Author: azeeadmin

Drivezy — the startup out of India that wants to turn private car usage on its head through a car-sharing network where people lend their cars and two-wheeled vehicles but also have options to use vehicles from a fleet managed by Drivezy — said it is raising more money as it gears up for the next stage of its expansion, including a launch in the US in coming weeks.

The company is in the process of raising $100 million in equity funding, plus another $400 million in asset financing, with the latter to help continue building out the inventory that sits alongside the vehicles provided by its users. This would technically be a Series C and is being raised at a $400 million valuation, the company confirmed to me.

“Currently” is the key word: Ankur Sengupta, who heads up business development for Drivezy, said in an interview that the startup will leave the round open for about a year and continue raising it on a rolling basis, with the valuation varying accordingly. “The valuation we are working at now is $400 million, but we will keep accepting investments, at different valuations,” he said.

(Note: This is not an entirely new way of raising rounds, but in the last few years, it has become a lot more common to see it rather clear “Series” blocks. Fast-growing companies like Snap and more recently Grab in Southeast Asia have chosen this route to tap into readily available funding faster and closer to when it’s actually needed.)

The company is not disclosing any names right now except to note that it is likely to include a new, large investor from Japan, and that it also has commitments from investors in the US, Singapore and China. Previous backers have included the Yamaha Motor Company, Axan Partners and IT-Farm, as well as Y-Combinator — where Drivezy was a part of a 2016 cohort as JustRide, led by its five founders Amit Sahu, Ashwarya Pratap Singh, Vasant Verma, Abhishek Mahajan and Hemant Sah. It has also been through Google’s Launchpad accelerator, although it doesn’t look like Google is investing (yet).

Drivezy last raised money as recently as three months ago, a $20 million Series B, when it also raised $100 million in asset financing. Alongside users’ own cars and the fleet it manages, Drivezy also works with in partnership with dealerships and others to provide vehicles for its inventory.

Between then and now, the company has seen a lot of growth.

The company gets more than 53,000 bookings for cars each month, versus 37,000/month just three months ago. Two-wheeled vehicles — primarily motorcycles — add nearly 30,000 more. While cars are typically booked for two-three days, two-wheeler bookings are weekly or monthly bookings.

The inventory has also gone up. Currently, there are 7,500 two-wheelers on the platform, with another 7,500 coming by the end this month; and 3,500 cars. (This is up from 5,000 motorbikes and scooters and 3,000 cars three months ago.) Currently there are 30 dealerships and more than 25 banks and other financial companies in Drivezy’s network.

Drivezy’s growth is coming at what seems to be a key inflection point for the transportation industry.

Some believe the the days of vehicle ownership in mature markets like the US are numbered, with several developments helping that trend along: the rise of over-expensive self-driving cars that many will not be able to afford; the proliferation of affordable Uber-style services; and the emergence of startups like Getaround (which will be a direct competitor to Drivezy when it comes to the US) and Fair to make it easy and cheap to procure a car ride without buying a car or using old-school car rental services.

But in developing markets like India, vehicle ownership is already a relative rarity, even if the desire to use a car is not: currently only seven percent of Indians own a car and sixteen percent own two-wheelers.

“That’s meant that the auto industry has been slow to grow here,” Sengupta said. (That, plus patchy public transport in many urban areas, has also meant a lot of growth, incidentally, for the likes of Ola.)

Drivezy’s response has been to create a completely new supply chain for private car and two-wheeled vehicle usage. Customers include people who are not able to purchase a car, those who do have cars but would appreciate some income to help pay off the loans they took to get them, plus car companies and dealerships who are looking for new avenues and business models to shift more vehicles.

Currently, the P2P side of the business is most popular on the car side of the business, where 70 percent of the inventory has been listed by private owners, while only 35 percent of the two-wheelers come from private owners (all the P2P vehicles get a “fitness check”. Most of the rest are listed by asset financing companies through SPVs on a revenue sharing basis, with less than two percent on Drivezy’s own books. These, the Sengupta said, have been purchased to meet licensing obligations in India.

While Drivezy has definitely benefitted from useful market conditions — low vehicle ownership and a rapidly growing, tech-savvy middle class with disposable income and more reasons for travelling — now the plan will be to take its model to other markets, including both those that have similar conditions to India’s, as well as those that are more developed (and hence, more competitive).

