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California Governor Gavin Newsom href="https://www.gov.ca.gov/2020/09/23/governor-newsom-announces-california-will-phase-out-gasoline-powered-cars-drastically-reduce-demand-for-fossil-fuel-in-californias-fight-against-climate-change/"> issued an executive order on Wednesday requiring sales of all new passenger vehicles be zero-emission by 2035.

The new order would be a huge boost for electric vehicles, and vehicles using alternative fuels like hydrogen, and could boost a sector that’s already surging in California.

As an announcement from the California Governor’s office indicates the transportation sector is responsible for more than half of all of California’s carbon pollution, 80 percent of smog-forming pollution and 95 percent of toxic diesel emissions.

“This is the most impactful step our state can take to fight climate change,” said Governor Newsom, in a statement. “For too many decades, we have allowed cars to pollute the air that our children and families breathe. Californians shouldn’t have to worry if our cars are giving our kids asthma. Our cars shouldn’t make wildfires worse – and create more days filled with smoky air. Cars shouldn’t melt glaciers or raise sea levels threatening our cherished beaches and coastlines.”

After the order, the California Air Resource Board will develop regulations that will mandate 100 percent of sales of passenger cars and trucks are zero-emission by 2035.

Setting the 2035 target would achieve reductions in greenhouse gases above 35 percent and an 80 percent improvement in oxides of nitrogen emissions from cars.

The board will also develop regulations that require operations of medium- and heavy-duty vehicles to be fully zero-emission by 2045 where feasible.

Under the order, state agencies in partnership with the private sector will be required to accelerate deployment of affordable fueling and charging options. The order also requires broad accessibility to zero-emission vehicles, according to a statement.

What it won’t require is for Californians who own gasoline-powered cars to give them up or deny car owners the ability to sell their gas-powered cars in the used car market.

With the initiative, California is joining fifteen countries that have already committed to phasing out gas-powered cars, according to a statement.

Built into the order is an assumption that zero-emission vehicles will be cheaper and better than fossil fuel powered cars, but there are significant hurdles — and opportunities before the market gets there.

There’s going to need to be a massive buildout of charging stations and fueling stations for electric and hydrogen powered vehicles. New charging technologies will need to be put in place to enable faster charging, and new financing models will need to be put in place to ensure the kind of accessibility that the California government is requiring.

All of these opportunities should have startups chomping at the bit, and several companies like the new electric vehicle manufacturers launching to compete with Tesla, the new charging technology developers and others will have Newsom to thank for the sudden boost in their valuations.

Last week at TechCrunch Disrupt, Alex Wilhelm hosted a panel titled “Getting to $100 million ARR” on the Extra Crunch Stage. He was joined by three executives, including Vineet Jain, CEO and co-founder at Egnyte, Michal Tsur, president and co-founder at Kaltura and Sid Sijbrandij, CEO at GitLab.

The panelists discussed their path to building successful companies — all of which could go public in the next year or two.

Here are our five favorite takeaways from the panel. These notions should offer founders some inspiration, and perhaps a little guidance as they scale their own startup. After all, $100 million in ARR is merely the pre-IPO milestone. After that things get even harder.

Everyone faces hard times, but you can work through them

Jain told the story of how his company was just two years old in 2013 when he was trying to raise its Series B and facing rejection at every turn. What’s worse, he was at risk of running out of money in 30 days, the startup death knell.

“In 2011, when I was trying to raise a Series B, I had dealt with 13 rejections from Monday morning partner meetings at all the venture firms that I can think of [there] on Sand Hill Road — and I was thinking, ‘Okay, how will I run my payroll?’ I was 30 days out from running out of cash,” Jain said.

A chance breakfast with a VC he knew from a previous venture led to a meeting with his firm, Kleiner Perkins. Jain said he had figured Kleiner wouldn’t be interested in his startup because it was too early-stage, but the friend told him to give it a shot. He got his Series B term sheet later that week.

What worked there? It was key that the VC knew him, believed in him, and, as Jain said, personal reputation matters. In this case it saved Egnyte, now worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

On the theme of working through hard times, Kaltura’s Tsur said every startup will face a bad quarter or two, but that the best way to cope was to analyze and fix underlying problems.

“If somebody tells you that they did not have such a quarter, they’re probably lying,” she said.

“I’ve been running products and platforms for most of my time with Kaltura, so I’ve always been looking at it from a product perspective. And you know, ultimately whenever we have plateaued, we look very seriously at whether it’s the market, whether it’s the product, whether it’s the people. And, you know, ultimately, adjust as much as we could,” said Tsur.

