circular, and sustainable businesses” titled SOUNDWaves. It’s unclear whether today’s filing is for SOUNDWaves or Sound Ventures’ main fund, or if those two have been combined under a new direction for the firm.

In 2018, Kutcher noted his love for scooters, instead of cars, on the TechCrunch Disrupt Stage. “There are cars parked everywhere! It’s ridiculous! They’re clogging the roads, they’re making it impossible to get anywhere you want to go,” Kutcher said. Notably, Sound Ventures invested in Bird, which this week announced its discussions to go public via SPAC.

Portfolio news continued this year when Root, an Ohio-based car insurance business, went public (and got a warm reception).

Beyond micro-mobility and insurance, Sound Ventures is looking for opportunities in fintech, enterprise, govtech and medtech infrastructure markets. The firm has invested in companies including Robinhood and Gusto.

The new fund filing come as Sound Ventures’ team continues to grow. In 2017, Sound Ventures hired Effie Epstein, who was leading global strategy at Marsh, to be the firm’s managing partner and COO. Epstein’s hire came as Sound Ventures itself looked to evolve past just consumer investors. Other hires include growth investor Susan Su, who led growth marketing at Stripe, and chief sustainability and strategy officer Katherine Keating, who previously clocked time at VICE Media and Maverick Management.

Companies that launch robotaxi services in California will be able to charge for and offer shared driverless rides as long as they can navigate a new government approval process that some in the industry argues adds unnecessary bureaucracy that could delay deployments by more than two years.

The California Public Utilities Commission approved Thursday two new programs to allow permitted companies to provide and charge for shared rides in autonomous vehicles.

The nascent automated vehicle technology industry has lobbied the CPUC for months to consider a rule change that would allow for operators to charge a fare and offer shared rides in driverless vehicles. The decision was widely cheered with some cautionary caveats.

“We are pleased that the CPUC has voted today to approve a state regulatory framework for commercial autonomous ride-hailing,” Waymo’s head of policy Annabel Chang said in an emailed statement. “This long-awaited agency action will allow Waymo to bring our fully autonomous Waymo One ride-hailing service to our home state over time. The CPUC’s decision comes at a key time as we bring more of our latest technology to San Francisco and look forward to putting our Waymo Driver to use in service to Californians.”

Companies won’t be able to start charging for rides tomorrow. Instead, these potential robotaxi operators will have to receive the proper permits from the CPUC and the California Department of Motor Vehicles AV as well as meet several reporting requirements. Companies can apply offer driverless service with or without shared rides.

Participating companies also have to submit a safety plan and quarterly reports to the CPUC with aggregated and anonymized information about the pick-up and drop-off locations for individual trips, the availability and volume of wheelchair accessible rides and service levels to disadvantaged communities. Companies also have to supply data such as the the fuel type used by the vehicles and electric, miles traveled and passenger miles traveled.

There is one primary sticking point, which Cruise raised in its submitted comments to the CPUC. Any company that wants to participate in the program will have to submit an application in the form of a “Tier 3” advice letter. Cruise argued that the Tier 3 process to obtain the deployment permit conflicts with the state’s other transportation, safety, and emissions reductions goals.

“As it currently stands, the process to acquire both Commission and DMV deployment permits may extend beyond two years — far too long considering the urgency of the need,” Cruise wrote in its submitted comments.

 

The security sector is ever frothy and acquisitive. Just last week Palo Alto Networks grabbed Expanse for $800 million. Today it was FireEye’s turn snagging Respond Software, a company that helps customers investigate and understand security incidents, while reducing the need for highly trained and scarce security analysts. The deal has closed, according to the company.

FireEye had its eye on Respond’s Analyst product, which it plans to fold into to its Mandiant Solutions platform. Like many companies today, FireEye is focused on using machine learning to help bolster its solutions and bring a level of automation to sorting through the data, finding real issues and weeding out false positives. The acquisition gives them a quick influx of machine learning-fueled software.

