Year: 2020

Hey everybody, welcome back to Week in Review. The world of COVID-19 is our new reality, so I’ll continue to include links to some positive updates on research, but I’ll be shifting back the focus to covering tech’s movers and shakers of the week.

If you’re reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can get this in your inbox here, and follow my tweets here.

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The big story

One thing that’s been interesting to see over the past few weeks is how our relationship with screen time has changed. For many, screen time is now all the time and while we haven’t stopped using too many gadgets, there are some we’ve taken out of drawers and closets and added to our repertoire.

For some, it’s been cooking gadgets. While I’ve yet to open up the sous vide gadget I received over the holidays, I was very tempted by my editor’s review of the Ooni gas-fired outdoor pizza oven this week. For me, I’ve strangely seemed to spend a lot more time with the two gadgets I own that are made by Facebook. The currently sold-out Oculus Quest and Facebook Portal are the twin pillars of Facebook’s hardware strategy, but it’s been a bit interesting to see how much more that strategy seems to thrive when we’re all stuck at home.

In a lot of ways, Facebook’s hardware feels built for a quarantine.

The Quest spent a lot of time in my closet when I was out in the world pre-quarantine, but now that I’m in my house most of the day, it spends a good amount of time strapped to my face. When VR was a more hyped technology, there was a broader conversation of whether it encouraged isolation, something promoters of the tech pushed aside, noting that it enables rich shared experiences over the web. As we all host Zoom birthday parties and visit each other’s Animal Crossing islands, it’s becoming clear that with the absence of available physical connections, we can turn a lot of things into rich shared experiences.

In a lot of ways, the Quest is a reminder of what I’m missing out on. The walls of my SF apartment feel less containing when I can hop into a VR workout or jump between games. For the first time, the technology has felt transportive in the way that the ads sold it, but it’s not that the experiences have gotten better, the world has just gotten much worse.

In the same way that VR allows us to re-skin isolation, the Portal allows us to commiserate in it.

My Portal usage has spiked in the past weeks as well. Before stay-at-home orders, coordinating a call with multiple family members was a logistical nightmare and FaceTime calls made it more likely we’d get in touch with each other, but none of my siblings are wandering far from their Portals these days.

We are all still on our phones, but for those of us working from home, mobile we are not. It’s always been fascinating that a tech company which has wildly succeeded at capturing the nuances of mobile computing has been so devoted to selling hardware meant to move us around the internet while staying in place at home. Now, that we are all at home, we are all always there and the Portal really lives up to its name.

Facebook has designed gadgets explicitly built for home use, and more than that, they’re designed devices built around session-based use cases. While Amazon Echos and Google Homes have fit into a persistent IoT platform that are always there for us, Facebook’s gadgets are more high-maintenance, designed for people to fully commit to. For a company that’s focused on the universal nature of its software, its hardware has been built for almost no one’s needs, instead designed to pull people into a future Facebook imagines.

For now, I put the Quest on my face and sometime I tell the Portal to call my sisters, but will these quarantine oddities form tech habits I hold onto after this is all behind us? In these historic times, we are at home and we are craving connections, and, for the time being, the Facebook future feels good.

Trends of the week

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

• Bezos wants to test all Amazon employees for COVID-19
  As Amazon bares the brunt of America’s online shopping needs, CEO Jeff Bezos wrote in a shareholder letter this week about some of the strategies the company has to ensure its workforce stays on the job. One possibility seems to be “regular testing of all Amazonians, including those showing no symptoms,” Bezos says. Read more here.
• Google is building a smart debit card
  Just as every startup is getting into lending or banking, every tech giant wants to have a piece of plastic (or metal) in your wallet. This week, TechCrunch broke news that Google is building a smart debit card that could rival the Apple Card. Read more about it here.
• Apple launches a new iPhone SE
  The iPhone SE has grown to become one of the more fascinating devices Apple sells, cramming speedy components into a form factor that’s fallen out of vogue for their customer obsessed with the latest designs. The latest SE adopt the body of the iPhone 8 with souped-up internals that rival more recent flagships on performance. Read more about the new hardware here.

COVID-19 Research

Here are some of the stories this week chronicling the fight against the coronavirus pandemic.

