Author: azeeadmin

I spent the week at SXSW, Austin’s really, really huge technology, music, comedy and film festival. It’s my first year making the trek down here for the event, which I did to interview sextech entrepreneur Lora DiCarlo founder Lora Haddock, whose robotics innovation reward was infamously revoked at this year’s CES.

“I brush my teeth and I masturbate. It’s all normal,” she said, addressing the stigma surrounding female-focused pleasure tech. Haddock, during our chat, also announced the first-ever government grant for a sextech startup, a $99,637 funding for Lora DiCarlo from the state of Oregon. Lora DiCarlo plans to release its first product, the Osé, this fall.

Here’s what happened while I was wondering confused around Austin.

Uber, Uber, Uber

Uber dominated the news cycle this week; here’s the TL;DR. The ride-hailing company is probably, most likely going to unveil its S-1 next month and it’s tying up some loose ends ahead of its big IPO. Uber wants to raise roughly $1 billion at a valuation of between $5 billion and $10 billion for its autonomous vehicles unit — yes, the same one that was burning through $20 million per month. Waymo, similarly, is looking to raise outside capital for the first time for its AV efforts.

Top TPG dealmaker caught in college admissions scandal

Bill McGlashan, who built his career as a top investor at the private equity firm TPG, was fired (or maybe quit?) says the firm after he was caught up in what the Justice Department said is the largest college admissions scandal it has ever prosecuted. Even worse, McGlashan lead TPG’s social impact strategy under the Rise Fund brand, making the charges particularly damning.

Accel gets $2.5B

HotelTonight and Slack stakeholder Accel raised $2.525 billion, sources confirm to TechCrunch; $525 million for its fourteenth early-stage fund, $1.5 billion for its fifth growth fund and $500 million for its second Leaders Fund, or a dedicated pool of capital meant to help the firm strengthen its positions on particularly competitive bets. Plus, 137 Ventures announced its fourth fund with $210 million in committed capital. The firm provides liquidity to founders and early employees of “sustainable, fast-growing, private companies.” In essence, 137 Ventures buys shares directly from employees at unicorn tech companies, like Palantir,  Flexport and Airbnb.

Sam Altman

Last week, we reported Y Combinator president Sam Altman would be stepping down to focus on OpenAI. TechCrunch’s Connie Loizos questions whether he had a positive or negative influence on the accelerator during his presidency. Altman was part of the first YC startup class in 2005 and began working part-time as a YC partner in 2011. He was ultimately made the head of the organization five years ago.

Brian O’Malley’s HotelTonight win

Forerunner Ventures general partner Brian O’Malley went long on HotelTonight and it paid off. For your weekend reading, we thought you might enjoy an oral history from O’Malley about how he stumbled upon HotelTonight and remained connected to the company across its nine-year history.

Here’s your weekly reminder to send me tips, suggestions and more to kate.clark@techcrunch.com or @KateClarkTweets. 

Startup cash

• Drivezy is raising $100M+ at a $400M valuation, eyes US expansion
• Newsela gets $50M to expand its content repository
• AgroStar gets $27M Series C to give more Indian farmers increased crop production with data analytics
• Investing app Stash raises $65M
• Truepill, the ‘AWS for pharmacies,’ raises $10M from Initialized Capital
• Flight-hailing app BlackBird raises $10M to replace driving with flying

VC shakeups 

In an announcement that shocked VC Twitter, Tiger Global announced that Lee Fixel, whom Bill Gurley once said is one of the smartest investors on the scene, is leaving the firm at the end of June. Scott Shleifer and Chase Coleman will continue as co-managers of the portfolios Fixel has overseen, with Shleifer taking over as its head. “Lee has been a driving force behind the expansion of Tiger Global’s private equity investing activities in the United States and India, and he has distinguished himself as a world-class investor across multiple sectors and stages,” the firm stated. And on the hiring front, Canvas Ventures is expanding its team of three general partners to four with the hiring of Mike Ghaffary, a former general partner at Social Capital.

