Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Weeks after Facebook invested $5.7 billion in Indian telecom giant Jio Platforms, private equity firm Silver Lake is following suit. 

Silver Lake announced on Monday it will be investing 56.56 billion Indian rupees (about $746.74 million) in the top telecom operator Jio Platforms, giving it a valuation of $65 billion.

Reliance Jio, which began its commercial operation in the second half of 2016, upended the local telecom market by offering bulk of 4G data and voice calls for six months to users at no charge. Jio Platforms, a subsidiary of Reliance Industries (India’s most valuable firm by market value), has amassed 388 million subscribers in the period, becoming the nation’s top telecom operator.

“Jio Platforms is one of the world’s most remarkable companies, led by an incredibly strong and entrepreneurial management team who are driving and actualizing a courageous vision. They have brought extraordinary engineering capabilities to bear on bringing the power of low-cost digital services to a mass consumer and small businesses population. The market potential they are addressing is enormous, and we are honored and pleased to have been invited to partner with Mukesh Ambani and the team at Reliance and Jio to help further the Jio mission,” said Egon Durban, co-chief executive and managing partner at Silver Lake, in a statement.

In a statement, Mukesh Ambani, who oversees Reliance Industries, said, “Silver Lake has an outstanding record of being a valuable partner for leading technology companies globally. Silver Lake is one of the most respected voices in technology and finance. We are excited to leverage insights from their global technology relationships for the Indian Digital Society’s transformation.”

In the company’s earnings call last week, Ambani said several firms had expressed interest in buying a stake in Jio Platforms.

More to follow…

An India-based startup that has built a Shopify -like platform for coaching centers to accept fees digitally from students, and deliver classes and study material online has received the nod — and capital — from a number of high-profile investors.

The business-to-business startup, called Classplus, said on Monday that it has raised $9 million in its Series A financing round led by RTP Global, a prolific investor in early stage startups. Existing investors Blume Ventures, Sequoia Capital India’s Surge, Spiral Ventures, and Strive also participated in the round, said the two-and-a-half-year-old startup.

As dozens of firms bet on hundreds of millions of students — and their parents — to embrace digital learning apps, Classplus, also backed by Times Internet, believes that tens of thousands of teachers and coaching centers that have gained reputation in their neighborhoods are here to stay.

“We are serving these hyperlocal tutoring centers that are present in nearly every nook and cranny in India. Anyone who was born in a middle-class family here has likely attended these tution classes,” said Mukul Rustagi, co-founder and chief executive of Classplus, in an interview with TechCrunch.

“These are typically small and medium setups that are run by teachers themselves. These teachers and coaching centers are very popular in their locality. They rarely do any marketing and students learn about them through word-of-mouth buzz,” he said.

Rustagi described Classplus as “Shopify for coaching centers.” Like Shopify, the service does run a marketplace that offers discoverability to these teachers or coaching centers. Instead, it offers a way for these teachers to leverage its tech platform to engage with customers (in this case, students).

Classplus has on-boarded more than 3,500 coaching centers on its platform, said Rustagi, more than 500 of which started using the service in the month of April after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government ordered to shut down schools and other public gatherings in a bid to curb the spread of the coronavirus disease.

Coaching centers use Classplus to digitally communicate with students, deliver video classes and other study material, and accept payments. These coaching centers can engage with their students through Classplus’ mobile app and the website. “Joining the platform is as easy as signing up for a team collaboration app. The whole process takes less than 30 minutes,” said Rustagi.

“According to the Global Teacher Status Index by the Varkey foundation in 2018, India was among the top-10 in the world in respecting teachers, though was in the last-10 in paying them. Classplus is liquidating this imbalance by empowering tutors with full-stack mobile solutions, while maintaining and further improving the high reputation of tutors. We are happy to back the company with this important mission, and have Classplus as our first edutech bet in India,” said Kirill Kozhevnikov, a partner at RTP Global, in a statement.

The startup, which employs about 200 people, aims to have 10,000 coaching centers join its platform by the end of the year. It has a sales team and other members in about 70 cities in India currently. Classplus also plans to introduce additional features for coaching centers on its platform.

When Roger Lee, the co-founder of Human Interest, heard that San Francisco imposed shelter-in-place orders, he started blogging about layoff news and posting crowdsourced lists of employees who were laid off. His goal was to increase awareness about layoffs and give recruiters a place to search for candidates.

