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Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

What a week, yeah? Instead of the news cycle slowing as the year races to a close, things are still as hot as ever. We have funding rounds big and small, IPOs, first-day extravaganza and more.

Luckily we had the whole crew around — Chris and Danny and Natasha and I. Here’s the rundown:

• Career Karma raised $10 million, and we have thoughts and concerns.
• Skyflow raised $17.5 million in an effort to try to get the Equity team to understand the nuances of different encryption types.
• Calm raised $75 million, which felt pretty reasonable given reports and its fundraising history.
• Squire tripled its valuation in a new round that included $45 million in equity capital along with some debt.’
• We also talked about the DoorDash and C3.ai IPO pops, where Airbnb priced, and who is coming next
• And we rounded off with what’s up with TikTok stars investing in tech startups. Danny was not a fan.

And that’s that! If you aren’t tired, have you even been paying attention?

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PDT and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

After pricing above its raised range last night, Airbnb opened this morning at $146 per share, up around 115% to kick off its life as a public company.

The company is now worth $158 per share. Using its IPO share count inclusive of shares reserved for underwriters, the company is worth $95.1 billion, but on a fully-diluted basis, including shares that could be exercised or awarded in the future, Airbnb is worth much more.

The home-sharing unicorn initially targeted $44 to $50 per share in its debut, later raising that range to $56 to $60 before pricing at at $68 per share. To open at such a premium is not shocking given how the debuts of DoorDash and C3.ai performed earlier in the week.

However, taken as a trio, the companies’ amped public debut are stoking concerns of mispriced IPOs and, at least in my head, public markets that are more enthusiastic than reasonable.¹

The explosive debuts of the enterprise AI company, the home-sharing giant and the food-delivery leader were not the first IPOs of 2020 to set off fireworks when trading began. Snowflake, another mega-debut, gained more than 100% in its first trading day, despite pricing above its own raised IPO price range.

What’s going on? Let’s use Snowflake as a prism through which we can figure it out. Lemonade, the Summer insurtech IPO, will also provide some useful guidance.

Was Snowflake underpriced?

When Snowflake’s IPO went out with a thunderclap, it was more ammunition for critics of the traditional public offering. The company and its private investors had done so much work to get Snowflake to the public markets, complaints seemed to go, and then some idiot bankers mispriced its debut by 100%, rewarding their clients and screwing the company? Awful!

So went the argument. However, as I wrote at the time, leaning on the work of Forbes’ excellent reporting, Snowflake’s CEO was not fully bought into the concept:

Alex Konrad at Forbes — a good chap, follow him on Twitter  here — caught up with Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman about the matter. He called the “chatter” that his company left money on the table “nonsense,” adding that he could have priced higher but that he “wanted to bring along the group of investors that [Snowflake] wanted, and [he] didn’t want to push them past the point where they really started to squeal.”

This is the “long-term investor” argument that you will hear on any call with a CEO on their IPO day. It goes like this: If you want long-term holders of the stock, you have to find a price that they will accept; that price may be different than what retail investors will pay when the company begins to trade. So, the gap, or pop, is fine as you are trading one thing for another.

The coronavirus pandemic accelerated America’s addiction to technology, and it’s making us sad, anxious and unproductive.

Companies like Facebook, TikTok and Snapchat earn more advertising revenue the more frequently we use their products. These firms use push notifications and personalized feeds to capture our attention, manipulate our emotions and influence our actions.

Business is good. Americans now spend more than five hours each day on their devices.

So what? As discussed in Netflix’s “The Social Dilemma,” tech firms will continue to follow their profit motive to capture our attention. Governments are no more likely to help manage unhealthy tech consumption than consumption of sugar or illegal drugs. We need to take control.

My perspective is as a former tech CEO and technology addict. The marketing platform I founded raised over $100 million, grew to 350 employees and sold to a private equity firm last year. Along the way I picked up some terrible tech habits; I checked email constantly and allowed push notifications to interrupt every in-person interaction.

My tech use hit rock bottom last year on a visit with family. I resolved to put down my phone and garden with my mom, who has advanced Parkinson’s and moves slowly and with intention.