Extra Crunch

Subscribers to TechCrunch’s premium content can learn which types of startups are most often profitable.

Y Combinator’s latest batch

YC demo days are coming up quick. The TechCrunch staff has been meeting with YC startups and documenting their journey through the startup accelerator. I spoke to YourChoice Therapeutics, a startup developing unisex, non-hormonal birth control, and Bottomless, which operates a direct-to-consumer coffee delivery service. TechCrunch’s Lucas Matney wrote about Jetpack Aviation, a YC startup, and its $380,000 flying motorcycle, and Adventurous, an augmented reality scavenger hunt crafted for families. TechCrunch’s Megan Rose Dickey spoke to Ysplit, which wants to make it so you never have to owe anyone money ever again.

Listen to me talk

This week on Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines, Crunchbase News’ editor-in-chief Alex Wilhelm and TechCrunch’s Connie Loizos discuss Uber’s IPO and Stash’s big round. Listen here.

Want more TechCrunch newsletters? Sign up here.

Mobile chipmaker Qualcomm has chalked up another small legal victory against Apple in another patent litigation suit.

A jury in a U.S. federal court in San Diego found Friday that Apple owes Qualcomm about $31M for infringing three patents, per Reuters.

Qualcomm has filed a number of patent suits against the iPhone maker in the U.S., Europe and Asia in recent years. The suits are skirmishes in a bigger battle between the pair over licensing terms that Apple alleges are unfair and illegal.

As we reported earlier the San Diego patent suit relates to the power consumption and speed of boot-up times for iPhones sold between mid-2017 and late-2018.

Qualcomm had asked to be awarded up to $1.41 in unpaid patent royalties damages per infringing iPhone sold during the period.

Reuters suggests the award could have wider significance if it ends up factoring into the looming billion dollar royalties suit between Apple and Qualcomm. By putting a dollar value on some of the latter’s IP, the San Diego trial potentially bolsters its contention that its chip licensing practices are fair.

At the time of writing it’s not clear whether Apple intends to appeal. Reuters reports the iPhone maker declined to comment on that point, after expressing general disappointment with the outcome.

We’ve reached out to Apple and Qualcomm for comment.

In a statement provided to the news agency Apple said: “Qualcomm’s ongoing campaign of patent infringement claims is nothing more than an attempt to distract from the larger issues they face with investigations into their business practices in U.S. federal court, and around the world.”

Cupertino filed its billion dollar royalties suit against Qualcomm two years ago.

It has reason to be bullish going into the trial, given a preliminary ruling Thursday — in which a U.S. federal court judge found Qualcomm owes Apple nearly $1BN in patent royalty rebate payments (via CNBC). The trial itself kicks off next month.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission also filed antitrust charges against Qualcomm in 2017 — accusing the chipmaker of operating a monopoly and forcing exclusivity from Apple while charging “excessive” licensing fees for standards-essential patents.

That trial wrapped up in January and is pending a verdict from Judge Lucy Koh.

At the same time, Qualcomm has also been pursuing several international patent suits against Apple — also with some success.

In December Apple filed an appeal in China to overturn a preliminary ruling that could have blocked iPhone sales in the market.

While in Germany it did pull older iPhone models from sale in its own stores in January. But by February it was selling the two models again — albeit with Qualcomm chips, rather than Intel, inside.

After a conspicuous stretch of silence ending with a mysterious teaser tweet on Thursday, No Man’s Sky creator Sean Murray revealed that another major free update is on the way. The new content, which is the first since last year’s Visions update, will hit the massive space exploration game this summer.

The bundle of new content, called No Man’s Sky “Beyond,” will tie together three different updates, though Murray is only giving up the details of one so far. The one we know about is something that Murray is calling “No Man’s Sky Online” which “includes a radical new social and multiplayer experience which empowers players everywhere in the universe to meet and play together” and weaves together three standalone updates into “a vision for something much more impactful.”