However, one week and 40 startup layoffs later, Lee saw his blog was not going to be able to keep up with the massive number of cuts happening across the country. So, Layoffs.fyi tracker was born and currently receives tens of thousands of visitors every day.

As for how he’s balancing the tracker and Human Interest? Lee noted that he has transitioned to work at the company from a board-level capacity.

Lee’s work is one example of many inspiring initiatives we’re going to showcase this week. Let’s get into the list.

1. Plan your future adventures. A number of sites have popped up to encourage people to buy gift cards and support their local restaurants. But what about their local tourism industries? Adam Faris, a student at the University of Oregon, launched a coronavirus initiative with a team of folks to support businesses in the action sports and adventure experience space. Faris has aggregated a number of businesses offering discounts on skiing, surfing, whitewater rafting and more to encourage people to support small businesses.
2. Extra help for developers. YouTeam, a Y Combinator-backed marketplace for building remote development teams, is launching a volunteer developers group. Any startups working on COVID-19-related issues can turn to the group to find technical support to aid them, and apply for free development hours of front-end, back-end or UX support. 
   
3. Tiny steps, big impact. Tiny Organics, a child nutrition company, is pledging $10,000 annually to Partnership for Healthier America, which works to make sure kids have access to health food. Tiny Organics also created a special edition plant-based meal, Michelle My Broccoli Belle, and will donate 100% of the proceeds to the Food Bank for New York City. 
   
4. Help from above. Skydio is donating dozens of self-flying drones to first responders across the country, as part of its Emergency Response program. The drones do not have speakers and will not be used as a communication mechanism, but instead as a way for fire and police units to see potential issues close up. Skydio will provide training and support at no cost. Additionally, the company is teaming up with Frontline Support, a nonprofit, to source and deliver more than a million units of PPE equipment to the University of Washington Hospital System through its logistical and supply chain systems. 
   
5. A safe space. Equal space (=SPACE), co-working space for multicultural, LGBTQ, and women-owned startups, has opened up its doors virtually. =Space is offering resources online for freelancers and small business owners that includes training, workshops, productivity sessions, and wellness talks all free of charge.
6. Aid for healthcare workers. Work & Co partnered with employees at Adobe, Dropbox, and a number of medical students to create a tool to connect healthcare workers with access to grocery delivery, discounted childcare, and free mental health services. The tool was made with input from doctors, nurses, and medical school faculty to help workers meet their basic needs, beyond PPE. It is currently available in New York.
7. Bandcamp waives fees. Bandcamp, a music company that lets users directly support artists, announced that it will be waiving fees for artists for a number of select days. Last time the platform waived fees, sales for music and merchandise pulled in $4.3 million for artists. It’s a refreshing way to support artists in a world where concerts are no longer a reality. Read more here. 
   
8. A pro bono portal. The American Bar Association and a justice tech company, Paladin, teamed up to create a portal to connect those impacted by COVID-19 to lawyers working pro bono. LegalZoom and Clio are also connected to the project. Read more here.
9. Hiring help. Binc, a recruitment company that works with companies like Tiktok, Stripe, Nest, Groupon, and more, has launched a free program to help tech workers find jobs. The company is placing employees in engineering, product, design, market, and recruitment professionals in jobs for no charge until the end of the month.
10.  Chipping in for COVID. Morning Brew is holding an online poker tournament-turned-fundraiser to raise money for Frontline Foods, which supports restaurants and feeds frontline workers. A donation of $100 is required to play.

It’s hard to work out just how different the covid and post-covid world will be, because it’s changing so comprehensively. Consider movie theaters. The first-order effect seems obvious: they’re doomed! Even after they reopen, they can’t make money with 50% of their capacity. How will they pay their rents?

Wrong question … or, more accurately, right question, but wrong scale. Yes, AMC and co. will probably go bankrupt, and in a just world their shareholders will get wiped out and their bondholders will take a haircut — that’s capitalism, baby, or at least it should be —

— but let’s consider the second-order effects. Inability to pay rent is only catastrophic if your landlord can rent your space to someone else. Who’s going to rent massive theater spaces during a pandemic? Who’s going to rent them during the recession which follows the pandemic? It’s not just movies; it’s basically every retail and theatrical space.

