Author: azeeadmin

Africa’s insurance market stands at a 3% penetration rate, per a McKinsey study in 2018 comparing six insurance regions on the continent. If the South African market is excluded, this number drops to a measly 1.12%.

Unlike other parts of the world, most African insurance providers neglect the importance of tailored and affordable insurance products to the average African consumer. Lami Technologies, a startup out of Kenya armed with $1.8 million in seed money, is looking to change that.

The round was led by Accion Venture Lab, a seed-stage investment firm that supports financial services targeted at underserved markets. Other VCs that participated include AAIC, Consonance, P1 Ventures, Acuity Ventures, The Continent Venture Partners and Future Africa.

Low insurance uptake in Africa is somewhat due to the traditional distribution of insurance policies. They customarily rely on brick-and-mortar channels to sell and process policies. This takes a long processing cycle and has poor customer satisfaction and higher distribution costs. 

Sequentially, the ways premiums are paid is affected. From the McKinsey report in 2018, the total gross written premiums (GWP) in Eastern Africa was $3.3 billion. In comparison, South Africa did $48.3 billion worth of GWP that same year.

For this reason, CEO Jihan Abass founded the company in 2018 to democratize insurance products in Kenya.

“For us, the main problem we wanted to solve was that 97% of Africans don’t buy insurance. We were trying to understand the methodology behind that, especially in Kenya where there are over 50 insurance companies but the penetration level is 2.4%,” she told TechCrunch.

“The driving force for us was making insurance widely available. We felt that building the technological infrastructure to facilitate the distribution of insurance was the best way to increase the penetration level in Africa.”

But selling directly to consumers would be a meticulous process as they rarely buy insurance from trusted organizations, let alone a third-party company. So Lami adopted a B2B2C approach to leverage the trust already built by platforms that converse with customers daily and innovate around it.

Via an API, it allows businesses like banks, startups, and organizations to offer digital insurance products to their users. The product can also be used by partner businesses to manage their own insurance needs.

Some customers like Stanbic Bank in Kenya use Lami’s API to run insurance operations; HR platform WorkPay makes insurance products available to the businesses using its platform. With over 20 insurance writers, the company is also launching an insurance marketplace on e-commerce platform Jumia.

Users can get a quote for motor, medical or other tailored insurance products through its API. They also can customize the benefits and adjust the premium to suit them, get their policy documents and access claims.

Typically, it takes about 90 days for claims to be processed for an average African insurer. Abass said Lami has reduced this to a week — it is one way the three-year-old company has developed trust with customers. 

Another challenge that Lami has been able to overcome is getting insurance companies onboard. According to the CEO, transitioning from a traditional way of offering insurance to digital distribution channels only worked because Lami began to show early the value of customer experience and journey which requires getting the right insurance to the right customer at the right time.

This is what makes Lami stand out, Abass continued. It co-designs products with its underwriting partners. And approaching design in this manner helps the businesses to offer unique insurance products to their underlying customer base.

She illustrates an offering with a bus-booking platform where passengers’ insurance points are calculated on a per-trip basis. It counts when they board the bus and stops when they alight. She believes an innovative process like this will take the continent’s insurance play to a more desirable place.

“I think there’s huge potential in the insurance industry. Despite the low penetration, the annual market is worth more than $60 billion a year. I think people are starting to open their eyes to insurance as opposed to other financial services.”

Since its inception, the insurtech startup has sold more than 5,000 policies. It has partnered with more than 25 active underwriters, including Britam, Pioneer and Madison Insurance. These underwriters help distribute more than 30 products from medical and employee benefits to motor and device insurance.

Lami will use the seed investment to hire more people, improve its technology and grow its presence across Africa.

Accion Venture Lab is placing a bet on Lami’s embedded finance play. Here’s what its African director, Ashley Lewis said of the investment. “… By embedding customized insurance within businesses that customers know and trust, Lami is making insurance accessible for underserved populations in Africa and enabling them to build financial resilience.”

Lami’s investment also represents a spark in a Kenyan tech ecosystem where being both an indigenous and female founder is an incongruous mix. A study in 2019 showed that Kenya had the strongest presence of expat co-founders of any of the Big Four tech ecosystems. While the country has a better female co-founder representation than other countries (1 in 4), the percentage of those from Kenya is about 12%.

There are just a handful of female founders who have raised million-dollar rounds. Though Abass sits comfortably in this illustrious club, it took thick skins and confidence in her product to get in.