The short preview video doesn’t reveal much, but it shows a ship we haven’t seen before in what looks like either a reimagined space station (that would be nice!) or some kind of brand new multiplayer hub area.

Murray emphasized that the multiplayer update wouldn’t add things from other major multiplayer games like microtransactions or subscriptions and that he has no intention of turning No Man’s Sky into an MMO. (Still, if a lot of people are playing online together in a massive world, isn’t it uh, kind of an MMO?) The blog post noted that the team would release more details on the other two big pieces of new content in the coming weeks.

“These changes are an answer to how we have seen people playing since the release of NEXT, and is something we’ve dreamed of for a long time,” Murray added.

After a very rough launch and its accompanying critical lambasting in 2016, No Man’s Sky’s team has consistently added huge free content updates to the game. That dedication to building out the world the development team initially promised has brought “millions” of new players into the fold and inspired a thriving online and in-game community.

That community will be happy to hear that according to his latest blog post, Murray doesn’t intend to walk away from the game any time soon.

As healthcare moves toward genetically tailored treatments, one of the biggest hurdles to truly personalized medicine is the lack of fast, low-cost genetic testing.

And few people are more familiar with the problems of today’s genetic diagnostics tools than Kalim Mir, the 52-year-old founder of XGenomes, who has spent his entire professional career studying the human genome.

“Ultimately genomics is going to be the foundation for healthcare,” says Mir. “For that we need to move toward a sequencing of populations.” And population-scale gene sequencing is something that current techniques are unable to achieve. 

“If we’re talking about population scale sequencing with millions of people we just don’t have the throughput,” Mir says.

That’s why he started XGenomes, which is presenting as part of the latest batch of Y Combinator companies next week.

A visiting scientist in Harvard Medical School’s Department of Genetics, Mir worked with the famed Harvard professor George Church on a new kind of gene sequencing technology that promised to conduct sequencing at higher speeds and far lower costs than anything that was on the market.

The costs of sequencing a genome have come down significantly in the 19 years since the Human Genome Project successfully completed its project for $1 billion.

These days, gene sequencing can take a couple of days and cost around $1,000, Mir says. But with XGenomes, Mir hopes to drive the cost of testing down even further.

“We developed a way where we’re sequencing directly on the DNA where we’re not manipulating it except for opening up the double helix,” says Mir. 

Running a startup focused on conducting gene sequencing at population scales is not where Mir thought he’d be when he was growing up in Yorkshire in Northern England. “When I was in school there, I was not into science or tech. I was interested in literature,” he recalls.

That changed when he read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and began thinking about the implications of genetic manipulation that the book presented.

Mir went on to study molecular biology at Queen Mary College and upon graduation worked in a biotech company in the U.S.

After returning to England to complete his doctorate in the mid-90s, Mir worked with the geneticist Edwin Southern on the foundational science that now form the core of testing technologies like 23andMe, Illumina, and Affymetrix.

Xgenomes technology works by unzipping strands of DNA and then sequencing the strands concurrently.

“I like to think of the genome as a book. The genome has chapters and the chapters could be the chromosomes,” says Mir. “Current technologies read it letter by letter. [But] we’re recognizing words.”

The company is able to accomplish this feat by using optical imaging technologies. Samples are treated with reagents that are then excited by lasers. XGenomes tech then “reads” the bits of DNA that are highlighted and identifies them.

Using this new tech, Mir thinks he can ultimately sequence a full genome in one to two hours and for as little as $100.

That would be a sea change in the way that testing is conducted and could bring about the rapid throughput of sequencing that Mir says is needed to make the vision of truly personalized medicine a reality.

Rising consumer interest in alternative proteins and meat replacements has brought hundreds of millions of dollars to companies trying to grow or replace beef or chicken, but few companies have turned their attention to developing seafood alternatives.

Now Shiok Meats is looking to change that. The company has raised pre-seed financing from investors like AIM Partners, Boom Capital, and Bryan Bettencourt and is now part of the recent Y Combinator cohort presenting next week.