That will include the US, where the company is planning on setting up its first pilots in April to test demand in different markets and market segments, Sengupta said. While it’s a very different market — and certainly more competitive when you consider the likes of Getaround, Turo, Fair and others — Drivezy (its founders having spent time there going through Y Combinator and Google’s accelerator) thinks that there is a gap in the area of microlending and the fact that even with a lot of options already, there can be more.

“People have an aspirational needs, they want better cars, BMWs and Audis for example, and there are no companies tackling the issue of bringing the cost of renting these models down,” Sengupta said. Considering that there is also a burgeoning market for scooters in the country, that could also be an area where Drivezy will get involved.

The pilot/expansion in the US will come alongside building and hiring for an innovations lab in the country, a pattern that Drivezy will also be following when it expands in Asia as well. Other countries where it plans to go this year, he said, include Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore.

It’s not often that you hear about startups out of India expanding to the US, so that in itself (in my opinion) is a great story about how the gravitational pull of the tech world has indeed shifted away from Silicon Valley. Ultimately, the international expansion to North America and other markets will serve a dual purpose for Drivezy. Not only will it help the company grow business, but it’s putting the company on the map, and that too will help attract more funding attention.

Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, Cortana and Bixby–almost all virtual assistants have something in common. Their default voices are women’s, though the role that plays in reinforcing gender stereotypes has been long documented, even inspiring the dystopian romance “Her.” Virtue, the creative agency owned by publisher Vice, wants to challenge the trend with a genderless voice called Q.

The project, done in collaboration with Copenhagen Pride, Equal AI, Koalition Interactive and thirtysoundsgood, wants technology companies to think outside the binary.

“Technology companies are continuing to gender their voice technology to fit scenarios in which they believe consumers will feel most comfortable adopting and using it,” says Q’s website. “A male voice is used in more authoritative roles, such as banking and insurance apps, and a female voice in more service-oriented roles, such as Alexa and Siri.”

To develop Q, Virtue worked with Anna Jørgensen, a linguist and researcher at the University of Copenhagen. They recorded the voices of five non-binary people, then used software to modulate the recordings to between 145-175 Hz, the range defined by researchers as gender neutral. The recordings were further refined after surveying 4,600 people and asking them to define the voices on a scale from 1 (male) to 5 (female).

Virtue is encouraging people to share Q with Apple, Amazon and Microsoft, noting that even when different options are given for voice assistants, they are still usually categorized as male or female. As the project’s mission statement puts it, “as society continues to break down the gender binary, recognizing those who neither identify as male nor female, the technology we create should follow.”

CXA Group, a Singapore-based startup that helps make insurance more accessible and affordable, has raised $25 million for expansion in Asia and later into Europe and North America.

The startup takes a unique route to insurance. Rather than going to consumers directly, it taps corporations to offer their employees health flexible options. That’s to say that instead of rigid plans that force employees to use a certain gym or particular healthcare, a collection over 1,000 programs and options can be tailored to let employees pick what’s relevant or appealing to them. The ultimate goal is to bring value to employees to keep them healthier and lower the overall premiums for their employers.

“Our purpose is to empower personalized choices for better living for employees,” CXA founder and CEO Rosaline Koo told TechCrunch in an interview. “We use data and tech to recommend better choices.”

The company is primarily focused on China, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia where it claims to works with 600 enterprises including Fortune 500 firms. The company has over 200 staff, and it has acquired two traditional insurance brokerages in China to help grow its footprint, gain requisite licenses and its logistics in areas such as health checkups.

We last wrote about CXA in 2017 when it raised a $25 million Series B, and this new Series C round takes it to $58 million from investors to date. Existing backers include B Capital, the BCG-backed fund from Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, EDBI — the investment arm of the Singapore Economic Development Board — and early Go-Jek backer Openspace Ventures, and they are joined by a glut of big-name backers in this round.

Those new investors include a lot of corporates. There’s HSBC, Singtel Innov8 (of Singaporean telco Singtel), Telkom Indonesia MDI Ventures (of Indonesia telco Telkom), Sumitomo Corporation Equity Asia (Japanese trading firm) Muang Thai Fuchsia Ventures (Thailand-based insurance firm), Humanica (Thailand-based HR firm) and PE firm Heritas Venture Fund.