I felt like an addict in withdrawal. My phone was like a magnet pulling me to check for missed work emails or breaking news. Tech overuse had rewired my brain, lowered the quality of everyday consciousness and prevented me from being present.

I stepped down as CEO of my company earlier this year. I’ve spent my time off learning about mindfulness, neuroplasticity and technology addiction. Most importantly, I developed a strategy for managing my tech use that’s made me happier and more productive.

Here’s what I learned.

Tech firms exploit our brains to capture our attention

In their quest for our attention, some tech firms target the oldest parts of our brain, what UCLA psychiatrist Daniel Siegel calls the downstairs brain. The downstairs brain includes your brainstem and limbic regions, which control innate reactions and impulses (fight or flight) and strong emotion (like anger and fear). In contrast, your upstairs brain, including your cerebral cortex, is where intricate mental processes take place, like thinking, imagining and planning.

The downstairs brain is reactive. It’s designed to protect us in emergencies; it can make quick judgements, hijack our consciousness and drive action through strong emotion. The downstairs brain is what is targeted by attention-seeking products. Headlines that make us feel outraged and TikTok notifications that make us feel reactive appeal to our downstairs brain.

Spending time in a reactive state rewires our brains

Our brains change with training. Research has shown that our brains are reprogrammed with the firing patterns of neurons. Our nervous system can be rewired and transformed through repetitive, focused attention or activity in a process called neuroplasticity.

Repetitive device usage is a perfect example of neuroplasticity at work. The more time we spend responding to push notifications, watching videos in infinite scroll or looking for social validation from social media, the more our brains will rewire to want the same.

Our addiction will get worse as firms get better at capturing attention

While many tech firms acknowledge problems from overusing their products, none will make radical changes needed to decrease their share of the attention profit pool. If they did, someone else would eat their lunch.

These firms are selling us sugary drinks. The taste is improving exponentially and the sweetest drinks haven’t been invented yet. The more we drink, the harder it gets to stop. We need to take control of our consumption and habits — we need to follow a technology diet — or we will suffer the mental equivalent of morbid obesity.

We can can rewire our brains to be more productive and happier by changing our habits

If we think of technology consumption as an analog to food consumption, tech products fall into four food groups based on the quality of information and method of delivery. Content quality is important: Some content is valuable (e.g., MIT’s online courseware) or critical (work email), while most is not useful (TikTok).

The delivery model is also important. Healthy platforms give agency to the user and allow us to pull content that’s useful when we need it. Conversely, harmful platforms often rely on push, sending us information that’s often not useful at a time when we’re doing something else. Based on my experience, here are three steps we can take to implement a tech diet:

1. Eliminate products that reinforce your downstairs brain (low-quality content pushed to you)

Willpower is finite. If we don’t want sugary drinks, don’t keep them in the house. We keep the most distracting applications ever developed within arms reach at all times. These applications prey on our downstairs brain, which hijacks our better intentions and delivers negative value for most people. I believe our best defense is abstinence; we shouldn’t use these apps.

Tip: I use Apple’s Content Restrictions on the iPhone and MacBook. I added the obvious offenders: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and some specific to me, which includes Zillow, StreetEasy and NYPost. My spouse has the override code. I can break it if needed, but the process is hard enough that it doesn’t enter everyday consciousness.

2. Consume more products that reinforce your upstairs brain (high-quality content that’s available when we need it)

Good content expands our knowledge and skills and may contribute to rewiring our upstairs brain in a way that adds to our empathy, imagination and mindfulness.

Consuming good content is rewarding but effortful. It requires uninterrupted focus. Unlike sugary beverages, which we’re wired to consume subconsciously, leafy greens have to be consumed intentionally.

Tip: Make a list of your favorite leafy greens. For me, this includes Kindle, Feedly, tech periodicals and my favorite curation platforms: HackerNews and Product Hunt. Calm, one of several booming mindfulness apps, also makes the list. These are the only apps on my home screen, which encourages me to use them more often. Like a food diet, I set attainable goals for “good” consumption and monitor my progress.

