Author: azeeadmin

Since moving to the United States, I’ve come to appreciate and admire the United States Postal Service as a symbol of American ingenuity and resilience.

Like electricity, telephones and the freeway system, it’s part of our greater story and what binds the United States together. But it’s also something that’s easy to take for granted. USPS delivers 181.9 million pieces of First Class mail each day without charging an arm and a leg to do so. If you have an address, you are being served by the USPS — and no one’s asking you for cash up front.

As CEO of Shippo, an e-commerce technology platform that helps businesses optimize their shipping, I have a unique vantage point into the USPS and its impact on e-commerce. The USPS has been a key partner since the early days of Shippo in making shipping more accessible for growing businesses. As a result of our work with the USPS, along with several other emerging technologies (like site builders, e-commerce platforms and payment processing), e-commerce is more accessible than ever for small businesses.

And while my opinion on the importance of the USPS is not based on my company’s business relationship with the Postal Service, I want to be upfront about the fact that Shippo generates part of its revenue from the purchase of shipping labels through our platform from the USPS along with several other carriers. If the USPS were to stop operations, it would have an impact on Shippo’s revenue. That said, the negative impact would be far greater for many thousands of small businesses.

I know this because at Shippo, we see firsthand how over 35,000 online businesses operate and how they reach their customers. We see and support everything from what options merchants show their customers at checkout through how they handle returns — and everything in between. And while each and every business is unique with different products, customers operations and strategies, they all need to ship.

In the United States, the majority of this shipping is facilitated by the USPS, especially for small and medium businesses. For context, the USPS handles almost half of the world’s total mail and delivers more than the top private carriers do in aggregate, annually, in just 16 days. And, it does all of this without tax dollars, while offering healthcare and pension benefits to its employees.

As has been the case for many organizations, COVID-19 has significantly impacted the USPS. While e-commerce package shipments continue to rise (+30% since early March based on Shippo data), it has not been enough to overcome the drastic drop in letter mail. With this, I’ve heard opinions of supposed “inefficiency,” calls for privatization, pushes for significant pricing and structural changes, and even indifference to the possibility of the USPS shutting down.

Amid this crisis, we all need the USPS and its vital services now more than ever. In a world with a diminished or dismantled USPS, it won’t be Amazon, other major enterprises, or even Shippo that suffer. If we let the USPS die, we’ll be killing small businesses along with it.

Quite often, opinions on the efficiency (or lack thereof) of the USPS are very narrow in scope. Yes, the USPS could pivot to improve its balance sheet and turn operating losses into profits by axing cumbersome routes, increasing prices and being more selective in who they serve.

However, this omits the bigger picture and the true value of the USPS. What some have dubbed inefficient operations are actually key catalysts to small business growth in the United States. The USPS gives businesses across the country, regardless of size, location or financial resources, the ability to reach their customers.

We shouldn’t evaluate the USPS strictly on balance sheet efficiency, or even as a “public good” in the abstract. We should look at how many thousands of small businesses have been able to get started thanks to the USPS, how hundreds of billions of dollars of commerce is made possible by the USPS annually and how many millions of customers, who otherwise may not have access to goods, have been served by the USPS.

In the U.S., e-commerce accounts for over half a trillion dollars in sales annually, and is growing at double-digit rates each year. When I hear people talk about the growth of e-commerce, Amazon is often the first thing that comes up. What doesn’t shine through as often is the massive growth of small business — which is essential to the health of commerce in general (no one needs a monopoly!). In fact, the SMB segment has been growing steadily alongside Amazon. And with the challenges that traditional businesses face with COVID-19, more small businesses than ever are moving online.

USPS Priority Mail gets packages almost anywhere in the U.S. in two to three days (average transit time is 2.5 days based on Shippo data) and starts at around $7 per shipment, with full service: tracking, insurance, free pickups and even free packaging that they will bring to you.

In a time when we as consumers have become accustomed to free and fast shipping on all of our online purchases, the USPS is essential for small businesses to keep up. As consumers we rarely see behind the curtain, so to speak, when we interact with e-commerce businesses. We don’t see the small business owner fulfilling orders out of their home or out of a small storefront, we just see an e-commerce website. Without the USPS’ support, it would be even harder, in some cases near impossible, for small business owners to live up to these sky-high expectations. For context, 89% of U.S.-based SMBs (under $10,000 in monthly volume) on the Shippo platform rely on the USPS.

