Year: 2020

Hiring chatbot Mya Systems — which uses a conversational AI to grease the recruitment pipeline by automating sourcing for agencies and large enterprises needing to fill lots of vacancies in areas such as retail and warehouse jobs — has closed an $18.75 million Series C.

The funding round was led by Notion Capital with participation from earlier investors, Foundation Capital and Emergence Capital, along with Workday Ventures . The 2012-founded company, which was previously known as FirstJob, raised an $11.4M Series A back in 2017.

Touting growth over the past year, Mya said it saw 3x customer subscription growth in 2019.

In all it says it now has more than 460 brands using its tools — including six of the eight largest staffing agencies, and 29 of the Fortune 100 — name checking the likes of Hays, Adecco, L’Oreal, Deloitte, and Anheuser Busch.

Its chatbot approach to engaging and “deeply” screening applicants via a mobile app has led to more than 400,000 interviews being scheduled with “qualified and interested” candidates, it added. 

Pointing to the COVID-19 pandemic, founder and CEO Eyal Grayevsky suggested there could be increased demand for AI job screening as companies face highly dynamic recruitment needs. “Now more than ever, organizations in healthcare, e-commerce, light industrial, transportation, logistics, retail, and other industries impacted by COVID-19 need help scaling recruitment to serve large, unexpected spikes in demand. Mya is uniquely positioned to help organizations with high volume recruitment needs and the increasing reliance on temp and contract-based work,” he said in a statement.

“While some hiring is slowing down due to COVID-19, we are seeing spikes in demand from industries such as healthcare, light industrial, call center, logistics, grocery, and supply chain. We have received multiple requests from our healthcare, light industrial and e-commerce customers seeking additional support to rapidly scale engagement with nurses, in-home care professionals, warehouse workers, call center representatives, etc. to serve rapidly growing demand for those functions,” he also told us, saying the team is prioritizing helping those dealing with spikes in demand as a result of the coronavirus public health emergency.

In addition to conversational AI, Mya has focused on integrating its platform with other tools used for recruitment, including CRM, ATS and HRIS systems — plugging into the likes of Bullhorn, Workday, and SAP SuccessFactors. Asked what the new funding will be put towards, Grayevsky told us deeper integrations with such partners is on the cards, along with expanding use-cases for the product.

“Mya will be using the funds to invest in our platform, further expanding the use cases designed to support the end-to-end recruiting and post hire engagement process, and continuing to deepen our integrations with partner ATS solutions like Bullhorn, Workday, and SAP Successfactors. In addition to deepening our integrations, we are also investing heavily in turnkey, fully-featured solutions built alongside our ATS partners that allow for even greater ease and speed to implement Mya,” he said.

“Mya will also be investing in deepening our core platform and conversational AI technology, specifically to expand our conversational capabilities across new industries. We will further enhance our self-service conversation design and configuration capabilities to make it even easier for our customers to rapidly scale the Mya conversational experience across both high volume, hourly and professional roles. Lastly, we are strengthening our infrastructure and support for global customers who are rapidly scaling internationally (e.g. L’Oreal is now live in 18 countries globally).”

At this point Mya is selling its product into more than 35 countries — predominantly in North America, EMEA and APAC — with a focus on large and mid-sized employers that operate globally, including staffing businesses and corporations across high-volume recruitment industries such as healthcare, light industrial, call center, retail, transportation and logistics, hospitality, grocery and automotive.

“We have teams in both the US and Europe to support our expanding global customer base,” Grayevsky added. “With the new funding, we will continue to invest in the distribution, infrastructure and support needed to address demand across target markets globally.”

He name-checks the likes of Olivia, AllyO, Job Pal, Roborecruiter, XOR, and TextRecruit as main competitors. In terms of differentiation, he points to Mya having processed “tens of millions” of candidate interactions thus far — amassing an “ever-growing domain specific conversational dataset” — which he said enables it to continue to enhance the experience the platform can deliver for candidates.

