Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Lego seems to have been inspired by recent events to bring its own vision fo the truck of the future to the world – behold this bold design statement in all its glory. Clearly, Lego is having a go at Elon Musk and the Tesla Cybertruck that he unveiled last week – which was… divisive in its reception, to say the least.

The Lego version is “guaranteed shatterproof,” Lego notes on Twitter, which is a jab at the failed demo wherein Musk had designer Franz von Holzhausen hurl a large metal ball at the driver and rear passenger windows of the Cybertruck, only to have them smash instantly upon contact. Musk has since said that this only happened because Holzhausen’s prior sledgehammer strikes to the driver door panel undermined the structure of the windows, but it was still highly memorable and memeable moment.

Despite launch day hiccups and a lot of poking fun at its looks, Musk has said that so far, more than 250,000 customers have signed up and put down a refundable $100 deposit for the Cybertruck, so it’s garnering enough interest for at least that level of commitment.

No word on Lego’s truck availability or pre-orders, but maybe they’ll challenge Ford to a truck duel, too.

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

We had a lot to get through this week and may have ran over our time a little bit but it was worth it. First, we discussed Weekend Fund’s second effort, a $10 million vehicle targeting early-stage upstarts. Led by Product Hunt founder and CEO Ryan Hoover, Weekend Fund raised a smaller debut angel fund a few years ago. Now they’re back at it after deploying capital to Girlboss, TTYL, Headspin and more.

Next, we turned to some upsetting news, at least for the employees and venture capitalists behind the startup Omni. After raising a total of $35 million in VC funding, Omni announced this week it was shutting down, with 10 of its engineers moving over to Coinbase. It appears the company struggled to make the economics of equipment rentals and physical on-demand storage work out. It’s another victim of a venture capital-subsidized business offering a convenient service at an unsustainable price.

Far from shuttering, we also spoke about Cocoon, a new company that wants to help you stay in touch with those who matter most. The company graduated from Y Combinator and has since raised $3 million in venture funding. The startup was founded by former Facebook employees, hence the headline, and is hoping to create the dedicated software that you use for that most important group chat in your life. The iOS-only app is a bit of a cross between Life360, Slack and Path.

Finally, we closed the episode with some Airbnb news and the New York Stock Exchange’s interesting plans to alter direct listings.

Glad you guys came back for another episode, we’ll see you soon.

Amazon helped pioneer and now dominates the online marketplace business model, where a variety of merchants post items for sale on its platform for billions of consumers to discover and buy them. Today, a London startup that’s taken that idea but is applying it to a far more curated set of retailers and goods has raised some money to fuel its international growth.

Trouva, which provides an online marketplace for brick-and-mortar independent boutiques selling “beautiful” and hard-to-find pieces — think Farfetch but less fancy and less high-end design — has raised £17 million ($21.8 million) in funding, money that it will be using to expand outside of the UK on the back of a strong launch in its Berlin last year, as well as to continue building out more technology on its platform, specifically around inventory and logistics management.

The funding is being led by Octopus Ventures, C4 Ventures (the venture firm launched by Apple vet Pascal Cagni) and Downing Ventures. BGF and LocalGlobe were also in the round, which brings the total raised to about $36 million. Mandeep Singh, who co-founded the company with Alex Loizou and Glen Walker, said in an interview that the startup is not disclosing valuation. 

Amazon may dominate our consciousness (and for some of us, our wallets, with its sticky Prime perks) when it comes to browsing for a variety of goods online, buying them, and getting them delivered to us in an efficient way.

But the Amazon way leaves a lot out of the proposition: for retailers it doesn’t give them a lot of leeway in how they present items, and they have to compete with many thousands of other offers (including Amazon itself) to get their products seen.

More generally for both sellers and buyers, the ethos of the platform is that of an “everything” store with little in the way of focus or curation: you can watch movies or listen to music, or you can buy an HDMI cable, or you can buy food, or you can buy a book, or you can buy a vase… and so on. That in a way makes it more of a functional rather than pleasurable experience.