I recommend fasting on technology periodically; I leave my phone at home for walks with my son and dinner with friends. I also recommend nontech activities that promote upstairs brain rewiring like an outdoor hike or learning to play an instrument.

3. Redesign consumption patterns for productivity tools

Email is required for most people. It has the potential to make us productive. But the average message quality is low, and the always-on, high frequency, push-by-default design prevents us from doing our best work.

Tip: I’ve turned off notifications on everything that’s not meant for urgent or timely messages (e.g., texts, Lyft, Tovala oven). Boomerang’s Chrome Extension can be set up to deliver all of your emails every hour on the hour. Batch processing email every hour dramatically reduces the volume of interruption without impacting my responsiveness.

We live in relative abundance, with food, goods and security that would make even our recent ancestors envious. But abundance doesn’t make us happy; we’re the least happy on record. We seem to be living in a collective state of downstairs brain, a continuous adult temper tantrum focused on strong feelings, emotion and impulsiveness.

But there’s hope.

As individuals, I found that even a few months of technology dieting helped me become less impulsive and more mindful. As employees, we can stop working for companies that profit from the attention economy. As managers, we can insist that our teams turn off their devices at night, turn off their Slack notifications and take real vacations. As parents, we can help our children develop healthy consumption patterns.

Collective action — and rewiring of our brains — could change the course of our politics and our ability to collaborate and solve the most important challenges of the 21st century.

American innovation dominates the attention economy. It’s time for American innovation to dominate the way we use technology.

A group of industry heavyweights, including Google, Box, Citrix, Dell, Imprivata, Intel, Okta, RingCentral, Slack, VMware and Zoom, today announced the launch of the moderncomputing.com.

The mission for this new alliance is to “drive ‘silicon-to-cloud’ innovation for the benefit of enterprise customers — fueling a differentiated modern computing platform and providing additional choice for integrated business solutions.”

Whoever wrote this mission statement was clearly trying to see how many words they could use without actually saying something.

Here is what the alliance is really about: even though the word Chrome never appears on its homepage and Google’s partners never quite get to mentioning it either, it’s all about helping enterprises adopt Chrome and Chrome OS. “The focus of the alliance is to drive innovation and interoperability in the Google Chrome ecosystem, increasing options for enterprise customers and helping to address some of the biggest tech challenges facing companies today,” a Google spokesperson told me.

I’m not sure why it’s not called the Chrome Enterprise Alliance, but Modern Computing Alliance may just have more of a ring to it. This also explains why Microsoft isn’t part of it, though this is only the initial slate of members and others may follow at some point in the future.

Led by Google, the alliance’s focus is on bringing modern web apps to the enterprise, with a focus on performance, security, identity management and productivity. And all of that, of course, is meant to run well on Chrome and Chrome OS and be interoperable.

“The technology industry is moving towards an open, heterogeneous ecosystem that allows freedom of choice while integrating across the stack. This reality presents both a challenge and an opportunity,” Google’s Chrome OS VP John Solomon writes today.

As enterprises move to the cloud, building better web applications and maybe even Progressive Web Applications that work just as well as native solutions is obviously a noble goal and it’s nice to see these companies work together. Given the pandemic, all of this has taken on a new urgency now, too. The plan is for the alliance to release products — though it’s unclear what form these will take — in the first half of 2021. Hopefully, these will play nicely with any browser. A lot of these ‘alliances’ fizzle out quite quickly, so we’ll keep an eye on what happens here.

Bonus: the industry has a long history of alliance like these. Here’s a fun 1991 story about a CPU alliance between Intel, IBM, MIPS and others.

Spotify said it has reset an undisclosed number of user passwords after blaming a vulnerability in its systems for exposing private account information to its business partners.

In a data breach notification filed with the California attorney general’s office, the music streaming giant said the data exposed “may have included email address, your preferred display name, password, gender, and date of birth only to certain business partners of Spotify.” The company did not name the business partners, but added that Spotify “did not make this information publicly accessible.”

