Category: UNCATEGORIZED

White House officials are talking to Intel and TSMC about building semiconductor foundries in the United States, according to a Wall Street Journal report. U.S. tech companies and the government have been trying to reduce the country’s dependence on chip factories in Asia for years, underscored by national security concerns, the U.S.-China tariff war and now the COVID-19 pandemic, which has disrupted supply chains and logistics around the world.

The WSJ also reported that some U.S. officials have also talked to Samsung Electronics about expanding its existing contract-manufacturing operations in the U.S. to produce more advanced chips.

Intel, TSMC and Samsung Electronics are able to make chips of 10-nanometers or lower, the fastest and most power-efficient chips currently on the market.

In an April 28 letter obtained by the WSJ, Intel CEO Bob Swan told Defense Department that the company is willing to build a commercial foundry in partnership with the Pentagon “given the uncertainty created by the current geopolitical situation.”

Intel already has U.S. operations that make chips for its own products, but the new factory would serve other companies as well. TSMC, a Taiwanese semiconductor contract manufacturer, would continue making chips for other companies (its customers include Qualcomm, Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices).

The newspaper reports that TSMC has been in talks with Commerce and Defense department officials and Apple, one of the biggest clients, about building a semiconductor factory in the U.S. The company said it is considering opening an overseas plant, but has finalized a decision yet.

“We are actively evaluating all suitable locations, including the U.S., but there is no concrete plan yet,” a TSMC spokesperson told the WSJ.

Other solutions that have been proposed by U.S. officials and industry groups include government investment in the domestic chip industry to support the high cost of building foundries, tax credits for semiconductor makers to buy and install equipment at U.S factories, and implementing more export restrictions for U.S. companies that ship microchips to buyers in China.

TechCrunch has contacted Intel and TSMC for comment.

The head of what is arguably private equity’s most successful technology investment firm — Vista Equity Partners — made a rare appearance on Meet The Press to discuss the steps that the country needs to take to help minority-owned businesses recover from the economic collapse caused by the COVID-19 epidemic.

Robert F. Smith is one of the worlds wealthiest private equity investors, a noted philanthropist, and the richest African American in the U.S.  Days after announcing a $1.5 billion investment into the Indian telecommunications technology developer Jio Platforms, Smith turned his attention to the U.S. and the growing economic crisis that’s devastating minority businesses and financial institutions even as the COVID-19 epidemic ravages the health of minority communities.

Calling the COVID-19 “a pandemic on top of a series of epidemics”, Smith said that the next round of stimulus needs to support the small businesses that still remain underserved by traditional financial institutions — and that new financial technology software and services can help.

“We need to continue to rally as Americans to come with real, lasting, scalable solutions to enable the communities that are getting hit first, hardest, and probably will take the longest to recover with solutions that will help these communities thrive again,” Smith told NBC’s Chuck Todd.

Smith called for an infusion of cash into community development financial institutions and for a new wave of technology tools to support transparency and facilitate operations among these urban rural communities that aren’t served by large banking institutions. 

In all, the first round of the Congressional stimulus package poured $6 trillion into the U.S. economy through authorizations for the Treasury to issue $4 trillion in credit and $2 billion in cash payouts to various industries. The average size of those initial loans was just under $240,000, according to a post-mortem assessment of the Payroll Protection Program written by Lendio chief executive Brock Blake for Forbes. 

Blake’s assessment of the shortcomings of the PPP echoes Smith’s own criticism of the program. “Many of these small communities — urban, rural — aren’t being banked by the large institutions,” Smith said. Instead they’re working with community development financial institutions that in many instances weren’t approved lenders under the Small Business Administration and so were not able to distribute PPP money and make loans to their customers.

“We have to take this opportunity to reinvest in our business infrastructure in these small to medium businesses. In our banking infrastructure so that we can actually emerge out of this even stronger,” Smith said. “We have to invest in technology and software so that these ‘capillary banking systems’ are more efficient and they have more access to capital so they can engage with these businesses that are underbanked.”

In many instances this would amount to the construction of an entirely new financial infrastructure to support the small businesses that were only just beginning to emerge in minority communities after the 2008 recession.

“We need to get this average loan size to $25,000 and $15,000,” said Smith. To do that, community banks and development finance institutions are going to need to be able to access new fintech solutions that accelerate their ability to assess the creditworthiness of their customers and think differently about how to allocate capital and make loans. 

