Category: UNCATEGORIZED

No matter what you think of Sequoia Capital, the firm doesn’t rest on its laurels. Though it’s now managing ungodly amounts of money and has for decades been considered among the top venture firms in the world, it routinely finds new ways to stay relevant and to ensure that it gets a first look at the most promising founders.

It was the first firm to employee scouts, for example. Recently, to create more room between itself and its ever-growing number of competitors, the firm has also begun fine-tuning a curriculum for the founders of both the pre-seed and seed-stage startups it has funded, as well as its Series A- and B-stage founders.

According to Roelof Botha — the U.S. head of the venture firm since 2017 — and Jess Lee, a partner at Sequoia for nearly four years, the idea is to arm the individuals it backs with Sequoia’s vast “tribal knowledge” so they can not only compete with their rivals but, hopefully, outperform them. “We were already delivering this on an on-demand basis,” says Botha, “so we figured why not [institutionalize it]?”

How do they work? Much as you might imagine. The pre-seed and seed-stage program is shorter but more intensive than the later-stage program — think three weeks of between three to six hours of programming a day, versus up to 10 weeks of more occasional programming for founders whose companies are more mature and who maybe can’t drop in for quite as much hands-on education. The content differs meaningfully, too. The seed-stage modules are really about creating a foundation that can stand the test of time, whereas the later-stage sessions center more around metrics, building out a sales organization, and so forth.

Both programs entirely opt-in, and so far, over the last three years, 100 founders have participated, with another 20 engaged in a seed-stage program that kicked off virtually last week. Both are highly interactive and involve enough workshopping that founders are “walking out with deliverables,” says Lee. “Everyone does show-and-tell demos. You see sausage making that you wouldn’t typically get to see.”

Lee happens to lead programming around storytelling with Sequoia’s in-house design partner, James Buckhouse. (They presented one small part of that module at our recent Extra Crunch event, which you can watch below.) But many of the firm’s partners are involved in the program.

Longtime partner Alfred Lee, who was formerly the COO and chairman of Zappos, teaches a module on culture, for example. Partner Bryan Schreier, long ago a senior director at Google, talks with founders about category creation and how to sell their products. Carl Eschenbach, the former president and COO of VMWare (who, notably, persuaded Sequoia to invest nearly $100 million in Zoom in early 2017), separately coaches founders on their go-to-market strategies.

As a result, founders are exposed to many of the firm’s partners beyond the one who may have a seat on their board. They’re also exposed to founders like Julia Hartz and Tony Xu who’ve been backed by Sequoia over time and who drop in to help mentor their peers. Combined, the two prongs go a long way toward fostering community, says Lee.

In fact, “Community is really the core element” of the programs, she says, adding that each “cohort really bonds with each other” and that more than one set of founders has gone on to rent office space with fellow Sequoia-backed founders, as well as become close friends.

Of course, the programming — first launched in 2018 —  was happening in-person until earlier this year. Now and for the foreseeable future, it will be happening online, suggests Botha, who says he “emcees the entire Series A stage program,” while Lee plays master of ceremonies to its earlier-stage founders.

They insist that transition to a virtual setting isn’t slowing anyone down and that on the contrary, it has enabled the growing number of Sequoia-backed founders elsewhere in the world to participate. (According to Lee, some actually used to fly in to join these sessions.)

In fact, a bigger change that Botha can foresee right now is layering in more education around “how to deal with a culture with a remote workforce.”

As he says, in a future where people may be working in smaller hubs, taking turns at the office, or working remotely entirely, “it will be interesting to see what it means for young founders who are first-time managers and who have to manage a distributing team.”

It will most certainly be “more taxing on [their] people skills,” he notes.

Andy Rachleff founded Wealthfront a decade ago to give investors a better and smarter way to manage their wealth, building on core academic research showing that a carefully balanced portfolio of low-fee ETFs outperformed more aggressive strategies. Since then, the company has taken in billions of dollars of invested capital under management and expanded into new banking services, including high-interest checking accounts.

Rachleff and I talked on Extra Crunch Live about where Wealthfront is heading as it speeds toward its second decade, how he sees the competition from other, more active trading platforms like Robinhood and his advice for startup founders looking to build enduring products and companies away from the daily status quo.

Self-driving money

Rachleff began our conversation talking about the future of Wealthfront, which is increasingly moving beyond its wealth management app to new services.

“Our vision is to automate all of your finances — we call this self-driving money,” he said. That platform is expected to role out in September, and include features like easy direct deposit and automated bill pay, with any savings left over automatically moving to the right investment assets that meet a user’s chosen risk tolerance.

Facebook joined the growing ranks of companies publicly complaining about the 30% fee that Apple collects on payments made through its App Store.

