“I was here during the dot-com bust and rush, and here during the financial fallout that happened, so we’re a little overdue for some corrective action in the market,” Kostka said. “While I’ve been through boom and bust cycles before, this one is more meaningful because life and death are associated with it.”
After our piece looking at the numbers came out, however, some readers weighed in that our coverage missed the mark: In the headline, did we focus too much on progress and not enough on what is left to be done?
Because we’re both social distancing, I caught up with Kostka on the phone and got her take on how to report numbers around diversity without glossing over the work that remains to be accomplished. We also discussed how to stay optimistic during a downturn, potential innovation that might come out of COVID-19 and why diversity matters now more than ever.
QuitGenius, the YC-backed startup that uses cognitive behavioral therapy to help folks quit smoking and vaping tobacco products, has today announced the close of am $11 million Series A round.
The new funding was led by Octopus Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, Startup Health and Triple Point Ventures.
Quit Genius was built by doctors — Yusuf Sherwani (co-founder and CEO), Mazof Ahmed (co-founder and COO), and Sarim Siddiqui (co-founder and head of product) — who met on the first day of medical school. They saw the terrible effects of smoking on patients’ health but didn’t see doctors giving those patients a clear path to quit smoking.
Cognitive behavioral therapy is seen as one of the more effective treatments for breaking addiction, helping patients focus on their thoughts, feelings and behaviors and understanding how one affects the others. The Quit Genius app helps users recognize when a negative thought or feeling pops up, and replace those triggering thoughts and emotions with more positive, healthier thoughts. This is done through various types of content, such as audio sessions, animated videos and interactive exercises.
The company also offers a device that can pair with the app to test users’ breath and help hold them accountable to their goal of quitting.
Quit Genius has already made headway with its smoking and vaping products, and is going to use the funding to expand into other types of addiction, such as alcohol and opioid addiction.
Alongside its consumer-facing product, Quit Genius also offers an enterprise product to businesses who are looking to foster a healthy workforce and also save money on healthcare for employees. Unlike most enterprise wellness programs that charge per person per year (regardless of utilization or engagement), Quit Genius only charges by engagement (employees who use the program) and offers a 25 percent quit rate guarantee.
In other words, if 25 percent of enrolled users don’t achieve their goal of quitting, Quit Genius will partially refund fees. Thus far, the company hasn’t had to do that, reports CEO Sherwani.
Sherwani added that the company has signed up 15 enterprise clients, split between self-insured employers and health plan providers.
Beyond the funding and expansion into other forms of addiction, Quit Genius is also trying to do its own part as the novel Coronavirus pandemic spreads across the globe. Noting the high risk status of smokers, Sherwani said that the company will offer its product for free to new sign ups through April so that they can quit smoking immediately.
Founded by doctors, Quit Genius prioritizes efficacy. The company has enlisted independent research studies to show the success rate of its product, the results of which have been published in peer-reviewed journals. According to that research, more than 60K people have quit smoking, with a 53 percent quit rate, which is higher than other quit-smoking techniques.
The startup has raised a total of $13.6 million from investors listed above, as well as Eric Ries, Serena Williams’ Serena Ventures, Venus Williams, and Instacart cofounder Max Mullen.
You have to actually get work done, not just video call all day, but apps like Zoom want to take over your screen. Remote workers who need to stay in touch while staying productive are forced to juggle tabs. Meanwhile, call participants often look and sound far away, dwarfed by their background and drowned in noise.
Today, Around launches its new video chat software that crops participants down to just circles that float on your screen so you have space for other apps. Designed for laptops, Around uses auto-zoom and noise cancelling to keep your face and voice in focus. Instead of crowding around one computer or piling into a big-screen conference room, up to 15 people can call from their own laptop without echo — even from right next to each other.
“Traditional videoconferencing tries to maximize visual presence. But too much presence gets in the way of your work,” says Around CEO Dominik Zane. “People want to make eye contact. They want to connect. But they also want to get stuff done. Around treats video as the means to an end, not the end in itself.”
Around becomes available today by request in invite-only beta for Mac, windows, Linux, and web. It’s been in private beta since last summer, but now users can sign up here for early access to Around. The freemium model means anyone can slide the app into their stack without paying at first.
