Year: 2020

It took an unusually long time, but HBO Max is set to launch on Roku devices tomorrow.

Roku users make up a massive chunk of the cord-cutting market, so the absence of an HBO Max app for Roku nearly seven months after the service launched was pretty glaring. We’d been wondering where the Max app was for months, its launch seemingly tied up over the matter of where and how customers could subscribe.

With Wonder Woman 1984 set to debut on Max in just a few weeks, one can assume there was tremendous pressure all around to get the deal done. As part of the deal, Roku users will be able to sign up for HBO Max using Roku’s built-in payment system, Roku Pay.

This news comes about a month after HBO Max filled a similar gap by finally launching on Amazon Fire devices, and days after the announcement of a mega deal that will see all 2021 Warner Bros. films launch on HBO Max on the same day they hit theaters.

With this launch, HBO Max will have most of the key bases covered, with support on iOS, Android, Chromecast, Roku, Amazon’s Fire devices, PC/Mac, and all of the modern gaming consoles minus the Switch.

Earlier today, TechCrunch reported that consumer reseller marketplace StockX raised $275 million at a valuation of approximately $2.8 billion.

Selling a tenth of your company for north of a quarter-billion may be somewhat common among late-stage software startups with tremendous growth, but one known for its market share in the sneaker resale niche? Don’t laugh, the round actually makes pretty OK sense. And given the growth that StockX has managed, it could have a path to the public markets in under a year.

In our piece covering the funding round, Matt Burns wrote that StockX saw its nondomestic sales rise 260% in Q3 compared to the year-ago period, recording half of its 13 million transactions in the last 12 months.

But that wasn’t really enough to get my head around the round, so I went hunting. Here’s a grip of other, dated growth metrics that help us put the new funding into proper context:

•  In mid-2019, when StockX became a unicorn after raising $110 million, it reported $100 million or more in monthly gross merchandise volume. It had around 800 employees at the time.
• As part of that deal, a former eBay exec and former NYSE executive vice president of the New York Stock Exchange took over as CEO and took a board seat. The man in question, Scott Cutler, remains the company’s chief executive.
• StockX claimed more than $1 billion in gross merchandise volume in 2019 (the company supports streetwear and luxury resales as well as sneakers). The company closed out 2019 with around 1,000 employees.
• In mid-2020, StockX released a midyear report — née “corporate brag sheet” — saying that it had surpassed $2.5 billion in gross merchandise volume, and 10 million trades, half of which had been recorded in the last year.

To understand if those numbers are impressive or not, we’ll need to convert gross merchandise result into revenue. So, we’ll need to better understand StockX’s fee structure.

A lot can change in a year. Especially this year. For Boston Dynamics, the past 12 months have brought a number of radical changes traditionally not seen at 30-year-old businesses of its size. It’s a list that includes the first new CEO in the company’s history, wide availability of its first commercial product and, most recently, being acquired by its third owner in seven years.

Of course, no one has ever accused Boston Dynamics of being traditional.

Last week, the Waltham, Massachusetts-based robotics pioneer confirmed earlier rumors that it was being acquired by Hyundai. The South Korean tech giant will be taking an 80% stake in the company, leaving the other 20% or so to its former owner, Softbank Group. The deal, which values the 300-person company at $1.1 billion, is expected to close next June.

“We grew from 100 people to 300 people under SoftBank,” CEO Rob Playter tells TechCrunch. “That took investment. It took encouragement from them to launch a product, launch the products that we had in mind. It was critical. So our mission, which they started us down the path of, is to launch multiple robot products that include mobility, manipulation and vision. And they really gave us power and afterburners to pursue that mission.”

Playter, a longtime Boston Dynamics employee, waves away unfavorable optics around the company’s quick transitions between owners. Each owner served its function for the company’s bottom line — Google offered resources for exploration, SoftBank compelled it to productize and Hyundai will deliver the sort of engineering and manufacturing know-how required to scale up its products.

Image Credits: Boston Dynamics

“Ultimately [SoftBank is] an investment company, and we always expected there to be some kind of an exit,” says Playter. “The question was always when, and when is the right timing? So this isn’t really a surprise to us. And I think they saw and we saw that the time was right as our product launch grew to get a different kind of partner.”

The executive adds that the nature of the company’s interactions with SoftBank were ultimately limited under regulatory restrictions placed on the acquisition by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). “Getting through CFIUS will be a closing condition on the Hyundai deal,” he explains.