“We have the most robust conversational technology and platform enabling rich, dynamic, and natural conversational experiences that deliver higher engagement, conversion, and actionable insights,” he claimed “We have the most in-depth solutions that support use cases across the entire recruiting funnel (e.g. sourcing, talent pool nurturing and re-engagement, screening, scheduling, contractor redeployment, etc.).

“We have the most experience successfully delivering deeply integrated solutions that scale for the largest staffing business and corporations (e.g. our largest customer is now deployed in 600+ locations globally, across hundreds of job roles, and thousands of recruiters on the platform, engaging with millions of both passive and active candidates on an annual basis), and… we are closely partnered with the leading ATS providers such as Workday and Bullhorn, where we have differentiated integrations and channel relationships that give us a competitive advantage.”

We also asked Grayevsky how the recruitment tool is complying with different national employment and equality laws, and also avoiding introducing any discrimination/bias into its AI-aided screening.

On this he said: “Mya does not apply any advanced AI or machine learning to decision making (i.e. determining fit for a job role), we are squarely focused on developing a robust conversational experience that allows Mya to engage instantly, capture information with high response and completion rates, automate outbound sourcing and scheduling process, and provide ongoing engagement and support with both active applicants and passive candidates in our customer’s talent community.”

He also said they have put steps in place to confirm the accuracy of candidate responses through the conversation (such as by adding a confirmation step for core requirements); and by “employing processes that check for bias, both before a solution goes into production and once its launched”.

Another step it’s taken to “ensure a positive experience for all candidates”, as he put it, is to provides the user an option to reroute a question that the bot does not understand to a recruiter.

“Those queries are immediately submitted into our AI training and annotation pipeline, tested and deployed into production to continually expand our FAQ support within the platform,” he told us.

“Mya’s mission is to create a far more efficient and equitable job market powered by conversational AI, and a core principle of that mission is to level the playing field,” Grayevsky added. “Our AI, engineering and product teams (which includes individuals from highly diverse backgrounds) make all product design decisions to consciously remove bias from the hiring process and ensure that information surfaced to hiring teams is accurate and objective.”

“We are also investing extensively to ensure Mya is in full compliance with local employment laws, data protection and privacy regulations, rules around opt-in and consent, everywhere we operate in the world. Ahead of GDPR, we worked with outside counsel on a Privacy Impact Assessment. That led to our appointment of a Data Protection Officer, and informed our ‘Privacy by Default’ and ‘Privacy by Design’ philosophies. We’re continuing to keep an eye on regulations around AI in the EU, and are already in compliance with the seven key requirements identified in the European Commission’s white paper on artificial intelligence.”

Asked about the disproportionate admin burden automated hiring tools can place on candidates, as they grease up efficiencies of scale for employers — i.e. by requiring jobseekers respond individually to screening system vs just being able to submit a single CV to multiple companies — Grayevsky argued that dynamic data-capturing recruitment systems, such as Mya, offer a better experience to job seekers via increased responsiveness and through expanding potential future job-matching opportunities.

“Traditional job applications often have many steps, and can take a long time to complete, creating a negative experience and drop-off for the employer. Those questionnaires are not dynamic and often lead to no response. That time and effort invested often cannot be leveraged into other opportunities,” he argued.

“With Mya, everyone gets a response instantaneously and around the clock (24/7). They can ask questions and get answers in real-time, providing more transparency and insight into the opportunity, process, and employer. Mya can follow up and if deemed fit by the hiring team, schedule a phone call or on-site interview with the recruiter or hiring manager to help accelerate the process.

“If they are ultimately not deemed fit by the hiring team due to a missing requirement, Mya is able to re-engage to help that candidate connect to a role that is more suitable based on their profile, interests, and availability. The idea is that a candidate can build one profile and be connected to multiple jobs, quickly and efficiently. We built our solution through the lens of the candidate, making it easy to provide information about qualifications, interests, and availability, and get connected to the right opportunities.”

