Year: 2020

Twitter may describe itself as the town square, but that doesn’t mean you have to talk to everyone walking past your seat at the cafe. Today, to increase the amount of “meaningful conversations” that take place on Twitter, and to help people weed out abuse and spam in their replies, the company announced that it is rolling out a new feature where users can limit who replies to their Tweets.

After a brief run in beta, the feature is rolling out globally starting today to users of the iOS and Android apps, as well as twitter.com, Suzanne Xie noted in a blog post announcing the feature. TweetDeck is not yet supported, Twitter tells me.

A small globe icon will start to appear at the bottom of your Tweet, and if you do nothing, everyone will still be able to reply — this is the default option. Or, you can tap it and limit replies just to those who follow you; or just to those who you tag in the Tweet itself.

And, if you pick the third of these and tag no one, it’s also a way to broadcast a Tweet or a thread of Tweets with no replies at all. (This all applies to “open” accounts; those that have locked who can view their Tweets are limited by default; and it doesn’t seem to replace the option to hide replies, which Twitter launched last year. We asked and Twitter declined to make any update or statement on the ‘hide replies’ functionality.)

The basic idea behind limiting replies is more control. Specifically, setting parameters around those who can reply can help the original poster curtail abusive or trolling replies, or to limit replies to keep the conversation on track. Both can be especially critical in a number of use cases common on Twitter. Those Tweeting about a sensitive issue or a political topic are classic scenarios that bring out trolls. And those trying to broadcast a conversation with a specific group (or indeed in a monologue) with the intention of making that conversation publicly viewable can now do it without interruption.

“Sometimes people are more comfortable talking about what’s happening when they can choose who can reply,” Xie wrote. “We’ve seen people use these settings to have conversations that weren’t really possible before. Starting today, everyone will be able to use these settings so unwanted replies don’t get in the way of meaningful conversations.”

Xie said that beta test feedback has been positive. Those using the feature said they felt more comfortable and protected from spam and abuse, and the feature is getting used: it found that those who have submitted abuse reports and had access to the new limit reply tool were three times more likely to use the settings.

It seems that limiting replies is more of a complement to, not a replacement for, muting and blocking: 60% of those using the limit replies feature weren’t already muting and blocking other users. Xie doesn’t mention how it is used alongside another spam-controlling feature Twitter launched last year, hiding replies.

People who are limited from replying directly can still retweet with a comment, and thus still inject whatever they want to say. But Xie noted that “these settings prevented an average of three potentially abusive replies while only adding one potentially abusive Retweet with Comment,” adding that there was no uptick in unwanted direct messages, either.

The feature getting announced today has been a while in the making, both from a product and even longer from an idealogical point of view.

The concept for limiting replies was first announced back at January at CES, when Kayvon Beykpour, Twitter’s VP of Product said that the primary motivation [for the feature] was control. “We want to build on the theme of authors getting more control and we’ve thought… that there are many analogs of how people have communications in life,” he said at the time.

The feature then formally started to roll out in a limited test in May, and the version that is getting turned on today looks just like that. (In fact, the screen shots are exactly the same, except with a more-recent date on the Tweets.)

But the bigger thinking behind new feature stretches back earlier than this year.

Twitter has long (as in years now) been working on creating better ways to channel its open-ended social platform to keep it from getting exploited and abused.

The issue stems from the platform’s basic DNA: Twitter was built around the idea of anyone being able to reply to anyone else, regardless of whether two users follow each other, or whether someone wants to hear a certain response. The issue, some argue, is that Twitter has dragged its feet because the open-ended aspect is actually in Twitter’s best business interest, since it encourages more engagement and use. (For a recent example of that argument pertaining specifically to Cancel Culture conversations, see here.)

Admittedly, it can be one of the more empowering feelings you can have on this big internet of ours, to be able to reply to someone on Twitter when you have an opinion on something, or just a question. Never mind that the reply may never come, or come from an army of trolls. And indeed, that open-ended aspect hasn’t always played out as a positive every time.

People, some of whom might be vulnerable or going through difficult situations, can be singled out for negative responses by other users, leading some of them to leave Twitter altogether, sometimes in very high-profile incidents. At a time when social media has become ever more influential and is being criticised by many asking whether it is fair enough, responsible enough and responsive enough in relation to the (incendiary and other) content that bounces around its playing fields, it has been a bad look for Twitter, and it’s been trying for years now to fix it. 

I’m guessing that some will decry the move to limit replies as a curtailing of free speech and free expression, that it might give a stronger voice to those who are actually using Twitter to disseminate abusive information themselves, by potentially limiting how people can respond.

