Category: UNCATEGORIZED

When Bill McDermott announced he was stepping down as CEO at SAP a couple of weeks ago, it certainly felt like a curious move, but he landed on his feet pretty quickly. ServiceNow announced he would be taking over as CEO there. The transition will take place at year-end.

If you’re wondering what happened to the current ServiceNow CEO, John Donahoe, well he landed a job as CEO at Nike. The CEO carousel goes round and round (and painted ponies go up and down).

Jeff Miller, lead independent director on the ServiceNow Board of Directors was “thrilled” to have McDermott fill the void left by Donahoe’s departure. “His global experience and proven track record will provide for a smooth transition and continued strong leadership. Bill will further enhance ServiceNow’s momentum and reputation as a digital workflows leader committed to customer success, and as a preferred strategic partner enabling enterprise digital transformation,” Miller said in a statement.

Jennifer Morgan and Christian Klein replaced McDermott as Co-CEOs at SAP, and during the announcement, McDermott indicated he would stay until the end of the year to help with the transition. After that, no vacation for McDermott, who will apparently start at ServiceNow after his obligations at SAP end.

As Lardinois wrote regarding McDermott’s resignation:

“I last spoke to McDermott about a month ago, during a fireside chat at our TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise event. At the time, I didn’t come away with the impression that this was a CEO on his way out (though McDermott reminded me that if he had already made his decision a month ago, he probably wouldn’t have given it away).”

This story is developing. More to come

After erasing over $30 billion in projected shareholder value, Adam Neumann will walk away from the We Company with a $1.7 billion payout, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. 

This is how the company will end, not with the pop of a successful public offering, but with a whimper from defeated investors probably tired after the months-long saga of trying to make sense of how a clever real estate plan ballooned into one of the greatest swindles in venture capital history.

Already ousted as the company’s chief executive, Neumann controlled shares of the company that gave him what amounted to significant control even after his removal.

The We Company drama has it all. Complacent directors, horrible management, rapacious greed — wrapped in a package of holistic spirituality and the invention of a new kind of conscious capitalism. Even if it was ultimately a capitalism that was conscious only of its ability to deceive.

As Neumann leaves, Softbank will gain control of the company it had once valued at $47 billion, but at a far more modest $8 billion figure. Still, the bid was more attractive to We Company’s board of directors than a competing offer from JPMorgan Chase, according to the Journal’s reporting.

Under the terms of the deal, Softbank will buy nearly $1 billion in stock from Neumann, who was already forced out from the company he co-founded as public markets balked over his managerial acumen. The Japanese conglomerate, which had pushed up the private market valuation of WeWork through its $100 billion Vision Fund, will also stake Neumann $500 million in credit to repay a loan facility and give him a $185 million consulting fee.

Even with the Hindenburg-level catastrophe that Neumann piloted as the chief executive of the money losing real estate venture, the former chief executive will still retain a stake in the company and remain an observer on the board of directors.

In all, Softbank is putting in a tender offer for as much as $3 billion to go to the company’s employees and other investors. In fact, WeWork needs the money to be able to afford the layoffs it reportedly wants to make as it tries to right the ship.

People with knowledge of the company’s plans said the decision could be announced today, according to the Journal’s reporting.

Part of the reason for the $500 million loan was that Neumann’s removal from the executive role at the company risked putting him in default with his JPMorgan loans.

WeWork revealed an unusual IPO prospectus in August after raising more than $8 billion in equity and debt funding. Despite financials that showed losses of nearly $1 billion in the six months ending June 30, the company still managed to accumulate a valuation as high as $47 billion, largely as a result of Neumann’s fundraising abilities.

“As co-founder of WeWork, I am so proud of this team and the incredible company that we have built over the last decade,” Neumann said in a statement confirming his resignation last month. “Our global platform now spans 111 cities in 29 countries, serving more than 527,000 members each day. While our business has never been stronger, in recent weeks, the scrutiny directed toward me has become a significant distraction, and I have decided that it is in the best interest of the company to step down as chief executive. Thank you to my colleagues, our members, our landlord partners, and our investors for continuing to believe in this great business.”

 

After erasing over $30 billion in projected shareholder value, Adam Neumann will walk away from the We Company with a $1.7 billion payout, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. 

