Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Earlier this week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that it would be updating its guidance to allow self-swab tests for COVID-19, in which a patient collects a sample for their own nose for a health professional to test. On Wednesday, UnitedHealth Group revealed the results of a peer-reviewed large scale study that provided the science behind the decision to switch to the less-invasive sample collection method.

The self-swab process doesn’t change where FDA-approved testing can happen – this expanded guidance only applies to the method of collection, meaning at-home swab-baed PCR tests that many startups had hoped to bring to market are still on hold. But even though people still have to go to either clinics or drive-through testing sites to get a COVID-19 test done, the ability to self-swab offers more comfort, as well as real advantages when it comes to the health and safety of the clinicians and frontline healthcare workers staffing the sites.

This new study shows that not only does iself-swabbing lessen the chance of someone with COVID-19 passing on their infection to a healthcare worker, it’s also just as effective as test where clinicians collected the sample from much deeper inside a person’s nasal cavity. UnitedHeatlh worked with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as Quest Diagnostics and the University of Washington to conduct the study which covered almost 500 patients who received tests at OptumCare diagnostic facilities in the state of Washington.

There are other benefits to the self-swab method as well, including eliminating the need for specifically-trained medical professionals who have to administer the tests at point-of-care. This should help with clearing up backlogs owing to staffing, at least, though supplies and bottlenecks due to demand are going to persist as more people seek diagnosis.

With limited prospects for growth, one of the iron laws of economic downturns is that advertising is among the first budgets to be cut.

Advertising revenues have already cratered at many alt-weekly newspapers, which heavily rely on local events and restaurants that have been shuttered in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak. BuzzFeed even went so far (as they do) to label it a “media extinction event.”

Clearly it’s bad times, but I wanted to get a lot more granular around the data for ad rates, particularly around top startups. So I compiled a list of a little more than 100 unicorns across a variety of sectors and explored how the prices of their search engine keywords have changed with the global pandemic that is sparking a global recession.

The results aren’t surprising — there has been a collapse in prices for almost all ads (with some very interesting exceptions we will get to in a bit). But the variations across startups in their online ad performance says a lot about industries like food delivery and enterprise software, and also the long-term revenue performance of Google, Facebook and other digital advertising networks.

A quick overview of the data

It’s common for startups to buy their own keywords on search engines like Google and the App Store. Owning that top rank guarantees that their own company’s page is the first result a user sees and prevents competitors from buying their name, potentially intercepting customers.

The world is changing fast. With the spread of coronavirus keeping folks in their homes, there’s no time like the present to connect with people online.

Tomorrow at 3pm EDT, betaworks’ John Borthwick and Matt Hartman will be joining us for a live conference call via Zoom (here’s the dial-in link) for everyone on TechCrunch. Folks will be able to join and get characteristically insightful answers from these two tech scene veterans.

John Borthwick is cofounder and CEO of betaworks, the startup studio that has fostered companies like Digg, Dots, Giphy, Chartbeat, TweetDeck, Gimlet Media, Bitly, and Quibb. Borthwick is one of New York’s most prestigious investors and, on a personal note, a delightful conversationalist.

Matt Hartman is betaworks’ first partner, leading the company’s external investment arm. He’s invested in companies like Giphy, Anchor, Gimlet Media, Twitter, Venmo, Kickstarter, and Tumblr.

Both Borthwick and Hartman are experts in the field of new media, among other things, and will have some interesting insights into the changing landscape of media, both broadly and within the scope of coronavirus.

We’ll be talking to them about how they’re advising their portfolio companies during this tumultuous time, which of the coronavirus-caused evolutions are here to stay and which are temporary, and what tech they’re most interested in right now.

Folks who have questions should come prepared. I’m going to try to prioritize audience questions over my own, so jot ’em down now!

Join us tomorrow (Thursday, March 26) at 3pm EDT/noon PDT using this Zoom link. If you can’t make it to the call, we’ll publish the transcript on Extra Crunch shortly after the call. See you there!

Victoria Stafford, a third-year student at UC Berkeley, was set to begin working at Yelp in June as a sales intern — the only internship she applied to. And then it was canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“When I first read the cancellation email, I didn’t believe it. I refreshed my inbox; I rubbed my eyes as if I were waking up from a dream. It was clear that COVID-19 was becoming a mounting concern, but it never occurred to me that my internship was in jeopardy,” Stafford said.