There are a couple of counter arguments, though. One is that people can still see and Retweet what someone says, one way of responding. And it’s worth pointing out that Retweet with Comment can still be pretty powerful: sometimes these tweets can go viral and be seen even more than the original Tweets themselves.

Xie noted that people will be able to see when replies have been limited, and that Twitter working on ways of making that more obvious. That might well include pointing people to further information elsewhere. And the new timeline containing “Retweets with Comments” launched in May gets four times more visits on Tweets using these settings, Xie said.

And there have, in fact, been a number of tweaks to reduce the amount of noise on the platform: last year Twitter turned on the ability to hide replies, and over the years Twitter has improved the process for reporting harassment (including a number of updates and tests around harmful language), blocking people (although it seems this has some people contesting it) and muting people.

And it’s worth pointing out that Twitter has been making a lot of efforts to better detect and help users report original Tweets that are abusive, discriminatory, contain fake news and the rest.

And that might be the most important point here. This is a net positive for the platform, but still just one step in a long journey to work on improving the climate on Twitter overall.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Airbnb could file confidentially to go public as early as this month. The same report states that Airbnb could follow that filing with an IPO before year’s end. Morgan Stanley and Goldman are helping the former startup with its IPO process, the Journal writes.

The news that Airbnb’s IPO could be back on caps a tumultuous year for the home-sharing unicorn, which promised in 2019 to go public in 2020. The company was widely tipped to be considering a direct listing before COVID-19 arrived, crashing the global travel market, and with it, Airbnb’s financial health.

Airbnb declined to comment on its IPO plans.

As travelers stayed home, the company was forced to sharply cut staff, and take on billions in capital at prices that compared to its late 2019-momentum looked rather expensive.

But since those blows, Airbnb has began to make noise about positive progress regarding its platform usage, and, implicitly, its financial performance.

In June Airbnb said that between “May 17 to June 6, 2020, there were more nights booked for travel to Airbnb listings in the US. than during the same time period in 2019” and that “globally, over the most recent weekend (June 5-7), we saw year-over-year growth in gross booking value” for “the first time since February.”

And in July, the company that said that its users had “booked more than 1 million nights’ worth of future stays at Airbnb listings” globally in a single day, the first time since March 3rd that that had happened.

Precisely how far Airbnb has financially clawed its way back is not clear. But the company’s cost basis in the wake of its layoffs could lower the revenue base it needs to recover to reach something akin to profitability, a traditional IPO benchmark though one that has lost luster in recent years.

And with local travel taking off — slowly-improving airline occupancy rates are, therefore, not indicative of Airbnb’s performance or health — the company could have retooled its business in the wake of COVID to something that can still put up attractive revenues at strong margins.

Needless to say I am hype to read the Airbnb S-1, so the sooner it drops the happier I’ll be. Getting an in-depth look at what happened to the unicorn during COVID-19 is going to be fascinating.

Airbnb joins DoorDash, Coinbase, Palantir, and others on our IPO shortlist. More as we have it.

Valence, the Los Angeles-based online community dedicated to increasing economic opportunity for the Black community, has raised $5.25 million in financing as it looks to continue to expand its network for Black professionals in all fields.

The timing for the investment is critical as the country reckons with the implications and effects of systemic racism. In no field is the under-representation of Black professionals more deeply felt than the tech industry, where lack of diversity can have profound implications on products and services that are becoming increasingly central to large swaths of the economy.

Problems with under-representation and underlying issues of systemic racism manifest in facial recognition technologies, social networking applications and decision-making software for lending and credit that are aspects of how American society functions.

It’s with an eye toward technology and entrepreneurship that Valence raised its most recent round, according to a letter sent to the company’s users by new chief executive officer Guy Primus.

“Now that we have the capital that we were seeking, we will be doing three things. First we will improve the current product. We are very proud of what we have built thus far, but we know there are a few issues. We will continue to address those issues and will accelerate work to enhance technical performance on the platform,” Primus wrote. “Second, we will be expanding the team. We expect the team to more than triple in the coming months so that we can better serve you. Finally, we’ll be adding features and expanding our services. We will be delivering additional tools that facilitate even more meaningful connections and will expand Valence’s scope to include the professional growth and development of our members.”

A lot of that product development will go toward building tools that can help with professional development and career growth.

“We’re being very targeted in how we can drive economic opportunity and wealth creation in the black community,” said Valence co-founder and Upfront Ventures general partner Kobie Fuller.  

