Category: UNCATEGORIZED

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

This week, Alex is on a much deserved vacation (but not from Twitter, it seems) so Danny Crichton and I chatted through the news and happenings of the week. Somehow we winded our way through the latest tech controversies, gave Chris Wallace a shout out, and ended with some funding rounds. I’ll be out next week so don’t miss me too much, but expect the entire Equity team to be back full-speed in mid-October. Thanks, as always, to our producer Chris Gates for his patience and diligence.

Now, onto a sneak peek of what we got into:

•  Moderation continues to be the root of all problems. We got into the anti-semitic comments that were spewed on Clubhouse, and what that means for the future of the audio-only platform. As Danny so eloquently put it: if Clubhouse is having moderation problems even with an exclusive invite-only user base, the problem will grow.
•  We also talked about Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong’s blog post, which triggered a debate between us on whether tech companies can even choose to not be political. For the record, Black Lives Matter is not a political statement. It’s a human statement. Read this op-ed for more.
•  I wrote a piece about how a new program wants to be the Y Combinator for emerging fund managers. The whole “YC for X” model usually makes me roll my eyes, but listen to hear why I’m actually optimistic and bullish on programs like these taking off within tech.
• Silver Lake added a $2 billion ‘long-term’ hedge fund backed by Abu Dhabi to its tech finance toolkit. The strategy is a signal to privately-backed startups, and potentially a slap in the face to SoftBank.
• For a quick edtech note, I caught up with Duolingo’s CEO this week in one of his rare press interviews. Luis Von Ahn explained the app’s surge in bookings, and there’s one key metric we pull out to noodle over.
• Danny explained Gusto’s latest product launch with, wait for it, Gusto. In all seriousness, he brings up interesting points about the future of fin-tech feeling more full-suite, and free.
• Funding round chatter continued when we unpacked Lee Fixel’s latest investment in India’s Inshorts
• Finally, we ended with LiquidDeath,  which is not the name of a drinking game, but instead the name of a startup that has successfully attracted millions in venture capital for mountain water.

And with that, we will be back next week. Vote like your life depends on it, because it does.

While the overall cloud infrastructure market is booming having reached $30 billion last quarter worldwide, Oracle is struggling with market share in the low single digits. It is hoping that the Zoom and TikTok deals can jump start those numbers, but trying to catch the market leaders Amazon, Microsoft and Google, never mind several other companies ahead of it, is going to take a lot more than a couple of brand name customers.

By now, you know Oracle and TikTok were joined together in unholy acquisition matrimony last month in the acquisition equivalent of a shotgun wedding. In spite of that, Oracle founder and chief technology officer Larry Ellison gushed in a September 19th press release about how TikTok had “chosen” his company’s cloud infrastructure service. The statement also indicated that this “choice” was influenced by Zoom’s decision to move some percentage of its workloads to Oracle’s infrastructure cloud earlier this year.

The mechanics of the TikTok deal aside, the question is how big an effect will these two customers have on the company’s overall cloud infrastructure market share. We asked a couple of firms who closely watches all things cloud.

John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research Group, wasn’t terribly optimistic that they would have much material impact on moving the market share needle for the database giant. “Oracle’s cloud infrastructure services growth has been consistently below overall IaaS and PaaS market growth rates so its market share has [actually] been nudging downwards. Zoom may be a good win but it is unlikely to move the needle too much — and remember Zoom also buys cloud services from AWS,” Dinsdale told TechCrunch.

As for TikTok, Dinsdale like the rest of us wasn’t clear how that deal would ultimately play out, but he says even with both companies in the fold, it wasn’t going to shift market share as much as Oracle might hope. “Hypothetically, even if Zoom/TikTok helped Oracle increase its cloud infrastructure service revenues 50% over 12 months, which would be a real stretch, its market share would still be nearer to 2% than 3%. This compares with Google at 9%, Microsoft 18% and AWS 33%,” Dinsdale said.