“The funding landscape in Kenya is generally biased towards male founders and in East Africa, especially to foreign founders. So it was a lot harder to get investors excited and onboard with us. For us, we’ve built something quite exciting, although it took some time. One key thing why we wanted to make this publicized is so other female founders can see that there’s an opportunity to do the same too,” she said.

Many publishers are focused on converting visitors to subscribers, but there’s another important bracket: people who want to view a premium article or video, but not enough to sign up for a subscription. Fewcents, a Singapore-based fintech startup that enables publishers to take “micropayments” for individual pieces of content, announced today it has raised $1.6 million in seed funding.

Fewcents can be used to monetize articles, video and podcasts. It accepts 50 currencies and is meant to serve as a complementary stream of revenue to advertisements and subscriptions. Its current clients include India’s Dainik Jagran, which has a readership of 55 million; Indonesian news site DailySocial; and streaming video site Dailymotion. The company, which monetizes by sharing revenue with digital publishers, also struck a partnership with Jnomics Media to expand in Europe.

Its funding round venture capital funds M Venture Partners and Hustle Fund. Participation also came from angel investors from some of the top fintech, adtech and media companies: Koh Boon Hwee (fomer chairman of DBS Bank); Kenneth Bishop (former managing director of Southeast Asia at Facebook); Jeremy Butteriss (head of partnerships at Stripe); Shiv Choudhury (partner and managing director of the Boston Consulting Group); Francesco Alberti (former APAC regional sales director for Bloomberg Media Distribution); Lisa Gokongwei-Cheng (Summit Media president); Prantik Mazumdar (Dentsu managing director), Saurabh Mittal (Mission Holdings chairman and founder) and Nitesh Kripalani (former director and country head of Amazon Video India).

Fewcents was launched last year by Abhishek Dadoo and Dushyant Khare. Dadoo’s previous startup Shoffr, an online-to-offline attribution platform, was acquired by Affle in 2019. Khare spent 12 years working at Google, including as director of strategic partnerships in Southeast Asia and India.

In an email, Dadoo and Khare told TechCrunch that only 1% to 5% of publishers’ active users are willing to commit to a monthly subscription. The majority are casual or referred users, and publishers rely on advertising to monetize that traffic.

Content creators are experimenting with micropayments, and other services include Flattr, which allows people to make one-time contributions and Axate’s pay-per-article tools. But publishers still debate how effective the model is and last year, TechCrunch reported that Google decided not to launch a tipping feature for sites.

To successfully implement a pay-per-content model, publishers not only need to produce compelling content, but also make it extremely easy for people to pay for it. For Fewcents, this means solving three key challenges, Dadoo and Khare said. First, they need to create a ubiquitous platform, since casual users won’t want to sign up for a new service every time they visit another site. It also needs to accept cross-border payments in local currency using the most popular payment methods, like digital wallets. And publishers need to be able to manage digital rights, like how long someone has access to content.

Publishers also need to determine price points that won’t turn away buyers, but will generate substantial enough revenue. Fewcents currently uses existing traffic data to manually price each piece of content. “Based on the supply-demand curve within each geography, we retroactively change the price to get the best revenue results,” Dadoo said. “However, as we develop our AI algorithms, the intent is to dynamically suggest the pricing depending on the geography and the semantics of the content.”

Khare said that by unbundling content, Fewcents can also provide deeper data than pageviews, helping them understand the preferences of specific markets and user segments, and develop customized “micro-bundles.” He added that Fewcents’ goal is to be able to automatically recommend customized content bundles for each user.

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here.

Are startup valuations about to fall?

Hello, friends! Alex here to talk to you for a hot second about money. Then we’ll get into startups, venture capital, what Big Tech is up to and more. I promise. But hang with me for a moment.

Tech stocks got hammered today: The tech-heavy Nasdaq fell by more than 2%. Cloud stocks endured twice the damage. What happened? The U.S. government said that it might raise interest rates. So what? Well, when rates were low, lots of money that might have been invested elsewhere was instead funneled into tech stocks and VC funds that invest in startups.

Now, with the government saying that it might shake up the current state of affairs, investors are responding by selling tech stocks. Bessemer Venture Partners investor Byron Deeter noted the drop, tweeting that after a “brutal few days in the clouds,” with software stocks off “~5% today and ~10% on the week,” he was curious if valuations are “just taking a breather after a massive 2020” or starting “a broader reset.”