Internship cancellations hurt more than just summer plans. The programs are often pipelines into future jobs and access to valuable work experience.

For Stafford, a business and domestic environmental major from a small town in rural Utah, there are very few business and policy-related opportunities.

“I ask that employers do everything they can to make their internship opportunities more accessible in these upcoming months, and come next year and the year after, show understanding and compassion for employment gaps,” she said.

Dozens of other students from across the country flooded my inbox, sharing stories about the impact on internship cancellations on their paths toward employment.

One student turned down offers and interviews from Google, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs to pursue a software engineering position. The offer they accepted was yanked weeks later. Another student lost their chance at a post-graduate job at their dream company because their offer was revoked. One only had an offer in their hands for three weeks before it was rescinded.

A number of companies across the country, including Google, Glassdoor, StubHub, Funding Circle, Yelp, Checkr and even the National Institutes of Health, have canceled their internship programs due to COVID-19, TechCrunch has learned. The cancellations, which will likely increase in the days and weeks to come, are unsurprising, due to the uncertainty the pandemic has caused. Still, fewer internships jeopardize the postgraduate job prospects for thousands of college students, and, beyond that, limit the talent pipeline on which tech companies so often are dependent. 

There’s even a Twitter account that tracks the status of 2020 internships.

From Denver to San Francisco

Like the concerts, conferences, universities and schools, these cancellations are because of the COVID-19 pandemic ravaging the world right now. While some companies cited health concerns, others pointed to the uncertain economic landscape. 

In a statement, job search and review platform Glassdoor said the rapid spread of COVID-19 has grown “beyond a health concern into an economic one.” As a result, it has “decided to pause hiring and reprioritize some initiatives internally to ensure we are well positioned for both the downturn and recovery.” 

A Funding Circle spokesperson confirmed that the company halted its internship program, “given the travel and relocation” for the upcoming intern cohort to San Francisco. In an email obtained by TechCrunch, the National Institute of Health canceled its prestigious internship — which has a 20% acceptance rate — to “stop community spread of Sars-Cov-2 through social distancing.”

“Therefore, hosting 1000+ early career scientists who deserve close supervision and intense mentoring is not appropriate at this time,” the email reads. “The cancellation of the NIH SIP applies to all students, whether you were planning to volunteer or were offered a fellowship position. It also applies, even if you were planning to do computational work that could be done remotely.”

In a statement to TechCrunch, NIH said its program has been reduced to “maintenance-only and mission critical (including research on COVID-19) operation due to spread of the novel coronavirus.”

“Regrettably, as part of this effort to keep people safe and limit the spread through social/physical distancing, it has been necessary to cancel the Summer Internship Program for young trainees at NIH for 2020, but those students already selected for the program will be given priority for summer internship positions in 2021.”

Checkr, based in Denver and San Francisco, put its summer internship program on hold due to “the challenges of onboarding interns while everyone is remote.”

Google has rescinded some internship offers for its UX design internship, per a LinkedIn post. Google denied this. 

“If you log on to a laptop, you can access an opportunity”

While a number of tech companies have put their internship programs on hold, others are piecing together experimental remote internship programs for their students. 

Quizlet is preparing for its annual internship program and is preparing a “contingency plan for an internship that will be virtual if necessary.” Uber has formed a dedicated team to start working on an online internship program “should the situation remain unchanged.” Lyft and Twitter, depending on the state of the pandemic, plan to onboard San Francisco interns virtually.

The pandemic has certainly put remote internship management services in high demand. That said, a handful of startups have been working on the sector for years. 

San Francisco-based Symba, which helps companies offer virtual internship programs, was founded in 2017. Co-founder Ahva Sadeghi said that last week more than 100 companies and 1,000 students reached out to Symba in regards to internship cancellations because of COVID-19.

“The companies we reached out to in the beginning who said, ‘This is great but not top of mind for us,’ are now calling us back asking us to jump on the phone today or tomorrow to get something implemented,” Sadeghi said in a phone call. “We thought we didn’t have product-market fit and now the conversation has completely changed.”

Sadeghi noted how internships assume a certain level of privilege in applicants, prioritizing those who can afford to move to a highly populated city with little to no pay. A remote internship, even in a time of health and prosperity, is important, she said.

