Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Why should you attend Disrupt 2020? We live in unprecedented times and face unprecedented challenges. But unprecedented opportunities are also part of this equation, and now is the time for creative startup minds and makers to go full-tilt disruptive.

We reengineered Disrupt, which takes place September 14 – 18, into a virtual global tech summit. And we’ve added enhancements to bridge the physical distance of a virtual conference. It’s designed to help you build the connections, skills and knowledge you need to discover, assess and capitalize on those opportunities.

Without further ado: Five reasons why you should attend Disrupt 2020.

1. More days to Disrupt

We expanded Disrupt to span five full days. Now you have more time to experience everything Disrupt offers. Interviews and panel discussions with the leading voices in technology, investing and business speaking from the Disrupt Stage. They’ll cover topics critical to startup success and address COVID-19 — the ginormous elephant in the room. Here’s just a sample of what we have on tap. Check out the growing Disrupt agenda.

• How Things Get Built in the Middle of a Pandemic with Anker CEO Steven Yang (Anker), Kate Whitcomb (Chrysalis Cloud) and Sonny Vu (Alabaster)
• The Black Founder Experience: Tactical Advice for Underrepresented Entrepreneurs with Michael Seibel (Y Combinator), Songe LaRon (Squire) and Reham Fagiri (AptDeco)
• How to Raise Your First Dollars with Alexa von Tobel (Inspired Capital Partners), Hunter Walk (Homebrew) and Ted Wang (Cowboy Ventures)

2. Network for weeks with CrunchMatch

You’ll need an effective tool to help you connect with thousands of Disrupt attendees around the world. CrunchMatch, our free, AI-powered networking platform (think speed dating for techies) is up and running. Simply register for Disrupt, and you can start connecting with the right people to build your empire now, weeks ahead of time. Schedule 1:1 video calls to meet new customers, pitch investors, recruit engineers and developers or interview prospective employees.

3. Extra Crunch Stage

Looking for workshops that deliver actionable tips you can apply to your business? Head to the Extra Crunch Stage. Interactive sessions — facilitated by top experts in marketing, business development and investing — cover topics like how to pivot in the face of a crisis, building a sales team and raising money in a tough economy.

4. Pitch Deck Teardown

Want to make a solid first impression with potential investors? You need a pitch deck that accurately reflects your startup’s goals and potential. During the Pitch Deck Teardown sessions, top venture capitalists will critique an early-stage startup’s pitch deck and provide tips to improve it. Want to be considered for the teardown treatment? Submit your pitch deck here.

5. Disrupt delivers

Networking, funding, brand exposure and new ways of thinking are just some of the benefits your peers have gleaned from Disrupt.

“Disrupt has everything early stage founders need, from advice on raising money and how to scale to exposure and brand recognition. Hearing expert panelists and industry leaders helped us think about emerging technologies and new markets we could explore.” — Joel Neidig, founder of SIMBA Chain

“The benefits of going to Disrupt were introducing my product, networking with investors and potential customers and talking to other founders about what it took to get their companies off the ground.” — Felicia Jackson, inventor and founder of CPRWrap

“Disrupt provides terrific insight on trends in different industries like e-grocery, AI and big data.” — Daniel Lloreda, general partner at H20 Capital Innovation

We haven’t even touched on core pillars of every Disrupt — the Startup Battlefield pitch competition with a $100,000 prize and Digital Startup Alley where you’ll find hundreds of the world’s most innovative young startups around the world.

What opportunities are waiting for you at Disrupt 2020? Buy your pass and get ready to find and create your own.

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

As the COVID-19 pandemic reshaped our world, more consumers have begun shopping online in greater numbers and frequency. According to new data from IBM’s U.S. Retail Index, the pandemic has accelerated the shift away from physical stores to digital shopping by roughly 5 years. Department stores, as a result, are seeing significant declines. In the first quarter of 2020, department store sales and those from other “non-essential” retailers declined by 25%. This grew to a 75% decline in the second quarter.

The report indicates that department stores are expected to decline by over 60% for the full year. Meanwhile, e-commerce is projected to grow by nearly 20% in 2020.