It’s not the size of your A round that matters, it’s getting it done

Tesla owners were locked out of their vehicles and the accompanying app for about an hour Wednesday morning, thanks to an outage that affected the company’s entire network, according to several sources.

The Tesla outage was caused by an internal break of their application programming interface (or API), according to sources familiar with the outage.

There’s a chance that the glitch could have something to do with the rollout of new two-factor authentication security features, which Tesla chief executive Elon Musk called “embarrassingly late”, in an August tweet.

Two-factor authentication, which is also known as two-step verification, combines something you know, like a password, with something you have, like your phone. It allows the app, verify that the real account holder — or car owner — is logging in and not a hacker.

Some websites do this by sending you a code by text message. But hackers can intercept these. A more secure way of doing it is by sending a code through a phone app, often called an authenticator, which security experts prefer.

While Tesla’s cars have had pin code entry since 2018, and they include GPS features that let owners track the vehicle, the lack of two-factor authentication has been an issue.

The Tesla app is a critical tool for owners, giving them control over numerous functions on their vehicles. Tesla owners have been calling out for the two-factor feature as an extra layer of security.

Glitches like these are not a great look for the automaker, which needs to convince an increasingly large consumer population that its electric vehicles are the ones to choose as more options emerge to challenge Tesla’s dominance in the electric vehicle marketplace.

A slew of cars will be hitting the road in 2021 and 2022 to challenge Tesla across nearly each of its price points and locking out owners for an extended period of time is not a great way to convince would-be buyers to shell out money for Tesla cars.

Still, the company is moving forward with plans that could sway consumer sentiment — specifically by working towards reducing the cost of its cars through battery innovations like the kind the company announced yesterday.

At the company’s much ballyhooed battery press conference Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Drew Baglino, the SVP of powertrain and energy engineering at the company, laid out plans and progress to eventually have 10 to 20 terawatt hours of annual battery production. The eventual goal is to reduce batteries enough to be able to build and sell an electric vehicle for $25,000.

Tesla did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.

Holy cats, it’s less than two weeks until TC Sessions: Mobility 2020 kicks off for two program-packed days focused squarely on mobility and transportation technology. On October 6-7, thousands of people from around the world will gather virtually to talk trends, demo products, share insight and discover new opportunities to drive their business into the future.

Don’t have your pass yet? We offer different price levels to accommodate a range of budgets: General admission, group discounts, student discounts and our brand-new Expo Ticket — just $25. Want to showcase your startup in the expo? Buy an Early Stage Startup Exhibitor Package while you can. We have only a few spots left.

Don’t wait: buy your pass today. Prices increase on October 5.

Now that we have the housekeeping out of the way, let’s talk about what you can expect at TC Sessions: Mobility 2020.

We packed the event agenda with world-class speakers. You’ll hear from and engage with the industry’s top leaders and innovators across the mobility spectrum. Interested in electric vehicles? No one knows more about the batteries that fuel them than JB Straubel, co-founder and CEO of Redwood Materials and Celina Mikolajczak, vice president of battery technology for Panasonic Energy of North America. There’s a conversation you won’t want to miss.

Does Polestar have enough of what it takes to go head-to-head with Tesla? Get the 411 when Polestar CEO, Thomas Ingenlath joins us for a fireside chat about the company and the future of electric vehicles.

Nothing happens without funding, but are VC dollars enough to move the industry needle in the right direction? Investors Reilly Brennan, Amy Gu and Olaf Sakkers will debate the uncertain future of mobility technology.

You’ll find more than 40 early-stage startups (and even a few more established companies) holding forth in our expo. Whether you’re looking for new partners, potential customers, a baby unicorn for your portfolio, employment opportunities or simple inspiration, explore the expo and get your networking mojo running.

Love it or hate it, networking is essential to success. Take advantage of CrunchMatch, our free AI-powered platform. It’s the perfect tool for navigating a virtual conference. Answer a few quick questions when you register and CrunchMatch will search for and find attendees who align with your business goals. You can use it for random, free form searching, too. Schedule 1:1 video calls to talk shop, view product demos, pitch investors or impress potential employers.

We added a new event this year — Pitch Night. Ten early-stage startups will compete in front of a panel of VC judges on October 5, the night before Mobility 2020 officially opens. Five of those intrepid startups will earn the right to pitch from the main stage on October 6. Talk about a must-see throw-down.