In a great example of what can happen when smart, technically-oriented people come together in a time of need, an open-source hardware project started by a group including Irish entrepreneur Colin Keogh and Breeze Automation CEO and co-founder Gui Calavanti has produced a prototype ventilator using 3D-printed parts and readily available, inexpensive material. The ventilator prototype was designed and produced in just seven days, after the project spun up on Facebook and attracted participation from over 300 engineers, medical professionals and researchers.

The prototype will now enter into a validation process by the Irish Health Services Executive (HSE), the country’s health regulatory body. This will technically only validate it for use in Ireland, which ironically looks relatively well-stocked for ventilator hardware, but it will be a key stamp of approval that could pave the way for its deployment across countries where there are shortages, including low-income nations.

Ventilator hardware in the U.S. is also likely to encounter shortages, depending on the progress of coronavirus spread in the country. On Wednesday, the White House enacted the Defense Production Act, which provides broad powers to the President for redirecting materials and private company production capacity to building much-needed supplies and equipment in a time of crisis.

During Wednesday’s White House briefing on the current COVID-19 situation, U.S. VP Mike Pence said that there are only 10,000 ventilators in the country’s strategic reserve, which, while it doesn’t take into account the stock of equipment in hospitals or healthcare facilities around the country, likely won’t address the overall needs of medical professionals in case some of the more serious projections about the infection come true.

The project could be one way to help address the shortfall, along with commitments by automakers including GM, Ford and Tesla to produce ventilator equipment should the need arise.

The group behind the ventilator also recently changed the focus of their Facebook community, renaming the group from the Open Source Ventilator Project to the Open Source COVID19 Medical Supplies community. They’re looking at expanding their focus to finding ways to cheaply and effectively build and validate other needed equipment, including protective gear like masks, sanitizer and protective face guards for front-line healthcare workers.

Ada today took the wraps off its $44M Series B that it hopes will allow the company to expand its offering of the company’s AI-powered customer service chatbot.

Accel lead the round with participation from existing investors, including Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark, Version One, Leaders Fund, and Burst Capital.

“Although AI gets thrown around a lot in the enterprise, we are focused on companies offering solutions that are driving real business value, and Ada is doing exactly that. Ada is breaking through the crowded market of chatbots to define a new category of automated customer experience that can manage far greater customer inquiry volumes while delivering some of the strongest customer satisfaction scores we’ve seen,” said Ben Fletcher, partner at Accel, in a released statement.

He adds that Ada delivers compelling value through “uniting automation, personalization, speedy implementation, and a no-code platform for non-technical users.”

Ada’s ACX platform features a chatbot powered by an AI engine that allows the company to deliver personalized customer service conversations. The company says it uses machine learning to increase the accuracy of its platform, and allows its customers in different markets to tailor the experience to its customers. For instance, for a company in fintech, the ACX platform can be trained to understand the industry’s jargon, typos, spelling errors, and work with 100 languages.

“Our founding team spent over a year in the trenches of customer support and saw first-hand that existing solutions just couldn’t scale in the face of soaring ticket volumes and sky-high customer expectations,” said Mike Murchison, Co-founder, and CEO of Ada, in a released statement. “We designed Ada to help customer service teams take advantage of all the benefits of automation without sacrificing the personalized touches that are so essential to winning loyal, long-term customers. Ada will use this investment to lead the next phase of this market, extending our best-in-class AI with the aim of delivering personalized experiences across all customer properties, while providing more tools to help businesses better calibrate their customer service strategy and optimize their bottom line.”

Several years back, the chatbot market suffered a quick rise and fall, but the current players are providing a critical service to its customers. They’re up against rising expectations from consumers and increasing demands from organizations looking to scale operations. Mature startups like Ada are well-positioned to continue to capitalize on the increased requirements, and this funding round should carry the company to new markets.