After two years in stealth, Around’s 12-person distributed team reveals that it’s raised $5.2 million in seed funding over multiple rounds from Floodgate, Initialized Capital, Credo Ventures, AngelList’s Naval Ravikant, Product Hunt’s Ryan Hoover, Crashlytics’ Jeff Seibert, and angel Tommy Leep. The plan is to invest in talent and infrastructure to keep video calls snappy.
Not Just A Picturephone
Around CEO Dominik Zane
Around was born out of frustration with remote work collaboration. Zane and fellow Around co-founder Pavel Serbajlo had built mobile marketing company M.dot that was acquired by GoDaddy by using a fully distributed team. But they discovered that Zoom was “built around decades-old assumptions of what a video call should be” says Zane. “A Zoom video call is basically a telephone connected to a video camera. In terms of design, it’s not much different from the original Picturephone demoed at the 1964 World’s Fair.”
So together, they started Around as a video chat app that slips into the background rather than dominating the foreground. “We stripped out every unnecessary pixel by building a real-time panning and zooming technology that automatically keeps callers’ faces–and only their faces–in view at all times” Zane explains. It’s basically Facebook Messenger’s old Chat Heads design, but for the desktop enterprise.
Calls start with a shared link or /Around Slack command. You’re never unexpectedly dumped into a call, so you can stay on task. Since participants are closely cropped to their faces and not blown up full screen, they don’t have to worry about cleaning their workspace or exactly how their hair looks. That reduces the divide between work-from-homers and those in the office.
As for technology, Around’s “EchoTerminator” uses ultrasonic audio to detect nearby laptops and synchronization to eliminate those strange feedback sounds. Around also employs artificial intelligence and the fast CPUs of modern laptops to suppress noise like sirens, dog barks, washing machines, or screaming children. A browser version means you don’t have to wait for people to download anything, and visual emotes like “Cool idea” pop up below people’s faces so they don’t have to interrupt the speaker.
Traditional video chat vs Around
“Around is what you get when you rethink video chat for a 21st-century audience, with 21st-century technology,” says Initialized co-founder and general partner Garry Tan. “Around has cracked an incredibly difficult problem, integrating video into the way people actually work today. It makes other video-call products feel clumsy by comparison.”
There’s one big thing missing from Around: mobile. Since it’s meant for multitasking, it’s desktop/laptop only. But that orthodoxy ignores the fact that a team member on the go might still want to chime in on chats, even with just audio. Mobile apps are on the roadmap, though, with plans to allow direct dial-in and live transitioning from laptop to mobile. The 15-participant limit also prevents Around from working for all-hands meetings.
Competing with video calling giant Zoom will be a serious challenge. Nearly a decade of perfecting its technology gives Zoom super low latency so people don’t talk over each other. Around will have to hope that its smaller windows let it keep delays down. There’s also other multitask video apps like Loom’s asynchronously-recorded video clips that prevent distraction.
With coronavirus putting a new emphasis on video technology for tons of companies, finding great engineers could be difficult. “Talent is scarce, and good video is hard tech. Video products are on the rise. Google and large companies snag all the talent, plus they have the ability and scale to train audio-video professionals at universities in northern Europe” Zane tells me. “Talent wars are the biggest risk and obstacle for all real-time video companies.”
But that rise also means there are tons of people fed up with having to stop work to video chat, kids and pets wandering into their calls, and constantly yelling at co-workers to “mute your damn mic!” If ever there was a perfect time to launch Around, it’s now.
“Eight years ago we were a team of locals and immigrants, traveling frequently, moving between locations and offices” Zane recalls. “We realized that this was the future of work and it’s going to be one of the most significant transformations of modern society over the next 30 years . . . We’re building the product we’ve wanted for ourselves.”
One of the best things about working remotely is you don’t have colleagues randomly bugging you about superfluous nonsense. But the heaviness of traditional video chat swings things too far in the other direction. You’re isolated unless you want to make a big deal out of scheduling a call. We need presence and connection, but also the space to remain in flow. We don’t want to be away or on top of each other. We want to be around.