I’ve seen a lot of talk about the USPS’s partnership with Amazon, how it is to blame for the current situation, and how under a private model, things would improve. While we have our own strong opinions on Amazon and its impact on the e-commerce market, Amazon is not the driver of USPS’s challenges. In fact, Amazon is a major contributor in the continued growth of the USPS’s most profitable revenue stream: package delivery.

While I don’t know the exact economics of the deal between the USPS and Amazon, significant discounting for volume and efficiency is common in e-commerce shipping. Part of Amazon’s pricing is a result of it actually being cheaper and easier for the USPS to fulfill Amazon orders, compared to the average shipper. For this process, Amazon delivers shipments to USPS distribution centers in bulk, which significantly cuts costs and logistical challenges for the USPS.

Without the USPS, Amazon would be able to negotiate similar processes and efficiencies with private carriers — small businesses would not. Given the drastic differences in daily operations and infrastructure between the USPS and private carriers, small businesses would see shipping costs increase significantly, in some cases by more than double. On top of this, small businesses would see a new operational burden when it comes to getting their packages into the carriers’ systems in the absence of daily routes by the USPS.

Overall, I would expect to see the level of entrepreneurship in e-commerce slow in the United States without the USPS or with a private version of the USPS that operates with a profit-first mindset. The barriers to entry would be higher, with greater costs and larger infrastructure investments required up-front for new businesses. For Shippo, I’d expect to see a much greater diversity of carriers used by our customers. Our technology that allows businesses to optimize across several carriers would become even more critical for businesses. Though, even with optimization, small businesses would still be the group that suffers the most.

Today, most SMB e-commerce brands, based on Shippo data, spend between 10-15% of their revenue on shipping, which is already a large expense. This could rise well north of 20%, especially when you take into account surcharges and pick-up fees, creating an additional burden for businesses in an already challenging space.

I urge our lawmakers and leaders to see the full picture: that the USPS is a critical service that enables small businesses to survive and thrive in tough times, and gives citizens access to essential services, no matter where they reside.

This also means providing government support — both financially and in spirit — as we all navigate the COVID-19 crisis. This will allow the USPS to continue to serve both small businesses and citizens while protecting and keeping their employees safe — which includes ensuring that they are equipped to handle their front-line duties with proper safety and protective gear.

In the end, if we continue to view the USPS as simply a balance sheet and optimize for profitability in a vacuum, we ultimately stand to lose far more than we gain.

To: Hans (Mr. Vestberg? Boss?)

RE: An Epic opportunity

We wanted to jot down this memo to pitch a deal that could remake Verizon’s fortunes in the media business.

Every major carrier and internet provider has staked out a huge piece of real estate in the entertainment world with the exception of Verizon (the parent of TechCrunch’s parent company). Over the past few years, the world of entertainment has been turned upside down by the $71.3 billion acquisition of 21st Century Fox by Disney; and before that it was the $84 billion deal that brought Time Warner and its assets under the AT&T umbrella.

New players like Netflix, Amazon, and Apple opened a window into the wide world of moneymaking that awaited winning entertainment platforms based in technology — or adjacent to technology platforms. And let’s not get started on YouTube which created whole new genres of entertainment and entirely new celebrity-making machine.

Verizon has made a couple of bids in the content space for dollars and eyeballs. There was the costly $1 billion go90 bet — Quibi knows it’s hard out there for a mobile first network play. And only slices of the Verizon Media Group (the company formerly known as Oath, which was formerly known as Yahoo-AOL) are even focused on entertainment — it’s mostly news, over here.

Even in the current wildly disruptive environment, there is a chance for Verizon to craft a new narrative for itself in the entertainment space. As you no doubt know, the advancement by acquisition game is a tough one to play cleverly. Integration has costs that go beyond money and focus is key in times like these. But there is one bet that we just can’t shake might be the perfect one for Verizon to make: Epic Games.

Epic is already in the market looking for cash at a valuation above $15 billion, which, given what folks have spent for other (bigger but no less buzzy properties) would be a steal.

Why Epic Games? Well, it’s the company behind Fortnite, the game that every parent has learned to love (when their kids are playing it) and hate (when their kids are playing it too much). The game is more than a simple novelty, however, it’s a messenger, a gathering place and a language of communion for the next generation of mobile customers. You know, the kid who may think of Verizon the way that I thought of IBM back when I was their age: Big, important, but something that sits in the background and does, well, whatever.

