Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Uber has pushed its target to achieve a measure of profitability to a quarter in 2021, reversing a decision made just three months ago to move up the goal to the end of this year.

Uber will miss its target to reach an adjusted EBITDA quarterly profit in the fourth period of 2020, CFO Nelson Chai said during the company’s earnings call Thursday. The new target is a quarter in 2021.

“Our goal remains the same, returning our growth to business and achieving profitability for all of our stakeholders, which we are now planning to achieve on an adjusted basis, on a quarterly basis, in 2021,” Chai said.

Uber didn’t specify which quarter in 2021 it would reach adjusted EBITDA profitability— earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. However, the company did say that it would be less than a year from its original target of Q4 2020.

“Reaching profitability as soon as possible remains a strategic priority for us,” CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said Thursday. “We believe that disruption caused by COVID-19 will impact our timeline by a matter of quarters and not years.”

If it feels like Uber has come full circle in a span of three months, it has. Last November, Uber said it would have a profitable quarter, on an adjusted basis, by the end of 2021. Confidence in the company swelled and in early February Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi moved up the profitability target by a full year to the fourth quarter of 2020.

And then COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, swept through Europe and North America. It became a global pandemic and ride-share became another COVID-19 statistic.

Uber reported Thursday a net loss of $2.94 billion in the first quarter. Uber’s adjusted EBITDA for the quarter came to a loss of $612 million. The ride-hailing company generated $3.54 billion in revenue in the first quarter, up 14% from $3.1 billion on a year-over-year basis.

Last month, and prior to the company’s first-quarter earnings report, Uber walked back its annual guidance for 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Uber withdrew its 2020 guidance for gross bookings, adjusted net revenue and adjusted EBITDA, which were provided on February 6, 2020 during the company’s earnings call. The company’s previous 2020 guidance was gross bookings between $75 billion and $80 billion, adjusted net revenue $16 billion to $17 billion and an adjusted EBITDA loss of between $1.45 billion and $1.25 billion. Uber did not provide new guidance for 2020.

As the infrastructure for developing games becomes more advanced, studios have turned to buying best-in-class technology from others instead of building everything from scratch (often with inferior quality).

This shift underpinned Unity’s rise as the most popular game engine. The current focus on games as ever-evolving social hubs that can remain popular for a decade requires investment in “live ops” to keep updating the game with new features and experiences, only adding to a game studio’s responsibilities.

There are big movements in gaming right now to make games cross-platform (not just restricted to mobile or PC or one console), incorporate new types of chat (in-game or outside of it) and to automatically remove bullies and bots among other things. Optimizing games’ virtual economies is only getting more complex as trade of virtual goods becomes increasingly popular.

All this means more opportunity for startups (and large incumbents) that provide new tools and platforms to game developers and gamers. To gauge which opportunities are prime for entrepreneurs, I asked four leading early-stage investors who focus on the gaming sector to share their analysis:

• Sam Englebardt, Galaxy Interactive
• Gigi Levy Weiss, NFX
• Amit Kumar, Accel
• Anton Backman, Play Ventures

Sam Englebardt, Galaxy Interactive

Which areas within gaming infrastructure seem firmly dominated by large incumbents, versus open for new startups to rise up?

I’m always rooting for the startup, but some of the really big and expensive infrastructure challenges seem unlikely to be solved by a startup, especially where the incumbents have a lead in time, money and the personnel they’re throwing at the problem. I’m thinking here, for example, about something like cloud computing, storage solutions, etc.

Tesla is aiming to ramping up ‘limited operations’ at its factory in Fremont, California, a decision that puts the company and its CEO Elon Musk in direct conflict with a stay-at-home order in Alameda County.

Employees received two emails — one from Musk and another from the Valerie Workman, the company’s human resources director — indicating that the factory would open as early as Friday. Bloomberg was the first to report the emails. The decision to open was based on new guidance from Gov. Gavin Newsom, who said Thursday that manufacturers could resume operations.

However, Tesla is ignoring other parts of Newsom’s announcement, specifically that local governments could keep more restrictive rules in place. Tesla’s Fremont factory is located in Alameda County, which along with several other Bay Area counties and cities, issued revised stay-at-home orders that will last through the end of May. Those revised orders did ease some of the restrictions. However, if followed Tesla wouldn’t be allowed to restart production of its Model S, Model X, Model 3 and now Model Y vehicles until June 1.

Officials at Alameda County could not be reached for comment. However, the county and other surrounding Bay Area cities and counties issued a joint statement Thursday, reiterating its order.