The pandemic has also helped refine which categories of goods consumers feel are essential, the study found. Clothing, for example, declined in importance as more consumers began working and schooling from home, as well as social distancing under government lockdowns. However, other categories including groceries, alcohol, and home improvement materials accelerated, by 12%, 16% and 14%, respectively.

Image Credits: IBM

The report suggests that department store retailers will need to more quickly pivot to omnichannel fulfillment capabilities in order to remain competitive in the new environment. Specifically, they will need to drive traffic to their stores through services like buy online, pickup in store (BOPIS) and will need to offer an expanded set of ship-from-store services.

Large retailers like Walmart and Target have embraced omnichannel fulfillment to their advantage. Both reported stellar earnings this month thanks to their earlier investments in e-commerce. In Walmart’s case, the pandemic helped drive e-commerce sales up 97% in its last quarter. Target set a sales record as its same-day fulfillment services grew 273% in the quarter. Both retailers have also invested in online grocery, with Walmart today offering grocery pickup and delivery services, the latter through partners. Target has also just now rolled out grocery pickup and runs delivery through Shipt.

Amazon, naturally, has also benefited from the shift to digital with its recent record quarterly profit and 40% sales growth.

The growth in e-commerce due to the pandemic has set a high bar for what’s now considered baseline growth. According to the Q2 2020 report from the U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. retail e-commerce reached $211.5 billion, up 31.8% year-over-year, in the quarter. E-commerce also accounted for 16.1% of total retail sales in Q2, up from 11.8% in the first quarter of 2020.

The questions that IBM’s report aims to answer is how much of this pandemic-fueled online spending is a temporary shift and to what extent is it impacting longer-term forecasts? The answer, at least in this estimate, is that this pandemic pushed the industry ahead by around five years. The shift away from physical stores was already underway, that is — but we’ve now jumped ahead in time as to where we would be if a health crisis had not occurred.

This is a similar trend to what other industries have seen as well, including things like streaming/cord cutting, gaming, and social video apps, and more.

Enterprise cloud giant Cloudera has pulled several of its cloud storage servers offline, despite initially claiming the servers were “open by design,” after a security researcher found sensitive internal files inside.

Chris Vickery, director of risk research at security firm UpGuard, found the cloud storage servers — known as buckets — hosted on Amazon Web Services in late July. The data largely contained legacy Hortonworks data from prior to its $5.2 billion all-stock merger with Cloudera in January 2019.

When reached, Cloudera spokesperson Madge Miller told TechCrunch that the buckets were supposed to be open and contained files and code that were open to its customers, users, and the wider community. The company said, however, that it identified three files that contained confidential information and were removed from the buckets.

But soon after, the company reversed its position and pulled the buckets offline altogether.

Vickery, who shared his findings exclusively with TechCrunch, said that although the vast majority of files in the cloud buckets were for public and community consumption, he also found files containing credentials, account access tokens, passwords and other secrets for Cloudera’s internal Jenkins system, which the company uses for building and testing its software projects. The buckets also contained entire SQL databases for its internal build databases, Vickery said.

A “secrets” file containing passwords and credentials for Cloudera’s internal systems. (Image: UpGuard/supplied

Later, Cloudera confirmed the security lapse in a later email to TechCrunch.

“Thanks to the questions from the security researcher, we did a deep dive and found some credentials and SQL dumps in the public buckets which should not have been placed there. The credentials were for our internal Jenkins build process and the SQL dumps were of our build database,” the spokesperson said.

“We have since removed this information from the public buckets and taken further remediation steps by changing credentials and rotating keys. We also concluded we could close access to a few unused publicly accessible buckets.”

The company said that the sensitive data, since removed, did not contain any customer data or any other personally identifiable information.

In all, the security lapse could have been worse — even if the incident could have been avoided altogether.

But Vickery said the incident was important to disclose as it reveals the inherent risk in using overwhelmingly large cloud storage containers. In other words, the buckets were so big and had so many files that it becomes nearly impossible to notice when something sensitive is added to the bucket by mistake.

“When that many directories and files of varying format are all stashed away together, it becomes all too easy for something to be mistakenly put among them and remain unnoticed, as is what appears to have happened here,” wrote Vickery.

Luminar, the lidar startup that burst onto the autonomous vehicle scene in April 2017 after operating for years in secrecy, is merging with special-purpose acquisition company Gores Metropoulos Inc., with a post-deal market valuation of $3.4 billion.