Microsoft bought Minecraft recently, and somehow hasn’t screwed that up. Fortnite is like Minecraft, but for older kids! And (we think) it’s bigger!. Bigger kids are also the type that spend bigger money. Future Verizon customers, I reckon.

This isn’t to say that Verizon Media Group isn’t doing well. We actually have been, lately (yeah!), but if we stacked Fortnite next to all our other work, we’d be hot shit. Everyone loves hot shit! Travis Scott just did a concert in Fortnite, what if he had just done one in Fortnite, Powered By Verizon?

We know that Verizon’s down with what the streamer kids are up to these days, because you just partnered with Faze Clan on a benefit event. 

Damn!

Not only that, but think about all the network demand that Verizon could create by making Epic Games’ Fortnite ubiquitous. Hans, boss, Mr. Vestberg, sir… Verizon could POWER THE METAVERSE. And the metaverse is gonna need a lot of 5G infrastructure we’d imagine.

We haven’t even talked about the fact that Epic’s game engine is still a thing too. That’s another potential source of value! 

Anyway, thanks for all that you do and for borrowing another $3.5 billion recently to boost our aggregate corporate liquidity. Let’s do it again, but like 8 times that much, and buy ourselves some Fortnite skins. Like, all of them.

Yours,

Shiebs and Alex

1. please don’t fire us

For pre-seed startups, precarious times are baseline until they secure their first customer, first hire and first check. But no matter how built-in turbulence might be for a pre-seed founder, we’re entering a period where stresses are amplified and outlooks are unpredictable.

In light of the new market conditions, a harder fundraising market and slower expected growth, Charles Hudson (founder and general partner of Precursor Ventures) is urging his portfolio companies to reassess their futures with a refreshingly human question: “Are you excited and prepared to run this company for the next two years?

If not, you might want to do something else. Why? Because if a super early-stage company manages to survive the COVID-19 era, making it out the other end, it’s not clear that they’ll be venture-ready when markets recover. As Hudson put it, “there’s never been a better time to maybe fold.” That’s because, he explained, startups that merely survive won’t be judged merely against their peers that also survived; they will also compete with brand-new startups for capital and companies that didn’t need to hunker down during lean times.

It’s possible to make it through, but it won’t be an easy path.

TechCrunch spoke with Hudson earlier this week as part of our ongoing Extra Crunch Live series that brings leading founders and investors to our (virtual) stage. Between our editors and journalists and the best questions from the audience, we’re working with guests to understand the new world that we find ourselves in. That we’re hosting these events virtually instead of in-person is testament to our changed reality.

But the chat was far from all gloom; Hudson is bullish on a number of things. Niche publications with subscription economics? Yes. Social services targeting particular audiences? Yep! Precursor is still cutting checks into net-new deals, and while it’s wrapping up its second main fund and first opportunity fund, the firm is also raising a new, larger capital pool.

The conversation ran the full hour we had set aside for it, meaning we had to condense some later discussions about fintech and the new trade-off between growth and profit, but we did get to diversity in venture and startups in the future, and what impact a recession might have on both (it’s a bigger possible impact than you’re considering).

Hit the jump for the best Hudson takeaways and the full audio recording from the session. Head here if you need Extra Crunch access; there are some trials for just a few bucks, so everyone can access the chat. Let’s go!

Raising a fund in the COVID-19 era

Next month, Apple and Google will unveil features to enable contact tracing on iOS and Android to identify people who have had contact with someone who tests positive for the novel coronavirus.

Security experts have been quick to point out the possible dangers, including privacy risks like revealing identities of COVID-19-positive users, helping advertisers track them or falling prey to false positives from trolls.

These are fresh concerns in familiar debates about tech’s ethics. How should technologists think about the trade-off between the immediate need for public health surveillance and individual privacy? And misformation and free speech? Facebook and other platforms are playing a much more active role than ever in assessing the quality of information: promoting official information sources prominently and removing some posts from users defying social distancing.

As the pandemic spreads and, along with it, the race to develop new technologies accelerates, it’s more critical than ever that technology finds a way to fully examine these questions. Technologists today are ill-equipped for this challenge: striking healthy balances between competing concerns — like privacy and safety — while explaining their approach to the public.