Those complaints came midway through a blog post about the social network’s new feature supporting paid online events. Facebook said that to support struggling businesses, it won’t be collecting any fees on those events, at least for the next year, which means that those businesses keep 100% of payments on the web and on Android.

But Facebook said that won’t be the case on iOS, due to App Store fees, and it took aim at Apple with surprisingly direct language (at least, direct for a corporate blog post):

We asked Apple to reduce its 30% App Store tax or allow us to offer Facebook Pay so we could absorb all costs for businesses struggling during COVID-19. Unfortunately, they dismissed both our requests and SMBs will only be paid 70% of their hard-earned revenue. Because this is complicated, as long as Facebook is waiving its fees, we will make all fees clear in our products.

iOS purchase flow on left, Android purchase flow on right

To that end, the post includes screenshots of how the events payment flow will look on iOS and Android. On Android, it says, “Facebook doesn’t take a fee from this purchase,” while on iOS, it says, “Apple takes 30% of this purchase.”

Facebook said this language is included in the app update “which we submitted to Apple today for approval” — suggesting that there’s a possibility that the update won’t be approved.

This comes just about 24 hours after Fortnite was removed from the App Store, after Epic Games introduced direct payments into its hit game. It seemed like Epic was intentionally trying to provoke a fight, with the company quickly announcing a lawsuit against Apple and releasing a short in-game video parodying Apple’s famous 1984 commercial, with Apple cast as the villain. (The game publisher is in a similar battle with Google and Android.)

While Apple’s 30% fee has been around for as long as the App Store, the issue came to the forefront earlier this summer after developer Basecamp got into a public feud with the company over its subscription email app Hey. Apple’s Phil Schiller told us at the time that the controversy was not prompting the company to reconsider any of its rules.

Businesses will now be able to monetize online events on Facebook, thanks to a new feature that the social network is launching in the United States and 19 other countries today.

In a call with reporters, Head of Facebook App Fidji Sumo said that Facebook’s Events feature was designed for in-person events, but with the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting social distancing orders, the company “really quickly pivoted” to supporting online events.

In fact, Sumo said that in June of this year, live broadcasts on Facebook Pages doubled compared to the same period in 2019.

Sumo also outlined the new feature in a Facebook blog post. Businesses will be able to host larger events through Facebook Live, and the company is also testing the ability to host smaller, more interactive gatherings in Messenger Rooms. The goal is to give business owners the ability to create the event, set the price, promote the event, collect the payment and host the event itself all from one place.

Apparently some of the paid events that  have already been organized during tests with early users include talks, trivia, podcast recordings, boxing matches, cooking classes, meet-and-greets and fitness classes.

iOS purchase flow on left, Android purchase flow on right

“With social distancing mandates still in place, many businesses and creators are bringing their events and services online to connect with existing customers and reach new ones,” Sumo wrote. “People are also relying on live video and interactive experiences more when they can’t come together physically.”

Sumo said Facebook will not be collecting any fees from paid online events for at least the next year year. So on the web and on Android “in countries where we have rolled out Facebook Pay,” businesses should be able to keep 100% of their online events revenue. That won’t, however, be the case on iOS, and Sumo’s blog post includes a surprisingly direct dig at Apple:

We asked Apple to reduce its 30% App Store tax or allow us to offer Facebook Pay so we could absorb all costs for businesses struggling during COVID-19. Unfortunately, they dismissed both our requests and SMBs will only be paid 70% of their hard-earned revenue. Because this is complicated, as long as Facebook is waiving its fees, we will make all fees clear in our products.

To that end, the post also includes an iOS screenshot (“which we submitted to Apple today for approval”) showing that the purchase button will include a small text message saying “Apple takes 30% of this purchase” beneath the purchase button (vs. “Facebook doesn’t take a fee from this purchase” on Android).

Welcome back to Human Capital, where we look at all things labor and diversity, equity and inclusion. This week, Uber and Lyft’s legal battle against a California law pertaining to independent contractors continued. As of right now, it’s looking like Uber and Lyft are going to temporarily cease operations in California next week if they can’t get their way.

Meanwhile, Pinterest employees reached their breaking point when former COO Françoise Brougher sued Pinterest alleging gender discrimination and wrongful termination. Now, they’re demanding systemic change at the company in light of the latest allegation of discrimination. 

Gig Life

Uber and Lyft say they’ll have to temporarily pause operations in California

A lot happened with Uber and Lyft this week, so let’s break down exactly what transpired. But first, a quick recap of the events leading up Uber threatening to cease operations in California. 