This is how the company will end, not with the pop of a successful public offering, but with a whimper from defeated investors probably tired after the months-long saga of trying to make sense of how a clever real estate plan ballooned into one of the greatest swindles in venture capital history.

Already ousted as the company’s chief executive, Neumann controlled shares of the company that gave him what amounted to significant control even after his removal.

The We Company drama has it all. Complacent directors, horrible management, rapacious greed — wrapped in a package of holistic spirituality and the invention of a new kind of conscious capitalism. Even if it was ultimately a capitalism that was conscious only of its ability to deceive.

As Neumann leaves, Softbank will gain control of the company it had once valued at $47 billion, but at a far more modest $8 billion figure. Still, the bid was more attractive to We Company’s board of directors than a competing offer from JPMorgan Chase, according to the Journal’s reporting.

Under the terms of the deal, Softbank will buy nearly $1 billion in stock from Neumann, who was already forced out from the company he co-founded as public markets balked over his managerial acumen. The Japanese conglomerate, which had pushed up the private market valuation of WeWork through its $100 billion Vision Fund, will also stake Neumann $500 million in credit to repay a loan facility and give him a $185 million consulting fee.

Even with the Hindenburg-level catastrophe that Neumann piloted as the chief executive of the money losing real estate venture, the former chief executive will still retain a stake in the company and remain an observer on the board of directors.

In all, Softbank is putting in a tender offer for as much as $3 billion to go to the company’s employees and other investors. In fact, WeWork needs the money to be able to afford the layoffs it reportedly wants to make as it tries to right the ship.

People with knowledge of the company’s plans said the decision could be announced today, according to the Journal’s reporting.

Part of the reason for the $500 million loan was that Neumann’s removal from the executive role at the company risked putting him in default with his JPMorgan loans.

WeWork revealed an unusual IPO prospectus in August after raising more than $8 billion in equity and debt funding. Despite financials that showed losses of nearly $1 billion in the six months ending June 30, the company still managed to accumulate a valuation as high as $47 billion, largely as a result of Neumann’s fundraising abilities.

“As co-founder of WeWork, I am so proud of this team and the incredible company that we have built over the last decade,” Neumann said in a statement confirming his resignation last month. “Our global platform now spans 111 cities in 29 countries, serving more than 527,000 members each day. While our business has never been stronger, in recent weeks, the scrutiny directed toward me has become a significant distraction, and I have decided that it is in the best interest of the company to step down as chief executive. Thank you to my colleagues, our members, our landlord partners, and our investors for continuing to believe in this great business.”

 

In a working environment obsessed with metrics dashboards, key performance indicators, and objectives and key results, the legal function presents an elusive target. Compared to sales, marketing and product, “legal” in a growing tech company can seem an inaccessible alchemy of risk, contracting and policy.

But interviews with general counsels at tech companies and a survey conducted by TechGC — a private community of top lawyers at technology companies across the United States — reveal how innovative in-house attorneys measure both productivity and quality and position their teams as central to advancing enterprise-wide goals.

The Status Quo

Legal lags behind other departments in the metrics game. While more than three-quarters of general counsels surveyed said their companies collected regular, department-specific metrics, only 29% indicated that the metrics regime extended to the legal department.

Many point to the unpredictable and reactive nature of a GC’s work as a key barrier to collecting informative metrics. As Sarah Feingold, former general counsel at Etsy and Vroom, explains, “if there’s a dispute or there’s an employment issue, everything else drops.” Absent an established operating history against which to measure, it can be hard to identify trends and put those disputes in context. “I could say, ‘oh we didn’t get sued this quarter,’ but that’s not necessarily so indicative of my performance as the general counsel,” adds Katherine Hooker, Head of Legal at Greenhouse.

Productivity & Quality

Faced with these challenges, many general counsels first turn to a “goal cadence” — a set of time-bound, objectively measurable goals against which to report progress. Goal Cadences come in many forms including “Objectives and Key Results [OKRs],” “Management by Objective [MBOs],” and “Goals/Signals/Metrics [GSMs].”

“At the beginning of the planning period, I map out key projects — closing a financing, data security audits, updating TOS and privacy policies — and lay those out across the period. Then it’s simply: did I finish projects on time yes or no,” says David Pashman, former GC at Meetup and current GC at JW Player . More than 40% of GCs surveyed collect OKRs or something similar (the second-most commonly collected metric after legal spend [74%]).

