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Venture capitalists tout themselves as frontier technology investors, but most of us are using the same infrastructure tools we’ve used for the past 20+ years — Excel and recent college grads searching Google .

We’ve seen some modest progress in people upgrading from Excel to Google Sheets, along with the use of CRM and cloud-based storage services, but according to Sebastian Soler, who oversees data science at Lux Capital, less than 5% of American VCs have a full-time team member who’s focused on technology.

“While the arguments for adopting the latest technology are now too compelling to ignore, finding the required budget for specialized tools can often prove to be a major challenge, especially for smaller managers,” said Tim Friedman, founder of PEStack. “Comprehensive market data can cost upwards of $25k for a leading service, portfolio monitoring can be double that, add in front office tools and you’re quickly into six-figure sums. My advice is: there are now more products than ever which focus on quick implementation and offer a lot of functionality at a fraction of the cost of some of the larger legacy providers.

TotemVC* is one example of a high-quality solution that offers a powerful platform with a transparent, affordable monthly rate. One piece of advice would be to use a service like [PEStack’s] free Vendor Profiles platform to identify viable providers and build up a shortlist. We also track sample clients so that our users can see what their peers are using. I would always advise managers to talk to other professionals to get the real inside scoop on which products work well, how painful the implementation was, and how good the ongoing support is.”

Jonathan Balkin, founder of Lionpoint Group, observed that the highest-impact technology initiative for a new PE/VC fund is typically to configure and enforce usage of a CRM system. The next most impactful initiative is usually to create an easy-to-use LP portal.

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1. Google CEO Sundar Pichai is taking over as CEO of Alphabet

Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin announced that Google CEO Sundar Pichai will be replacing Page as the CEO of parent company Alphabet. In addition, Brin is stepping down from his role as Alphabet’s president.

Rather than framing this as a departure, the pair suggested that they’ve “never been ones to hold on to management roles when we think there’s a better way to run the company” and that they remain “deeply committed to Google and Alphabet for the long term, and will remain actively involved as Board members, shareholders and co-founders.”

2. Plex launches a free, ad-supported streaming service in over 200 countries

Although there are plenty of similar offerings on the market, what makes Plex’s new streaming service unique is its broad availability — unlike many competitors, Plex has structured its deals in order to stream content outside the United States.

3. Toyota leads $50M investment in autonomous shuttle startup May Mobility

May Mobility has 25 autonomous low-speed shuttles spread out between Detroit; Grand Rapids, Michigan; and Providence, Rhode Island. As part of the deal, Toyota has picked the startup as one of its “autonomous driving providers for future open platforms.”

4. Progressive VCs and private equity are using tech and analytics to revolutionize investing

HOF Capital’s David Teten says private equity and venture capital investors are copying their counterparts in the hedge fund world by trying to automate more of their jobs. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

5. Kustomer raises $60M for its omnichannel-based CRM platform

The New York-based company has been on a growth tear and has raised more than $161 million in the last 18 months. CEO Brad Birnbaum said the valuation is now “definitely above $500 million,” but he declined to be more specific.

6. Instagram still doesn’t age-check kids. That must change.

Josh Constine argues that user growth at all costs is no longer acceptable: It’s time for Instagram to step up and assume responsibility for protecting children, even if that means excluding them. (In fact, after this post was published, Instagram announced that it would in fact require birth dates from all new users.)

7. Reddit’s monthly active user base grew 30% to reach 430M in 2019

The most-upvoted post this year referenced Reddit’s fundraise from China’s Tencent, which led Reddit’s $300 million Series D. Users were concerned at the time the investment would lead to Chinese censorship, leading them to flood the site with images that would be forbidden in China.

Fancy websites and services come and go, but Craigslist endures. And now one of its main shortcomings is fixed: there’s an official app. Currently available for iOS and in beta for Android, the app provides a true-to-form Craigslist experience: useful, unfussy, and anonymous.

There isn’t much to say about the app beyond that it faithfully replicates the website, down to the color scheme. All categories of posts are available to browse or search; you can favorite things, save searches, and change the way results look. Different categories have their pertinent settings, so when you look for a car you’ll get odometer, model year and so on the way you do on the site.

