Year: 2020

Four years ago, mathematician Vlad Voroninski saw an opportunity to remove some of the bottlenecks in the development of autonomous vehicle technology thanks to breakthroughs in deep learning.

Now, Helm.ai, the startup he co-founded in 2016 with Tudor Achim, is coming out of stealth with an announcement that it has raised $13 million in a seed round that includes investment from A.Capital Ventures, Amplo, Binnacle Partners, Sound Ventures, Fontinalis Partners and SV Angel. More than a dozen angel investors also participated, including Berggruen Holdings founder Nicolas Berggruen, Quora co-founders Charlie Cheever and Adam D’Angelo, professional NBA player Kevin Durant, Gen. David Petraeus, Matician co-founder and CEO Navneet Dalal, Quiet Capital managing partner Lee Linden and Robinhood co-founder Vladimir Tenev, among others.

Helm.ai will put the $13 million in seed funding toward advanced engineering and R&D and hiring more employees, as well as locking in and fulfilling deals with customers.

Helm.ai is focused solely on the software. It isn’t building the compute platform or sensors that are also required in a self-driving vehicle. Instead, it is agnostic to those variables. In the most basic terms, Helm.ai is creating software that tries to understand sensor data as well as a human would, in order to be able to drive, Voroninski said.

That aim doesn’t sound different from other companies. It’s Helm.ai’s approach to software that is noteworthy. Autonomous vehicle developers often rely on a combination of simulation and on-road testing, along with reams of data sets that have been annotated by humans, to train and improve the so-called “brain” of the self-driving vehicle.

Helm.ai says it has developed software that can skip those steps, which expedites the timeline and reduces costs. The startup uses an unsupervised learning approach to develop software that can train neural networks without the need for large-scale fleet data, simulation or annotation.

“There’s this very long tail end and an endless sea of corner cases to go through when developing AI software for autonomous vehicles, Voroninski explained. “What really matters is the unit of efficiency of how much does it cost to solve any given corner case, and how quickly can you do it? And so that’s the part that we really innovated on.”

Voroninski first became interested in autonomous driving at UCLA, where he learned about the technology from his undergrad adviser who had participated in the DARPA Grand Challenge, a driverless car competition in the U.S. funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. And while Voroninski turned his attention to applied mathematics for the next decade — earning a PhD in math at UC Berkeley and then joining the faculty in the MIT mathematics department — he knew he’d eventually come back to autonomous vehicles. 

By 2016, Voroninski said breakthroughs in deep learning created opportunities to jump in. Voroninski left MIT and Sift Security, a cybersecurity startup later acquired by Netskope, to start Helm.ai with Achim in November 2016.

“We identified some key challenges that we felt like weren’t being addressed with the traditional approaches,” Voroninski said. “We built some prototypes early on that made us believe that we can actually take this all the way.”

Helm.ai is still a small team of about 15 people. Its business aim is to license its software for two use cases — Level 2 (and a newer term called Level 2+) advanced driver assistance systems found in passenger vehicles and Level 4 autonomous vehicle fleets.

Helm.ai does have customers, some of which have gone beyond the pilot phase, Voroninski said, adding that he couldn’t name them.

Day after day, the burden of COVID-19 caused by SARS-CoV-2 mounts further. As of this writing, nearly 400,000 patients worldwide were confirmed for the disease, including over 46,000 cases spanning every state in this country.

In tandem with this mounting burden, due to numerous fumbles over the past 10 weeks, the U.S. has faced significant bottlenecks in the production of diagnostic testing and imposed substantive red tape to deter testing. As more diagnostic tests have come online, the rate of “confirmed cases” — the key performance indicator (KPI) being monitored by decision-makers across the country — continues to accelerate. 

Why businesses love KPIs

Leaders of startups are familiar with the attention paid towards KPIs such as profit margins, burn rates, net dollar retention rate, and customer acquisition costs. These metrics, when chosen appropriately, allow leaders to continuously take the pulse of their companies and take action in response.

Along these lines, Phil Nadel has written on TechCrunch that founders “cannot hope to grow a company in any meaningful way without…KPIs…[b]ecause KPIs, if constructed correctly, give management and potential investors a cold, analytical snapshot of the state of the company, untainted by emotion or rhetoric” (emphasis added).

