Author: azeeadmin

In tech circles, it would be easy to assume that the world of high-impact charitable giving is a rich man’s game where deals are inked at exclusive black tie galas over fancy hors d’oeuvre. Both Mark Zuckerberg and Marc Benioff have donated to SF hospitals that now bear their names. Gordon Moore has given away $5B – including $600M to Caltech – which was the largest donation to a university at the time. And of course, Bill Gates has already donated $27B to every cause imaginable (and co-founded The Giving Pledge, a consortium of billionaires pledging to donate most of their net worth to charity by the end of their lifetime.)

For Bill, that means he has about $90B left to give.

For the average working American, this world of concierge giving is out of reach, both in check size, and the army of consultants, lawyers and PR strategists that come with it. It seems that in order to do good, you must first do well. Very well.

Bright Funds is looking to change that. Founded in 2012, this SF-based startup is looking to democratize concierge giving to every individual so they “can give with the same effectiveness as Bill and Melinda Gates.” They are doing to philanthropy what Vanguard and Wealthfront have done for asset management for retail investors.

In particular, they are looking to unlock dollars from the underutilized corporate benefit of matching funds for donations, which according to Bright Funds is offered by over 60% of medium to large enterprises, but only used by 13% of employees at these companies. The need for such a service is clear — these programs are cumbersome, transactional, and often offline. Make a donation, submit a receipt, and wait for it to churn through the bureaucratic machine of accounting and finance before matching funds show up weeks later.

Bright Funds is looking to make your company’s matching funds benefit as accessible and important to you as your free lunches or massages. Plus, Bright Funds charges companies per seat, along with a transaction fee to cover the cost of payment processing, sparing employees any expense.

It’s a model that is working. According to Bright Fund’s CEO Ty Walrod, Bright Funds customers see on average a 40% year-over-year increase in funds donated through the platform. More importantly, Bright Funds not only transforms an employee’s relationship to personal philanthropy, but also to the company they work for.

Grassroots Giving

This model of bottoms-up giving is a welcome change from the big foundation model which has recently been rocked by scandal. The Silicon Valley Community Foundation was the go-to foundation for The Who’s Who of Silicon Valley elite. It rode the latest tech boom to become the largest community foundation in eleven short years with generous stock donations from donors like Mark Zuckerberg ($1.8 billion), GoPro’s Nicholas Woodman ($500 million), and WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum ($566 million). Today, at $13.5 billion, it surpasses the 80+ year old Ford Foundation in endowment size.

However, earlier this year, their star fundraiser Mari Ellen Loijens (credited with raising $8.3B of the $13.5B) was accused of repeatedly bullying and sexually harassing coworkers, allegations that the Foundation had “known about for years” but failed to act upon. In 2017, a similar case occurred when USC’s star fundraiser David Carrera  stepped down on charges of sexual harassment after leading the university’s historic $6 billion fundraising campaign.

While large foundations and endowments do important work, their structure relies too much on whale hunting for big checks, giving an inordinate amount of power to the hands of a small group of talented fund raisers.

This stands in contrast to Bright Funds’ ethos — to lead a grassroots movement in empowering individual employees to make their dollar of giving count.

Rebuilding charitable giving for the platform age

Bright Funds is the latest iteration of a lineup of workplace giving platforms. MicroEdge and Cybergrants paved the way in the 80s and 90s by digitizing the giving experience, but was mainly on-premise, and lacked a focus on user experience. Benevity and YourCause arrived in 2007 to bring workplace giving to the cloud, but they were still not turnkey solutions that could be easily implemented.

Bright Funds started as a consumer platform, and has retained that heritage in its approach to product design, aiming to reduce friction for both employee and company adoption. This is why many of their first customers were midsized tech startups with limited resources and looking for a turnkey solution, including Eventbrite, Box, Github, and Contently . They are now finding their way upmarket into larger, more established enterprises like Cisco, VMWare, Campbell’s Soup Company, and Sunpower.

Bright Funds approach to product has brought a number of innovations to this space.

The first is the concept of a cause-focused “fund.” Similar to a mutual fund or ETF, these funds are portfolios of nonprofits curated by subject-matter experts tailored to a specific cause area (e.g. conservation, education, poverty, etc.). This solves one of the chief concerns of any donor — is my dollar being put to good use towards the causes I care about? Passionate about conservation? Invest with Jim Leape from the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, who brings over three decades of conservation experience in choosing the six nonprofits in Bright Fund’s conservation portfolio. This same expertise is available across a number of cause areas.

Additionally, funds can also be created by companies or employees. This has proven to be an important rallying point for emergency relief during natural disasters, where employees at companies can collectively assemble a list of nonprofits to donate to. In 2017, Cisco employees donated $1.8 million (including company matching) through Bright Funds to Hurricanes Harvey, Maria, and Irma as well as the central Mexico earthquakes, the current flooding in India and many more.

The second key feature of their product is the impact timeline, a central news feed to understand where your dollars are going across all your cause areas. This transforms giving from a black box transaction to an ongoing dialogue between you and your charities.

