Author: azeeadmin

In 2019, the global fertility services industry was estimated to be worth $14.8 billion with demand driven by the significant growth in the median age of first-time mothers, according to a Research & Markets report.

Gina Bartasi, founder and CEO of NYC-based fertility center Kindbody, has pointed to macroeconomic trends responsible for the industry’s consistent growth, such as the increase in single mothers by choice and the fact that “heterosexual couples are waiting to have children and waiting to get married, and more and more same-sex couples are having children, which is relatively new.”

Regardless of the increasing demand, disasters can disrupt fertility services: On March 17, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine directed U.S.-based fertility clinics to avoid initiating new treatments, push back nonemergency surgeries and shift care to telemedicine.

Now reopened, it’s undeniable that COVID-19’s national impact could alter the space as different types of crises have in the past. In looking back, we can find a better understanding of what the future holds.

After the terror attacks on September 11, 2001, a University of Louisville study found that there was “a prompt and significant increase in births and birthrates in the post-9/11 period” in New York City. Relatedly, when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005 and created the nation’s costliest natural disaster, it was also one of five times since 1987 that frozen embryos were evacuated and protected during a natural disaster.

According to a study done by University of Wisconsin, “following Katrina, displacement contributed to a 30% decline in birth cohort size. Black fertility fell, and remained 4% below expected values through 2010. By contrast, white fertility increased by 5%.” The communities were so ravaged that the area’s Black population has remained substantially smaller.

The PACT Act is a new bipartisan effort to reform Section 230, the crucial liability shield that enables internet platforms to exist, approaching the law’s shortcomings “with a scalpel rather than a jackhammer,” as Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) describes it. It would be a welcome alternative to the dangerous EARN IT Act and risible Executive Order also in the running.

Section 230 protects companies online from being liable for content posted by their users, as long as those companies remove illegal content when it is pointed out to them. Politicians have recently characterized it as an excuse for companies like Facebook and Twitter to control speech on their platform and avoid responsibility for shoddy or arbitrary moderation policies.

But the two most high profile attempts to change this law, which arguably made the modern internet possible, are riddled with problems. The EARN IT Act is widely understood to be an end run against encryption by an impotent and furious Justice Department; Trump’s recent Executive Order, in addition to plainly being retaliation against Twitter for fact-checking his tweets, doesn’t actually appear to do much of anything.

Yet there is growing consensus that Section 230, while it has filled its purpose admirably for two decades, needs to be adjusted to accommodate for a changed digital environment. To that end, Sen. Schatz and his colleague Sen. John Thune (R-SD), leaders of the Communications, Technology, Innovation and Internet Subcommittee, are proposing a reasonable alternative.

“The best thing we can do for the internet, and for the law that enabled the internet to happen, is to modify this law so that it works for another 20 years instead of pretending that it’s perfect just the way it is,” Sen. Schatz said in a call with press.

Their Platform Accountability and Consumer Transparency Act focuses more on exposing the process rather than changing it. Under the proposed law, companies using Section 230 would have to:

• Publicly document their moderation practices and issue a standardized quarterly report on actions they’ve taken and the complaints that prompted them
• Make and report moderation decisions within 14 days of user reports, and allow appeals
• Remove “court-determined illegal content and activity” within 24 hours, with some flexibility allowed for smaller platforms

The Act would also limit the scope of Section 230 in protecting companies when they are facing action from federal regulators and state attorneys general, or when they are provably aware of the illegal nature of the content.

It would not affect or involve changes to encryption, which is another tool companies have to distance themselves from illegal content: If they can’t read the data, they can’t tell if it’s illegal. But attempts to weaken encryption or reduce its use have been met by polite but firm rejection by the tech industry — it’s clear that we have been traveling down a one way street in that regard.

“This is not designed to attract people who want to bully tech companies into political submission,” said Sen. Schatz. “It’s designed to improve federal law.”

“Here’s why we think this bill is significant,” he continued. “First, because we believe it is the most serious effort to retain what works in 230, and try to fix what is broken about 230. Second, you have the chair and ranking member of the subcommittee introducing the bill, which is not a trivial matter. And third, because we do think there is an appetite to legislate here. Though the volume gets turned up when someone wants to beat up on the platforms via cable TV or twitter, the serious work of the Commerce Committee has always been bipartisan.”