That’s a great question. More on the underlying economics of the situation here and here. Now, into startup-land.

Twitter doubles down on subscriptions

If you were curious about how Twitter was going to pursue its subscription strategy, the answer, to a degree, is buying startups. Today Big Tweet announced that it is buying Scroll, a startup that charges its users a fee, providing them with an ad-free experience on various media sites. Scroll then split its user fee with those sites.

A neat model, yeah? It’s a bit like the startup called Contenture that TechCrunch covered a few times back in 2009. Only Scroll made more progress than Contenture did. And your humble servant was not a co-founder at Scroll.

Regardless, the Scroll-Twitter deal matters because the social media company is busy rolling up startups and products into its ecosystem to better craft a set of services that may help it monetize more effectively over the long haul. Sarah reports:

[Scroll] will become a part of Twitter’s larger plans to invest in subscriptions, the company says, and will later be offered as one of the premium features Twitter will provide to subscribers. Premium subscribers will be able to use Scroll to easily read their articles from news outlets and from Twitter’s own newsletters product, Revue, another recent acquisition that’s already been integrated into Twitter’s service. When subscribers use Scroll through Twitter, a portion of their subscription revenue will go to support the publishers and the writers creating the content, explains Twitter in an announcement.

Twitter vs. Substack? Yep. Twitter vs. Clubhouse? Yep. And if Twitter can help media companies better monetize and thus not die? Well, then it’s Twitter versus the a16z media operation. I didn’t really expect a Jack versus Marc 2021 but am here for it all the same.

A typical day in today’s startup funding market

There was a cornucopia of startup news today on the site, so I’ve narrowed it a bit to get you what you need in a hurry. Also, shoutout to Mary Ann for covering half of it all by herself.

Here’s the rundown:

• HoneyBook raises $155M at $1B+ valuation to help SMBs, freelancers manage their businesses — Tiger participated in this particular Series D led by Durable Capital. Financial control software is hot!
• Persona lands $50M for identity verification after seeing 10x YoY revenue growth — You might recall that Persona raised $17.5 million last January. That’s one hell of a COVID-era growth cycle.
• WorkBoard raises $75M as the OKR-focused startup bets on a growing economy, changes to business culture — The great OKR startup software boom continues. More on the upstart cohort here.
• Acronis raises $250M at a $2.5B+ valuation to double down on cyber protection services — You might know Acronis as a Williams F1 sponsor, but it’s also now a multicorn with a quarter billion of capital on its books. Perhaps F1 is that expensive.

To round out our startup and venture capital notes, here are two more bits of news: Austin-based Multicoin Capital has raised a $100 million fund to “further capitalize on rampant excitement in the crypto world,” per our own reporting. Oh, and London-based seed investment fund Stride VC has raised a £100 million fund.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

How to break into Silicon Valley as an outsider

There is no magic spell that will induce an investor to meet with you. As with most things in life, it all comes down to who you know and what you have to offer.

“Nothing beats building human networks,” says Domm Holland, CEO and co-founder of Fast. “That’s the way that you’re going to get this done in terms of fundraising.”

Since its founding in 2019, Fast has raised $124 million across three rounds as it lands new users and partners like Stripe for its one-click checkout product. In this interview, Holland, a native Australian, shares actionable advice for other outsiders with startup dreams.

“Raising money isn’t the only thing,” Holland says. “You’ve got to hire people, you’ve got to build a team, you’ve got to build customers and suppliers, and you’ve got to build entire ecosystems.

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

The enterprise strikes back

Before we get into the enterprise news, here’s what you want to read about: Tesla spent $3 (not a typo) to purchase patents relating to battery tech that we think could really matter.

On the enterprise front, Ron has two stories today from tech giants that matter. The first is an interview with SAP CEO Christian Klein. SAP, you will recall, spun out Qualtrics a little bit ago. What’s ahead for the software giant? Ron is on the case!

From the same pen, Box’s time in the barrel continues as some of its largest public shareholders are agitating to “inject [Box’s] board with still more new blood, taking a swipe at the Box leadership team while it was at it.” This is a fight worth watching as it could encourage, or discourage, more unicorns from going public.

Finally from Big Tech, some good news. Namely that Instagram is working on improving its caption tech, which could help with accessibility. And our own Twitter-free Devin reports that Microsoft wants to help kids read.