As the old joke goes, “if you owe the bank a million dollars, then you have a problem; but if you owe the bank a billion dollars, then the bank has a problem.” You may think it’s bad to be a movie theater, a restaurant, or a retail store, and it is … but the second-order effect is that it’s even worse to be in commercial real estate. One struggling tenant is a headache. All struggling tenants is a catastrophe.

But hey, at least you’ve got office space, right? Except that we just might find that a lot of companies forced to try out working from home might discover it’s actually highly cost-effective:

The same is true of retail space everywhere. Remember, “retailpocalypse” was headline fodder even before the virus prompted everyone to start getting everything delivered from the Internet. The same is true of restaurants, who were struggling to come to terms with food delivery services (please, stop using GrubHub and Seamless) even before the virus hit.

So, the first-order hit is to the obvious suspects: theaters, stadiums, restaurants, retail, gyms. The second-order hits are to owners of commercial real estate. wholesalers, service providers, etc. The third-order hit is to taxes paid to, and therefore budgets of, governments. We’ll see comparable effects elsewhere, too — e.g. first-order to airlines and buses, second-order to hotels and rental cars and events and cargo shippers, third-order to airports and governments again.

But let’s focus on one particular interesting question. What happens next?

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 lockdown-then-recession eventually eats 20% of that — which seems at least 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.)

While you’re at it, you could take a couple million feet of those space and convert them to 200 sq. ft. mini-apartments to house every homeless person in San Francisco. (It’s not that crazy a notion. New York City has been legally required to house every homeless person in its five boroughs, and has plenty of apartments that small which people pay good money for.)

This is no panacea, of course. Nothing will be. Converting retail and office to residential will be very expensive … although not as expensive as letting them lie there worthless without collecting any rent at all. But if our post-covid world is one in which demand for office and retail space plummets, which seems likely, let’s take advantage of that space to help deal with the housing crisis which has plagued wealthy cities across the world.

Ultimately, tech companies, long blamed for gentrification and spiraling prices in San Francisco and many other cities, could become a major part of the solution to that problem, by making the tools (and setting the examples) for freeing up office space by working from home. Sadly, we can preemptively rely on this dark irony being lost on the usual outraged suspects.

Some big M&A is afoot in Israel in the world of smart transportation. According to multiple reports and sources that have contacted TechCrunch, chip giant Intel is in the final stages of a deal to acquire Moovit, a startup that applies AI and big data analytics to track traffic and provide transit recommendations to some 800 million people globally. The deal is expected to close in the coming days at a price believed to be in the region of $1 billion.

We have contacted Nir Erez, the founder and CEO of Moovit, as well as Intel spokespeople for a comment on the reports and will update this story as we learn more. For now, Moovit’s spokesperson has not denied the reports and what we have been told directly.

“At this time we have no comment, but if anything changes I’ll definitely let you know,” Moovit’s spokesperson.

Sources tell TechCrunch that the startup — which had previously been backed by Intel Capital in a strategic investment — will become part of Intel’s Israeli automotive hub, which is anchored by Mobileye, the autonomous driving company that Intel acquired for $15.3 billion in 2017.

It’s not clear yet what Moovit would be doing in that hub, but as a rule, ingesting and actioning reliable, real-time traffic data and intelligent routing — the crux of what Moovit does — are some of the most challenging aspects of getting autonomous vehicle services up and running.

And in fact, Moovit had already been working with Mobileye and Intel: the latter led Moovit’s last round of funding, a Series D of $50 million in 2018, and as part of that, Professor Amnon Shashua, Senior Vice President of Intel and CEO / CTO of Mobileye, joined Moovit’s Board of Directors as an observer.

Bringing on talent and integrating it into Intel’s bigger strategy appears to be a big part of the deal. Of the $1 billion, employees will get about 10% of the final amount as part of a retention package, a detail both reported by Israeli Hebrew-language newspaper The Marker and passed to us by David Bedussa, an analyst with Wadi Ventures.

At the time of Moovit’s last funding round, the startup was valued at over $500 million, but it has grown a lot in the last two years.

It produces a popular, standalone app that people use to figure out the best way to navigate around cities, and it also integrates with the likes of Uber in its efforts to provide multi-modal routes using different forms of transportation from Uber cars and bikes to using public transport and walking.

In 2018, Moovit said its iOS, Android and Web apps were used by 120 million people globally across 2,000 cities in 80 countries. Now in 2020, that figure is over 800 million riders across 3,100 cities in 102 countries and 45 languages.