This opens the door to a multitude of different competitors, and there is where Trouva has stepped in. Where Amazon gives us the promise of everything, the smaller startup has effectively incorporated scarcity into its DNA.

“We are very picky,” Singh said. “We have to turn down the majority of applications from stores that want to sell on our site. We are looking for the very best curators. Having every single vase in the world is less important than having the best one, curated by an expert.”

While we are continuing to see a surge of purchasing via the web and apps — a trend that will get played out during holiday shopping in the weeks ahead — analysts estimate that some 85% of retail is still happening offline.

Within that group there is an interesting core of brick-and-mortar independent shops: At a time when large chains and the likes of Amazon are shifting the sands for how people sell things — and certainly how people shop — there remains a large group of independent retailers — “curators,” as Singh describes them. These shops target consumers with disposable income, people who are looking for more unique things to buy with their money.

The challenge of the ‘High Street’

Independent stores are often under threat in cities like London. First, they pop up in areas where rents are not as high, with like-minded people congregating to live in the same neighborhoods for the same reason. There, they sell a small selection of not-cheap clothes, interesting home goods, a variety of tchotchkes, or quirky gifts and develop a local following.

But their emergence can also often signal wider tides of gentrification. Ultimately, that shift is what moves those stores out as the rents subsequently go up, and bigger chains and fancy boutiques move in. (SoHo in NYC is another classic victim of this trend.)

Be that as it may, Singh notes that there are still more than 20,000 independent shops in the UK. “And we are working with 500 of the very best,” he added.

The company’s biggest competition, to my mind, are other players that are also looking to target the same kinds of shoppers online, for example, another UK site, Not On The High Street, or Etsy, which focuses less on retailers and more on makers. Similarly, there is the prospect of stores building their own sites, although that comes with its own set of headaches that independent shopkeepers may be less inclined to deal with.

“Yes, it’s very easy for an independent brick-and-mortar boutique to set up an online shop. That’s the easy part,” Singh said. “But what you find with independents is that building a website doesn’t help drive customers. There is a range of backend technology that we take care of, including inventory management software and handling the logistics of shipping. All of those can be difficult for a [physical] boutique to do on its own. It’s easy to sell online but you still need someone who has the economies of scales to pick up and deliver.”

On the other hand, he notes that “Amazon definitely doesn’t worry us.”

“We position ourselves as the complete opposite. Giants like that are too focused on categories that work well,” he added. Notably, he believes that the biggest threats are the same ones that threaten the independent stores that use Trouva to sell online: “Offline chains, those who sell homewares and clothes. The big guys.”

Trouva has no plans to move into selling its own goods, or to work with other online retailers, although it might consider down the line how it could leverage warehouse space to help its retailers with their inventory management (since many of these shops are very small indeed). “One hundred percent of our supply comes from our brick and mortar store partners,” he said.

Nor does it currently have anything like a Prime-style loyalty program. It does work with retailers and shipping partners to provide an end-to-end shipping service from store to buyer, with options for next-day delivery if it’s necessary.

“The relationship is mutually symbiotic with the boutiques, who benefit from a broader customer base, better priced and efficient delivery and stock tracking and management software from Trouva, and in turn higher revenues and improved profitability,” said Jo Oliver, a venture partner at investor Octopus. “As more boutiques are added the customer proposition becomes more and more attractive, particularly as Trouva’s footprint expands internationally.”

Singh notes that there is “exclusivity” for the shops that eventually come on to Trouva, although that’s almost by default since they are the kinds of small operations that are unlikely to be in the business of trying to expand their online presence.

Amazon has been working hard to improve how it interfaces with and curates items on its site to provide products, and a marketplace selling service, to the same consumer and retailer demographics that Trouva (and others) target. That’s unlikely to disappear over time, especially since Amazon plays the long game, where it will gradually tinker with an idea while at the same time quietly shift our shopping habits to match what it is producing.

“Online sellers like Amazon and eBay have tried to make a better experience, but it’s very hard for a business to change its DNA,” Singh said.

Updated with investor comment.