• FDA debuts new online portal to encourage donation of plasma from recovered COVID-19 patients
• Mammoth Biosciences receives first peer-reviewed validation of CRISPR-based COVID-19 test
• FDA authorizes production of a new ventilator that costs up to 25x less than existing devices
• FDA clears N95 decontamination process that could clean up to 4 million masks per day
• MIT developed a wireless box that can detect COVID-19 patients’ movement and breathing at home

Extra Crunch

Investors and entrepreneurs are shifting their chats to Zoom, so we’re taking note and hosting live Q&A discussions for our Extra Crunch subscribers with some of tech’s most visible figures. We’ll be hosting these Extra Crunch live chats over the next several weeks.

Announcing the Extra Crunch Live event series

• This upcoming week, we’ll be talking to Aileen Lee & Ted Wang of Cowboy Ventures.
  Monday, April 20 at 10:30am PT / 1:30pm ET
  

We’ll be chatting with Aileen Lee (former KPCB partner, founder and managing director at Cowboy.vc and coiner of the term “Unicorn”) and Ted Wang (Cowboy.vc partner, former partner at Fenwick & West, and former outside counsel to Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Square and more) about how they’re advising their portfolio companies, if there are new and innovative ways for early-stage startups to secure capital beyond the traditional VC route and whether startups should hunker down or lean in during these uncertain times.

It’s scary, living with a killer virus that we can’t yet destroy and that has completely upended our lives for who knows how long. It’s very easy to feel helpless in the face of it all, to throw up one’s hands.

Don’t do this, says Marc Andreessen in thoughtful new essay published today to the site of his venture firm, Andreessen Horowitz. In it he says, build something — anything — that moves society forward from here.

In order to “reboot the American dream.” he writes, we need to “demand more of our political leaders, of our CEOs, our entrepreneurs, our investors. We need to demand more of our culture, of our society. And we need to demand more from one another. We’re all necessary, and we can all contribute, to building.”

Andreessen notes that much of the technology has already been built. He highlights housing, education, manufacturing and transportation, observing that many of the tools needed to massively accelerate each into a bright new future already exist, but that it’s easier to keep on keeping on with the systems that once served us well than muster the collective will to uproot and replace them.

The problem, he says is “desire. We need to want these things. The problem is inertia. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things. The problem is regulatory capture. We need to want new companies to build these things, even if incumbents don’t like it, even if only to force the incumbents to build these things. And the problem is will. We need to build these things.”

He’s right, of course, but we’d love something more prescriptive from Andreessen, who has largely retreated from public view in the last couple of years and whose 20,000-foot view is inspiring yet also, we hope, only a starting point.

What society would seem to need right now is not top-down advice but a bottoms-up approach. The way to solve problems is by breaking down big challenges into little bits. Someone like Andreessen could really lead here, by talking more explicitly about how current technologies can and should be used to achieve goals we need to meet right now, including to: get money into the hands of people who need it faster, use business intelligence to gather information from ER doctors in how they are managing Covid-19 patients, and help the country’s governors with supply chain management.

Andreessen argues that America, expressly, needs a strenuous push. That reality can’t be clearer than right now, as he writes, noting that, “We don’t have enough coronavirus tests, or test materials — including, amazingly, cotton swabs and common reagents. We don’t have enough ventilators, negative pressure rooms, and ICU beds. And we don’t have enough surgical masks, eye shields, and medical gowns — as I write this, New York City has put out a desperate call for rain ponchos to be used as medical gowns. Rain ponchos! In 2020! In America!”

It’s an appalling state of affairs, one driven largely by our political system, as he notes but also, not said by Andreessen, by the fact that the United States has the highest income inequality of all the G7 nations, with more wealth accruing to a relative minuscule number of people every year, an ever-shrinking middle class, and ballooning poverty.

But one thing at at time. What we really need right now is the Covid-19 equivalent of the Manhattan Project, and we need Silicon Valley to lead it.

If Andreessen wants to help on this front, we’re all for it. We’re listening.

We are beset on all sides, daily if not hourly, by COVID-19 data, hypotheses, speculation, and crackpot conspiracy theories. Even if armed with a mathematical mind, and some kind of grounding in critical thinking, how are we supposed to make sense of it all?