Co-founders Sandiya Shriram and Ka Yi Ling are both stem cell scientists working at Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research who decided to leave their cushy government posts for life in the fast lane of entrepreneurship. 

The two have set themselves a goal of creating a shrimp substitute that would be similar to what’s typically found in the freezer section of most grocery stores — and a minced shrimp-replacement for use in dumplings.

There’s a huge market for seafood across the globe, but especially in Asia and Southeast Asia where crustaceans are a huge part of the diet. Chinese consumers alone account for the consumption of some 3.6 million tons of crustaceans, according to a 2015 study from the Food and Agriculture Department of the United Nations .

Shrimp cultivation as it stands is also a pretty dirty business. The industry is constantly being criticized for poor working conditions, unsanitary farms, and ancillary environmental damage. A blockbuster report from the Associated Press revealed instances of modern slavery in the Thai seafood industry.

“We chose to start with shrimp because it’s an easier animal to deal with compared to crabs and lobsters,” says Shriram. But the company will be expanding its offerings over time to those higher-end crustaceans.

Right now, the focus is squarely on shrimp. The company’s early tests have proved successful and the company estimates that it can make a kilogram of shrimp meat for somewhere around $5,000.

While that may sound expensive, it’s still much less than many of the lab-grown meat companies are pending to produce their replacement beef.

“We’re still relatively low compared to the other clean meat companies, which are still at hundreds of thousands of dollars,” says Ling.

The company is looking to bring its first product to market in the next three-to-five years and will initially target the Asia-Pacific consumer.

That means initially selling into their home market of Singapore and expanding into Hong Kong, India and eventually, Australia.

In the aftermath of the tragic mosque massacre that claimed 49 lives in Christchurch, New Zealand, tech companies scrambled to purge their platforms of promotional materials that the shooter left behind. As most of the internet is now unfortunately aware, the event was broadcast live on Facebook, making it one of the most horrific incidents of violence to spread through online communities in realtime.

As Twitter users cautioned others from sharing the extraordinarily graphic video, some Reddit users actively sought the video and knew exactly where to look. The infamous subreddit r/watchpeopledie was quarantined (making it unsearchable) in September 2018 but until today remained active for anyone to visit directly. The subreddit has a long history of sharing extremely graphic videos following tragic events and acts of violence, like the 2018 murder of two female tourists in Morocco.

After Thursday’s shooting, the subreddit became extremely active with users seeking out a copy of the video, which was shot in first-person perspective from a head-mounted camera.

After the flurry of interest, one the subreddit’s moderators locked the a thread about the video and posted this statement:

“Sorry guys but we’re locking the thread out of necessity here. The video stays up until someone censors us. This video is being scrubbed from major social media platforms but hopefully Reddit believes in letting you decide for yourself whether or not you want to see unfiltered reality. Regardless of what you believe, this is an objective look into a terrible incident like this.

Remember to love each other.”

Late Thursday, the subreddit’s members were actively sharing mirrored links to the Christchurch video, though they did so largely via direct messaging. After watching the footage, many users returned to the thread to express that the content was extremely disturbing and to caution even their most violence-hardened peers from seeking the video.

The subreddit remained active until some time late Friday morning Pacific Time, when Reddit banned the controversial community.

Reddit declined to provide details about its decision to ban the long-running community after this particular act of violence. “We are very clear in our site terms of service that posting content that incites or glorifies violence will get users and communities banned from Reddit,” a company spokesperson told TechCrunch. “Subreddits that fail to adhere to those site-wide rules will be banned.”

The subreddit’s many detractors consider the act of seeking and sharing such graphic depictions of death both inherently disturbing and disrespectful to victims and their families.

The subreddit is unquestionably grisly but remains surprisingly well-loved by some devotees, who insist that its graphic depictions of death are in fact life-affirming.

“Definitely saved me and helped me figure out I didn’t necessarily have tomorrow to get my shit in order,” one former member said in a thread discussing the since-banned community.