In some ways, Smith is echoing the call that fintech executives have been making since the PPP stimulus first started making its way through the financial system and banks began issuing loans.

“We would be remiss if we didn’t take a significant portion of capital to reinvest in the infrastructure of delivering capital back into those businesses and frankly reinvest in those businesses and give them technology and capability so there’s more transparency and visibility so there’s an opportunity to grow [and] scale,” said Smith. “I don’t want to see us go back to the same position where we were so we have these banking deserts.”

The head of Vista Equity Partners has even tasked his own portfolio companies to come up with solutions. As Barron’s reported last week, Smith told the Vista Equity portfolio company Finastra to develop technology that could help small lenders process Paycheck Protection Program loans for small businesses in underserved communities.

“In the process, it became apparent how unbanked these most vulnerable communities are, and we felt it was imperative to help build out permanent infrastructure in those banks so that they can build long-term relationships with the U.S. Small Business Administration beyond PPP,” Smith told Barrons.

As of last week, 800 lenders had processed 75,000 loans using the software that London-based Finastra developed for U.S. small lenders. Those loans generated $2.2 million in processing fees for the fintech company, proving that there’s money to be made in the small ticket lending market. And even as Finastra is reaping the rewards of its push into small business lending services, Vista Equity and Smith are donating the same amount to local food banks, according to a spokeswoman for the private equity firm, Barron’s reported.

The entire world has run smack into the biggest economic wall since the Great Depression, and the US stock market is … above where it was this time last year. American tech megacorns like AirBNB, Lyft, and Uber have laid off 20% of their staff … and the Big Five tech companies are worth a record 20% of the entire market. What the hell?

Yes, those three cited companies are directly affected by the coronavirus pandemic, but so many sectors are — travel, retail, hospitality, entertainment, events, real estate, business services, to name only a few — that every other sector is inevitably indirectly affected too.

So what are the markets, in their infinite wisdom, collectively expecting? The old saw has it that the market is a voting machine in the short term, but a weighing machine in the long run. What futures are being weighed?

I see seven possibilities bouncing around in time’s great lottery machine:

The Flying V

The future: In this, the best and laziest of all possible futures, we have beaten down the virus’s attack; a few easy countermeasures such as hand-washing, mask-wearing, and surface-sanitizing prevent future exponential growth, and when the lockdownss end, people flock back to their previous activities. Maybe a few extra months for some sectors, but come the autumn, schools reopen, flights resume, and life basically returns to normal. The economy and its jobs soon follow, and this short, sharp, V-shaped recession is behind us by November.

Probability apparently assigned by the market and many politicians: Call it 40%.

Its actual likelihood: This is delusional idiocy. Even with strict lockdowns, case counts are only plateauing in many areas. Mask wearing and hand washing are good and important, but not enough, and Americans have committed murder rather than wear masks. Most importantly, there is no way in hell people will flock back to previous activities as before — data shows they actually abandoned them before lockdowns were introduced. Consumer spending, and hence jobs, and hence the economy, will continue to suffer, lockdowns or no, while the virus is out there and (very understandably) keeping people in their homes.

The Christmas Tree

The future: We live in a world of Green Zones and Red Zones. In green zones, case counts are kept to near-zero, outbreaks are tracked with frequent ubiquitous testing — for which people are paid $50/test, to ensure underclasses don’t go untested — and forcefully squelched by aggressive contact tracing and away-from-home quarantines. People coming from Red Zones are kept in quarantine buffers before entry is allowed. In green zones, economies are roaring, but in red zones, the battle against the virus continues, and economies remain semi-comatose. Red and green zones are roughly equally distributed, so the economy is only half as bad as it would be in an all-red world.

Probability apparently assigned by the market and many politicians: Maybe 5%?

Its actual likelihood: I mean, we live in this already — Taiwan, South Korea, New Zealand, and (apparently) China and Vietnam are Green Zones. The likelihood of this extending to Europe and the USA, though … I don’t know. California moved fast and is competently governed, but now has roughly as many confirmed cases as all of China (allegedly) did. Hard to pack that mushroom cloud back into its uranium casing. But not impossible, with enough testing and tracing. Meanwhile, states with governments in denial will not dedicate the resources required to turn green. So, plausible, but IMHO not actually likely for the USA or Europe, much less South America or sub-Saharan Africa. I would think it a quite likely future for my homeland Canada … except we’re too tightly connected to fractured and incompetent America.