Assuming you even want to make sense of the chaos; assuming you haven’t already decided on a fixed position and a rigid lens. Assuming that resisting any change in your thinking, no matter what new information comes in, has not become the bedrock of your identity. It’s sad how often that seems to be the case. It applies to everyone ranting “Bill Gates did it” to “we are the virus” to “it’s just the flu” to “any deceleration means it’s clearly time to end lockdown,” and numerous others.

In extremely grudging fairness to them, we live in a world in which news, or “news,” often pops up on social media without any useful context or consideration. We have to provide our own context, now, in this brave new world of news. Learning how to do that is becoming one of the most crucial skills we need to make sense of what we read.

Even if you’re blessed with that skill, though — well, we’re all watching science happen in real time. Extraordinary work is being done at an astonishing rate. We live in a miraculous era. That said, the process can be messier than some may have imagined. We have to know how to weigh preprints vs. peer review, models vs. data, and hypothetical speculation vs. grim reality.

This applies to treatments as much as research. If your opinion of whether Drug X works is colored by whether your political tribe supports Drug X, you aren’t just doing science wrong, you’re doing knowledge wrong. The virus does not care about your politics.

We also have to accept nuance. Consider ventilators. The initial word was: “we desperately need as many ventilators as possible!” Of late there have been some intimations that “ventilators are overused, and may sometimes do more harm than good!” Both of these things could be true at the same time. Resist the temptation to conquer this chaos with slashing, drastic mental oversimplifications.

A good way to make sense of the noise is to distinguish between three categories of information: A) what we know is true, B) what we think is true, inferences drawn from reasonably strong supporting evidence, and C) opinions and speculation.

There’s a lot of C) with extremely limited evidence masquerading as B). And there are a lot of grim facts which are now firmly in category A), such as the extremely clear evidence that this virus can and will overwhelm hospitals if left unchecked, as shown again and again: in Wuhan, in Lombardy, in Spain, in New York City.

There was low-grade C-category speculation early on that the virus might have an infection fatality rate as low as 0.025%. Now that ~13,000 New Yorkers are already categorized as confirmed or probable COVID-19 deaths, in a city with a population of 8.5 million — a fatality rate of 0.15% for the entire city, not just those infected — it’s past time to recategorize that and similar speculation as category D), “proved completely wrong.”

It’s important to be ready to move your own beliefs to category D as well. There’s much we don’t know, and much we’re still learning. If you think you know all the answers today, please consider the certainty that you are incredibly wrong. I can assure you that you will never get a chance to debate the virus and convince it of the rightness of your beliefs. So try to be not just ready, but eager, to change them in the face of new evidence.

Helena Price Hambrecht and Woody Hambrecht always had plans for Haus, their direct-to-consumer low-alcoholic drink, to land white-label partnerships with local restaurants. But when coronavirus spread across the country and hurt thousands of local restaurants, the Haus founders saw an opportunity to fast forward on that product plan and at the same time give back.

Haus recently announced its plans to work with restaurants across the country and co-create local digs-inspired apéritifs. For Mister Jiu’s, an upscale Chinese restaurant in San Francisco, the beverage will mix “warm black cardamom, smoky lapsang tea, spicy ginger, and floral osmanthus.” For JuneBaby, a southern fare restaurant in Seattle, the drink will have hints of elderflower and oranges. The entire profit will go to the restaurants themselves, Helena tells me. And Haus has already begun cutting five-figure checks to restaurants just from pre-orders of these Haus-powered beverages alone.

On this refreshing note, let’s get into other ways venture-backed startups are using their presence to help others struggling during this time.

1. A phone booth for COVID-19 tests. Room, which manufactures privacy-focused office phone booths, hasn’t had much of a customer base lately as COVID-19 limits people from going into the office. The company has pivoted its resources to deploy a new product: coronavirus test booths for use in hospitals. The booths allow healthcare professionals to conduct tests with a protective barrier. It has already donated the first group of test booths to hospitals around the world, and it has made the design files for the booths available for free download to encourage others to manufacture locally.

2.Mission critical deliveries for free. Onfleet is offering its delivery software free of charge for companies and organizations that have mobilized to do community building deliveries. The startup is notably focused on critical deliveries and institutions that have had to change to delivery operations overnight. It’s working with partners like SF-Marin Foodbank, The NYC Dept for the Aging, various farmers markets around the country and other PPE delivery organizations that have recently organized.