“If you can log on to a laptop, you can access an opportunity,” she said. Another program, Chicago-based Sage Corps, founded in 2013, is pushing companies to sponsor the students impacted by internship cancellations. If sponsored, students can still participate in career growth development workshops virtually from Sage Corps, at $1,250 per student. 

Thomas Brunskill, the founder of InsideSherpa, which helps companies host virtual internships, said he’s seen nearly 1,000 students a day sign up for the platform, from Northern Italy, to South-East Asia, to the United States. He started the company, which went through Y Combinator last year, to give students courses and online simulations of jobs through the comfort of their own homes.

He said his customers are mainly larger companies that employ upwards of 1,000 students, like JPMorgan Chase, Deloitte, Citi, BCG and GE.

On one end, Brunskill said the interest makes sense, as larger companies have to meet significant hiring demands. Per the National Association of Colleges and Employers, 70.4% of interns get return offers from the company where they intern. 

On the other end, this concentration further showcases how smaller businesses will be impacted disproportionately from this pandemic. Many will freeze hiring altogether.

“Obviously [this] matters for students, but it also matters for companies who are now going to have this blackhole of talent,” Brunskill said. “Nobody wins in that situation — companies end up with less work-ready students who don’t really know what they’re getting into and students end up in full-time jobs that might not be aligned to their interest or skills because they never had an opportunity to test it out first.”

While layoffs are devastating, and obviously well upon us in the tech world, internship cancellations offer a harsh window into how COVID-19 doesn’t just impact our current workforce, but our future one as well.

Seasoned secondary players were expecting it. As the markets began to plummet in recent weeks, shareholders who’d turned down earlier offers to buy this or that holding were suddenly curious to see if those interested parties might still be interested. Alas, it was too late. The market was moving too fast. It still is.

“Up until last week, everyone was calling to get old pricing,” says Hans Swildens, the founder of 20-year-old Industry Ventures in San Francisco, an investment firm that invests in hundreds of venture funds and is also among the industry’s biggest buyers of secondary shares. “It was, ‘Hey, we reconsidered this offer. Could you pay me what the market was paying last month?'”

Swildens says that everybody in the secondaries market said no. They had no choice. “It’s almost impossible to buy when you don’t know what numbers you’re buying against. Buyers don’t know how far the [net asset value] of funds will go down. No one wants to buy something for $10 million that might be worth $5 million [in the not-too-distant future].”

Such is the state of affairs in the venture-backed world of startups right now. Though 2020 once promised to be a year of splashy IPOs and long-awaited liquidity for players across the ecosystem — from employees to founders to venture firms to the limited partners that invest in venture firms — it may well be remembered instead as the year that time stood still.

Certainly, everyone seems stuck in place right now.

While limited partners are largely avoiding their phones, and hoping the venture managers in their portfolio will stop asking for capital, venture firms that didn’t push their portfolio companies to go public are now feeling pressured to produce liquidity somewhere in their holdings, and that’s tougher than ever right now.  With some exceptions, cash-rich companies are in no hurry to go shopping (they also have to worry about looking monopolistic).  With some exceptions, companies aren’t merging just yet (though expect a lot of this soon).

Yet secondary shops have hit the pause button, too, as the everyone on the ground tries to get a better sense of where the bottom might be.

It could take one to three quarters to assess, say those in the know. For one thing, a lot of nontraditional players have propped up the venture market over the last decade, and some, including hard-hit corporations and family offices, might not have the wherewithal to support their venture managers, even if that’s not obvious today.

On the company level, there are also plenty of questions that are unanswerable at the moment. “Right now, everything is on pause in terms of activity,” says Swildens, adding that “in a month, we’ll know more. Are people going back to work or not? What were Q1 numbers like? How does April look? Did this company miss revenue by 10% or 80%? Did it beat revenue in March or April? For the buy side, in a month, we’ll have data from the companies and the funds while right now, no one knows how bad it is.”

In the meantime, secondary players are in the catbird’s seat, seemingly, even while they have to sit tight for what insider say could be one to three quarters.