The Hammer And The Dance

The future: As described by Tomas Pueyo in a viral and pretty-good piece that came out a couple of months ago, the current lockdowns (The Hammer) are followed by the virus sine-waving indefinitely: it seethes, and from time to sporadic time erupts anew, and those eruptions are followed by localized screw-tightening including further lockdowns. But we keep it below health-system capacity, and we buy enough time such that when a vaccine is finally found and distributed, we haven’t come anywhere near herd immunity, and have thus saved many lives. The economy sine-waves too: surges of normalcy followed by massive ebb tides continue through 2020 and well into 2021 at the least.

Probability apparently assigned by the market and many politicians: Say 10%.

Its actual likelihood: I’d think reasonably high. We know lockdowns can plateau and reduce the virus; I fear that generalized incompetence and intransigence makes a Christmas Tree future implausible, at least in the USA, whose people and politicians tend to confuse organization with tyranny, and instead favor crude instruments such as lockdowns: and given those circumstances, this is the least bad option. I fear dangerous overshoots during “The Dance,” but I don’t think they’re inevitable. However, from an economic POV, this is not a good solution. People will continue to feel unsafe, and the economy will continue to be hit by hammerblows, albeit lighter than the one we’re in now.

The Silver Bullet(s)

The future: We’d best conservatively assume that, even if accelerated by human challenge studies and simultaneously building factories for seven different vaccines, we’ll be at least well into 2021, and possibly some distance beyond, before we get a vaccine. But a vaccine is not the only possible medical solution. If we find prophylaxes or treatments which, singly or in combination, render the disease much less dangerous, that would be hugely beneficial and change the proverbial game.

Probability apparently assigned by the market and many politicians: At least 35%. You can almost hear them screaming “Nerd harder!” at the doctors and scientists.

Its actual likelihood: Well, call me Pollyanna if you will, but I actually think this is fairly plausible. It’s still early but we’re already seeing (very initial) studies indicating that not just one, not just two, but a few different treatments may be beneficial. I want to stress again: very initial, and like hydroxychloroquine, may yet be ruled out by better data. But presumably the more we learn about this disease the better our treatments will get. The question is how much better, and how fast — but “much better, quite soon” is at least within the realm of possibility.

The Cattle Drive

The future: We basically give up on fighting the virus — while still trying to keep it from overwhelming healthcare systems and doing our level best to protect the elderly, the immunocompromised, the diabetic, etc. etc., with the fabled goal of Herd Immunity. Unfortunately we’ll almost certainly overshoot the actual Herd Immunity number, and it’s next to impossible to protect the elderly (“Who do you think works at those nursing homes? Highly trained gibbons?”), so this will almost certainly kill a lot of people who don’t have to die, while also not doing much for the economy since no one’s actually all that eager to rush out and catch a virus which has some chance of becoming the worst experience of your adult life even if it doesn’t ultimately kill you.

Probability apparently assigned by the market and many politicians: I’d like to think they don’t give this more than a 10% chance, largely because they know it wouldn’t fly with the public and also wouldn’t be particularly good for the economy.

Its actual likelihood: This is kind of the worst-case “Hammer and Dance” scenario, in which we just barely keep health-care systems from bursting. People call it “the Swedish model,” and we’ll see what happens there, but note that Sweden’s population is roughly comparable to New York City’s, and “the NYC model” sounds a whole lot less appealing. I think the cautionary tales of New York and Lombardy will keep most of the West from trying to deliberately seek out herd immunity.

The Second Wave

The future: After we relax the current lockdowns, everything seems fine. A few sporadic outbreaks here and there, the virus continuing to smolder a little, but basically a fire which is guttering and going out. But it turns out that it’s seasonal — and then — come the autumn — a completely unexpected second wave, which nobody predicted or saw coming, hits! You know, just like the Spanish Flu!

Probability apparently assigned by the market and many politicians: 0%.