Over the past few years, academics have worked to give students ways to address the ethical dilemmas technology raises. Last year, Stanford announced a new (and now popular) undergraduate course on “Ethics, Public Policy, and Technological Change,” taught by faculty from philosophy, as well as political and computer science. Harvard, MIT, UT Austin and others teach similar courses.

If the only students are future technologists, though, solutions will lag. If we want a more ethically knowledgeable tech industry today, we need ethical study for tech practitioners, not just university students.

To broaden this teaching to tech practitioners, our venture fund, Bloomberg Beta, agreed to host the same Stanford faculty for an experiment. Based on their undergraduate course, could we design an educational experience for senior people who work across the tech sector? We adapted the content (incorporating real-world dilemmas), structure and location of the class, creating a six-week evening course in San Francisco. A week after announcing the course, we received twice as many applications as we could accommodate.

We selected a diverse group of students in every way we could manage, who all hold responsibility in tech. They told us that when they faced an ethical dilemma at work, they lacked a community to which to turn — some confided in friends or family, others revealed they looked up answers on the internet. Many felt afraid to speak freely within their companies. Despite several company-led ethics initiatives, including worthwhile ones to appoint chief ethics officers and Microsoft and IBM’s principles for ethical AI, the students in our class told us they had no space for open and honest conversations about tech’s behavior.

Like undergraduates, our students wanted to learn from both academics and industry leaders. Each week featured experts like Marietje Schaake, former Member of the European Parliament from the Netherlands, who debated real issues, from data privacy to political advertising. The professors facilitated discussions, encouraging our students to discuss multiple, often opposing views, with our expert guests.

Over half of the class came from a STEM background and had missed much explicit education in ethical frameworks. Our class discussed principles from other fields, like medical ethics, including the physician’s guiding maxim (“first, do no harm”) in the context of designing new algorithms. Texts from the world of science fiction, like “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin, also offered ways to grapple with issues, leading students to evaluate how to collect and use data responsibly.

The answers to the values-based questions we explored (such as the trade-offs between misinformation and free speech) didn’t converge on clear “right” or “wrong” answers. Instead, participants told us that the discussions were crucial for developing skills to more effectively check their own biases and make informed decisions. One student said:

After walking through a series of questions, thought experiments or discussion topics with the professors, and thinking deeply about each of the subtending issues, I often ended up with the opposite positions to what I initially believed.

When shelter-in-place meant the class could no longer meet, participants reached out within a week to request virtual sessions — craving a forum to discuss real-time events with their peers in a structured environment. After our first virtual session examining how government, tech and individuals have responded to COVID-19, one participant remarked: “There feels like so much more good conversation to come on the questions, what can we do, what should we do, what must we do?”

Tech professionals seem to want ways to engage with ethical learning — the task now is to provide more opportunities. We plan on hosting another course this year and are looking at ways to provide an online version, publishing the materials.

COVID-19 won’t be the last crisis where we rely on technology for solutions, and need them immediately. If we want more informed discussions about tech’s behavior, and we want the people who make choices to enter these crises prepared to think ethically, we need to start training people who work in tech to think ethically.

To allow students to explore opposing, uncomfortable viewpoints and share their personal experiences, class discussions were confidential. I’ve received explicit permission to share any insights from students here.

Matt Ocko, co-founder of venture firm Data Collective (DCVC), was among a small group of VCs viewed as alarmists when they began tweeting about the coronavirus’s imminent appearance in the U.S. back in January.

In retrospect, those individuals were prescient, so we spoke with Ocko last week about why he was so certain the U.S. was about to get walloped by COVID-19, and asked how some of the startups in DCVC’s portfolio — which has long had a strong biotech focus — are trying to get us back to a state of normalcy.

This conversation has been edited for length.

TechCrunch: You were tweeting about COVID-19 back in January; I almost canceled a flight out of San Francisco because of your [expressed concern about a flight bound for SFO from Wuhan, China]. What did you see that the rest of us missed?

Matt Ocko: My family has been working with the Chinese government at a reasonably high level since the late 1970s, starting with my dad, and I kind of grew up in that environment. And at a relatively young age, as a professional [in the 1990s], I started pro bono helping my dad, who’s a Chinese legal expert, on things like constructing the laws around China’s Nasdaq equivalent, its stock markets, the joint dollar-renminbi investment legislation, advice on technology development and venture capital development.