While SoftBank’s ownership of the company was seen as, at very least, aggressively nudging the company in the direction of commercialization after decades of operating as a research firm, the executive tells TechCrunch that Hyundai largely approved of the company’s existing roadmap. The past two years have certainly brought some profound changes for the company, but Boston Dynamics is still a fairly lean organization, and as such is designed to take a measured approach to the market.

Of the 300 or so employees, between 100 to 120 are currently focused on its first commercial product, Spot. Many of the company’s recent hires are focused on areas like sales, customer service and quality control — relatively unfamiliar terrain for an organization that went more than a quarter-century without releasing its first product. The team focused on its logistics robot, Handle, is significantly smaller, but growing, and will “match or exceed Spot over the course of the next year,” he adds. Handle is, after all, Boston Dynamics’ commercial launch. The company is set to unveil the commercialized version of the box-lifting machine in April. Pilot programs similar to those offered for Spot will follow and sales of the product will start at some point the following year.

The company has already begun to test “proof of concept” models with select partners in real-world warehouses. “These are systems for development that we’re taking onto customer sites to do proof of concept tests,” says Playter. “We’re taking learnings from that to improve the design. In parallel work, we’re designing the for-manufacture version of that robot right now. And first versions of that new generation will come online next summer.”

Fulfilment and logistics have already been a hot category for robotics for a number of years, but interest has only grown amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Handle represents a decidedly different to-market approach than Spot, in that respect. A large part of the quadrupedal robot’s pilot program was working with customers and partners to determine which categories had the highest demand for the advanced robotics technology. Demand for Spot hasn’t been huge, but it’s been steady, with the company selling more than 400 million units in the first 15 months.

In-demand applications include deployment in dangerous scenarios like a BP oil rig and a National Grid electric plant. Other more surprising use cases have arisen, as well. Late last year, the ACLU raised concern around video of a Spot robot featured in police training drills, which debuted at our Robotics event back in April. This October, a Spot was seen at a crime scene in Brooklyn. Playter confirmed that the NYPD is one of the company’s customers.

“They have a Spot and were using it, I think, to maintain a safe standoff distance when somebody (a potentially armed suspect) was barricading themselves,” he explains. “So I think getting a camera in and potentially communicating, de-escalating a potentially dangerous situation was the goal there.”

“One of the intended purposes of Spot is to enhance the safety of our customers by removing or providing the opportunity to remove a person from a dangerous environment,” Playter adds. “And that includes public safety officials like the police. And in particular, the Massachusetts State Police have been interested in using Spot in a classic mobile robot application, investigating suspicious packages or potential bombs. So I think these are great applications of robotics and something that we support.”

The next year will also see Boston Dynamics continuing to expand Spot’s available markets. Under the Hyundai banner, the company will likely continue the pace of releases set by Spot and Handle.

“I think something like a robot every couple of years is a pace that we could manage. From clean sheet, we can build a new robot in under a year,” says Playter. “And then you have to go through an iterative process of refining that concept and starting to understand market fit. And so I would look to, I want to stabilize the launch of Spot. There’s already improvements to Spot that we want to be thinking about. So I don’t know if we’re going to go build the next generation of Spot or maybe build the next robot for the next market. And that remains to be seen. We don’t quite have the team that’s big enough to do that just yet.”

The company’s research wing, which focuses on even more bleeding-edge robots like the humanoid Atlas, will also continue under Hyundai’s watch. The company stopped accepting new defense contracts in 2014, shortly after the Google acquisition, but research continues to be a key part of Boston Dynamics’ work.

“[W]e’re developing our own R&D work with Atlas internally,” Playter says. “And so we still use that as a platform to build both advanced hardware and software. We have some exciting things that I think will come out in the near future. We’re going to show you what we’ve been up to, probably in the classic Boston Dynamics home grown video way. I don’t think we have a deadline on when that’s going to come out, but there’s something in the oven.”

Integrating some of Boston Dynamics’ more advanced research into far out Hyundai concepts like the recently announced Ultimate Mobility Vehicle could also be a good fit. “We think the combination of wheels on legs is really interesting. If you recall, we built the first version of Handle with wheels and legs. And so there’s some real synergy there, I think. I think they’re really going to be able to build those vehicles.”

Amazon SVP of Devices & Services David Limp joined us at TC Sessions: Space today, and he shared some new details about the company’s Project Kuiper broadband satellite constellation. Limp shared more details on the technical design challenges that the Kuiper team solved with its revolutionary customer terminal, but he also shared more info on the company’s plans around launching its constellation, which will number 3,236 per the current plan approved by the FCC.