Community

We asked everyone on Twitter about their experience trying to learn a foreign language, and you can weigh in here. Some of you have tried using Duolingo (with success!) and some shockingly got through German class in junior high without learning a single sentence of the language. Regardless of your personal experience, give the Duolingo EC-1 a read and learn about how the company started, how they figured out how to make money and what’s up next for them.

Speaking of starting a company … if you’re building your own, join us for this week’s Extra Crunch Live. Register here. It’s free! See you there.

Earlier today recent dog-parent Alex Konrad and fellow Forbes staffer Eliza Haverstock broke the news that Divvy, a Utah-based corporate spend unicorn, is considering selling itself to Bill.com for a price that could top $2 billion. For the fintech sector, it’s big news.

Corporate spend startups including Ramp and Brex are raising rapid-fired rounds at ever-higher valuations and growing at venture-ready cadences. Their growth and its resulting private investment were earned by a popular approach to offering corporate cards, and, increasingly, the group’s ability to build software around those cards that took into account a greater portion of the functionality that companies needed to track expenses, manage spend access, and, perhaps, save money.

The latter category was what Ramp focused on when it launched. It worked. More recently Ramp added expense tracking efforts to its own software suite. And Brex, an early leader in its efforts to get corporate cards into the hands of smaller, and more nascent businesses, has also built out its software efforts. So much so that the company, in conjunction with its huge recent fundraise, announced that it will begin offering a software package for a monthly fee.

Competitors like Airbase charge for their code, while some, like Divvy, traditionally have not.

Enter Bill.com. As the software work from the corporate spend startups has improved, it may have begun cutting into the corporate payments and expense software categories. For Bill.com in the payments world, and Expensify in the expense universe, that possible incursion could prove to be a growth-retarding concern. Thus to see Bill.com decide to take on the yet-private corporate spend startups off the playing field makes sense; why not absorb a growing customer base, and fend of competition in a single move?

To get a better handle on how the startups that compete with Divvy feel about the deal, TechCrunch reached out to both Ramp CEO Eric Glyman, and Brex CEO Henrique Dubugras. We’ll start with Glyman, who broadly agrees with our read of the situation:

It’s only been three years since they hit the streets and Revel’s blue electric mopeds have already become a common sight in New York, San Francisco and a growing number of U.S. cities. However, Revel founder and CEO Frank Reig has set his sights far beyond building a shared moped service.

In fact, since the beginning of 2021, Revel has launched an e-bike subscription service, an EV charging station venture and an all-electric rideshare service driven by a fleet of 50 Teslas.

So we caught up with Reig to talk about what he learned from building the company, how Revel’s business strategy has evolved, and what lies ahead.

Before we get to the good stuff, here’s some background:

The idea for Revel seems like it came from the classic entrepreneur’s guidebook: Reig had a need that no existing company addressed. He’d seen mopeds used as major, if not dominant, forms of transportation as he traveled around Europe, Asia and Latin America, and he wondered why this logical (and fun) mode of transport was largely absent from American cities in general, and in his hometown, New York City, in particular.

So in 2018, Reig quit his job, raised $1.1 million from 57 people, and launched a small pilot program involving 68 mopeds in Brooklyn. In May 2019, he raised $4 million in VC funding, which helped him expand to 1,000 electric mopeds across Brooklyn and Queens. Revel secured another $33.8 million in September 2019, in a round that included funding from Ibex Investments, Toyota Ventures, Maniv Capital, Shell and Hyundai, according to Reig. This has allowed the founder to execute a grander plan to build an electric mobility company.

The company now operates more than 3,000 e-mopeds in New York City, and has another 3,000 across Washington, D.C., Miami, Oakland, Berkeley and San Francisco.

TechCrunch: You’ve added three new business lines and told us previously that you have more on the way. That’s a lot.

Frank Reig: Yes, we have had a busy start to 2021! We began the year announcing our fast-charging stations across the city that will help fill the large gap in infrastructure to support the wide-scale adoption of EVs. We launched our e-bike subscription program to offer New Yorkers another way to navigate their city, and with our newly announced electric ride-sharing program, we are solving the “chicken and egg” problem of EV charging and demand. We are focused on building out these business lines and our moped business as well and very much looking forward to what is to come.

When shared micromobility companies expand, they often just offer different vehicles. You seem to be going, “Ok, we’ll offer a different vehicle — an e-bike, but it’s a subscription. And we’re also doing electric vehicle chargers, and let’s add an EV rideshare to the mix.” It’s pretty broad.