He did point out that the company’s SaaS business is much stronger. “Broadening the scope a little to other cloud services, Oracle’s SaaS growth is running roughly in line with overall market SaaS market growth so market share is steady. Oracle’s share of the total enterprise SaaS market is running at around 6%, though if you drill down to the ERP segment it is obviously doing much better than that,” he said.

Canalys, another firm that follows the cloud infrastructure market says their numbers tell a similar story for Oracle. While it’s doing well in Saas with 7.8% market share, it’s struggling in IaaS/PaaS.

“For IaaS/PaaS, Oracle Cloud is at 1.9% for Q2 2020 and that isn’t moving much. The top 3 providers are AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, who have 30.8%, 20.2% and 6.2% respectively,” Blake Murray from Canalys told TechCrunch.

It’s worth keeping in mind that Google hired Diane Greene five years ago with the hope of accelerating its cloud infrastructure business. Former Oracle exec Thomas Kurian replaced her two years ago and the company’s market share still hasn’t reached double digits in spite of a period of big overall market growth, showing how much of a challenge it is to move the needle in a significant way.

Another big company, IBM bought Red Hat two years ago for $34 billion with an eye towards improving its cloud business, and while Red Hat has continued to do well, It does not seem to have much impact on the company’s overall cloud infrastructure market share, which has been superseded by Alibaba in fourth place, according to Synergy’s numbers. Both companies are in the single digits.

Image Credits: Synergy Research

All that means, even with these two clients, the company still has a long way to go to be relevant in the cloud infrastructure arena in the near term. What’s unknown is if this new business will help act as lures for other new business over time, but for now it’s going to take a lot more than a couple of good deals to be relevant — and as Google and IBM have demonstrated, it’s extremely challenging to gain chunks of market share.

“Gradually, then suddenly.” Hemingway’s words succinctly capture the recent history of tech in Latin America. After more than a decade of gradual progress made through fits and starts, tech in Latin America finally hit its stride and has been growing at an accelerating pace in recent years.

The region now boasts 17 unicorns up from zero just three years ago. For the first time, the most valuable company in the region isn’t a state-controlled oil or mining behemoth, but rather e-commerce platform MercadoLibre.

We are only in the first chapter of this long story, however. When we compare the penetration of tech companies in Latin America to both developed and developing markets, we estimate that the market could grow nearly tenfold over the next decade. The value to be unlocked will be measured in trillions of dollars and the lives improved in the hundreds of millions.

Our venture capital fund, Atlantico, conducts a thorough annual analysis of market data from Latin America in what we call the Latin America Digital Transformation Report. The report consists of hundreds of data-rich slides based off of original studies, surveys and models constructed from a combination of public and proprietary data shared by many of the region’s leading tech companies. This year, for the first time, we have decided to make the report public and here we highlight some of the findings from this year.

Global venture capitalists, the likes of Sequoia, Benchmark and a16z have planted their flags through key investments in companies like Nubank, Wildlife and Loft. Those are not isolated incidents – venture capital investments in the region have nearly doubled annually for the last three years according to the Latin American Venture Capital Association (LAVCA). In order to understand what investors are seeing in the region, we analyzed the market through a simple framework we apply throughout our report.

The starting point for this framework is the socioeconomic foundation in place. The context in which transformation occurs is important in shaping its possible outcome. The same ingredients applied in different contexts and time periods will produce very different results. Thus, we believe that Latin America is unique globally, and the types of companies that will flourish (and to what extent) will be different than in other parts of the world. Trying to shoehorn foreign business models and products is unlikely to yield good results.

In the case of Latin America, it’s key to remember the region boasts a population twice that of the United States and a GDP half that of China’s (but similar on a per capita basis). In short: Latin America is big, a central factor that has the power to attract capital and talent. However, also critical to note is that economic inequality is severe. While a quarter of the region’s population lives in poverty, the wealthy in Mexico City and São Paulo enjoy living standards in line with their peers in New York and London.