“Don’t think it is the kind of place to spend too much time in but, we all need reminders.”

Reddit banned the adjacent subreddits r/gore and r/wpdtalk (“watch people die talk”) on Friday as well.

Mital Makadia’s legal career began on the East Coast, with Big Law firms, but she moved into early-stage startup work with long-time Silicon Valley boutique Grellas Shah nearly a decade ago. She’ll work with companies on a range of usual startup issues, but she and the firm also focus on individual founder representation (when it comes to that).

As part of the interview below, we got into a conversation about contentious terms in term sheets — and she ended up writing a guest post for us about the biggest gotchas that she sees in Series A docs. Read up on her here, then go check out What To Watch For In A VC Term Sheet.

On the founder focus:

“We approach the practice with a view to protecting the founders. So we’re not looking to please the VCs. And if that means reviewing the transaction a little bit differently then what the investors are used to, that’s fine by us. That’s pretty much our philosophy.”

On the different perspective:

“For me, I have been through enough financing rounds to know what VCs tend to push for and what’s ‘market’ at a given point in time. But just because a provision might be one my client will likely have to give on, depending on negotiating leverage, I make sure my client understands how it impacts the company and its founders. I don’t simply gloss it over as “market.” And sometimes in those conversations, I suss out legitimate concerns from clients that we can creatively address. But that requires you to have a founder hat — not a VC hat – on when you are reviewing a term sheet.”

On second looks:

“Now, we have a lot of clients who come to us, whether they’re going through an M&A or whether they’re incorporating or whether they are going through a financing round term sheet who may have a lawyer representing the company, but who wants our advice in protecting the founders.”

Below, you’ll find founder recommendations, the full interview, and more details like their pricing and fee structures.

This article is part of our ongoing series covering the early-stage startup lawyers who founders love to work with, based on this survey and our own research. The survey is open indefinitely so please fill it out if you haven’t already. If you’re trying to navigate the early-stage legal landmines, be sure to check out our growing set of in-depth articles, like this checklist of what you need to get done on the corporate side in your first years as a company.

Full Interview:

Eric Eldon: I would love to hear about how you got into working with startups, given your very different focus earlier in your career.

Mital Makadia: Actually, I didn’t start my legal career working with startups. After law school, I did general corporate work at large firms in New York and DC. That feels like a lifetime ago.

I eventually moved out to the West Coast when I got married and came across Grellas Shah when I started looking for a job here. I can’t say my goal was necessarily to work with startups at that point. But I loved this practice from day one.

Of course, I immediately loved working with entrepreneurs. The brilliant new ideas, enthusiasm, optimism, work ethic, and ambition is infectious.

But a huge part of what I have loved about this practice is working with and learning from our firm’s founder, George Grellas. George has been working in Silicon Valley since 1983 and has really seen the ups and downs in the tech industry. Largely due to his reputation as a sharp yet practical startup attorney, our firm has built an enviable client base, which has been an ideal platform for me to launch my own career in the startup world.

When startup founders review a VC term sheet, they are mostly only interested in the pre-money valuation and the board composition. They assume the rest of the language is “standard” and they don’t want to ruffle any feathers with their new VC partner by “nickel and diming the details.” But these details do matter.

VCs are savvy and experienced negotiators, and all of the language included in the term sheet is there because it is important to them. In the vast majority of cases, every benefit and protection a VC gets in a term sheet comes with some sort of loss or sacrifice on the part of the founders – either in transferring some control away from the founders to the VC, shifting risk from the VC to the founders, or providing economic benefits to the VC and away from the founders. And you probably have more leverage to get better terms than you may think. We are in an era of record levels of capital flowing into the venture industry and more and more firms targeting seed stage companies. This competition makes it harder for VCs to dictate terms the way they used to.