You can read the full text of the bill here; We’ll soon hear whether the Senators’ effort bears any fruit.

AWS today announced the beta launch of Amazon Honeycode, a new fully managed low-code/no-code development tool that aims to make it easy for anybody in a company to build their own applications. All of this, of course, is backed by a database in AWS and a web-based drag-and-drop interface builder.

Developers can build applications for up to 20 users for free. After that, the pay per user and for the storage their applications take up.

Image Credits: Amazon/AWS

Like similar tools, Honeycode provides users with a set of templates for commonly use cases like to-do list applications, customer trackers, surveys, schedules and inventory management. Traditionally, AWS argues, a lot of businesses have relied on shared spreadsheets to do these things.

“Customers try to solve for the static nature of spreadsheets by emailing them back and forth, but all of the emailing just compounds the inefficiency because email is slow, doesn’t scale, and introduces versioning and data syncing errors,” the company notes in today’s announcement. “As a result, people often prefer having custom applications built, but the demand for custom programming often outstrips developer capacity, creating a situation where teams either need to wait for developers to free up or have to hire expensive consultants to build applications.”

It’s no surprise then that Honeycode uses a spreadsheet view as its core data interface, which makes sense, given how familiar virtually every potential user is with this concept. To manipulate data, users can work with standard spreadsheet-style formulas, which seems to be about the closest the service gets to actual programming.

AWS says these databases can easily scale up to 100,000 rows per workbook. With this, AWS argues, users can then focus on building their applications without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure.

Honeycode currently only runs in the AWS US West region in Oregon but is coming to other regions soon.

Among its first customers are SmugMug and Slack.

Updating…

Think you’ve found a way to consistently brick someone’s PS4, or make it run code that it shouldn’t? Sony wants to know — and now they’re willing to pay.

This morning Sony announced that it’s opening its bug bounty program to the public, and will pay for newly discovered bugs and exploits that impact either the PlayStation 4 or their online PlayStation Network.

Sony is pretty explicit about what kind of bugs they’re looking for: anything that hits “the PlayStation 4 system, operating system, accessories” in its current and/or beta form, or that impacts any of a handful of PlayStation Network domains/APIs. Tactics like socially engineering Sony employees or DDoSing their servers, meanwhile, aren’t allowed.

Bugs found in the PlayStation Network will have base bounties of $100-$3,000 or more (depending on severity), while critical bugs found related to the PS4 itself will pay upwards of $50,000. You can see Sony’s breakdown, including what’s in/out of the program’s scope, right here.

(Note the focus on PlayStation 4. Finding a new way to break the ol’ PS2 is cool and all, but Sony won’t be dishing out any money for it.)

In a blog post announcing the bug bounty program, Sony notes that they’ve actually been running this program quietly with a handful of researchers for a while now — today, though, they’re opening it up to anyone with the skill and interest. The program’s HackerOne page says Sony has already paid out over $170,000 to researchers, with an average bounty of around $400.

Microsoft launched a similar bug bounty program for Xbox Live earlier this year.

Hoxton Ventures, a London-based early-stage VC firm best known for backing British unicorns Babylon Health, Darktrace and Deliveroo, announced its second fund last week, coming in at just under $100 million.

The firm’s self-proclaimed strategy is to seek out startups that can scale globally into “large, category-defining leaders” in nascent industries — A strategy that appears to be bearing fruit.

However, although fund two is twice the size of the firm’s $40 million debut fund back in 2013 (when new VC firms in Europe were still seen as a novelty), Hoxton struggled somewhat to close a new fund. Despite having the highest ratio of unicorns to investments in Europe, according to Dealroom, it took more than four years to get fund two over the line, leaving many VC watchers scratching their heads.

To find out exactly what happened and to learn more about Hoxton’s strategy going forward, I put questions to founding partners Rob Kniaz and Hussein Kanji — Fidelity and Accel alums, respectively — and new partner and chief operating officer Rob Ludwig. The conversation that followed was refreshingly candid, providing valuable insights into the state of early-stage venture capital in Europe and what it takes to get funded by an outlier VC like Hoxton.