Already, Valence has brought on some of the top names in Silicon Valley as participants in a program to promote entrepreneurship and career development.

Valence currently has 10,000 people signed up for the platform and is growing at about 20% per month, according to Primus. The goal is to serve educational advice and tools to Valence users while at the same time making that group of career-minded Black professionals available to companies that would want to hire them.

Primus said that Valence will be selling its database and access to companies that would want to find prospective hires on the platform in a per-seat licensing model that would be accessible to headhunters and human resources departments.

The new investment round was led by GGV Capital, the international investment firm whose investments include Slack, Peloton, Wish and StockX. Hans Tung, the managing director who invested in those marquee deals, will be joining the company’s board of directors.

Other investors in the round include Upfront Ventures, along with Maveron, the SoftBank Opportunity Fund and Silicon Valley Bank.

We’ve aggregated many of the world’s best growth marketers into one community. Twice a month, we ask them to share their most effective growth tactics, and we compile them into this Growth Report.

This is how you stay up-to-date on growth marketing tactics — with advice that’s hard to find elsewhere.

Our community consists of startup founders and heads of growth. You can participate by joining Demand Curve’s marketing training program or its Slack group.

Without further ado, on to our community’s advice.

Accessing social groups through referrals

Excerpt from Demand Curve’s Growth Training.

A surprising benefit of referrals is how they often lead to social partnership opportunities.

Consider this process:

1. Find your happiest users.
2. Figure out what social groups they belong to. This could be anything from a female founders group, to university alumni networks, to a restaurant management trade association.
3. How do you find out? Just ask them what groups they belong to. Don’t be afraid of conversation.
4. Ask the happy user to connect you with the heads of those groups. Solve a problem they collectively have — even if it’s only tangentially related to your business. What matters is that more of these ideal customers know and trust you. You can also refer speakers, offer deals, write content for them or offer free office hours.
5. Down the road, these people inevitably send you referrals.
6. Reach out cold to people in other, similar groups. Reference the endorsement of the original group and provide a case study (with their permission).

Going through groups can be a high-leverage way to land and expand into ideal audiences.

Pixel-sharing tactics

Pattern, a Lehi, Utah-based reseller that offers large and small brands a way to optimize their sales on marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Walmart and Google Shopping, has raised $52 million in growth funding, the company said.

The money, from Ainge Advisory and KSV Global, will be used to expand the company’s business worldwide.

Founded in 2013, the e-commerce reseller uses analytics to lock down market specific keywords in advertising and has managed to reach a run-rate that should see it hit $500 million in annual revenue by the end of 2020, according to Pattern co-founder and chief investment officer, Melanie Alder.

Brands like Nestle, Pandora, Panasonic, Zebra and Skechers sell their goods to Pattern in an effort to juice sales on digital marketplaces.

“Pattern represents our brands in the US, across Europe, and in select markets in Asia, selling for us on global marketplaces such as Amazon, Walmart, Tmall, and JD as well as building and managing three of our direct-to-consumer sites,” said Kyle Bliffert, CEO and president of Atrium Innovations, a Nestle Health Science company, in a statement. “The global e-commerce growth we have experienced by leveraging Pattern’s expertise is extraordinary.”

Pattern places bets on where a product is likely to receive the most attention using specific keywords, according to the company’s chief executive, Dave Wright. The company buys products from its brand partners and then sells them widely across marketplaces in the US, Europe and Asia. These markets represent $2.7 trillion in total sales and Wright expects it to reach $7 trillion by 2024.

As Wright noted, a majority of searchers for sales begin on Amazon . The company just opened its eighteenth location in Germany. Pattern has grown sales for brands from $3 million to $26 million and the company makes money off of the margin on the sales of products. With the new funding, the company intends to expand into other geographies like Japan and India.

Wright says his company addresses one of the fundamental problems with advertising technology — the proliferation of tools hasn’t meant better optimization for most brands, because they’re teams aren’t equipped to specialize.

While there may be hundreds of different advertising and marketing folks working at a company, each company may have hundreds of brands that it sells and the dedicated teams to specific brands may only have one or two  people on staff.

“Data makes all the difference,” said co-founder and CEO Dave Wright. “I’ve spent the bulk of my career in data science and data management, and our ability to detect and act on ‘patterns’ on ecommerce platforms has allowed the brands we represent to be incredibly successful.”