3. Code from home. Fullstack Academy, an online coding and career development bootcamp, is offering a bootcamp prep course for free for two upcoming cohorts. The course, which will be run remotely, will cover specific coding and JavaScript concepts.

4. A daily assessment as a civic duty. A small team at Stanford Medicine created a National Daily Health Survey to help identify the prevalence of symptoms associated with COVID-19 in different ZIP codes across the United States. This survey is aimed at individuals who want to do a small part every day to help predict surges and inform response efforts. The survey takes 2-3 minutes to complete the first day, and 1 minute to complete in the days after that. It is currently being translated into five languages for broader usage. The team says that it’s looking for people who will make a long-term commitment for the survey.

5. World Without COVID. Clara Health, along with tech folks like Raj Kapoor of Lyft and Vijay Chattha of VSC, are launching a free website to track the public health status of the sick and healthy alike. The site wants to draw COVID-19 treatment data for public health professionals, as well as connect people to clinical trials. The team says that it will also track immunity status to help surface individuals that can volunteer in healthcare efforts in the future.

6. Twilio -powered hotline. WhileAtHome.org is a website spun up by volunteers to provide resources on education, healthcare tips and concerts. Recently, the team launched a Twilio-powered hotline so people can be connected to local state hotlines. If you dial 478-29COVID, Twilio will automatically route you to the hotline that is in your state.

Hiring efforts for laid-off make-up artists. Il Makiage is hiring makeup artists who were recently laid off due to COVID-19 related reasons for virtual one-on-one makeup tutorials. The direct-to-consumer beauty brand is paying make-up artists $25 an hour.

7. A charitable Chrome extension. 4thwall wants to take all the TV binge-watching and put it toward a social good. First, users can sign up for a 4th wall Chrome extension. Then, once they activate the extension, they can stream Netflix or Hulu. After 250 minutes of streaming, a relief cause is unlocked and users can pick which COVID-19 specific charity they want to support. 4thwall will make a donation at no cost to the user. Per the website, the cost-free donations are possible because the company will send the viewer demographic metrics, anonymized, to other companies to see viewing trends and create content accordingly.  One of the creators, Andrew Schneider, says that the community has already raised $1,500 in the first two weeks, and the goal is to raise $40K in the next 10 weeks.

8. Bridal brand gives back. Online bridal brand Anomalie is delivering CDC-certified face masks to hospitals to help front-line healthcare workers. The company is using its supply chain and manufacturing relationships in China to make masks, instead of wedding dresses. The first two shipments of over 10,000 masks have been delivered and received.

9. Bedtime storytelling just got a glow up. Yumi, a science-based childhood meal delivery startup, has created a free children’s book to explain COVID-19 to your little ones. It is available for download, and Snoop Dogg tweeted about it.

Welcome to a look back at the past week in security and what it means for you. Each week we’ll look at the big news of the week and why it matters.

What will the world look like after the coronavirus pandemic subsides?

Some of us are now in our fifth week of sheltering in place, but there’s no fixed end-date in sight. We’ve gone from a period of confusion and concern to testing and mitigation. Now we’re starting to look ahead at the world post-coronavirus. Things still have to get done. But how do we regain a semblance of normality in the middle of a pandemic?

Tech can be the answer but it’s not a panacea; Apple and Google have explained more about their contact tracing efforts to help better understand the spread of the virus seems promising. But privacy concerns and worries that the system could be abused have raised justified concerns. On the other hand, with a U.S. presidential election slated for later this year, many experts want tech out of the picture in favor of a secure solution that uses paper ballots.

Will tech save the day, or will it kick us while we’re down? Let’s dive in.

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THE BIG PICTURE

Voting by mail should be having its moment. Will it?

This year’s U.S. presidential election will still go ahead — it’s in the constitution as an immutable fact — but a pandemic throws a wrench in the works.

But security experts say electronic voting isn’t secure or resilient enough to protect from foreign interference. Even the more established mobile voting offerings have been shown to be deeply flawed.

Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger have teamed up to launch their first product together since leaving the Facebook mothership. Rt.live is an up-to-date tracker of how fast COVID-19 is spreading in each state.