Spotify said the vulnerability existed as far back as April 9 but wasn’t discovered until November 12. But like most data breach notices, Spotify did not say what the vulnerability was or how user account data became exposed.

“We have conducted an internal investigation and have contacted all of our business partners that may have had access to your account information to ensure that any personal information that may have been inadvertently disclosed to them has been deleted,” the letter read.

Spotify also said that the company has “no reason to believe that any unauthorized use of your information has or will occur,” suggesting the incident is different from a separate incident involving Spotify user passwords disclosed last month, which prompted Spotify to also reset user passwords.

Security researchers found an unsecured database, likely operated by hackers, allegedly containing around 300,000 stolen user passwords. The database was probably used to launch credential stuffing attacks, in which lists of stolen passwords are matched against different websites that use the same password.

A spokesperson for Spotify did not immediately respond to questions about the incident. We’ll update if we hear back.

Cityblock Health, a company that provides healthcare services to low-income communities, is now commanding a high-priced valuation of over $1 billion after venture capitalists poured $160 million into the company.

The round was led by new investor General Catalyst with participation from crossover investor Wellington Management and support from major existing investors, including Kinnevik AB, Maverick Ventures, Thrive Capital, Redpoint Ventures, and more, according to a statement from the company.

Cityblock works with community caregivers to work with residents to provide primary care, behavioral health and other services to address social determinants of health, in person and… increasingly… through virtual consultations.

The company first spun out of Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs in 2017 and initially partnered with EmblemHealth. By relying primarily on licensed clinical social workers, community health partners and a network of specialized practice clinicians and doctors to provide basic primary care and supporting health services, Cityblock believes it can drive down the costs of healthcare.

Some 70,000 patients use Cityblock services in four major U.S. cities, the company said.

To date, Cityblock has raised $300 million.

The company said in a statement that the new funding will be used to support Cityblock’s national expansion in caring for Medicaid and dually-eligible communities, to attract and onboard talent across its product, engineering, data science, clinical, and business operations, to launch new service lines, and to continue investing in its proprietary technology platform, Commons.

Twitter is partnering with Snap to bring tweets into Snapchat with a native integration that both companies hope will push users away from screenshots and towards more interactive embeds.

Twitter users who are also logged into the Snapchat app on their phone will be able to access the functionality by tapping share on a particular tweet and navigating to the Snapchat icon where they’ll be able to share and react or comment on a Twitter post and send it to a friend or share on their story. The functionality will notably only work for tweets from public accounts, not protected ones.

The feature is rolling out on iOS for now, with Android integration “coming soon.”

Given how much content across Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and Reddit originates from Twitter, it’s surprising that this functionality is arriving so deep into Twitter’s life as a company. They’ve long had a web embed integration which has allowed reporters to embed tweets into stories, but when it came to sharing on social media, Twitter’s strategy has deferred to the un-trackable and un-monetizable screenshot.

This has been low-hanging product rollout for Twitter which will likely be able to coax some non-Twitter users to enjoy content straight from the source, something the company has been vaguely alluding to in marketing campaigns over the years but is just now approaching with a direct integration into another company’s platform.

With Twitter now starting to roll out its Stories product Fleets to users, the company likely feels as though they have more feature familiarity to bring new users onboard from Snap who might not have experimented with the platform previously.

The truth is there aren’t a ton of integrations across social media channels, screen recordings and screen shots tell one platform’s story in an imperfect way on another’s. This integration comes as a result of updates made to Snap’s Snap Kit API and a particular feature called Creative Kit. Snap says that Spotify, Reddit, SoundCloud, Sendit, YOLO and GOAT have also created integrations that allow content from those apps to be shared across Snapchat.

Twitter didn’t rule out the expansion of this feature to other platforms in the future.

“This agreement with Snap was focused on this feature,” a Twitter spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We would love to partner with other platforms to enable people to share Tweets more widely. We hope this will be the first of many integrations of its kind.”

DoNotPay, the consumer advice company that started out helping people easily challenge parking tickets, has come a long way since it launched. It’s expanded to help consumers cancel memberships, claim compensation for missed flights, and even sue companies for small claims. In the early days of the pandemic, the startup helped its users file for unemployment, where many state benefit sites crashed.