Today Microsoft announced that its Teams product, a Slack competitor and likely beneficiary of the COVID-19 remote work boom, has reached 32 million daily active users (DAUs). The new figure represents a huge gain on the number Microsoft shared in November 2019, when the product had 20 million DAUs.

Slack, Microsoft’s arch-rival in this particular niche of the productivity space, last announced 12 million DAUs in October of 2019. Of course, as Slack has also grown since the start of Q4 2019, that figure is dated.

Microsoft and Slack have been locked in a competition to build the biggest internal-work chat service since Teams’ launch in late 2016 — it’s a rivalry I’ve written about since early 2017. The strife has a rich history, including a reported decision to not buy Slack by Microsoft’s brass, and an open letter from the then-private upstart that took aim at its older, larger rival when it brought Teams to market.

It’s a fun rivalry to track, with a cool, Silicon Valley-popular unicorn taking on Microsoft, a decreasingly uncool enterprise behemoth.¹

But for Slack, the Teams news comes at an unwelcome time. Its share price has been under fire lately, with investors repricing it to lower and lower revenue multiples. The implication is that the public markets are expecting the company to grow more slowly over time, generating less future cash.

(Reviewing Slack’s earnings transcript it appears that the company is conservatively discussing its future as it watches product usage grow ahead of product revenue; we’ll know a hell of a lot more after its next earnings report which will include the post-usage revenue result of the COVID-19 era. Ironically its Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella who likes to say that “revenue is a lagging indicator, usage is a leading indicator.”)

Teams is likely part of investor reaction to Slack’s numbers, given that Microsoft is aggressively working to grow its mind- and marketshare in Slack’s market. The Big Five firm recently launched an ad campaign for Teams, to pick an example. And it’s dropping new DAU figures pretty quickly after the smaller company’s earnings were poorly received by Wall Street.

Microsoft didn’t announce the new DAU figure by itself. The company also detailed a number of new Teams features, including “noise suppression” for calls, a “raise hand” feature that lets users better juggle whose turns it is to speak, the ability to break-out discrete chats into smaller windows, “offline and low-bandwidth support,” along with a few integrations. (Bits of that should sound familiar, Zoom has a hand-raise feature for example.)

Usage

Slack has made noise in the past about what daily active users means as a concept, underscoring how active its users are at the same time. Microsoft detailed how it counts DAUs in a blog post today, saying that it requires a user to make an “intentional” action inside a 24-hour period, including “sending or replying to a chat, joining a meeting, or opening a file,” while discounting “passive actions like auto boot, minimizing a screen, or closing the app.”

That seems pretty reasonable. But I’m less convinced by the how active are the DAUs discussion due to differences in userbase targeting. Microsoft has spoken repeatedly about how it wants to help non-office workers stay in touch with Teams. Today it discussed how it’s working towards “bringing technological solutions to traditionally underserved professionals, including first-line and healthcare workers.” I’d hazard that those workers are, on average, less active on an internal chat app during the day than, say, your local startup employee.

Wrapping as we’ve said enough for today, it’s worth keeping in mind that there is room in this market for a few players. From our current point in time, it seems unlikely that either Slack or Teams will take the whole market. Not that they aren’t trying, naturally.

1. Increasingly cool?

Storj, a startup that developed a low-cost, decentralized cloud storage solution, announced a new version today called Tardigrade Decentralized Cloud Storage Service.

The new service comes with an enterprise service level agreement (SLA) that promises 99.9999999% file durability and over 99.95 percent availability, which it claims is on par with Amazon S3.

The company has come up with an unusual system to store files safely, taking advantage of excess storage capacity around the world. They are effectively doing with storage what Airbnb does with an extra bedroom, enabling people and organizations to sell that excess capacity to make extra money.

It’s fair to ask if that wouldn’t be a dangerous way to store files, but Storj Executive Chairman Ben Golub says that they have come up with a way of distributing the data across drives on their network so that no single file would ever be fully exposed.