It is important that our local communities understand that the regional Health Orders that took effect May 4 are still in effect. These orders — in Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties and the City of Berkeley — loosen restrictions on construction as well as outdoor activities and businesses. The Bay Area orders do not currently permit curbside pickup from non-essential, nonoutdoor businesses, and that is not allowed to begin on Friday, May 8.

Later in the statement, the officials said “in our current environment, if a county order differs from a state order, the more restrictive order takes precedence.”

Tesla did not respond to requests for comment.

Tesla has battled with Alameda officials before over regulations put in place due to COVID-19. The dispute began March 16 after Alameda County ordered all nonessential businesses to close, including bars, gyms and dine-in restaurants because of the global spread of COVID-19.

Tesla kept the Fremont factory open despite the order, claiming that part of the company’s operations fell under an exemption in the county’s order. Musk would tell employees in an email that the company would continue operations at the Fremont factory. He also told employees they should not feel obligated to come to work if they “feel the slightest bit ill or even uncomfortable.”

The Alameda County Sheriff disagreed, and on March 17 tweeted that Tesla was not “essential.” The automaker still ignored the order and the sheriff’s tweet. Employees received another email from Workman that the factory was still open for production, because it has had “conflicting guidance from different levels of government.” The email told employees to come to work if their job is to produce, service, deliver or test its electric vehicles.

A week after the order went into effect, Tesla suspended production at the Fremont factory. Basic operations have continued at the factory per an agreement with the county. The company said at the time it would suspend production through May 4, prompting it to cut pay for salaried employees between 10% and 30% as well as furlough workers.

But towards the end of April, the Bay Area counties extended the stay-at-home order, triggering a tweetstorm from Musk, who criticized the rules at one point wrote “Free America Now.”

After months of testing, Facebook’s redesign is finally official. Announced last year at F8, the more minimalist approach to its desktop design has been rolled out in waves. In March, the company added an option to try out the new version. Users could switch back and leave feedback for why they had done so. This week, the redesign becomes official. 

Change is hard, especially when it comes to redesigning a popular website. Even the best redesign still requires some rewiring of the user’s brain to adapt. Simplicity is the thing here — that’s a particularly big ask for a platform like Facebook, which is constantly adding new venues for content. Having played around with it in its earlier iteration, I can say that Facebook’s not afraid to leave blank canvas for this “fresh, simpler” design. Videos, games and groups are among those content types that will be prioritized here. 

The redesign takes cues from the mobile app, designed to offer faster load times and easier navigation (again, it will take getting used to).”We’ve grown since Facebook .com launched 16 years ago,” the company writes. “We’ve built new features, optimized for new devices and operating systems, and expanded to hundreds of languages. Recently we’d focused on the mobile Facebook experience, and realized our desktop site had fallen behind. People need it to keep up.”

For many, however, the biggest news here may be the long awaited arrival of dark mode for the desktop, as Facebook finally joins the likes of Twitter and countless apps. You’re no doubt well-versed with the benefits of dark mode: it’s easier on the ease and generally makes for a better video viewing experience (a top priority for the company, these days).

Also new is the ability to create groups, pages and, naturally, ads faster than before. The new version also offers previews of each, so you know what you’re getting yourself into before hitting Publish.

The company says it’s still actively seeking user feedback. So you can voice your inevitable dissatisfaction through the settings menu. Facebook will continue to tweak the design going forward, in a Sisyphean effort to please everyone on the internet.

Target makes another acquisition, social platforms struggle with a “Plandemic” conspiracy video and Boston Dynamics’ robot Spot encourages social distancing.

Here’s your Daily Crunch for May 8, 2020.

1. Target to acquire same-day delivery tech from Deliv

Target, which already owns on-demand delivery service Shipt, is in the process of acquiring technology assets from same-day delivery service Deliv . The retailer is characterizing the deal as more of an R&D type of acquisition, not one that will have an immediate consumer-facing impact.

Deliv had raised more than $80 million in venture capital funding. The acquisition price is said to be immaterial to Target, which isn’t issuing a press release or an 8-K filing to note.

2. Platforms scramble as ‘Plandemic’ conspiracy video spreads misinformation like wildfire

A coronavirus conspiracy video featuring a well-known vaccine conspiracist is spreading like wildfire on social media this week, even as platforms talk tough about misinformation in the midst of the pandemic. The video took off mid-week after first being posted to Vimeo and YouTube on May 4. From those sites, it traveled to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, where it circulated much more widely and racked up millions of views.

3. Boston Dynamics’ Spot is patrolling a Singapore park to encourage social distancing

In a new pilot program, a remote operator will control Spot as it patrols around two miles of Singapore’s Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park. A recorded message encourage social distancing will be broadcast from the robot.