“We’re launch agnostic” Limp said. “If you know somebody who has a rocket out there, give us a call. “One of the reasons we thought the time was right to do a constellation now is because of some of the dynamics happening in the launch industry. Every day, we see a new demonstration of reusability every day, we see new demonstration of breakthroughs in better engines, whether that’s Raptor [SpaceX’s engine] or BE-4 [Blue Origin’s].”

Part of the FCC’s approval for Amazon’s constellation requires it to send up around half of its planned total constellation within the next six years, which is a significant volume and will require an aggressive launch pace to achieve. SpaceX’s Starlink, for context, has launched 16 batches of 60 satellites each for its network, with 14 of those happening in 2020 alone. In order to achieve that pace, Limp said that while he hopes Blue Origin (the Jeff Bezos-owned private rocket launch company) can provide some of its launch capacity, they will be looking elsewhere for rides to space as well.

“When you have to put 3,200-plus things into space, you will need will need launch a lot lots of launch capacity,” he said. “Our hope is that it’s not just one provider, that there will be multiple providers.”

Depending on the final Project Kuiper satellite spec, this could be a huge opportunity for new small satellite launchers coming on board, including companies like Astra, Kuiper and Virgin Orbit who spoke earlier today at the event on the progress their launch companies are making. It could also be a windfall for existing providers like Rocket Lab – and even potentially SpaceX. In response to a separate question, Limp noted that he doesn’t believe Project Kuiper is in direct competition with SpaceX’s Starlink, since there’s such a broad addressable market when it comes to connectivity for unserved and underserved customers globally.

With COVID-19 vaccinations just beginning, Twitter will ramp up its efforts to tamp down conspiracy theories that might discourage people from getting the vaccine.

The newly expanded rules apply to debunked information about the adverse effects of getting vaccinated, misleading tweets claiming the vaccine is not necessary and conspiracies that claim COVID-19 vaccines are used to “intentionally cause harm to or control populations.” Twitter’s updated policy will go into effect on December 21.

Twitter will require users who tweet something that falls in one of those categories to delete the content before being allowed to tweet again. Addressing vaccine misinformation that doesn’t meet the threshold for removal, Twitter says that it will begin placing warning labels on “unsubstantiated rumors, disputed claims, as well as incomplete or out-of-context information about vaccines” starting in early 2021. Those tweets may also be hidden, have their engagement limited and be accompanied by public health information labels.

The company said that it will prioritize removing misinformation with the greatest potential to do harm, and we’ve asked Twitter if that decision is made based on how much exposure a tweet is getting or the nature of its content. The new policies will be enforced through a hybrid approach of automation and human moderation.

Early in the pandemic, Twitter created a set of new content policies specific to COVID-19 misinformation, which was just beginning to take off. While bogus and potentially harmful misinformation about how the virus was transmitted were the big worries then, the company’s new policy update will address concerns that online misinformation might lead a significant portion of the population to refuse the vaccine.

In November, Californians voted to pass Proposition 24, a ballot measure that imposes new regulations on the collection of data by businesses. As part of the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), individuals will now have the right to opt out of the sharing and sale of their personal information, while companies must “reasonably” minimize data collection to protect user privacy.

For companies like Apple, Facebook, Uber and Google, all of which are headquartered in California, these new requirements may seem like a limitation on their existing data collection capabilities.

Looking more closely, it’s a nuanced story: By not only meeting the demands of these new regulations but exceeding them, companies have an opportunity to differentiate themselves from competitors to grow their bottom line, thanks to new technologies that put data privacy in the hands of consumers.

Take Apple, the world’s most valuable tech company, as an example. When Google and Facebook — two of Apple’s largest competitors — were under fire for exploiting customer data, CEO Tim Cook saw an opportunity to turn privacy into a competitive advantage.

The tech giant rolled out a suite of new privacy-maximizing features, including a new Sign In With Apple feature that allows users to securely log in to apps without sharing personal information with the apps’ developers. More recently, the company updated its privacy page to better showcase how its flagship apps are designed with privacy in mind.

This doubling down on privacy took center stage in the company’s marketing campaigns, too, with “Privacy Matters” becoming the central message of its prime-time air spots and its 10,000+ billboards around the world.

And of course, the company could hardly resist taking the occasional jab at its data-hungry competitors:

“The truth is, we could make a ton of money if we monetized our customer — if our customer was our product,” said Cook in an interview with MSNBC. “We’ve elected not to do that.”