If we’re talking about electrifying mobility in major cities, it starts with infrastructure. And we’re the company rolling up our sleeves and doing it now by building that infrastructure and operating fleets. Because in a city like New York, the infrastructure does not exist for electric mobility.

There are a few Tesla superchargers around the city, usually behind parking paywalls, so you have to pay the garage to even use it. And, of course, you need a Tesla for that infrastructure to even be relevant. And when you think about other public fast-charging access points in the city, they are few and far between. We’re building 30 in one site and many more beyond that in 2021.

New York is a complicated city to operate in, so it’s easier for us to add e-bikes as a service because I already have the infrastructure and on-the-ground operations that we built with the mopeds. I have multiple warehouses throughout this city. I have full-time staff that I’ve employed, from field technicians to mechanics, and a fleet of over 3,000 vehicles on the streets in New York. So it’s a natural extension of the platform to be able to add another product to it, to reach a new type of user, or to supplement the use case of our current moped users. All we needed to do was finance some e-bikes, and then you have another line of business.

Investors gave Lyft’s value a small bump Tuesday after the American ride-hailing company reported results that weren’t quite as bad as the company, and Wall Street had expected. Shares of the Uber competitor rose as much as 4.5% in after-hours trading following the disclosure of its financial performance from the first three months of the year. As of the time of writing those gains have fallen to a smaller 2.5% gain.

Turning to its results, Lyft’s revenue fell 36% to $609 million in the first quarter of 2021 compared to the same period last year before the COVID-19 pandemic upended the economy, and, more specifically the ride-hailing industry. That disparity in revenue can be directly tied to fewer active riders using its app. The company said it had 13.49 million active riders in the first quarter, down more 36.4% from the 21.2 million riders on its network in the same period last year.

But while the company’s ride base and revenues did fall, the drops were not as extreme as the company, or its backers feared. As Lyft trumpeted at the top of its quarterly results deck, its revenue in the period was $59 million greater than the midpoint of its guidance. That’s investor speak for overshooting the mean, which apparently is an A+ in today’s market.

The company reported an adjusted EBITDA loss totaling $73 million in the first quarter, which was far better than anticipated. The company had expected a sharper $135 million adjusted EBITDA deficit for the period.

In addition to beating its own Q1 2021 goals to some degree, Lyft posted 7% percent revenue growth over what it recorded in Q4 2020, a detail that Lyft pointed to as a sign that the company was on the road to recovery. Lyft said ridership also improved some 8% from the previous quarter.

The company remains deeply unprofitable, despite its partial recovery. Lyft reported a net loss of $427.3 million in the first quarter, a 7.3% worsening from the $398.1 million net loss it recorded during the same period last year. Those losses included $180.7 million of stock-based compensation and related payroll tax expenses and $128.0 million related to changes to the liabilities for insurance required by regulatory agencies attributable to historical periods.

Despite the losses, Lyft executives said they were buoyed by stronger rider demand, which has picked up in recent months.

The company also emphasized the sale of its self-driving unit called Level 5, which was announced last week. Lyft sold the autonomous vehicle unit to Toyota’s Woven Planet Holdings subsidiary for $550 million, the latest in a string of acquisitions spurred by the cost and lengthy timelines to commercialize autonomous vehicle technology. Uber also sold its self-driving tech, work that was once seen as existential to the ride-hailing game.

Lyft’s so-called Level 5 division will be folded into Woven Planet Holdings once the transaction closes in the third quarter of 2021. Lyft will receive $550 million in cash, with $200 million paid upfront. The remaining $350 million will be made in payments over five years. About 300 people from Lyft Level 5 will be integrated into Woven Planet. The Level 5 team, which in early 2020 numbered more than 400 people in the U.S., Munich and London, will continue to operate out of its office in Palo Alto, California.

Lyft reported $2.2 billion of unrestricted cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments at the end of the first quarter of 2021.

Considering the company’s quarter in aggregate it’s easy to make the bearish and bullish case regarding its performance. On the bearish side of things, Lyft is smaller, and losing even more money than it did in the year-ago period. And the road to recovery for its operations will prove winding as COVID-19 declines to fuck off, even in the face of rising global vaccination levels.

On the bullish side of things, the following chart from the Lyft earnings deck is perhaps the best single-image argument that could be made for Lyft’s recovery being deeply underway:

More when Uber reports its own Q1 2021 performance tomorrow.