Chris Douvos, a longtime investor in venture funds observes that there’s an “immense amount of capital looking for fund stakes,” meaning from outfits like Industry Ventures and roughly 75 other players in the market. “If I’m a VC right now, I’m wondering when [these] investors — folks who have billions of dollars in committed capital and love to buy fund stakes at 65 cents on the dollar —  start capitulating, but that’s like six to nine months out when you really see [these transactions] happen.”

Swildens suggests that’s about right. “Sellers have to reset pricing expectations, then buyers have to come up with a price they are willing to pay, and those things have to meet. And that takes one to two quarters.”

What’s happening between now and then are calls, more calls, and endless number-crunching. Some of it is proving dismal, with a lot of those numbers shrinking as revenue slows and sales cycles grow harder. Some of it, around pre-IPO companies, is likely particularly agonizing. “All the boards and CEOs are trying to work out pro forma plans now,” says Swildens. “If they cut spending too much, growth slows too much and they can’t take the company public next year. They can’t cut to the bone, or they can’t list it.”

There are bright spots, however. As Swildens observes, “Everybody is being negatively impacted right now, with the exception of some bandwidth, infrastructure, fintech and edtech investments. For some of these, [this shutdown] has been kind of a good thing. Edtech companies’ prices are probably going to go up with tens of millions of people suddenly signing up for their services.”

Now to hurry up and wait.

By way of a working from home Twitter message, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that the company has sourced and will be donating 10 million face masks. The number is sizable increase over the two million reported last week and a hefty bump over the nine million figure Vice President Mike Pence announced during last night’s White House Press Conference.

“Apple has sourced, procured and is donating 10 million masks to the medical community in the United States,” Cook says in the video. “These people deserve our debt of gratitude for all of the work they’re doing on the front lines.”

Apple is joining fellow tech companies in donating masks amid a national shortage as COVID-19 takes an increasing toll on the U.S. population. Many of the donated masks have been stockpiled, in order to adhere to California Occupational Safety and Health Standards put into action following last year’s devastating wildfires. 

Other companies, like Ford, have transformed production facilities to create additional masks.

United Airlines, which had already announced drastic cuts to its domestic and international schedule, today announced even deeper cuts. While the carrier was originally planning to cut 42 percent of its domestic schedule, that number is now up to 52 percent as demand for flights continues to dwindle in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. In total, across domestic and international flights, United will reduce capacity by 68 percent in April.

The revised schedule will be available on United’s website later today. When the airline announced the first round of cuts, it stressed that it wasn’t leaving any of the cities it previously flew to without service but it’s unclear if this will still be the case now. We have contacted United for more details and will update this post once we learn more about these cuts.

United, just like all other U.S. airlines, had already cut most of its international flights. And like virtually all global airlines, the current downturn hit the company right in the middle of a boom in demand for its services and while it was actually routinely expanding its schedule.

Like others, United is now also using empty passenger planes to fly cargo. It’s Star Alliance partner Lufthansa is doing the same and now going as far as loading cargo onto seats and into overhead bins. For the most part, though, airlines are now parking their fleets and drawing down their schedules as they wait for the pandemic to end and demand to pick up again. Chances are, they will also get substantial government support during this time, though the details of what that will look like are still up in the air.

With the novel coronavirus pandemic posing an ongoing threat to people’s health, especially the health of essential workers, San Francisco is conducting a survey to learn more about the issues gig workers are facing during this time. The results of this survey, which should be available within four to six weeks, will help shape local policy decisions.

The survey seeks to understand how COVID-19 has impacted the number of gig jobs available, pay, and companies’ stances on health insurance and paid sick leave. It also asks what workers feel they most urgently need, whether it’s access to protective equipment or emergency funds, as well as if workers are likely to work while sick due to their financial situation.

Conducted by the city’s Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO) and led by UC Santa Cruz professor Chris Benner, the study is targeting at least 500 gig workers who perform services for 12 of the most popular platforms: Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Caviar, Uber Eats, Postmates, GrubHub, Instacart, Shipt, Saucey, Amazon Flex and Drizly.

“This is a very critical workforce for a number a reasons,” Benner told TechCrunch. “They are particularly vulnerable and susceptible, especially early on with drivers taking people to and from the airport. But now as we’re potentially seeing a spike in the online ordering of groceries and food delivery, these people doing the deliveries are providing essential services during this time of having to shelter in home and are potentially vulnerable. And if they’re not being careful in handling food and groceries, they could potentially be spreading [COVID-19].”