Now the so-called “robot lawyer” has a new trick. The startup now lets you request information from U.S. federal and state government agencies under the Freedom of Information Act.

FOIA allows anyone to request information from the government, with some exceptions. But ask anyone with experience in filing FOIAs (hello!) and they can tell you that requesting data requires skill and practice to avoid having the request thrown out for being too broad, or not being specific enough. And when you do eventually get something back, it might not be what you expect.

That’s where DoNotPay wants to help. The new feature guides you through how to file a request for information, as well as wrangle the fee waivers and option to expedite processing — which is up to you to convince the government department why you should get the information for free and faster than regular FOIA requests. (In reality, the FOIA system is massively under-resourced, and responses can take months or years to get back.) After asking you a series of questions and what you want to request, DoNotPay generates a formal FOIA request letter using your answers and files it to the government agency on your behalf.

Do Not Pay’s website. (Screenshot: TechCrunch)

DoNotPay’s founder and chief executive Joshua Browder said he’s hoping the new feature can help consumers “beat bureaucracy.”

“Hundreds of users have requested a FOIA product, because the government makes it deliberately difficult and bureaucratic to exercise these rights,” Browder told TechCrunch.

Browder said that DoNotPay “would not exist” without FOIA laws. “When we got started appealing parking tickets, we used previous requests to see the top reasons why parking tickets were dismissed,” he said. Browder said he’s hoping the feature will help consumers uncover more injustices — just like with parking tickets — to feed his product with more features. “The overall strategy is to use any interesting FOIA data to build great new DoNotPay products,” he said.

DoNotPay raised $12 million in its Series A earlier this year, led by investment firm Coatue Management, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, and and Felicis Ventures. The startup has just three employees, including Browder, and is valued at about $80 million, the company confirmed.

The FOIA filing feature is free for academics and journalists, and is included as part of the company’s subscription service of $3 per month for everyone else.

In North America, shoppers are increasingly turning to online orders to buy their products.

National postal services have seen a significant uptick in parcel volumes; so many that the number matches those sent during the Christmas surge — minus the wrapping paper. But although the pandemic has acted as a catalyst for online shopping, it’s part of a continuing trend.

The online sector has slowly been eating up the percentage of sales from retail stores. Virtual shopping’s total share of the global market has doubled between 2015 and 2019, with the U.S. Department of Commerce reporting that online retail sales overtook general merchandise stores in the country for the first time in February 2019.

As customers have turned to their web browsers, shop vacancies are on the rise around the world, with big brands deserting even New York’s Fifth Avenue.

The high street has been forced into a period of transformation. Now, forward-thinking companies are finding ways to adapt.

New realities in retail

In 2019, Charles Bergh, the CEO of Levi’s, proclaimed that stock sizes for clothes would be gone within a decade. Body scanning and made-to-order items would replace the letters and numbers found on the labels of clothes, and products would no longer be found by scrolling through images or browsing shop floors. Instead, customers would select their products — a pair of shoes, a new coffee table, a snapback hat — and customize it to their own specifications. These clothes or items would be tried on or placed within a virtual scan of their room, all without leaving the couch.

Using 3D modeling and augmented reality (AR) — a technology that places computer-generated images onto the real world — Bergh’s vision is already possible.

One of the first sectors to take advantage of the nascent technology was the furniture industry. Leading retailers like Wayfair and IKEA invested early into 3D and AR, allowing customers to physically visualize their products inside their spaces. For Shrenik Sadalgi, the director of Research and Development at Wayfair Next — the arm of the furniture giant that uses technology to make shopping more seamless — adding the two technologies to its sales arsenal was an obvious choice for the company.

Wayfair’s customers can take advantage of two AR experiences. The first, View in Room 3D, lets users place an accurately sized piece of furniture into their room, twist and move it in the space, and even walk around it in real time. Room Planner 3D goes further, allowing customers to visualize the piece of furniture in their home even when they’re on the go.