This year’s TC Sessions: Mobility on October 6 & 7 will be a fantastic opportunity to find out all the latest on advancements in autonomy, micro-mobility, transportation AI and much more. Argo AI co-founder and CEO Bryan Salesky is among the best-positioned people in the world to speak to all those topics, and how they intersect with both the startup world, and legacy automaker giants like Ford and Volkswagen.

Salesky has a long history of focusing on the intersection of robotics and transportation dating all the way back to his work at the Carnegie Mellon University National Robotics Engineering Center, and CMU’s DARPA Urban Challenge winning competition entry in 2007. He was also an early team member for Google’s self-driving car project, which would eventually become Waymo, overseeing the search comnpany’s self-driving sensor, computer and vehicle hardware platform.

Since founding Argo AI in 2016, Salesky has also been at the center of some of the biggest and most influential developments in the autonomous vehicle industry. The startup first made waves with a $1 billion investment from automaker Ford in 2017, which gave Ford a majority stake in the venture. Then in 2019, Volkswagen announced a $2.6 billion investment in Argo, putting it at the center of the self-driving stack of now just one, but two of the world’s largest car companies.

As of July, Argo’s valuation sits at around $7.5 billion, making it a unicorn many times over. We’ll hear from Salesky how the company is helping both these industry heavyweights prepare for an autonomous future. We’ll also talk about the path to commercialization of these services, and how soon we can think about seeing them in active use as consumers.

Get your tickets for TC Sessions: Mobility to hear from Bryan Salesky along with several other fantastic speakers from Porsche, Waymo, Lyft, and more. Tickets are just $145 for a limited time with discounts for groups, students and exhibiting startups. We hope to see you there!

Till, a platform that serves as an intermediary between landlords and renters, has raised an $8 million seed round led by Route 66 Ventures with participation from MetaProp Ventures and NextGen Venture Partners.

Till was founded on the premise that people are not always able to pay their rent on the 1st of the month, but might be better suited to paying their rent in smaller payments throughout the month. Through its flexible rent platform, Till creates a customized payment schedule for renters that aligns with their monthly cash flow. Till estimates it can help cut evictions by as much as 50%.

“We work to understand that timing and we can look at their expense loads to help them balance if they should be paying more now or more later in the month,” Till CEO David Sullivan told TechCrunch.

With the funding, Till plans to work on getting more landlords on board across additional states and further develop the flexible rent product. In order for renters to use the platform, their landlords must already be working with Till. To date, Till is live at 170 properties that consist of 30,000 units in total across 14 states.

“Since we first learned about Till, we have been extremely impressed by its ability to bridge the gap between the increasingly volatile income and expense patterns of renters and the more rigid financial realities of landlords,” Metaprop General Partner Zak Shwarzman said in a statement. “As the uncertainty wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic and related economic fallout continues with no clear end in sight, it’s more important than ever that landlords find new, mutually beneficial, ways to work with renters to reduce late fees, minimize evictions and foster renters’ long-term financial health.”

Late fees vary by state and by landlord. Sometimes they come in the form of a flat fee or a percentage of your rent. Either way, they’re punitive.

“It’s a very punitive fee against a renter having a cash flow issue,” Sullivan said. “Even if a renter has the ability to stay in the unit, renters then get overburdened with fees, which makes their ability to pay even more challenging.”

While this product may have more relevance these days, during a time when people are facing severe economic insecurity as a result of COVID-19, Sullivan said this problem is not specific to the pandemic. Though, COVID-19 has exacerbated the issue.

“Pre-Covid, you have about $50 billion of delinquent rent a year and renters being charged about $5 billion in late fees,” Sullivan said. “That creates a burden on renters. It leads to three million families being evicted in normal year. And evictions disproportionately impact minority communities.”

The business model, however, relies on financial insecurity, as Till’s target customer is someone who already struggles to make their monthly rental payments. For its flexible rent product, Till charges renters $3 per month if they make all of their payments on time, and $9 per month if they don’t. Till also offers a rental loan product for renters with varying rates.

“We want to create win-win outcomes,” Sullivan said. “We fundamentally believe that when you get renters to succeed, landlords succeed to.”

The summer is coming to an end, and fall is almost here. Which means it’s time for students to “return” to school. To help those looking to get ahead, we are offering an annual Extra Crunch membership to students for $50 off. That’s a full year of Extra Crunch for only $50 (plus tax). You’ll also be grandfathered in at the discounted price for future years until you cancel. Make the most of your curriculum with Extra Crunch startup intelligence at your disposal. 

How to claim the discount:

• Use a .edu or university email address and send a message to our customer support team at extracrunch@techcrunch.com. Please let them know that you are seeking the back to school student discount. 
• The team will respond within 24 hours with a unique link to claim your discount.