This unique mix of large opportunity and critical problems waiting to be solved has provided fertile ground for the gig economy to flourish. Case-in-point: Brazil is Uber’s largest market globally in volume of rides, with São Paulo its largest city. Rappi, a major food delivery player in the region, valued at over $3 billion, grew its sales by 113% over the first five months of the pandemic. When taken together, the largest ride-hailing and food-delivery services in Brazil are already the largest private employer in Brazil, a formidable contribution to reducing high unemployment.

When we track technology company value as a percent of the economy (tech company market cap as a % of GDP) we clearly see that Latin America, at 2.2% penetration, has a ways to go. Our estimate is that it is 10 years behind China (at 27% penetration), which itself is five years behind current U.S. levels (39% penetration).

Image Credits: Atlantico

However, it is important to note that Latin America is making up for lost time. This metric for tech company penetration or share has been growing on average at 65% per year since 2003. In comparison, the growth in U.S. tech company penetration has grown at 11% annually in the same period, while China’s has expanded at 40%.

Image Credits: Atlantico

Drivers of digital transformation

Within the socioeconomic context of the region, we advance to looking at the three drivers of change in our framework: people, capital and regulation.

On the people front, the greater visibility of successful role models has catalyzed a desire to follow entrepreneurial footsteps. People like Mike Krieger (co-founder of Instagram), Marcos Galperin (founder/CEO of Mercado Libre) and Henrique Dubugras (founder/co-CEO of Brex) have shown that local talent can go on to build global companies.

In a survey we conducted with nearly 1,700 college students from the top universities in Brazil, 26% of students voiced a desire to work at startups or big tech companies. A whopping 39% expressed plans to start a company in the future, that number rising to 60% when we consider only computer science students. As more and more of the region’s top graduates flock to tech, it gives us confidence in the accelerating growth of the sector over many years to come.

Image Credits: Atlantico (opens in a new window)

On the capital front, the growth of venture funding in the region has been frequently written about. Last year, it hit a peak of $4.6 billion after doubling from the year before. However, what perhaps is more surprising is that despite this rapid growth, we are still far from the ceiling. When we view venture capital investments as a proportion of GDP, we see Latin America as only one-seventh of the U.S. level and a quarter of the level in India.

Following a particularly dark and vivid display of the threats to the 2020 U.S. election during Tuesday’s first presidential debate, Facebook has further clarified its new rules around election-related ads.

Facebook is now expanding its political advertising rules to disallow any ads that “[seek] to delegitimize the outcome of an election” including “calling a method of voting inherently fraudulent or corrupt, or using isolated incidents of voter fraud to delegitimize the result of an election.”

Facebook Director of Product Management Rob Leathern, who leads the company’s business integrity team, announced the changes on Twitter.

Facebook says it will also not allow ads that discourage users from voting, undermine vote-by-mail or other lawful voting methods, suggest voter fraud is widespread, threaten safe voting through false health claims and ads that suggest the vote is invalid because results might not be immediately known on election night.

Both Twitter and Facebook recently issued new guidelines on how they will handle claims of election victory prior to official results, though Facebook’s rules appear to only apply to those claims if they’re made in advertising. We’ve asked Facebook for clarification about how those claims will be handled outside of ads, on a candidate’s normal account.

While Twitter opted to no longer accept political advertising across the board, Facebook is instead tweaking its rules about what kinds of political ads it will allow and when. Facebook previously announced that it would no longer accept ads about elections, social issues or politics in the U.S. after October 27, though political ads that ran before that date will be allowed to continue.

Facebook is already grappling with a deluge of attacks on the integrity of November’s U.S. election originating with President Trump and his supporters. During Tuesday night’s debate, Trump again cast doubt about voting by mail (a system already trusted and in use nationwide in the form of absentee ballots) and declined to commit to accepting election results in the event that he loses.