A couple of days after Microsoft unveiled a ton of info about the Xbox Series X, Sony is about to do the exact same thing in a live video. Sony is hosting a live broadcast about the PlayStation 5 today at 9 AM PT, 12 PM ET, 4 PM GMT.
Lead system architect Mark Cerny will unveil the console’s architecture and what it means for both developers and gamers. We already know that the PlayStation 5 will be launched in late 2020. It’ll feature an eight-core AMD CPU, a custom AMD GPU with ray-tracing support and SSD storage.
The controller will support haptic feedback and adaptive triggers depending on what you’re doing in the game. But many details are still missing. Today’s announcement should answer some questions.
The U.S./Canada border has remained open despite measures by both countries to block and limit international flights and mobility in light of the coronavirus pandemic, but that is changing today as the two countries have agreed, “by mutual consent,” to suspend any movement between the two beyond “essential traffic” and “trade,” as first revealed via President Donald Trump on Twitter.
Earlier this week, Canada announced during a press conference with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that it would be closing its borders to all non-citizens and residents, with the exception of American citizens. He was asked multiple times during the Q&A session at that briefing about why the U.S. was exempted, given that the rate of new cases in the U.S. was now large and growing larger at a rapid pace.
Trudeau said that closing the border to the U.S. was still on the table as an option, but emphasized the intertwined nature of the economies of both countries as one key factor in why they were not included in the original travel limitations. The exception for traffic deemed “essential” as well as for trade transportation between the two countries in the measures announced by Trump today appear to be an attempt to keep at least part of that economic activity intact.
We don’t yet know the extent of the border closure, or what will qualify as “essential” travel between Canada and the U.S. in detail, so stay tuned as we learn more about this latest travel restriction development.
The rollercoaster ride of equity markets continues as all of the major stock indexes opened sharply lower one day after President Donald Trump announced the intention to push through a sweeping aid package — including the potential for a direct payout to most American workers.
Domestic indexes had risen sharply on Tuesday, but market volatility increasingly seems to be the new normal according to market analysts at some of the nation’s biggest financial services firms. “The Covid-19 pandemic sparked the fastest reassessment of equity market fundamentals and risk in the last 30 years,” Bram Kaplan, executive director of equity derivates strategy at JPMorgan, told clients in a note quoted by CNN.
On a net basis, the market is heading south. Worth just a handful of points over the 20,000 mark, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) is nearly 10,000 points closer to its 52 week low than to its 52k week high, for example. More exotic indices have also seen their value decline. A popular basket of SaaS and cloud stocks, for example, is off over 30% from recent highs, including a 4.2% decline today.
Here’s the day’s damage, so far as trading resumes:
DJIA: dropped 1,162.44, or 5.47%, to 20.074.94
S&P 500: fell 126.55, or 5%, to 2,402.64
Nasdaq Composite: slid 306.74, or 4.18%, to 7,028.05
The declines, however, are not spread equally. Companies like Uber and Lyft, CrowdStrike and Slack have taken extra large lumps in recent weeks. It appears that the optimism which drove their value as private, and later newly public companies, has fallen away.
And companies that lose money, no matter their growth rate, shine less brightly when negative emotion outweighs its sunnier sibling.
Still, as the markets follow the gyrations of a news cycle driven by the US response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has now infected over 6,500 people in the US, volatility is going to be the new normal.
A new website called Help Main Street is offering a simple way for people to pitch in by searching or browsing through local business listings, then purchasing gift cards (or making Square payments). That way you can contribute cash to help business owners get through this crisis, and then redeem the card whenever things return to normal.
The site was created by team of activists and technologists, including restaurant ordering startup Lunchbox and seed investor Eniac Ventures. Eniac’s Nihal Mehta told me that for the team, “This was a way to do a small part to help immediate victims of COVID-19 while releasing some nervous anxiety working from home.”
To create the site, Lunchbox engineers have been scraping restaurant websites and validating gift cards. Help Main Street has 20,000 listings at launch, but Mehta is hoping that number will expand quickly as chambers of commerce, small business associations and individual users add new listings.
“We are hoping this will jumpstart a major crowdsourcing movement where merchants and customers alike will add,” he said.
Mehta added that the site will eventually introduce a way to offer “Patreon for merchants”-style recurring payments.