No account is required at all to browse listings or contact sellers, and conveniently all their contact info pops up easily, letting you email, text, or call as desired.

Obviously the web app is still perfectly serviceable, and some may even prefer it. But it’s nice to have a native app, if only to deter the imitation Craigslist apps that piggyback on the popularity of the original no-frills listings.

The app was released yesterday and is already climbing the charts. Grab it today and start looking for free furniture!

Nintendo today noted that the Switch just had its best-ever week of sales week in the States. Over the course of Thanksgiving week, the three-year-old console moved more than 830,000 units. That brings the system up to a combine 17.5 million units in the U.S., by Nintendo’s count. It’s pretty impressive momentum for a mature console.

Back in late October, the Switch hit the 15 million mark in the States. It continues to sit atop the console sales charts posted by analytics firms like NPD. The numbers, of course, were juiced by both the upcoming holidays, the addition of the the new, lower-price Switch Lite and various Black Friday offers that bundle in things like a free copy of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.

The system is expected to get another major boost outside of the U.S., which a forthcoming launch in China. Nintendo is teaming up with Tencent to deliver the system to a potentially massive market at around $300 a pop. Preorders in the country opened today, with sales starting on December 10, along with a trio of Mario titles.

As of late-September, the system has sold in excess of 40 million units globally — a healthy upgrade from its lukewarmly received predecessor, the Wii U, which only managed to move 13.5 million in its lifetime. The Switch still has some catching up to do with the eight-year-old 3DS, which has sold 75.5 million copies, globally. 

Data breaches that could cause millions of dollars in potential damages have been the bane of the life of many a company. What’s required is a great deal of real-time monitoring. The problem is that this world has become incredibly complex. A SANS Institute survey found half of company data breaches were the result of account or credential hacking.

GitGuardian has attempted to address this with a highly developer-centric cybersecurity solution.

It’s now attracted the attention of major investors, to the tune of a $12 million in Series A funding, led by Balderton Capital . Scott Chacon, co-founder of GitHub, and Solomon Hykes, founder of Docker also participated in the round.

The startup plans to use the investment from Balderton Capital to expand its customer base, predominantly in the US. Around 75% of its clients are currently based in the US, with the remainder being based in Europe, and the funding will continue to drive this expansion.

Built to uncover sensitive company information hiding in online repositories, GitGuardian says its real-time monitoring platform can address the data leaks issues. Modern enterprise software developers have to integrate multiple internal and third-party services. That means they need incredibly sensitive “secrets”, such as login details, API keys, and private cryptographic keys used to protect confidential systems and data.

GitGuardian’s systems detect thousands of credential leaks per day. The team originally built its launch platform with public GitHub in mind, however, GitGuardian is built as a private solution to monitor and notify on secrets that are inappropriately disseminated in internal systems as well, such as private code repositories or messaging systems.

Solomon Hykes, founder of Docker and investor at GitGuardian, said: “Securing your systems starts with securing your software development process. GitGuardian understands this, and they have built a pragmatic solution to an acute security problem. Their credentials monitoring system is a must-have for any serious organization”.

Do they have any competitors?

Co-founder Jérémy Thomas told me: “We currently don’t have any direct competitors. This generally means that there’s no market, or the market is too small to be interesting. In our case, our fundraise proves we’ve put our hands on something huge. So the reason we don’t have competitors is because the problem we’re solving is counterintuitive at first sight. Ask any developer, they will say they would never hardcode any secret in public source code. However, humans make mistakes and when that happens, they can be extremely serious: it can take a single leaked credential to jeopardize an entire organization. To conclude, I’d say our real competitors so far are black hat hackers. Black hat activity is real on GitHub. For two years, we’ve been monitoring organized groups of hackers that exchange sensitive information they find on the platform. We are competing with them on speed of detection and scope of vulnerabilities covered.”

Korean e-commerce giant Coupang has a new chief financial officer. The company announced today that it has hired Alberto Fornaro, who previously served the same role at International Gaming Technology (IGT PLC), the multinational gaming machine company. Fornaro succeeds Richard Song, who joined Coupang in 2011 and is retiring.