While the unique circumstances of the pandemic are leading to logistical challenges, voting through the mail is not new. A handful of states including Colorado and Oregon already conducted elections through the mail and vote-by-mail is just a scaled-up version of the absentee voting systems already in place nationwide.

On Wednesday, President Trump sowed conspiratorial ideas about defective ballots that were sent out in New York state as a result of vendor error. The state will reissue the ballots, but Trump seized on the incident as evidence that vote by mail is a “scam” — a claim that evidence does not bear out.

Trump’s attacks on the U.S. election are an unprecedented challenge for social platforms but also one for the nation as a whole, which has never in modern times seen the peaceful transfer of executive power threatened by a sitting president.

Opportunity alert! We’re just five short days away from TC Sessions: Mobility 2020, a two-day event focused on building the future of transportation. Thousands of attendees from around the world will be looking for the latest technologies and up-and-coming startups. Will they find your up-and-coming startup?

The answer is a resounding yes — if you buy an Early Stage Startup Exhibitor Package. Join more than 40 other early-stage startups exhibiting in our expo area and plant your company in the path of the influencers who can help drive your business forward. Expand your network and build sustainable relationships that can provide long-lasting benefits.

Deadline Alert! Act now because exhibitor package sales end tomorrow, October 2, at 11:59 p.m. (PT).

Let’s look at just some of the benefits that come from exhibiting at TC Sessions: Mobility. It’s a “Field of Dreams” moment — if you exhibit, they will come. We’re talking media hunting for their next great story, investors who want to pack their portfolio pipeline, founders looking for partnerships, brilliant engineers eager for employment and, of course, potential customers.

Exhibiting lets you present your pitch decks, schedule demos, start conversations and see where they lead. Add it all together and you get invaluable exposure, increased brand recognition and infinite opportunity.

“TC Sessions Mobility offers several big benefits. First, networking opportunities that result in concrete partnerships. Second, the chance to learn the latest trends and how mobility will evolve. Third, the opportunity for unknown startups to connect with other mobility companies and build brand awareness.” — Karin Maake, senior director of communications at FlashParking.

Want even more exposure? We’ve got you covered. Every exhibiting startup will get five minutes to pitch live in a pitch session. Think of it: you — strutting your stuff in front of influential mobility movers, shakers and startup dream makers from around the world. Warm up your pitching arm, folks. It’s gonna be a wild ride.

TC Sessions: Mobility 2020 takes place October 6-7, but your opportunity to exhibit in the expo comes to a screeching halt tomorrow, October 2 at 11:59 p.m. (PT). Don’t waste another minute. Secure your Early Stage Startup Exhibitor Package now and get ready to fast-track opportunity.

In case you missed it: On Monday, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong wrote a company blog post titled “Coinbase is a mission focused company” which drew both praise and critique that has continued throughout the week. Personally, I wasn’t terribly impressed.

I limited my reaction on Twitter to one retweet, a couple of replies and some likes. But on Tuesday, a journalist asked if I had any comment to contribute to a piece she’s writing on the matter, so I tried to articulate a comment in one or two lines. The next thousand-ish words is what I ended up with.

This is such a sensitive, nuanced and personal topic, and I wouldn’t want to be irresponsible by making a quick off-handed remark or not taking enough into consideration.

However, I think it’s so important, it’d be irresponsible not to say something when asked.

I’d like to think I understood the intent — that Brian wants to ensure that Coinbase is inclusive of people who hold different views than what’s assumed to be progressive in the tech sector (or elsewhere) and avoid creating a workplace that is divided and too “distracted” (his word) by political causes or social activism.

However, what he’s really only done is highlight his tremendous position of privilege. Privilege doesn’t mean that he hasn’t struggled or hasn’t worked hard at being CEO of his company or in life. It simply means he thinks social activism can be a “distraction.” It means he thinks it’s a distraction to think about human rights and whether what’s happening around us is just or not.