Apple’s commitment to privacy not only puts them in a stronger position to comply with new CPRA regulations. It also sends a strong message to an industry that has profited off of customer data, and an even stronger message to consumers: It’s time to respect personal data.

The growing demand for privacy

The prioritization of consumer data privacy comes out of a need to address growing consumer concerns, which have consistently made headlines in recent years. Attention-grabbing stories such as the Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal, as well as major breaches at companies such as Equifax, have left consumers wondering whom they can trust and how they can protect themselves. And the research is pretty conclusive — consumers want more out of their businesses and governments:

• Only 52% of consumers feel like they can trust businesses, and only 41% worldwide trust their governments (Edelman).
• 85% of consumers believe businesses should be doing more to actively protect their data (IBM).
• 61% of consumers say their fears of having personal data compromised have increased in the last two years (Salesforce).

It’s hard to say exactly how this trust crisis will manifest in the global economy, but we’ve already seen several large boycotts, like the #DeleteFacebook movement, and a staggering 75% of consumers who say they won’t purchase from a company they don’t trust with their data.

And it’s not just Big Tech. From loyalty programs and inventory planning to smart cities and election advertising, it’s hard to overestimate the appetite — and effect — of using data to optimize processes and drive behavioral change.

As we look toward a new data-driven decade, however, we’re starting to realize the cost of this big data arms race: Consumers have lost trust in both the private and public sectors.

Private sector initiatives like Apple’s strengthened commitment to privacy, alongside public policy legislation like the CPRA, have the potential to not only build back consumer trust but to go even further beyond the minimum requirements. Thanks to new technologies like self-sovereign identity, companies can transform their data privacy policies, while cutting costs, reducing fraud and improving customer experiences.

The value of SSI

Self-sovereign identity (or SSI) leverages a thin layer of distributed ledger technology and a dose of very advanced cryptography to enable companies to prove the identities of their customers, without putting privacy at risk.

At its simplest, SSI is a way of giving consumers more control over their personal information. It offers a way for consumers to digitally store and manage personal information (in the form of verifiable credentials) that are issued and signed by a trusted authority (like a government, bank or university) in a way that can never be altered, embellished or manipulated. Consumers can then share this information when, where and with whom they wish as a way of proving things about themselves.

While sharing digital records online is nothing new, SSI changes the game in two fundamental ways:

1. Organizations can capture the required data, without overcollection. Unlike the physical credentials we carry in our wallets, like driver’s licenses and insurance cards, a digital verifiable credential can be divided into individual attributes, which can be shared separately.

The classic example is walking into a bar and showing the bouncer your driver’s license to verify that you are of legal age. The card reveals the necessary data, but it also includes information that the bar has no business knowing — such as your name and address. With verifiable credentials, we can share proof of age without revealing anything else.

For sensitive cases, self-sovereign identity even allows us to cryptographically prove something about ourselves without revealing the actual data. In this case, we could provide a yes/no answer to whether we are of a legal age, without revealing our date of birth.

For individuals, data minimization represents a great stride forward in privacy. For organizations, it’s a way of avoiding the massive liability of storing and securing excess personally identifiable information.

1. Correlation becomes much, much harder. While there are those who say privacy is a myth and our data will all be correlated anyway, self-sovereign identity protects us against many of the leading concerns with other digital identity solutions.

For example, if we look at other tools that give us some level of data portability, like single-sign-on, there is always a concern that a single player in the middle can track what we do online. There’s a reason those Facebook ads are eerily relevant: They know every site and app we have signed into using our Facebook profile.

With SSI, there’s no one player or centralized registry in the middle. Verifiers (those requesting an identity verification) can verify the authenticity cryptographically, meaning they don’t have to “phone home” to the original credential issuer and the credential issuer has no way of knowing when, where or to whom a credential was shared. No correlatable signatures are shared, and your digital identity is truly under your control and for your eyes only.

As a result, the consumer benefits from better privacy and security, while businesses benefit from:

• Reduced fraud, with better, more accurate data verification at the time of account creation.
• Reduced friction, with a dramatically faster sign-up process.
• Reduced costs, both from time savings and from smarter KYC compliance (which normally costs large banks $500 million+ each year).
• Increased efficiency, with less back-and-forth verifying third-party data.
• Better customer experiences, with the ability to create a personalized, omnichannel customer experience without data harvesting.

And it’s not science fiction, either. Several major governments, businesses and NGOs have already launched self-sovereign solutions. These include financial institutions like UNIFY, Desert Financial and TruWest, healthcare organizations like Providence Health and the NHS, and telecom and travel giants like LG and the International Air Transport Association.