Lastly, Bright Funds wants to take away all the administrative burden that might come with giving and volunteering — everything from tracking your volunteer opportunities and hours, to one-click tax reporting across all your charitable donations. In short, no more shoeboxes of receipts to process through in April.

Doing good & doing well

Although Bright Funds is focused on transforming the individual giving experience, it’s paying customer at the end of the day is the enterprise.

And although it is philanthropic in nature, Bright Funds is not exempt from the procurement gauntlet that every enterprise software startup faces — what’s in it for the customer? What impact does workplace giving and volunteering have on culture and the bottom line?

To this end, there is evidence to show that corporate social responsibility has a an impact on recruiting the next generation of workers. A study by Horizon Media found that 81% of millennials expect their companies to be good corporate citizens. A separate 2015 study found that 62% of millennials said they’d take a pay cut to work for a company that’s socially responsible.

Box, one of Bright Fund’s early customers, has seen this impact on recruiting firsthand (disclosure: Box is one of my former employers). Like most tech companies competing for talent in the Valley, Box used to give out lucrative bonuses for candidate referrals. They recently switched to giving out $500 in Bright Funds gift credit. Instead of seeing employee referrals dip, Box saw referrals “skyrocket,” according to Box.org Executive Director Bryan Breckenridge. This program has now become “one of the most cherished cultural traditions at Box,” he said.

Additionally, like any corporate benefit, there should be metrics tied to employee retention. Benevity released a study of 2 million employees across 118 companies on their platform that showed a 57% reduction in turnover for employees engaged in corporate giving or volunteering efforts. VMware, one of Bright Fund’s customers, has seen an astonishing 82% of their 22,000 employees participate in their Citizen Philanthropy program of giving and volunteering, according to VMware Foundation Director Jessa Chin. Their full-time voluntary turnover rate (8%) is well below the software industry average of 13.2%.

Towards a Brighter Future

Bright Funds still has a lot of work to do. CEO Walrod says that one of his top priorities is to expand the platform beyond US charities, finding ways to evaluate and incorporate international nonprofits.

They have also not given up their dream of becoming a truly consumer platform, perhaps one day competing in the world of donor-advised funds, which today is largely dominated by big names like Fidelity and Schwab who house over $85B of assets. In the short term, Walrod wants to make every Bright Funds account similar to a 401K account. It goes wherever you work, and is a lasting record of the causes you care about, and the time and resources you’ve invested in them.

Whether the impetus is altruism around giving or something more utilitarian like retention, companies are increasingly realizing that their employees represent a charitable force that can be harnessed for the greater good. Bright Funds has more work to do like any startup, but it is empowering the next set of donors who can give with the same effectiveness as Gates, and one day, at the same scale as him as well.

People don’t eat enough fruit and vegetables, that’s despite an embarrassment of options today that include fast grocery delivery and takeout services with a focus on health.

A study from the U.S-based Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released last November found that just one in ten adults in America “meet the federal fruit or vegetable recommendations” each day. The bar isn’t that high. The recommendation is just 1.5-2 cups of fruit and two to three cups of vegetables per day, but failing to meet it can put people at risk of chronic diseases, the CDC said.

The problem is universal the world over, but perhaps most acute in the U.S, where finding healthy food is easier than ever. Amazon’s same-day grocery deliveries, make-it-at-home services like Blue Apron and various healthy takeout services have helped some people, but no doubt there’s much more to be done for standards to be raised across the nation and beyond.

That’s where one early-stage startup, Kencko, is aiming to make a difference by making fruit and vegetable more accessible. Its thesis is that wholly organic diets are daunting to most, but packaging the good parts in new ways can make it easier for anyone to be more healthy.

The company’s first offering is a fruit drink that can be made in minutes using just a sachet, water and its mixer bottle.

Just add water

Unlike other ‘instant’ mixer options, Kencko uses freeze-drying to turn fruit and vegetable mixes into powder without compromising on health. That process — which is similar to how NASA develops food for astronauts — retains minerals, protein, vitamins and all the other good stuff typically lost in healthy drinks, the startup said. The fruit and vegetables used are organic and sourced from across the world — that’s broken down into more details on the Kencko website — while the mixes don’t contain sugar or other additives.

Kencko customers make their drink by mixing the sachet with water and shaking for one minute. Each sachet is 20g and, when combined with water, that gets you a 160g serving. That’s around two daily portions, and it  has a 180-day shelf live so it can keep. There are six different combinations, each one is a mixture of six fruit and vegetables.

Unlike others that pair with water, Kencko actually includes fruit pieces and seeds — I tested a batch. That’s pretty unique, although it is worth noting that some of the more berry fruit heavy combinations mix less efficiently than the plant-based ones, at least from my experience. As someone who lives in a city where fresh fruit and vegetables are easily found — thank you, Bangkok — I’m not the target customer. But I can readily recall living the busy 9-6 office life in London a decade ago, and back then I’d have been curious enough to at least take Kencko for a spin in my quest to be a little healthier.

Kencko is also affordable when compared to most health food options, which tend to be positioned as premium.