“There are additional insurance companies and strategic partners that we aren’t listing,” said Koo.

Rosaline Koo is founder and CEO of CXA Group

That’s a very deliberate selection of large corporates which is part of a new strategy to widen CXA audience.

The company had initially gone after massive firms — it claims to reach a collective 400,000 employees — but now the goal is to reach SMEs and non-Fortune 500 enterprises. To do that, it is using the reach and connections of larger service companies to reach their customers.

“We believe that banks and telcos can cross-sell insurance and banking services,” said Koo, who grew up in LA and counts benefits broker Mercer on her resume. “With demographic and work life event data, plus health data, we’re able to target the right banking and insurance services.

“We can help move them away from spamming,” she added. “Because we will have the right data to really target the right offering to the right person at the right time. No firm wants an agent sitting in their canteen bothering their staff, now it’s all digital and we’re moving insurance and banking into a new paradigm.”

The ultimate goal is to combat a health problem that Koo believes is only getting worse in the Asia Pacific region.

“Chronic disease comes here 10 years before anywhere else,” she said, citing an Emory research paper which concluded that chronic diseases in Asia are “rising at a rate that exceeds global increases.”

“There’s such a crying need for solutions, but companies can’t force the brokers to lower costs as employees are getting sick… double-digit increases are normal, but we think this approach can help drop them. We want to start changing the cost of healthcare in Asia, where it is an epidemic, using data and personalization at scale in a way to help the community,” Koo added.

Talking to Koo makes it very clear that she is focused on growing CXA’s reach in Asia this year, but further down the line, there are ambitions to expand to other parts of the world. Europe and North America, she said, may come in 2020.

On the heels of its groundbreaking foray into interactive storytelling with the choose-your-own-adventure style “Black Mirror” episode, Bandersnatch, Netflix will look to produce much more interactive entertainment, according to vice president of content, Todd Yellin.

Speaking at the FICCI-Frames conference for Indian media and entertainment in Mumbai, Yellin said in a keynote that audiences could expect many more interactive stories to come from the streaming media service, according to a report in Variety.

“We realized, wow, interactive storytelling is something we want to bet more on,” Yellin reportedly said. “We’re doubling down on that. So expect over the next year or two to see more interactive storytelling.”

One of the things Yellin floated was the idea of a romantic comedy where the audience would choose “will-they or won’t-they”? It sets up the potential for a world where viewers could determine that Ross and Rachel never go on a break.

The initiative would likely require a lot of heavy lifting from writers, editors and actors. Black Mirror took two years to get from concept to screen and involved a lot of heavy lifting from Netflix .

In Bandersnatch, Netflix collaborated with the writers and directors of Black Mirror to develop the technology to support streaming a film that relied on the “branching narrative” storytelling structure that required viewers to pick between choices to advance the story.

Filmed over a seven-week shoot, the filmmaking process took 250 distinct video segments that were stitched together to cover all possible endings, according to a lengthy description of the making of the episode in The Hollywood Reporter.

Bandersnatch doesn’t have an official run time, and viewers can spend anywhere from an hour and a half to two and a half hours to make it until the credits roll.

Netflix’s investment included new technology that the company calls “state tracking” which logs the choices viewers make as they watch the Bandersnatch episode. The company also engineered a new technology that would load the episode without any lags. And Netflix created a new internal writing tool called Branch Manager so that Brooker could write his script and deliver it directly to the company, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

After all of that internal investment, it’s little wonder that Netflix is planning to roll the new narrative framework out in other storylines, or across different titles.

Netflix had previously applied the choose-your-own-adventure style narratives to children’s animated programming, but since the success of Bandersnatch, that is definitely going to be expanding.

“We do want to take a number of gos at this and see what works for different audiences,” Netflix’s director of product innovation, Carla Engelbrecht Fisher told The Hollywood Reporter. “That’s what we’re engaged in now: What are the other kinds of stories that we can tell and that folks are excited to tell? And continuing to unearth this iceberg of opportunity and see what’s there.”

Microsoft’s Seeing AI is an app that lets blind and limited-vision folks convert visual data into audio feedback, and it just got a useful new feature. Users can now use touch to explore the objects and people in photos.