Measuring outputs and productivity has its rewards, as Colin Sullivan, head of legal at Patreon explains. “When you measure, there are two purposes: one is to improve and the other is to demonstrate the value you are providing to the company.”  Many GCs stressed the power of metrics collection and presentation as key in characterizing how the company at large viewed the legal department.

But over-reliance on OKRs risks treating productivity as a proxy for quality, which can be more challenging to pin down. A full 45% of GC’s characterized the method they use to judge the performance of their own direct reports as “kind of a Potter Stuart Thing (‘I know it when I see it’),” a phrase famously used by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stuart to characterize hardcore pornography in Jacobellis v. Ohio. 

To to penetrate the qualitative side, GCs turn primarily to flash surveys of internal clients (e.g. the sales team) and to “360 reviews” — recurring professional feedback from both direct reports, lateral colleagues and managers. Regular reviews offer minimal disruption and a cost-effective method for generating metrics that can be compared over time to illustrate trends. As Ben Alden, GC at Betterment assesses it, 360 reviews offer an efficiency play. “A fully-scoped procurement process could include metrics on speed, cost and comparisons against benchmarked best practices. But that takes a lot of overhead to set up; versus a solid 360 review process makes sure that people are performing at their best and is ready out of the box.”

Version 2.0

More sophisticated metrics regimes yield more granular measures. In addition to core financial metrics like spend on outside counsel and performance against budget and spend as a percentage of overall operating expense, general counsels focus on tracking items like deal terms and risk exposure.

In a working environment obsessed with metrics dashboards, key performance indicators, and objectives and key results, the legal function presents an elusive target. Compared to sales, marketing and product, “legal” in a growing tech company can seem an inaccessible alchemy of risk, contracting and policy.

But interviews with general counsels at tech companies and a survey conducted by TechGC — a private community of top lawyers at technology companies across the United States — reveal how innovative in-house attorneys measure both productivity and quality and position their teams as central to advancing enterprise-wide goals.

The Status Quo

Legal lags behind other departments in the metrics game. While more than three-quarters of general counsels surveyed said their companies collected regular, department-specific metrics, only 29% indicated that the metrics regime extended to the legal department.

Many point to the unpredictable and reactive nature of a GC’s work as a key barrier to collecting informative metrics. As Sarah Feingold, former general counsel at Etsy and Vroom, explains, “if there’s a dispute or there’s an employment issue, everything else drops.” Absent an established operating history against which to measure, it can be hard to identify trends and put those disputes in context. “I could say, ‘oh we didn’t get sued this quarter,’ but that’s not necessarily so indicative of my performance as the general counsel,” adds Katherine Hooker, Head of Legal at Greenhouse.

Productivity & Quality

Faced with these challenges, many general counsels first turn to a “goal cadence” — a set of time-bound, objectively measurable goals against which to report progress. Goal Cadences come in many forms including “Objectives and Key Results [OKRs],” “Management by Objective [MBOs],” and “Goals/Signals/Metrics [GSMs].”

“At the beginning of the planning period, I map out key projects — closing a financing, data security audits, updating TOS and privacy policies — and lay those out across the period. Then it’s simply: did I finish projects on time yes or no,” says David Pashman, former GC at Meetup and current GC at JW Player . More than 40% of GCs surveyed collect OKRs or something similar (the second-most commonly collected metric after legal spend [74%]).

Measuring outputs and productivity has its rewards, as Colin Sullivan, head of legal at Patreon explains. “When you measure, there are two purposes: one is to improve and the other is to demonstrate the value you are providing to the company.”  Many GCs stressed the power of metrics collection and presentation as key in characterizing how the company at large viewed the legal department.

But over-reliance on OKRs risks treating productivity as a proxy for quality, which can be more challenging to pin down. A full 45% of GC’s characterized the method they use to judge the performance of their own direct reports as “kind of a Potter Stuart Thing (‘I know it when I see it’),” a phrase famously used by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stuart to characterize hardcore pornography in Jacobellis v. Ohio. 