Packs are priced at $29.90 for ten sachets, $74.50 for 30 and $123.50 for 60. The startup offers a ‘Lifetime Founding Member’ package that gives 30 percent off those prices for an initial charge. That’s $32 for those wanting 10 servinggs, $79.90 for 30 and $129 for 60.

More than pressed juice

Kencko — which means health in Japanese — is the brainchild of Tomás Froes, a former tech worker who got into veganism after being diagnosed with acute gastritis.

Froes, who is from Portugal and once ran an artisanal hot dog brand in China, was told that his ailment was treatable but that it would require a cocktail of pills for the rest of his life. Seeking an alternative, he threw himself into the world of alternative health and, after settling on a 90 percent fruit and vegetable diet, found that his condition had cleared without medicine.

Keen to help others enjoy the benefits of his journey, he began talking to nutritionists and experts whilst trying to figure out possible business options. In an interview with TechCrunch, Froes said he settled on a new take on the existing ‘health drink’ space that he maintains is inadequate in a number of ways.

“The end goal is to help consumers reach the recommendation of five servings/portions of fruit a day,” he explained. “That would be impossible to do if we excluded the seeds and bits of fruits like cold-pressed juice companies do. They press the juice out of the fruits, leaving the most nutritional part from pulp and the seeds out.”

“We blast freeze fruit and vegetables at -40 degrees which allows us to maintain the same nutritional properties as fresh fruit for longer periods. We then use a slow heat process of 60 degrees to evaporate only take the water-based parts without damaging nutrition,” Froes added.

Added that, Froes said, Kencko helps cut down on the use of plastic by using the same mixer, return customers only require new sachets.

As proof of Kencko’s versatility, he brought his mixer and sachets along to the vegan cafe we met at earlier this year when I visited London, putting me to shame for buying the cold pressed option — which was no doubt more expensive, to boot.

Kencko is based in New York but with a processing facility in Lisbon, Portugal. It is heavily focused on the U.S. market where it offers delivery in 24-48 hours, but it also covers the UK and Canada. There are plans to increase support, particularly in Asia.

Building a health food brand

Kencko was formed in 2017 and, after landing undisclosed seed funding, it launched its product in March of this year. Already it has seen progress; the startup recently entered the TechStars accelerator program in London as one of a batch of ten companies.

“I’m excited to work with Tomas and the Kencko team,” Eamonn Carey, who leads TechStars in London, told TechCrunch. “I first read about them on ProductHunt and bought into their mission straight away. Once I tasted the product for the first time, I was sold — both as a subscriber and an investor.”

Froes told TechCrunch that drinks are just the first phase of what Kencko hopes to offer consumers. He explained that he wants to move into other types of food and consumables in the future to help give people more options to get their daily portion of fruit and vegetables.

Up next could be Apple-based snacks. Foes shared — quite literally — a new batch of snack that’s currently in development and is made from the fruit. He believes it could be marketed a healthier option than crisps and other nibbles people turn to between meals. Further down the pipeline, he said, will be other kinds of food that maintain the 100 percent organic approach.

Beyond food, Kencko wants to build a close bond with its customers. It is developing iOS and Apple Watch apps that help its users to track their fruit and vegetable consumption, and more generally make their diet and routine healthier.

With the membership package and apps, it becomes clear that Kencko aspires to build a brand and not just sell a product online. That’s double the challenge (at least), and that makes the company one to watch.

Already it has found some success within tech circles such as TechStar’s Carey — people who aspire to eat and drink better but are pushed for time — but if Froes is to even begin to deliver on his mission then Kencko will need to go beyond the tech industry niche and attract mainstream consumers. For now though, the product is worth close inspection if you think your lifestyle is in need of a fruit boost.

The slings and arrows aimed at tech’s titans these days are almost too numerous to count. Jeff Bezos: squandering money on space while exploiting warehouse employees. Mark Zuckerberg: complicit in everything from genocide to the death of democracy. Larry Page and Sergey Brin: in bed with China and the military. Elon Musk: where even to begin?

Tim Cook has mostly escaped the brickbats, but if Steve Jobs were still with us, it seems plausible he’d be the biggest target of all. And the list goes on from there, of course.

Let’s not kid ourselves: a lot of this criticism is warranted. Amazon should treat its warehouse workers better. Facebook should have seen the new form of information warfare coming from further away, recognized it when it was happening, and responded much faster and more decisively. Google shouldn’t have come as close as it did to implementing Project Maven. Tesla should … well … should basically be less of a mess.

More generally, the tech sector is vastly more important than it used to be, both as a segment of the economy and as an intimate part of people’s lives, and the tech industry’s responsibilities are, accordingly, vastly greater than they were. People should be more critical of us, and more watchful. We should more carefully consider the consequences of our actions and inactions.

And yet. It’s hard to shake the sense that a lot of the criticism aimed at tech titans is because they are so visible, not because they are actually responsible. Bezos and Musk get an amazing amount of flak for their efforts at private space exploration. This just seems bizarre. You may not agree that space exploration is an important, and possible critical, field of human endeavor, but surely you can agree that people might believe this in good faith, and that it’s not just — at the most extreme and laughable edge of those criticisms — the patriarchy in action.