A joint investigation by watchdogs in Canada and British Columbia has found that Cambridge Analytica-linked data firm, Aggregate IQ, broke privacy laws in Facebook ad-targeting work it undertook for the official Vote Leave Brexit campaign in the UK’s 2016 EU referendum.

A quick reminder: Vote Leave was the official leave campaign in the referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union. While Cambridge Analytica is the (now defunct) firm at the center of a massive Facebook data misuse scandal which has dented the company’s fortunes and continues to tarnish its reputation.

Vote Leave’s campaign director, Dominic Cummings — now a special advisor to the UK prime minister — wrote in 2017 that the winning recipe for the leave campaign was data science. And, more specifically, spending 98% of its marketing budget on “nearly a billion targeted digital adverts”.

Targeted at Facebook users.

The problem is, per the Canadian watchdogs’ conclusions, AIQ did not have proper legal consents from UK voters for disclosing their personal information to Facebook for the Brexit ad blitz which Cummings ordered.

Either for “the purpose of advertising to those individuals (via ‘custom audiences’) or for the purpose of analyzing their traits and characteristics in order to locate and target others like them (via ‘lookalike audiences’)”.

Oops.

Last year the UK’s Electoral Commission also concluded that Vote Leave breached election campaign spending limits by channeling money to AIQ to run the targeting political ads on Facebook’s platform, via undeclared joint working with another Brexit campaign, BeLeave. So there’s a full sandwich of legal wrongdoings stuck to the brexit mess that UK society remains mired in, more than three years later.

Meanwhile, the current UK General Election is now a digital petri dish for data scientists and democracy hackers to run wild experiments in microtargeted manipulation — given election laws haven’t been updated to take account of the outgrowth of the adtech industry’s tracking and targeting infrastructure, despite multiple warnings from watchdogs and parliamentarians.

Data really is helluva a drug.

The Canadian investigation cleared AIQ of any wrongdoing in its use of phone numbers to send SMS messages for another pro-Brexit campaign, BeLeave; a purpose the watchdogs found had been authorized by the consent provided by individuals who gave their information to that youth-focused campaign.

But they did find consent problems with work AIQ undertook for various US campaigns on behalf of Cambridge Analytica affiliate, SCL Elections — including for a political action committee, a presidential primary campaign and various campaigns in the 2014 midterm elections.

And, again — as we know — Facebook is squarely in the frame here too.

“The investigation finds that the personal information provided to and used by AIQ comes from disparate sources. This includes psychographic profiles derived from personal information Facebook disclosed to Dr. Aleksandr Kogan, and onward to Cambridge Analytica,” the watchdogs write.

“In the case of their work for US campaigns… AIQ did not attempt to determine whether there was consent it could rely on for its use and disclosure of personal information.”

The investigation also looked at AIQ’s work for multiple Canadian campaigns — finding fewer issues related to consent. Though the report states that in: “certain cases, the purposes for which individuals are informed, or could reasonably assume their personal information is being collected, do not extend to social media advertising and analytics”.

AIQ also gets told off for failing to properly secure the data it misused.

This element of the probe resulted from a data breach reported by UpGuard after it found AIQ running an unsecured GitLab repository — holding what the report dubs “substantial personal information”, as well as encryption keys and login credentials which it says put the personal information of 35 million+ people at risk.

Double oops.

“The investigation determined that AIQ failed to take reasonable security measures to ensure that personal information under its control was secure from unauthorized access or disclosure,” is the inexorable conclusion.

Turns out if an entity doesn’t have a proper legal right to people’s information in the first place it may not be majorly concerned about where else the data might end up.

The report flows from an investigation into allegations of unauthorized access and use of Facebook user profiles which was started by the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for BC in late 2017. A separate probe was opened by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada last year. The two watchdogs subsequently combined their efforts.

The upshot for AIQ from the joint investigation’s finding of multiple privacy and security violations is a series of, er, “recommendations”.

On the data use front it is suggested the company take “reasonable measures” to ensure any third-party consent it relies on for collection, use or disclosure of personal information on behalf of clients is “adequate” under the relevant Canadian and BC privacy laws.