I’m not an anti-China hawk by any means. But I do have an understanding of some of the idiosyncrasies of Chinese culture reflected in its government, the same way every country has its idiosyncrasies.

[In China’s case], it’s a focus on face and reputation and extreme sensitivity to negative perception or shame or humiliation at every level of government and culture. And so there’s [an] unfortunate trend — and not a universal one — for people to manage upwards, especially in the government, and tell their higher-ups what they want to hear to avoid shame, to avoid the loss of reputation and to kick the can down the road or hope that circumstances on the ground change favorably in the face of denial or equivocation.

The coronavirus has decimated the travel industry, and Airbnb, the home rental company that appeared unstoppable not so long ago, has not been spared.

While the headlines have focused on the measures it’s taking to stockpile cash to offset its losses, behind the scenes, the nearly 12-year-old company has been busily redesigning its products. These include rethinking its home screen and app landing pages to reflect a world where short-term stays are out and longer-term stays — including for medical professionals needing to quarantine themselves from their families — are in.

We talked with Airbnb’s chief design officer, Alex Schleifer,  this morning to learn more about what’s been changing behind the scenes and how. Our chat has been edited lightly for length and clarity.

TC: Airbnb’s home page is suddenly very focused on three things — online experiences, monthly stays, and what you’re calling “frontline,” which is an area for hosts to offer housing to healthcare staff and first responders. What was that design process like and how long did it take?

AS: Our team mapped it out in under three weeks. There were a couple hundred employees working on the project at any point in time — people from ops, products, localization, design, policy, engineering. It’s a complex operation (here); everything we need to do needs to be done in 60 languages. Because of the scale of everything we do, the idea is often the easiest piece.

The difficulty was [sharpened] because the crisis was also impacting us. Everyone was working from home. There were questions around how do we do childcare, for example. But there was still immense energy, including because we had thousands of hosts contacting us and saying, ‘We want to help.’

TC: Where exactly do you start on a redesign like this one?

AS: You define the scope of it. You could put a banner on your home page, or you can start talking with hosts and governments to understand what kind of help they need and whether this is something they want, then you start building. Part of that is looking at the behavior of the guests on our platform in real time, which changes every day. It’s also a matter of talking with other travel partners and seeing what they are doing.

Ultimately, we [decided to take] over a pretty large amount of real estate so frontline workers know where to go. They also use our core search, but we want to make sure they have specific space for people who want to donate space or support the program. We had a goal of 100,000 homes that would be provided, but we beat that goal faster than we thought we would.

TC: Are these spaces being offered at no cost?

AS: They are donated or offered at reduced pricing.

TC: Another new section now centers around ‘online experiences.’ These are hosts who are offering their own classes on cooking and other things?

AS: Yes, like “Sangria mixing with Pedro,” which is a cocktail mixing show with a lot of entertainment. Airbnb is all about connection — it’s built on hosting. But if not everybody is able to travel, the question becomes: what are our options here? We discussed a lot of ideas, but the way we were working and connecting as a team [remotely] and living online with family made this idea more concrete for us. So we contacted hosts, did trial runs with these hosts with mic set-ups [and everything else required], and launched with 50 people. Now, we have nearly 100 hosts offering experiences online and thousands more who’ve offered to host experiences. Some of the most popular offerings — which aren’t one-to-many experience where you are watching a show but rather an interactive experience — are already sold out.

(Above, Airbnb’s homepage before the updates.)

TC: Do you see this becoming a sizable piece of Airbnb’s business going forward?

AS: It’s only a few weeks old, but even for a product in its first version, we were really enjoying this. It has beaten expectations, and I do think it will be a huge business for us as we get out of the pandemic because it allows hosts to host both online and real-world experiences.

TC: I’m sure a lot of ideas have been batted around. How are you choosing what to circle around?

AS: We’re lucky to sit on a lot of data, but you can only test so much. You need really strong and fast decision-making, so leadership and the executive team would meet daily.

The other thing that as a designer I appreciate is we made sure to remove abstract layers of communication. We wouldn’t just load up a Google doc but we made it real using [the collaborative interface design tool] Figma to look at all the designs and quickly prototype and screen-share, whether with the experiences team or me or [CEO] Brian [Chesky], to see what customers would see and make decisions.