Also, it’s hard to ignore the fact that, on a relative shoestring, SpaceX and Blue Origin have been making meaningful advances (such as self-landing reusable boosters, and the cost-per-kilogram-to-orbit of the Falcon Heavy) which NASA has failed to make directly with its $19 billion budget — which in turn, as Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield points out, is less than twice what America spends on Halloween every year.

And if people are upset about tech billionaires squandering money, why on earth aren’t they up in arms, in mobs with pitchforks and torches, enraged by the financial industry? The financial industry which consumes 30% of all US corporate profits, compared to 10% thirty years ago. Of course, in exchange for that extra fifth of all profits, it gives us … uh … well, nothing, really; it just takes.

Similarly, there are fewer hedge-fund billionaires than there used to be, thankfully, but there are still an astonishing number of these people who are, in essence, very smart parasites who contribute nothing. “8 percent of the 400 wealthiest people in America is a big number for a group that arguably doesn’t contribute any economic activity.” Indeed — and, from the same article:

Hedge fund managers are different from other rich people in this way: Theirs is extremely liquid wealth. Other billionaires’ holdings are often locked up in assets that cannot be sold as easily, such as real estate or company shares. Because hedge fund managers are essentially in a cash business, these managers are able to buy sports teams and other high-priced toys by writing a check.

There’s a reason why there have been no mobs on Wall Street since the Occupy movement dissipated, and it is, I think, sadly, learned helplessness and despair. People don’t protest the parasites of the financial industry, or the military-industrial complex, or the bizarre cost disease that infects the US economy, or other aspects of our economy which are far, far more damaging than even the worst aspects of the tech industry, because they no longer believe that anything can be done about them. It’s sad but understandable.

In a way, it speaks well of technology that it attracts such criticism. It means that we’re incompatible with learned helplessness and despair, because for all of our (many) flaws, ours is still essentially an industry of hope, and one which actually builds and contributes thing rather than siphoning value. As mentioned, a lot of the criticisms are merited, and we should absorb them, consider them, and act upon them.

But at the same time let’s not pretend that tech is in any way Public Enemy No. 1, or that we represent all that is wrong with the world, or that tech people are uniquely and specially terrible, or that we should be the primary focus of criticism re how the world works, just because we are particularly striking and visible. If you want to deal with the enemies of a better world in order of importance, then I’m afraid you’re going to need to start elsewhere.

What’s standing between you and a chance to launch your pre-Series A startup in front of Europe’s influential technorati? A mere 24 hours. That’s how much time you have left before we stop accepting applications to Startup Battlefield at Disrupt Berlin 2018, which takes place on November 29-30. There’s still time, but not a moment to waste. Apply right now.

Startup Battlefield is a whirlwind roller coaster, and over the years it’s been the launch platform for more than 750 companies — our Startup Battlefield alumni community — that have collectively raised $8 billion dollars and generated 102 exits. Names like TripIt, Dropbox, Vurb and Mint grew from humble beginnings to big-time tech companies.

Discerning TechCrunch editors with a knack for choosing successful startups will review every application and ultimately pick up to 15 companies to compete. Participating founders benefit from free pitch coaching from those Startup Battlefield-tested editors. You’ll be at your very best when you step onto the main stage to present your case.

Teams get six minutes to pitch and demo their product to the judges — experienced entrepreneurs, technologists and investors — and then spend another six minutes answering probing questions from said judges.

Five teams move on for another round of pitching and Q&A. Judges will choose one team from that impressive squad as the Startup Battlefield champion. Winning founders get bragging rights, the Disrupt Cup and a $50,000 equity-free cash prize.

The competition takes place in front of a live, rowdy audience — thousands of attendees cheering for you. Among them will be investors, journalists and influential technologists looking for the next big thing.

Plus, we live-stream the entire Startup Battlefield competition to a global audience on TechCrunch.com, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter (and make it available later, on-demand).

All Startup Battlefield participants get to exhibit in Startup Alley for the duration of Disrupt. That’s prime networking, maybe even life-changing, territory. We’d say it’s worth the price of admission, but TechCrunch does not charge any fees to participate. Competing in Startup Battlefield is 100 percent free.

You have only 24 hours left to decide your fate. The application window closes on August 27 at 9 p.m. PST. If you want to compete in Startup Battlefield at Disrupt Berlin 2018 on November 29-30, you need to apply right here, right now.

Chinese ride-hailing firm Didi Chuxing, the $60 billion-valued company that bought out Uber’s China business, has suspended its carpooling service after the murder of a female passenger. The fatally is the second such incident this year after a passenger was murdered in May.

Police this weekend arrested a man who is accused of raping and killing a 20-year-old female who rode with him via Didi’s Hitch service on Friday in Zhejiang, a province in the east of China. Reuters reports that the woman had messaged her friend earlier in the day asking for help before she disappeared.

Authorities in Zhejiang city Leqing suspended the service before Didi later announced it would suspend Hitch nationwide.

“We are sorry the Hitch service… would be suspended for now because of our disappointing mistakes,” Didi said in a statement.