Gores Metropoulos, which is listed on the Nasdaq exchange, is a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC sponsored by an affiliate of The Gores Group, the global investment firm founded in the late 1980s by Alec Gores.

The SPAC merger comes just three months after Luminar hit a critical milestone and announced that Volvo would start producing vehicles in 2022 equipped with its lidar and a perception stack. The Luminar technology will be used to deploy an automated driving system for highways.

Luminar is the latest startup — and second lidar company — to turn to SPACs this summer in lieu of a traditional IPO process. In June, Velodyne Lidar struck a deal to merge with special-purpose acquisition company Graf Industrial Corp., with a market value of $1.8 billion. Four electric vehicle startups have also skipped the traditional IPO path in recent months, opting instead to go public through a merger agreement with a SPAC, which are also known as blank check companies. Canoo, Fisker Inc. Lordstown Motors, and Nikola Corp. have gone public via a SPAC merger this spring and summer.

Luminar said it was able to raise $170 million in private investment in public equity, or PIPE, by institutional investors including Alec Gores, Van Tuyl Companies, Peter Thiel, Volvo Cars Tech Fund, Crescent Cove, Moore Strategic Ventures, GoPro founder Nick Woodman and VectoIQ, with the majority of the major existing investors participating. The transaction will also include a balance of about $400 million cash that has been held by Gores Metropoulos.

Once the transaction closes, Luminar will maintain its name and will be listed on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol LAZR. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2020. Founder Austin Russell will continue to serve as CEO and Tom Fennimore will continue to serve as CFO. Alec Gores will join the Luminar board of directors upon closing of the transaction.

“This milestone is pivotal not just for us, but also for the larger automotive industry,” said Russell said in a statement. “Eight years ago, we took on a problem to which most thought there would be no technically or commercially viable solution. We worked relentlessly to build the tech from the ground up to solve it and partnered directly with the leading global automakers to show the world what’s possible. Today, we are making our next industry leap through our new long-term partnership with Gores Metropoulos, a team that has deep experience in technology and automotive and shares our vision of a safe autonomous future powered by Luminar.”

Luminar was founded by Russell in 2012, but it operated in secret for years until coming out of stealth in spring 2017 with backing from Thiel. Russell, who is now 25 years old, worked on the Luminar technology as a Thiel fellow, which gives young people $100,000 over two years to drop out of college and pursue their ideas.

Luminar has raised $250 million prior to the SPAC announcement. The company now has 350 employees and operations in Silicon Valley as well as a factory in Orlando. Luminar said it plans to open an office in Detroit as well.

Lidar, light detection and ranging radar, measures distance using laser light to generate a highly accurate 3D map of the world around the car. The sensor widely considered critical to the commercial deployment of autonomous vehicles. Automakers have also begun to view lidar as an important sensor to be used to beef up the capabilities and safety of its advanced driver assistance systems in the new cars trucks and SUVs available to consumers.

Volvo is one of those automakers. Luminar’s Iris lidar sensors — which TechCrunch  has described as about the size of really thick sandwich and one-third smaller than its previous iterations — will be integrated in the roof of Volvo’s production vehicles, beginning in 2022.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest big news, chats about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here, and myself here, and don’t forget to check out last Friday’s episode.

What was on the docket this morning? All sorts of good stuff, though the Sumo Logic S-1 did drop just after we wrapped. Here’s today’s rundown:

• YC Demo day is this week, so make sure to stick around TechCrunch and Extra Crunch for all our coverage.
• SPACs continue, with more automotive companies looking at alt-routes to the public markets. This time it’s Luminar. And, here’s the Bill Gurley post that we promised to link to.
• E-commerce and on-demand are booming in China after we saw similar results via Uber and domestic e-commerce players.
• The Fortnite-Apple brouhaha continues with more filings and even Microsoft weighing in. At the same time TikTok v. The United States appears set to go to court. (Zuck is behind some anti-TikTok Washington sentiment, it appears.)
• The Palantir S-1 has gone missing. Where is it? Give it to us!
• Dataiku has raised $100 million for its enterprise AI platform. Forbes has more.
• Datasembly has raised $10.3 million in new capital for its IRL store data service. TechCrunch has more.
• The Anti-Antitrust Club is live and you can read it here. We’re trying to find out who is taking on the biggest names in tech on purpose. Who would be so garishly bold? The Anti-Antitrust club!