It’s powered by machine learning, of course, specifically object and scene recognition. All you need to do is take a photo or open one up in the viewer and tap anywhere on it.

“This new feature enables users to tap their finger to an image on a touch-screen to hear a description of objects within an image and the spatial relationship between them,” wrote Seeing AI lead Saqib Shaikh in a blog post. “The app can even describe the physical appearance of people and predict their mood.”

Since there’s facial recognition built in as well, you could very well take a picture of your friends and hear who’s doing what and where, and whether there’s a dog in the picture (important) and so on. This was possible on a image-wide scale already, as you can see in this image:

But the app now lets users tap around to find where objects are — obviously important to understanding the picture or recognizing it from before. Other details that may not have made it into the overall description may also appear on closer inspection, such as flowers in the foreground or a movie poster in the background.

In addition to this, the app now natively supports the iPad, which is certainly going to be nice for the many people who use Apple’s tablets as their primary interface for media and interactions. Lastly there are a few improvements to the interface so users can order things in the app to their preference.

Seeing AI is free — you can download it for iOS devices here.

Bill McGlashan, who built his career as top investor at the private equity firm TPG, has been put on “indefinite administrative leave, effective immediately,” says the firm after McGlashan was caught up in what the Justice Department said today is the largest college admissions scandal it has ever prosecuted.

McGlashan is among 49 others involved in a bribery ring involving parents, admissions counselors, and athletic coaches at Yale, Wake Forest, and the University of Southern California (USC), among other institutions as they shelled out big bucks to secure spots for their children at the schools.

“As a result of the charges of personal misconduct” against McGlashan, said the firm just now, Jim Coulter, Co-CEO of TPG, will be “interim managing partner” of the parts of TPG that McGlashan oversees, including TPG Growth and The Rise Fund.

“Mr. Coulter will, in partnership with the organization’s executive team, lead all investment work for both going forward,” according to a statement sent us just now by the firm.

McGlashan, who joined the private equity giant TPG in 2003, first to rethink and lead its earlier-stage strategy and, in more recent years, to lead its social impact strategy under the Rise Fund brand, is one of 33 parents being accused of trying to buy their kids’ admission. Others include actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin.

For McGlashan especially, whose job, is ostensibly to make a measurable, beneficial social or environmental impact, the charges are particularly damning, highlighting as they do how wealthy families sometimes use their financial muscle in socially unjust ways — in this case, paying to secure spots at colleges and depriving deserving students of admission in the process.

Indeed, TPG seemingly had little choice but separating from McGlashan, at least for now. In making its case against McGlashan and the others, the Justice Department has laid bare each party’s wrongdoings with painstaking specificity. For his part, McGlashan has been charged with both participating in a college entrance exam cheating scheme and recruitment scheme, including by trying to bribe the senior athletic director at USC,  and striking a deal with an individual who later became a cooperating witness (referred to below as CW-1).

Among this person’s promises: that he would, in exchange for money, correct McGlashan’s son’s ACT exam questions once his test was completed at a special facility in Tampa, Florida, instead of at the teenager’s Marin County school in Northern California.

He also received McGlashan’s sign-off to doctor a photo that would make McGlashan’s son look like a football recruit and, as McGlashan was told, thus more desirable to the specialty program in arts, technology and business at USC that his son hoped to attend.

This wasn’t all theoretical. According to the Justice Department, after McGlashan’s son took the test and the proctor corrected his answers to produce a score of 34 out of a possible 36, it was provides as part of his application to Northeastern University in Boston.

Worse for McGlashan, according to the Justice Department’s complaint, McGlashan discussed repeating the ACT cheating scheme for his two younger children and parts of these conversations were recorded via a court-authorized wiretap. Here’s just one outtake of many:

McGLASHAN: One other, just family question, with [my younger son] now entering his sophomore year, and sort of, the process is beginning, we have him on time and a half. I told [my spouse] yesterday, and [my daughter] by the way, who is the, who I think is the one who needs the most time, has no extra time currently. And [my spouse] is talking to the doctor that assessed them, to get her to ask, to request time for [my daughter]. I told her she should be requesting double time for all of them.

CW-1: 100% multiple days. No matter what, multiple days. So, even if it’s 50%, time and a half, multiple days.

McGLASHAN: So is that a different ask to get multiple days versus–

CW-1: Well the 100%.