Other investors in Moovit in addition to Intel include BMW, Sound Ventures, Gemini Israel, Sequoia Israel and LVMH.

The acquisition (if it goes through, but also the M&A interest) comes at a critical moment in the world of transportation. Currently, many people around the world are being asked to curtail their movement to slow down the spread of COVID-19 cases in what has become a global pandemic; and partly as a result of that same public health crisis, the global economy has been in a major downswing. Both have had a direct impact on the automotive world, which is seeing a slowdown in production and some changing courses in ambitious next-generation strategies.

At the same time, those in the world of tech have been working on leveraging their assets in as optimised a way as possible to help keep things moving (so to speak).

So, while consumer usage of Moovit’s app will have drastically dropped off with people moving around less, the company has launched a series of COVID-19 services to help those that still need to keep things operational, and still need to get from A to B.

These have included a special service for transit data managers (which it’s offering for free, unlike its normal B2B products) to both receive updated transit and traffic data and subsequently put in place “thousands of  short-term changes quickly, enabling riders to plan their trips with only updated, valid routes.”

It has also started a real-time service for Moovit app users to make sure that they are getting those alerts. Thirdly, it has launched an “emergency mobilisation on-demand” service that lets transportation managers redeploy buses on routes more quickly to better serve essential workers that are still using public transport. 

Since the start of the outbreak, governments and companies have scrambled to develop apps and websites that can help users identify COVID-19 symptoms.

India’s largest cell network Jio, a subsidiary of Reliance, launched its coronavirus self-test symptom checker in late March, just before the Indian government imposed a strict nationwide lockdown to prevent the further spread of the coronavirus. The symptom checker allows anyone to check their symptoms from their phone or Jio’s website to see if they may have become infected with COVID-19.

But a security lapse exposed one of the symptom checker’s core databases to the internet without a password, TechCrunch has found.

Jio’s coronavirus symptom checker. One of its databases exposed users’ responses. (Image: TechCrunch)

Security researcher Anurag Sen found the database on May 1, just after it was first exposed, and informed TechCrunch to notify the company. Jio quickly pulled the system offline after TechCrunch made contact. It’s not known if anyone else accessed the database.

“We have taken immediate action,” said Jio spokesperson Tushar Pania. “The logging server was for monitoring performance of our website, intended for the limited purpose of people doing a self-check to see if they have any COVID-19 symptoms.”

The database contains millions of logs and records starting April 17 through to the time that the database was pulled offline. Although the server contained a running log of website errors and other system messages, it also ingested vast numbers of user-generated self-test data. Each self-test was logged in the database and included a record of who took the test — such as “self” or a relative, their age, and their gender.

The data also included the person’s user agent, a small snippet of information about the user’s browser version and the operating system, often used to load the website properly but can also be used to track a user’s online activity.

The database also contains individual records of those who signed up to create a profile, allowing users to update their symptoms over time. These records contained the answers to each question asked by the symptom checker, including what symptoms they are experiencing, who they have been in contact with, and what health conditions they may have.

Some of the records also contained the user’s precise location, but only if the user allowed the symptom checker access to their browser or phone’s location data.

We’ve posted a redacted portion of one of the records below.

A redacted portion of the exposed database. (Image: TechCrunch)

From one sample of data we obtained, we found thousands of users’ precise geolocation from across India. TechCrunch was able to identify people’s homes using the latitude and longitude records found in the database.

Most of the location data is clustered around major cities, like Mumbai and Pune. TechCrunch also found users in the United Kingdom and North America.

The exposure could not come at a more critical time for the Indian telecoms giant. Last week Facebook invested $5.7 billion for a near-10% stake in Jio’s Platforms, valuing the Reliance subsidiary at about $66 billion.

Jio did not answer our follow-up questions, and the company did not say if it will inform those who used the symptom tracker of the security lapse.

During these long, mundane physically-distant days, stretching on into an uncertain future like an ever-lengthening beigeish corridor, it’s impossible not to miss hanging out with friends. Especially the kind of hanging out where you’re not really doing anything in particular, not talking about any one thing—just kind of being.

As we continue to stay physically distant from one another, it can be hard to feel socially present with the tools we have. Even with Zoom and other more casual chat apps, video chat can feel sort of flat. (And for those of us lucky enough to be working from home, visiting friends after work with the same tools we use to do work stuff doesn’t always feel great.) More often than not, we sit, stationary at our designated video-chat-spot, trade reports from self-quarantine and maybe drag in a cat or a kid or two.