With Extra Crunch membership, students receive more than 100 exclusive articles delivered per month, including weekly investor surveys, market analysis and how-tos and interviews on fundraising, growth, monetization and other work topics. You also can browse and use TechCrunch.com more efficiently without the distraction of banner ads, and stay up-to-date through our Extra Crunch members-only newsletter.

Another benefit of Extra Crunch is discounts on events and services. If you have interest in attending TechCrunch events, you’ll be able to save 20% on tickets. Once you join, all you have to do is reach out to our customer service team to receive a discount code for any TechCrunch event.

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Extra Crunch is currently available in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and select European countries. We’re also hoping to have support in Australia by the end of August. If you are outside of the supported regions, you will not be able to take advantage of this deal.

Mozilla today announced a major restructuring of its commercial arm, the Mozilla Corporation that will see about 250 employees lose their jobs and the shuttering of the organization’s operations in Taipei, Taiwan. This move comes after the organization already laid off about 70 employees earlier this year.  The most recent numbers from 2018 put Mozilla at about 1,000 employees worldwide.

Citing falling revenues because of the global pandemic, Mozilla’s executive chairwoman and CEO Mitchell Baker said in an internal message that the company’s pre-COVID plans were no longer feasible.

“Pre-COVID, our plan for 2020 was a year of change: building a better internet by accelerating product value in Firefox, increasing innovation, and adjusting our finances to ensure financial stability over the long term,” Baker writes. “We started with immediate cost-saving measures such as pausing our hiring, reducing our wellness stipend and cancelling our All-Hands. But COVID-19 has accelerated the need and magnified the depth for these changes. Our pre-COVID plan is no longer workable. We have talked about the need for change — including the likelihood of layoffs — since the spring. Today these changes become real.”

Layed off employees will receive severance that is at least equivalent to their full base pay through December 31 and will still receive their individual performance bonuses for the first half of the year, as well as part of their company bonus and the standard COBRA health insurance benefits.

Mozilla promises that its smaller organization will be able to act more “quickly and nimbly” and that it will work more closely with partners that share its goal of an open web ecosystem. At the same time, Baker wants Mozilla to remain a “technical powerhouse of the internet activist movement,” yet she also acknowledges that the organization as a whole must also focus on economics and work on creating sustainable business models that still stay true to its mission.

‘We are also restructuring to put a crisper focus on new product development and go to market activities,” writes Baker. “In the long run, I am confident that the new organizational structure will serve our product and market impact goals well, but we will talk in detail about this in a bit.”

On the product side, Mozilla will continue to focus on Firefox, as well as Pocket, its Hubs virtual reality project, its new VPN service, Web Assembly and other privacy and security products. But it is also launching a new Design and UX team, as well as a new applied machine learning team to help bring machine learning to its products.

Fintech is quite possibly the hottest investment area in the venture world these days, and that is why we are so excited to have one of the world’s leading operators and investors talk more about the future of fintech, wealth management, neobanks, infrastructure and more later today on Extra Crunch Live at 1pm EDT / 10am PDT / / 5pm GMT.

For more than a decade, Andy Rachleff has been the founder and CEO of Wealthfront, an algorithmic wealth management app that has also been adding new banking functionality as well. Before Wealthfront, he was a general partner at early-stage venture firm Benchmark.

We’re going to be taking a bunch of questions from the audience, so do come prepared. That said, there is just so much to talk about in fintech these days that we are going to cover a lot of ground.

We’ll talk a bit about what the landscape looks like in the robo-advisor world, and how and why Wealthfront has been building out neobank features. We’ll ask Rachleff what he sees as the future of the industry, particularly given that bank heavyweights like Chase and Goldman Sachs are increasingly becoming digital native.

And then we will migrate the conversation into the VC investing world covering the full range of fintech stages. For the earliest startups, what does the world look like today to get started in the fintech space? Getting started seems easier than ever due to the rise of platforms like Plaid, but the ease of starting has been met with a massive increase in competition. How should startups navigate that? And are there still moats available in the fintech space?

On the other side of the coin, what does the exit market look like for fintechs these days? We had a number of massive exits last year including Plaid and Galileo, and so what does the future portend here?

These questions, plus more questions from you, our audience. So join us if you’re an Extra Crunch member and get caught up on all the fintech goodness going on. And if you aren’t an Extra Crunch member, be sure to check out subscription options before we get started.

Meeting details are below the paywall.

Meeting Details