Year: 2021

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Hello and welcome to Extra Crunch for August 5, 2021. What goes up must come down. Mostly. That’s the lesson from Robinhood’s stock this week. It shot higher yesterday. And today it fell sharply. Something something stonks. Regardless, we have big news from Apple, Facebook, a host of startups and even some drones for you today.

A quick reminder that tomorrow is the last day for early-bird Disrupt tickets. Be there or be a big lame! We’re also excited to announce that TechCrunch is launching another newsletter! This Week in Apps by Sarah Perez launches this Saturday morning, August 7, and is the place to go for all of your app news goodness. Be sure to sign up here. — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Apple to scan iPhones for abusive content involving children: Apple’s privacy push is running into its efforts to limit the sharing of known child sexual abuse material. Its plan, that it has yet to roll out, will work at the device level to “identify if a user uploads known child abuse imagery to iCloud without decrypting the images until a threshold is met and a sequence of checks to verify the content are cleared.”
• When a startup should leave a market: In the wake of news that Deliveroo may leave the Spanish market, TechCrunch wanted to learn more about when a startup should leave a particular city or country to its competitors. So we rounded up some smart VCs and got to asking questions. The short answer is that you want gold and silver medals to build a unicorn, not bronze.
• Facebook redesigns its privacy settings: And TechCrunch’s Devin Coldeway is not impressed, writing that Facebook has “taken the ‘privacy settings’ settings and scattered them mischievously among the other categories.” If you are a Facebook user, it’s always a good time to check your privacy setup on the social platform. It just may take a little longer now.

Startups/VC

We have a strong batch of startup stories below, but to kick things off have a bite of the latest drone story from Brian Heater. It’s rather tasty. Heater dug into the warehouse drone space, a somewhat natural environment for the tech as large storage buildings aren’t bothered by buzzy sounds, and often boxes in those buildings feature bar codes and are stacked vertically.

Now, our usual rundown:

• Quora launches subscriptions to access certain answers: Creators who love answering questions, Quora would like your attention. Long-running Q&A site Quora is rolling out Quora+ — natch — that will cost $5 per month, and allow access to content that creators decide should cost money to access.
• When is a startup going to build the hub for all our subscriptions to digital content so that we can stop having to use password managers for everything? Someone build that, please.
• Allocations raises $4M to power small PE funds: This one is cool. Allocations has built tech that enables fund managers to quickly spin up new private equity funds and SPVs. And the startup’s tech handles boring things like paperwork and capital calls. The thesis here is that there will be many more smallish PE funds in the future. The solo GP movement indicates that Allocations might be barking up the correct money tree.
• Ad astra for Astra: That’s the news from space launch vehicle company Astra, which is targeting August 27 for its first commercial launch. Sure, Boeing is struggling to make its rocket go up, but seeing Astra chase better-known launch systems is good news. More competitors, more rockets in time. And then you and I can go to space.
• OffLimits raises $2.3M for healthy cereal: Here in America we like our breakfasts sweet. That means our cereals are often loaded with sugar, and are thus both killing us while also making us smile. OffLimits is making cereal that is healthy (alas) but tasty, as well as “organic, vegan [and] gluten-free.” That sounds less fun than Cap’n Crunch, but as I’d like to avoid eventual limb amputation, perhaps the startup is onto something.
• From the world of edtech, TechCrunch’s Natasha Mascarenhas has a big piece out today looking at two companies — Coderhouse and Crehana — that are working in the reskilling space in Latin America. Reskilling, the teaching of new tricks to workers already in the market, is a big market. And Latin America is becoming a pretty key market for edtech, so make sure you don’t miss this one.
• Cent raises 300,000,000 cents to help make sense of NFTs: Remember when @Jack sold his first tweet as an NFT? The platform that made that transaction possible just raised $3 million. Or as we noted before, 300 million cents. Regardless of how you prefer to write out monetary sums — 12,000,000 quarters! — the latest Cent deal indicates that VCs are still more than willing to bet on NFTs in particular, and the cryptoeconomy more broadly.

TechCrunch’s Ron Miller covered a huge $125 million Series E for Bluecore today. The new capital made the e-commerce personalization platform the world’s newest unicorn. At least for a few hours. I asked Miller why he covered the round. Here’s what he said:

Bluecore is part of the omnichannel personalization market. It’s an area that thrived during the pandemic as more commerce shifted online and it became more imperative to offer more targeted messaging. The round is a sign that investors see the value in this and are willing to bet big money on companies like Bluecore being successful long term.