“These measures should include both contractual measures and other measures, such as reviewing the consent language used by the client,” the watchdogs suggest. “Where the information is sensitive, as with political opinions, AIQ should ensure there is express consent, rather than implied.”

On security, the recommendations are similarly for it to “adopt and maintain reasonable security measures to protect personal information, and that it delete personal information that is no longer necessary for business or legal purposes”.

“During the investigation, AIQ took steps to remedy its security breach. AIQ has agreed to implement the Offices’ recommendations,” the report adds.

The upshot of political ‘data science’ for Western democracies? That’s still tbc. Buckle up.

Back in 2010, the web performance and security company Cloudflare launched in the TechCrunch Disrupt SF Battlefield competition. The company came in second. Earlier this year, Cloudflare IPOed. To talk about this journey, Cloudflare CEO Matt Prince will join us on the main stage at Disrupt Berlin on December 12. He’ll also participate in a panel about building successful SaaS companies on the Extra Crunch stage, together with Red Point’s Laura Urquizo and Point Nine Capital’s Christoph Janz.

Cloudflare IPOed successfully in September, with its stock rising about 20 percent that day and topping out at just under $21 a few days later. Since then, though, the stock has seen its ups and downs. In our chat, we’ll talk about how a CEO should handle this, whether it opens up Cloudflare to be an acquisition target for a larger company, and his plans for the future of the company. An IPO is only the beginning of a company’s story, after all.

Besides the company’s journey to an IPO — and what comes next, there’s plenty of other things to talk about with Prince. These days, after all, a large percentage of the web’s traffic flow through Cloudflare’s servers. That makes it a valuable company but also open to criticism because, without its protection for DDoS attacks, any site can easily be taken down by an attacker. The company’s general stance has always been to protect free speech — and hence any website — from attacks. Over the course of the last few years, it did decide to ban forums like 8chan from its platform, however. At the time, Prince said that “no one should have that power” to do so.

Buy your ticket to Disrupt Berlin to listen to this discussion and many others. The conference will take place on December 11-12.

In addition to panels and fireside chats, like this one, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield to compete for the highly coveted Battlefield Cup.

Big bucks are pouring to get you through the chaotic traffic on Indian roads.

Bounce, a Bangalore-based startup that operates over 17,000 electric and gasoline scooters in three dozen cities in India, has raised about $150 million as part of an ongoing financing round led by existing investors Eduardo Saverin’s B Capital and Accel Partners India, two sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

The new financing round, dubbed Series D, values the startup “well over $500 million,” the people said requesting anonymity. This is a significant increase since the five-year-old startup’s Series C financing round, which closed in June, when it was worth a little over $200 million.

A spokesperson of Bounce declined to comment.

Bounce, formerly known as Metro Bikes, allows customers to rent a scooter for as little as Rs 15 (21 cents) an hour. Once the ride has been completed, customers can drop the scooter at any nearby parking spot.

The startup, which had raised $92 million prior to the new financing round, said last month that it has amassed 1.2 million customers.

The affordability of these rides is one of the selling points for smart electric and gasoline bikes in India. The other perk is the increasingly growing realization that two wheels warp through much faster in crowded traffic than four.

In this way, smart scooters are posing a challenge to Ola and Uber, both of which have invested billions of dollars to populate more than 100 cities with hundreds of thousands of cabs. In an interview with the New York Times, Bounce co-founder and chief executive Vivekananda Hallekere said earlier that “traditional”model of Uber and Ola is reaching its limits.

“You can’t make it affordable with a driver,” Hallekere told the Times. “And if users know how to use a scooter, why do you need a driver?”

Both Ola and Uber have taken notice.

Bounce competes with a handful of local players including Vogo, which is heavily backed by ride-hailing giant Ola, and Yulu, which maintains a partnership with Uber and closed an $8 million Series A funding this week.

Hallekere told TechCrunch in an interview earlier this year that Bounce, which currently offers IoT hardware and design for the scooters, is working on building its own form factor for scooters.

India is the world’s largest market for two-wheelers. According to industry estimates, more than 200 million people have a license to ride a two-wheeler vehicle in the country. And about 20 million new motorcycles and scooters are sold in the nation each year.