“What we do in order to make this work is, first, before any data is uploaded, our customers encrypt the data, and they hold the keys so nobody else can decrypt the data. And then every part of a file is split into 80 pieces, of which any 30 can be used to reconstitute it. And each of those 80 pieces goes to a different drive on the network,” Golub explained.

That means even if a hacker were able to somehow get at one encrypted piece of the puzzle, he or she would need 29 others, and the encryption keys, to put the file back together again. “All a storage node operator sees is gibberish, and they only see a portion of the file. So if a bad person wanted to get your file, they would have to compromise something like 30 different networks in order to get [a single file], and even if they did that they would only have gibberish unless you also lost your encryption keys,” he said.

The ability to buy excess capacity allows Storj to offer storage at much lower prices than typical cloud storage. Golub says his company’s list prices are one-half to one-third cheaper than Amazon S3 storage and it’s S3-compatible.

The company launched in 2014 and has 20,000 users on 100,000 distributed nodes today, but this is the first time it has launched an enterprise version of the cloud storage solution.

The state of testing for the novel coronavirus currently spreading globally in the U.S. is abysmal, relative to other developed countries, but there are a number of efforts underway to help improve availability. One company doing their part is at-home lab testing startup Everlywell, which has been offering a number of in-home self collection kits for things like food sensitivity, metabolism, thyroid and more. As of Monday March 23, it’ll also offer a COVID-19 sample collection kit for home use.

Everlywell’s test kit includes swab-based collection equipment, as well as shipping materials that ensure safe transport of a person’s sample as outlined by the CDC and UN Committee of Experts on the Transport of Dangerous Goods to help prevent any possible risk to mail carriers or couriers actually moving the packages. The samples collected are then tested by labs certified for COVID-19 testing under the FDA Emergency Use Authorization issued to help build out America’s testing capacity.

The company also includes overnight shipping labels for the samples, and says that results will be available in a secure, online format within 48 hours. For anyone who tests positive, Everlywell will also be connecting them with certified physicians that can provide them with consultations and guidance via telehealth, and it notes that any positive results will also be sent to federal and state reporting agencies, as is currently required by mandate.

I asked Everlywell about the accuracy of these tests relative to other methods, and they noted that their at-home collection method have been validated by a number of peer-reviewed medical studies. Experts have been calling for use of at-home collection as one way to increase collection volume and lower the risk for front-line medical staff, too. The tests themselves are also all conducted at certified private labs, with results reviewed by board-certified physicians for accuracy.

Initially, Everlywell says it will have 30,000 at-home diagnostic kits available, though it hopes to eventually scale that to up to be able to offer tests to up to 250,000 people weekly. Getting to that target could “take several weeks” or even “a few months,” however, according to the company, because of a global shortage of the nasopharyngeal swabs that are used in COVID-19 testing, which affects not only the startup’s ability to produce test kits, but everyone else’s as well. The company also says that it’s working on potential validation of testing for the new coronavirus using different types of biological samples that would use different collection methods, in case of future approval of their use by health regulators.

Everlywell will have a screening process in place via their website, based on CDC guidelines, to determine who gets the kits. They also carry a $135 charge, which Everlywell says it sees no profit from, and which can also be covered by participating insurance providers. The company is also trying to see if it can provide them free of charge in partnership with government and public health partners.

Dozens of startups have stepped up in India in recent quarters to improve banking experience for millions of users and businesses in the country. As a result, tens of thousands of people who could not get a loan or a credit card from a bank can now secure both from fintech startups.

But this push to bring financial inclusion to everyone still has many areas to cover. Blue-collar workers, for instance, are still facing challenges in availing some basic banking services.

Kosh, a Y Combinator-backed startup (W20), is beginning to tackle this challenge. It groups three or as many as ten blue-collar workers and gives them a loan.

“When a user logs into our Android app, they are able to apply for a loan. But before they do that, they need to add some of their colleagues and friends who are also looking for a loan,” explained Aayush Goel, co-founder of Kosh, in an interview with TechCrunch.