“We’re letting customers capture the space first,” Sadalgi says of Room Planner 3D. “So you take a photo, and that photo is a very piece of rich information about your room. At a later point in time — maybe you’re on the subway, or maybe you’re at a friend’s house or whatever — you can pull up your room, and then you can add furniture as if you were there. So you don’t have to actually be in the space to plan your space.”

It’s not just homeware companies that have embraced the digital option. Augmented reality has found a natural fit in the beauty industry, and like major furniture retailers, bigger brands have been using the tech for several years. The experiences they offer continue to be refined as the technology improves. Leading players like L’Oréal, Sephora, Procter & Gamble, and more have been honing their version of the AR over time, offering customers a more interactive shopping experience.

For Lynda Pak, senior vice president at beauty powerhouse Estée Lauder, AR lets shoppers gain a familiarity with many of the products within its portfolio of 29 brands.

“AR is becoming a way for a consumer to be able to engage with a beauty advisor or makeup artist,” she says. “It may be tied in with, let’s say, a digital consultation. But if the consumer wants no live consultation whatsoever, [they] can just try the various shades on their own as well.

“The AR experiences that we have right now are really around virtual try-on for makeup,” she continues. “That encompasses eye, it encompasses foundation, it encompasses lip, and we also have skin diagnostic capabilities. The calibration that we’ve done is able to note if you’ve got some dry patches or red flares, or if you’re looking a little tired — it will highlight some of those skin concerns. When we go into haircare, we’re able to view the scalp and the condition of the hair close to the scalp, as well as further down to the ends. You’re able to see what you look like as a blonde, of what you may look like with an ombre. It’s a great way to get a sense of what the shade will look like.”

In both of these industries, as well as a number of others that rely on customization or fit, consumers are beginning to shop differently. Companies like Facebook have invested heavily in online transactions, encouraging more purchases in the digital realm.

Instagram now boasts its Shopping and Checkout options to allow businesses to advertise and complete transactions through the app, offering an alternative to website- or brand app-based shopping platforms — all with a potential customer base of over a billion. As buyers continue to explore new ways to make their shopping decisions, brands are increasingly focusing on how they present their products digitally.

Making the digital feel physical

Changes in retail have always been tied to developments in technology. The advent of the postal service inspired mail-order catalogs. Televisions created shopping channels. The internet ushered in the possibility of online shopping, and mobile phones — with their cameras — have been the launchpad for AR and 3D. Each leap creates more opportunity for shoppers to see the product how it really is — as if it was already on their body or in their homes.

Given how reliant many people have become on rideshare drivers and especially delivery workers during the pandemic, Uber is pushing for them to get priority access to the COVID-19 vaccine. Today, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi sent a letter to all 50 governors asking them to prioritize giving drivers and delivery workers the vaccine as essential workers.

“Over the last nine months, these workers have been a lifeline to their communities,” Khosrowshahi wrote in the letter. “They have transported healthcare workers to hospitals, delivered food to people socially distancing at home, and helped local restaurants stay in business.”

In the letter, Khosrowshahi argues that the work of drivers and delivery people has become essential. That’s why Uber wants them to get the vaccine “quickly, easily and for free,” he wrote in the letter. Additionally, Uber has offered to help share information about the vaccine and encouraging those who are eligible to get vaccinated.

“After nine months on the frontlines keeping their communities running, we are asking governors in all 50 states to prioritize drivers and delivery people for early vaccine access,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in a statement to TechCrunch. “Uber stands ready to do everything we can—leveraging our technology, our logistical expertise and our resources—to help protect the people working on our platform and bring vaccines to the public as quickly and efficiently as possible.”

Khosrowshahi’s letter to governors is an addition to the one Uber sent one to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that advocated for the inclusion of non-health essential workers in the priority phase of distribution for the vaccine.

Uber’s advocating on behalf of workers comes amid an ongoing battle around how to classify rideshare drivers and delivery workers. Uber has long argued that its workers are not employees, while many gig workers have argued they are misclassified as independent contractors and should be entitled to the many labor rights that come with the employee classification.