Nico Berardi considers himself to be a citizen of the world, with a penchant for travel and a wide range of interests. Unlike many other VCs, who’ve increasingly specialized their mandates as the market has grown more crowded, Berardi is nearly as wide-ranging in his approach to venture capital, too.

Somewhat counterintuitively, it’s paying off. At least, Berardi’s venture firm, Animo Ventures, has been investing a $60 million debut vehicle since closing it in July of last year.

It’s an impressive, surprising, amount for someone raising a fund for the first time, but then, Berardi’s trajectory into the world of venture capital hasn’t been completely straightforward, either. First, Berardi grew up in Argentina and started his professional life at a community-focused nonprofit Techo, a kind of Habitat for Humanity focused on Latin America. He was so good at his development job, in fact, that he was moved to Miami as the CEO of Techo’s U.S operations.

It was there, over his six year career with the organization, that he was first introduced to the world of investing. Specifically, encouraged by several board members who were angel investors — and aided by some backing from the Knight Foundation — Berardi left in 2014 to launch a still-active angel investor group called Miami Angels that funnels around $3.5 million into roughly 10 local companies each year. In quick succession, he then applied to and was accepted into the tuition-based Kauffman Fellows Program, fell in love with a medical student in Boston, and headed to Harvard Business School to be closer to her, spending his summers with the Boston (and San Francisco-based) early-stage firm Resolute Ventures.

He imagined he’s land in San Francisco with Resolute afterward, he says, but when that student — now his wife — wound up landing a job back in Miami, he headed there instead and decided to launch his own venture firm. Enter Animo, a Latin word that means with intention or purpose and also, notes Bernardi, “sounds international.”

The latter matters because while Berardi is the sole general partner of the firm, he’s running it with two colleagues, neither of whom lives in the U.S. One of these is partner Antonio Osio, a native Mexican who was running his own firm, Capital Invent, when he first met Berardi through Kauffman Fellows. (“I poached him,” says Berardi.) They also have an operations partner in Caro Acevedo, who worked with Berardi as his COO at Techo and who still lives in Argentina.

As for the money, Berardi says it “mostly comes from Latin America and Europe,” including from anchor investor Techint. It’s a 60,000-person Argentine conglomerate that owns steel, construction, oil, gas, and healthcare businesses around the world and whose CEO, Paulo Rocco, sees Animo as a way to put the company’s resources into new materials sciences and manufacturing technology and machine learning startups, says Berardi.

“We want to make a dent in the universe, and there aren’t a lot of Latinx investors around and we want to carry that flag,” he offers.

To date, Animo has announced 11 deals, all in the U.S., including six investments in New York and six others in other places, including Scottsdale, Az.; Toronto, Ontario; Miami; and Richmond, Va.

Notably, Animo does not have plans to invest in Latin American companies, though it has backed a number of Latin American founders in the U.S. “I think every investor has their own set of biases,” says Berardi. “Our diversity numbers point in that way, but it hasn’t been a conscious effort. That’s just who we are.” He adds a much bigger focus for the firm is using its connections in “tier one ecosystems” like San Francisco and New York to “help [founders] outside the bubble enter it.”

Berardi does say there are a few things Animo won’t consider. “We stay away from FDA-regulated stuff because we don’t understand it well enough and therefore can’t be useful.” Mostly, however, he’s open to anyone and everyone who appreciates hard work, he suggests. “We’re younger, we’re hungry. We work 100-hour weeks and travel like crazy people.”

To underscore his point, Berardi tells a story about Intello, a SaaS operations platform that helps companies manage their SaaS spend, usage and compliance data. The startup had rented a booth at a conference organized by Okta, the publicly traded identity and access management company. “They didn’t have enough people to man the booth,” says Berardi, “and I was in town, so I was like, ‘I’ll man the booth with you in a cloud suit.’ They thought I was joking and I made an idiot of myself, but it drew a lot of people to the booth.”

Pictured above from left to right, Animo founders Nico Berardi, Caro Acevedo, and Antonio Osio.