But even untethered from our desks with more playful video chat apps or innovations like Facebook’s Portal and its roving eye, there’s still something else that doesn’t get conveyed. With flat screens, we have little sense of our physical selves in relation to one another. Socializing spatially, as it turns out, is something we probably took for granted. But the gaming world has understood this for years.

Now more than ever, we need creative ways to feel present with other people. The whole crisis looks like a huge opportunity for the gaming industry, but also one for more transcendent digital social experiences that don’t just look like playing a few rounds of Call of Duty after work. Hopefully, these experiences could be so imaginative that we don’t even know what they could look like yet.

If VR had delivered on its early promise, we’d all probably be living in it right now. The idea of having some kind of shared virtual realm is still a potent one, but the additional hardware has proven too prohibitive to get the average person on board (for now, at least) and even the coolest VR experiences remain niche. Still, it’s clear that we want to come together, not just in Instagram DMs and email threads, but as avatars navigating shared spaces. Somehow.

Virtual worlds getting it right

If the mainstream crossover success of Animal Crossing is any indication, people have a huge appetite for virtual spaces right now. Even with Nintendo’s truly painful online multiplayer experience, there’s something fun and special about visiting a friend, bopping each other with nets and showing them your new digs.

In Animal Crossing, this is truly a more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts experience. The last time I genuinely laughed and could not stop was visiting my younger sister’s Animal Crossing island right after the game launched. In spite of the interface’s few emotes and harsh character limits, her weird sense of humor managed to bubble up through the game’s limitations. And those constraints made it more special, for some reason. When I left her island I felt a pang of sadness at leaving her funny little physical manifestation, running circles around my own. It felt different than signing out of a video chat or dropping out of a conversation via text.

These experiences are happening on an individual level, but also a collective one—and people are getting creative. One of the writers from Rogue One just made his own in-game Animal Crossing talkshow, complete with its own tiny guest couch and cityscape view.

A developer in New York even launched a dev conference that took place entirely on an Animal Crossing island. Much like a normal conference, “Deserted Island DevOps” boasted speakers, moderators and even talks to be uploaded to YouTube after the fact.

Plenty of players are using Animal Crossing for more intimate get-togethers too, like celebrating Ramadan and Passover last month or just gathering far-flung friends or family together in one place.

The pandemic is showing us that the sweet spot of mainstream virtual presence might be something more than a Zoom-like video conference but less than a full-on virtual reality experience. Video games, or more specifically video games as platforms, seem to be resonating right now, even among the kinds of people who wouldn’t identify as gamers. That last bit is important.

This is something that Fortnite maker Epic Games has been doing right for a while now. There’s a reason that Fortnite, like Animal Crossing, brought non-gamers into the fold. Sure, Fortnite is fun and addictive, but lots of games are fun and addictive—and Fortnite is much harder than a lot of those games.

Epic’s real innovation is its buttery-smooth social layer that seamlessly connects players across platforms. If you can talk a friend into downloading an app, you’re in business. Of course, other games get this right too (Minecraft comes to mind, of course, and others) but timing is everything right now. And Fortnite’s team is cleverly iterating on its already-good ideas.

This week, Epic added a new deliberately chill game mode called Party Royale to Fortnite—a new island just for hanging out with friends. Littered with appropriately zany non-lethal weapons like throwable hamburgers and paintball guns, Party Royale is a designated space where you can take a group and chat while doing mindless yet amusing nonsense, like awkwardly kicking a soccer ball around (I did this with a total stranger for 20 minutes for some reason!) or driving virtual ATVs off virtual precipices.

And like much of Epic’s battle royale hit, the island itself is over-the-top weird, stocked with everything from a pirate ship to a music festival grounds awash in colorful lights, gigantic neon dancers and a very psychedelic vibe, molly not included. There’s even a drive-in movie screen, like another area of the main game, which could signal interesting things to come. If we’re lucky and Epic expands it out, Fortnite’s newest casual online virtual space could evolve into something pretty interesting.

Fortnite is a game ostensibly about killing people before they kill you, but it’s also a concert venue—and that hints at Epic’s deeper ideas about the game as a versatile social platform. The game held its latest big in-game show event last month, this time featuring a skyscraper-height Travis Scott who performed as he stormed around a bucolic-turned-kaleidoscopic version of the Fortnite map. 12 million people tuned in, besting the 10 million who played during the more modest Marshmello in-game EDM show a year prior. Whether you even listen to his music or not, the wildly visually imaginative event was, by all accounts, cool as hell.