SpaceX has launched 60 more of its Starlink internet broadband satellites — on ‘Star Wars Day,’ no less, and only five days after it launched the last batch. The company has now delivered 420 Starlink satellites since the beginning of March, a sum that SpaceX CEO and founder must not be aware of because he definitely would’ve tweeted about it by now if he was.

This launch took off from Cape Canaveral in Florida at 3:01 PM ET (12:01 PM PT), and used a re-used Falcon 9 booster that had flown 8 times previously. That booster also landed back on SpaceX’s floating drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean, tying the record for SpaceX’s reusable flight program in terms of flying resumed boosters, which it just set in March. This is the company’s 115th Falcon 9 launch so far.

SpaceX also shared updated figures around its Starlink consumer hardware, which is used to transmit and receive signal from the constellation for broadband service. The company has received “over half a million” pre-order reservations for its service so far, which includes advance deposits on the hardware.

That strong demand helps explain why there appears to be such a significant backlog in terms of fulfilling orders for Starlink. Customers looking to user the service can sign up via SpaceX’s website, and place a pre-order for the kit, which induces the Starlink receiver, a router, power supplies and mounting hardware for your home.

The service is available to beta customers in six countries thus far, including Australia, New Zealand, Mexico and the U.S. and Canada, but the goal is to continue to expand coverage to achieve near-global reach by the end of 2021 in terms of service availability, with a number of additional launches planned throughout the rest of the year.

Facebook unceremoniously confiscated Trump’s biggest social media megaphone months ago, but the former president might be poised to snatch it back.

Facebook’s Oversight Board, an external Supreme Court-like policy decision making group, will either restore Trump’s Facebook privileges or banish him forever on Wednesday. Whatever happens, it’s a huge moment for Facebook’s nascent experiment in outsourcing hard content moderation calls to an elite group of global thinkers, academics and political figures and allowing them to set precedents that could shape the world’s biggest social networks for years to come.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Trump’s suspension from Facebook in the immediate aftermath of the Capitol attack. It was initially a temporary suspension, but two weeks later Facebook said that the decision would be sent to the Oversight Board. “We believe the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in January.

Facebook’s VP of Global Affairs Nick Clegg, a former British politician, expressed hope that the board would back the company’s own conclusions, calling Trump’s suspension an “unprecedented set of events which called for unprecedented action.”

Trump inflamed tensions and incited violence on January 6, but that incident wasn’t without precedent. In the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man killed by Minneapolis police, President Trump ominously declared on social media “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” a threat of imminent violence with racist roots that Facebook declined to take action against, prompting internal protests at the company.

The former president skirted or crossed the line with Facebook any number of times over his four years in office, but the platform stood steadfastly behind a maxim that all speech was good speech, even as other social networks grew more squeamish.

In a dramatic address in late 2019, Zuckerberg evoked Martin Luther King Jr. as he defended Facebook’s anything goes approach. “In times of social turmoil, our impulse is often to pull back on free expression,” Zuckerberg said. “We want the progress that comes from free expression, but not the tension.” King’s daughter strenuously objected.

A little over a year later, with all of Facebook’s peers doing the same and Trump leaving office, Zuckerberg would shrink back from his grand free speech declarations.

In 2019 and well into 2020, Facebook was still a roiling hotbed of misinformation, conspiracies and extremism. The social network hosted thousands of armed militias organizing for violence and a sea of content amplifying QAnon, which moved from a fringe belief on the margins to a mainstream political phenomenon through Facebook.

Those same forces would converge at the U.S. Capitol on January 6 for a day of violence that Facebook executives characterized as spontaneous, even though it had been festering openly on the platform for months.

 

How the Oversight Board works

Facebook’s Oversight Board began reviewing its first cases last October. Facebook can refer cases to the board, like it did with Trump, but users can also appeal to the board to overturn policy decisions that affect them after they exhaust the normal Facebook or Instagram appeals process. A five member subset of its 20 total members evaluate whether content should be allowed to remain on the platform and then reach a decision, which the full board must approve by a majority vote. Initially, the Oversight Board was only empowered to reinstate content removed on Facebook and Instagram, but in mid-April began accepting requests to review controversial content that stayed up.