Editor’s note: Drew is a geek who first worked at AOL when he was 16 years old and went on to become a senior writer at TechCrunch. He is now the VP of Communications for venture equity fund Scaleworks.

There are a few ways that people use Twitter, but for the most part the ones who have pushed the social platform into the national lexicon are regular users who like to communicate with each other using the thing. They’re the ones who use it a lot. They’re the ones who make Twitter go.

Now, mind you, I’m an extreme case. I share a lot. I’ve shared my cancer diagnoses, my stem cell treatment, new jobs, my wedding. And the loss of my father Barry.

Today, Twitter announced that it will reclaim dormant accounts. That is, if you haven’t logged into yours for a long time, it is considered inactive and will be included in the reclamation process.

At first I thought that was pretty cool. There are a ton of accounts that get squatted on, forcing new users to use crappy AOL-like names, such as Joe583822. No fun at all. And these accounts aren’t even in use! As in not active.

No big deal.

But then I saw this:

My heart sank. And I cried. You see, I didn’t think about this. It is a big deal.

My father’s Twitter account isn’t active. He passed away over four years ago. My Dad was a casual tweeter at best. He mostly used it because I, well, overused it. And it was charming. Once in a while he’d chime in with a zinger of a tweet and I’d share it humbly with the folks who kindly follow me.

He got a kick out of that, and so did I. I still do. I still read his tweets, and from time to time I still share them with you. It’s my way, odd or not, of remembering him. Keeping his spirit alive. His tweets are timestamped moments that he shared with the world.

And Twitter is sweeping them up like crumpled-up paper and junk in a dustbin.

Surely, my father isn’t the only person who has passed away and left a Twitter account unkept — or, as the company puts it, “inactive.” I can think of a few others. And I get even more upset at the thought of their thoughts disappearing. I might not remember everyone we’ve lost, but not being able to recall something they’ve said or shared in the past is depressing.

When people ask me why I use Twitter so much, it’s mostly because I see the platform as a living organism. It’s not perfect. In fact, it’s awful sometimes. Lately, a lot of times.

During events and during holidays it’s almost as if that tiny little app on my phone has a pulse. And a heart. Because of course it does: It’s full of human beings with feelings and real thoughts. That’s what makes Twitter Twitter.

And just because someone’s pulse no longer beats doesn’t mean their thoughts no longer matter.

I sincerely hope that Twitter didn’t think about this first and reverse course. Perhaps they’ll offer a way to memorialize an account. I don’t have my dad’s login. I can’t “wake up” his account to keep it safe. I am truly sad at the thought of losing some of his quirky nerdy tweets.

Especially this one:

My dad thought I was the only person on the damn site and I never corrected him or schooled him on Twitter. He used it the way he wanted to, and that reminds me of the person he was. If you take that away from me, then what is Twitter anyway?

Facebook allows you to memorialize someone’s page and that’s pretty great. Unfortunately, my father’s page was deactivated and deleted without my having been consulted. By the time I realized it was gone, Facebook told me there was nothing it could do. It was really traumatizing for me and my other family members. So many interactions there, thoughts, smiles. A timeline. No, a time capsule.

Just gone. Like my dad.

Big tech companies are good at a lot of things, but what they seem to lack is collective empathy and heart. When humans use the things you build and you stop treating them like humans, but rather like bits and bytes and revenue dollars, you’ve given your soul away. And maybe it’s just me getting older, but I’ve had about enough of it.

To quote the late great Barry Olanoff:

Think about it, Twitter. Do better. Because every time you make me question your humanity, I’m one step closer to not being that whale of a user that helped get you here in the first place.

Netflix is expanding its theatrical presence by signing a long-term lease for The Paris Theatre, a historic single-screen venue in New York City.

This follows reports that Netflix is also working to buy the Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles. And while these might seem like odd moves for a streaming company, they may also be necessary iof Netflix wants to continue working with high-profile filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Noah Baumbach.

After all, although Scorsese’s latest film “The Irishman” and Baumbach’s “Marriage Story” are both playing in theaters, they’re appearing on a limited number of screens.