Jan 1, 2020: Assembly Bill 5 becomes law. The bill, first introduced in December 2018, codified the ruling established in Dynamex Operations West, Inc. v Superior Court of Los Angeles. In that case, the court applied the ABC test and decided Dynamex wrongfully classified its workers as independent contractors. According to the ABC test, in order for a hiring entity to legally classify a worker as an independent contractor, it must prove (A) the worker is free from the control and direction of the hiring entity, (B) performs work outside the scope of the entity’s business and (C) is regularly engaged in an “independently established trade, occupation, or business of the same nature as the work performed.”

May 2020: CA Attorney General Xavier Becerra, along with city attorneys from Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco, filed a lawsuit asserting Uber and Lyft gain an unfair and unlawful competitive advantage by misclassifying workers as independent contractors.

The suit argues Uber and Lyft are depriving workers the right to minimum wage, overtime, access to paid sick leave, disability insurance and unemployment insurance. The lawsuit, filed in the Superior Court of San Francisco, seeks $2,500 in penalties for each violation, possibly per driver, under the California Unfair Competition Law, and another $2,500 for violations against senior citizens or people with disabilities. 

June 2020: Becerra and others file motion for a preliminary injunction seeking to force Uber and Lyft to immediately classify their drivers as employees.

August 6, 2020: CA Superior Court Judge Ethan P. Schulman hears arguments pertaining to the preliminary injunction. At the hearing, Uber and Lyft maintained that an injunction would require them to restructure their businesses in such a material way that it would prevent them from being able to employ many drivers on either a full-time or part-time basis. Uber and Lyft’s argument, effectively, is that classifying drivers as employees would result in job loss.

“The proposed injunction would cause irreparable injury to Lyft and Uber, and would actually cause massive harm to drivers and harm to riders,” Rohit Singla, counsel for Lyft, said at the hearing.

For example, Lyft estimates it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars simply to process the I-9 forms, which verify employment eligibility. It doesn’t cost anything to file that form, but it would require Uber and Lyft to further invest in their human resources and payroll processes.

August 9, 2020: Judge Schulman grants the preliminary injunction, which goes into effect on August 20, 2020. 

“The Court is under no illusion that implementation of its injunction will be costly,” Judge Schulman wrote in the order. “There can be no question that in order for Defendants to comply with A.B. 5, they will have to change the nature of their business practices in significant ways, such as by hiring human resources staff to hire and manage their driver workforces.”

Meanwhile, Uber and Lyft made clear their respective plans to file emergency appeals. 

August 12, 2020: Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi says Uber will have to temporarily shutdown in California if the court doesn’t overturn the preliminary injunction. Lyft says it, too, will be forced to temporarily cease operations in California.

August 13, 2020: Judge Schulman denies Uber and Lyft’s appeal. Uber says it plans to file another appeal while Lyft says it will seek a further stay from the state’s appellate court. 

Looking ahead

August 20, 2020: Preliminary injunction is set to go into effect and Uber and Lyft will likely be temporarily ceasing operations in California.

November 2020: Californians will vote on Prop 22, a ballot measure majorly funded by Uber, Lyft and DoorDash. Prop 22 aims to keep gig workers classified as independent contractors. The measure, if passed, would make drivers and delivery workers for said companies exempt from a new state law that classifies them as W-2 employees. 

The ballot measure looks to implement an earnings guarantee of at least 120% of minimum wage while on the job, 30 cents per mile for expenses, a healthcare stipend, occupational accident insurance for on-the-job injuries, protection against discrimination and sexual harassment and automobile accident and liability insurance.

Stay Woke

Pinterest’s fall from grace

Back in 2015, Pinterest was known as one of the companies doing some of the best work around diversity, equity and inclusion. That perception changed this year. 

Pinterest was one of the first tech companies to set concrete hiring goals. In 2015, those goals were to increase hiring rates for full-time engineering roles to 30 percent female, increase hiring rates for full-time engineers to 8 percent from underrepresented ethnic backgrounds; increase hiring rates for non-engineering roles to 12 percent from underrepresented backgrounds; and implement a Rooney Rule requirement where at least one person from an underrepresented background and one female candidate is interviewed for every open leadership position.

Pinterest was also one of the first companies to hire a head of diversity and inclusion. In 2016, Pinterest hired Candice Morgan for the role. Morgan left the company earlier this year and joined VC firm GV as its equity, diversity and inclusion partner. Still, Morgan had one of the longest stints at any tech company’s diversity and inclusion department.

In the company’s 2020 diversity report, Pinterest showed it beat all of its hiring goals but what was missing from that report was retention data. When TechCrunch asked in January if they would make the data available, a Pinterest spokesperson said, “unfortunately, we can’t share the retention metrics publicly, but it will continue to be an internal priority.”