Conversely, when misconstructed, misconstrued or overlooked, KPIs can cause organizations to crash and burn. This phenomenon has been deemed “surrogation,” or reflecting the potential for critical thinking around strategy to be subverted by elevation or suppression of a single number. For example, maximizing profit margin can hurt the quality of goods/services, and maximizing lifetime value (LTV) can negatively impact customer experience by, say, encouraging the use of shady cross-selling or up-selling techniques that are harmful in the long-term to customers (as was the case at Wells Fargo after the financial crisis).

Taken too far, wrongly-selected KPIs can cause organizations to suffer profoundly, such as with Uber’s patchy quality standards for driver recruitment leading to innumerable controversies around customer experience. And while consistently poor quarterly failures in the boardroom can lead to organization crises, they do not bear remotely the same stakes as public health crises.

The primary KPI for COVID-19 has been an unreliable figure in the U.S.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the primary KPI tracked by U.S. leaders has been the number of confirmed cases of the disease. Yet epidemiologists monitoring the outbreaks have become increasingly frustrated with the meandering pace of actions taken by U.S. decision-makers. The core of the mismatch between actions desired by scientists and those (not) taken by policymakers lies in misinterpreting the “denominator.” In other words, misconstruing the pandemic’s primary KPI.

The denominator refers to the formula from which mortality rates are calculated — the number of deaths divided by the number of cases. While this seems to be straightforward algebra, the devil is in the details. Since the beginning of the outbreak, the Chinese government has waffled on their definition of “confirmed cases”: deciding ultimately to go with a definition (positive only if laboratory-confirmed, regardless of symptoms or other tests) that may suppress the real number. Analogously, diagnostic testing snafus in the U.S. suggest that the number of “confirmed cases” here is simply not reliable. Both of these stand in stark contrast to countries such as Taiwan and South Korea, both of which swiftly diverted resources to scale up, broaden, and fully report testing.

Predictably, these snafus have led to diagnosis of disproportionately severe cases thus far in the U.S.: with the exception of NBA players and movie stars, only highly symptomatic individuals have been eligible to receive testing (due to clinical red tape), able to receive testing (due to shortages), and subsequently confirmed. This selection bias of severe cases implies that overall case number — the true denominator — is markedly underestimated. Accordingly, since the beginning of February, epidemiologists have been vocal that “simple counts of the number of confirmed cases can be misleading indicators of the epidemic’s trajectory.”

Relying on confirmed cases as the primary KPI may have delayed and misled critical action

A timeline of COVID-19’s progression in the U.S. illustrates the impact of using confirmed cases as the country’s primary KPI for public health response.

On January 22, President Trump stated that “we have [SARS-CoV-2] totally under control, it’s one person [confirmed].” On February 25, with 53 confirmed, he claimed that “the coronavirus…is very well under control in our country. We have very few people with it.” The following day, the president declared that “the risk to the American people remains very low.” On March 6, with 227 confirmed, he shared that “I think we’ve done a tremendous job of keeping [the number of confirmed cases] down.” And just one week ago on March 17, the president praised West Virginia as the single state without any cases, hailing “Big Jim, the governor…must be doing a good job.” 

By the end of that day, the praise no longer held. Reports later emerged that the reason West Virginia had no cases for so long was related to the fact that the state was ill-equipped, and perhaps resistant, to performing testing that might come back positive.

With confirmed cases on U.S. soil as the North Star for decision-making — despite “the system blinking red” on other dimensions — early decisions to take vital preventive actions were punted. It wasn’t until March 13 (over seven weeks after the first confirmed U.S. case) that the president declared a national emergency. And even as 70 million Americans were under lockdown as of March 20, 47 states maintained few restrictions for social distancing (which remains the only intervention currently with proven effectiveness against COVID-19). Those under lockdown permit leaving for “essential” tasks, which itself is fuzzily-defined.

Moreover, emerging evidence suggests that mild (“subclinical”) cases — exactly the ones that have not been tested — may be driving community spread of the virus. Nonetheless, focus on confirmed cases as principal KPI has elicited few interventions against these “below the surface” cases. Domestic travel restrictions by foot, bike, car, bus, train, and plane remain mostly limited. Spring breakers continue to party at Miami Beach’s hookah shops and Nashville’s honky-tonks. 