4. Microsoft and AWS exchange poisoned pen blog posts in latest Pentagon JEDI contract spat

As you may recall, the DoD selected Microsoft last fall as the winning vendor in the JEDI winner-take-all cloud infrastructure sweepstakes. Amazon took exception to the decision and went to court to fight it. Since then, the two companies have been battling in PR pronouncements and blog posts trying to get the upper hand in the war for public opinion.

5. SaaS stocks defy gravity amid pandemic, record job losses

This week, shares of SaaS and cloud companies reached new record highs following an earnings cycle that came in better than some expected. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. A Chinese city to pump life into local business with WeChat live streaming

Messaging giant WeChat, which commands 1.16 monthly active users, announced this week it’s partnering with the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou to host a live stream shopping festival in June. The initiative, in which a municipal government aims to pump up the local economy through live streaming e-commerce, is first of its kind in China.

7. Student Discount: Join Extra Crunch for $50 per year

Speaking of Extra Crunch: Graduation season is here, and to celebrate we are offering annual Extra Crunch memberships to students for half price. That’s a full year of Extra Crunch for only $50 (plus tax). You just need a .edu or university email address.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

This week shares of SaaS and cloud companies reached new record highs as investors bid their equities higher following an earnings cycle that came in better than some expected.

SaaS stocks, as measured by the Bessemer-Nasdaq cloud index, closed at a 1,484.93 yesterday, a record, and just a hair under its intraday high of 1,491.59.

The raw numbers matter less than the index’s movement. From highs of around 1,400 in March, the index dropped to 892.60 during the early-year market selloff. Since then, SaaS and cloud companies have come roaring back. This is reflected in the new, higher valuation multiple that the companies are priced at by investors today, namley an enterprise value/revenue multiple of 14.7x.

So let’s take a look at why the SaaS cohort is the apple of Wall Street’s eye. There isn’t a single reason, but we have two that are worth considering. (Also up ahead: Notes on a chat with Alteryx’s CEO and a working definition of socialism. It’s Friday, let’s have some fun.)

A reminder

Briefly, we observe movements in the value of public SaaS and cloud stocks because they inform private market investors about possible exit values for startups. This helps VCs price venture rounds. So, in a somewhat slow mechanism, public values of a stocks help price startups. Given the portion of venture capital dollars and the amount of startup effort that goes into the SaaS space (AI companies are often built using SaaS models, lots of consumer apps are SaaS, and business software is lucrative), we care a lot about the value of SaaS and cloud stocks.

So is the run-up in SaaS stocks, therefore, good for startups? Yep. Now let’s get into why clouds shares are going up.

A meditation of the morality on capitalism

Since announcing the commercial availability of Spot, Boston Dynamics has presented a factotum of different gigs for the robot, from construction to telepresence. Last month, the company announced that it was partnering with local hospitals interested in using the platform to perform remote visits for COVID-19 victims.

Turns out the global pandemic has spurred all manner of surprise innovation for the technically impressive quadrupedal robot.  Among the more expected is Singapore’s use of Spot to patrol parks and encourage social distancing among citizens. The pilot program starts today and will run for two weeks during off-peak hours.

A remote operator will control the robot (social distancing, mind) as it patrols around two miles of Singapore’s Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park. A recorded message encourage social distancing will be broadcast from the robot. There are cameras on board, too, used to monitor gatherings, but the government insists that they won’t be using face tracking or collected personal data.

“Spot is fitted with safety sensors to detect objects and people in its path,” according to the release. “It has in-built algorithms to detect an object or person within 1 metre of its proximity to avoid collision. SPOT will be accompanied by at least one NParks officer during the trial period.” If things go well, the robot will be allowed to patrol during peak hours, as well.

One of the pandemic’s more fascinating knock-on effects to the tech world is an increased interest in robotics and automation. Check out our recent VC survey to see how COVID-19 could shape the future of the industry.

Microsoft and Amazon are at it again as the fight for the Defense Department JEDI contract continues. In a recent series of increasingly acerbic pronouncements, the two companies continue their ongoing spat over the $10 billion, decade-long JEDI contract spoils.

As you may recall (or not), last fall in a surprise move, the DoD selected Microsoft as the winning vendor in the JEDI winner-take-all cloud infrastructure sweepstakes. The presumed winner was always AWS, but when the answer finally came down, it was not them.

To make a very long story short, AWS took exception to the decision and went to court to fight it. Later it was granted a stay of JEDI activities between Microsoft and the DoD, which as you can imagine did not please Microsoft . Since then, the two companies have been battling in PR pronouncements and blog posts trying to get the upper hand in the war for public opinion.