Now, transparency about retention data is just one of a handful of demands Pinterest employees have. Two days ago, former Pinterest COO Françoise Brougher sued the company, alleging gender discrimination, retaliation and wrongful termination. Prior to that, Aerica Shimizu Banks and Ifeoma Ozoma, also accused Pinterest of discrimination.

In light of those allegations, Pinterest employees are walking out today to demand change at the company. The walkout is directly in response to recent accusations of racial and gender discrimination at Pinterest. In addition to the walkout, there’s a petition circulating throughout the company demanding systemic change. The change they seek entails full transparency about promotion levels and retention, total compensation package transparency and for the people within two layers of reporting to the CEO to be at least 25% women and 8% underrepresented employees.

Don’t Miss

Initialized Capital, the early-stage venture firm that got its start inside of Y Combinator almost a decade ago and spun out of the organization roughly five years later, has closed its newest fund with $230 million in capital commitments, cofounder Garry Tan announced on Medium earlier today.

The fund, its fifth, brings the assets that the San Francisco firm is managing to $770 million.

Tan also announced that Initialized has a new general partner in Brett Gibson, with whom Tan has partnered with time and again in the past. Specifically, Gibson co-founded with Tan the blog platforms Posthaven and Posterous. He and Tan also later wrote software for Y Combinator, building the organization’s internal software systems.

Initialized has been much in the news recently. We had the chance to talk with Tan just last month for at TechCrunch event organized for our Extra Crunch readers, and we discussed a few of the biggest mistakes that startups tend to make.

This editor also talked back in March with Tan and Alexis Ohanian, the Reddit cofounder and later Y Combinator partner with whom Tan, also a former YC partner, had founded Initialized. The two talked at the time about the importance of founders finding a way to eke out 18 months of runway on the assumption that the pandemic could take a while. While they gave no indication that they’d be parting ways, that’s exactly what happened more recently, with Ohanian deciding to raise his own pre-seed stage fund (reportedly with a $100 million-plus target), and Tan forging ahead with Initialized.

Asked about the development last month, Tan told us that “Alexis isn’t leaving the firm, he’s stepping into a board partner role, so all of the existing portfolio companies are going to continue to have him [involved].” Tan added he has “never seen anyone” identify promising startups when it’s “just an idea and a team and before there’s even a product” . . . “better than Alexis has,” adding that the split is “really about setting each other up for success.”

If there’s more to the story, investors don’t seem to mind, given some of the early returns they are poised to see thanks to early bets on some very well-known companies including the cryptocurrency platform Coinbase and the grocery delivery company Instacart. The firm has also seen the rapid rise of two other companies, the telemedicine startup Ro and the HR systems provider Rippling, both now so-called unicorns.

Even during these uncertain days, Initialized has seemingly remained active, writing follow-on checks to Bodyport, a San Francisco-based digital health company focused on the detection and management of heart disease (it just closed a Series A round), and Truepill, a San Mateo, Ca.-based online pharmacy that’s expanding into telehealth (and recently closed a Series B round.)

Initialized also recently co-led a round for Shelf Engine, a five-year-old, Seattle-based company that optimizes the process of stocking store shelves for supermarkets and groceries.

Initialized closed its fourth fund with $225 million just shy of two years ago.

NASA and SpaceX have set a specific target date for Crew-1, the first operational crewed mission for SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft. Crew-1 will carry astronauts Shannon Walker, Victor Oliver, Mike Hopkins and Soichi Noguchi to the International Space Station, and will mark the first regular service mission of the Dragon spacecraft following its certification at the conclusion of its development and testing program.

Crew Dragon’s final major milestone in that process was Demo-2, the mission launched on May 30 with astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley on board. While Hurley and Behnken completed that mission with a successful return to Earth earlier this month, that was still technically part of the qualification process for Crew Dragon and for SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, in order to certify it for human spaceflight so that it could begin regular mission operations – which kick off with Crew-1.

NASA says that the late October date (it had earlier discussed a late September timeframe as a possibility) in order to allow for the upcoming Soyuz spacecraft traffic from Russia to the ISS, as well as the departure of the current Space Station crew at the end of their current rotation. It’s also still pending a full review of the data and qualification criteria of Crew Dragon and the Demo-2 mission, which definitely appears to have gone pretty much exactly to plan, but which still will be examined under a microscope by NASA and SpaceX staff to ensure that was indeed the case.

If this data review goes well, and Crew-1 flies in October, then Crew-2 should take place next spring, bringing up four more astronauts to relieve the Crew-1 astronauts for another tour of science and Space Station operations.