Its actual likelihood: I too think this is very unlikely. First, if the virus is susceptible to heat and humidity, explain Ecuador and Brazil. Second, and more importantly, unlike the Spanish Flu, we have the example of the Spanish Flu to be warned by. Come the autumn, and again the winter, half the world will be watching all the data with keenly twitching antennae. Surely we can’t be collectively dumb enough to be ambushed by a Second Wave again. Right? Right?

The Double Tap

The future: This isn’t so much a new future as an add-on to any of the above. In this future, the coronavirus triggers a chain of effects which cascade into another, different massive crisis, while we’re still dealing with this first one. Say, an attempt to postpone November’s presidential election, followed by a constitutional crisis and calls for the US military to intervene. Or a huge spike in food prices around the globe, followed by widespread famine, riots, and revolution. Or the fracturing of a major nation hit particularly hard by the virus, e.g. Brazil or Russia or India.

Probability apparently assigned by the market and many politicians: 0%; second-order effects are generally beyond their remit.

Its actual likelihood: Pretty small … but not zero, and definitely worrying.

“I just think change unfairly favors the startup, the nimble small company,” says Roelof Botha.

The Sequoia partner, whose portfolio includes Unity, 23andMe, Instagram, Instacart, Xoom and YouTube, says he’s hopeful about the opportunities this pandemic has created for companies across a variety of sectors, including healthcare, cloud computing, social and others.

We spoke for an hour with Botha about several topics, including how user behavior is rapidly evolving, trends he’s seeing, his outlook on economic recovery, how he’s evaluating new investments and how fundraising itself is changing. Fun fact: Sequoia has made 10 investments over Zoom since the coronavirus pandemic forced us to stay at home.

The full conversation was broadcast on YouTube, and the embed appears below.

Side note: Extra Crunch Live is our new virtual speaker series for Extra Crunch members. Folks can ask their own questions live during the chat, with guests that include Aileen Lee, Kirsten Green, Mark Cuban and many, many more. You can check out the schedule here.

Below, you’ll find a lightly edited transcript of our recent chat with Botha. Enjoy!

The differences in fundraising based on stage

When you’re listening to a seed-stage company, it’s often about the story. The founders paint a vision of the future. That’s part of what I love about my job, by the way. You’re sitting there and you’re trying to imagine what the world is going to look like one day and whether this company is on the right side of history. Or is it implausible that this will happen? It’s so much fun to sit there and think about that. At the seed stage, it’s about the story.

As you get to a Series A or Series B stage, the company will definitely start to have some metrics: usage numbers, early adoption numbers. If it’s an enterprise company, what are people willing to pay for your product? You start to get a sense of the metrics that back up the story. If the metrics don’t support the story, then you start to wonder if that company makes sense. In the long run, you need to have financials that flow from the metrics. But that’s typically at a Series C or later stage. And clearly, by the time a company goes public, you need to have connected story to metrics to financials.

“Upload” feels like a slight, funny show — until you realize that without the jokes, the story would be unwatchably bleak.

The Amazon Prime Video series (created by Greg Daniels of “The Office,” “Parks & Recreation” and the upcoming “Space Force”) takes place in a near future where people can upload digital copies of themselves before they die.

The experience is marketed as a virtual retirement community, but it quickly becomes clear that being trapped in an afterlife run by a for-profit tech company has plenty of pitfalls. That’s doubly true for the show’s protagonist Nathan (played by Robbie Amell), who finds his entire existence controlled by his still-living girlfriend.

As we explain on the latest episode of the Original Content podcast, we enjoyed the show’s humor and the richness of its worldbuilding. If we had a complaint, it was that the murder mystery plot was fairly perfunctory.

You can listen to our review in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You can also send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)

If you’d like to skip ahead, here’s how the episode breaks down.
0:00 Intro
0:20 “Upload” review (mild spoilers)
30:11 “Upload” spoiler discussion

“Upload” feels like a slight, funny show — until you realize that without the jokes, the story would be unwatchably bleak.

The Amazon Prime Video series (created by Greg Daniels of “The Office,” “Parks & Recreation” and the upcoming “Space Force”) takes place in a near future where people can upload digital copies of themselves before they die.

The experience is marketed as a virtual retirement community, but it quickly becomes clear that being trapped in an afterlife run by a for-profit tech company has plenty of pitfalls. That’s doubly true for the show’s protagonist Nathan (played by Robbie Amell), who finds his entire existence controlled by his still-living girlfriend.