This way of banding together people allows Kosh to charge a lower rate of interest on the loan, said Goel.

“We have borrowed this from the world of microfinance. Essentially, we have a joint liability model. Let us say there were three people who were looking for a loan. We band them together and instead of giving each of them a separate loan, we give the group one loan” he said.

In each group, at least one member is credit-worthy in the traditional sense, he explained. The startup also uses alternative data such as information gleaned from text messages to determine a person’s eligibility.

Such an arrangement has traditionally seen fewer people default (or fall behind paying their debt) because of social pressure from their colleagues and friends, as all of them are liable.

Kosh started to disburse loans in December. It currently offers loans up to twice the salary of an individual and over a tenure of up to 10 months, said Goel. The startup has disbursed close to 150 loans worth $35,000. It works with a Noida-based non-banking financial company to fund these loans.

The startup said it plans to broaden its neobanking offering this year by creating bank accounts for its customers. “There is a general lack of discipline in how these people spend their money. Having access to a bank account that works for them could prove very useful,” said Goel.

In recent years, a handful of startups such as Bangalore-based Open and NiYO Solutions have developed neobanks or alternative banks to serve businesses and individuals. In January, two former Google Pay executives announced their own neobank startup that aims to serve millennials.

GIGI Benefits, another Y Combinator-backed startup (W20), offers insurance and savings — perks that only full-time employees typically have — to gig-economy workers and freelancers.

“We help each worker set aside part of a paycheque to cover their costs of insurance, short-term expenses, and plan for their retirement,” said Sowmya Rao, founder and chief executive of GIGI Benefits, in a post.

Venture capitalists have raised record-breaking funds in recent years, but that doesn’t always mean the money is there for them when they want it. In extreme downturns, limited partners or LPs — the people and institutions that promise capital to venture capital firms, and then wire it when the VCs need it for their startups — have little choice but to answer the phone less. The alternative is to sell others of their positions — including in publicly traded stocks —  at a steep loss, and they’d prefer not to do that.

“The public markets end up being the ATM for the illiquid stuff,” says Chris Douvos of Ahoy Capital, an LP who has backed such firms as First Round, Data Collective, and True Ventures. When the markets are in free fall as now — today the S&P closed nearly 30% below a record set last month — the collective reaction of asset managers, he says, is: “Holy smokes, this kind of sucks.”

What happens next depends on how sustained and deep the downturn, but LPs seem to agree that the the industry could be in for a reckoning this time that’s beyond their control. They have little choice but to get practical, fast.

Already, newer managers are seeing LP interest dissipate before their eyes. Though Douvos says he doesn’t “think we’re there yet,” he also shares the story of a fund manager who has been struggling to close a $50 million fund and on whose behalf Douvos has been “pinging a bunch of my LP friends, and the response I’m getting is, ‘We’e not investing in new relationships right now. We’re not even investing the time.'”

Joanna Rupp, a managing director at the University of Chicago’s Office of Investments, notes that the school’s endowment has stakes in many smaller managers with whom it has strong relationships, including Pear in Palo Alto. She echoes what Douvos is seeing, explaining that, “Everyone who is currently in our pipeline and who we committed to invest in three weeks ago, I’m still investing with them.” But given the financial gut punch the economy has taken, “some [new managers] who we wanted to build relationships with and who could be interesting to invest with, I now don’t have the capacity to add them.”

Adds Rupp, “It’s going to be very difficult for newer managers without established LP bases to raise.”

Perhaps more relevant to the broader startup industry is that, absent a quick economic rebound, older relationships can also start to receive the cold shoulder. This means less dollars for the venture firms that have already closed their funds, and fewer capital for startups that might need it.