Hitch is a modern take on hitchhiking that lets a passenger ride for free with a driver headed in their direction. Passengers are encouraged to leave a tip to cover petrol, but the idea is to make each car ride more efficient. Didi doesn’t monetize the service, but it is a strategic way to attract passengers and drivers who may use other services that the firm does draw revenue from.

Didi claims Hitch has handled over a billion trips in the past three years, but there are major safety issues.

This new murder occurred a little over three months after an air stewardess was killed in Henan province by a driver who got on to Didi’s platform using an account belonging to his father, a verified Didi driver. Following that incident, Didi suspended Hitch for six weeks. The service resumed in June with a number of restrictions, in particular, one that only allowed drivers to serve passengers of the same sex during late night hours.

This fatal Zhejiang ride occurred at 1pm, according to police, and there’s plenty to be concerned with.

Didi said in a statement that the alleged murderer, who does not have a criminal record, had been flagged to Didi’s safety team just one day before. A female passenger complained that the driver had requested her to ride in the front seat and then followed her for some time after she left his vehicle.

The Didi safety center representative who handled the complaint had not followed company policy of initiating an investigation within two hours, according to Reuters. That policy was introduced during the suspension period after Didi discovered another passenger had flagged suspicious behavior from the driver who then went on to commit the murder in May.

“The incident shows the many deficiencies with our customer service processes, especially the failure to act swiftly on the previous passenger’s complaint and the cumbersome and rigid process of information sharing with the police. This is too high a cost to pay. We plead for law enforcement and the public to work with us in developing more efficient and practical collaborative solutions to fight criminals and protect user personal and property safety,” Didi said in a statement.

The company confirmed that it has fired two executives following the murder: the general manager for Hitch and the company’s vice president of customer services.

Didi said it will launch a “co-supervisory process of our operations” which it invited members of the public and experts to take part in.

Following the murder in May, Didi said it has booked “proactive consultation sessions with relevant authorities and experts” as it sought to shore up its safety processes.

Didi has operated a virtual monopoly on ride-hailing services since it acquired and integrated Uber’s China business in 2016, but this year it has seen increased competition.

In particular, Didi is facing pressure from rival Meituan Dianping, which started out in local services but recently introduced ride-sharing services and moved into dockless bikes with the acquisition of Mobike. Meituan recently filed to go public in Hong Kong, with some reports suggesting it could raise as much as $4 billion.

Meituan is involved in a dogfight with Alibaba to win China’s local services market — Alibaba just amped up its efforts with a $3 billion raise for its Ele.me business unit — but no doubt Meituan will now doubly focus on its own safety and security measures to push its case as a legitimate alternative to Didi.

Didi has gone to great pains to emphasize that Hitch is well used — it hamfistedly shoved a mention of the service’s ride completion numbers into its apology statement — but at this point it seems best to shutter the service if it can’t guarantee the safety of all passengers, no matter how popular or strategic it may be.

Today, there was a little bit of a skirmish between two professional YouTubers. Our dear old friend Logan Paul and KSI had an actual boxing match at the Manchester Arena where 15,000 tickets were sold (!!!!!!!!) for an event that ultimately ended in a draw and vows for a rematch.

The action onstage wasn’t the only place where viewers could get a look into the action, there was a $10 pay-per-view stream on YouTube, but more people seemed to end up watching pirated streams on Twitch with boxing fight streams reaching over a million concurrent users at one point. Streams also popped up on Twitter-owned Periscope and there were a few unofficial streams popping up on YouTube as well.

Now, forget the parties involved and the topic and the motivations for a moment if you can. I understand if it might feel more than a little difficult to feel remorse for the parties involved, that has been a common refrain for pirated content popping up from whatever group for whatever reason though.

There’s obviously a big difference between free curiosity and $10 curiosity for an event like this but it seems pretty apparent that having access to a free stream on an easily-accessible mainstream site probably dissuaded some people from paying for the event on YouTube. While people may have previously scoured the web for pop-up ridden sites to view something like this, Twitch and other services unofficially served it up on a platter.

There are plenty of events similar to this one, but so often the refrain is made that people have to turn to pirated streams because the alternative is paying for cable or something that is really against the spirit of these easy-to-access platforms. Well, here’s an example of something that falls far outside that argument.

It’s impossible to squash all of the pirated streams, but Amazon’s Twitch is a bit too mature to be hosting pirated streams in such rampant numbers without being a little more proactive — instead of just relying on user reports to police pirated content that was fairly hard to avoid stumbling upon on the platform.

Even as tech companies continue to try and crack live content, services like Twitch that don’t proactively search out users hijacking streams of big events like this really serve to complicate and deter their own goals of eventually finding a way to monetize big events like this.

What’s next for robotics? At at Disrupt SF, we’ll be joined by four experts to discuss how new technologies are changing the field.

Those experts include Peter Barrett, founder and CTO and Playground, a venture fund and design studio focused on hardware startups. Barrett is a 30-year veteran of the tech industry, whose accomplishments include developing Cinepak (video compression software that was included as part of Apple QuickTime) and working at WebTV — which was acquired by Microsoft, where he led Internet TV efforts for more than a decade.