TC: You mention Figma. What other tools have you been relying on more heavily as you work from home?

AS: We like to use as few tools as possible, but Figma is a game changer because people can see decisions being made live. Google Docs is really powerful for us. Slack also allows us to work asynchronously, which is important. And Zoom has been critical to everyone.

TC: Things are changing by the day. Parts of the world are opening while others remain shut. How is this impacting your work?

AS: We built the product and site to be really modular and also targetable by region because you’re right, the world will open up on different schedules with different restrictions and permutations and we want to make sure we can offer to people what is available to them. In some cases, they might be [hampered by] travel within a certain distance, or air travel might not be open, so we want to help people to find things that are close by.

We’re also building other pieces continuously, some in direct response to the crisis, including a hub that communicates to our guests and hosts what’s happening with travel and what happens after the storm.

As a global company, we’re pretty used to [adapting to change]. Of course, this is a different scale.

Divergent, the Los Angeles-based startup aiming to revolutionize vehicle manufacturing, has cut about one-third of its staff amid the COVID-19 pandemic that has upended startups and major corporations alike.

The company, which employed about 160 people, laid off 57 workers, according to documents filed with the California Employment Development Department. Founder and CEO Kevin Czinger didn’t provide specific numbers. However, he did confirm to TechCrunch that he had to reduce staff due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A core team remains, he said.

“Whenever you’re doing something that’s affecting people’s jobs  — and especially in a company where I basically recruited everyone and knew everyone by face and name — it’s obviously super painful to do that under any circumstance,” Czinger said in an interview this week.

The company’s No. 1 priority was to ensure long-term financial stability and secure the core team, technology development and customer programs no matter what the scenario, Czinger said, adding that there is still enormous uncertainty surrounding the real impact and duration of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“This was about making the company as totally weatherproof as possible,” Czinger said.

Divergent 3D is essentially a Tier 1 supplier for the automotive and aerospace industry. But it can hardly be considered a traditional supplier. After resigning as CEO of the now-defunct EV startup Coda Automotive in 2010, Czinger began to focus on how the vehicle manufacturing process could become more efficient and less wasteful.

Divergent 3D was born out of that initial exploration. The company developed an additive manufacturing platform designed to make it easier and faster to design and build new cars at a fraction of the cost — all while reducing the environmental impact that traditional factories have.

The platform is an end-to-end digital production system that uses high-speed 3D printers to make complex parts out of metal alloys. This system produces the structures of vehicles, such as the full frame, subframes and suspension structures that are part of the crash-performance structure of the vehicle.

In its early years as a company, Divergent 3D was perhaps best known for Blade, the first automobile to use 3D printing to form the body and chassis. Divergent 3D made Blade — which was on the auto show circuit in 2016 — to demonstrate the technology platform.

It was enough to get the attention of investors and at least two global OEMs as customers. Divergent can’t name the customers because of non-disclosure agreements.

The company has raised about $150 million from investors that include venture capital fund Horizons Ventures, automotive and aerospace engineering services company Altran Technologies and Chinese backers O Luxe Holdings, an investment conglomerate backed by the Hong Kong-based real estate investment magnate Li Ka-shing and Shanghai Alliance Investment Limited, an investment arm of the Shanghai Municipal Government.

The latest example of Divergent’s technology is the 21C, a hypercar unveiled in March that was built using the additive manufacturing platform. The high-performance 3D-printed vehicle was produced by Czinger Vehicles. Divergent 3D and Czinger Vehicles are wholly owned subsidiaries under Divergent Technologies.

Image Credits: Czinger Vehicles

Czinger said the company is poised to navigate the pandemic and ultimately survive. Divergent 3D has two global OEMs as customers. Structures such as chassis components and subframes, for which Divergent has supply contracts, are going through various testing and validation stages, depending on the program. Those programs, which are for serial production vehicles, are moving forward, Czinger said.

There will be delays as automakers have slowed or stopped operations. Czinger is hopeful that by 2021 the company will be able to announce that its 3D-printed structures will be production vehicles.

Today marks the conclusion of a years-long saga that started when John Oliver did a segment on Net Neutrality that was so popular that it brought the FCC’s comment system to its knees. Two years later it is finally near addressing all the issues brought up in an investigation from the General Accountability Office.