FireEye sees a product that can help add speed to its existing tooling.”With Mandiant’s position on the front lines, we know what to look for in an attack, and Respond’s cloud-based machine learning productizes our expertise to deliver faster outcomes and protect more customers,” Kevin Mandia, FireEye CEO said in a statement announcing the deal.

Mike Armistead, CEO at Respond, wrote in a company blog post that today’s acquisition marks the end of a 4-year journey for the startup, but it believes it has landed in a good home with FireEye. “We are proud to announce that after many months of discussion, we are becoming part of the Mandiant Solutions portfolio, a solution organization inside FireEye,” Armistead wrote.

While FireEye was at it, it also announced a $400 million investment from Blackstone Tactical Opportunities fund and ClearSky (an investor in Respond), giving the public company a new influx of cash to make additional moves like the acquisition it made today.

It didn’t come cheap. “Under the terms of its investment, Blackstone and ClearSky will purchase $400 million in shares of a newly designated 4.5% Series A Convertible Preferred Stock of FireEye (the “Series A Preferred”), with a purchase price of $1,000 per share. The Series A Preferred will be convertible into shares of FireEye’s common stock at a conversion price of $18.00 per share,” the company explained in a statement. The stock closed at $14.24 today.

Respond, which was founded in 2016, raised $32 million including a $12 million Series A in 2017 led by CRV and Foundation Capital and a $20 million Series B led by ClearSky last year, according to Crunchbase data.

Roblox, the child-friendly gaming company, filed to go public today.

Its listing comes one day after the lending company Affirm initiated its own public offering and a mere two days after Airbnb’s filing.

Roblox filed confidentially to go public in mid-October, but its numbers were unreleased until today when it published its S-1 document.

The company is not the first gaming platform company to go public this year, with gaming engine Unity debuting earlier this year. After its IPO, Unity shares have rocketed, perhaps preparing the public markets for Roblox’s own debut.

This post will provide an overview of Roblox’s business results, and a quick dig into its history of raising private capital and who owns what in the company as it stands today. TechCrunch will have more on venture capital results, and the nuances of Roblox’s business model, once we tease them out of its fresh SEC filing.

Financials

Roblox is a free-to-play game and developer platform, which means users don’t pay to access its service, but there are in-game purchases through a currency called Robux and a subscription service called Roblox Premium, which comprise the bulk of the company’s revenues.

Third-party developers can create experiences on the platform that cost Robux, a model that has seen significant uptake over time. According to Roblox, its developer and creator pool earned $72.2 million in the first three quarters of 2019, a figure that soared to $209.2 million in the same period of 2020. (TechCrunch has a deep-dive into Roblox and its pre-IPO success here if you want more depth in its business mechanics. We’ve also dug into its tech stack evolution here, if that is your jam.)

Roblox has seen similar growth in its total revenues, growing 139% to $312.8 million in 2018, and 56% to $488.2 million in 2019. More recently, the company’s revenue expanded 68% in the first three quarters of 2020 from its 2019 result over the same period, to $588.7 million.

The company, then, has grown more quickly in 2020 to date than it did in 2019, an impressive acceleration at scale. A COVID-derived tailwind has helped the company, with Roblox stating in its S-1 filing that it enjoyed “rapid growth” in part of Q1, and all of Q2 and Q3 that it says was “due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic given our users have been online more as a result of global COVID-19 shelter-in-place policies.”

The unicorn gaming company also warned that “in future periods” it anticipates “growth rates for our revenue to decline,” going on to warn that it “may not experience any growth in bookings or our user base during periods” that are later compared to its COVID-boosted 2020 results.

How investors weigh that warning against the company’s growth remains to be seen, but Roblox has had an extraordinary 2020. For example, the company’s bookings — what it defines as “sales activity in a given period without giving effect to certain non-cash adjustments” – grew 62% in 2018 to $499.0, 39% in 2019 to $694.3 million, and 171% to $1.24 billion in the first three quarters of 2020, when compared to the same period of 2019.