As the antitrust drumbeat continues to pound on tech giants, with Reuters reporting comments today from the US Justice Department that it’s moving “full-tilt” on an investigation of platform giants including Google parent Alphabet, startups in Europe’s travel sector are dialling up their allegations of anti-competitive behavior against the search giant.

Google has near complete grip on the search market in Europe, with a regional marketshare in excess of 90% according to Statcounter. Unsurprisingly industry sources say a majority of travel bookings start as a Google search — giving the tech giant huge leverage over the coronavirus-hit sector.

More than half a dozen travel startups in Germany are united in a shared complaint that Google is abusing its search dominance in a number of ways they argue are negatively impacting their businesses.

Complaints we’ve heard from multiple sources in online travel range from Google forcing its own data standards on ad partners to Google unfairly extracting partner data to power its own competing products on the cheap.

Startups are limited in how much detail they can provide about Google’s processes on the record because the company requires advertising partners to sign NDAs to access its ad products. But this week German newspaper Handelsblatt reported on antitrust complaints from a number of local startups — including experience booking platform GetYourGuide and vacation rental search engine HomeToGo — who are accusing the tech giant of stealing content and data.

The group is considering filing a cartel complaint against Google, per its report.

We’ve also heard from multiple sources in the European travel sector that Google has exhibited a pattern of trying to secure the rights to travel partners’ content and data through contracts and service agreements.

One source, who did not wish to be identified for fear of retaliation against their business, told us: “Each travel partner has certain specialities in their business model but overall the strategy of Google has been the same: Grab as much data from your partners and build competing products with that data.”

Not ok, Google

This is now a very familiar complaint against Google. Crowdsourced reviews platform Yelp has been accusing the tech giant of stealing content for years. More recently, Genius got creative with a digital watermark that caught Google redhanded scraping lyrics content from its site which it pays to license (but Google does not). As Lily Allen might put it, it’s really not okay.

Last month’s Congressional antitrust subcommittee hearing kicked off with exactly this accusation too — as chair, David Cicilline, barked at Google and Alphabet CEO, Sundar Pichai: “Why does Google steal content from honest businesses?” Pichai dodged the question by claiming he doesn’t agree with the characterization. But for Google and parent Alphabet there’s no dodging the antitrust drumbeat pounding violently in the company’s backyard.

In Europe, Google’s business already has a clutch of antitrust enforcements against it — starting three years ago, in a case which dated back six years at that point, with a record breaking penalty for anti-competitive behavior in how it operated a product search service called Google Shopping. EU enforcements against Android and AdSense swiftly followed. Google is appealing all three decisions, even as it continues to expand its operations in lucrative verticals like travel.

The Commission’s 2017 finding that Google is dominant in the regional search market carried what lawmakers couch as a “special responsibility” to avoid breaching the bloc’s antitrust rules in any market Google plays in. That finding puts the travel sector squarely in the frame, although not yet under formal probe by EU regulators (although they have opened an active probe of Google’s data collection practices, announced last year).

EU regulators are also examining a range of competition concerns over its proposed acquisition of Fitbit, delaying the merger while they consider whether the deal would further entrench Google’s position in the ad market by giving it access to a trove of Fitbit users’ health data that could be used for increased ad personalization.

But so far, on travel, the Commission has been keeping its powder dry.

Yet for around a decade the tech giant has been building out products that directly compete for travel bookings in growth areas like flight search. More recently it’s added hotels, vacation rentals and experiences — bringing its search tool into direct competition with an increasing range of third party booking platforms which, at least in Europe, have no choice but to advertise on Google’s platform to drive customer acquisition.

One key acquisition underpinning Google’s travel ambitions dates back to 2010 — when it shelled out $700M for ITA, a provider of flight information to airlines, travel agencies and online reservation systems. The same year it also picked up travel guide community, Ruba.

Google beat out a consortium of rivals for ITA, including Microsoft, Kayak, Expedia, and Travelport, who relied upon its data to power their own travel products — and had wanted to prevent Google getting its hands on the data.

Back then travel was already a huge segment of search and online commerce. And it’s continued to grow — worth close to $700BN globally in 2018, per eMarkter (although the coronavirus crisis is likely to impact some recent growth projections, even as the public health crisis accelerates the industry’s transition to digital bookings) — all of which gives Google huge incentive to carve itself a bigger and bigger share of the pie. 

This is what Google is aiming to do by building out ad units that cater to travellers’ searches by offering flights, vacation rentals and trip experiences, searchable without needing to leave Google’s platform. 

Google defends this type of expansion by saying it’s just making life easier for the user by putting sought for information even closer to their search query. But competitors contend the choices it’s making are far more insidious. Simply put, they’re better for Google’s bottom line — and will ultimately result in less choice and innovation for consumers — is the core argument. The key contention is Google is only able to do this because it wields vast monopoly power in search which gives it unfair access to travel rivals’ content and data.