The report covers numerous cybersecurity and IT issues, some of which the FCC addressed quickly, some not so quickly, and some it’s still working on.

“Today’s GAO report makes clear what we knew all along:  the FCC’s system for collecting public input has problems,” Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel told TechCrunch. “The agency needs to fully fix this mess because this is the way the FCC is supposed to take input from the public. But as this report demonstrates, we have real work to do.”

Here’s the basic timeline of events, which seem so long ago now:

• May 2017: John Oliver’s segment airs, and the next day the FCC claims it was hit by denial-of-service attacks that took down its comment system, ECFS. (In fact it was merely the sheer volume of people who wanted to share their opinion of the FCC’s plan to kill net neutrality.)
• July 2017: Despite calls for details, the FCC refuses to release any details on the cyberattack, despite Congressional demands, saying the threat was “ongoing.” (Its investigations had not in fact determined malicious intent and its official account was in doubt internally from the start.)
• August 2017: Congress calls for an independent investigation of the FCC’s claims and its comment system. (That’s the report released today. Also around this time another improbable “hack” was found to have (not) happened in 2014.)
• October 2017: FCC’s chief information officer, David Bray, who claimed the attacks took place both in 2017 and 2014, leaves the FCC.
• December 2017: The FCC votes along party lines to kill net neutrality.
• June 2018: A watchdog group acquires 1,300 pages of emails, which (though very heavily redacted) show that the DDoS claims were essentially false and known to be so.
• August 2018: The FCC finally admits that it was never hacked, and the next day its own internal report comes out showing that it really was just overwhelming interest from people wanting to be heard. Members of Congress accuse Chairman Ajit Pai of “dereliction of duty” in perpetuating this dangerously incorrect narrative.

Then it’s pretty quiet basically until today, when the report requested in 2017 was publicly released. A version with sensitive information (like exact software configurations and other technical information) was internally circulated in September, then revised for today’s release.

The final report is not much of a bombshell, since much of it has been telegraphed ahead of time. It’s a collection of criticisms of an outdated system with inadequate security and other failings that might have been directed at practically any federal agency, among which cybersecurity practices are notoriously poor.

The investigation indicates that the FCC, for instance, did not consistently implement security and access controls, encrypt sensitive data, update or correctly configure its servers, detect or log cybersecurity events, and so on. It wasn’t always a disaster (even well-run IT departments don’t always follow best practices), but obviously some of these shortcomings and cut corners led to serious issues like ECFS being overwhelmed.

More importantly, of the 136 recommendations made in the September report, 85 have been fully implemented now, 10 partially, and the rest are on track to be so.

That should not be taken to mean that the FCC has waited this whole time to update its commenting and other systems. In fact it was making improvements almost immediately after the event in May of 2017, but refused to describe them. Here are a few of the improvements listed in the GAO report:

Representative Frank Pallone (D-NJ), who has dogged the FCC on this issue since the beginning, issued the following statement:

I requested this report because it was clear, after the net neutrality repeal comment period debacle, that the FCC’s cybersecurity practices had failed. After more than two years of investigating, GAO agrees and found a disturbing lack of security that places the Commission’s information systems at risk… Until the FCC implements all of the remaining recommendations, its systems will remain vulnerable to failure and misuse.

You can read the final GAO report here.

As a small business owner, I was excited to learn about the $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act that offers low-interest loans to firms impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, as I read through the details and began to apply, it became clear that this legislation — while well-intentioned — may not be enough to help many SMBs and startups.

Here’s a quick recap of my experience.

Emergency Economic Injury Grants and Economic Injury Disaster Loans

First and foremost: You need to act swiftly. Emergency Economic Injury Grant and Economic Injury Disaster Loan programs included in the CARES Act function on a first-come, first-served basis, and are funded from a limited pool of resources.

I began my company’s application process by submitting our EIDL and EEIG applications through the SBA website. This was easy, if tedious. It took about two hours to complete the necessary online forms and about two seconds to click the EEIG checkbox. Submission was seamless, but I haven’t received any further communication from the SBA since completing my application, which is a bit confusing — EEIG funds are supposed to be dispersed within 3-5 days of the submission date.

However, I know there’s been a huge volume of submissions recently and this must be exceptionally difficult to handle. I look forward to any email correspondence or updates from the SBA that might give me — and other applicants — an updated estimate of the expected dispersal timeline.