Last month, the Oversight Board replaced departing member Pamela Karlan, a Stanford professor and voting rights scholar critical of Trump, who left to join the Biden administration. Karlan’s replacement, PEN America CEO Susan Nossel, wrote an op-ed in the LA Times in late January arguing that extending a permanent ban on Trump “may feel good” but that decision would ultimately set a dangerous precedent. Nossel joined the board too late to participate in the Trump decision.

The Oversight Board’s earliest batch of decisions leaned in the direction of restoring content that’s been taken down — not upholding its removal. While the board’s other decisions are likely to touch on the full spectrum of frustration people have with Facebook’s content moderation preferences, they come with far less baggage than the Trump decision. In one instance, the Oversight Board voted to restore an image of a woman’s nipples used in the context of a breast cancer post. In another, the board decided that a quote from a famous Nazi didn’t merit removal because it wasn’t an endorsement of Nazi ideology. In all cases, the Oversight Board can issue policy recommendations, but Facebook isn’t obligated to implement them — just the decisions.

Befitting its DNA of global activists, political figures and academics, the Oversight Board’s might have ambitions well beyond one social network. Earlier this year, Oversight Board co-chair and former Prime Minister of Denmark Helle Thorning-Schmidt declared that other social media companies would be “welcome to join” the project, which is branded in a conspicuously Facebook-less way. (The group calls itself the “Oversight Board” though everyone calls it the “Facebook Oversight Board.”)

“For the first time in history, we actually have content moderation being done outside one of the big social media platforms,” Thorning-Schmidt declared, grandly. “That in itself… I don’t hesitate to call it historic.”

Facebook’s decision to outsource some major policy decisions is indeed an experimental one, but that experiment is just getting started. The Trump case will give Facebook’s miniaturized Supreme Court an opportunity to send a message, though whether the takeaway is that it’s powerful enough to keep a world leader muzzled or independent enough to strike out from its parent and reverse the biggest social media policy decision ever made remains to be seen.

If Trump comes back, the company can shrug its shoulders and shirk another PR firestorm, content that its experiment in external content moderation is legitimized. If the board doubles down on banishing Trump, Facebook will rest easy knowing that someone else can take the blowback this round in its most controversial content call to date. For Facebook, for once, it’s a win-win situation.

An issue every developer faces is dealing with problems on a live application without messing it up. In fact, in many companies such access is restricted. Cased, an early stage startup, has come up with a solution to provide a way to work safely with the live application.

Today, the company announced a $2.25 million seed round led by Founders Fund along with a group of prestigious technology angel investors. The company also announced that the product is generally available to all developers today for the first time. It’s worth noting that the funding actually closed last April, and they are just announcing it today.

Bryan Byrne, CEO and co-founder at Cased says he and his fellow co-founders, all of whom cut their teeth at GitHub, experienced this problem of working in live production environments first hand. He says that the typical response by larger companies is to build a tool in-house, but this isn’t an option for many smaller companies.

“We saw firsthand at GitHub how the developer experience gets more difficult over time, and it becomes more difficult for developers to get production work done. So we wanted to provide a developer friendly way to get production work done,” Byrne explained.

He said without proper tooling, it forces CTOs to restrict access to the production code, which in turn makes it difficult to fix problems as they arise in production environments. “Companies are forced to restrict access to production and restrict access to tools that developers need to work in production. A lot of the biggest tech companies invest in millions to deliver great developer experiences, but obviously smaller companies don’t have those resources. So we want to give all companies the building blocks they need to deliver a great developer experience out of the box,” he said.

This involves providing development teams with open access to production command line tools by adding logging and approval workflows to sensitive operations. That enables executives to open up access with specific rules and the ability to audit who has been accessing the production environment.

The company launched at the beginning of last year and the founders have been working with design partners and early customers prior to officially opening the site to the general public today.

They currently have five people including the 4 founders, but Byrne says that they have had a good initial reaction to the product and are in the process of hiring additional employees. He says that as they do, diversity and inclusion is a big priority for the founders, even as a very early stage company.

“It’s very prominent in our company handbook, so that we make sure we prioritize an inclusive culture from the very beginning because […] we know firsthand that if you don’t invest in that early, it can really hold you back as a company and as a culture. Culture starts from day one, for sure,” he said.

As part of that, the company intends to be remote first even post-pandemic, a move he believes will make it easier to build a diverse company.

“We will definitely be remote first. We believe that also helps with diversity and inclusion as you allow people to work from anywhere, and we have a lot of experience in leading remote first culture from our time at GitHub, so we began as a remote culture and we will continue to do that,” he said.