It’s certainly notable that Alphabet hasn’t felt the need to shell out to acquire any of the major travel booking platforms since its ITA acquisition. Instead its market might allows it to repackage and monetize rival travel platforms’ data via an expanding array of its own vertical travel search products. 

One of the German consortia of travel startups with a major beef against Google is Berlin-based HomeToGo. The vacation rentals platform confirmed to TechCrunch it has filed an antitrust complaint against the company with the European Commission.

It told us it’s watched with alarm as Google introduced a new ad unit in search results which promotes a vacation rental search and booking experience — displaying property thumbnails, alongside locations and prices plotted on a map — right from insight Google’s platform.

Screengrab showing Google vacation rental ad unit, populated with content from a range of partners

Discussing the complaint, HomeToGo CEO and co-founder, Dr Patrick Andrae, told us: “Due to the monopoly Google has in horizontal search, just by having this kind of access [to the vast majority of European Internet searchers], they’re so top of the funnel that they theoretically can go into any vertical. And with the power of their monopoly they can turn on products there without doing any prior investment in it.

“Anyone else has to work a lot on SEO strategies and these kind of things to slowly go up in the ranking but Google can just snap its fingers and say, basically, tomorrow I want to have a product.”

The complaint is not just that Google has built a competing ad product in vacation rentals but — following what has become a standard colonizing playbook for seemingly any vertical area Google sees is grabbing traffic — its packaging of the competing product is so fully featured and eye-catching that it results in greater prominence for Google’s ad vs organic search results (or indeed paid ad links) where rivals may appear as plain old blue links.

“They create this giant, colorful super CTA [call-to-action], as we call it — this one-box thing — where everything is clickable and leads you into the Google product,” said Andrae. “They explain that it’s better for the user experience but no one ever said that the user wants to have a one-box there from Google. Or why shouldn’t it be a one-box from HomeToGo? Or why shouldn’t it be a one-box in the flight word from Kayak? Or in the hotel world from Trivago? So why is it just the Google product that’s colorful, nice, and showing up?”

Andrae argues that the design of the unit is intended to give the user the impression that “Google has everything there”, on its platform. So, y’know, why go looking elsewhere for a vertical search engine?

He also points out that the special unit is not available to competitors. “You cannot buy it,” he said. “So even if you would like to have this prominent kind of placement you cannot buy that as a third party company. Even if you would like to pay money for it — I’m not talking about being in the product itself, that’s another topic — but just having the same kind of advertisement, because it is what they do — they advertise their own product there for free — and this is our complaint.”

Pay with your data

In 2017, when the Commission slapped Google with the first record-breaking penalty over its search comparison service — finding it had systematically given prominent placement to its own comparison shopping service over and above rival services in organic search results — competition chief Margrethe Vestager disclosed it had also received complaints about Google’s behavior in the travel sector.

Asked about the sector’s concerns now, some three years later, a Commission spokeswoman told us it’s “monitoring the markets concerned” — but declined to comment on any specific gripes.

Here’s another complaint: GetYourGuide, a Berlin based travel startup that’s created a discovery and booking platform for travel tours and experiences, has similar concerns about Google’s designs on travel experience booking — another travel segment the tech giant is moving into via its own eye-catching ad units flogging experiences.

“They want to create experience products now directly on Google search itself, with the aim that ultimately people can book these type of things on Google,” said GetYourGuide CEO and co-founder Johannes Reck. “What Google tries to do now is they try to get [travel startups’] content and our data in order to create new competitive products on Google.”

The startup is unhappy, for example, that a ‘Things to do’ ad product Google shows in its search results doesn’t link to GetYourGuide’s own search page — which would be the equivalent and competing third party product.

“Google will not allow us to link them into our search but only into the details page so the customer sees even less of our brand,” he said. “Or in Maps, for instance, if you go to Eiffel Tower and press to book tickets you don’t see any of GetYourGuide despite us fulfilling that order.”

He also rejects Google’s claim against this sort of complaint that it’s simply ‘doing the right thing for the user’ by not linking them out to the rival platform. “We do know from our data that users convert better and spend more time on our site and have higher engagement rates when we link them into our search and then deeper down into the funnel,” he told TechCrunch. “What Google is saying is not that it serves the user — it serves Google and it serves their profits. Because the deeper down the funnel that you link, the user will either buy or they will bounce back to Google and search for the next product. If you link into searches — if you don’t verticalize as much — then the user will end up in a different ecosystem and might not bounce back to Google.”