So much to do in just two short days — we haven’t even talked about the breakout sessions. TC Sessions Mobility 2020 is right around the corner. Get excited, get focused and get ready to take advantage of every juicy opportunity. But first, get your pass — whatever flavor floats your autonomous boat — before the prices go up.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Mobility 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Robots have shown themselves to excel at any number of sports and activities, though they do best when they have a single task. Fortunately some sports, such as curling, consist mostly of one task, and Korean researchers have made a robot that throws the stone well enough to compete at a national level.

If you’ve never gone curling yourself — first of all, for shame, it’s basically ice bocce and it’s very fun. But you may not know then that the principal action in the game is a simple but subtle one of gauging the power and angle (and spin, if you’re good) with which to slide a heavy kettle-shaped stone in order to get it near the center of a target, knock an opponent’s stone out of the way, or nudge another of your own into position. And that’s exactly what Curly the robot does.

The researchers, from Korea University in Seoul and the Berlin Institute of Technology, devised Curly as a way to test “the interaction between an AI system and a highly nonstationary real-world scenario.” In other words: A robot that can observe the real world and act accordingly in a precise and strategic manner.

Curly is actually a team of two robots, one of which observes the position of the stones at the scoring end while the other does the actual throwing. There’s no robot that sweeps the ice in front of the moving stone or yells “hard, hard!” but no doubt that is forthcoming.

Image Credits: Korea University

The robots’ AI was trained entirely on computerized games, in which the stone and ice are physically simulated. One can see this type of training going well or poorly, depending on how accurate the simulation is. As it turns out, it works extremely well, giving Curly enough confidence that it only needs one throw at the beginning of each game in order to account for differing conditions like ice that’s more or less slick.

Image Credits: Korea University

Its play is similarly impressive: Up against some of the country’s leading women’s teams and the national wheelchair team, Curly won three out of four rounds. One wonders whether permitting sweepers would change the outcome, but sufficient for the day is the achievement thereof.

The researchers point out that this is an important achievement not just because robots have been shown to be competitive in yet another sport, but because that sport involves fairly dynamic observation and decision-making in the real world and in real-time — the team can’t go retrain the network to deal with an unexpected setup. So it’s a win for both AI and robots in general, but also for the prospect of training such robots in simulated environments, which until fairly recently simply weren’t good enough to provide a reasonable facsimile of such complex physics.

You can read more about Curly and the complex AI and engineering that underpin it in the latest issue of the journal Science Robotics.

The iOS 14 homescreen customization trend is driving a new set of apps to the top of the App Store charts, and delivering record downloads for sources of inspiration, like Pinterest. According to new data from app store market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, installs of the top 20 homescreen customization apps reached 5.7 million total downloads worldwide in the first four days following the release of iOS 14 on September 16.

Remarkably, the three most-downloaded apps — Widgetsmith, Color Widgets, and Photo Widget — account for 95% of these 5.7 million downloads. That indicates that the rest of the app customization market today is much smaller. But this could still change over time if more apps embrace the trend and expand to include innovative and unique features.

Sensor Tower’s study on the homescreen customization market only focused on those apps that were used to create homescreen widgets or existed primarily to service them, like calendars, clocks, memos, and others.

To determine if the app offered homescreen customization tools, Sensor Tower analyzed the app metadata of all the apps that ranked at any point on the App Store after September 16, then manually reviewed those apps to confirm their functionality was homescreen customization related.

The report’s focus was also more on widget apps, rather than apps than helped users make custom icons or existing apps that added widget functionality, as Sensor Tower decided it wouldn’t be able to determine how many had done so based on their metadata. It’s also difficult to determine, in some cases, if an app with a larger purpose beyond widgets is moving up the charts simply because it has now added widgets.

The top 20 list, in order, includes the following:

Widgetsmith, Color Widgets, Photo Widget, Photobox Widget, MemoWidget, Home Photo Widget, Motivation Widget, Ermine, Date Today, Hey Weather, TimeDeck, Widgeridoo, Glimpse 2, Widget Wizard, Widget Web, Locket, ItemMemo, OMDZ, Clock Widget for Home Screen, and Photo Widgets.

Image Credits: Sensor Tower

Combined, the group has generated a collective $400,000 in consumer spending in four days — from September 17 through September 20. Widgetsmith dominated the group, accounting for $370,000 of that total, followed by an app called Date Today with close to $20,000, per Sensor Tower estimates. (We should note Widgetsmith’s figure comes in a bit lower than some of the other estimates that were floating around.)