Coupang is Korea’s largest e-commerce platform. In 2018, its annual revenue was 4.42 trillion won, an increase of 65% from the previous year. The company says its sales are increasing more than 60% year over year and it currently has more than $10 billion in gross merchandise volume. Founded in 2010, the company has raised $3.4 billion so far, including $2 billion from SoftBank Vision Fund announced in November 2018.

Fornaro’s career spans South Korea, Europe and the United States. Before IGT PLC, he was Doosan Infracore Construction Equipment’s global CFO and president of Europe, the Middle East and Africa. He has also held financial leadership positions at CNH Global, NV/Fiat Group and Italian banks Cassa Di Risparmio Di Perugia and Credito Italiano.

Fornaro told TechCrunch in a phone call that at Coupang he will be able to draw on his experiences in a wide range of industries, for example IGT’s focus on technology and Fiat’s complex fulfillment infrastructure. “E-commerce is a relatively new industry and Coupang is a revolutionary in the retail industry,” he said.

Despite speculation that Coupang is working towards an IPO, founder and chief executive officer Bom Kim told TechCrunch that the company is focused on executing its growth strategy within Korea, which is poised to become the world’s third-largest e-commerce market after China and the United States.

“We’re excited to have Alberto join us and bring in additional leaders, because the company is scaling very rapidly,” says Kim. “It’s a very large and very fast-changing company. We need our hiring and leadership team to grow in-line with not only our growth rate, but the ambitions we have for our customers and business.”

“Alberto shares this real passion for revolutionizing the customer experience and for having an impact on millions and millions of customers,” he added.

When asked if WeWork’s failed IPO has affected Coupang, since SoftBank Vision Fund is also a major investor in the commercial real estate startup, Kim said “the short answer is no, it hasn’t really. SoftBank has been a great investor, but like any investor in the company, what happens to the investors, good or bad, positive or negative, doesn’t really impact the company or our mission and strategy, and it hasn’t impacted our execution against that strategy.”

One of the Coupang’s strategies is launching new verticals enabled by its end-to-end fulfillment and logistics infrastructure. For example, it recently began focusing on electronics and more on-demand delivery programs, including dawn delivery (or items ordered at night for delivery early the next morning) and Rocket Fresh for groceries, which help it compete with domestic rivals like Gmarket.

Kim said Coupang’s emphasis is on offering as many items for on-demand delivery as other major e-commerce companies do for their regular shipment options.

“We’re scaling very rapidly, have made aggressive investments and now we’re scaling the investments that we’ve made,” he said. “Alberto will play a critical role on our leadership team to not only scale out and improve the customer experience, but also to leverage economies of scale, to find ways to further lower prices for our customers.”

Instagram is done playing dumb about users’ ages. After 9 years, Instagram is finally embracing more responsibility to protect underage kids from the problems with social media. It will now ask new users to input their birthdate and bar users under 13 from joining. However, it won’t be asking existing users their age, so Instagram will turn a blind eye to any underage kids already amongst its 1 billion members.

Instagram will later start using age info to offer education about settings and new privacy controls for younger users. It’s also adding the option to only allow people you follow to message you, add you to a group, or reply to your Story.

Yesterday we published an opinion piece noting that “Instagram still doesn’t age-check kids. That must change” after receiving no-comments from Instagram after mobile researcher Jane Manchun Wong spotted Instagram prototyping an age check feature. As the code she found indicated, Instagram will keep your birthday and date private, and sync it with your Facebook profile if you link your accounts together.

Instagram had fallen far behind in protecting underage users. It’s relied on ignorance about users’ ages to avoid a $40,000 fine per violation of the Child Online Privacy Protection Act that bans services from collecting personal info from children under 13.

Facebook, Snapchat, and TikTok already require users to enter their birthdate as soon as they start the signup process. TikTok built a whole seperate section of its app where kids can watch videos but not post or comment after it was fined $5.7 million by the FTC for violating COPPA.

This is a good first step for Instagram. But it should consider how it can do more to verify the ages users enter and keep out those who don’t belong exposed to strangers across the app.