It’s seven years since you announced your debut fund, which I remember at the time was considerably harder to raise than you had perhaps envisaged. However, despite having three unicorns in fund one, this second fund also appears to have taken a long time to get over the line. Why was that?

Hussein Kanji: I see you’re not taking it easy on us. Good question. Fundraising is our Achilles’ heel.

We did our final closing in November 2014 (not widely reported) and did the majority of this fund’s closing in January/February 2019. That’s a little more than a four-year gap, meaning we’re a year (maybe two) past due. That goes to a combination of two things: we are terrible fundraisers and we had a really awkward experience with the European Investment Fund, which set us back by at least a year.

Rob Kniaz: Yes, sadly EIF denied this publicly but they discontinued new fund relationships in the U.K. after Article 50 triggered, so that cost us a significant amount of time due to the length of their process. By that time we had other commitments that had timed out so we probably had and then lost then reraised nearly half of what we eventually raised.

Editor’s note: Andreessen Horowitz’s Crypto Startup School brought together 45 participants from around the U.S. and overseas in a six-week course to learn how to build crypto companies. Andreessen Horowitz partnered with TechCrunch to release the online version of the course. 

The final week of a16z’s Crypto Startup School kicks off with former Coinbase Chief Legal Officer Brian Brooks discussing “Token Securities Frameworks and Launching a Network.” Brooks starts off calling crypto the “most perfect intersection of tech and finance,” but he cautions that crypto builders must navigate traditional financial-services regulatory structures.

This takes on special importance because tokens, the native assets of crypto networks, can be deemed securities by regulators, making them illegal to list on exchanges and subject to disclosures and other legal requirements.

Brooks explains the four-part Howey test, the Supreme Court ruling that has come to define when a given transaction is a securities transaction. Because crypto is still relatively new, however, the path to legality is still developing.

In the meantime, the crypto industry has created the Crypto Rating Council, a new tool to objectively rate tokens and gauge their risk of being deemed securities. Broadly, the tokens that carry the most risk of being labeled securities are those issued before a crypto network is fully decentralized, and while the actions of the management team remain critical to a network’s success. (Bitcoin, for example, is not a security, because it is completely decentralized and there is no core management team.)

Brooks introduces some promising new regulatory paths for crypto including membership models — similar to cooperatives or mutuals — in which token holders agree to only sell the token to other members of the network, avoiding a secondary sales market and thus steering clear of securities issues. While this model hasn’t been tested with the SEC, it has a long track record in other industries and bears further study.

In the final video of the program, former a16z partner and Mediachain co-founder Jesse Walden discusses “Fundraising and Deal Structure” for crypto startups. During early product development, crypto startups can raise traditional venture capital through equity, which allows for the most alignment between founders and investors.

Then, unlike a traditional startup, a crypto startup can invite its user base to participate in ownership and operation via the disbursement of tokens, once the core founding team has found product-market fit and established a viable network. This aligns incentives among the network, its users, the core team, and venture investors. Issuing tokens dilutes the stakes of the core team and early investors, but this is a desirable outcome because incentivizing more participants increases the chances that a network will grow. This leads to a larger pie overall for investors to share.

Walden also discusses Network Monetary Policy, citing Bitcoin, with its guaranteed limit of 21 million tokens, as having a fixed, deflationary supply policy. Other networks may be inflationary, with no ceiling on token amount, thereby perpetually diluting founders and early investors.

A perpetually dilutive system can nonetheless be productive for token holders due to staking, or the process of holders contributing to the operation of the network, which pays off in newly minted tokens for stakers and the retention of their ownership stakes.

See the videos from all six weeks of Crypto Startup School.

When Dell bought EMC in 2016 for $67 billion it was one of the biggest acquisitions in tech history, and it brought with it a boatload of debt. Since then Dell has been working on ways to mitigate that debt by selling off various pieces of the corporate empire and going public again, but one of its most valuable assets remains VMware, a company that came over as part of the huge EMC deal.

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that Dell is considering selling part of its stake in VMware. The news sent the stock of both companies soaring.

It’s important to understand that even though VMware is part of the Dell family, it runs as a separate company, with its own stock and operations, just as it did when it was part of EMC. Still, Dell owns 81% of that stock, so it could sell a substantial stake and still own a majority the company, or it could sell it all, or incorporate into the Dell family, or of course it could do nothing at all.