Simultaneously, numerous universities — sensitive to the fact that college dormitories are amongst the highest risk settings for contracting an infection — suspended classes and evacuated their students. However, these moves overlook the fact that college students are amongst the least likely to manifest symptoms. As such, by seeking to prevent any confirmed cases on their campuses, these universities may have ushered the virus into the homes of parents and grandparents in innumerable local communities across the U.S.

Alternative KPIs for COVID-19 can help get the U.S. back on track

If the wrong KPI created this mess, then the right KPI(s) are urgently needed to begin fixing it.

For starters, risk stratification is desperately required. Rather than resorting to black-and-white measures of infected versus uninfected, risk spectra can better characterize the threat faced by specific individuals, communities, states, and countries.

For example, mortality risk can be quantified and monitored. Elderly individuals and those with pre-existing medical conditions are at the highest risk of severe infection. By deriving and pooling individual risks, the relative threat to communities can be evaluated: encouraging high-risk communities to take more immediate and more proactive preventive action. Florida, for instance, could benefit from this kind of measurement: 27% of the state’s residents population are elderly, but thus far shockingly few individuals have been tested for coronavirus in retirement communities like the Florida Keys (where 75 people had been assessed as of March 24 amidst the height of Spring Break). This could lead to protective policies like visitation restrictions and hygiene guidelines.

Additionally, transmission risk can be a useful KPI. Certain demographic groups, like students and healthcare workers, are at much higher risk of propagating the virus — with or without the presence of symptoms. Individuals with exposure to the virus in confined spaces (such as cruise ships or airplanes) also have much higher transmission risk. Scoring metrics could be adapted from other infectious diseases to help policymakers better visualize and prevent transmission in their communities. This could encourage prospective procedures like contact tracing and symptom monitoring.

Designating mortality risk (for vulnerable patients) and transmission risk (to vulnerable patients) as KPIs could provide much more granularity to decision-makers than can confirmed cases alone. Including these collectively on a dashboard will generate insights and stimulate further actions than relying on a single narrow, fallible KPI. 

And of course, these are only two (reductive) examples of potentially useful metrics for public health responders. Far more diverse forms of metrics are possible. These are often pioneered, unsurprisingly, by startups — such as in the case of Kinsa Health, a producer of smart thermometers. The company’s temperature geo-maps are already providing a leading COVID-19 indicator for local decisionmakers, as they have previously for the seasonal flu (compared to CDC models).

In healthcare and beyond, new KPIs will prove critical moving forward

As far as COVID-19 goes, the steps our country needs to take are fairly clear. An analysis by researchers at Imperial College London’s COVID-19 Response Team suggested that near-universal social distancing measures are the only tool available to prevent “hundreds of thousands of deaths and health systems (most notably intensive care units) being overwhelmed many times over.” Countries that continue to be ravaged by the virus (such as Iran and Italy) enacted social distancing interventions excessively late. As the trajectory of the infection curve in the U.S. closely mirrors these countries (despite probable underestimates of case burden), more universal measures are sorely needed. Better healthcare KPIs can help us understand the next steps we need to take.

As far as the startup community goes, there is much to learn from this situation. A proverb in medicine advises: “during a cardiac arrest, the first procedure is to take your own pulse.” Since startups may face numerous crises (in the business sense) amidst the economic convulsions of COVID-19, composure will be essential to guide decisions under pressure. Meaningful KPIs are the stethoscopes, tourniquets, and barometers that enable startups to take their own pulse—and to rapidly commence any resuscitation that may be required.

Another medical proverb dictates that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Prescient leaders of startups would be well-served by seeking the tools for prevention sooner rather than later.

Earlier this week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that it would be updating its guidance to allow self-swab tests for COVID-19, in which a patient collects a sample for their own nose for a health professional to test. On Wednesday, UnitedHealth Group revealed the results of a peer-reviewed large scale study that provided the science behind the decision to switch to the less-invasive sample collection method.

The self-swab process doesn’t change where FDA-approved testing can happen – this expanded guidance only applies to the method of collection, meaning at-home swab-baed PCR tests that many startups had hoped to bring to market are still on hold. But even though people still have to go to either clinics or drive-through testing sites to get a COVID-19 test done, the ability to self-swab offers more comfort, as well as real advantages when it comes to the health and safety of the clinicians and frontline healthcare workers staffing the sites.