Video games should evolve to meet the moment

For anyone who’s spent any time in massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), this will all sound familiar. These games have long, vibrant history of drawing huge numbers of people together into persistent shared virtual spaces and letting them express themselves. Curating outfits, decorating spaces and even making choices around playstyle and faction affiliation are all ways to express aspects of who you are and what you’re about in a virtual world populated by other people doing the same. As someone who played World of Warcraft for years, this was the real appeal of the game for many of us. The game itself—quests, dungeons and the rest—was secondary.

During its peak ten years ago, World of Warcraft had as many active subscribers as players who tuned into the Travis Scott event—12 million. Since then, gaming exploded into the mainstream and by late 2018, Fortnite boasted almost 80 million active players. Online multiplayer itself bounded forward too, mostly through the success of blockbuster first-person shooters—usually grim, well-funded and vaguely or overtly militaristic games that routinely court one kind of gamer. Playful, candy-colored shooters like Fortnite, Splatoon and Overwatch emerged to extend a hand to casual players, even non-gamers, but there’s still plenty of room for online gaming to move beyond shooters.

The wild popularity of Minecraft carved out a path for cooperative gaming not just because building stuff is incredibly fun, though that’s true too, but because doing anything new with friends in a virtual space is really cool. Scrappier games like the incredible No Man’s Sky could do for exploration what Minecraft did for building, but with an indie developer’s budget, big ideas about multiplayer play can only get so far. Historically, the lion’s share of industry resources still get funneled toward reliably profitable military-style shooters. But with the world changing, trends could transform too. Just look at sales of Animal Crossing’s social feng shui sim dominating sales during the first months of the epidemic.

There’s a big opportunity right now for games offering a common social experience that’s magnetic enough to draw in the kind of people who don’t even play games. For those of us stuck at home, imaginative gaming worlds offer not just their usual escape from the moment’s stresses, but a way to share space when we can’t come together.

We just need more of them to visit.

We’ll admit it: Some of your Original Content podcast hosts are a little skeptical about improvised comedy.

Of course, we can enjoy improv when it’s done well. It’s just that we’ve seen it done less well, often by friends who are so enthusiastic without being particularly funny. And our friends aside, live improv has rarely been translated successfully into an on-screen show or special.

So we had some reservations going into “Middleditch & Schwartz” on Netflix, which consists of three hourlong improv specials. But our doubts were quickly demolished as we watched the mind-bogglingly talented Thomas Middleditch (“Silicon Valley”) and Ben Schwartz (“Parks & Recreation”) spin up dizzyingly complex plots based on just a few prompts from the audience, bringing to life dozens of characters and tying everything together into a big comedic climax right as their time is runs out.

And sometimes, the show is even better when things don’t go smoothly — when they’re forced to backpedal out of a narrative dead end, or when they struggle to remember the names of the character they’re playing at a given moment, or the accent they should be using.

Before we get to our review, we also discuss our thoughts on the current battle between NBCUniversal and big movie theater chains, over the studio’s decision to release “Trolls World Tour” directly to video-on-demand and potentially to follow suit with other films.

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!)

And if you’d like to skip ahead, here’s how the episode breaksdown:
0:00 Intro
0:30 NBCUniversal news
18:00 “Middleditch and Schwartz” review

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

How well is SaaS overcoming business impacts of the pandemic? First, there’s no negative impact on the revenues of big cloud infrastructure providers visible so far, according to a new research report out that we covered on TechCrunch this week. While some spending may have pulled back, growth from more remote work and other activities have maintained the overall momentum.

However, startups across the category could be “looking at around a 30% miss to plan in Q2,” Alex Wilhelm concludes based on a long interview with Mary D’Onofrio, a growth investor focused on the category at Bessemer Venture Partners. “This has tempered investor growth expectations. But even more than raw growth figures, SaaS investors are looking for efficient growth. In Bessemer’s eyes, a 1:1 ratio of ARR add to burn is the target. It won’t be easy. Startups selling to SMBs are going to hurt worse by rising churn than enterprise-focused startups, while startups selling to larger customers may struggle with new customer adds given travel restrictions. So, enterprise-focused startups will likely lean more on upsells than new logo adds. Those will also prove difficult, even if they won’t slow completely.”