Whew, with YC and Palantir this week and a chat with Twilio’s CEO it’s going to be an active few days. Ready?

Yac, the digital voice messaging service that launched last year, has raised new money from the Slack Fund as it continues to gain ground among companies looking to give their employees new communication tools for remote working.

The Florida-based startup initially spun out of a pitch at Product Hunt’s Maker Festival. Developed by the digital agency SoFriendly, Yac’s digital voice messaging service won the startup competition at the event and attracted the interest of Boost VC and its founder, the third generation venture capitalist, Adam Draper .

Yac officially launched in March and had 900 teams sign up within the first week. The company’s product now includes one-to-many messaging, slack integration and an improved desktop app. It also managed to attract the attention of the Slack Fund.

The investment from Slack comes two years after Yac’s founder Justin Mitchell first reached out to the company, Mitchell said.

Instead of a cold call, Mitchell found himself as the object of Slack’s attention thanks to an introduction from Jim Rand, an entrepreneur whose Synervoz Communications was also working on new voice communications applications.

Rand and Mitchell had connected through LinkedIn and bonded over the trials and tribulations of entrepreneurship. As they continued talking, Rand, whose company makes an api to connect audio applications to other services, asked if Mitchell wanted to talk to Slack about collaborating.

Slack reached out and Mitchell responded via the Yac app. Essentially all of the due diligence was conducted over a series of voice messages that Mitchell left responding to questions from the Slack team, Mitchell said.

The publicly traded messaging company came in with a small investment of $500,000.

Yac now has a bit over 5,000 users on its service and charges per seat, in the same way Slack does. Mitchell said he will use the funds to integrate more closely with Slack’s own messaging service. Some Yac features will automatically be integrated into Slack where users can turn their call button into a Yac button to deliver audio messages instead of doing real-time phone calls.

Long story short, I borrowed a new Bentley Bentayga for 24 hours. What follows is a brief overview of the $177,000 sport utility vehicle. As I had the vehicle for a short time, I was unable to dive deep into the SUV, and it feels disingenuous to write a full review after driving just a few miles in the Bentayga.

Here’s the short version: The Bentayga surprises. Constantly. I was surprised continuously, both good and bad, at the Bentayga’s ride, performance, and quirks.

[gallery ids="2035078,2035082,2035079,2035077,2035080"]

A different ride from Bentley’s coupe and sedan

The new Bentayga is the third Bentley I’ve driven recently, and it’s different from the rest. The ride is supple, and nearly to a fault. It flows over the road in a bumbling and bouncy manner, floating over any fault or bump. This is different from what I experienced in the new Flying Spur or Continental GT as those cars felt more planted to the ground with less side-to-side bouncing.

The Bentayga’s springy ride is so elastic I found it nauseating the first tour around town. After several dozen miles, I settled into the ride.

Now, having spent several hours in the car, the ride quality continues to surprise me. Turn hard, and the heavy SUV stays surprisingly flat. It’s agile in the corners in a way that defies expectations. Mash on the twin-scroll V8, and the suspension instantaneously firms up, preventing the SUV from rearing on its hind legs.

I want more time in the Bentayga to explore the ride quality. I’m not sure I love it or hate it. On the one hand, it’s exceptionally soft on long stretches of roads. But when the road gets twisty, the ride becomes surprisingly competent.

Questionable infotainment system

The new Bentayga is equipped with Bentley’s next-generation infotainment system. It’s similar in design to the outgoing version, but I found the operation laggy. Click a button, wait for a second, and finally, it responds. I expect more from budget cars, and the Bentayga costs $177,000 as tested.

Bentley is part of the Volkswagen corporation and shares a lot of components and systems with Audi vehicles. The system in the new Bentayga is similar in design language as Audi’s latest infotainment system, but I haven’t experienced this sort of lag in Audi’s implementation.

Putting the lag aside, the infotainment system is well designed and laid out pleasingly.

The Bentayga’s infotainment system is missing a crowd-pleasing feature found on the Flying Spur and Continental GT. In those Bentley vehicles, the screen can be flipped inside the dashboard, hiding the screen and revealing three analog gauges. It’s clever and not available in the Bentayga, which is a shame as it’s a unique feature found nowhere else at this price point.