This new study shows that not only does iself-swabbing lessen the chance of someone with COVID-19 passing on their infection to a healthcare worker, it’s also just as effective as test where clinicians collected the sample from much deeper inside a person’s nasal cavity. UnitedHeatlh worked with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as Quest Diagnostics and the University of Washington to conduct the study which covered almost 500 patients who received tests at OptumCare diagnostic facilities in the state of Washington.

There are other benefits to the self-swab method as well, including eliminating the need for specifically-trained medical professionals who have to administer the tests at point-of-care. This should help with clearing up backlogs owing to staffing, at least, though supplies and bottlenecks due to demand are going to persist as more people seek diagnosis.

With limited prospects for growth, one of the iron laws of economic downturns is that advertising is among the first budgets to be cut.

Advertising revenues have already cratered at many alt-weekly newspapers, which heavily rely on local events and restaurants that have been shuttered in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak. BuzzFeed even went so far (as they do) to label it a “media extinction event.”

Clearly it’s bad times, but I wanted to get a lot more granular around the data for ad rates, particularly around top startups. So I compiled a list of a little more than 100 unicorns across a variety of sectors and explored how the prices of their search engine keywords have changed with the global pandemic that is sparking a global recession.

The results aren’t surprising — there has been a collapse in prices for almost all ads (with some very interesting exceptions we will get to in a bit). But the variations across startups in their online ad performance says a lot about industries like food delivery and enterprise software, and also the long-term revenue performance of Google, Facebook and other digital advertising networks.

A quick overview of the data

It’s common for startups to buy their own keywords on search engines like Google and the App Store. Owning that top rank guarantees that their own company’s page is the first result a user sees and prevents competitors from buying their name, potentially intercepting customers.

The world is changing fast. With the spread of coronavirus keeping folks in their homes, there’s no time like the present to connect with people online.

Tomorrow at 3pm EDT, betaworks’ John Borthwick and Matt Hartman will be joining us for a live conference call via Zoom (here’s the dial-in link) for everyone on TechCrunch. Folks will be able to join and get characteristically insightful answers from these two tech scene veterans.

John Borthwick is cofounder and CEO of betaworks, the startup studio that has fostered companies like Digg, Dots, Giphy, Chartbeat, TweetDeck, Gimlet Media, Bitly, and Quibb. Borthwick is one of New York’s most prestigious investors and, on a personal note, a delightful conversationalist.

Matt Hartman is betaworks’ first partner, leading the company’s external investment arm. He’s invested in companies like Giphy, Anchor, Gimlet Media, Twitter, Venmo, Kickstarter, and Tumblr.

Both Borthwick and Hartman are experts in the field of new media, among other things, and will have some interesting insights into the changing landscape of media, both broadly and within the scope of coronavirus.

We’ll be talking to them about how they’re advising their portfolio companies during this tumultuous time, which of the coronavirus-caused evolutions are here to stay and which are temporary, and what tech they’re most interested in right now.

Folks who have questions should come prepared. I’m going to try to prioritize audience questions over my own, so jot ’em down now!

Join us tomorrow (Thursday, March 26) at 3pm EDT/noon PDT using this Zoom link. If you can’t make it to the call, we’ll publish the transcript on Extra Crunch shortly after the call. See you there!

Victoria Stafford, a third-year student at UC Berkeley, was set to begin working at Yelp in June as a sales intern — the only internship she applied to. And then it was canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“When I first read the cancellation email, I didn’t believe it. I refreshed my inbox; I rubbed my eyes as if I were waking up from a dream. It was clear that COVID-19 was becoming a mounting concern, but it never occurred to me that my internship was in jeopardy,” Stafford said.

Internship cancellations hurt more than just summer plans. The programs are often pipelines into future jobs and access to valuable work experience.

For Stafford, a business and domestic environmental major from a small town in rural Utah, there are very few business and policy-related opportunities.

“I ask that employers do everything they can to make their internship opportunities more accessible in these upcoming months, and come next year and the year after, show understanding and compassion for employment gaps,” she said.

Dozens of other students from across the country flooded my inbox, sharing stories about the impact on internship cancellations on their paths toward employment.

One student turned down offers and interviews from Google, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs to pursue a software engineering position. The offer they accepted was yanked weeks later. Another student lost their chance at a post-graduate job at their dream company because their offer was revoked. One only had an offer in their hands for three weeks before it was rescinded.