It means he doesn’t wake up worrying about how institutional racism or systemic oppression might affect him. It means he doesn’t relate to the feeling that he could be the next driver to be unjustifiably stopped and searched, asked to get out of his car (or worse) for a broken taillight or verbally ridiculed or assaulted for someone else’s assumptions about his sexual orientation. It means he doesn’t think the rise of white supremacy in America is going to affect or diminish his ability to “stay focused” on his company’s mission. It means he doesn’t have to go to work wondering if he’ll be pushed aside, undermined or spoken over by a male colleague.

Brian’s statement made me think back to conversations I had with some friends over the summer who said they weren’t going to watch “every single video” of police brutality in the U.S. relating to the Black Lives Matter protests. It’s possible that I was watching too much because it was only increasing my frustration and feelings of powerlessness to help or change things, but I also realized that my friends admitting that they’d stopped watching each new video was a luxury and a privilege for them.

They didn’t have to watch them — no one is required to — but they were able to switch off because the injustice and inequity of it all doesn’t burn in their minds. It doesn’t affect them personally. It doesn’t impact how they walk down the street or conduct themselves around law enforcement. They have the privilege of not ever imagining or worrying if the victims of police brutality happened to be their family or close friends or even people they might know.

Brian Armstrong’s call to not engage in political discourse via his platform and his position as a leader is a privilege whilst others are compelled out of concern and fear to speak up for themselves, others, and those who have softer or even no voices.

In the memo, he takes time to reiterate the fact that the company will “focus on the things that help us achieve our mission,” including sourcing job candidates from underrepresented backgrounds, reducing unconscious bias and fostering an environment where everyone is welcome regardless of background, sexual orientation, race, gender, age, etc. While I‘m glad to see him recognize these areas of focus, immediately after that section he goes on to say that Coinbase won’t engage on “broader societal issues” or advocacy for political causes. From where does he think the first set of principles emerged?!?

It seems outlandish to have to establish this, but it wasn’t always the case that sexual orientation, race, gender or age were awarded equal treatment in employment law. It was in my lifetime that women could be fired from work for being pregnant. It is precisely engaging in “broader societal issues” that brought about those points of legal fairness and equality — and those are incredibly vulnerable right now. How dare he say he’s willing to embrace and stand for what’s been established so far, but that there’s no reason to engage any further? What that tells me is that as far as he’s concerned, the debates and activism to date have achieved enough and the rest, now, is distraction.

That. Is. Privilege.

Obviously, I know Coinbase is Brian’s company, and therefore it’s fully his prerogative to lay out the “mission” and rules as he sees fit. But what bothers me is that he and others who are feeling emboldened to say they agree or even commend him for “being brave” enough for saying so won’t realize the extent of their privilege and may inadvertently walk back so much recent progress and positive dialogue in the tech sector and business more broadly. We’ve seen so much evidence in recent years that consumers and purchasing power gravitate toward brands and companies that articulate what they stand for.

No longer is it enough for brands to be likable or just upbeat. Their silence on social injustices is deafening. Their association with individuals who either contribute to or enable racism or oppression of people and groups is enough for customers to think twice about using them. Their public support of activism and human rights either in merchandise or TV advertisements drives up their stock price. As more and more products and services are increasingly commoditized, consumers have sought to align themselves with brands and products that reflect their ethos.

It was a free pass for too long for businesses and their leaders to say that they didn’t wade into politics. In recent years, for example, because of the U.K.-EU Brexit referendum, the 2016 U.S. presidential election, or other occasions, companies and brand values have been drawn out and exposed for good or bad. It would be a shame for consumers and all stakeholders to lose that trend.

I hope that investor shareholders and employees of companies where leaders might be asserting similar views of not wanting to get “distracted” by social action will help to demonstrate just how much impact can be achieved by dialogue and action.

People do their best work and form championship teams when they feel good about supporting their teammates and colleagues, not when they remain silent.