Though Sensor Tower’s study had a narrower focus, there are signals that plenty of apps have benefitted from the customization craze beyond the widget makers themselves.

Design inspiration resource Pinterest, as noted above, saw record daily downloads. TuneTrack, now the No. 18 free (non-game) app on the U.S. App Store appears to be gathering steam in the absence of an official Spotify widget. Its app offers both Apple Music and Spotify widgets for showing off favorite music on your homescreen.

Sensor Tower says TuneTrack saw 552,000 installs between Sept. 17 and 20, for example — a figure up 1,840% from the prior week (9/10-9/13). The Motivation widget saw 431,000 installs, up 798%.

Meanwhile, design tool Procreate Pocket is now the No. 2 paid (non-game) app in the U.S., and PicsArt is No. 31 free app. An app that simplifies icon changing, Icon Changer+, is No. 40 on the Top Free Apps charts in the U.S., followed by an app called Shortcuts, which is not the same Shortcuts app from Apple. (And surprisingly being allowed to use the same name!)

Image Credits: Sensor Tower

Because there’s not a specific category for homescreen customization tools, some of the new apps can be found in the Productivity category, while others categorized themselves as Utility apps or something else entirely. This makes it more difficult for a consumer who wants to compare the rankings of all top apps offering homescreen customization functionality in one place.

Given that iOS 14 has effectively created an entire new category of apps, it’s possible that Apple would consider adding a customization category to the App Store in the future, if the trend continues long-term.

For now, however, Apple is addressing the discoverability issues with new App Store editorial content. A featured story on the App Store’s “Today” page, for example, is titled “How to Set Up Widgets,” and recommends a number of apps that have added widgets — like Todoist, Carrot Weather, Timepage, Apollo, Spark Mail, and others, in addition to Widgetsmith.

There are new widgets still arriving, as well, as developers roll out their iOS 14 updates. Fantastical, for example, just launched 12 homescreen widgets today.

What’s unfortunate is that Apple didn’t give its developer community enough time to prepare for launch day. The company announced iOS 14’s release with less than 24 hours’ notice and without the final version of Xcode available to developers. As a result, when users began to customize their homescreens, they may not have found all the widgets they would have wanted.

Every founder dreams of building a substantial company. For those who make it through the myriad challenges, it typically results in an exit. If it’s through an acquisition, that can mean cashing in your equity, paying back investors and rewarding long-time employees, but it also usually results in a loss of power and a substantially reduced role.

Some founders hang around for a while before leaving after an agreed-upon time period, while others depart right away because there is simply no role left for them. However it plays out, being acquired can be an emotional shock: The company you spent years building is no longer under your control,

We spoke to a couple of startup founders who went through this experience to learn what the acquisition process was like, and how it feels to give up something after pouring your heart and soul into building it.

Knowing when it’s time to sell

There has to be some impetus to think about selling: Perhaps you’ve reached a point where growth stalls, or where you need to raise a substantial amount of cash to take you to the next level.

For Tracy Young, co-founder and former CEO at PlanGrid, the forcing event was reaching a point where she needed to raise funds to continue.

After growing a company that helped digitize building plans into a $100 million business, Young ended up selling it to Autodesk for $875 million in 2018. It was a substantial exit, but Young said it was more of a practical matter because the path to further growth was going to be an arduous one.

“When we got the offer from Autodesk, literally we would have had to execute flawlessly and the world had to stay good for the next three years for us to have the same outcome,” she said at a panel on exiting at TechCrunch Disrupt last week.

“As CEO, [my] job is to choose the best path forward for all stakeholders of the company — for our investors, for our team members, for our customers — and that was the path we chose.”

For Rami Essaid, who founded bot mitigation platform Distil Networks in 2011, slowing growth encouraged him to consider an exit. The company had reached around $25 million run rate, but a lack of momentum meant that shifting to a broader product portfolio would have been too heavy a lift.

Conventional wisdom says your company should be up and running and have some traction before you raise. But MasterClass co-founder David Rogier says entrepreneurs should try to raise funds before launching.

Before going live, David raised $6.4 million — $1.9 million in a seed round and $4.5 million in a Series A — for what would become MasterClass. To date, the company has raised six funding rounds and secured almost $240 million.

MasterClass’s first investment actually came from Michael Dearing, the founder of VC firm Harrison Metal and one of David’s business school professors. After graduating from Stanford University Graduate School of Business, David started working for Michael at the firm. About a year in, he quit to start his own company.