She and Bessemer had already developed a series of metrics to analyze the health of cloud companies, including a ‘Cash Conversion Score‘ and a Nasdaq emerging cloud index. Check out the rest of the article on Extra Crunch for how D’Onofrio sees those numbers being affected now.

A fond farewell to Josh Constine

This newsletter focuses on key meta topics for startups, and sometimes that means getting even more meta and talking about changes at TechCrunch. Josh Constine will be leaving us for the VC world, where he’ll be investing and heading up content with SignalFire.

If you have ever thought that Josh would be the one to really get your hot new consumer product idea first, you now have a new reason to talk to him. Read his thoughts on the new job in this personal post (and ongoing newsletter).

If you’re not familiar with the name, you’ve still read Josh quite a bit this decade if you’ve been reading TechCrunch — or tech news in general. He started here with me in late 2011 writing about Facebook and social trends, and has become one of the most influential writers on social and startup topics today. In addition to his traffic stats, top journalist rankings*, etc that one can measure most easily, we have watched his analysis regularly result in major changes to the main products of leading consumer internet companies in the world today.

His repertoire expanded over the years to include huge scoops (like Bing’s child-porn problem or Facebook’s secret VPN), memes (Zoombombing) and many appearances across global stages.

He has accomplished almost all of what great tech writers can accomplish and I cannot say I’m surprised that he wanted to try his hand at investing, having known him since before we first worked together last decade. I believe he’ll succeed as an investor, and be a force for good in that role like he has been here.

There is one thing I think he should still do as a professional writer, though — write a book. About his own life in the startup world this past decade. Trust me, you’d want to read it.

*Here’s how to find other great tech reporters who cover what you do

…Besides just reading this site, of course. Josh was the #1 ranked author on Techmeme, the news aggregator of record for the tech industry, by a number of measures. Want to find the right reporter to talk to, besides him? Go to Techmeme.com/lb to find expert TechCrunch authors and some of our most worthy competitors across 43 industry categories, including AI, e-commerce, enterprise software and many more. [Note: This is an unpaid plug for a great independent tech media product, we don’t normally run third-party shoutouts in here.]

Startup fundraising updates… keep those teeth gritted

We have a few writers tracking the latest ins and outs of fundraising during pandemic, here are notable updates from this week:

“Some of our peers in the Valley have up to 40% of their companies that need an infusion or some sort of bridge to get through,” Mike Janke, co-founder of early-stage cybersecurity investment firm Datatribe, told Jon Shieber. “These companies that had higher valuations that came out of the Valley have had to do more drastic cuts.” Startups that raised cash in markets outside the Bay Area have not had as much difficulty, he says, because they’re more efficient. “When you see regions like Boston, the DC corridor, Austin and Boulder, those companies don’t raise as big a round and they’re a little more financially conservative.”

One wonders if these hubs will see comparative growth sooner and stronger than the Valley itself? Meanwhile, the screws continue to twist in today’s term sheets.

“Let’s say you were a founder and you were doing great and you were on track and you were going to start raising your Series A or Series B, you know, in May,” Freada Kapor Klein of Kapor Capital explained to Megan Rose Dickey during an EC Live interview on Tuesday. “Well, you’re screwed. And so we see VCs sitting on the sidelines, waiting for the startups to almost go under and then put the most draconian term sheet in from of them where they wipe everybody off the cap table, where if you don’t put in your pro rata — we’ve got one of these going on right now — if you don’t put in your pro rata, we’re going to lose at least 90% of our investment.”

As Alex Wilhelm noted in a separate article, even if startups can keep revenue up and burn-rate down (see first item above), investors are slowing their pace of putting money in. Companies that should have been able to raise will no longer be able to at worthwhile terms.

Kapor suggested that some companies might want to consider broader options. For example, if a company thinks it is headed towards losing control to investors who have different motives, it may be able to re-establish itself as a public benefit corporation to spell out the mission and preserve it in the charter (to a degree).

A simpler answer for many startups is to drop all fundraising goals and focus on profitability. “Genuinely, it’s not rocket science,” Bryce Roberts of Indie.vc tells Megan in an interview. “Profitability isn’t this crazy, elusive thing. It’s literally more achievable than a Series A round. It’s way more achievable than a Series B round. If you look at the kind of fall-off between those rounds, most entrepreneurs would be better off finding their path to profitability and scale.” Instead, Roberts reminds us that you do not need anyone’s permission to do a startup. You can figure out how to do it yourself like countless great founders before you.