We’ll also be joined by Helen Boniske, a partner at early stage hardware investor Lemnos. Before joining Lemnos, Boniske was a front office executive for the Arizona Diamondbacks.

The panel will also include Claire Delaunay, Nvidia’s vice president of engineering. Delaunay was previously robotics program lead at Google, co-founder of autonomous vehicle startup Otto and director of engineering at Uber. At Nvidia, she leads the Isaac robotics initiative.

The final panelist will be Cyril Ebersweiler. Ebersweiler is founder and managing director of Hax, a hardware accelerator with offices in both Shenzhen and San Francisco. He’s also a general partner at global venture capital firm SOSV. And somehow, he pulls off describing himself as a “visionary punk” on his LinkedIn profile.

Disrupt SF will take place in San Francisco’s Moscone Center West from September 5 to 7. (The robotics panel will be at 1:15pm on the 5th.) You can still buy tickets right here.

It’s not been a great week for cell carriers. EE was hit with two security bugs and T-Mobile admitted a data breach. Now, Sprint is the latest phone giant to admit a security lapse, TechCrunch has learned.

Using two sets of weak, easy-to-guess usernames and passwords, a security researcher accessed an internal Sprint staff portal. Because the portal’s log-in page didn’t use two-factor authentication, the researcher — who did not want to be named — navigated to pages that could have allowed access customer account data.

Sprint is the fourth largest US cell network with 55 million customers.

TechCrunch passed on details and screenshots of the issue to Sprint, which confirmed the findings in an email.

“After looking into this, we do not believe customer information can be obtained without successful authentication to the site,” said a Sprint spokesperson.

“Based on the information and screenshots provided, legitimate credentials were utilized to access the site. Regardless, the security of our customers is a top priority, and our team is working diligently to research this issue and immediately changed the passwords associated with these accounts,” the spokesperson said.

We’re not disclosing the passwords, but suffice to say they were not difficult to guess.

The first set of credentials let the researcher into a prepaid Sprint employee portal that gave staff access to Sprint customer data — as well as Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile, which are Sprint subsidiaries. The researcher used another set of credentials to gain access to a part of the website, which he said gave him access to a portal for customer account data.

A screenshot shared with TechCrunch showed that anyone with access to this portal allowed the user to conduct a device swap, change plans and add-ons, replenish a customer’s account, check activation status and view customer account information.

All a user would need is a customer’s mobile phone number and a four-digit PIN number, which could be bypassed by cycling through every possible combination.

The researcher said there were no limits on the number of PIN attempts.

Account PIN numbers are highly sensitive as they can be used to transfer ownership from one person to another. That gives hackers an easier route to carry out a “SIM swapping” attack, which target and hijack cell phone numbers. Hackers use a mix of techniques — such as calling up customer service and impersonating a customer, all the way to recruiting telecom employees to hijack SIM cards from the inside. In hijacking phone numbers, hackers can break into online accounts to steal vanity Instagram usernames, and intercept codes for two-factor authentication to steal the contents of cryptocurrency wallets.

SIM swapping is becoming a big, albeit illegal business. An investigation by Motherboard revealed that hundreds of people across the US have had their cellphone number stolen over the past few years. TechCrunch’s John Biggs was one such victim.

But the authorities are catching up to the growing threat of SIM swapping. Three SIM swappers have been arrested in the past few weeks alone.

If you’re not sure about watching a whole movie where your point-of-view is limited to computer and smartphone screens, you’re not alone — “Searching” filmmakers Aneesh Chaganty and Sev Ohanian told me they had very similar reservations.

Chaganty said that when the pair was first approached by Timur Bekmambetov’s Bazelevs (the production company behind the “Unfriended” movies), the idea was to contribute a segment to an anthology of short films set on computer screens. That’s when they came up with the basic plot of “Searching” — after a teenaged girl goes missing, her father (played by John Cho) goes through the laptop she left behind in an effort to find her.

But then the studio proposed turning the idea into a feature film, with Chaganty directing, Ohanian producing and the two of them writing the screenplay.

“It was this incredible moment where no filmmaker ever gets this opportunity,” Chaganty recalled. “But in that instant, I said no.”

It seemed to him that they’d come up with a way to make the format more than a gimmick —but as a short film. He worried that extending it into a feature might “stretch it right back into a 90-minute gimmick.”

Chaganty and Ohanian kept talking about the idea, though, and ultimately moved forward after coming up with an opening sequence — which is indeed the opening sequence of the finished film. It’s a seven-minute montage of footage stored on a desktop computer, which doubles as a compressed (and surprisingly emotional) history of the Kim family.

“In that moment, there was a click, there was a lightbulb that went off, where we realized the potential of this format with this story,” Chaganty said. “And we realized, despite the films that had existed before, there was a way to make this feel not only new … but also for once emotional, engaging, cinematic.”

“Searching” is in limited release this weekend, before opening more widely on Friday, August 31. You can read more about how Chaganty and Ohanian actually made the movie in the edited transcript below.