While successful in its primary mission, the latest SpaceX launch wasn’t without unexpected issues: The secondary mission of recovering the Falcon 9 booster with a controlled landing failed, for the second launch in a row, and SpaceX CEO and founder Elon Musk also confirmed that one of the rocket’s engines shut down early during the ascent phase of the launch vehicle.
This didn’t affect the actual orbital deployment of the 60 Starlink satellites which were on board the Falcon 9, which went exactly as planned. That’s due in part to the redundancy built into the design of the Falcon 9 launch vehicle, which uses 9 Merlin engines working together. But Musk still said on Twitter that the failure of one of those would still mean a “thorough investigation [is] needed before next mission.”
To be clear, SpaceX’s Merlin engine has been an extremely reliable performer for the company to date, with 84 out of 86 fully successful missions vs. attempts for Falcon 9 class vehicles in just under a decade. Falcon Heavy, which also employs Merlin engines, has also performed successfully during its three flights to date.
It’s worth pointing out, however, that SpaceX originally scrubbed this Falcon 9 Starlink launch at the last second during its planned Sunday mission window, due to engine power readings that were above expected numbers. That could indicate some kind of relationship between those readings and the failure of the single Merlin engine during today’s ascent, but as Musk noted, more detailed investigation from the SpaceX team will be required to find out what exactly happened.
In terms of impact to SpaceX’s launch schedule, it’s not yet clear what this could mean, but Musk clearly stated that they’ll have to figure out what occurred before any future flights. SpaceX is still preparing for its first ever human spaceflight with the commercial crew Demo-2 mission, set to take place tentatively sometime in April, May or June – provided the ongoing COVID-19 situation doesn’t affect that schedule, either.
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.
This morning we’re tracking Airbnb’s latest losses, its anticipated and real Q1 revenue growth, and what the company’s current situation likely means for its public debut, something the company has promised will occur in 2020.
Last September, Airbnb told its investors, employees, and the world that it would begin to trade publicly in 2020, with the company widely expected to pursue a direct listing instead of a traditional IPO. Since then, the company’s persistent deficits have continued. And, unexpectedly, the world’s travel industry has become troubled in light of the spread of COVID-19, the resulting border closures and reduction in personal and business travel. Mix in a broad stock market selloff, and Airbnb is in a tricky spot.
It is too early to say that Airbnb will not float in 2020, but it’s not too early to say that a public listing in the first half of the year is out. Let’s explore why.
As part of its $300 million News Initiative, Google is teaming up with the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media’s Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media, local news association LION Publishers and consultant Douglas K. Smith to launch a new initiative called Project Oasis.
In a blog post for Google, UNC CISLM Director Susan Leath wrote that this project is partly a response to to the school’s News Deserts Project (hence the name), which tracks the disappearance of local newspapers in the United States — apparently 2,100 of them have them have closed between 2004 and 2020, leaving a huge gap for many people hoping to stay informed about their communities.
Leath continued:
Despite these stark numbers, we’re starting to see the evidence that local news digital startups can thrive in communities and fill these gaps. [UNC Professor Penny Abernathy’s] research has shown that a positive response to the loss of local newspapers has come from the several hundred digital news outlets that now span the country, most of them started in the past decade. Project Oasis will build on a range of programs at UNC CISLM to arm these local news publishers with sustainable practices to help strengthen their digital business models and strategies.
The first piece of this project is a survey of digital news organizations that will run through April. The aim is to create a database of online local news publications in the U.S. and Canada, a set of case studies focusing on specific publishers and a “starter pack” for entrepreneurs as they consider launching local publications of their own.
In a blog post of his own, LION Publishers Executive Director Chris Krewson said the “ultimate goal” is to create “a guide to help entrepreneurs start local news businesses, and existing local news startup founders learn from the successes of their peers.”
Krewson added:
This guide won’t be prescriptive; we won’t favor one tax status over another; we won’t mandate that success equals using any particular CMS; we won’t declare that financial sustainability can only come via the use of programmatic advertising or paid referral services. The reality is we need to try to learn from as many approaches as possible, because every community and business problem is different and our tools and platforms are rapidly changing.