In the case of “The Irishman,” Netflix reportedly hoped for a bigger rollout but failed to get the big theatrical chains on-board because the company would only wait four weeks (shorter than the traditional window of theatrical exclusivity) before launching the movie online.

Despite its deep pockets, Netflix’s theatrical challenges might dissuade other Scorsese-caliber filmmakers from signing with the service, particularly if it affects the likelihood that “The Irishman” and “Marriage Story” (and last year’s “Roma,” which won three Oscars but lost out for Best Picture) will be able to win major awards.

So by buying or leasing theaters of its own, Netflix can ensure that its films will get the cachet of a big-screen release. It can also host glitzy premieres and other events.

As for the Paris Theatre, it opened in 1948, and reopened earlier this month to screen “Marriage Story.” (By the way: I highly recommend seeing “Marriage Story” on the big screen — I’ve already done so twice.)

“After 71 years, the Paris Theatre has an enduring legacy, and remains the destination for a one-of-a kind movie-going experience,” said Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos in a statement. “We are incredibly proud to preserve this historic New York institution so it can continue to be a cinematic home for film lovers.”

It’s strange that no matter how hard Amazon denies that its warehouses are terrible, dangerous places to work, the reports to that effect just keep coming out. Not only that, but now a whistleblower alleges the company worked with Indiana officials to erase a workplace safety violation that cost a man his life.

Reveal News reports the whistleblower’s account of Phillip Lee Terry’s death in 2017 and the subsequent efforts to shift blame from Amazon to the deceased. The full report is worth reading; it implicates Amazon, the head of Indiana’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and even the governor.

The short version is this: Terry died on the job in a forklift accident. An investigation conducted by the whistleblower, John Stallone, found that Amazon had failed to provide adequate safety training. Citations were issued and $28,000 in fines proposed. But Stallone’s boss, IOSHA’s director, directly contacted Amazon and discussed how they might reduce those fines and place the blame on Terry.

Stallone knows this because he was in the room and recorded the conversation, which Reveal News listened to. Amazon told TechCrunch that it “worked directly with [IOSHA] during the inspection and in follow-up discussions to provide Mr. Terry’s training records.” When I asked directly whether the company disputed Stallone’s account of the call, the representative suggested I contact the Indiana state government instead.

A few days later, Stallone said, he was called into the office of Indiana’s Labor Commissioner, Rick Ruble, and found the governor, Eric Holcomb, there as well. He was told to stop pursuing the case, according to Stallone’s account, because of — you guessed it — Indiana’s aspirations to host Amazon’s HQ2.

Stallone soon quit, and a year later, the fines were reversed and all four safety violations were struck from the record. Instead it is listed as an “unpreventable employee misconduct,” meaning Terry was legally responsible for his own death — counter to the conclusions of the investigation, which had Terry’s coworker on the record stating Amazon had failed to provide proper training.

Governor Holcomb retaliated with a statement denying any involvement with a Labor Department case, denying he ever had the meeting Stallone describes, called the allegations “fabricated” and the report “irresponsible and deliberately misleading… heinous lies.”

It’s hard to imagine why Stallone would fabricate such a meeting, when other efforts by state officials to quash these violations and fines are on record. It has not yet been shown beyond the two competing claims whether the meeting indeed took place, but presumably it was informal anyway, which provides the governor plausible deniability.

This would all be harder to believe if we hadn’t seen the frenzy of servility Amazon’s HQ2 announcement provoked nationwide. Or if the allegations of poor working conditions at Amazon warehouses hadn’t continued to pile up in the meantime. Reveal’s investigations related to the whistleblower’s case show an alarmingly high number of injuries at Amazon’s facilities.

In a statement, Amazon said that it takes “an aggressive stance on recording injuries no matter how big or small,” leading to higher numbers than other, similar work environments. As usual, workers at the warehouses dispute Amazon’s account, recalling systematic efforts to under-report and increases in injuries coming from automation.

One thing is certain: Ordering from Amazon during the holidays adds pressure to a warehouse system that by many accounts is already operating at superhuman levels — with very human costs. Perhaps shopping local is a better move this year.