As we explain on the latest episode of the Original Content podcast, we enjoyed the show’s humor and the richness of its worldbuilding. If we had a complaint, it was that the murder mystery plot was fairly perfunctory.

You can listen to our review in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You can also send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)

If you’d like to skip ahead, here’s how the episode breaks down.
0:00 Intro
0:20 “Upload” review (mild spoilers)
30:11 “Upload” spoiler discussion

Tesla filed a lawsuit Saturday against Alameda County in an effort to invalidate orders that have prevented the automaker from reopening its factory in Fremont, California.

The lawsuit, which seeks injunctive and declaratory relief against Alameda County, was first reported by CNBC. The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for California’s Northern District.

Earlier Saturday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted that he was filing a lawsuit against Alameda County and threatened to move its headquarters and future programs to Texas or Nevada immediately.

Tesla had planned to bring back about 30% of its factory workers Friday as part of its reopening plan, defying Alameda County’s stay-at-home order. Musk was basing the reopening on new guidance issued Thursday by California Gov. Gavin Newsom that allows manufacturers to resume operations. The guidance won praise from Musk, who later sent an internal email to employees about plans to reopen based on the governor’s revised order. However, the governor’s guidance included a warning that local governments could keep more restrictive rules in place. Alameda County, along with several other Bay Area counties and cities, last week extended the stay-at-home orders through the end of May. The orders were revised and did ease some of the restrictions. However, it did not lift the order for manufacturing.

The lawsuit argues that by preventing Tesla from opening, the Alameda County is going against its own guidance.

“Alameda County has expressly recognized and publicized that “businesses may . . . operate to manufacture” batteries and electric vehicles,” the complaint reads. “Inexplicably, however, the Third Order as well as County officials have simultaneously insisted that Tesla must remain shuttered, thereby further compounding the ambiguity, confusion and irrationality surrounding Alameda County’s position as to whether Tesla may resume manufacturing activities at its Fremont Factory and elsewhere in the County.”

The term “third order” is a reference to a revised stay-in-place order issued by Alameda County.

On Friday, the Alameda County Health Department said Tesla had not been given “the green light” to reopen and said if the company did, it would be out of compliance with the order.

Editor’s note: Get this weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use every Saturday morning by email (7am PT). Subscribe here.

A specific type of small startup has a window to raise crowdfunding in a somewhat less regulated way than normally required in the U.S., based on a temporary set of rule changes by the Securities and Exchange Commission announced this week. Excited yet?

The new terms are generally geared towards the millions of mom-and-pop businesses that were the intended recipients of the PPP grants, who did not actually receive those grants as needed, as Jon Shieber covered on TechCrunch this week. However, this grim fall-back measure to stave off disaster for a key part of the economy is also a way for small startups to start creating jobs a little faster, potentially. One of the main adjustments: if you’re looking to raise between $107,000 and $250,000, you don’t need to have your financial statements reviewed first by an outside auditor. Instead, the SEC says you just need “[f]inancial statements of the issuer and certain information from the issuer’s Federal income tax returns, both certified by the principal executive officer.”

The catch is you still have to follow a long list of other do’s and don’ts provided by the SEC, such as being in business least six months prior, and clear disclosures to investors about your financial reliance on this “relief.” The temporary permissiveness is set to expire by August 31.

Investors bet big on robotic automation during the pandemic

Automation will happen at an even more foundational level than one might guess as supply chains try to resolve huge new types of kinks. Here’s how Shahin Farshchi of Lux Capital describes it, in a sample from one of our investor surveys on Extra Crunch this week.

COVID-19 revealed that our just-in-time manufacturing and logistics infrastructure cannot react to unexpected change. We expect the best practices of tech companies: rapidly adopting new tools and quickly iterating on their products and processes to become common in the realm of manufacturing and logistics. Engineers will be handed credit cards to try the latest tools, building on open source will be widely embraced, and making bets on products from startups will become the norm in this industry which has its roots in the industrial revolution.