When David gave his notice, Michael told him he would invest just under $500,000, even though David didn’t have an idea yet.

“I was honored, I was thrilled and I was terrified, all within the span of 10 seconds,” David says. “It was an amazing gift, but I also felt an immense amount of pressure. I knew this was a once-in-a-lifetime chance, and I didn’t want to mess it up.”

He drew a blank for a year, but finally got inspiration from a story his grandmother told him when he was in second grade. In it, she stressed the importance of education, the one thing no one can ever take away from you. Upon remembering that lesson, David knew he wanted to give as many people as possible the opportunity to learn from the best, and MasterClass was born.

In an episode of How I Raised It, David shares some of his secrets to raising capital.

First money, then metrics

Securing funding before you even launch your company definitely isn’t a common practice. But David is adamant that you should attempt it.

“Your metrics out of the gate are never going to be great,” David says. “You need enough funds to have the time to actually improve them.” At the beginning, instead of relying on data, you should sell investors on your vision.

Of course, this is easier said than done. Many investors don’t want to give you a dime until you’ve proven your concept works. To overcome this barrier, David figured out what he could do to help minimize risk for investors.

Email startup Superhuman has been lauded by plenty in the tech community as a simpler and faster way to navigate email, but at $30 per month, the service’s hefty subscription price has been out of reach for plenty of potential users.

Today, the startup is taking some aims to bring more users outside of the tech world into the fold of its “premium email” service, rolling out academic pricing for students and educators. The new, discounted $10/month plan is available for undergrad and graduate students and faculty members with a valid school-issued email address.

CEO Rahul Vohra says the effort is intended to bring their service to folks in the academic world who have seen their reliance on email grow even more amid the pandemic, he sees Superhuman as a natural fit for plenty of their needs.

“With academics, so much of their work runs on email collaborating on papers, collaborating with conference organizers, collaborating with journal and publications,” Vohra tells TechCrunch. “And with almost every single student attending their classes virtually… email is going to be critical for students, professionals and employers.”

The company still has a lengthy waitlist of potential users, some 350,000 people at this point, but many people are on the waitlist because Superhuman doesn’t work with the platforms they use yet. The six-year-old startup still does not have an Android mobile app and it only works for Gmail users, Vohra says that 61 of the top 100 universities are using G Suite. By the end of next year Vohra hopes to have rolled out both Office 365 support and the long-awaited Android app.

Students and faculty at colleges signing up with .edu addresses will notably be able to jump in front of the lengthy waitlist queue.

Superhuman’s features includes split algorithmic inboxes, a powerful set of keyboard shortcuts, reminders and, most recently, deep calendar integrations. The set of features has been enough to earn the service a $260 million valuation after raising a $33 million Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz last year.

The company has kept a singular focus on selling singular subscriptions. Asked whether this education pricing could one day become the service’s default pricing, Vohra insisted that $30/month was the right price point for their service today. “I would never say never, but I think superhuman is priced correctly, especially for where we are today,” he said.

The Superhuman for Education pricing tier rolls out today.

French startup Kard has added $3.5 million (€3 million) to its seed round. The company already raised the same amount last year, which means that Kard has raised $7 million (€6 million) in total for its seed round.

Founders Future is leading the round, with Laurence Krieger, Michael Vaughan, Jon Oringer and Iris Mittenaere also participating.

Kard is building a challenger bank specifically designed for teenagers. When you create an account, you receive your own IBAN and a Mastercard debit card. You can block and unblock the card, you receive instant transaction notifications and you can send and receive money with other Kard users.

For the past year, the service has been completely free and 50,000 teenagers signed up. Starting today, Kard is switching to paid subscriptions for new users. Each family has to pay €4.99 per month or €49.90 per year to create a family account. After that, you can create as many account as you want — if you have two, three or four children, it still costs €4.99 per month.

With today’s change, Kard is also adding some additional features. Parents can download the Kard app and manage allowances from the app. You can schedule weekly or monthly transfers, block your child’s card and send money instantly by pairing a card with the app.

As for teenagers, Kard users now get a virtual card for online payments. As a Kard user, your smartphone is insured against screen damage (up to €100). There are now three different card designs as well — black, silver or pink.

The startup says that Apple Pay and Google Pay are on the roadmap, as well as money pots. There will be some personalized discounts in the app as well, which could open up a new revenue stream.

Kard competes with PixPay, Xaalys, Vybe, but also Revolut Junior, Lydia and services from traditional banks. Let’s see how the new pricing strategy affects Kard’s growth going forward.