McGLASHAN: And if they get time and a half, can they use your facility to take the test?

CW-1: No, not unless it’s multiple days.

McGLASHAN: So as long as it’s multiple days, we’re in.

CW-1: Correct, correct. Like it could be–

McGLASHAN: And they, that’s a separate filing?

CW-1: Overall it’s the same. Well, so, you’re saying [your younger son’s] got a, time and a half?

McGLASHAN: Yeah.

CW-1: So, what has to happen, is there has to be an appeal to get the multiple days. The doc’s got to come up with stuff, discrepancies, to show why he needs multiple days. That he can’t sit six and a half hours taking one test.

McGLASHAN: Perfect.

CW-1: And so if he gets multiple days, then I can control the center.

McGLASHAN: Thank you.

During the call, McGlashan tries to ensure that his son won’t know that his scores have been tampered with, or the degree to which McGlashan has inserted himself into the process.

McGLASHAN: Now does he, here’s the only question, does he know? Is there a way to do it in a way that he doesn’t know that happened?

CW-1: Oh yeah. Oh he–

McGLASHAN: Great.

CW-1: What he would know is, that I’m going to take his stuff, and I’m going to get him some help, okay?

McGLASHAN: So that, that he would have no issue with. You lobbying for him. You helping use your network. No issue.

CW-1: That letter, that letter comes to you.

McGLASHAN: Yup.

CW-1: So, my families want to know this is done.

McGLASHAN: Yup.

Somewhat unbelievably, the cooperating witness goes on to explain that to take advantage of a “side door” that could further strengthen the odds that McGlashan’s son will be accepted at USC, he will need to create a fake athletic profile for McGlashan’s son, which he says he has done “a million times” for other families. Remarkably, after McGlashan tells him that his family has images of the teenager playing lacrosse and is told by the cooperating witness that USC doesn’t have a lacrosse team, McGlashan is told that a picture of his son “doing something” would “be fine.”

CW-1: I have to do a profile for him in a sport, which is fine, I’ll create it. You know, I just need him– I’ll pick a sport and we’ll do a picture of him, or he can, we’ll put his face on the picture whatever. Just so that he plays whatever. I’ve already done that a million times. So–

McGLASHAN: Well, we have images of him in lacrosse. I don’t know if that matters.

CW-1: They don’t have a lacrosse team. But as long as I can see him doing something, that would be fine.

McGLASHAN: Yeah.

CW-1: And then what happens is, then what you have to do, because this would be a specialty program, is that you have to then talk to the department and say, “Hey listen, can you take him in the department? We’ve gotten him accepted into the university.”

McGLASHAN: Yup. Well I can handle, I think I, I mean, I’ll know after this lunch. I think I can handle them at Iovine and Young.

CW-1: Right.

McGLASHAN: Yeah. Which is where he really wants to go.

CW-1: Right. So you’re saying, “Hey listen, I think I can get him into this school.”

McGLASHAN: Yup.

CW-1: Now, now, can you, ’cause they’re going to come to you and say, this is a selective program, would you want this kid? And he’s quote an “athlete” who’s coming to you. In fact, would you take him? And the department says yes.

McGLASHAN: Now, would he see that, ’cause that, he’s going to be fairly well seen at the school, because half the board knows me, and I’m going to be sort of 64 calling in and asking people to help, you know [Board Member 1] and [Board Member 2], and all those guys?

CW-1: But, so– what I would suggest is, have you called them? Any of them yet?

McGLASHAN: No.

CW-1: Good, don’t.

McGLASHAN: Okay.

CW-1: Because you don’t need, because when this, the way this, the quieter it, the quieter this is, the better it is, so people don’t say, “Well, okay, this guy, why are all these people calling us? The kid’s already been accepted. He’s coming here as an athlete. He’s already in.” What you just want is, the person you’re meeting with on Friday to say, you know, what we want [is] this kid.

McGLASHAN: So he doesn’t have to know how he got in. Is that the case?

CW-1: What I would say to him, if you want to have that discussion now with [your son] there, that we have friends in athletics, they are going to help us, because [he] is an athlete, and they’re going to help us. From the–

McGLASHAN: But I can’t say that in front of [my son], ’cause he knows he’s not.

CW-1: No, no, right.

McGLASHAN: Yeah.