It’s not clear how soon the technology will become ubiquitous, but it is clear that privacy is quickly emerging as the next competitive battleground. Newly passed regulations like CPRA codify the measures companies need to take, but it’s consumer expectations that will drive long-term shifts within the companies themselves.

For those ahead of the curve, there will be significant cost savings and growth — especially as customers start to shift their loyalty toward those businesses that respect and protect their privacy. For everyone else, it will be a major wake-up call as consumers demand to take back their data.

Few young software companies have had as great a year as San Diego-based ClickUp . The company, which makes business productivity tools for task management, goals and docs, raised its first bit of outside funding in mid-2020.

Just six months later, it has reached a $1 billion valuation after doubling its customer base and revenue increased ninefold as businesses embraced remote work.

The new funding and valuation after just a few months of hefty growth show just how closely investors are watching the productivity software space. I spoke with ClickUp CEO Zeb Evans yesterday to get his insights on the challenges of hypergrowth and why it made sense to say “yes” to the check.

This interview has edited for length and clarity.

TechCrunch: This has been an awfully busy year for your team. What’s happened since we talked about your Series A?

Zeb Evans: The last time we chatted with you, we were at an inflection point where we had seen a lot of growth pre-COVID and then post-COVID we saw that growth continue. So we just really kept up those growth rates and really increased in some areas. Last time we chatted we had about 100,000 teams and now we’re over double that with over 200,000 teams that use our software. I think we were at about a million users and now we’re well over two million users that use the product as well.

CEO Zeb Evans. Image Credits: ClickUp

That’s interesting, so it sounds like you’ve found a sweet spot in terms of team size?

Yeah, our number of users per team ends up being around 10 people or a little bit more than that. And that’s really stayed true from six months ago to today.

How has your own team’s size changed?

We’re right around 200 people right now, so we’ve definitely more than doubled since the last time that we talked, and we’re going to double again hopefully in the next quarter so we’ve got an aggressive hiring plan to do that.

Cool, so you’ve doubled your user base in six months as well as your team. How has your team adjusted to scaling so quickly?

It’s a good question. I think that the biggest thing that we’ve always focused on is shipping a new version of ClickUp every week. That is our differentiation. We’ve kind of created these iterative cycles called natural product market fit and it’s been hard to keep up with that. I mean, we’ve done it but as you scale, you know you have many more users and more considerations to take into every feature that you change and feature that you develop.

I think that’s been like the biggest thing we’ve been focused on and listening to that community that that is ever-growing every week. Obviously hiring is always top of mind also, and we haven’t done that as fast as we’d like to. But we’re making improvements there and we’re getting there.

A lot of startups raised opportunistic rounds during what’s seemed to be a very hot market, at what point did you think that it might make sense to raise even more money after closing that Series A?

So, our Series A was our first outside capital and we didn’t really know what that would do at the time. What we saw when we raised that fund was that we were able to really accelerate our vision and our product. We’ve used these resources very efficiently and we saw great unit economics come out of that. And also as you mentioned, it’s certainly a good time and a great market to be in — the productivity market is just the hottest right now. So it was kind of a trifecta of that but the real reason to raise was certainly to be able to continue that product growth and the acceleration of scaling that comes with raising money.

Texas announced Wednesday that it will sue Google, accusing the search giant of maintaining an illegal monopoly in online advertising. The suit, which has yet to appear in an official filing, was first announced in a video from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Texas will be joined by Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Mississippi, South Dakota, North Dakota, Utah and Idaho, according to reporting from Reuters.

“It isn’t fair that google effectively eliminated its competition and crowned itself the head of online advertising,” Paxton said. Paxton argues that Google’s advertising practices and “anticompetitive conduct” give it too much power over the online advertising ecosystem, to the detriment of publishers.

Paxton’s name might sound familiar. He’s the state official who led a recent lawsuit disputing President-elect Joe Biden’s wins in the battleground states of Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin on behalf of Texas. The Supreme Court unceremoniously rejected the suit on the grounds that the state lacked the standing to file it. Paxton is also currently under investigation by the FBI for bribery allegations, making him a deeply controversial figure to lead such an effort.

The lawsuit from the coalition of states comes two months after the Justice Department filed its own antitrust suit against Google. The DOJ’s effort is focused on “anticompetitive and exclusionary practices” in the company’s search and advertising business.