That growth is downright impressive. As you’d imagine, the company’s impressive sales gains were derived from rising user interest, with Roblox averaging “31.1 million average DAUs across over 180 countries” during the first nine months of 2020, up from 17.1 million during the same portion of 2019.

Along with more consumers coming to the Roblox platform, the hours engaged also increased. Users on Roblox spent 22.2 billion hours in the first 9 months of 2020, up 122% during the same portion of 2020. Daily active users spend an average of 2.67 hours per day on the platform.

Despite its rapid growth, Roblox, like many unicorns, is still unprofitable. The company lost $97.2 million in 2018, $86.0 million in 2019. Its losses exploded in 2020, with the company posting a net loss of $203.2 million in the first three quarters of the year, compared to just $46.3 million during the same portion of 2019.

Those losses appear to be driven mainly from rising spend across its operations, and an increase in the cost of share-based compensation in 2020 compared to 2019.

However, on a cash basis Roblox appears to be in much better shape than its GAAP numbers would have you initially estimate.  The firm’s operating cash flow grew from $62.6 million in the first nine months of 2019 to $345.3 million in the same period of this year. Over the same period, the company’s free cash flow was $6.0 million and $292.6 million.

Roblox’s numbers demonstrate that its space can be large, and economically interesting. So much so that the company will make a number of VCs rich.

Who owns what?

While private, Roblox raised $335.7 million, according to Crunchbase data, with rounds led by Altos Ventures, First Round Capital, Meritech, Index, Greylock, Tiger Global, and Andreessen Horowitz powering its life until today.

Roblox has around $810 million in cash and equivalents, heading into its IPO. And once it goes public, the company’s investors will start a clock on when they can convert their formerly illiquid shares into cash.

The S-1 gives an idea of who owns how much of the gaming developer platform, and thus who might benefit the most from the IPO. Altos Ventures is the principal stockholder, holding 23.9% of the company at 114,261,961 shares. This is not surprising given how many Roblox rounds it helped lead. Right behind Altos comes Meritech Capital, which owns 11.6% of Roblox, Index Ventures, with 11.1%, Tiger Global at 8.2% and First Round Capital at 7%.

The executive team, in aggregate, holds just 6.8% of the company. David Baszucki, the co-founder and CEO of Roblox, owns 8,252,471 shares, or 1.6% of the company, indicating the true effects of dilution when you are as richly-funded a company as Roblox.

Beyond the numbers

In its S-1, Roblox did address that its success depends on its ability to “provide a safe online environment” for children, or else its “business will suffer dramatically.”

In 2018, Roblox responded to a grotesque hack that allowed a young girl’s avatar to be raped on a playground on one of its games. Other allegations continue, including that the business has offered a platform to criminal offenders to lure children into interacting with creeps off-platform, according to the S-1.

“While we devote considerable resources to prevent this from occurring, we are unable to prevent all such interactions from taking place,” the document states. However, the document does go on to say that communications on its platform are not encrypted “at this time” and that they have an “increased risk” of data security incidents around access and disclosure. With children on the platform, this is a huge weak spot for Roblox.

The business intends to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “RBLX.”

HuffPost has a new owner, Facebook says its misinformation-fighting AI is getting smarter and Affirm files to go public. This is your Daily Crunch for November 19, 2020.

The big story: Verizon sells HuffPost to BuzzFeed

TechCrunch’s parent company Verizon Media has sold HuffPost. This is part of a larger deal that also includes an investment in BuzzFeed, a content syndication agreement, potential advertising collaboration and more.

BuzzFeed co-founder and CEO Jonah Peretti was actually one of The Huffington Post founders back in 2005. And it’s been nearly a decade since what was then AOL acquired HuffPost for $315 million.