Patrick Moorhead, founder and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy thinks this might just be about floating a trial balloon. “Companies do things like this all the time to gauge value, together and apart, and my hunch is this is one of those pieces of research,” Moorhead told TechCrunch.

But as Holger Mueller, an analyst with Constellation Research, points out, it’s an idea that could make sense. “It’s plausible. VMware is more valuable than Dell, and their innovation track record is better than Dell’s over the last few years,” he said.

Mueller added that Dell has been juggling its debts since the EMC acquisition, and it will struggle to innovate its way out of that situation. What’s more, Dell has to wait on any decision until September 2021 when it can move some or all of VMware tax-free, five years after the EMC acquisition closed.

“While Dell can juggle finances, it cannot master innovation. The company’s cloud strategy is only working on a shrinking market and that ain’t easy to execute and grow on. So yeah, next year makes sense after the five year tax free thing kicks in,” he said.

In between the spreadsheets

VMware is worth $63.9 billion today, while Dell is valued at a far more modest $38.9 billion, according to Yahoo Finance data. But beyond the fact that the companies’ market caps differ, they are also quite different in terms of their ability to generate profit.

Looking at their most recent quarters each ending May 1, 2020, Dell turned $21.9 billion in revenue into just $143 million in net income after all expenses were counted. In contrast, VMware generated just $2.73 billion in revenue, but managed to turn that top line into $386 million worth of net income.

So, VMware is far more profitable than Dell from a far smaller revenue base. Even more, VMware grew more last year (from $2.45 billion to $2.73 billion in revenue in its most recent quarter) than Dell, which shrank from $21.91 billion in Q1 F2020 revenue to $21.90 billion in its own most recent three-month period.

VMware also has growing subscription software (SaaS) revenues. Investors love that top line varietal in 2020, having pushed the valuation of SaaS companies to new heights. VMware grew its SaaS revenues from $411 million in the year-ago period to $572 million in its most recent quarter. That’s not rocketship growth mind you, but the business category was VMware’s fastest growing segment in percentage and gross dollar terms.

So VMware is worth more than Dell, and there are some understandable reasons for the situation. Why wouldn’t Dell sell some VMware to lower its debts if the market is willing to price the virtualization company so strongly? Heck, with less debt perhaps Dell’s own market value would rise.

It’s all about that debt

Almost four years after the deal closed, Dell is still struggling to figure out how to handle all the debt, and in a weak economy, that’s an even bigger challenge now. At some point, it would make sense for Dell to cash in some of its valuable chips, and its most valuable one is clearly VMware.

Nothing is imminent because of the five year tax break business, but could something happen? September 2021 is a long time away, and a lot could change between now and then, but on its face, VMware offers a good avenue to erase a bunch of that outstanding debt very quickly and get Dell on much firmer financial ground. Time will tell if that’s what happens.

Instagram is expanding its TikTok competitor known as “Reels” to new markets, following its launch last year in Brazil. Starting today, Instagram is rolling out further access to Reels in France and Germany, allowing users to record short, 15-second video clips set to music or other audio, then share them on the platform where they have the potential to go viral.

The Reels feature is similar to TikTok in that it presents a set of editing tools that make it easier to film creative videos. At launch, for example, Reels offered a countdown timer, the ability to adjust the video’s speed, and other effects.

The company learned from its early tests in Brazil and has since rethought key aspects to the Reels experience.

Before, Reels were meant to be shared only within Instagram Stories. But the Instagram community said they wanted the ability to share Reels with followers and friends in a more permanent way, and also have the opportunity to expand that distribution more broadly if desired.

In addition, the community said they wanted a dedicated space where they could easily compile Reels and watch other people’s Reels.

With the expansion in Germany and France, Instagram has moved Reels to a dedicated space on the user Profile and in Explore — the latter for public accounts — so people can share with a new audience and share on their Instagram Feed, a company spokesperson tells TechCrunch.

These changes offer the chance for more exposure for both Reels and their creators, as Reels becomes more of a destination in the app — like the Stories row is today, for instance.

Reels are not Facebook’s first attempt at challenging TikTok’s growing popularity.