CW-1: And just say, you know what, we’re going to get, we’re going to get some, we’re going to get people to help us.

McGLASHAN: Why wouldn’t, why wouldn’t I say, “Look, leave it to me to worry about getting him in, ’cause I have a lot of friends involved in the school.”

CW-1: Perfect, perfect. 

Ultimately, McGlashan shelled out more than $250,000 in the scheme, money that may wind up costing McGlashan much more.

Vungle founder Zain Jaffer filed a lawsuit today accusing the mobile advertising company of wrongfully terminating him from the role of CEO.

The lawsuit cites a section of the California labor code that it says “expressly and specifically prohibits discrimination and retaliation by employers based upon an arrest or detention that did not result in conviction.”

Jaffer was arrested in October 2017 in an incident involving his young son — the charges included performing a lewd act on a child and assault with a deadly weapon. Last year, the charges were dropped, with the San Mateo District Attorney’s Office saying it did “not believe that there was any sexual conduct by Mr. Jaffer that evening,” while “the injuries were the result of Mr. Jaffer being in a state of unconsciousness caused by prescription medication.”

Afterwards, Jaffer began looking into either selling his Vungle shares or pursuing a leadership change at the company, something he alludes to in his statement on the suit:

Once I was absolved of any wrongdoing, I was looking forward to a friendly relationship with the Company. Instead, Vungle unfairly and unlawfully sought to destroy my career, blocked my efforts to sell my own shares or transfer shares to family members, and tried to prevent me from purchasing shares in the Company.

When reached by TechCrunch, a Vungle spokesperson declined to comment on the lawsuit.

The suit does not specify the amount that Jaffer is seeking, but his attorney Joann Rezzo reportedly told Bloomberg that he has suffered at least $100 million worth of harm. When asked about damages, Jaffer’s spokesperson sent us the following statement from Rezzo:

The amount to be awarded would be entirely within the discretion of the jury. My firm won almost $20M for an employee who asserted similar claims against Allstate Insurance Company. Mr. Jaffer’s potential recovery is much, much higher.

The suit she’s referring to involved a former Allstate employee who was awarded $18.6 million after he was fired, following an arrest for domestic violence and possession of marijuana paraphernalia. All the charges were eventually dismissed.

You can read Jaffer’s full lawsuit below.

Jaffer v. Vungle Conformed … by on Scribd

In the wake of FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb’s abrupt resignation, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex M. Azar III announced that Dr. Ned Sharpless will serve as interim commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.

Since October 2017, Dr. Sharpless served as Director of the National Cancer Institute and, before that, worked as a researcher and hematologist-oncologist at the University of North Carolina. He is also a cofounder of G1 Therapeutics, a biotech firm focused on cancer treatment therapies that went public in May of 2017.

Dr. Sharpless is a temporary appointment, with Secretary Azar saying that the search is on for a permanent candidate for the position, according to the NYT.

The change comes at a tumultuous time for the e-cigarette industry in particular, which has been a focal point for Commissioner Gottlieb. As vaping continues to grow in popularity among teens, Gottlieb has enforced new rules for the industry and promised to keep a close watch on youth use of these products and the companies that sell them.

Gottlieb praised the appointment:

Whether or not an acting commissioner will be able to push forward initiatives related to the tobacco industry, such as limiting the nicotine in combustible cigarettes and enforcing stricter regulation on e-cigs, is unclear. However, Altria shares fell on the news.

In America, democracy and capitalism go hand in hand. Watching our democracy function (or, more accurately, malfunction) over the past few years, I have come to the conclusion that there is a slow-moving crisis developing for our democracy — and our economy. For entrepreneurs to have a fighting chance and for existing companies to prosper, our legislators must strive to construct a truly competitive economic system that encourages innovation and works for everyone, not just those with the most political influence or campaign donations.

What might our country look like if we were to surrender policy-making to the anti-democratic forces of campaign donation-obsessed politicians, rent-seeking special interests and behemoth oligopolistic-minded corporations? Well, it would look a lot like what we have now:

• There has been zero meaningful action to combat catastrophic global climate change, which, if left unaddressed, will cost our economy and businesses hundreds of billions of dollars.
• The U.S. pays far more than other countries for the exact same medications, which means the American people pay through the nose to subsidize the rest of the world.
• Our legislators have shown no interest in regulating the biggest banks, which have only consolidated control since the 2008 Recession that their market abuses directly caused, ultimately wiping out nearly 9,000,000 jobs.
• Because of lenient anti-trust enforcement, smaller retailers are being forced to close their doors everywhere we look and entrepreneurship is experiencing its slowest rate of growth since 2004.
• The Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico occurred because of lax environmental protection oversight of offshore drilling.