Kara Carmichael has been an Instacart shopper for years in Orlando, Fla. It’s how she’s been able to support her family, she told TechCrunch. But she says she has noticed an increase in third-party bot activity that has made shopping “nearly impossible.”

Despite the high demand for Instacart amid the COVID-19 pandemic, shoppers like Carmichael are facing difficulties claiming orders within the shopper app. This is the result of what appears to be some sophisticated work by third-party apps like Ninja Hours, Sushopper and others.

“They grab the batches within a blink of an eye,” Carmichael said. “I can barely see the amounts offered. Sometimes I may even just receive a notification because the batch has been taken before it was even registered in my app.”

Ninja Hours appeared on the scene about a year ago in the Little Havana community in Miami, according to Logan B, an Instacart shopper with experience using Ninja Hours. Shoppers could pay Ninja Hours about $25 to $35 a week to get access to hours for the following week and in exchange, Ninja Hours would take over the shopper’s app to claim hours on their behalf. This was during a time when Instacart required shoppers to claim hours rather than on-demand orders.

Ninja Hours also provided account activations for immigrant workers without proper documentation. For $200, according to Logan, undocumented immigrants could pay Ninja Hours to create an account for them so they could shop.

Logan says Instacart eventually caught on to Ninja Hours, which forced the service to shut down. Ninja Hours then became Hours For You, which emerged in the fall, Logan says. Hours For You then folded into Sushopper earlier this year.

“The site would go offline for a week and then they would send you a text message,” he said. “It was always written in Spanish — really targeting the Latino community.”

Other shoppers didn’t seem to notice this was going on, Logan says, because Sushopper would claim the orders before they would even appear on the apps. But now that Sushopper has shut down, there’s a new service — one that is not quite as fast.

“There is definitely still a service out here because I’m not getting anything at all,” Logan, who has since stopped paying for early access to orders, said. “There’s no way anyone would be able to grab it that fast.”

What’s happening is that shoppers can see the orders come in, but then they pretty much immediately disappear. Below, you can see a gif of how the moment batches become available, one order immediately disappears.

With this new service, which he doesn’t know the name of, the messages are coming in Portuguese. That leads him to believe it’s run by a different group of people.

“It’s so mainstream now and it seems just about everywhere is having a problem,” Logan said.

Instacart has acknowledged this is a practice that goes on but says that this is not a breach of its platform.

“The safety and security of the entire Instacart community is our top priority,” an Instacart spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We have several robust security measures in place to ensure the security of the Instacart platform. Selling or purchasing batches is not an authorized use of the Instacart platform and is a violation of our Terms of Service. Anyone found to be engaged in any type of inappropriate or fraudulent use of the Instacart platform, including selling or purchasing batches or utilizing any of these types of services, will have their accounts immediately deactivated. We advise shoppers not to engage with any individual or company that claims to provide priority access to batches on the platform, particularly those that request sensitive information such as Instacart usernames, passwords, and/or credit card information.”

Despite Instacart’s efforts, it’s gotten so bad that Carmichael ends up sitting in her car for hours waiting for a batch she can try to snag before the bots.

“My thumbs are sore and eyes are strained,” she said. “I’ve only managed to grab four orders. My livelihood is literally being snatched out from beneath me.”

She and others have reached out to Instacart to report the issue, Carmichael said. But in her experience and the experience of those she knows, Instacart has not responded. Some shoppers, however, are able to get through to Instacart support about this issue. As you can see below, Instacart acknowledges an issue and told one shopper it will “be fixed as soon as possible.”

Before the bot activity ramped up in Orlando, Carmichael was receiving about 20 orders a week. During the week of March 16 – 22, for example, Carmichael completed 26 batches, according to documents reviewed by TechCrunch. Last week she was only able to claim 11. This week, she has only been able to get four batches.

This increase in bot activity comes at a time when Instacart is ramping up its hiring of full-service shoppers. Just yesterday, Instacart announced it’s adding 250,000 more shoppers to meet demand. That came after Instacart announced last month its plans to hire another 300,000 shoppers.

The increased number of full-service shoppers coupled with third-party bots quickly claiming orders, it’s no wonder why some shoppers are feeling frustrated. Behind the scenes, Instacart is working to ban unauthorized third parties from accepting batches. In the meantime, the company is recommending shoppers not engage with those services.