“At some point,” says Douvos, fear and uncertainty starts to “creep into your existing portfolio, and you start doing portfolio triage, and you’re like, ‘Wait, I have 24 venture managers and I’ve got to cut somewhere.” The questions begged are: “Do I make smaller commitments to each of them? Do I start saying sayonara to the bottom third?”

It’s precisely the scenario that played out exactly 20 years ago, when following the dot-com boom and bust, limited partners — from pension funds to charitable foundations to school endowments — saw their overall assets shrink, forcing venture managers to whom they’d committed capital to slow their investments.

Some venture firms were eventually forced to shut down. Others had to downsize their ambitions. Accel, for example, not only reduced a $1.4 billion fund it had raised at the time, but its partnership actually cut back the fund twice, in both 2002 and 2003, releasing some of its backers from their obligations.

Certainly, many of the surrounding circumstances feel familiar to longtime industry participants who’ve awaited some kind of a correction — one more dramatic than the 2008 financial crisis, which hit Wall Street far harder than Silicon Valley. Indeed, with record amounts of venture capital raised, a market peak, then sudden plunge, the moment feels very much like it did in the spring of 2000 when the high-flying market, rife with young internet companies, abruptly nose-dived, wiping out thousands of startups — and hundreds of venture firms — over the following three years.

At least some lessons were learned in the aftermath of that earlier crash. For one thing, says Rupp, in these “unprecedented times, people will show their character. You get a sense of who people are and how they think about the world, and GPs need to be really mindful of that and how supportive they are in communicating with their portfolio companies.”

Rupp also suggests that LPs, like savvy VCs, can sometimes use downturns as a way to ease out of some positions and double down on others. Even faced with possible budget cuts, says Rupp, “Some folks we wouldn’t cut back, while you hope you might get additional allocation as other LPs become more conservative.”

Elizabeth “Beezer” Clarkson, who has led Sapphire Partners investments in numerous venture firms, further posits that companies might realize now that IPO “windows aren’t opened forever.” While a generation of startups has subscribed to the notion that should stay private as long as possible — earning the patience of early investors and employees by overseeing smaller secondary share sales — many could have made their employees, venture investors, and the industry’s limited partner more had they moved faster to go public.

“Can everyone be made a millionaire off secondaries?” Clarkson says. “It must be harder.”

Of course, much remains to be seen. Coronavirus vaccines are being researched around the world, and should something work soon, economies around the globe could spring back. In the meantime, VCs might want to give their LPs a break, for as long as they can, while these investors are getting whipsawed.

Says Douvos of the current atmosphere, “Everybody believes that, ‘Oh my gosh, all of a sudden, entrepreneurs are willing to accept term sheets at like 10% less,’ The [VCs] see this as a value.

“What they don’t realize is that [right now], there’s so much more value out in the rest of the world,” he continues. “All things being equal, you’d rather buy a public stock that you can buy on sale and get out of when it runs up again than a private company that you have to hold for eight or nine years . . . Being asked to lock in losses to buy illiquid assets doesn’t feel that great.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an internal memo earlier this week that the company will give employees working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic a $1,000 cash bonus. But, as the Intercept first reported, contractors will not receive the bonus.

When TechCrunch asked Facebook why contractors won’t get the bonus, a company spokesperson sent us a statement similar to the one it gave the Intercept, saying that “The $1,000 is for full-time employees who are working from home. For contract workers, we are sending them home and paying them in full even if they are unable to work, which is much more meaningful than a one off payment.”

The BBC reported earlier today that Zuckerberg said in a call with reporters that contract workers will also get their full salaries even if they are unable to complete all their usual tasks. But Joe Rivano Barros of the Worker Agency, which coordinates campaigns for advocacy groups like Gig Workers Rise and RAICES Texas, told the publication, “it’s great that they are letting them work from home, but it seems like the bare minimum Facebook could do.”