“As a partner [of Google] you have limited choice to participate [in its ad products]. You do need to give Google that content and then Google will try to move as many of the customers to them,” Reck added. “I don’t think there ever will be a world where booking.com or Expedia or GetYourGuide will disappear — rather our brands will start to disappear.

“That is something that I think ultimately is bad for the customer and only serves Google, again, because the customer will, in the long run, have no other choice and no other visibility on how he can get to choice than to go through Google because our brands will basically be hidden behind a Google wall. That will turn Google firmly away from what their original mission was… to steer people to the most relevant content on the web… Now they are trying to be completely the opposite; they’re trying to be the Amazon or Alibaba of travel and try to keep and contain people in their ecosystem.”

During the congressional antitrust subcommittee hearing last month Pichai claimed Google faces fierce competition in travel. Again, Reck contends that’s simply not true. “In Europe more than 75% of travellers go to Google to search for travel and all those users are free,” he said. “Everyone else in the travel industry pays Google top dollar… for these queries. Which competition exactly is he referring to?”

“[Pichai] then claimed that they’re not leveraging partners’ content — that’s not accurate. If you look at Google if you want to be in the top results these days you either pay or you give them data so that they can build their own products into search.”

“This dates back ten years now when they acquired ITA software, which is the leading data provider for flights,” Reck added. “They’ve just paved their way into travel. I think their intent is very clear at this point that they have no interest in their partners — or their customers for that matter, who like the choice that’s being offered on Google.”

“What they want to morph into, basically, is to turn Google into the Amazon of travel where everyone else maybe a content provider or a fulfilment agent but the consumer has no choice but to go through Google. I think that is the key intent here. They want to limit consumer choice. And they want to monopolise the space. We don’t want that and we will fight that. And if that means we need to go to the EU Commission to protect our and the customers’ interests then we’ll do that and we’re currently reviewing that option.”

The looming harm for consumers around reduced choice could manifest in poorer customer service, which is an area vertical players tend to focus on — whereas Google, as a platform funnel, does not.

Another German travel startup — Munich-based FlixBus — was also willing to go on the record with concerns about the impact of Google’s market power on the sector, despite not being in the same position as its business is not an aggregator.

Nonetheless, FlixBus Jochen Engert, founder and CEO, called on regional lawmakers to act against what he described as Google’s “systematic abuses” of market dominance.

“We call on the politicians in Germany and the EU to now work for fair competition on the Internet. It must be forbidden that monopolistic companies like Google abuse their market power, especially in times of crisis, and prevent competition for the benefit of the customer due to their dominance,” he told us. “Google systematically abuses its dominant market position to seal off access to customers from competitors and gets away with it time and again. It is only a matter of time before other industries and business models, in addition to travel, hotel and flight bookings, are permanently threatened.

“For FlixMobility [FlixBus’ parent company] as an internationally positioned market leader with its own platform, technology and our unique content, the situation is more relaxed than for smaller start-ups or those which also aggregate content such as Google. Nevertheless, in our opinion Google should be obliged to list and market its own products in search results on an equal footing with comparable offers. Here regulation must not stand by and watch for too long, but must react before Google irretrievably controls customer access and excludes competition.”

GetYourGuide’s Reck expressed hope that German lawmakers might be able to offer more expeditious relief to the sector than the European Commission — whose competition investigations typically grind through the details for years.

“The German government is actually very alert at this point in time,” he said. “They’re currently working on a new competition legislation that they will put in place probably within the next six months. It’s already in the making — and that will also be addressed to exactly that type of behavior of global, quasi-monopolistic platforms crossing the demarcation line, moving into other fields and trying to leverage their monopoly in order to create synergies in adjacent fields and crowd out competition.”

Asked what kind of intervention he would like to see regulators make against Google, Reck suggests its business should be regulated akin to a utility — advocating for controls on data, including around the openness of data, to level the playing field.

Though he also told us he would be supportive of more radical measures, such as breaking Google up. (But, again, he says speed of intervention is of the essence.)

“If you look at all of the data that Google collects, whether that’s consumer reviews, availability from its partners, all of the content from its partners, all of the information that they have through Android, whether that’s geo-specific data, whether that is interests, whether that is contextual information, Google is training their algorithms day and night on this data, no one else can. But we all have to provide data to Google,” he said.

“That’s not a level playing field. We need to think about how we can have a more open data architecture, that obviously is compliant with our data privacy laws but where developers from anywhere can build products based on the Google platform… As a developer in travel it’s currently very hard for me to access any data from Google so I can build better products for consumers. And I think that really needs to change — Google needs to open us for us to create a more vibrant and competitive ecosystem.”