In a year-end retrospective released this morning, Reddit says its user base grew 30% this year to reach 430 million monthly active users, as of the end of October. Its users also contributed 199 million posts, 1.7 billion comments, and 32 billion upvotes, the company says.

Last year, Reddit reported 330 million monthly active users — bigger than Twitter.

Monthly comments and monthly views were also up on an annual basis in 2019, with increases of 37% and 54%, respectively.

The most-upvoted post this year referenced Reddit’s fundraise led by China’s Tencent, which in February led Reddit’s $300 million Series D, valuing the site at $3 billion. Users were concerned at the time the investment would lead to Chinese censorship, which led them to flood the site with images that would be forbidden in China. One of these, a photo of “tank man” at Tienanmen Square, then became the most-upvoted post with 228,000 upvotes.

Meanwhile, the most upvoted AMA (Ask Me Anything) post on the site was with Bill Gates, which received 110,000 upvotes.

Reddit also noted a number of trends across its over 100,000 active communities, including sizable increases in its top 50 beauty and style communities, which grew 63+% and 52%+ year-over-year, respectively. To some extent, these increases were driven by the blogger beauty feuds — for example, the r/beautyguruchatter community jumped up by 87% year-over-year. The r/skincareaddiction community was the most popular beauty community, reaching over 1 million subscribers, Reddit says.

Wedding-focused Reddit communities also grew, with r/weddingsunder10k up by 109% and r/bridezillas up by 852%, year-over-year. Family and parenting communities grew by 87% year-over-year.

The top 50 food communities grew 35% year-over-year, and several spirits-focused communities grew — like r/tequila (+99%), r/whiskey (+52%), r/vodka (+44%), r/bourbon (+27%), and r/winemaking (+16%). The top 50 fitness/wellness communities grew by 30%.

News was also a big focus on Reddit this year, with the top 50 news communities growing by 17% year-over-year. The company in 2018 first introduced its “news” tab to drive more traffic to timely articles. This appears to have worked, given the increases. This year, top stories included Robert Mueller’s hearings, the current impeachment inquiry, the Hong Kong protests, climate change and more. r/politics remained the top news community.

Elsewhere on the site, the top 50 entertainment communities grew by 27%, the top 50 sports communities grew 34%, and te top 50 gaming communities grew 42%.

The full report has even more data and details.

One thing Reddit’s year-end review didn’t delve into, however, was its hard numbers around pageviews or revenue. Reddit was said to be on track to reach $119 million in U.S. ad revenues this year, according to a forecast from eMarketer, which would give it a 0.1% share of the U.S. digital ad market. By 2021, the analysts estimated it would more than double those revenues to $261.7 million, to claim a 0.2% share. Mobile is expected to account for 57% of revenues in 2019.

Enterprise AI company Dataiku has announced some changes in its capitalization table. CapitalG (formerly Google Capital), Alphabet’s growth equity investment fund, is investing in the startup by buying out some of Serena Capital’s shares.

Serena Capital has been an investor in Dataiku since 2014. “Serena was looking for a bit of liquidity. They invested in Dataiku when the valuation was 100 times less than what it is following today’s transaction,” Dataiku co-founder and CEO Florian Douetteau told me.

Serena is still keeping a stake in Dataiku and a board seat. CapitalG has acquired those secondary market shares at a valuation of $1.4 billion.

Dataiku helps enterprise clients turn large data sets into actionable insights using machine learning. The company connects to various storage systems and databases, such as Hadoop, NoSQL or image sets.

You can then use Dataiku to clean your data set, create segments and build a machine learning model. The company then lets you run your own model.

Dataiku has always been focused on bringing data science to more people — not just data scientists. If you’re a business analyst, you can take advantage of Dataiku’s visual coding tool to get insights from your data sets.

The company has been switching to a Kubernetes-powered infrastructure, which lets you scale up your Dataiku infrastructure by spinning up more containers and scale it down when you’re done.

Dataiku now generates half of its revenue in the U.S. Clients include big enterprise clients, such as General Electric, Sephora and Unilever.

“We’re very product-centric. We want to handle the data science cycle from start to finish with a single product,” Douetteau said. “This strategy alone makes us stand out.”