The lack of courage demonstrated by our elected politicians to rein in corporate abuses and protect our markets is our giant white flag of surrender, and its effects can be found in nearly every sector of our economy. Our prosperity has been seized by the anti-competitive and anti-innovation forces of a dysfunctional political system dominated by monied special interests. And it’s happening right out in the open for all of us to see. Fret not, however, because it is entirely within our power to squash the bugs that have infested our democracy.

Our elected leaders seem to have hoisted a giant white flag of surrender — either unable or unwilling to rein in corporate abuses and protect our markets. The effects of these anti-competitive and anti- innovation forces of our dysfunctional political system can be found in nearly every sector of our economy. Monied special interests are draining our prosperity, and it’s happening right out in the open for all of us to see.

As business leaders and entrepreneurs, we must demand our politicians step up and take action to protect economic competitiveness and provide guard rails for expansion of our capital markets. For American citizens to have confidence that legislators are working toward these dual goals of protection and expansion, it is absolutely crucial that we first do everything possible to make our democratic elections as competitive and fair as possible.

This notion of prodigious change to our electoral system is not new. In fact, more than two-thirds of the amendments to the U.S. Constitution since the Bill of Rights were crafted specifically to address voting, representation and election shortcomings in our democracy. Fortunately, we don’t have to wait for a constitutional amendment to resolve our problems. There are actionable things we can do right now to expand democratic participation and restore trust in our elections.

For starters, I, along with many other business leaders across America, am supporting the Secure Elections Act, a bipartisan bill introduced in the U.S. Senate last year by Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and James Lankford (R-OK). This bill requires paper records and rigorous audits to reduce the risk of vote hacking, improves information sharing between federal and state election officials and establishes cybersecurity guidelines to protect our elections.

Further, there are simple, proven changes that make voting accessible to more citizens:

• Enable automatic (opt-out) voter registration upon turning 18
• Allow no-fault absentee vote by mail for all voters
• Expand early voting dates and locations
• Restore voting rights for people who have served their time for non-violent offenses

Policies that expand voting rights benefit all members of a democracy, regardless their political affiliation. State by state, progress is already being made. In 2018, by an overwhelming margin, voters in Florida restored voting rights to non-violent ex-felons. On the same day, balloters in Nevada and Michigan approved initiatives to automatically register voters when they turn 18, bringing the total to 15 states where this is the law. It’s time to put partisan politics aside and do this in all 50 states.

Finally, elections can be made more democratic and competitive:

• End gerrymandering of districts
• Adopt open primaries
• Enact ranked-choice voting

In 2018, anti-gerrymandering efforts passed at the ballot box in Michigan, Missouri, Utah, Ohio and Colorado. In Pennsylvania, the 21st Century Election Reform Modernization proposal, introduced by Governor Tom Wolf (D), would enact many of these voter-friendly upgrades. The Fair Representation Act, co-sponsored by Ro Khanna (D-CA) here in Silicon Valley, Don Beyer (D-VA) and Jamie Raskin (D-MD), proposes an innovative approach to ensuring we all have a voice in our democracy, no matter where we live.

House Democrats are making a statement with HR1, the first bill of the 116th Congress, which addresses money in politics, ethics and voting rights. It’s a great step in the right direction, but for this to be successful, Republicans must join Democrats to create bipartisan consensus.

As business leaders, our political ideologies are as diverse as our industries. But one thing we should all be able to recognize is that for America to thrive and innovate in an increasingly competitive global economy, we need strong, uncorrupted, fairly regulated markets. To reach that ideal, we must first protect and strengthen the democratic foundations of our elections. I invite every business leader across the nation to join me in fighting for a more democratic democracy for all Americans by supporting legislation and lawmakers working diligently toward that goal.