Where are the opportunities? Here’s DCVC’s Kelly Chen:

Despite the storm, we are optimistic about a number of things:

• As the crisis spotlighted, global supply chains are a delicate balance of factors that can easily be disrupted. In addition to growing labor costs, regulatory uncertainty, and higher international shipping costs, we believe companies will increasingly innovate on domestic manufacturing channels. “Bring manufacturing home” is a cry reverberating across many industries in many countries.
• Online commodity retail is finally getting a kick in the tail. Last year, 4% of groceries were ordered online. In a recent large survey after COVID-19, a third of respondents ordered groceries online, many for the first time. The traditional two-day delivery will benefit, but we think momentum will shift to micro-fulfillment, where large hubs will service distributed local warehouses that are much closer to the customer, auto-fulfilling orders within hours.
• Separate from fulfillment, we believe the hundreds of thousands of new manual delivery jobs will endure. We predict it will be years before tech allows for scalable automated door-to-door delivery.
• As employers explore tech to automate labor in tough times, they find that humans are incredibly difficult to replace. At DCVC, we like tech that automates the kind of tasks that could never be done at human scale — things that scale the value of human skills, not replace them.

We also published a survey on media startup investing this week, and another on gaming technology infrastructure.

The benefits of a commercial real estate collapse in SF

Full-time CTO and long-time TechCrunch columnist Jon Evans has a fun muse for any reader who is looking to stay in the Bay Area and also pay less for housing. What is going to happen to all of the commercial real estate that is getting rendered obsolete as many companies go big on remote? Presumably a lot more housing stock. Here’s a taste of the full thing over on TechCrunch:

Consider San Francisco, everyone’s favorite overpriced, overcrowded, inequality poster child. It has roughly 150 million square feet of combined office and retail space at the moment. If the COVID-19 lockdown-then-recession eventually eats 20% of that — which is plausible between the retailpocalypse and what I will christen the “officepocalypse,” i.e. the revealed cost savings of working from home — that’s 30 million square feet of empty space.

If converted to housing, this could increase the city’s total housing stock by well over 10%. That would drive prices and rents, already pressured by the recession, way down — while presumably still remaining simultaneously profitable, since current prices are so high. Needless to say this conversion would also create a lot of jobs. (Although, in some cases, no conversion will be required.)

The rebirth of the vertical B2B marketplace startup

It was one of those seemingly guaranteed winners of the dot-com bubble, that got torched along with most other ideas around back then. Today, marketplaces for businesses in complex supply chains are back in vogue, Shieber writes for Extra Crunch this week. The original thesis was that “thousands of small businesses were making specialized products consumed by larger businesses in huge industries, but the reach of smaller players was limited by their dependence on a sales structure built on conferences and personal interactions.”

The opportunity has been clarified over the course of the past decade.

The first sign of life for the directory model came with the success of GoodRX back in 2011. The company proved that when information about pricing in a previously opaque industry becomes available, it can unleash a torrent of new demand.

“GoodRX did this to huge success,” said Shaun Maguire, a partner at Sequoia Capital, who invested in Knowde, a marketplace that follows a similar model. “The idea of crawling the public internet and creating structured data and winning SEO or doing SEO for the first time for something so you get a lot of traffic from buyers so you have something to offer sellers so you can get the sellers to cooperate with you… that playbook can be taken to many different industries.”

Across the week

TechCrunch:

This early Facebook investor wants to find smart students a job at the next Facebook

We need more video games that are social platforms first, games second

Tech for good during COVID-19: Sky-high gifts, extra help and chips

Data shows which tech roles might be most vulnerable amid layoffs

Latin America Roundup: Big rounds, big mergers and a $3.8M pandemic fund from Nubank

Extra Crunch:

AR is the answer to plummeting retail sales during lockdown

TechCrunch’s top 16 picks from Techstars April virtual demo days

Longtime VC Todd Chaffee of IVP says late-stage scene is now ‘M&A world’

As private investment cools, enterprise startups may try tapping corporate dollars

The great unicorn retreat

Around TechCrunch

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#EquityPod

From Alex Wilhelm:

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

Every week we write this post with some opening line akin to wow, what a week, huh? This is yet another one of those weeks. Perhaps this is just life now, and every week will stretch before us, similar to what Gandalf said after killing that Balrog, that “every day was as long as the life age of the Earth.”