Last week, 46 states announced a lawsuit against Facebook over parallel antitrust concerns. That suit, which the state of Texas is also participating in, alleges that Facebook built a monopoly through predatory business practices like buying its rivals. The FTC also filed its own lawsuit against Facebook last week, alleging that the company is a monopoly and that its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp should be undone.

We already knew that Facebook isn’t happy about Apple’s upcoming restrictions on app tracking and ad targeting, but the publicity battle entered a new phase today.

Over the summer, Apple announced that beginning in iOS 14, developers will have to ask users for permission in order to use their IDFA identifiers for ad targeting. On one level, it’s simply giving users a choice, but since they’ll have to opt-in to participate, the assumption is that we’ll see a dramatic reduction in app tracking and targeting.

The actual change was delayed until early next year, but in the meantime Facebook suggested that it might mean the end of its Audience Network, which uses Facebook data to target ads on other websites and apps.

Then, this morning, Facebook placed print ads in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post declaring that it’s “standing up to Apple for small businesses everywhere,” and it published a blog post and website making the same argument.

While it’s easy to see all of this as an attempt to put a more sympathetic face on a PR campaign that’s really just protecting Facebook’s ad business, Dan Levy — the company’s vice president of ads and business products — got on a call with reporters today to argue otherwise.

Image Credits: Facebook

For one thing, he said that with its “diversified” advertising business, Facebook won’t feel the impact as keenly as small businesses, particularly since it already acknowledged potential ad targeting challenges in its most recent earnings report.

“We’ve already been factoring this into our expectations for the business,” he said.

In contrast, Levy said small businesses rely on targeting in order to run efficient advertising campaigns — and because they’ve got small budgets, they need that efficiency. He predicted that if Apple moves forward with its plans, “Small businesses will struggle to stay afloat and many aspiring entrepreneurs may never get off the ground.”

Levy was joined by two small business owners, Monique Wilsondebriano of Charleston Gourmet Burger Company in South Carolina and Hrag Kalebjian of Henry’s House of Coffee in San Francisco. Kalebjian that while business in the coffee shop is down 40% year-over-year, his online sales have tripled, and he credited targeted Facebook campaigns for allowing him to tell personal stories about his family’s love for Armenian coffee.

Wilsondebriano said that when she and her husband Chevalo started a business selling their homemade burger marinade, “we did not have the option to run radio ads or TV ads, we just didn’t have a budget for that” — and so they turned to Facebook and Instagram. With the Charleston Gourmet Burger Company now available in 50 states and 17 countries, Wilsondebriano said, “It makes me sad that if this update happens, so many small businesses won’t get that same opportunity that Cheval and I had.”

Levy also suggested that Apple’s bottom line might benefit from the changes — if developers make less money on ads from Facebook and other platforms, they may need to rely more on subscriptions or in-app transactions (with Apple collecting its much-discussed fee), and they might turn to Apple’s own targeted advertising platform.

A number of ad industry groups have taken also issue with Apple’s policy, with SVP Craig Federighi fighting back in a speech criticizing what he called “outlandish” and “false” claims from the adtech industry. In that speech, Federighi said Apple’s App Tracking Transparency feature is designed “to empower our users to decide when or if they want to allow an app to track them in a way that could be shared across other companies’ apps or websites.”

In 20 years of working for startups, I’ve never seen as many plot twists and turns as I have in the last several months. Times are tough.

But, from the perspective of raising capital, 2020 has not been an awful time to be a startup founder. The world has changed, but the fundamentals of raising capital are the same. In the first half of the year, VCs invested $129 billion, and Q3 is up 9% year-over-year, reports Crunchbase.

After the screeching halt to business in April subsided, founders and investors, people who are generally comfortable with uncertainty, got back to work raising and investing.

Choosing the right VC is one of the most important decisions startup founders will make. In good times, the choice can make or break a startup. When times are bad, it’s even more likely that the wrong VC partner could be the catalyst that starts a downward spiral. With many funds still looking to make investments before the end of the year and startups jockeying for cash, founders need to know how to find the right investor.

It’s not about simply choosing an investor — you are hiring your next boss. The investor should be someone you feel comfortable working with and working for.

You don’t want an investor who is checked out, but too much focus isn’t good, either. And, you don’t want an investor who is completely agreeable since your best outcome will be driven by a constructively demanding advisor.

My company, Quiq, had several term sheets when the dust settled on our Series B pitch meetings. Since the financial terms were similar, selecting an investor was made on a more subjective basis and boiled down to two fundamental questions: