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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for August 6, 2021. We made it to Friday. High-fives all around. If you own stocks or cryptos, you are wrapping up the week on a high. Crypto prices are rising while some indices are hitting records.

Before we get into the news, don’t forget that TechCrunch is launching another newsletter! The first edition of This Week in Apps by our own Sarah Perez launches Saturday morning and is the place to go for all of your app news goodness. Be sure to sign up here.

Now, the news. — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• SpaceX builds 400-foot rocket: If you were concerned that childish jokes regarding billionaire rocketry were about to die down, fear not: SpaceX has stacked its Starship vehicle on top of a Super Heavy booster. That means a very tall rocket with much oomph. This is the first time that Starship and Super Heavy have come together.
• The changing value of insurtech startups: A few weeks back, TechCrunch asked if the market should be concerned about insurtech valuations. Then they took another hit. We tackled the topic in the wake of Hippo’s public listing, deciding that most public insurtech companies are wealthy enough in cash terms to not sweat the declines. Too much.
• What to expect from Samsung’s next hardware event: Samsung’s impending Unpacked event may be, well, packed. We could see a new Galaxy Fold phone, new watches, wearables from a Google partnership and more. TechCrunch will be covering the event this August 11, so stick close to the site for more.

Startups/VC

• DesignOps is the new DevOps: That’s our take on zeroheight and its new $10 million Series A round. The startup “does for UX what DevOps platforms like GitHub do for building and shipping code, providing a central place to document and manage UX components,” CEO Jerome de Lafargue told TechCrunch.
• 500 Startups backs the Carta for Africa: Carta is an important part of the U.S. startup technology stack, helping keep cap tables and shares in proper order. As Africa’s startup scene expands, it will need something similar. And Raise is building it. Per the startup, most startup equity on the continent is still tracked with paper. It’s time for that to change.
• Healthcare provider API raises $17M: APIs to help companies manage their providers are not new. AgentSync is building something in the space for insurance brokers. Verifiable is pursuing a similar model, but focused on healthcare workers. As with Rapid, what is being replaced are manual processes. Software is good at many things, but alleviating humans from certain types of bullshit work is one of them.
• Card-issuing APIs are coming to Africa: Thanks to the first Zambian company to get into Y Combinator, I hasten to add. The startup in question, Union54, was first launched in 2015 as Zazu, a neobank. But it found the card-issuing space so punitive to work with that it took on that problem, rebranding along the way. Card issuing is a big market in the U.S. and Latin America. Let’s see how it performs in the startup space on a new continent.
• To close out our startup coverage today, TechCrunch has a good and long look at the burgeoning startup hub of Utrecht, that bit of the Netherlands that always looks super gorgeous when you see a photo of it. Enjoy!

Craft your pitch deck around ‘that one thing that can really hook an investor’

We frequently run articles with advice for founders who are working on pitch decks. It’s a fundamental step in every startup’s journey, and there are myriad ways to approach the task.

Michelle Davey of telehealth staffing and services company Wheel and Jordan Nof of Tusk Venture Partners appeared on Extra Crunch Live recently to analyze Wheel’s Series A pitch.

Nof said entrepreneurs should candidly explain to potential investors what they’ll need to believe to back their startup.

” … It takes a lot of guesswork out of the equation for the investor and it reorients them to focus on the right problem set that you’re solving,” he said.

“You get this one shot to kind of influence what they think they need to believe to get an investment here … if you don’t do that … we could get pretty off base.”

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

Big Tech Inc.

• Amazon gets win in Indian Supreme Court: Not happy with a planned sale of Indian retail and warehouse chain Future Group to Reliance Retail, the leader in its category, Amazon won a legal reprieve this week when India’s Supreme Court said that a ruling in Singapore to halt the transaction was valid in the country. Seeing a U.S. tech giant argue against consolidation of players in a market may sound ironic, or even hypocritical, but in business it’s better to simply remember that corporations are amoral by nature at best.
• Drama costs at Velodyne rise: Lidar shop Velodyne, a company that went public via a SPAC, is still paying out to cover the price of internal drama and some executive departures. TechCrunch dug into the company’s latest earnings here.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

We’re reaching out to startup founders to tell us who they turn to when they want the most up-to-date growth marketing practices. Fill out the survey here.

Read one of the testimonials we’ve received below!

Marketer: Tate Lowry, Ranq

Recommended by: Anonymous

Testimonial: “They have been on my radar since their co-owner sold the e-comm website Here Pup. Tate and Perrin knew exactly what my site needed to ensure a realistic growth. They didn’t blow up any promises; they didn’t nickel and dime me along the way. Honest and genuine agencies that actually map out how they can and will help you are far and few between.”

“The growth industry is definitely maturing. Less hacks, more teams, more focus on velocity,” Ward van Gasteren, founder of Grow with Ward told us in an interview this week. “Everybody within the field is getting to know the best practices very quickly and implementing them even quicker. So then what?”

Working with a growth professional can alleviate some of the pressure on founders who are finding their way. In our discussion, van Gasteren spoke about the importance of knowledge — qualitative feedback, systemic approaches and when/how to experiment.

This week in TechCrunch’s growth marketing roundup, you’ll also find two guest columns from Stewart Hillhouse and Sam Richard’s take on how to hire a growth team. Below you’ll find recommendations of growth marketers from the community. If there’s a growth marketer that you’ve enjoyed working with, please fill out our survey.

Marketer: Maksym Podsolonko, Fractional CMO
Recommended by: Anonymous
Testimonial: “They provide hands-on marketing support and take full ownership of the marketing function. Ideal for companies that don’t need a full-time CMO.”

Marketer: Tate Lowry, Ranq
Recommended by: Anonymous
Testimonial: “They have been on my radar since their co-owner sold the e-comm website Here Pup. Tate and Perrin knew exactly what my site needed to ensure a realistic growth. They didn’t blow up any promises, they didn’t nickel and dime me along the way. Honest and genuine agencies that actually map out how they can and will help you are far and few between.”

 

Help TechCrunch find the best growth marketers for startups.

Provide a recommendation in this quick survey and we’ll share the results with everybody.

 

Demand Curve: Tested tactics for growing newsletters: Stewart Hillhouse, senior content lead at Demand Curve, talks through tactics for email newsletters. Hillhouse tells us that newsletters have nearly 40x ROI, but you have to work in order to achieve that. This article discusses the 60% rule for pop-ups, the strategy behind email timing and the importance of quality over quantity. Hillhouse mentions, “We’ve seen very little correlation between volume of emails and the resulting conversion rate.”

(Extra Crunch) Demand Curve: Questions you need to answer in your paid search ads: Hillhouse also wrote an Extra Crunch article this week about the 14 questions you should be answering with your paid search ads. One question he mentions revolves around acceptance and how “Going shopping in real life is a social activity. Shoppers will peer into the carts of others, compare their tastes and ask those with them for input.” Let’s be honest — we’ve all done it. Hillhouse answers how this behavior can be replicated for online shopping.

(Extra Crunch) How to hire and structure a growth team: Sam Richard, senior director of growth at OpenView, provides insights on what questions you should be asking when you’re hiring a growth leader. Richard says, “A strong growth-minded hire will already have a feel for benchmarks and should be able to identify which growth lever in your customer journey needs the most help.”

How Ward van Gasteren thinks about growth hacking today: In this interview, Ward van Gasteren spoke about common misconceptions regarding growth hacking, like how it’s assumed to be a perfect approach. But, we were told, “The hard data that you see in your analytics tools can only tell you what is slowing down your growth … not why your growth slows down there.”

Is there a startup growth marketing expert that you want us to know about? Let us know by filling out our survey.

Assembling a startup team is harder than assembling 10 IKEA dressers, and the stakes are much, 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 must make careful decisions about whom they invite to join the core team.

Will that stellar engineer become a great CTO? 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.”

In a related article, Gregg Adkin, VP and managing director at Dell Technologies Capital, shared the framework he’s developed for helping founders set up their board.

Choosing the right mix of people can impact everything from fundraising to hiring: “Investors often ask founders about their board [because] it says a lot about their character, their judgment and their willingness to be challenged,” he writes.

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Full Extra Crunch articles are only available to members
Use discount code ECFriday to save 20% off a one- or two-year subscription

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Miranda Halpern spoke to Amsterdam-based coach Ward van Gasteren for our latest growth marketing interview, which is free to read.

In their discussion, van Gasteren addressed misconceptions about growth hacking, the mistakes most startups are likely to make, and the distinctions he draws between growth hacking and growth marketing:

“Growth hacking is great to kickstart growth, test new opportunities and see what tactics work,” he tells us.

“Marketers should be there to continue where the growth hackers left off: Build out those strategies, maintain customer engagement, and keep tactics fresh and relevant.”

Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch this week; I hope you have a great weekend.

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch

@yourprotagonist

What Square’s acquisition of Afterpay means for startups

In his first column since returning to TechCrunch, reporter Ryan Lawler considered the potential ripples Square’s purchase of Afterpay may send across the pond of buy now, pay later startups.

For commentary and perspective, he interviewed:

• Dan Rosen, founder and general partner, Commerce Ventures
• Jake Gibson, founding partner, Better Tomorrow Ventures
• TX Zhuo, partner, Fika Ventures
• Matthew Harris, partner, Bain Capital Ventures

The investors he spoke to agreed that deferring payments helps drive e-commerce, “but scale matters and long-term margins look slim for BNPL startups,” reports Ryan.

Enterprise AI 2.0: The acceleration of B2B AI innovation has begun

Businesses have been deploying AI solutions for 20 years, but few have achieved the outstanding gains in efficiency and profitability promised when the technology first appeared.

But there’s a burgeoning new generation of enterprise AI, Eshwar Belani, an operating partner at Symphony AI, writes in a guest column.

“Companies on the leading edge of AI innovation have advanced to the next generation, which will define the coming decade of big data, analytics and automation — Enterprise AI 2.0.”

Embodied AI, superintelligence and the master algorithm

Over the next 18 months, one technologist says the increased adoption of embodied artificial intelligence will open a path to superintelligence — incredibly powerful software that dwarfs anything the human mind could produce.

“All the crazy Boston Dynamics videos of robots jumping, dancing, balancing and running are examples of embodied AI,” says Chris Nicholson, founder and CEO of Pathmind, which uses deep reinforcement learning to optimize industrial operations and supply chains.

“The field is moving fast and, in this revolution, you can dance.”

A lot of cash and little love: An insurtech story

The Exchange looks at the valuations of public insurtech companies and considers what that means for startups — but from a slightly different perspective.

“We’d typically riff on the new values of public neoinsurance companies and use that data to work our way into a guess concerning what the price declines might mean for related startups,” Alex Wilhelm writes. “Taking public-market data and using it to better understand private markets is pretty much the national pastime of this column.

“Not today.”

5 factors founders must consider before choosing their VC

The fact that the globe is awash in venture capital should not be news to readers of this newsletter.

For founders, it means more than just fat checks, Kunal Lunawat, the co-founder and managing partner of Agya Ventures, writes in a guest column.

“Founders would be well served to go back to the basics and focus on the principles of fundraising when determining who sits on their cap table.”

Neobanks’ moves toward profitability could be the path to public markets

Alex Wilhelm checks in on results from Starling Bank and Monzo to see what the neobanks’ most recent financial figures say about the state of neobanks overall.

“Although some neobanks are managing to clean up their ledgers and work toward profits — or reach profitability — not all are in the black,” he notes.

But among those that are?

“At least a portion of the neobanking world is financially stable enough to consider public offerings.”

Founders must learn how to build and maintain circles of trust with investors

The red-hot venture capital market may give founders lots of investors to choose from, but the most important thing (if you can be choosy) is being able to trust and rely on your investors, Ripple Ventures’ Matt Cohen and True’s Tony Conrad write in a guest column.

“This … new dynamic is forcing founders to be extremely selective about exactly who is sitting around their mentorship table,” they write.

“It’s simply not possible to have numerous deep and meaningful relationships to extract maximum value at the early stage from seasoned investors.”

What’s the board’s role in an early-stage startup?

Assembling a board of directors is not merely about finding individuals who can aid your early-stage journey, Gregg Adkin, the vice president and managing director at Dell Technologies Capital, writes in a guest column.

The composition of the board can also impact your fundraising.

“Investors often ask founders about their board [because] it says a lot about their character, their judgment and their willingness to be challenged,” he writes.

Adkins offers a framework he calls “SPIFS” — for strategy, people, image, finance and systems for compliance — to aid founders in setting up a board.

Do bronze medals ever make sense for unicorns?

In the wake of Deliveroo’s plans to abandon the Spanish market after the country passed legislation requiring companies dependent on gig workers to hire employees, Alex Wilhelm wondered about the battle for smaller markets and whether third place is sufficient.

“One company exiting a market is not a big deal, but we were curious about Deliveroo’s comments regarding the need for market leadership — or something close to it — to warrant continued investment,” he writes for The Exchange.

“Is this the common reality for startups battling for market position, no matter if those markets are cities or countries?”

Biden’s major bipartisan infrastructure plan struck a rare chord of cooperation between Republicans and Democrats, but changes it proposes to cryptocurrency regulation are tripping up the bill.

The administration intends to pay for $28 billion of its planned infrastructure spending by tightening tax compliance within the historically under-regulated arena of digital currency. That’s why cryptocurrency is popping up in a bill that’s mostly about rebuilding bridges and roads.

The legislation’s vocal critics argue that the bill’s effort to do so is slapdash, particularly a bit that would declare anyone “responsible for and regularly providing any service effectuating transfers of digital assets” to be a broker, subject to tax reporting requirements.

While that definition might be more straightforward in a traditional corner of finance, it could force cryptocurrency developers, companies and even anyone mining digital currencies to somehow collect and report information on users, something that by design isn’t even possible in a decentralized financial system.

Now, a new amendment to the critical spending package is threatening to make matters even worse.

Unintended consequences

In a joint letter about the bill’s text, Square, Coinbase, Ribbit Capital and other stakeholders warned of “financial surveillance” and unintended impacts for cryptocurrency miners and developers. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Fight for the Future, two privacy-minded digital rights organizations, also slammed the bill.

Following the outcry from the cryptocurrency community, a pair of influential senators proposed an amendment to clarify the new reporting rules. Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-OR) pushed back against the bill, proposing an amendment with fellow finance committee member Pat Toomey (R-PA) that would modify the bill’s language.

The amendment would establish that the new reporting “does not apply to individuals developing block chain technology and wallets,” removing some of the bill’s ambiguity on the issue.

“By clarifying the definition of broker, our amendment will ensure non-financial intermediaries like miners, network validators, and other service providers—many of whom don’t even have the personal-identifying information needed to file a 1099 with the IRS—are not subject to the reporting requirements specified in the bipartisan infrastructure package,” Toomey said.

Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis also threw her support behind the Toomey and Wyden amendment, as did Colorado Governor Jared Polis.

Picking winners and losers

The drama doesn’t stop there. With negotiations around the bill ongoing — the text could be finalized over the weekend — a pair of senators proposed a competing amendment that isn’t winning any fans in the crypto community.

That amendment, from Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) and Mark Warner (D-VA), would exempt traditional cryptocurrency miners who participate in energy-intensive “proof of work” systems from new financial reporting requirements, while keeping those rules in place for those using a “proof of stake” system. Portman worked with the Treasury Department to author the cryptocurrency portion of the original infrastructure bill.

Rather than requiring an investment in computing hardware (and energy bills) capable of solving increasingly complex math problems, proof of stake systems rely on participants taking a financial stake in a given project, locking away some of the cryptocurrency to generate new coins.

Proof of stake is emerging as an attractive, climate-friendlier alternative that could reduce the need for heavy computing and huge amounts of energy required for proof of work mining. That makes it all the more puzzling that the latest amendment would specifically let proof of work mining off the hook.

Some popular digital currencies like Cardano are already built on proof of stake. Ethereum, the second biggest cryptocurrency, is in the process of migrating from a proof of work system to proof of stake to help scale its system and reduce fees. Bitcoin is the most notable digital currency that relies on proof of work.

The Warner-Portman amendment is being touted as a “compromise” but it’s not really halfway between the Wyden-Toomey amendment and the existing bill — it just introduces new problems that many crypto advocates view as a fresh existential threat to their work. Prominent members of the crypto community including Square founder and Bitcoin booster Jack Dorsey have thrown their support behind the Wyden-Lummis-Toomey amendment while slamming the second proposal as misguided and damaging.

Unfortunately for the crypto community — and the promise of the proof of stake model — the White House is apparently throwing its weight behind the Warner-Portman amendment, though that could change as eleventh hour negotiations continue.

Andy Yang joined Indiegogo at a turbulent time. As the crowdfunding platform’s then-CEO stepped aside for personal reasons, the service also reportedly grappled with layoffs. Coming on board after a stretch with Reddit, the new CEO would have less than a year at the helm before COVID-19 turned the globe upside down.

Now 13 years old, the San Francisco-based site matured alongside the world of online crowdfunding. And, certainly, Indiegogo had a front-row seat for all of the ups and downs. Indiegogo introduced several million-dollar campaigns, but the platform has often suffered from comparisons to Kickstarter, a service that has become synonymous with the category for many.

Yang sat down to discuss how Indiegogo has changed under his tenure, how crowdfunding has evolved and what both will look like in a post-pandemic world.

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

What was your primary objective coming on as CEO?

I was at Reddit doing core product, and when Indiegogo’s board and founders reached out, it was really around, “Hey, we would love somebody with product experience, a background in community.” What was going on in Indiegogo was really an evaluation of, “What’s our core values?” When I took the saddle and the reigns, it was really focusing on that core of who we are, what segments do we want to go after, and where do we want to focus. Where do we want to focus our product?

From that perspective, we’ve been really heads-down for the last two years, just working on ourselves, internally, and focusing on the core — what we’re terming “bringing the crowd back in crowdfunding.” I think a lot of the platforms have been very transactional in nature, and so I think backers and consumers and users have been trained by Amazon to click a button and get things two hours later. The premise of crowdfunding is very different.

You may or may not get this perk delivered in the time frame that you’re expecting, and to help educate backers and the community around that is really core to who we are. We’ve been through the last two years with COVID, but we’ve been profitable since I’ve joined, which is huge. We can control our own destiny and really take the time to do things right and invest in areas like trust and safety, like community, that we really wanted to.

The company wasn’t profitable when you joined?

We weren’t profitable. I enjoyed and then we cut to profitability, or at least kind of a neutral state, and with any kind of change in leadership, some tenured folks opted out, and we basically became a new team overnight to kind of re-found the company, and we’ve been slowly adding people over the last couple years, but always with that eye on profitability and controlling our own destiny.

Beyond people changing roles, what had to happen in order for the company to become profitable?

Really doubling down on making sure that we understood our sales pipeline and making sure that, from a supply perspective, that we had a number of campaigns from across a number of categories. Obviously, our bread and butter is what we call tech and innovation, consumer electronics hardware, but also seeing what other categories that we can lean into. We’re definitely strong in comics, travel, outdoors, and what can we do from expanding our wedge and our categories in different areas that we’re seeing growth. I think a trend that we’re currently seeing is a lot of green tech. Just trying to understand what categories are growing, where our brand resonates with entrepreneurs and backers.

That’s what needed to happen — just making sure that we had adequate supply on the platform, and also just from the backer side, we had not traditionally focused on the backer side. We had heavily focused on the supply side, but really starting to, again, return back to the crowd in crowdfunding, leaning on my Reddit experience, just making sure that we can engage the community in new and interesting ways.

Kickstarter announced on Wednesday that backers have pledged $6 billion to more than 200,000 projects over the course of the crowdfunding site’s history. The milestone comes a little over a year after the platform hit the $5 billion mark.

A matter of weeks before the company hit that last massive round number, however, it revealed starker news. Kickstarter reduced its staff by 39%, through a combination of layoffs and buyouts, as newly minted CEO Aziz Hasan noted a 35% drop in new projects. The company wasn’t alone, certainly, in suffering major setbacks in the face of a pandemic, but that likely didn’t cushion the blow of a downturn with “no clear sign of rebound,” according to the executive.

With another $1 billion pledge in the intervening 15 months, however, it’s probably safe to say that predictions of crowdfunding’s demise were somewhat premature. Like most of the rest of us, the pandemic has spurred a reprioritization and recentering, and the service that has long been synonymous with the category looked to new methods of engagement.

After a dozen years of being the face of crowdfunding, plenty of question marks still remain. The past decade has seen something of a hype bubble for the process, and for some, the shine has worn off a bit, courtesy of undelivered gifts and unfinished campaigns. What will the next decade hold for crowdfunding’s biggest name? And will the pandemic fundamentally transform how people back projects on the internet?

We sat down with Hasan to discuss the past year, the company’s big milestone and the future of crowdfunding.

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

When you took the role of CEO in 2019, what changes did you feel like you needed to implement?

I’d really like to touch on the connection that I’ve always felt with Kickstarter. It, for me personally, is a place where I feel like both my personal passion and what we do on a day-to-day basis came together really well. At one of the first all-hands when I got hired, I said what’s beautiful about the job that I get to do is that every evening I go home and I illustrate. And so I get to feel the hard pain, a lot of the insecurity and the uncertainty that comes with being a creator.

I come in every morning and I say, “OK, how am I going to fix that? What can I do to make that process better, make that easier?” And so that for me was just this underlying motivation. This is what gets me out of bed in the morning. The thought to me was, “What are the ways in which we have the greatest strength in helping creators find the funding that they need?”

I think one of the greatest opportunities that I really see is that the backers are such an incredible part of this puzzle, and for us, for the longest time we really focused on the creator tools and really making sure that the creators have a way to share their project. What we’ve seen is that backers are such a tremendous part of this process and their ability to discover the joy, the fun, the curiosity that they feel through that process is such an important part of the experience as well. And so here’s a place where we can actually put some focus and some time and attention on what the backer experience looks like. And so that really has been a big mantra for me as we’ve been moving forward.

What does it mean to impact the backer experience? In the past two years, how has the backer experience changed?

One is just making it simpler and easier for backers to find projects that they would care about. And I think us being just a space where this stuff exists, I think just putting it out there as it is on a home page or through the creator that you know isn’t enough. And so there are a lot of channels that we’ve been using, particularly thinking about our emails and newsletters and these points of connection that we have with the backer over the course of their journey and actually introducing projects that they might like through that process. So we have a recommendation engine that we’ve been developing over the last few years that’s meant to help connect, make better connections based on either affinity, which you might like, or the way that you backed in the past or projects that you might’ve watched.

Early last year, Kickstarter went through a fairly large round of layoffs — 40%, according to reports. How did the company navigate the earliest days of the pandemic and what do you feel you’ve done to help right that ship?

What we saw in our platform was that creators just kind of off the bat had the same level of uncertainty everybody else was feeling. We saw a slowdown of projects and what we saw was about 40% of our pledge volume dipping. And as a result, there’s a lot of projects that fell off as a result of that. There were some very, very concerning times. The big thing that we thought about was, we need to make sure that our business is resilient for the future, make sure that we’re actually just set up operationally in a way that we can withstand uncertainty as it comes. Through that really tough time and then, kind of peeking out toward the end of 2020, the backers didn’t change their pattern of behavior. Even though creators were launching fewer projects during that really difficult time, what we saw was that the backers remained extremely eager to keep pushing forward and supporting creative work.

So things like our pledge rates and success rates remained quite high and that’s especially if you think about the games community, comics, publishing a number of these spaces where we’ve always seen strong engagement. That engagement actually continued through. About four or five months after that initial dip, we slowly started to see some of the creators come back online, because I think they also started to recognize that the backers are there. They haven’t changed their backing patterns. And so what that did for us is that started to give us a bit of understanding here that we should start to connect back to the creators and let them know that the backers are here.

It sounds like a plan concocted by a supervillain, if that villain’s dastardly end was to provide cheap, clean power all over the world: launch a set of three-kilometer-wide solar arrays that beam the sun’s energy to the surface. Even the price tag seems gleaned from pop fiction: one hundred million dollars. But this is a real project at Caltech, funded for a nearly a decade largely by a single donor.

The Space-based Solar Power Project has been underway since at least 2013, when the first donation from Donald and Brigitte Bren came through. Donald Bren is the chairman of Irvine Company and on the Caltech board of trustees, and after hearing about the idea of space-based solar in Popular Science, he proposed to fund a research project at the university — and since then has given over $100M for the purpose. The source of the funds has been kept anonymous until this week, when Caltech made it public.

The idea emerges naturally from the current limitations of renewable energy. Solar power is ubiquitous on the surface, but of course highly dependent on the weather, season, and time of day. No solar panel, even in ideal circumstances, can work at full capacity all the time, and so the problem becomes one of transferring and storing energy in a smart grid. No solar panel on Earth, that is.

A solar panel in orbit, however, may be exposed to the full light of the sun nearly all the time, and with none of the reduction in its power that comes from that light passing through the planet’s protective atmosphere and magnetosphere.

“This ambitious project is a transformative approach to large-scale solar energy harvesting for the Earth that overcomes this intermittency and the need for energy storage,” said SSPP researcher Harry Atwater in the Caltech release.

Of course, you would need to collect enough energy that it’s worth doing in the first place, and you need a way to beam that energy down to the surface in a way that doesn’t lose most of it to the aforementioned protective layers but also doesn’t fry anything passing through its path.

These fundamental questions have been looked at systematically for the last decade, and the team is clear that without Bren’s support, this project wouldn’t have been possible. Attempting to do the work while scrounging for grants and rotating through grad students might have prevented its being done at all, but the steady funding meant they could hire long-term researchers and overcome early obstacles that might have stymied them otherwise.

The group has produced dozens of published studies and prototypes (which you can peruse here), including the lightest solar collector-transmitter made by an order of magnitude, and is now on the verge of launching its first space-based test satellite.

“[Launch] is currently expected to be Q1 2023,” co-director of the project Ali Hajimiri told TechCrunch. “It involves several demonstrators for space verification of key technologies involved in the effort, namely, wireless power transfer at distance, lightweight flexible photovoltaics, and flexible deployable space structures.”

These will be small-scale tests (about 6 feet across), but the vision is for something rather larger. Bigger than anything currently in space, in fact.

“The final system is envisioned to consist of multiple deployable modules in close formation flight and operating in synchronization with one another,” Hajimiri said. “Each module is several tens of meters on the side and the system can be build up by adding more modules over time.”

Eventually the concept calls for a structure perhaps as large as 5-6 kilometers across. Don’t worry — it would be far enough out from Earth that you wouldn’t see a giant hexagon blocking out the stars. Power would be sent to receivers on the surface using directed, steerable microwave transmission. A few of these in orbit could beam power to any location on the planet full time.

Of course that is the vision, which is many, many years out if it is to take place at all. But don’t make the mistake of thinking of this as having that single ambitious, one might even say grandiose goal. The pursuit of this idea has produced advances in solar cells, flexible space-based structures, and wireless power transfer, each of which can be applied in other areas. The vision may be the stuff of science fiction, but the science is progressing in a very grounded way.

For his part, Bren seems to be happy just to advance the ball on what he considers an important task that might not otherwise have been attempted at all.

“I have been a student researching the possible applications of space-based solar energy for many years,” he told Caltech. “My interest in supporting the world-class scientists at Caltech is driven by my belief in harnessing the natural power of the sun for the benefit of everyone.”

We’ll check back with the SSPP ahead of launch.

It sounds like a plan concocted by a supervillain, if that villain’s dastardly end was to provide cheap, clean power all over the world: launch a set of three-kilometer-wide solar arrays that beam the sun’s energy to the surface. Even the price tag seems gleaned from pop fiction: one hundred million dollars. But this is a real project at Caltech, funded for a nearly a decade largely by a single donor.

The Space-based Solar Power Project has been underway since at least 2013, when the first donation from Donald and Brigitte Bren came through. Donald Bren is the chairman of Irvine Company and on the Caltech board of trustees, and after hearing about the idea of space-based solar in Popular Science, he proposed to fund a research project at the university — and since then has given over $100M for the purpose. The source of the funds has been kept anonymous until this week, when Caltech made it public.

The idea emerges naturally from the current limitations of renewable energy. Solar power is ubiquitous on the surface, but of course highly dependent on the weather, season, and time of day. No solar panel, even in ideal circumstances, can work at full capacity all the time, and so the problem becomes one of transferring and storing energy in a smart grid. No solar panel on Earth, that is.

A solar panel in orbit, however, may be exposed to the full light of the sun nearly all the time, and with none of the reduction in its power that comes from that light passing through the planet’s protective atmosphere and magnetosphere.

“This ambitious project is a transformative approach to large-scale solar energy harvesting for the Earth that overcomes this intermittency and the need for energy storage,” said SSPP researcher Harry Atwater in the Caltech release.

Of course, you would need to collect enough energy that it’s worth doing in the first place, and you need a way to beam that energy down to the surface in a way that doesn’t lose most of it to the aforementioned protective layers but also doesn’t fry anything passing through its path.

These fundamental questions have been looked at systematically for the last decade, and the team is clear that without Bren’s support, this project wouldn’t have been possible. Attempting to do the work while scrounging for grants and rotating through grad students might have prevented its being done at all, but the steady funding meant they could hire long-term researchers and overcome early obstacles that might have stymied them otherwise.

The group has produced dozens of published studies and prototypes (which you can peruse here), including the lightest solar collector-transmitter made by an order of magnitude, and is now on the verge of launching its first space-based test satellite.

“[Launch] is currently expected to be Q1 2023,” co-director of the project Ali Hajimiri told TechCrunch. “It involves several demonstrators for space verification of key technologies involved in the effort, namely, wireless power transfer at distance, lightweight flexible photovoltaics, and flexible deployable space structures.”

These will be small-scale tests (about 6 feet across), but the vision is for something rather larger. Bigger than anything currently in space, in fact.

“The final system is envisioned to consist of multiple deployable modules in close formation flight and operating in synchronization with one another,” Hajimiri said. “Each module is several tens of meters on the side and the system can be build up by adding more modules over time.”

Eventually the concept calls for a structure perhaps as large as 5-6 kilometers across. Don’t worry — it would be far enough out from Earth that you wouldn’t see a giant hexagon blocking out the stars. Power would be sent to receivers on the surface using directed, steerable microwave transmission. A few of these in orbit could beam power to any location on the planet full time.

Of course that is the vision, which is many, many years out if it is to take place at all. But don’t make the mistake of thinking of this as having that single ambitious, one might even say grandiose goal. The pursuit of this idea has produced advances in solar cells, flexible space-based structures, and wireless power transfer, each of which can be applied in other areas. The vision may be the stuff of science fiction, but the science is progressing in a very grounded way.

For his part, Bren seems to be happy just to advance the ball on what he considers an important task that might not otherwise have been attempted at all.

“I have been a student researching the possible applications of space-based solar energy for many years,” he told Caltech. “My interest in supporting the world-class scientists at Caltech is driven by my belief in harnessing the natural power of the sun for the benefit of everyone.”

We’ll check back with the SSPP ahead of launch.

With most popular online video games, there’s a huge gap between being a good player and a great one. A casual player might be able to hold their own against other casual players, only for a random pro to wander by and chew through everyone like they’re somehow playing with a different set of rules.

Could an AI-driven voice in your ear help close that gap, if only a bit? SenpAI.GG, a company out of Y Combinator’s latest batch, thinks so.

Much of that aforementioned gap boils down to practice, muscle memory, and — let’s face it — natural ability. But as a game gets older/bigger/more complex, the best players tend to have a wealth of one resource that’s oh-so-crucial, if not oh-so-fun to gather: information.

What guns do the most damage at this range? Which character is best suited to counter that character on this map? Hell, what changed in that “minor update” that flashed across your screen as you were booting up the game? Wait, why is my favorite weapon suddenly so much harder to control?

Staying on top of all this information as players discover new tactics and updates shift the “meta” is a challenge in its own right. It usually involves lots of Twitch streams, lots of digging around Reddit threads, and lots of poring over patch notes.

SenpAI.GG is looking to surface more of that information automatically and help new players get good, faster. Their desktop client presents you with information it thinks can help, post-game analysis on your strategies, plus in-game audio cues for the things you might not be great at tracking yet.

It currently supports a handful of games — League of Legends, Valorant, and Teamfight Tactics — with the info it provides varying from game to game. In LoL, for example, it’ll look at both team’s selected champions and try to recommend the one you could pick to help most; in Valorant, meanwhile, it can give you an audio heads up that one of your teammates is running low on health (before said teammate starts yelling at you to heal them), when you’ve forgotten to reload, or how long you’ve got before the Spike (read: game-ending bomb) explodes.

Just as important as the information it provides is the information it won’t provide. In my chat with him, SenpAI.GG founder Olcay Yilmazcoban seemed very aware that there’s a hard-to-define line here where “assistant” blurs into “cheating tool” — but the company follows certain rules to stay on the right side of things and prevent their players from getting banned.

They won’t, for example, ever take action on a player’s behalf — they might fire an audio cue to say “hey, you should heal that teammate”, but they won’t press the button for you. They’ll only generate their real-time insights from what’s on your screen — not anything hidden within the running process. They also won’t do things like reveal an enemy’s location just because your teammate is also running the app and can see them. Think “good player standing over your shoulder,” not “wall hack.” The company says that they’re always within each game developer’s competitive fairness guidelines, and only work with approved/provided APIs.

It’s a good idea because it’s one that, arguably, never gets old. With each new game they support, they’ve got a new potential audience to serve. Meanwhile, it’s not as if the old games/insights will expire — a game’s big ol’ book-of-stuff-you-need-to-know tends to only get bigger and more complex as a game ages and the patches pile up. There are games I’ve been playing for years where I’d still love a voice assistant that says “Oh hey, the recoil on the gun you just picked up has gotten way more intense since the last time you played.” SenpAI.GG isn’t there yet, but there’s a ton of natural room for growth.

Yllmazcoban tells me that they currently have over 400,000 active users, with a team of eleven people working on it. The base app is free, with plans to offer advanced features for a couple bucks a month.

With most popular online video games, there’s a huge gap between being a good player and a great one. A casual player might be able to hold their own against other casual players, only for a random pro to wander by and chew through everyone like they’re somehow playing with a different set of rules.

Could an AI-driven voice in your ear help close that gap, if only a bit? SenpAI.GG, a company out of Y Combinator’s latest batch, thinks so.

Much of that aforementioned gap boils down to practice, muscle memory, and — let’s face it — natural ability. But as a game gets older/bigger/more complex, the best players tend to have a wealth of one resource that’s oh-so-crucial, if not oh-so-fun to gather: information.

What guns do the most damage at this range? Which character is best suited to counter that character on this map? Hell, what changed in that “minor update” that flashed across your screen as you were booting up the game? Wait, why is my favorite weapon suddenly so much harder to control?

Staying on top of all this information as players discover new tactics and updates shift the “meta” is a challenge in its own right. It usually involves lots of Twitch streams, lots of digging around Reddit threads, and lots of poring over patch notes.

SenpAI.GG is looking to surface more of that information automatically and help new players get good, faster. Their desktop client presents you with information it thinks can help, post-game analysis on your strategies, plus in-game audio cues for the things you might not be great at tracking yet.

It currently supports a handful of games — League of Legends, Valorant, and Teamfight Tactics — with the info it provides varying from game to game. In LoL, for example, it’ll look at both team’s selected champions and try to recommend the one you could pick to help most; in Valorant, meanwhile, it can give you an audio heads up that one of your teammates is running low on health (before said teammate starts yelling at you to heal them), when you’ve forgotten to reload, or how long you’ve got before the Spike (read: game-ending bomb) explodes.

Just as important as the information it provides is the information it won’t provide. In my chat with him, SenpAI.GG founder Olcay Yilmazcoban seemed very aware that there’s a hard-to-define line here where “assistant” blurs into “cheating tool” — but the company follows certain rules to stay on the right side of things and prevent their players from getting banned.

They won’t, for example, ever take action on a player’s behalf — they might fire an audio cue to say “hey, you should heal that teammate”, but they won’t press the button for you. They’ll only generate their real-time insights from what’s on your screen — not anything hidden within the running process. They also won’t do things like reveal an enemy’s location just because your teammate is also running the app and can see them. Think “good player standing over your shoulder,” not “wall hack.” The company says that they’re always within each game developer’s competitive fairness guidelines, and only work with approved/provided APIs.

It’s a good idea because it’s one that, arguably, never gets old. With each new game they support, they’ve got a new potential audience to serve. Meanwhile, it’s not as if the old games/insights will expire — a game’s big ol’ book-of-stuff-you-need-to-know tends to only get bigger and more complex as a game ages and the patches pile up. There are games I’ve been playing for years where I’d still love a voice assistant that says “Oh hey, the recoil on the gun you just picked up has gotten way more intense since the last time you played.” SenpAI.GG isn’t there yet, but there’s a ton of natural room for growth.

Yllmazcoban tells me that they currently have over 400,000 active users, with a team of eleven people working on it. The base app is free, with plans to offer advanced features for a couple bucks a month.