There, a look behind the curtain!

A blueprint for building a great startup founding team

Assembling a startup’s team is harder than assembling 10 IKEA dressers and the stakes are much higher.

Starting with the assumption that 90% of startups will fail and the most successful ones take an average of six years to IPO, founders have to make careful decisions about who they invite to join the founding team.

Is a stellar engineer a great choice? Or a terrible choice? Should your product person be opinionated or a team player? Are you even the best choice for CEO?

ThoughtSpot CEO Sudheesh Nair shared some of his thoughts about building a sturdy leadership team and drafted a thorough checklist for entrepreneurs who are putting a crew together. His initial advice?

“Investors love founder-CEOs, and founders are often fantastic candidates for this role. But not everyone can do it well, and more importantly, not everyone wants to.”

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

• Twitter Spaces adds co-hosting capabilities: Now you can enlist your friends to help you manage your next live audio conversation on Twitter. Yes, Spaces, Big Tweet’s chatroom tool, is expanding its feature set. You can now have a host, two co-hosts and up to 10 speakers at once. Just don’t, because that would be more noise than signal.
• Qualcomm wants to buy Veoneer: Qualcomm is offering $800 million more than what Magna International offered for Swedish automotive tech company Veoneer. The chip company is willing to cough up $4.6 billion for the asset. Why? Because Veoneer builds “advanced driver assistance systems, decision-making vehicle hardware and software.” So consider this a long-term bet by Qualcomm that self-driving tech is going to be everywhere. Eventually.
• Automakers want more government money: Cars are going electric, and the U.S. government has big goals to boost their domestic market share and production volume. Automakers are like, hey, how about some help. To that end a group of automotive OEMs are asking for the “timely deployment of the full suite of electrification policies committed to by the Administration in the Build Back Better Plan.” That means money in the form of consumer incentives and a charging network.
• Which feels a bit odd given that GM is making oodles of money at the moment. Surely it can deploy some of that capital? Also I hear that money is cheap at the moment.
• Google refreshes its Nest lineup: Finally for the day, Google’s Nest division has refreshes ready for its Nest lineup of cameras and doorbells. Nest is a bit of a dark horse inside of Google, given that it’s a hardware division at what is nearly entirely a software business. Still, the new hardware looks quite nice.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

TechCrunch wants you to recommend growth marketers who have expertise in SEO, social, content writing and more! If you’re a growth marketer, pass this survey along to your clients; we’d like to hear about why they loved working with you.

If you’re curious about how these surveys are shaping our coverage, check out this interview Miranda Halpern did with Ward van Gasteren, founder of Grow with Ward, “Which person should you hire: A growth hacker or a digital marketer?”

Uber’s second quarter earnings revealed greater than expected losses, in large part due to the company’s massive $250 million stimulus package launched in April to incentivize drivers back onto the app after a pandemic-induced shortage. 

The company reported a loss of $509 million before EBITDA. For comparison, Lyft reported a positive adjusted EBITDA in the quarter at $23.8 million the day before. Uber’s losses point to a larger problem facing the app-based ride-hailing industry: The triple threat of lagging driver supply, the cost of attracting them, and the Covid-19 Delta variant looming in the periphery. 

“Drivers increasingly want to get back on the road,” said CEO Dara Khosrowshahi during the earnings call on Wednesday. “In June, 60% of inactive drivers told us they intended to start driving again within a month. That’s up from 40% in April. And 90% of drivers told us they expect to come back by September. We’re also beginning to see marketplace metrics revert to normalcy in several markets with surge levels and wait times back to nearly normal in Miami, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston and Phoenix. But in major cities like New York, San Francisco and LA, demand continues to outpace supply and prices in late times remain above our comfort levels.”

Khosrowshahi said Uber is expecting the driver momentum that has been picking up over the last few months to continue, even as Uber tapers off its “post-pandemic” incentives for drivers. But the thing is, the pandemic is far from over. Only 50% of the U.S. population is fully vaccinated, and the CDC has said the highly contagious Delta variant has caused between 80% and 87% of all U.S. Covid-19 cases in the last two weeks of July. Many computer models predict case counts will peak sometime between mid-August and early September, bringing as many as 450,000 daily cases.