“Rt” measures the average number of people who become infected by an infectious person. The higher above the number 1, the faster COVID-19 races through a population, while a number below one shows the virus receding. For example, Rt.live displays that Georgia has the highest, most dangerous Rt score of 1.5 while New York is down to 0.54 thanks to aggressive shelter-in-place orders.

Krieger tells me that “Kevin has been writing and publishing open-source data analysis notebooks on how to calculate Rt on a daily basis. We wanted to take that work and visualize it so anyone can see how their state is doing at curbing the spread.” Krieger had meanwhile been pitching in by building SaveOurFaves, a directory of local Bay Area restaurants that are selling gift cards so patrons can keep them afloat during quarantine. Built with his wife, the Kriegers open sourced it so people can build similar sites for their communities.

Rt.live shows that as of yesterday, Texas and California are at or just under 1 and Vermont has the best score at 0.33. The charts over time reveal how Washington and Georgia were successfully fighting COVID-19, dipping beneath 1 until the virus bounced back recently. Data is sourced from the COVID Tracking Project and you can examine Rt.live’s modeling system on GitHub.

“As states decide whether and how to open back up, they’ll have to manage their infection rate carefully, and we hope dashboards like rt.live will be helpful in doing so” Krieger says. By better illustrating how even small differences in shelter-in-place policy and compliance can exponentially change the severity of the impact of the virus, it could help convince people to stay inside. This kind of tool could also be helpful for determining where it’d be safe to reactivate some businesses, and quickly catch if virality is spiking and strict social distancing needs to be reinstated.

One fascinating feature of the site is the ability to filter by region so you can see how the Western states are doing better at suppressing COVID-19 than those in the South. You can also view the states with no shelter-in-place orders to see they’re doing worse on average. The charts could help identify how different political orientations and their subsequent policies translate to infection outcomes.

It might seem out of character for the photo app moguls to be building a medical statistics site. But Systrom has long studied virality as part of his work that helped Instagram grow so fast. He began publishing his own statistical models for tracking coronavirus infections and deaths on March 19th. “We’d been talking about ways of working together and this came out of that — my first job out of school was actually doing data visualizations / analysis at Meebo so a blast from the past in more ways than one” Krieger tells me. While Systrom did the data analysis, Krieger built the site, mirroring their old front-end and back-end Instagram roles.

“We built Rt.live because we believe Rt — the effective infection rate — is one of the best ways to understand how COVID is spreading” Kreiger explains. “It was great to work together again — we were able to take it from idea to launch in just a few days because of all our history & shared context.”

Cognizant, one of the largest tech and consulting companies in the Fortune 500, has confirmed it was hit by a ransomware attack.

Details remain slim besides a brief statement on its site, confirming the attack.

“Cognizant can confirm that a security incident involving our internal systems, and causing service disruptions for some of our clients, is the result of a Maze ransomware attack,” the statement read. “Our internal security teams, supplemented by leading cyber defense firms, are actively taking steps to contain this incident.”

The IT giant said it was engaging with the law enforcement.

The company, which offers a range of services, including IT consultation to clients in more than 80 countries, posted $16.8 billion in revenue last year. The 26-year-old firm also maintains a partnership with Facebook to help the social giant moderate content on its platform.

When reached, Cognizant spokesperson Richard Lacroix declined to comment further.

Maze is not like typical data-encrypting ransomware. Maze not only spreads across a network, infecting and encrypting every computer in its path, it also exfiltrates the data to the attackers’ servers where it is held for ransom. If a ransom isn’t paid, the attackers publish the files online.

However, a website known to be associated with the Maze attackers, has not yet published the data.

The FBI privately warned businesses in December of an increase in Maze-related ransomware incidents.

Since the warning, several major companies have been hit by Maze, including cyber insurer Chubb, accounting giant MNP, a law firm and an oil company.

According to Bleeping Computer, which first reported the attack, Maze denied responsibility for the attack.

“That does not mean Maze was not responsible,” said Brett Callow, a threat analyst and ransomware expert at security firm Emsisoft. “At some point in the last three weeks, Maze also hit two Manitoba law firms, neither of which has been listed.”

“It’s possible the group is holding off naming the firms and publishing any data pending the outcome of negotiations, and that could be the case with Cognizant too,” said Callow.