Immigration to the US still possible

Resident immigration lawyer Sophie Alcorn does a regular Q&A column for us, responding to reader questions about the US process. A one “Scientist in South San Francisco” asked her what the impact was of a recent attempt to suspend green cards in a TechCrunch column this week. We’re highlighting the answer because we know that Scientist is far from alone:

“The proclamation that President Trump signed last Wednesday falls far short of the outright suspension of immigration he tweeted about on Monday. The order places a very limited 60-day moratorium on issuing green cards to individuals seeking to come to the U.S. from abroad. Aimed at protecting job opportunities for unemployed Americans and relieving U.S embassies and consulates of the green-card processing workload, this “temporary suspension” has already begun. It’s possible that it could be extended beyond 60 days….

What this new policy actually means is that no employment- or family-based green cards will be issued to candidates living outside of the U.S. except for spouses and dependent children of American citizens, physicians, nurses, or other healthcare professionals who are coming to the U.S to perform research or work to combat COVID-19 in the next couple of months.”

She separately breaks down immigration issues combined with PPP loans for those facing such complexities in this Extra Crunch column.

Hopefully, in any case, this country will soon return to being a place where people want to move.

VCs talk startups in gaming during the pandemic

In our investor surveys this week, media analyst Eric Peckham caught up with top investors in gaming, part of an ongoing series he’s been doing since last year. But this time around, he talked about the COVID-19 impact on social gaming and MMOs, and separately on esports. Here’s one key part from Ryann Lai of Makers Fund:

Peckham: What’s different about MMO (massively multiplayer online) game studios founded recently versus those founded three or so years ago? Any distinct change in strategies, team composition, etc.?

Lai: I like to think that every game is becoming more MMO-esque with persistent social profiles and deeper social interactions. The “traditional” MMOs themselves are seeing ever-increasing player expectations on visuals, narratives, social systems, and accessibility (e.g., less grind, shorter sessions, cross-play, etc.).

On the supply side — we’ve seen a continued democratization of multiplayer-centric development driven by a) decrease in development and operating costs, as well as b) availability of talents and specialized backend solutions providers that empower smaller (both in size and budget) and more distributed teams to have “MMO” ambition.

Around TechCrunch

Extra Crunch Live: Join Roelof Botha for a live Q&A on May 6 at 2pm ET/11am PT

Extra Crunch Live: Join Hunter Walk for a Q&A May 7th at 1 pm ET/10 am PT

Atlassian co-founder and co-CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes is coming to Disrupt SF 2020

Across the week

TechCrunch

When regulation presents a (rare) opportunity

Quarantine creates new opportunities for video makers, according to a Butter Works report

A new pro bono portal just launched for lawyers looking to help people hit hard by the pandemic

Cleo Capital’s Sarah Kunst launches a fellowship for laid-off workers

Equity Monday: Startups run low on cash, and why some Internet tailwinds are fading

Extra Crunch

5 tips for starting a business with a stranger

How this startup built and exited to Twitter in 1,219 days

Precursor Ventures’ Charles Hudson on ‘the conversation no one has during an upmarket’

A full-time VC & part-time ER doctor shares his thoughts on COVID-19

Digging for dollar signs amid edtech’s current momentum

#EquityPod

There is money in design tools, but do designers have a target on their backs?

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, according to App Annie’s “State of Mobile” annual report. 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 the U.S. and other international efforts to develop contact-tracing apps, plus the use of live-streaming apps as fundraising tools, the impact of quarantine on iPad apps and more. We’re also tracking news related to Zoom’s latest backtrack, WhatsApp’s plans to enter the credit market, the Instagram pods discovery, TikTok best quarter (better than any app… ever), Facebook’s plan for virtual dating and more.

Headlines

Apple News hits 125M monthly active users

The COVID-19 pandemic has driven a significant increase in how many people are using Apple’s News app on their mobile devices, tablets and Macs. During Apple’s earnings call this week, the company revealed Apple News now sees over 125 million monthly active users in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia, up from 100 million in January. Apple, however, did not note how many were subscribed to its $9.99/month premium news service, Apple News+.

Apple & Google release first version of the exposure notification API