Lockdowns haven’t been the only things causing driver shortages: Drivers don’t want to risk their lives during a pandemic for what is often argued to be meager pay. Uber’s losses and attempts to attract more drivers also come as the company is back on stage as a potential threat to gig workers’ labor rights. Uber is part of a coalition of app-based ride-hailing and on-demand delivery companies that filed a petition this week to introduce a ballot measure in Massachusetts that would define drivers as independent contractors, not employees – similar to what happened last year in California with Proposition 22.

“I took the incentives that they used to get people back, and I think most drivers that have any brains did the same,” an Uber driver called Jay who’s been driving since 2013 told TechCrunch. “And once the incentives ran out, I stopped driving, because I’m losing money when I drive for them now. They have cut the rates so low that it doesn’t make any sense anymore to work for them, and that’s why people are having such a hard time getting an Uber. You have these disgustingly out of touch billionaires running this company into the ground.” 

Despite these setbacks, Khosrowshahi – presumably one of the “out of touch billionaires” Jay references – went on to assure investors that Uber expects to achieve total company EBITDA profitability by the end of the year. Uber is hoping its investments in what it calls the “earner experience” will help retain workers. 

“From doubling down on our app quality to targeted and personalized reengagement campaigns, to completely redesigning our onboarding flow to make it easier and faster than ever to earn safely, to rolling out unique programs like free language learning from Rosetta Stone, or free tuition with ASU, our earner Super App is unique in the depth and breadth of earnings opportunities we can offer drivers and couriers globally,” he said.

If mobility continues to take a hit, as it has recently in cities like Sydney, Australia due to persistent lockdowns, Khosrowshahi says Uber can fall back on its other businesses, like freight, Uber Eats and courier service. Khosrowshahi said there’s been a trend of Uber Eats and courier orders increasing as rides decrease.

Last November, Uber acquired online food delivery app Postmates, which the company says has resulted in nearly 5 million additional consumers, 160,000 couriers and over 25,000 merchants migrating from Postmates to Uber Eats, as well as helping Uber establish itself as a category leader in Los Angeles and New York City.

Uber has also expanded into new verticals recently like grocery, convenience and alcohol delivery, with U.S. gross bookings in June nearly tripling from December 2020 levels and doubling in the U.K. and France.

“The differentiator that we have is the audience and the Uber platform,” said Khosrowshahi. “We were actually one of the latest players to build up a delivery business, and we built it based on the Uber brand, the marketplace-matching technology that we have, the pricing technology, routing, etc[…] We’ve got bigger datasets than anyone else. We’re able to train our algorithms over much larger global data points versus our competitors, which allow us to build a matching, routing, incentives, marketing engine that is more personalized and just has greater capabilities than anyone else.”

Khosrowshahi also noted that the company has ops teams on the ground in every market so it can understand the right inventory per marketplace.

“It all translates into: Lower cost of customer acquisition, higher lifetime value, lower overheads and greater tech capabilities. That’s the differentiator.”

Aside from hitting its EBITDA goals by Q4, Khosrowshahi said Uber expects total company gross bookings to be between $22 and $24 billion, and total company adjusted EBITDA to be better than a loss of $100 million for Q3.

Duolingo, best known for its whimsical owl and language-learning app, is working on a new product to add to its growing suite: a math app, according to CEO Luis von Ahn. The co-founder mentioned the app during an interview last week, the same day that Duolingo officially listed in the stock market.

After the interview, TechCrunch reached out to Duolingo to get more information about the app, but the company declined to provide more detail because it is “still very early” in the development process. It did say that users may learn more about it later this month at Duocon, Duolingo’s annual free conference. A May job posting shows that Duolingo has been looking for a learning scientist with a PhD in mathematics to help build out a new math app alongside a “small cross-functional team.”

The listing hints that the app will be focused on serving younger learners. It mentions that Duolingo wants candidates to have classroom experience and knowledge about teaching K-12 level math, especially with younger students between 3rd and 8th grade.

Duolingo’s current users feel mixed about the idea of Duolingo getting into math.

In an interview on IPO day, CEO Luis von Ahn said that users may see Duolingo accelerate its math app and that the company plans to expand beyond language learning through upcoming acquisitions. That may calm some qualms around Duolingo needing to put a ton of resources toward an entirely new piece of software or curriculum.

“If there are other subjects where we think somebody is doing a pretty good job and they have a similar mission to us, and they have a similar company culture,” Duolingo may consider acquiring the company, von Ahn said in the interview.

Math-focused edtech companies include Khan Academy, Brilliant.org, Photomath, Numerade and the recently acquired Symbolab.