Facebook has an estimated 15,000 content moderators, working through third-party contractors. In the call covered by the BBC, Zuckerberg said that Facebook full-time employees will take over decisions about sensitive topics, including self-harm and suicide, in part to reduce the mental health impact of viewing such content on contractors, and added he was “personally quite worried that the isolation from people being at home could potentially lead to more depression or mental health issues, and I want to make sure that we are ahead of that supporting our community.”

A portion of Facebook’s content moderation is also performed by algorithms, though the shortcomings of its filters was highlighted this week when a bug blocked sharing of coronavirus-related content on the platform, even from legitimate new sources (posts were later restored). Human workers are still essential to Facebook’s content moderation system.

The impact of screening content, including violent or disturbing material, on human moderators was brought to attention last year after a major report from The Verge in February 2019 about the mental health toll experienced by many contractors. Afterward, Zuckerberg said the company would commit to paying all Facebook contractors in the U.S. “a wage that’s more reflective of the local costs of living. And for those who review content on our site to make sure it follows our community standards, we’re going even further. We’re going to provide them a higher base wage, additional benefits, and more supportive programs given the nature of their jobs.”

As part of its COVID-19 response, Facebook also said that it will pay contingent workers who cannot work as offices close because people have been ordered to work from home, following similar measures from Microsoft and other companies.

But as TechCrunch’s Jonathan Shieber and Alex Wilhelm noted, many tech companies have created a “dual-class worker system in recent years, keeping their more technical and product-oriented staff as full-time workers for the main company, while exporting elements of labor to third-party companies… Moving to comp more, or all workers, is not only good PR, though it is also that, it’s simply good ethics.”

You don’t have to go far to find someone online downplaying the severity of a global pandemic that’s shut down entire economies and ground everyday life to a halt. Knowing that, Twitter will take extra steps to remove tweets that put people at risk of contracting the novel coronavirus as it rapidly sweeps through communities around the globe.

On Wednesday, Twitter updated its safety policy to prohibit tweets that “could place people at a higher risk of transmitting COVID-19.” The new policy bans tweets denying expert guidance on the virus, encouraging “fake or ineffective treatments, preventions and diagnostic techniques” as well as tweets that mislead users by pretending to be from health authorities or experts.

Given the new guidelines Twitter has outlined, the platform is going to have its work cut out for it. Under the ruleset, a tweet that claims “social distancing is not effective” would be subject to removal. Twitter also wants to delete telling followers to do ineffective or dangerous things like drinking bleach, even if the tweet is “made in jest” because that content can prove harmful when taken out of context.

Twitter also wants to delete tweets that make calls to action encouraging other users to behave in a way counter to what health authorities recommend, with the example tweet of “coronavirus is a fraud and not real – go out and patronize your local bar!!” Some political figures have faced criticism for similar statements in recent days, including Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) who encouraged Fox Business viewers “to just go out… go to your local pub.”

The rules will also ban tweets in which people play armchair doctor and make claims like “if you have a wet cough, it’s not coronavirus – but a dry cough is.” Users will also not be allowed to make coronavirus claims that single out groups of people based on race or nationality, like discouraging followers to eat at Chinese restaurants. Other race-based claims like John McAfee’s tweet that “Coronavirus cannot attack black people” won’t fly either.

Twitter’s new set of coronavirus-related misinformation rules is as thorough as it will be difficult to enforce. Many, many tweets would appear to fall under the deepened policy designed to prevent health misinformation from spreading on the social network.

To meet the unique challenge posed by the pandemic, Twitter said it has put a “content severity triage system” in place so that the most potentially damaging tweets can be identified and removed, with less emphasis on users flagging the tweets themselves. The company previously announced that it would be relying more heavily on automation and machine learning to act on content that violates platform rules, which Twitter admits may lead to mistakes in some cases.

In an effort to rise to the gravity of the situation, Twitter’s policies lay out an aggressive and fluid approach that we don’t always see from social networks. We’ll be following along to see how the platform experiment goes in the coming days and if Twitter can help stem the flow of potentially lethal misinformation as the world wakes up to the global threat of COVID-19.