A number of companies across the country, including Google, Glassdoor, StubHub, Funding Circle, Yelp, Checkr and even the National Institutes of Health, have canceled their internship programs due to COVID-19, TechCrunch has learned. The cancellations, which will likely increase in the days and weeks to come, are unsurprising, due to the uncertainty the pandemic has caused. Still, fewer internships jeopardize the postgraduate job prospects for thousands of college students, and, beyond that, limit the talent pipeline on which tech companies so often are dependent. 

There’s even a Twitter account that tracks the status of 2020 internships.

From Denver to San Francisco

Like the concerts, conferences, universities and schools, these cancellations are because of the COVID-19 pandemic ravaging the world right now. While some companies cited health concerns, others pointed to the uncertain economic landscape. 

In a statement, job search and review platform Glassdoor said the rapid spread of COVID-19 has grown “beyond a health concern into an economic one.” As a result, it has “decided to pause hiring and reprioritize some initiatives internally to ensure we are well positioned for both the downturn and recovery.” 

A Funding Circle spokesperson confirmed that the company halted its internship program, “given the travel and relocation” for the upcoming intern cohort to San Francisco. In an email obtained by TechCrunch, the National Institute of Health canceled its prestigious internship — which has a 20% acceptance rate — to “stop community spread of Sars-Cov-2 through social distancing.”

“Therefore, hosting 1000+ early career scientists who deserve close supervision and intense mentoring is not appropriate at this time,” the email reads. “The cancellation of the NIH SIP applies to all students, whether you were planning to volunteer or were offered a fellowship position. It also applies, even if you were planning to do computational work that could be done remotely.”

In a statement to TechCrunch, NIH said its program has been reduced to “maintenance-only and mission critical (including research on COVID-19) operation due to spread of the novel coronavirus.”

“Regrettably, as part of this effort to keep people safe and limit the spread through social/physical distancing, it has been necessary to cancel the Summer Internship Program for young trainees at NIH for 2020, but those students already selected for the program will be given priority for summer internship positions in 2021.”

Checkr, based in Denver and San Francisco, put its summer internship program on hold due to “the challenges of onboarding interns while everyone is remote.”

Google has rescinded some internship offers for its UX design internship, per a LinkedIn post. Google denied this. 

“If you log on to a laptop, you can access an opportunity”

While a number of tech companies have put their internship programs on hold, others are piecing together experimental remote internship programs for their students. 

Quizlet is preparing for its annual internship program and is preparing a “contingency plan for an internship that will be virtual if necessary.” Uber has formed a dedicated team to start working on an online internship program “should the situation remain unchanged.” Lyft and Twitter, depending on the state of the pandemic, plan to onboard San Francisco interns virtually.

The pandemic has certainly put remote internship management services in high demand. That said, a handful of startups have been working on the sector for years. 

San Francisco-based Symba, which helps companies offer virtual internship programs, was founded in 2017. Co-founder Ahva Sadeghi said that last week more than 100 companies and 1,000 students reached out to Symba in regards to internship cancellations because of COVID-19.

“The companies we reached out to in the beginning who said, ‘This is great but not top of mind for us,’ are now calling us back asking us to jump on the phone today or tomorrow to get something implemented,” Sadeghi said in a phone call. “We thought we didn’t have product-market fit and now the conversation has completely changed.”

Sadeghi noted how internships assume a certain level of privilege in applicants, prioritizing those who can afford to move to a highly populated city with little to no pay. A remote internship, even in a time of health and prosperity, is important, she said.

“If you can log on to a laptop, you can access an opportunity,” she said. Another program, Chicago-based Sage Corps, founded in 2013, is pushing companies to sponsor the students impacted by internship cancellations. If sponsored, students can still participate in career growth development workshops virtually from Sage Corps, at $1,250 per student. 

Thomas Brunskill, the founder of InsideSherpa, which helps companies host virtual internships, said he’s seen nearly 1,000 students a day sign up for the platform, from Northern Italy, to South-East Asia, to the United States. He started the company, which went through Y Combinator last year, to give students courses and online simulations of jobs through the comfort of their own homes.

He said his customers are mainly larger companies that employ upwards of 1,000 students, like JPMorgan Chase, Deloitte, Citi, BCG and GE.

On one end, Brunskill said the interest makes sense, as larger companies have to meet significant hiring demands. Per the National Association of Colleges and Employers, 70.4% of interns get return offers from the company where they intern. 