Google today announced a few updates to Live View, the augmented reality walking directions in its Google Maps app that officially launched last year. Live View uses your phone’s camera and GPS to tell you exactly where to go, making it a nice addition to the standard map-centric directions in similar applications.

The new features Google is introducing today include the ability to invoke Live View from the transit tab in Google Maps when you’re on a journey that includes multiple modes of transportations. Until now, the only way to see Live View was when were asking for pure walking directions.

Image Credits: Google

If you’re like me and perpetually disoriented after you exit a subway station in a new city (remember 2019, when we could still travel?), this is a godsend. And I admit that I often forget Live View exists. Adding it to multi-model directions may just get me to try it out more often since it is now more clearly highlighted in the app.

Google Maps can now also identify landmarks around you to give you better guidance and a clearer idea of where you are in a city. Think the Empire State Building in New York, for example.

Image Credits: Google

These new landmarks will be coming to Amsterdam, Bangkok, Barcelona, Berlin, Budapest, Dubai, Florence, Istanbul, Kuala Lumpur, Kyoto, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Milan, Munich, New York, Osaka, Paris, Prague, Rome, San Francisco, Sydney, Tokyo and Vienna, with more to follow.

If you’re a regular Live View user, you’ll know that the actual pin locations in this mode can sometimes be off. In hilly areas, the pin can often be hovering high above your destination, for example. Now, Google promises to fix this by using a combination of machine learning and better topographical maps to place the pin exactly where it’s supposed to be.

Also new is the ability to use Live View in combination with Google Maps’ location sharing feature. So when a friend shares their location with you, you can now see exactly where they are in Live View, too, and get directions to meet them.

Bullpen Capital, a now 10-year-old, venture fund in Menlo Park that focuses on what it calls post-seed investing — it backs startups that have already raised up to $5 million and “aren’t quite ready for a $10 million check but another $5 million would make them dangerous,” says firm cofounder Paul Martino — just closed its fifth fund with $130 million in capital commitments.

The firm also brought aboard a new general partner: Ann Lai, formerly of Binary Capital, a firm that has since closed its doors but where Lai, who has a PhD in engineering sciences from Harvard PhD, developed a thesis  around bringing in more diverse startups from both a startup and geographic perspective — work that, it turns out, is also a prime focus for Bullpen.

In a call with both Martino and Lai earlier this week, they pointed to the startup Hemster to illustrate how both Bullpen and Lai respectively think about startups, and why, soon after Lai brought the deal to Bullpen roughly a year ago, it knew it had found its newest GP.

Hemster was founded by a solo founder, who happens to be a woman (Allison Lee), who happens to be a first-time entrepreneur. In the traditional world of venture capital, that’s three knocks against the company.

What the company does — on-demand tailoring — doesn’t necessarily sound on its face like a venture-like bet, either. Martino admitted that his first reaction to Lai’s pitch was: Why would we fund this?

Yet what Lai saw, and Bullpen eventually did, too, is a company positioned well to seize on the continuing shift from offline to online shopping where all manner or technologies have tried to map body types in order to guarantee a better fit for customers but Hemster, by constructing data about customers and their preferred fit, could potentially develop a portable identify for individuals in the world of digital retail.

The company has already worked with True Religion and Michael Kors to test out its technology; if all goes well, it eventually partners with many other major retailers, and “if you like how something fits based on one alteration, you’re able to find that same fit irregardless of retailer,” said Lai.

Bullpen — which is also run by GPs Eric Wiesen and Duncan Davidson — thinks it has developed an ear for startups whose proposition is likely to be overlooked by other investors, and it’s pushing that narrative aggressively.

During our chat earlier this week, Martino also pointed to FanDuel, the gaming company that sprang from Edinburgh, Scotland, cofounded by husband and wife Nigel and Lesley Eccles. “Everyone overlooked it,” said Martino. “It was the wrong location and the wrong team. I can’t tell you how any firms [we approached as coinvestors who] said, ‘Categorically, 100% percent, no husband-and-wife teams.'”