For Duolingo, the math app is another chapter in its history of experimentation. The company has churned through hundreds of ideas in its decade of existence, which have had varying degrees of success.

Over the past few years, it built a product suite beyond its core app, which includes Duolingo ABC, a literacy app for kids and the Duolingo English Test. Meanwhile, Duolingo’s “graveyard” of failed ideas includes a few retired monetization strategies and AI-powered chatbots. Popular features like leaderboards sputtered before they succeeded. And math, interestingly, has always been in the back of von Ahn’s head.

As mentioned in the Duolingo EC-1, von Ahn has always said that he and his co-founder, Severin Hacker, were thinking about making Duolingo a math app before they eventually decided on language learning.

“I love math, but if you learn math, math itself can’t make you any money,” von Ahn said in a previous interview. “You learn math to learn physics to become an engineer, whereas knowledge of English directly improves your income potential in most countries of the world.”

One user wrote that “[math] is such a key skill to learn…[and] hopefully this may provide better resources especially to those with such limited access, while being inspirational and equally engaging to those of us with more opportunities.”

Others seemed to want Duolingo to invest inwardly on its language-learning service before moving outward to other areas. “It’s odd that Duo should consider branching into Maths when its coverage of the majority of languages (with the notable exception of French and Spanish) leaves a great deal to be desired,” one user wrote.

The company can only teach from a beginner to a low-intermediate level of language fluency according to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). About 30% to 40% of Duolingo courses are in some stage of CEFR alignment, per the company’s last pull of metrics from May.

It may be too soon to assume how Duolingo’s math app would look, what it would offer or even if it will be monetized. Regardless, it will be Duolingo’s first formal foray into an area of education beyond language.

The company will need to find not only the product, but the philosophical overlap between the two subjects. Language learning is a skill that is benefited by cultural context and nuance, while math revolves around the goal of getting to the one right answer. However, both areas of education require methodical thinking and the ability to apply functions to get to answers. Ultimately, both rely on what Duolingo often argues is its biggest product: motivation to open up an app, and pay attention to what’s happening on the screen.

Ward van Gasteren embraces the “growth hacker” term, despite the fact that some in the profession prefer the term “growth marketing” or simply “growth.” What’s the difference to him? The hacking part should be a distinct effort from ongoing marketing efforts, he says.

“Growth hacking is great to kickstart growth, test new opportunities and see what tactics work,” van Gasteren said. “Marketeers should be there to continue where the growth hackers left off: build out those strategies, maintain customer engagement and keep tactics fresh and relevant.”

Based in The Netherlands, he has developed his own growth hacking courses, Grow With Ward, and worked with large companies like TikTok, Pepsi and Cisco, and startups like Cyclemasters, Somnox and Zigzag. In the conversation below, van Gasteren shares the importance of building internal processes around growth for the long term, the state of growth today and his own development.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You’re a certified growth hacker — how do you think this sets you apart from others? How has this certification changed the way you approach working with clients?

I was part of the first-ever class from Growth Tribe (when they still offered multimonth traineeships), which was an amazing experience. The difference that a certification shows is that you know that a certified growth hacker has knowledge of the beginning-to-end process of growth hacking, and that this person is supposed to look at more than just a single experiment to hack their growth.

There are a lot of cowboy growth hackers who simply repeat the same tactics, instead of trying to work from a repeatable process, where you identify problems through data, have a non-biased prioritization process for ideas and will focus on long-term learnings over direct impact. A proper certificate shows that you know what it takes.

When do you think clients should invest in the beginner growth hacking course you offer on your website rather than investing in working with you directly?

I created the course to make growth hacking available to a larger audience. I noticed that almost all other growth hacking courses fell into one of two buckets: (1) cheap (<$200), but focused on superficial growth tactics, or (2) good quality in-depth content, but very expensive ($1,500-$5,000). And I believe everybody should have access to that knowledge of how to build a systematic process to achieve long-term sustainable growth, so I created my own course, since I know that working one-on-one with me is also too expensive for most people.

Especially if you’d look at students or junior marketeers, for whom I created a proper beginner growth hacking course that will teach you 20% of the knowledge that is necessary to achieve the first 80% of the results.

Growth hacking does have some noticeable differences from marketing, as outlined on your website. How should clients make the decision between working with you, a growth hacker, instead of with a marketer?