On the other end, this concentration further showcases how smaller businesses will be impacted disproportionately from this pandemic. Many will freeze hiring altogether.

“Obviously [this] matters for students, but it also matters for companies who are now going to have this blackhole of talent,” Brunskill said. “Nobody wins in that situation — companies end up with less work-ready students who don’t really know what they’re getting into and students end up in full-time jobs that might not be aligned to their interest or skills because they never had an opportunity to test it out first.”

While layoffs are devastating, and obviously well upon us in the tech world, internship cancellations offer a harsh window into how COVID-19 doesn’t just impact our current workforce, but our future one as well.

Seasoned secondary players were expecting it. As the markets began to plummet in recent weeks, shareholders who’d turned down earlier offers to buy this or that holding were suddenly curious to see if those interested parties might still be interested. Alas, it was too late. The market was moving too fast. It still is.

“Up until last week, everyone was calling to get old pricing,” says Hans Swildens, the founder of 20-year-old Industry Ventures in San Francisco, an investment firm that invests in hundreds of venture funds and is also among the industry’s biggest buyers of secondary shares. “It was, ‘Hey, we reconsidered this offer. Could you pay me what the market was paying last month?'”

Swildens says that everybody in the secondaries market said no. They had no choice. “It’s almost impossible to buy when you don’t know what numbers you’re buying against. Buyers don’t know how far the [net asset value] of funds will go down. No one wants to buy something for $10 million that might be worth $5 million [in the not-too-distant future].”

Such is the state of affairs in the venture-backed world of startups right now. Though 2020 once promised to be a year of splashy IPOs and long-awaited liquidity for players across the ecosystem — from employees to founders to venture firms to the limited partners that invest in venture firms — it may well be remembered instead as the year that time stood still.

Certainly, everyone seems stuck in place right now.

While limited partners are largely avoiding their phones, and hoping the venture managers in their portfolio will stop asking for capital, venture firms that didn’t push their portfolio companies to go public are now feeling pressured to produce liquidity somewhere in their holdings, and that’s tougher than ever right now.  With some exceptions, cash-rich companies are in no hurry to go shopping (they also have to worry about looking monopolistic).  With some exceptions, companies aren’t merging just yet (though expect a lot of this soon).

Yet secondary shops have hit the pause button, too, as the everyone on the ground tries to get a better sense of where the bottom might be.

It could take one to three quarters to assess, say those in the know. For one thing, a lot of nontraditional players have propped up the venture market over the last decade, and some, including hard-hit corporations and family offices, might not have the wherewithal to support their venture managers, even if that’s not obvious today.

On the company level, there are also plenty of questions that are unanswerable at the moment. “Right now, everything is on pause in terms of activity,” says Swildens, adding that “in a month, we’ll know more. Are people going back to work or not? What were Q1 numbers like? How does April look? Did this company miss revenue by 10% or 80%? Did it beat revenue in March or April? For the buy side, in a month, we’ll have data from the companies and the funds while right now, no one knows how bad it is.”

In the meantime, secondary players are in the catbird’s seat, seemingly, even while they have to sit tight for what insider say could be one to three quarters.

Chris Douvos, a longtime investor in venture funds observes that there’s an “immense amount of capital looking for fund stakes,” meaning from outfits like Industry Ventures and roughly 75 other players in the market. “If I’m a VC right now, I’m wondering when [these] investors — folks who have billions of dollars in committed capital and love to buy fund stakes at 65 cents on the dollar —  start capitulating, but that’s like six to nine months out when you really see [these transactions] happen.”

Swildens suggests that’s about right. “Sellers have to reset pricing expectations, then buyers have to come up with a price they are willing to pay, and those things have to meet. And that takes one to two quarters.”

What’s happening between now and then are calls, more calls, and endless number-crunching. Some of it is proving dismal, with a lot of those numbers shrinking as revenue slows and sales cycles grow harder. Some of it, around pre-IPO companies, is likely particularly agonizing. “All the boards and CEOs are trying to work out pro forma plans now,” says Swildens. “If they cut spending too much, growth slows too much and they can’t take the company public next year. They can’t cut to the bone, or they can’t list it.”

There are bright spots, however. As Swildens observes, “Everybody is being negatively impacted right now, with the exception of some bandwidth, infrastructure, fintech and edtech investments. For some of these, [this shutdown] has been kind of a good thing. Edtech companies’ prices are probably going to go up with tens of millions of people suddenly signing up for their services.”