“I have vivid memories of growing HuffPost into a major news outlet in its early years, but BuzzFeed is making this acquisition because we believe in the future of HuffPost and the potential it has to continue to define the media landscape for years to come,” Peretti said in a statement.

The tech giants

Facebook details AI advances in catching misinformation and hate speech — Facebook’s battle against misinformation will never be over at this rate, but that doesn’t mean the company has given up.

Instagram revamps its mobile messaging app Threads — The redesigned version of the Threads app includes updated navigation and a Status tab, as well as support for posting photos and videos to your Instagram Story.

Google plans to test end-to-end encryption in Android messages — Google says it will start with one-on-one conversations, leaving open the possibility of end-to-end encrypted group chats.

Startups, funding and venture capital

SellerX raises $118M to buy up and grow Amazon marketplace businesses — Somehow, this is a $118 million seed round.

Lime plans for ‘modes’ beyond bikes and scooters in 2021 — Lime CEO Wayne Ting hinted that a “third mode” is in the works for the first quarter of next year.

Near acquires Teemo to expand its data business into Europe — Teemo’s founder and CEO Benoit Grouchko will become Near’s chief privacy officer.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Inside Affirm’s IPO filing: A look at its economics, profits and revenue concentration — Is Affirm another pandemic-fueled company going public on the back of a COVID-19 bump, or are its business prospects more durable?

Is the internet advertising economy about to implode? — An interview with Tim Hwang on his new book, “Subprime Attention Crisis.”

Is a new game and $100M investment enough for South Korea’s PUBG to return to India? — South Korea-based PUBG Corporation announced last week that it plans to return to India, its largest market by users.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

Tech in the Biden era — President-elect Joe Biden may have spent eight years in an administration that doted on the tech industry, but that long honeymoon (punctuated by four years of Trump) looks to be over.

‘Wonder Woman 1984’ is coming to HBO Max (and some US theaters) on Dec. 25 — The film will debut in theaters internationally on December 16, then launch in U.S. theaters and on HBO Max on December 25.

Fintech unicorn Affirm has a lot of eggs in one basket — The new episode of Equity includes additional thoughts on Affirm’s finances.

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 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

When the music’s over, turn out the lights. Back in the day, The Doors were one of a number of 60s rock groups to surface around the intersection of blues, R&B, and a cultural shift that challenged our notions of who was in charge. The Doors were a four-piece that sounded like something bigger. The keyboard player, Ray Manzarek, created that sleight of hand by collapsing bass, drums, guitar, keyboard, and vocal to drums, guitar, vocal, and bass on his left hand and melody on his right.

In the studio, they often augmented the sound with a traditional bass sideman, but the overall feel of the left hand driving the feel and the right the upper notes produced a unique sound and hybrid of musical styles. They were not my favorite, but the night I caught them at a New York club called Electric Circus, I lurked stunned behind Manzarek as he performed this magic trick cum laude into the night. Years later, I remember every note. It feels like I cheated the bounds of the universe.

Since the election, I’ve been hoping for a sense of completion, of triumph over the bounds of the terror of these times. Surely, a big part of it is the pandemic, which doesn’t care how close it was in Georgia or when or if Trump flies off to Florida for the holidays. But news of a second robust vaccine trial suggests the tough times, though not over by any means, may be in sight of an end or at least some version of a plan to get there.

Not so much for Trump and his fearful enablers. There’s much to look forward to: Inauguration Day, or as I like to call it, Eviction Day. A bailout of the 20 million unemployed that keeps them in their homes and on a pathway to economic recovery. A rational approach to the science of the virus and how to slow it while we figure out how to distribute the vaccines. A majority government for a change.

Instead, every last step will be fought tooth and nail. The early breath of fresh air is still lingering, but there’s no doubt this will be for every inch of the way. Come to think of it, did we really expect anything different? No, we expected the worst, and we got it. But this is not about the politics for me. It’s about finding a place to breathe, to invest in a future we can accept, to relearn how to be kind to ourselves in setting our expectations.