That fight took a hard turn this week when the two companies really went at it in dueling blog posts after Amazon filed its latest protest.

First there was Microsoft with PR exec Frank Shaw taking exception to AWS’s machinations, claiming the company just wants a do-over:

This latest filing – filed with the DoD this time – is another example of Amazon trying to bog down JEDI in complaints, litigation and other delays designed to force a do-over to rescue its failed bid.

Amazon’s Drew Herdner countered in a blog post published this morning:

Recently, Microsoft has published multiple self-righteous and pontificating blog posts that amount to nothing more than misleading noise intended to distract those following the protest.

The bottom line is that Microsoft believes it won the contract fair and square with a more competitive bid, while Amazon believes it should have won on technical superiority, and that there was political interference from the president because he doesn’t like Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post.

If you’ve been following this story from the beginning (as I have), you know it has taken a series of twists and turns. It’s had lawsuits, complaints, drama and intrigue. The president has inserted himself into it too. There have been accusations of conflicts of interest. There have been investigations, lawsuits, and more investigations.

Government procurement tends to be pretty bland, but from the start when the DoD chose to use the cutesy Star Wars-driven acronym for this project, it has been anything but. Now it’s come down to two of the world’s largest tech companies exchanging angry blog posts. Sooner or later this is going to end right?

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.

“Is Greta Thunberg a hypocrite?” Google that phrase and you will get thousands of results. It just goes to show that, to a large extent, the “Q&A” model is broken on the internet. Where once Yahoo Answers and Quora were considered the bright young things of Web 2.0’s “Read/Write Web”, today there is only the chaos of myriad search results. Let’s face it, many have tried to really crack Q&A (remember “Mahalo”?) but few ever got very far and most became zombie sites.

But look again and you will notice something. A site called Parlia sits at Number 3 on that search result for ‘Is Greta Thunberg a hypocrite’. But Parlia only launched (in stealth mode) in October last year.

So how can this be?

Well, this upstart in the Q&A space has now closed a Pre-seed round of funding from Bloomberg Beta, Tiny VC and others (amount undisclosed).

And as founder, and former journalist, Turi Monthe tells me, the idea here is Parlia will become an “encyclopedia of opinion.”

“We’re a wiki: mapping out all the perspectives on both the breaking stories and controversies of the day, as well as the big evergreen questions: does God exist? Is Messi really better than Ronaldo? The way we’re building is to also help fix today’s polarisation, outrage and information silo-ing,” he tells me.

While most Q&A sites are geared around X vs Y, and focused on rational debate, Parlia is trying to map ALL the opinions out there: flat earthers’ included. It’s aiming to be descriptive not prescriptive and is closer to a wiki, unlike Quora where the authors are often selling ‘something’ as well as themselves as experts.

The site is already on a tear. And also highly appropriate for this era.

Right now top subjects include “How to stay healthy during quarantine at home?” or “What are the effects of spending long periods in coronavirus isolation?” or “Will the coronavirus crisis bring society together?” The list goes on. Users see the arguments calmly, dispassionately laid out, alongside counter-arguments and all the other arguments and positions.

Says Munthe: “In 2016, I realized the age of political consensus was over. I watched as Britain spilt maybe a trillion words of argument in the build-up to the Brexit Referendum and thought: there are no more than a half-dozen reasons why people will vote either way.”

He realized that if there’s a finite number of arguments around something as huge and divisive as Brexit, then this would be true for everything. Thus, you could theoretically map the arguments around Gun Control, Abortion, responses to the Coronavirus, the threat of AI, and pretty much everything.

So why would anyone want to do that? It’s, of course, a good thing in itself and would help people understand what they think as well as help them understand how the rest of the world thinks.

Luckily, there is also a business model. It will potentially carry ads, sponsorships, membership, user donations. Another is data. If they get it right, they will have surfaced foundational information about the very ways we think.

Munthe thinks all the users will come through Search. “The media opportunity, we think, is 100M+ pageviews/month,” he says.

Munthe’s cofounder is J. Paul Neeley, former Professor of the Royal College of Art, and a Service Designer who’s worked with Unilever and the UK’s Cabinet Office. Munthe himself has been exploring the systemic issues of the media ecosystem for some time. From founding a small magazine in Lebanon, reporting in Iraq in 2003, then starting and exiting Demotix, to launching North Base Media (a media-focused VC).

The temptation, of course, is to allow bias to creep in return for commercial deals. But, says Menthe: “We will never work with political parties, and we will set up our own ethics advisory board. But that understanding should be of value to market researchers and institutions everywhere.”

So now you can find out how coronavirus will change the world?