Now to hurry up and wait.

By way of a working from home Twitter message, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that the company has sourced and will be donating 10 million face masks. The number is sizable increase over the two million reported last week and a hefty bump over the nine million figure Vice President Mike Pence announced during last night’s White House Press Conference.

“Apple has sourced, procured and is donating 10 million masks to the medical community in the United States,” Cook says in the video. “These people deserve our debt of gratitude for all of the work they’re doing on the front lines.”

Apple is joining fellow tech companies in donating masks amid a national shortage as COVID-19 takes an increasing toll on the U.S. population. Many of the donated masks have been stockpiled, in order to adhere to California Occupational Safety and Health Standards put into action following last year’s devastating wildfires. 

Other companies, like Ford, have transformed production facilities to create additional masks.

United Airlines, which had already announced drastic cuts to its domestic and international schedule, today announced even deeper cuts. While the carrier was originally planning to cut 42 percent of its domestic schedule, that number is now up to 52 percent as demand for flights continues to dwindle in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. In total, across domestic and international flights, United will reduce capacity by 68 percent in April.

The revised schedule will be available on United’s website later today. When the airline announced the first round of cuts, it stressed that it wasn’t leaving any of the cities it previously flew to without service but it’s unclear if this will still be the case now. We have contacted United for more details and will update this post once we learn more about these cuts.

United, just like all other U.S. airlines, had already cut most of its international flights. And like virtually all global airlines, the current downturn hit the company right in the middle of a boom in demand for its services and while it was actually routinely expanding its schedule.

Like others, United is now also using empty passenger planes to fly cargo. It’s Star Alliance partner Lufthansa is doing the same and now going as far as loading cargo onto seats and into overhead bins. For the most part, though, airlines are now parking their fleets and drawing down their schedules as they wait for the pandemic to end and demand to pick up again. Chances are, they will also get substantial government support during this time, though the details of what that will look like are still up in the air.

With the novel coronavirus pandemic posing an ongoing threat to people’s health, especially the health of essential workers, San Francisco is conducting a survey to learn more about the issues gig workers are facing during this time. The results of this survey, which should be available within four to six weeks, will help shape local policy decisions.

The survey seeks to understand how COVID-19 has impacted the number of gig jobs available, pay, and companies’ stances on health insurance and paid sick leave. It also asks what workers feel they most urgently need, whether it’s access to protective equipment or emergency funds, as well as if workers are likely to work while sick due to their financial situation.

Conducted by the city’s Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO) and led by UC Santa Cruz professor Chris Benner, the study is targeting at least 500 gig workers who perform services for 12 of the most popular platforms: Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Caviar, Uber Eats, Postmates, GrubHub, Instacart, Shipt, Saucey, Amazon Flex and Drizly.

“This is a very critical workforce for a number a reasons,” Benner told TechCrunch. “They are particularly vulnerable and susceptible, especially early on with drivers taking people to and from the airport. But now as we’re potentially seeing a spike in the online ordering of groceries and food delivery, these people doing the deliveries are providing essential services during this time of having to shelter in home and are potentially vulnerable. And if they’re not being careful in handling food and groceries, they could potentially be spreading [COVID-19].”

This survey comes after Benner was tasked with leading a broader survey about gig workers in San Francisco. That survey kicked off last September but is currently on hold as Benner and his team focus more on the COVID-19 survey. Still, they are analyzing the 700 responses from that initial survey.

“What we know from other sources and what our survey will likely confirm is it’s a large immigrant workforce,’ Benner said. “It’s a lot of people working on low wages and many hours and many people do this work full-time.”

Outside of this survey, the city has begun taking steps to advocate for this essential workforce. Yesterday, SF’s Board of Supervisors pushed for more gig worker protections, asking the SF Office of Labor Standards Enforcement, for example, to establish enforcement procedures in compliance with Assembly Bill 5. AB 5 is the new California law that outlines what types of workers can be legally classified as independent contractors.

This board of supervisor’s resolution, which Gig Workers Rising and We Drive Progress advocated for the board of supervisors to adopt, came after Gig Workers Rising urged California lawmakers to enforce AB 5. Earlier this month, Gig Workers Rising sent a letter to California Gov. Gavin Newsom and other state officials asking them to step in and protect workers during this pandemic.

In the meantime, workers interested in filling out the survey can do so here.