TechCrunch: How much of this started with the format, and how much with the kidnapping plot?

Sev Ohanian: Honestly, it was almost neither of those things. Aneesh and I are writing partners — he directs, I produce, we met each other at USC film school. We had made a two-minute short film that takes place on the Google Glasses, if you remember those at all? It kind of blew up — it was called “Seeds” — and one of the results of that was he got hired by Google to come out here and start writing commercials for one or two years.

I’ve been an indie producer for a couple of years now and I had an opportunity to meet with Timur Bekmambetov’s company Bazelevs. He had just released “Unfriended,” it was super successful, and he asked me if there were any filmmakers I wanted to collaborate with. I immediately thought of Aneesh, of course.

Aneesh Chaganty: When I came in and we had the meeting together, they were like, “We want to follow-up ‘Unfriended’ but we don’t want to follow it up with a traditional feature, we want to follow it up with an anthology feature, basically comprised of a bunch of shorts, all of which take place on computer screens.”

Immediately to me, that was a lot more interesting than a feature film, because we had seen all the feature films that took place on screens and none of them were proof that this was a direction we should be going in. A short film, though, I knew we could make it into not a gimmick, which I think all the other films were. [Pauses.] Sort of rude, but whatever.

About a month and a half later, we ended up texting each other with the idea for “Searching” — first as a short film, that’s how it started out. Same plot. Basically, Dad breaks into his daughter’s laptop to look at clues to find her.

We thought in eight minutes it could be not a gimmick and really cool and engaging and get out before anyone got bored. And we sent a few pages back to the company and I happened to be in Los Angeles a few weeks later for a Google photo shoot and they called us into a board room. All of a sudden, it was Sev and myself in front of a big table of execs and financiers and all that stuff.

They basically told us, “Hey, we don’t want to make the short.” We go, “Well, that’s a bummer.” And they go, “We want to turn it into a feature. Sev and Aneesh, you guys can write it, we’ll pay you guys to write it, Sev, you can produce it, Aneesh, we’ll pay you to direct your first feature, and we’ll finance the whole thing. What do you guys say?”

It was this incredible moment where no filmmaker ever gets this opportunity — but in that instant, I said no.

Ohanian: He said no!

Chaganty: On my left side, he was like kicking me, like, “What are you doing?” and everything like that. But in the moment, it felt like what we were being asked to do was take a concept that we had found to not be a gimmick and then stretch it right back into a 90-minute gimmick. And more than that, make a film not because ours had any artistic merit, but because another film was a hit. Not that ours deserved to exist.

And so for the right reasons I said no, and for the right reasons, Sev said, “We’ll be in touch.” And we left the room and we just kept talking about the enormity of the opportunity, obviously, and how that never happens, despite the parameters of what we were being asked to do. And we were like, “If we hit a wall, we hit a wall, but we should pay respect to this by talking.”

So for two months we just tried to figure out a way into the story and we couldn’t. Until one day, I was living in Williamsburg at the time, and I was texting Sev, and I was like, “Hey, I have a really random idea for an opening sequence.” And Sev goes, “I have an idea for an opening sequence.” And we get on the phone and we pitch each other the exact same opening scene. And to this day, that’s the opening sequence of the film, which is a standalone, very unique seven-minute montage that takes place over 16 years of a family’s life stored on their desktop computer.

In that moment, there was a click, there was a lightbulb that went off, where we realized the potential of this format with this story. And we realized, despite the films that had existed before, there was a way to make this feel not only new, but also for once emotional, engaging, cinematic.

Ohanian: Our idea with the opening scene was, we wanted to create something that within five minutes, audiences would just forget that what they were watching was unfolding on screens and just get sucked into the story. Hopefully we did that.

Chaganty: So we put together a longer pitch, because immediately [after] that idea of the opening scene, we were like, “And I guess the next scene would be this, and the next scene would be this.” And we started plotting it out immediately. We had a structure very quickly.

We sent that structure back to the company, they bought in, they were like, “We’re paying you guys to do this.” I quit my job at Google, and I got on a flight, moved to L.A. and we made a movie.

TechCrunch: My understanding is that you had created a lot of what happens on the computer screen first, and then John and Debra [Messing] and the other actors were acting on webcams to a certain extent based on what you’d already created.

Chaganty: The way that we like to describe this movie is, we sort of made an animated movie, then shot a live action film, and then put the live action film within the animated film and just kept refining it and refining it.

The reason we started with an animated movie was Sev’s idea, and basically coming from a movie called “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.” It was made in a very similar way, in the sense that it was made before it was made.

Basically, what we realized was that in our film, there are two cameras. There’s all the footage that you’re seeing on this screen, and then there’s the way that you’re framing it, because the camera in our film is always moving around. We realized those two need to play with each other and also inform one another. We need to know what the final product is going to look like, before we even went to set.

So basically, seven weeks before we even hired the actors, we brought in the editors to the film and took them to a room about this big, with two iMac computers, and said, “Welcome home.” And literally just said, “Go.”