But like any negotiating partner, a VC will likely be evaluating how savvy you appear to be in approaching a proposed term sheet when deciding how hard they are going to push on terms. If the VC sees you as naïve or green, they can easily take advantage of that in negotiating beneficial terms for themselves. So what really matters when you are negotiating a term sheet? As a founder, you want to come out of the financing with as much overall control of the company and flexibility in shaping the future of the company as possible and as much of a share in the future economic prosperity of the company as possible. With these principles in mind, let’s take a look at four specific issues in a term sheet that are often overlooked by founders and company counsel:

• What counts in pre-money capitalization
• The CEO common director
• Drag-along provisions
• Liquidation preference.

What counts in pre-money capitalization

Buttons or plates (like the one above) that automatically open doors can do a lot to make a building more accessible, but they aren’t always a perfect solution. For wheelchair users with limited upper body movement, the buttons can be tough to hit. Other times, the button is installed poorly — too high, too low, or just too far from the door to be useful, with the door closing too fast.

Portal Entryways is a startup trying to make these existing buttons more useful. They’ve built a device that piggybacks on top of existing access buttons, allowing these doors to be opened automatically (and, importantly, kept open) when a wheelchair user approaches.

Portal’s product has two components: a piece of Bluetooth Low Energy-enabled hardware that hooks into the existing door opening system, and a companion app running on the wheelchair user’s smartphone. The app searches for these Bluetooth Low Energy devices. When it finds one within range, it sends a command to open the door, keeping it open until the user has passed through the doorway. Portal-enabled doorways are marked with a sticker, helping users to know which ones will open as they approach.

Portal is a part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2019 class, but it began its life as a student project in an innovation program at BYU which tasked students with solving a real-world problem. Co-founder Sam Lew tells me they initially started out working on an entirely unrelated concept (shipping logistics). After they met someone on their school campus who had arranged a schedule of friends to open doors or press accessibility buttons that had been installed out of reach, they shifted focus.

It’s still early days, but they’re aiming to grow quickly. They’re approaching 250 devices installed, with a goal of having contracts signed for around 1,250 devices by the end of the month.

Right now, the company’s founders are doing the installations themselves. Different doors use different buttons and motors. Some mechanisms are connected by wire, while others are all wireless. Getting things all connected — at least right now — requires a bit of specialized knowledge. But co-founder Josh Horne tells me that it’s compatible with most of the popular existing mechanisms. “As long as it’s not ancient,” he says, “it should work.”

The company’s main focus right now is on locations with many publicly-accessible doors, like universities or malls. They’re still working out exactly what it’ll cost in the future, but they estimate around $100-200 per door per year.

Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke has revealed he was a member of a notorious decades-old hacking group.

The former congressman was a member of the Texas-based hacker group, the Cult of the Dead Cow, known for inspiring early hacktivism in the internet age and building exploits and hacks for Microsoft Windows. The group used the internet as a platform in the 1990s to protest real-world events, often to promote human rights and denouncing censorship. Among its many releases, the Cult of the Dead Cow was best known for its Back Orifice program, a remote access and administration tool.

O’Rourke went by the handle “Psychedelic Warlord,” as revealed by Reuters, which broke the story.

But as he climbed the political ranks, first elected to the El Paso city council in 2005, he reportedly grew concerned that his membership with the group would harm his political aspirations. The group’s members kept O’Rourke’s secret safe until the ex-hacker confirmed to Reuters his association with the group.

Reuters described him as the “most prominent ex-hacker in American political history,” who on Thursday announced his candidacy for president of the United States.

If he wins the White House, he would become the first hacker president.

O’Rourke’s history sheds light on how the candidate approaches and understands the technological issues that face the U.S. today. He’s one of the few presidential candidates to run for the White House with more than a modicum of tech knowledge — and the crucial awareness of the good and the problems tech can bring at a policy level.

“I understand the democratizing power of the internet, and how transformative it was for me personally, and how it leveraged the extraordinary intelligence of these people all over the country who were sharing ideas and techniques,” O’Rourke told Reuters.

The 46-year-old has yet to address supporters about the new revelations.