I’ve always held a fascination for technology for just that reason — to experience the combined shouts of innovation and inspiration that lead to breakthroughs in what’s possible. Even in the darkest depths of this crisis, the vaccine trials offer a glimpse at the leading edge of new approaches that will span not just the current virus but advances in efforts to battle cancer and other more traditional enemies. In politics, some of the citizen-based fundraising efforts of Bernie Sanders and media innovations like the Lincoln Project suggest ways of countering the negative effects of social networks and misinformation attacks.

In the more conventional reaches of tech, Apple’s M1 transition from Intel to Apple Silicon chips is unmistakably thrilling. Seeing the wave of computing acceleration spurred by the iPhone and iPad merging with the Mac on the desktop is so inspiring. For the first time, I’m delaying the new iPhone because I lust for the new Silicon version of the MacBook Air. Why? Because of what it doesn’t have, a fan. It’s like the taxi scene in Star Wars, you know the one where they’re not the droids you’re looking for. Then: no wheels.

Now: it’s not about the fact that you can run iOS apps on the Mac. It’s that you can write apps that take advantage of the whole platform, not just mobile but not Mac, or Web but not etc. The trade offs between the two platforms are evaporating. Notifications may be useless still on the desktop; that will rapidly change as app makers get used to the system-wide features spread across the merged platform. Video editing can move seamlessly to and from iPad (LumaTouch) and back to the Mac (X86 emulation mode), creating a production ecosystem and rendering farm for the new streaming renaissance. Work from home goes portable, plug and play as you travel and collaborate.

This will happen because Apple Silicon is such a game changer that it will be impossible to disrupt. Instant on, silent computing, virtual memory so invisible that you can swap huge loads in and out of memory, all kinds of attention to how people really use computers in this mobile era. The iPhone and iPad changed the way we thought about things. Now the Mac thinks that way too.

The only way I can justify the upgrade to the latest iPhone is by reupping to the Apple monthly payment contract at the end of the first of two years. So, Apple, how about you put the M1 MacBook Air on that plan, That way, as the ecosystem expands across the new modular software/hardware economy of speed, silence, and computing that just works, I can upgrade every release to the latest and greatest. The Apple Tax never had it so good.

__________________

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary, and Steve Gillmor . Recorded live Friday, November 13, 2020.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang

For more, subscribe to the Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the backchannel here on Telegram.

The Gillmor Gang on Facebook … and here’s our sister show G3 on Facebook.

Amazon has confirmed an early Financial Times report outlining layoffs at the retail giant’s Prime Air drone delivery program.

“As part of our regular business operations, we are reorganizing one small team within our larger Prime Air organization to allow us to best align with the needs of our customers and the business,” spokesperson Kristen Kish said in a statement offered to TechCrunch. “For affected employees, we are working to find roles in the areas where we are hiring that best match their experience and needs.”

The statement echoes similar sentiment from Amazon departments that have undergone headcount reduction, including the bit about attempting to shift employees around inside the company. Among other things, it’s an attempt to get out in front of suggestions that the project could be struggling. The company adds, however, that it is committed to the Prime Air project.

The initial report points to dozens of layoffs, though Amazon, unsurprisingly, is loath to give an exact figure. Understandably, the ambitious project, which would add rapid air delivers to Amazon’s existing robust delivery structure, hasn’t exactly been a quick launch.

In a blog post tied to the company’s RE:Mars conference last June, consumer head Jeff Wilke noted, “[W]ith the help of our world-class fulfillment and delivery network, we expect to scale Prime Air both quickly and efficiently, delivering packages via drone to customers within months.”

Certainly the health risks to essential workers during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is a prime candidate for such a launch, but there are a number of hurdles for the program, including both regulatory and technological. In August, the service received FAA approval for trials.