The backseat is cozy

Don’t be fooled by the Bentley nameplate and sport utility stance. The Bentayga is a mid-size SUV. The backseat area is pleasant but modest in size and appointments. This is not a sizeable luxury land yacht.

The Bentayga is a sporty grocery-getter rather than a palatial personal transport. Like most Bentley’s, the Bentayga is designed around the driver. This is a driver’s SUV — if there’s such a thing. Riders are treated with pleasing fabrics and soft seats, but there’s little extra over a top-tier Audi or BMW SUV.

In the end, there’s plenty of room in the Bentayga to haul four adults and their clubs to the local course and that’s probably all that matters.

Zoom says it’s having an outage. Perfect timing to help you avoid your Monday morning meeting.

The video calling giant said it’s “received reports of users being unable to visit the Zoom website (zoom.us) and unable to start and join Zoom Meetings and Webinars.”

“We are currently investigating and will provide updates as we have them,” according to Zoom’s status page.

Zoom video webinars are also suffering because of the outage.

Not everyone is affected, it seems. Some users are reporting that their Zoom calls are working fine. Others say they cannot get into their regularly scheduled Zoom meetings.

Zoom didn’t immediately comment on the outage. We’ll have more as we get it. In the meantime, go get yourself another coffee. You earned it.

In 2010, TV show host Conan O’Brien was abruptly asked to give up the time slot he’d been handed just six months earlier by his longtime employer NBC. Instead, he famously gave the network the figurative finger, taking his act to the basic cable network TBS later that same year and — embraced by legions of fans who tweeted “I’m with CoCo” in the aftermath of the NBC fiasco — launching an online media company of his own, Team Coco.

Network executives might have tried laughing off these moves, but O’Brien has in subsequent years become more ubiquitous, and more popular, than ever because of them. While TV viewing has grown increasingly splintered, he has attracted 28.5 million Twitter followers, and Team Coco has garnered more than 8 million YouTube subscribers. Meanwhile, his nearly two-year-old podcast, “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend,” is now among the most popular podcasts in the country.

O’Brien isn’t one to be complacent. Not only has he continued his TBS show over Zoom throughout the pandemic, hosting unstructured one-on-on interviews with a wide range of guests, but not a week has gone by that Team Coco hasn’t published O’Brien’s weekly podcast. This despite that in late July, O’Brien and his cohosts — Matt Gourley, the show’s producer, and O’Brien’s “trusty assistant” Sona Movsesian — affectionately announced they were taking a needed break from one other.

As he told Variety last year, the podcast “is a big part of people’s lives. They put on their earbuds, and you’re with them at the gym or on the subway. I never foresaw how much this show would mean to people.”

It’s partly because of O’Brien’s work ethic that we’re so ecstatic he’s joining us for this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt. We have a million questions for him, and we’re especially eager to talk about what he and his team have built so far with Team Coco — and where they plan to take the company in the coming years. More diversification seems to be in the cards, certainly. Among the other podcasts it has spun up, for example, are “Literally! With Rob Lowe,” and “In Bed with Nick and Megan.”

We also want to talk with O’Brien about working without a live audience this year for the first time; whether he ever worried that his visual brand of comedy might not work in podcast form; and how he thinks about some of the rich podcasting deals to be struck in recent years by Spotify.

Not last, we’d like to hear from O’Brien how his online momentum has him feeling about maintaining a TV show once his agreement with TBS expires at the end of 2022. As O’Brien — who has hosted a late-night show since 1993 — told Variety in that same interview, his own TV habits have changed completely in recent years. “I used to be someone who checked out late-night TV all the time. But I wouldn’t be watching me right now. I’d be binge-watching ‘Killing Eve.’”

You won’t want to miss this very special conversation with O’Brien, a self-described “national treasure” and “voice of the people.” (He adds in his Twitter profile, “Sorry, people.”)

Disrupt 2020 runs from September 14 through September 18 and will be 100% virtual this year. Get your front row seat to see O’Brien live with a Disrupt Digital Pro Pass or a Digital Startup Alley Exhibitor Package. We’re excited to see you there.