To to penetrate the qualitative side, GCs turn primarily to flash surveys of internal clients (e.g. the sales team) and to “360 reviews” — recurring professional feedback from both direct reports, lateral colleagues and managers. Regular reviews offer minimal disruption and a cost-effective method for generating metrics that can be compared over time to illustrate trends. As Ben Alden, GC at Betterment assesses it, 360 reviews offer an efficiency play. “A fully-scoped procurement process could include metrics on speed, cost and comparisons against benchmarked best practices. But that takes a lot of overhead to set up; versus a solid 360 review process makes sure that people are performing at their best and is ready out of the box.”

Version 2.0

More sophisticated metrics regimes yield more granular measures. In addition to core financial metrics like spend on outside counsel and performance against budget and spend as a percentage of overall operating expense, general counsels focus on tracking items like deal terms and risk exposure.

There is no bigger industry on our planet than food and agriculture, with a consistent, loyal customer base of 7 billion. In fact, the World Bank estimates that food and agriculture comprise about 10% of the global GDP, meaning that, food and agriculture would be valued at about $8 trillion globally based on the projected global GDP of $88 trillion for 2019.

On the food front, a record $1.71 trillion was spent on food and beverages in 2018 at grocery stores and other retailers and away-from-home meals and snacks in the United States alone. During the same year, 9.7% of Americans’ disposable personal income was spent on food — 5% at home and 4.7% away from home — a percentage that has remained steady amidst economic changes over the past 20 years.

However, despite a stalwart customer base, the food industry is facing unprecedented challenges in production, demand and regulations stemming from consumer trends. Consumer demands and focus have changed in recent years. An increasing focus by consumers on sustainability, health and freshness has placed significant pressure on the food industry to innovate.

Innovation imperative

In recent years, agtech innovators have created exciting new ways to harness the power of technology to enhance the world’s food supply. Agtech innovations are protecting crops and maximizing outputs — enabling structural changes in the agriculture system that could achieve important sustainability goals of lowering greenhouse gasses, reducing water use, ending deforestation and potentially even sequestering carbon back into soil.

But this is just the beginning. As everyone needs to eat (multiple times a day!), there remains a huge opportunity for investments in innovative food and beverage technology, or food tech, that better the health of our food ecosystem through novel ingredients and improved diets via better food distribution, preservation and access.

The opportunity to use technology to improve food is massive and extends to improving food usage and decreasing waste — a key to minimizing the environmental impacts of a growing human population. Cognizant of this huge opportunity, venture capitalists are closely tracking this space. According to PitchBook, funding for food tech has skyrocketed from about $60 million in 2008 to more than $1 billion in 2015. And unique investments from VCs and private equity funds have doubled from 223 in 2015 to 459 in 2017, according to CB Insights. In examining total investments made, along with exit activity, food tech has now surpassed agtech on both fronts. This is still relatively small, given the food tech sector’s large potential customer base globally of more than 7 billion people (and growing).

Key drivers of food tech investments

Consumers are getting pickier about what they eat. They are juggling hectic work and personal lives, and demand convenience when it comes to their meals. But this convenience cannot come at the expense of quality. Now more than ever, people want to know what’s in their food, where it came from and how its production and sourcing impacts the environment.

In years past, consumer packaged goods (CPG) incumbents rushed to deliver on these heightened demands — promising convenient, superior-quality food. But falling margins on commodity ingredients, coupled with industry consolidation, have discouraged these efforts, and many have refocused their attention — leaving the door open for a new wave of hungry (pun intended) innovators and startups.

Today’s consumers are not only looking for convenience and consistency, but are also seeking nutritious food that can be accessed with ease, limits waste creation and aligns with their personal brands. In reality, it has never been more difficult to be a food company. Consumer demands have expanded to include ethical mantras but have not given way to requirements of convenience. However, spending trends show that consumers are ready and willing to pay a premium for food tech innovations that can meet their ever-increasing needs of convenience, health and low environmental impact. The opportunity for food innovators to capitalize on these market demands is growing!

Food tech present

Today, grocery ordering and delivery represents the largest food tech category, while meal ordering comprises the greatest number of privately held, venture-backed startups in food tech globally. Last year was an exceptional year for food tech, with a record-breaking $16.9 billion in funding recorded. According to Crunchbase, the three biggest deals of the year included $1 billion for Swiggy, India’s leading online restaurant marketplace; $600 million for Instacart, a U.S. grocery delivery service; and $590 million for iFood, a Brazil-based restaurant marketplace.