The choice between working with a growth hacker versus a digital marketer is not a one-or-the-other choice; the fields are very different in focus and actually complementary to each other. Growth hacking is great to kickstart growth, test new opportunities and see what tactics work. Marketeers should be there to continue where the growth hackers left off: build out those strategies, maintain customer engagement and keep tactics fresh and relevant. You shouldn’t hire a growth hacker to maintain your marketing strategies; they’re excited to make new growth steps and would get bored when they can’t test new ideas.

Most of the time, I help a client get up to speed, show which opportunities are valuable and give them a strategy to execute. Then I hand it over to marketing for the long-term execution and coach them on the execution, and step back in when there’s a need for new growth input.

What are some common misconceptions about growth hacking?

A lot of growth hackers still present growth hacking as a perfect approach, where thanks to our data-driven way of working we can always make the right moves. But that’s not true: The hard data that you see in your analytics tools, can only tell you what is slowing down your growth, but not why your growth slows down there. While the “why” is what we build our experiments on top of … many growth hackers just fill that with their own assumptions to keep their speed, but that’s not sustainable long term.

Next to the hard data, you need soft data: the why. And that comes from talking with customers, running hypothesis-focused experiments (not result-focused) and maybe by looking at your feedback from customer support or surveys. Every time I implement a soft data feedback loop with my clients, I see that we increase our experiment effectiveness from 1 in 10 up to 1 in 3.

What trends are you seeing in the growth hacking world right now?

The growth industry is definitely maturing. Less hacks, more teams, more focus on velocity. Everybody within the field is getting to know the best practices very quickly and implementing them even quicker. So then what? We need more knowledge, more qualitative feedback and a more systematic approach to scale up our impact, to be able to rise above best practices and implement truly relevant and sophisticated tactics for our businesses. Since the field is maturing, you see people starting to get rid of the shoestring tools.

For this reason, I’m currently rolling out a growth management tool for growth teams, called Upgrow, where teams can more easily manage their experiment velocity, report to stakeholders with the click of a button and make sure that they systemize the knowledge retention from their articles to build companywide knowledge. And you see that mature growth teams need this kind of software to really level up and manage these trends that are putting stress on their process due to the growth of their company.

What do startups continue to get wrong?

Most startups just keep perfecting their product forever-and-ever: “Just this one extra feature and then we go live.” I can understand that, since north-star metrics, NPS scores and product-led growth are dominating the conversation around startup growth nowadays, but let me be real: You will never be fully done. There will always be a next feature. And you will only have a benefit if you grow alongside your customers. Put a “coming soon” on your website for the features that are in the making, and just start selling and scaling up your growth efforts: Different channels bring different kinds of users, who will have new demands, so you have to be adapting all the time. Not just now.

Apple later this year will roll out new tools that will warn children and parents if the child sends or receives sexually explicit photos through the Messages app. The feature is part of a handful of new technologies Apple is introducing that aim to limit the spread of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) across Apple’s platforms and services.

As part of these developments, Apple will be able to detect known CSAM images on its mobile devices, like iPhone and iPad, and in photos uploaded to iCloud, while still respecting consumer privacy.

The new Messages feature, meanwhile, is meant to enable parents to play a more active and informed role when it comes to helping their children learn to navigate online communication. Through a software update rolling out later this year, Messages will be able to use on-device machine learning to analyze image attachments and determine if a photo being shared is sexually explicit. This technology does not require Apple to access or read the child’s private communications, as all the processing happens on the device. Nothing is passed back to Apple’s servers in the cloud.

If a sensitive photo is discovered in a message thread, the image will be blocked and a label will appear below the photo that states, “this may be sensitive” with a link to click to view the photo. If the child chooses to view the photo, another screen appears with more information. Here, a message informs the child that sensitive photos and videos “show the private body parts that you cover with bathing suits” and “it’s not your fault, but sensitive photos and videos can be used to harm you.”

It also suggests that the person in the photo or video may not want it to be seen and it could have been shared without their knowing.

Image Credits: Apple

These warnings aim to help guide the child to make the right decision by choosing not to view the content.

However, if the child clicks through to view the photo anyway, they’ll then be shown an additional screen that informs them that if they choose to view the photo, their parents will be notified. The screen also explains that their parents want them to be safe and suggests that the child talk to someone if they feel pressured. It offers a link to more resources for getting help, as well.

There’s still an option at the bottom of the screen to view the photo, but again, it’s not the default choice. Instead, the screen is designed in a way where the option to not view the photo is highlighted.