Uber thought it would have 75,000 autonomous vehicles on the roads this year and be operating driverless taxi services in 13 cities by 2022, according to court documents unsealed last week. To reach those ambitious goals, the ride-sharing company, which hopes to go public later this year, was spending $20 million a month on developing self-driving technologies. 

The figures, dating back to 2016, paint a picture of a company desperate to meet over-ambitious autonomy targets and one that is willing to spend freely, even recklessly, to get there. As Uber prepares for its IPO later this year, the new details could prove an embarrassing reminder that the company is still trailing in its efforts to develop technology that founder Travis Kalanick called “existential” to Uber’s future.

The report was written for Uber as part of last year’s patent and trade secret theft lawsuit with rival Waymo, which accused engineer Anthony Levandowski of taking technical secrets with him when he left Google to found self-driving truck startup Otto. Uber acquired Otto in 2016. Uber hired Walter Bratic, the author of the report, as an expert witness to question Waymo’s valuation of the economic damages it had suffered – a whopping $1.85 billion. Bratic’s report capped the cost to independently develop Waymo’s purported trade secrets at $605,000.

Waymo eventually settled for 0.34 percent of Uber’s equity, which could be worth around $300 million after an IPO if a recent $90 billion valuation of the company is accurate.  

Bratic’s report provides details of internal analyses and reports codenamed Project Rubicon that Uber carried out during 2016. A presentation in January that year projected that driverless cars could become profitable for Uber in 2018, while a May report said Uber might have 13,000 self-driving taxis by 2019. Just four months later, that estimate had jumped to 75,000 vehicles.

The current head of Uber’s self-driving technologies, Eric Meyhofer, testified that Uber’s original estimates of having tens of thousands of AVs in a dozen cities by 2022 were “highly speculative” “assumptions and estimates.” Although Meyhofer declined to provide any other numbers, he did say, “They probably ran a lot of scenarios beyond 13 cities. Maybe they assumed two in another scenario, or one, or three hundred. It’s a set of knobs you turn to try to understand parameters that you need to try to meet.”

One specific goal, set by John Bares, the engineer then in charge of Uber’s autonomous vehicles, was for Uber to be able to forgo human safety drivers by 2020. The company’s engineers seemed certain that acquiring Otto and Levandowski would supercharge its progress.

“At one point, John Bares and [ex-Google engineer] Brian McClendon estimated that it would help accelerate [AV development] by 12 to 24 months,” testified one Uber corporate development manager.

In a newly unsealed note from a January 2016 meeting with Levandowski, Bares thought that simply talking with Levandowski might be worth tens of millions of dollars: “He would bring (filtered) advice about what to try and not try…that is a day with him and our team could save us months towards 2020 (month = $20 million run rate).”

If Uber had maintained a $20 million monthly run rate since beginning its AV program in early 2015, and allowing $200 million for its Otto purchase, TechCrunch has calculated that Uber could have spent over $900 million on automated vehicle research. In contrast, Waymo spent $1.1 billion on its own self-driving cars from 2009 to the end of 2015, and could be spending as much as $1 billion a year today.

But the honeymoon period for Otto and Uber was brief. In a deposition for the lawsuit, Bares said that his expectation that the Otto acquisition would advance Uber’s self-driving car efforts lasted for “a three- to four-week period, starting in early January 2016.” By August 2016, he testified, it was actually proving a setback: “We never got any lasers out of it. It had… a huge managerial disruption on our staff… as a result of Anthony’s effort to manage and lead.”

The Bratic report details the number of people Uber had working on automated vehicles. It says the headcount of Uber’s hardware department in June 2017 was 155 people, with 405 people working on software. A separate Uber filing from two months earlier stated that it had more than twice as many people, 1,500, working in its AV unit, although this number may have included Uber’s test operation team and vehicle operators.  

The newly unsealed document also reveals that Waymo claimed Uber’s alleged misappropriation of its trade secrets had accelerated the commercialization of Uber’s autonomous technology by over three years and 10 months.

“This would mean that, applying [Uber’s] assumption of commercialization in 13 cities by 2022, Uber should be ready to commercialize AV technology in 13 cities by 2018,” wrote Bratic. Clearly, this did not happen. In fact, Uber only recently resumed testing a handful of AVs on public roads, following a fatal crash in Tempe, Arizona, last March.

Uber reported a net loss of $865 million in the last quarter of 2018, and has never made a profit.