They started screen capturing the Internet, like doing text messages, voicemail, whatever, every single thing, zooming in, putting together a cut. And by the end of seven weeks, we had an hour-and-40-minute cut of the entire film, starring me playing every role — dad, daughter, brother, mother, father. You know, all of the friends, talking to myself. And we would understand how the camera was moving and everything, and how to make this movie.

We showed that cut to the crew the night before we started shooting and it was in that moment that they were like, “Oh, that’s the movie we’re making.” Because up until that point, this movie is impossible to talk about. Now we have a trailer, we have a poster, it’s all very easy to be like, “Oh, this is what we made.” But before that I’m saying, “We’re making a thriller, but it takes place on a computer screen, but it’s going to be really good.” And it’s really hard to sell people on that idea. So for them to finally see what we were thinking was very helpful.

And then on set, John’s character, who’s literally operating the computer in the movie, his eyeline — he needs to know exactly where every button is, where every cursor moves, where everything pops, where every video message comes in, he always needs to have a perfect eyeline in the film and know what’s happening. We literally needed to show him that temp video as he’s shooting, so he understands where what he’s shooting is actually being placed in the larger film.

Ohanian: And the idea with that previz version of the movie was, we wanted the final version of the film to feel polished and cinematic and grab the audience’s attention. It’s a studio movie now with worldwide distribution, but it started off as an indie film. You’ve seen the movie: There’s aerial stuff, car stuff, crowd scenes, water, ravines. We shot it in 13 days.

And part of the idea of doing this version was that we wanted to spend every one of those days making them count as much as we can, and the final product would have consistency and good screen composition and mise en scene and all these amazing things. So it wouldn’t feel accidental, it would feel polished.

TechCrunch: When you were working with the actors, how much did they instinctively know what to do, and how much, given that this is not a format that exists already, did you have to train them for a different kind of acting?

Chaganty: I think every single person on the cast and the crew had to relearn aspects of the job to make this movie. Michelle [La, who plays the daughter Margot] actually says this, that it’s a lot easier for her to behave in front of a screen than it was for John. Maybe it’s a generational thing or whatever, but for us, all the rules visually are different. None of us have ever made another movie like this. I know for a fact, none of us are going to do this again. We’re on-set, we’re all learning together.

I really equate this whole movie with cast and crew holding each other’s hands, we all walk into a dark cave, every single person thinks the person to their right knows a little more than them, but nobody does. And I’m on the far right being like, “Uh, I don’t know … ” But jumping in, and at every point of this cave, in the pure darkness, realizing that there’s one person on this crew or cast who knew how to get to this next challenge.

TechCrunch: It sounds like you guys aren’t necessarily looking to make “Searching 2,” and in fact, I know you already have another project lined up.

Now that you’re at the end of the process, to what extent do you feel that okay, [computer screen movies are a genre] where other directors can come in and do interesting stuff? And to what extent to do you feel like this is probably something that you can make four or five films with, and at the end of it, the possibilities are exhausted?

Chaganty: At the end of the day, I keep saying this, but I think that if you asked Christopher Nolan how many more backwards films are going to happen [after “Memento”], is he starting a subgenre with backwards films? I don’t think the answer would be yes.

We feel the same way about this movie. This, at the end of the day, is a gimmick. It’s a style of telling the story. We found a way, I think, to make it not that and tell the story first, but at the same time, a computer screen only has set imagery. It’s even more limiting than traditional found footage, because with traditional found footage you can set yourself in Singapore, or Hong Kong, or New York, or whatever. You’re always on a laptop screen with a computer screen film.

Maybe the lesson people will learn from us is something that I’ve learned: There is a way still to show technology accurately and honestly — because I don’t think Hollywood has done that yet — using screens and using traditional cinematic language when you’re showing screens. You can still combine that with a live action film, and in a way that feels consistent with your tone and style and genre of whatever larger piece you’re making.

Whatever criteria we look at, whether it’s schools with the highest number of well-capitalized founders, highest funding totals or even where startup investors went to college, the same names top the list. The only surprise factor, it seems, is whether Harvard or Stanford will be in first place.

It’s possible we’ll do a data-driven university- and startup-related ranking that doesn’t feature the same two schools in the top two positions. But that’s not happening today, as we look at universities with founder alumni who have raised the most venture funding.¹

OK, so who else is on the list?

Luckily, there are more than two names on the list. In this survey, we looked at the top 15 schools ranked by alumni who have raised the most venture funding for their startups in roughly the past year.

This is a follow-up to our earlier piece, which ranked U.S. universities according to the number of funded startup founders who raised $1 million or more in the survey period. The results, however, feature most of the same names, and an only slightly altered order.

Take a look for yourself below. The chart includes the name of the school, the total known venture capital funding raised by alumni founders since August 1, 2017, and the most heavily funded companies.

Methodology

In the survey results, we included universities and affiliated business schools together. This significantly bumped up the totals for universities with well-known business schools, like Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania (home of the Wharton School of Business).

Additionally, a number of funded founders have degrees from more than one university in the ranking. These entrepreneurs are counted once for each university.

1. The survey data is for seed through late-stage venture funding rounds announced on or after August 1, 2017.