These types of features could help protect children from sexual predators, not only by introducing technology that interrupts the communications and offers advice and resources, but also because the system will alert parents. In many cases where a child is hurt by a predator, parents didn’t even realize the child had begun to talk to that person online or by phone. This is because child predators are very manipulative and will attempt to gain the child’s trust, then isolate the child from their parents so they’ll keep the communications a secret. In other cases, the predators have groomed the parents, too.

Apple’s technology could help in both cases by intervening, identifying and alerting to explicit materials being shared.

However, a growing amount of CSAM material is what’s known as self-generated CSAM, or imagery that is taken by the child, which may be then shared consensually with the child’s partner or peers. In other words, sexting or sharing “nudes.” According to a 2019 survey from Thorn, a company developing technology to fight the sexual exploitation of children, this practice has become so common that 1 in 5 girls ages 13 to 17 said they have shared their own nudes, and 1 in 10 boys have done the same. But the child may not fully understand how sharing that imagery puts them at risk of sexual abuse and exploitation.

The new Messages feature will offer a similar set of protections here, too. In this case, if a child attempts to send an explicit photo, they’ll be warned before the photo is sent. Parents can also receive a message if the child chooses to send the photo anyway.

Apple says the new technology will arrive as part of a software update later this year to accounts set up as families in iCloud for iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and macOS Monterey in the U.S.

This update will also include updates to Siri and Search that will offer expanded guidance and resources to help children and parents stay safe online and get help in unsafe situations. For example, users will be able to ask Siri how to report CSAM or child exploitation. Siri and Search will also intervene when users search for queries related to CSAM to explain that the topic is harmful and provide resources to get help.

Many VCs tout their mentorship and hands-on approach to founders, especially those who run early-stage startups. But in the recent era of lightning-fast rounds closing at sky-high valuations, the cap tables of early-stage startups are becoming increasingly crowded.

This isn’t to say that the value VCs bring has diminished. If anything, it’s quite the opposite — this new dynamic is forcing founders to be extremely selective about exactly who is sitting around their mentorship table. It’s simply not possible to have numerous deep and meaningful relationships to extract maximum value at the early stage from seasoned investors.

Founders should definitely pursue big rounds at sky-high valuations, but it’s important that they recognize how important it is to manage who they allow into their mentorship circles. Initially, founders should make sure their first layer consists of the real “doers” — usually angels and early venture investors who founders meet with weekly (or more frequently) to help solve some of the most granular problems.

Everything from hiring to operational hurdles all the way to deeper, more personal challenges like balancing family life with a rapidly growing startup.

This circle is where the real mentorship happens, where founders can be open and vulnerable. For obvious reasons, this circle has to be small, and usually consist of two to six people at most. Anything more simply becomes unwieldy and leaves founders spending more time managing these relationships than actually building their company.

The second layer should consist of the “quarterly crowd” of investors. These aren’t necessarily people who are uninterested or unwilling to participate in the nitty gritty of running the company, but this circle tends to consist of VCs who make dozens of investments per year. They, like their founders, aren’t capable of managing 50 relationships on a weekly basis, so their touch points on company issues tend to move slower or less frequently.

In May, Yahoo! Answers shut down after helping the internet answer its most burning questions since 2005. But now, Quora, which began as a question-and-answer site but expanded to incorporate blogging, is making its platform more appealing to creators.

Quora says it’s “on track to be cash flow positive from ads alone,” implying that the platform isn’t currently in the black. But Quora sees tapping into the creator economy and subscriptions as a way to turn a profit.

“We want to make sharing knowledge more financially sustainable for creators,” Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo wrote in a blog post. “Even though many people are motivated and able to spend their time writing on Quora just to share their knowledge, many others could share much more with financial justification to do so.”

Quora’s first new product is Quora+ — subscribers will pay a $5 monthly fee or a $50 yearly fee to access content that any creator chooses to put behind a paywall. These are the same rates that Medium, which has no ads, charges for its membership program.

Rather than paying select creators, subscribers will pay Quora. Then, each subscriber’s payment will be distributed to creators “in proportion to the amount each subscriber is consuming their content, with more of a subscriber’s contribution going to writers and spaces the subscriber follows.” Creators have the option to enable a dynamic paywall on Quora+ content, which would give free users access to certain posts if Quora thinks they’re likely to convert to paid membership; there’s also an “adaptive” paywall option, which uses an algorithm to decide whether to paywall content for a specific user on a case-by-case basis. This is supposed to help creators strike a balance between monetizing their content and growing their audience to find new potential subscribers.

Quora told TechCrunch that it is still experimenting with Quora+ and can’t yet say what percentage it will take from subscriptions.