Cities around the world have become home this decade to distributed tech teams and homegrown startup successes. Each of these additional layers of experience and specialization help to make each local community stronger, like what began happening in Silicon Valley many decades ago.

Now layoffs are striking deep into these fragile, complex ecosystems.

Yes, companies in San Francisco and other tech metros are seeing big cuts, as you can read all about on TechCrunch this week. But the satellite offices also seem to be taking big hits, as Natasha Mascarenhas covered. Data from Layoffs.fyi shows thousands of jobs bleeding out in places like Salt Lake City, Las Vegas and Louisville to name a few.

The immediate reason this is particularly bad is that tech jobs have a multiplier on jobs in other local industries, particularly where there aren’t that many tech jobs. But the bigger long-term risk is that people who might be starting the next company in your city don’t get the hands-on experience and the connections locally and globally that come distributed teams. How long will it take many of the hubs that were going strong just a couple months ago to recover now?

Of course, the even bigger opposing trend is remote work now that everyone is doing it. Will the future founder who was going to move to San Francisco for networking purposes just stay in Louisville, and have a local HQ or just keep it remote-first? Will we still need all that commercial real estate in the Bay Area, actually?

TechCrunch is covering the downs-and-ups of startup hubs during the pandemic (see Extra Crunch for more on Salt Lake City this week, actually). Want to talk about what your city is doing to keep its startup scene strong? Email me at eldon@techcrunch.com and let’s discuss.

Investors rethink consumer and edtech investing

For our first investor survey this week, Josh Constine and Arman Tabatabai talked to 17 top social investors about the impact of COVID-19 on the category. Here’s Wayne Hu of SignalFire, excerpted from the full article on Extra Crunch.

There are, however, other social trends that were already picking up steam before COVID-19 that may further accelerate now. Many of these may be newer behaviors that sound dumb or are hard to explain, but ultimately provide value. Peloton sounded silly to many before they became popular, and there are several other companies now bridging the gap between consumers, trainers and fellow participants to bring the in-person social phenomenon of spin cycle and fitness boutiques into the living room. Tempo, a SignalFire portfolio company, is the first to offer high-intensity strength training complete with weights in the home. Beyond the convenience, 3D sensors automatically track reps and weights and users also receive targeted feedback on form from world-class trainers aided by real-time motion tracking — something that would be too expensive for most consumers otherwise. Coronavirus will be a catalyst for many to experience this and other accelerating trends for the first time.

EC members, don’t miss their social overview survey last week.

Next, Natasha and Arman talked to leading edtech investors for Extra Crunch about how the new coronavirus is impacting their companies. Many startups in the category have suddenly had much brighter futures — with some new challenges. Here’s Tetyana Astashkina of Learn Launch:

A lot of our companies across all segments are offering their products for free. User (teacher) training has always been key to successful product adoption. All of the training happens online now which is new and needs adjustment. Also, the timelines to respond to customer inquiries are very compressed which puts pressure on companies, especially because of eternally limited resources.

K-12 districts need to have budgets in place by the end of June for the next school year. So selling, while giving the product away for free and while supporting un-trained users is going to be a scramble. Now imagine being a cash-starved start-up trying to deal with your own homeschooling needs…

The latest venture shifts in the COVID-19 era

Many VCs continue to say they are open for biz while others say they are ‘focused on helping portfolio companies.’ So here’s what we’re seeing on the fundraising front this week.

First, leading seed-stage VC Y Combinator has scaled down its pro-rata program of recent years. It had taken a 7% stake in every company that has raised a priced seed or Series A round since it began the policy in 2015, totaling hundreds of rounds in hundreds of companies.

But it has also expanded its class size dramatically in recent years. Eventually, as described by CEO Michael Seibel, in a memo to companies this week obtained by Jon Shieber for TechCrunch, it couldn’t do both. So starting next month, it will be doing pro-rata for YC companies on a case-by-case basis and at a flat 4%. 

This change likely would have happened anyway, but it happens right when more startups than ever are looking for sources of cash.

Overall, seed money appears to continue to be in sharp decline — a trend that had already accelerated before the pandemic, Alex Wilhem detailed on Extra Crunch.