Anyhoo, we recorded Equity to try and make a little sense of the week as there was a lot going on. So, Natasha, Danny, and Alex once again gathered to parse it all. Here’s a rough digest of the topics from this episode:

• Techstars’ virtual demo days. Natasha and Alex are listening in to as many Techstars  virtual demo confabs as they can along with other TC staff, pulling out favorites as we go. Today we dug into what is working, and what isn’t with virtual demo days.
• While VC Twitter might make it seem like every firm is open for business, that is not the reality. We talk about signaling risk, external signs a firm is investing, and throw pro rata chat around in between.
• Peanut, a social network for women, raised $12 million and that is the good news we needed this week. Think of it as a better, cleaner and more intimate version of your favorite Facebook group. About 1.6 million are on the platform.
• Every Mother raised a small sum to bring safety and community to pre and post natal workouts for mothers.
• Robinhood’s Series F. The new Robinhood  round values the company at around $8.3 billion, a huge number but one that wasn’t as high as we might have expected, given how much its valuation used to grow between new funding events.
• Airbnb cut 1,900 people in a devastating round of layoffs for the travel and hospitality company. We discuss o-founder and CEO Brian Chesky’s detailed blogpost about the cuts, and whether it is better to be a public or a private company during this pandemic.
• Uber cut staff this week, and pumped money into a massive Lime downround that may see it offload its own micromobility business onto the smaller company. Not a good week for Uber, not a good week for Lime.

We didn’t get to chat API funding rounds or the unicorn retreat, or even really riff on earnings. There’s so much going on! But, we’ll be back Monday morning so sit tight.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Saturday the company will file a lawsuit against Alameda County and threatened to move its headquarters and future programs to Texas or Nevada immediately, escalating a fight between the company and health officials over whether its factory in Fremont can reopen.

Tesla had planned to bring back about 30% of its factory workers Friday as part of its reopening plan, defying Alameda County’s stay-at-home order.

TechCrunch has reached out to Elon Musk directly. We will update the story if he responds.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued new guidance Thursday that allowed manufacturers to resume operations. The guidance won praise from Musk, who later sent an internal email to employees about plans to reopen based on the governor’s revised order. However, the governor’s guidance included a warning that local governments could keep more restrictive rules in place. Alameda County, along with several other Bay Area counties and cities, last week extended the stay-at-home orders through the end of May. The orders were revised and did ease some of the restrictions. However, it did not lift the order for manufacturing.

On Friday, the Alameda County Health Department said Tesla had not been given “the green light” to reopen and said if the company did, it would be out of compliance with the order.

In the tweet, Musk said Tesla is filing a lawsuit against Alameda County immediately. In a later tweet, he also encouraged shareholders to file a lawsuit against the county.

“The unelected & ignorant “Interim Health Officer” of Alameda is acting contrary to the Governor, the President and our Constitutional freedoms & just plain common sense!,” the tweet said. He followed up with another tweet claiming that Tesla will now move its HQ and future programs to Texas or Nevada immediately.

“If we even retain Fremont manufacturing activity at all, it will be dependent on how Tesla is treated in the future. Tesla is the last carmaker left in CA,” Musk wrote.

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all.

The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019. People are now spending 3 hours and 40 minutes per day using apps, rivaling TV. Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus.

In this Extra Crunch series, we help you keep up with the latest news from the world of apps, delivered on a weekly basis.

This week we’re continuing to look at how the coronavirus outbreak is impacting the world of mobile applications, including the latest on countries’ various contact-tracing apps, the pandemic’s impact on gaming and fintech and more. We’re also looking at that big app crash caused by Facebook, plus new app releases from Facebook and Google, Android 11’s new timeline and Apple’s plans to move WWDC online, among other things.

Headlines

WWDC goes virtual June 22

Apple announced this week its plans for a virtual version of its Worldwide Developer Conference. The company will host its WWDC 2020 event beginning on June 22 in the Apple Developer app and on the Apple Developer website for free for all developers.

It will be interesting to see how successfully Apple is able to take its developer conference online. After all, developers could already access the sessions and keynotes through videos — but the real power of the event was in the networking and being able to talk to Apple engineers, ask questions, get hands-on help and see how other developers are using Apple technologies to innovate. Unless Apple is planning a big revamp of its developer site and app that would enable those connections, it seems this year’s event will lack some of WWDC’s magic.

The company also announced the Swift Student Challenge, an opportunity for student developers to showcase their coding by creating their own Swift playground.