The other option is for creators to write paywalled posts on Spaces, which are like user-created publications on Quora. Quora will take 5% of the subscription fee, which the creator can choose at their own discretion — comparatively, the direct-to-consumer blogging platform Substack takes 10% of writers’ profits, which makes Quora a competitive alternative. Other platforms like Ghost ask for a $9 monthly fee, but let writers retain their revenue — for writers making at least $180 per month, Ghost would be more profitable than Quora.

“We’re able to sustainably commit to taking only a minimal fee without needing to increase it in the future because we make enough revenue from ads to fund most of the platform’s development and operations,” D’Angelo wrote. Substack, meanwhile, doesn’t have ads.

Quora reached a $1.8 billion valuation in 2017 after raising $85 million, and at the time, the platform had 190 million monthly users. Now, according to D’Angelo’s blog post, over 300 million people use Quora each month. Despite this user growth, Quora laid off an undisclosed amount of staff in its Bay Area and New York City offices in January 2020.

Space subscriptions will launch today for English language users in 25 countries, including the U.S. The rollout of Quora+ will be less immediate as Quora invites select writers to test the platform and determine what works best for subscribers and creators.

Later this year, Apple will roll out a technology that will allow the company to detect and report known child sexual abuse material to law enforcement in a way it says will preserve user privacy.

Apple told TechCrunch that the detection of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is one of several new features aimed at better protecting the children who use its services from online harm, including filters to block potentially sexually explicit photos sent and received through a child’s iMessage account. Another feature will intervene when a user tries to search for CSAM-related terms through Siri and Search.

Most cloud services — Dropbox, Google, and Microsoft to name a few — already scan user files for content that might violate their terms of service or be potentially illegal, like CSAM. But Apple has long resisted scanning users’ files in the cloud by giving users the option to encrypt their data before it ever reaches Apple’s iCloud servers.

Apple said its new CSAM detection technology — NeuralHash — instead works on a user’s device, and can identify if a user uploads known child abuse imagery to iCloud without decrypting the images until a threshold is met and a sequence of checks to verify the content are cleared.

News of Apple’s effort leaked Wednesday when Matthew Green, a cryptography professor at Johns Hopkins University, revealed the existence of the new technology in a series of tweets. The news was met with some resistance from some security experts and privacy advocates, but also users who are accustomed to Apple’s approach to security and privacy that most other companies don’t have.

Apple is trying to calm fears by baking in privacy through multiple layers of encryption, fashioned in a way that requires multiple steps before it ever makes it into the hands of Apple’s final manual review.

NeuralHash will land in iOS 15 and macOS Monterey, slated to be released in the next month or two, and works by converting the photos on a user’s iPhone or Mac into a unique string of letters and numbers, known as a hash. Any time you modify an image slightly, it changes the hash and can prevent matching. Apple says NeuralHash tries to ensure that identical and visually similar images — such as cropped or edited images — result in the same hash.

Before an image is uploaded to iCloud Photos, those hashes are matched on the device against a database of known hashes of child abuse imagery, provided by child protection organizations like the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) and others. NeuralHash uses a cryptographic technique called private set intersection to detect a hash match without revealing what the image is or alerting the user.

The results are uploaded to Apple but cannot be read on their own. Apple uses another cryptographic principle called threshold secret sharing that allows it only to decrypt the contents if a user crosses a threshold of known child abuse imagery in their iCloud Photos. Apple would not say what that threshold was, but said — for example — that if a secret is split into a thousand pieces and the threshold is ten images of child abuse content, the secret can be reconstructed from any of those ten images.

It’s at that point Apple can decrypt the matching images, manually verify the contents, disable a user’s account and report the imagery to NCMEC, which is then passed to law enforcement. Apple says this process is more privacy mindful than scanning files in the cloud as NeuralHash only searches for known and not new child abuse imagery. Apple said that there is a one in one trillion chance of a false positive, but there is an appeals process in place in the event an account is mistakenly flagged.

Apple has published technical details on its website about how NeuralHash works, which was reviewed by cryptography experts.

But despite the wide support of efforts to combat child sexual abuse, there is still a component of surveillance that many would feel uncomfortable handing over to an algorithm, and some security experts are calling for more public discussion before Apple rolls the technology out to users.

A big question is why now and not sooner. Apple said its privacy-preserving CSAM detection did not exist until now. But companies like Apple have also faced considerable pressure from the U.S. government and its allies to weaken or backdoor the encryption used to protect their users’ data to allow law enforcement to investigate serious crime.