The Instagram parent company had previously launched short-form video app Lasso, but it has so far failed to gain significant traction. With Reels, however, Instagram is able to tap into its existing base of creators and leverage users’ familiarity with its video editing tools.

The challenge for Reels is in getting Instagram users to create a different type of content than they do today in Feed posts and in Stories. Those video tend to be more personal in nature — like clips from someone’s day or a vlog, for example. Meanwhile, more professional creator content has been relocated to IGTV.

TikTok videos, on the other hand, tend to be rehearsed and choreographed. Users learn a dance, perform a trick, make jokes, lip-sync to songs or audio, or replicate a popular meme in their own way. These videos are not typically off-the-cuff, as on Instagram. Encouraging this content requires a different editing tool set and workflow, which is what Reels offers.

Instagram didn’t say when it plans to roll out Reels globally or when it expects to bring the product to the U.S., but says the further expansion will allow the company to continue to build on the existing experience and evolve the product.

After what felt like winter, investors say startup deals are back on — although the numbers suggest they never stopped. As Semil Shah of Haystack VC phrased it in a blog post, “It’s game on, pandemic or bust.”

This is good news for founders and big funds, but the investment landscape becomes more complicated when it comes to up-and-coming venture capitalists. “My impression of the current mood amongst traditional limited partners is that most have slowed down considerably in terms of net new investments, new relationships,” Shah told TechCrunch.

So rebound or not, we’re in a volatile time, and first-time fund managers are looking for unique ways to de-risk themselves.

One route: Put liquidity up high in your pitch deck. Moore Ventures, a new fund focused on investing in diverse teams working on sustainability, is experimenting with an unconventional fund structure. Instead of traditional ventures where returns come from multiple rounds of financing and an exit either through acquisition or IPO, Moore is concentrating on successful liquidity strategies throughout a portfolio company’s life.

Constant commercialization, if it works, could be music to a limited partner’s ears.

“Some will fall into the licensing model, some will be developing the product and then selling the design and manufacturing process to an existing company before expanding marketing and sales. Only if a company has the ability to expand its product base and scale will we plan to commercialize through the traditional company development process,” said Darius Sankey, a general partner at Moore Ventures.

Does your elevator pitch lack traction? Could it do with a serious makeover? We’re here to help. Tune into Pitchers & Pitches, an interactive pitch-off and feedback session, on July 1 at 4pm ET / 1pm PT. This event is 100% free — simply register here to attend.

Pitchers & Pitches — part pitch-off, part masterclass — features startups (all exhibitors in Digital Startup Alley during Disrupt 2020) delivering their best 60-second pitch to a panel of judges. The panel for this session consists of two TechCrunch editors — Jordan Crook and Kirsten Korosec — and two VCs — Matthew Hartman of Betaworks Ventures and Dayna Grayson of Construct Capital.

The panel will critique each presentation, offer advice and suggest ways to forge a pitch for the ages. Take their tips, adapt them your specific situation and get ready super charge your elevator pitch.

Note: The Pitchers & Pitches webinar series is free and open to all, but only companies that purchased a Disrupt Digital Startup Alley Package are eligible to pitch. We randomly chose these startups to compete on July 1st:

Cognidna – provides DNA insights on cognitive traits, helping parents make more informed educational decisions for their children.

Munch – a digital platform for restaurants designed to create better customer experiences.

Flexlane – an online wholesale marketplace that transforms the way local retailers in Asia buy for their stores.

Bitsensing – aims to design future safety in the era of Autonomous Vehicles.

What’s a pitch-off without a prize? One pitching startup will win a consulting session with cela. cela connects early-stage startups to accelerators and incubators that can help them scale their businesses.

And while the judges evaluate and provide feedback, it’s the virtual audience (i.e., you) who determines the ultimate winner. That said, everyone who attends the event comes away with a stronger pitch and stands a greater chance of catching investor attention. Win-win.

Keep your startup focused and on track. Register for Pitches & Pitchers and join us next week, July 1 at 4pm ET / 1pm PT. If you want to be eligible to pitch your startup at Pitchers and Pitches, purchase your Digital Startup Alley ticket and opt in to being considered for our fourth installment of Pitchers and Pitches.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.