The company eventually reached a valuation of $1 billion before selling for half that amount to the Dublin, Ireland-based bookmaker Paddy Power Betfair, since renamed Flutter Entertainment. While the exit reinforces Martino’s point, it should be noted that the story doesn’t have the happiest ending. Earlier this year, FanDuel’s founders filed a lawsuit against private equity investors KKR and Shamrock Capital of squeezing FanDuel’s founders, early employees,  and its early funders out of any interest in the sports gaming site following that sale.

A far newer investment that also underscores Bullpen’s appetite for the unconventional is Sisu Cosmetics, a nearly two-year-old, Ireland-based chain of cosmetic clinics that’s expanding into the U.S., and earlier this week announced $5.5 million in Series A funding led by Greycroft and Bullpen.

Bullpen’s funds have all been similar in size, backing roughly 25 startups each; Martino said to expect the same of the firm’s new fund, which will generally invest $2 million to $4 million into rounds that are $4 million to $6 million in size.

Lai — who settled a lawsuit against Binary’s cofounders earlier this year after alleging a culture of harassment at the firm, including a requirement that female job applicants submit headshots — will now be writing a quarter of those checks.

Asked if she wanted to comment about the somewhat famous case, she said she has long moved on from it.

Naj Austin, founder and CEO of subscription-based physical and digital community Ethel’s Club, is building Somewhere Good to be a one-stop shop for people of color. Beyond being a place for people of color to connect, it’s also about creating a safe space for folks to be their authentic selves.

“A lot of how we’re talking about Somewhere Good with investors is this idea of a new online world where our identities are centered,” Austin told me. “The vision for Somewhere Good is you take your phone out of your pocket and, as a Black person or person of color, all of your needs are met there in that one place.”

That means folks could access communities around things like wellness, art, music and film, and engage in commerce through those groups. It’s not that some of these communities don’t already exist, it’s just that they’re fragmented across the web and not always easy to find.

Through operating wellness community Ethel’s Club, Austin said many members keep asking her if she knows of other types of spaces for Black people and people of color that focus on more granular topics, like jazz music from the eighties or an online space specifically for Black women who don’t want children.

“We’ve had so many of those,” Austin said. “We just need to create a platform where they can do it themselves. It goes back to my core belief of building a company that provides space for people of color. My whole thing is, are we providing more space, are more people of color feeling empowered. As long as that’s a yes, it doesn’t matter the vehicle.”

[gallery ids="2054998,2054999,2055000,2055001,2055009,2055010,2055011"]

When Somewhere Good launches in beta in January, Austin said users will be able to input their general info and then choose a selection of interests. For example, someone could identify themselves as a mother who likes painting, has a dog and works as a baker.

“We would then spit out communities we think are the best fit for you,” Austin said.

That will enable Somewhere Good to foster an additional level of connection for users, Austin said. One way of achieving that extra layer will be through a matchmaking tool.

“We’re trying to give people a more tangible reason for connection,” Austin said. “Other than you’re both Black.”

Ethel’s Club, the wellness platform for people of color that currently lives on Mighty Networks, will be just one of many communities on Somewhere Good. The plan is to bring on a number of other communities to the platform that center Black people and people of color. From there, Austin envisions users of those communities may then create communities of their own on Somewhere Good.

“We want to give space to people who are already creating community, allow people who want community to build it and then for the audience, once they’re feeling empowered, to be able to build community,” she said.

When you go to Somewhere Good right now, you’ll engage in a Stumble Upon-esque experience where you click “Take me somewhere new” to see a brand geared toward Black people or people of color. There are a little over 100 brands currently featured on the site, including Black hair brand Nappy Head Club, Black designer directory Black Fashion Fair and cereal and culture brand OffLimits.

Image Credits: Screenshot

While OffLimits, for example, doesn’t currently have a community, the brand centers around thinking about food differently, Austin said. But OffLimits, which tells its story through “emotionally unstable, counterculture cartoon characters,” could run a community on Somewhere Good centered around product design or food. She also envisions makeup brand Fenty running a community centered around skin care.