Tech giants have refused efforts to backdoor their systems, but have faced resistance against efforts to further shut out government access. Although data stored in iCloud is encrypted in a way that even Apple cannot access it, Reuters reported last year that Apple dropped a plan for encrypting users’ full phone backups to iCloud after the FBI complained that it would harm investigations.

The news about Apple’s new CSAM detection tool, without public discussion, also sparked concerns that the technology could be abused to flood victims with child abuse imagery that could result in their account getting flagged and shuttered, but Apple downplayed the concerns and said a manual review would review the evidence for possible misuse.

Apple said NeuralHash will roll out in the U.S. at first, but would not say if, or when, it would be rolled out internationally. Until recently, companies like Facebook were forced to switch off its child abuse detection tools across the bloc after the practice was inadvertently banned. Apple said the feature is technically optional in that you don’t have to use iCloud Photos, but will be a requirement if users do. After all, your device belongs to you but Apple’s cloud does not.

Fleets weren’t long for this world, but Twitter’s product teams aren’t slowing down on bringing new stuff to Spaces, the company’s own take on audio rooms. Twitter introduced Spaces in a limited test last year, expanding the Clubhouse copycat feature more broadly to anyone with at least 600 followers in May.

Now, Twitter is giving Space hosts the ability to add two co-hosts, who they can rope in through an invite system. Spaces will allow one main host, two additional co-hosts and up to ten speakers. Additional co-hosts will make the task of moderation much more manageable, as they’ll be able to vet speaker requests, tap speakers and give anyone in the Space the boot.

With Fleets out of the picture, Twitter’s Spaces are the only feature for now that lives above the main feed in the Twitter app. That virtual real estate, which has echoes of Instagram’s Stories, draws the eye to anything that a social network wants its users to check out first. Twitter also began rolling out a dedicated tab to make it easier to discover Spaces, surfacing live audio rooms in real time in a central location.

A number of major apps spliced live audio chat rooms into their platforms in light of Clubhouse’s breakout run. In June, Spotify launched Greenroom, a standalone app that allows people to create 1,000-person voice events. Naturally, Facebook also launched its own spin on live audio rooms (called Live Audio Rooms) in June. Discord, already a leader in voice-based chat, added its own Clubhouse-like event channels in March. Twitter followed the same trend with Spaces, but unlike with Fleets, it looks like the company plans to continue supporting the relatively new feature.

In a company’s early days, the difference between C-level executives and the rest of the organization is simple — employees can walk away from a failure, but the leaders cannot. Under these conditions, certain kinds of people thrive in leadership roles and can take a company from ideation to production.

While there’s no magic formula for what works and what doesn’t, successful startups share common traits in terms of the way their foundational leadership teams are built.

We’ve all experienced what it looks like on the negative end of the spectrum — people making points simply to hear their own voice, leaders competing for credit and clashing agendas. When people would rather be heard than contribute, the output suffers. Members of a healthy leadership team are unafraid to let others have the limelight, because they trust the mission and the culture they’ve built together.

We are all imperfect human beings, founders included. There are always going to be moments that leaders can’t predict, and mistakes come with the territory. The right leadership team should be able to mitigate the unexpected, and sometimes make the future easier to predict. Putting the right people in the right roles early on can be the difference between success and failure — and that starts at the top.

Start by determining who will lead as CEO

Investors love founder-CEOs, and founders are often fantastic candidates for this role. But not everyone can do it well, and more importantly, not everyone wants to.

Startup founders should ask themselves a few questions before they lose sleep over the prospect of handing over the reigns:

• Do I even want to be CEO? If yes, for how long?
• Can I maximize the potential of the company if I’m not the CEO?
• Am I really the best person for this job at this stage?

An honest self-assessment is necessary and this is something that only exceptional and selfless founders are capable of. In many cases, founders decide they need outside help to fill the role. While a CEO may not be your first hire — or even one of the first five — the person you choose will ultimately occupy your organization’s most critical leadership role, so choose wisely.

What to look for: Ambitious vision grounded in execution reality. Your CEO should have hands-on experience that allows them to see around corners, predict pitfalls and identify opportunities.

What to watch out for: Leaders who lack respect for the founding vision or the ability to hire and balance an executive team quickly. A good CEO should be able to manage short-term cash flow and go-to-market needs without compromising the true north, while building a foundation and culture for the long term.

Then, hire a leader for your engineering team