The mortality rate continues to increase across the board, too. When investors give up on selling a company, they send them to Sherwood Partners, a “restructuring firm” that acts as a sort of startup undertaker (mainly selling off the IP and other parts). In an interview with Connie Loizos for Extra Crunch this week, founder Marty Pichinson says they are winding down two to three companies per day, up from two to four per week a few years ago. “We’re in companies that raised $10 million to $25 million, to companies that raised up to $1.5 billion,” he told her. “It doesn’t matter what size they are; when they come to us, they’re all broke. If we’re closing it down to clean up and monetize what we can, they are basically in the same position, whether they raised $20 million or they were once a billion-dollar business.”

Across the week

TechCrunch

Tech for good during COVID-19: Pivots and partnerships to help people deal

This venture firm is offering fast funding in a time of uncertainty

How I Podcast: First Draft and Track Changes’ Sarah Enni

Extra Crunch

As COVID-19 pummels global economy, 8 new companies join the $100M ARR club

Punitive liquidation preferences return to VC — don’t do it

Traditional sales and marketing strategies won’t see you through this crisis

How Adobe shifted a Las Vegas conference to executives’ living rooms in less than 30 days

Dear Sophie: How do I extend my visa status without leaving the US?

#EquityPod

From Alex:

Turning to the show, as has been the case every single week since we cannot recall when, we had a hell of a packed agenda.; there were new funds to talk about, there were rounds aplenty. As the unicorn era hands the baton to the COVID-19 downturn, there still more than we can get through each week.

But we did manage all that follows:

• Lightspeed raised a host of new funds worth billions of dollars, including $1.83 billion in capital for later-stage deals and $1.5 billion to pour more capital into its international investments.
• Andreessen Horowitz wants to put together a second crypto-focused fund worth $450 million. That’s more than last time, and we had questions.
• Corigin Ventures raised its first institutional fund at $36 million, effectively stepping out of complete control from its parent organization, Corigin Real Estate.
• Stripe raised $600 million more, at a flat valuation to its preceding round. The payments company is now worth around $36 billion. The news dropped out of nowhere, and probably means that the eventual Stripe IPO is far, far away.
• Robinhood is raising new capital, which caught our eye.
• Carta, which helps manage equity for startups, laid off 16 percent of its staff as detailed in an emotional memo by the company’s CEO Henry Ward. Then, the plot thickened when news broke that it’s raising a new round of funding that would value it at $3 billion.
• Lucid and Everee, two Utah-based companies raised capital this week, right after we saw Podium raise the week before. $52 million for Lucid, makers of Lucidchart, and $10 million fo Everee, a payroll software startup with a fun twist.
• But we weren’t done yet, as we had to talk about Airbnb’s new debt work; Danny made the point that it’s hardly cheap capital for the firm to raise, possibly adding pressure to Airbnb later on. This is another company that will not go public in 2020.
• Savi raised $6 million to help students pay student loans, while Frank raised $5 million to help students avoid racking them up.
• Despite tight school budgets, Labster landed a deal with the California Community Colleges which tells us a bit about how edtech optimism is turning into actual dollars.

What we’re up to:

Extra Crunch Live: Join Aileen Lee, Ted Wang for Q&A on 4/20 at 10:30am PT/1:30pm ET

Apply to compete in Startup Battlefield at Disrupt SF 2020

Extra Crunch members save money with Partner Perks and event discounts

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We discussed our initial impressions of “Devs” on an episode of the Original Content podcast a few weeks ago, shortly after the show launched on FX/Hulu. At the time, we observed that even the show made time for bits of Silicon Valley satire, the mood was mostly one of mystery and dread.

Now that we know the full story, it seemed like a good time to revisit our discussion. If anything, the dread increases over the course of the show’s first and only season, becoming oppressive and overwhelming as writer-director Alex Garland lays out the full implications of a mysterious quantum computing project known as Devs.

Our reactions to the story’s heady philosophical atmosphere varied — Jordan found the whole thing a bit ponderous, while Anthony and Darrell were completely happy to follow Garland into arguments about determinism versus free will, and to debate the implications of the show’s final episode.

At the very least, we all agreed that there’s nothing on television quite like it. Plus, the show features strong performances from Nick Offerman as a tormented tech CEO and Alison Pill as the Devs project’s steely leader.

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

And if you’d like to skip ahead, here’s how the episode breaks down:
0:00 Intro
0:18 “Devs” full season review
7:25 “Devs” spoiler discussion