Each community on Somewhere Good will have a moderator and all members will need to follow Somewhere Good’s code of conduct. The platform will not allow any hate speech, abusive behavior, bullying or other types of violence.

“Any users acting against out code of conduct will be immediately removed from the Somewhere Good platform,” the platform’s mission statement says.

Somewhere Good will be a 100% ad-free environment and says it will never sell data. Its business model relies on users paying to join communities and then taking a percentage of that transaction.

“That means we have to create a compelling opportunity for people to create communities,” she said.

Down the road, Somewhere Good plans to enable communities to charge for live-streamed events, sell products and enable other types of peer-to-peer transactions. The company would then take a percentage from those transactions, as well.

Somewhere Good soft-launched with a tweet last week and began taking signups. Already, there are more than 2,500 people on the wait list.

“It’s almost the exact strategy I had with Ethel’s Club,” Austin told me. “Though, I don’t know if I would actually call it a strategy but it’s like, I don’t know exactly what it is but I think people should know about it. It shows initial interest in this concept and now it’s up to us to build the thing.”

Ethel’s Club, which got its start as a physical community space in Brooklyn before expanding into the digital realm as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, has currently raised a little over $1 million from Dream Machine, Shrug Capital, Canvas Ventures, Color, Debut Capital and angel investors like Katie Stanton, Roxane Gay and Hannibal Buress.

Since transitioning into digital, Ethel’s Club has grown to more than 1,500 members. But the biggest issue is that people just want more, Austin said. And Somewhere Good aims to be just that, she said. It aims to be the one platform where people of color can go to for everything.

Trapped-ion quantum computing startup IonQ today announced the launch of its latest quantum computer, which features what IonQ calls “32 perfect qubits with low gate errors.”

Using IBM’s preferred quantum benchmark, IonQ expects to hit a quantum volume of 4,000,000. That’s a massive increase over the double-digit quantum volume numbers that IBM itself recently announced and it’s a pretty extraordinary claim on IonQ’s side as this would make its system the most powerful quantum computer yet.

The (well-funded) company has never used this metric before. Through a spokesperson, IonQ also noted that it doesn’t necessarily think quantum volume is the best metric, but since the rest of the industry is using it, it decided to release this number. The company argues that its ability to achieve 99.9% fidelity between qubits has allowed it to achieve this breakthrough.

“In a single generation of hardware, we went from 11 to 32 qubits, and more importantly, improved the fidelity required to use all 32 qubits,” said IonQ CEO and president Peter Chapman. “Depending on the application, customers will need somewhere between 80 and 150 very high fidelity qubits and logic gates to see quantum advantage. Our goal is to double or more the number of qubits each year. With two new generations of hardware already in the works, companies not working with quantum now are at risk of falling behind.”

Image Credits: Kai Hudek, IonQ

It’s worth noting that IonQ’s trapped-ion approach is quite different from IBM’s (or D-Wave’s for that matter) which uses a very different technique. That makes it hard to compare raw qubit counts between different vendors. The quantum volume metric is meant to make it easier to compare these systems, however.

“The new system we’re deploying today is able to do things no other quantum computer has been able to achieve, and even more importantly, we know how to continue making these systems much more powerful moving forward,” said IonQ Co-Founder & Chief Scientist Chris Monroe. “With our new IonQ system, we expect to be able to encode multiple qubits to tolerate errors, the holy grail for scaling quantum computers in the long haul.”

Using new error correction techniques, IonQ believes that it will only need 13 qubits to create a “near-perfect” logical qubit.

For now, IonQ’s new system will be available as a private beta and it’ll be interesting to see if its early users will back up the company’s claims. Later, the company will make it available through partners like Amazon with its Braket service and the Microsoft Azure Quantum Cloud.

Image Credits: Kai Hudek, IonQ