This survey comes after Benner was tasked with leading a broader survey about gig workers in San Francisco. That survey kicked off last September but is currently on hold as Benner and his team focus more on the COVID-19 survey. Still, they are analyzing the 700 responses from that initial survey.

“What we know from other sources and what our survey will likely confirm is it’s a large immigrant workforce,’ Benner said. “It’s a lot of people working on low wages and many hours and many people do this work full-time.”

Outside of this survey, the city has begun taking steps to advocate for this essential workforce. Yesterday, SF’s Board of Supervisors pushed for more gig worker protections, asking the SF Office of Labor Standards Enforcement, for example, to establish enforcement procedures in compliance with Assembly Bill 5. AB 5 is the new California law that outlines what types of workers can be legally classified as independent contractors.

This board of supervisor’s resolution, which Gig Workers Rising and We Drive Progress advocated for the board of supervisors to adopt, came after Gig Workers Rising urged California lawmakers to enforce AB 5. Earlier this month, Gig Workers Rising sent a letter to California Gov. Gavin Newsom and other state officials asking them to step in and protect workers during this pandemic.

In the meantime, workers interested in filling out the survey can do so here.

A tweet by conservative online magazine The Federalist, which suggested people should deliberately infect themselves with the coronavirus strain COVID-19, has been pulled after it “violated” Twitter’s rules.

The infringing tweet, posted on Wednesday morning, said: “It is time to think outside the bod and seriously consider a somewhat unconventional approach to COVID-19: controlled voluntary infection.”

A spokesperson for Twitter confirmed the tweet violated its rules, but did not say why.

The article focuses on “pox parties,” where parents would historically gather their young children together in order to infect their children with the common childhood disease. The theory goes that the child obtains the immunity and doesn’t suffer from the illness later in life, which can have far more serious medical implications. The article goes on to suggest this same principle should be used for the coronavirus strain, COVID-19, which to date has killed more than 20,000 people.

Governments, both federal and local, have unified behind mandating that people stay at home and self-isolate in the hope of slowing the spread of the virus to prevent overrunning the health systems.

Experts were quick to dispel the theory. Eugene Gu, a doctor and chief executive of Cool Quit, called the article “dangerous” and “irresponsible.” The article also used a racist term in its headline to describe the coronavirus, which Gu called the “racist cherry on top of dangerous and fake medical advice.”

One Twitter user said that sharing the link to The Federalist’s article was blocked because it was “potentially harmful.”

A spokesperson for The Federalist did not comment.

Twitter has taken an aggressive approach to misinformation by proactively verifying known experts to improve the flow of accurate information. It’s also doubled down on its efforts to prevent disinformation by updating its policies to prohibit new tweets that “could place people at a higher risk of transmitting COVID-19.”

NASA’s renewed efforts to return to the Moon may be impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, but works still proceeds on a number of projects related to the effort, including a series of hot-fire test of thrusters designed by NASA and partner Frontier Aerospace. These tests, more than 60 in total performed over the course of just 10 days, were performed under conditions designed to simulate what it would be like to use them in space, and provided key information that could lead to the verification of this thruster design for future use by NASA and its commercial partners.

The prototype thrusters are designed for use with small rockets, in space, delivering enough power for flight path adjustments or altitude changes. They’re designed to be as small and efficient as possible, while also meeting the requirements of landing spacecraft on the Moon, and their first likely use will be in Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander, which is currently scheduled to fly on a Vulcan Centaur rocket in July 2021.

Peregrine is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, through which the agency has built a list of what amount to approved vendors for building and flying lunar landers that can carry payloads to the Moon on its behalf. These thrusters are being developed under a separate program, NASA’s Thruster for the Advancement of Low-temperature Operation in Space (TALOS) project, but their work will contribute both to CLPS, and to future spacecraft used in NASA’s Artemis series of lunar missions.

The design of the thrusters incorporates use of a propellant made up of nitrogen and mono methyl hydrazine, which offers benefits like being able to burn at much lower temperatures without risk of freezing – their operating range is between -40 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit, whereas most traditional thrusters work at between 45 and 70 Fahrenheit. Their operating range has the side-benefit of not requiring conditioning hardware, which means that they can work with less bulky and power-hungry designs – both incredibly important when you’re building spacecraft.