“At a national or EU level we need to have an updated legal code that allows for quick interventions,” Reck added, saying competition enforcement simply can’t carry on at the same pace as for the markets of the past. “Things are moving way too quickly for that. You need to take a completely new approach.

“As Google correctly pointed out consumer prices have fallen but falling consumer prices is the weapon in tech; offering products for free allows you to gain marketshare in order to crowd out competition, which again leaves less choice for the customer so I think we need to think about how we think about tech and platforms in new ways.”

The Commission is currently consulting on whether competition regulators need a new tool to be able to intervene more quickly in digital markets. But there’s more than a trace of irony that its adherence to process means further delay as regulators question whether they need more power to intervene in digital markets to prevent tipping, instead of acting on long-standing complaints of market abuse attached to the 800lb gorilla of Internet search — with its “special responsibility” not to trample on other markets.

Reached for comment on the travel startups’ complaints, a Google spokeswoman sent us this statement:

There are now more ways than ever to find information online, and for travel searches, people can easily choose from an array of specialized sites, like TripAdvisor, Kayak, Expedia and many more. With Google Search, we aim to provide the most helpful and relevant results possible to create the best experience for users around the world and deliver valuable traffic to travel companies.

During the pandemic, we’ve been working hard with our partners in the travel industry to help them protect their businesses and look toward recovery. We launched new tools for airlines so they can better predict consumer demand and plan their routes. For hotels, we expanded our ‘pay per stay’ program globally to shift the risk of cancellation from our partners to us. And we’ve updated our search products so consumers can make informed decisions when planning future travel, further reducing the risk of cancellation.

The company did not respond to our request for a response to claims we heard that it seeks to secure rights to partners’ content and data via contracts and service agreements.

No relief

In another sign of the growing rift between Google and its travel partners in Europe, German startups in the sector banded together to press it for better terms during the coronavirus crisis earlier this year — accusing the tech giant of being inflexible over payments for ads they’d runs before the crisis hit. This meant they were left with a huge hole in their balance sheets after making mass refunds for travellers who could no longer take their planned trip. But the gorilla wasn’t sympathetic, demanding full payment immediately.

Asked what happened after TechCrunch reported on their concerns at the end of April, Reck said Google went silent for a few weeks. But as soon as the travel market started picking up in Germany — and GetYourGuide decided it needed to start advertising on Google again — it reissued the demand for full payment.

GetYourGuide says it was left with no choice but pay, given it needed to be able to run Google ads.

Reck describes the recovery package Google offered after it made the payment as “a Google recovery package” — as it was tied to GetYourGuide spending a large amount on YouTube ads in order to get a small discount.

The offer would recoup only “fraction” of GetYourGuide’s original losses on Google ads during the peak of the COVID-19 crisis, per Reck. “YouTube obviously is not where we lost the money. We lost the money in search where we had high intent customers, Google customers that wanted to come and shop. So that to us was [another] slap in the face,” he added.

Across the board, industries need to embrace modern workflows to keep up with the speed of startups. And out of all the various methodologies, I find the “lean methodology” to be the most intriguing of them all. It’s a unique combination of pragmatism and a higher purpose.

Lean methodology descends directly from the Toyota Production Systems (TPS), which is based on a philosophy of eliminating waste to achieve efficiency in processes. It relies heavily on the mindset of “just-in-time,” making only “what is needed when needed, and in the amount needed.” In software development, this means only developing the features your clients need, and only when they need them.

To emphasize the point and stir some creative juices, let’s look at the Japanese concepts of muda, mura and muri, and how this applies to being lean when we are building and shipping software.

Muda, mura and muri

Muda is the “waste” we are working to remove that is directly hurting efficiency. Waste is any activity that doesn’t create value, in the form of the products and services we offer. As every engineer knows, spending half the day in meetings is a painful waste of time.

Mura is “unevenness,” referring to any variance in the process itself or the output generated. In software development, “mura” causes unpredictability that makes it impossible to embrace a “just-in-time” mindset. If the quality of a new upcoming feature is uncertain, then additional time and resources will have to be reserved for quality assurance and bug-fixing efforts. It’s better to know upfront what you are going to get, how long it will take and what the cost will be.

Muri is “overburden,” which happens when we demand the unreasonable from our team, tools and processes. If we want to deliver a specific feature just-in-time, then we must allocate the appropriate time and resources. Giving our engineering teams too many simultaneous tasks, or failing to give them the tools necessary to succeed, will only lead to disappointment in time, quantity, quality or cost.

Forms of waste

Diving deeper into muda — what I consider the cardinal sin of lean methodology — here are the forms of waste we should always be on the lookout for:

1. Overproduction – Producing more than is needed, or before it is required. Besides unneeded features, we often over-allocate computing resources, especially in non-cloud environments.