While consumers still have an appetite (again with the puns!) for grocery ordering and delivery plays, investors are becoming increasingly cautious in the wake of meal kit service Blue Apron’s high-profile failure (among others), which emphasized challenges like scalability, the inability to patent food and spoilage and contamination concerns across the supply chain. These missteps have led many investors to turn their attention to new food tech frontiers.

Food tech future

There are three key areas in which food tech innovations are beginning to deliver completely new and novel approaches along the value chain. These areas represent technological approaches addressing serious pain points within the food industry, and we anticipate that these sectors will experience significant growth and investment attention in the coming years.

Consumer food tech

Consumer food tech is the segment within food technology investment that focuses on development of technologies primarily marketed toward the consumer. Be it plant-based meats, novel distribution systems or nutrition-based tech, this segment aims to assuage consumer-driven demands. Examples of consumer food tech innovators include alternative protein/diary, nutrition and meal kit distribution companies.

As the organic food trend reached its peak and began to commoditize, another food trend has risen to take its place. Plant-based, meatless, animal-free … regardless of the moniker given, it seems like everyone is getting into the meatless craze. News or ads trumpeting the arrival of “meatless meat” are unavoidable.

Fast food giants Burger King (via Impossible Foods) and McDonald’s (via Beyond Meat) are now serving meatless burgers on their menus, attracting new customers that typically shop for food at Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods. Memphis Meats is another example, as is the retail giant Ikea, which is working on a vegetarian version of its infamous Swedish meatballs.

But it doesn’t end there. Other innovative companies are working on the commercialization of alternative proteins such as Clara Foods (egg whites from cell cultures), and Ripple Foods and Oatly that are focused on developing dairy and nut-free milk alternatives. UBS estimates that the market for plant-based proteins alone could expand from just under $5 billion at present to some $85 billion over the next decade, at a roughly 28% growth rate year-over-year.

Meanwhile, companies like Brightseed, Just and Renaissance Bioscience are blazing new trails on the biological and nutraceuticals front, seeking ways to produce food and nutritional supplements in cleaner, smarter and more sustainable ways.

Industrial food tech

While some companies focus on the food itself, many others are exploring how to process, package and distribute this new wave of sustainable, healthy and innovative food. Industrial food tech is the sub-segment of food tech that focuses on addressing fundamental business model and B2B pain points within the food industry. The companies include innovators in novel processing and packaging technology and new/functional ingredients that have improved nutritional, labeling or formulation characteristics.

Food preservation technology companies like Apeel Sciences and Hazel Technologies are leading the way in reducing food waste, while improving produce quality during transportation. This is a massive issue ripe for innovation, as pre-consumer food waste comprises 40% of all food wasted in the U.S. Improved food-waste profiles could enable an overall reduction in required arable land.

Food processing/grading technologies will also be at the forefront of this segment; for example, food inspection startup P&P Optica has received financing to develop their food quality and foreign object detection technology. This hyperspectral tech has the potential to provide not only food-safety improvements in automated foreign object detection, but also to enable meat quality grading to be standardized and improved over time.

Coupled with a burgeoning sector in industrial ingredients like emulsifiers, sweeteners and firming agents, among other additives, this segment is growing quickly as large-scale food producers are facing consumer pressure to not only innovate, but also to do so sustainably. Companies like Aromyx are working to quantify things like taste and smell to help enhance production processes across a range of industries, from pharmaceuticals and chemicals to agriculture, food and beverages and consumer packaged goods.

Supply chain & procurement

The Chipotle contamination crisis (and others like it) underscores the importance of improving visibility into food supply chains. Safe Traces and other startups are helping to increasing food traceability by commercializing new modes of tracking food provenance. Consumer awareness regarding food fraud and requirements for food traceability, as well as records of provenance, are increasing. This has created a strong business case for innovation in the food supply chain to satisfy these demands. Changing consumer preferences for quality, convenience and gourmet products in food service has led to a rise in the category of fast-casual restaurants and placed pressure on fast food restaurants to rethink their delivery models.

Startups like Farmer’s Fridge (a Finistere portfolio company) and BingoBox package chef-curated meals and snacks in conveniently placed vending machines or unmanned, automated convenience stores. 6D Bytes uses AI and machine learning to prepare healthy food, like smoothies, while Starship Electronics has, in partnership with local stores and restaurants, introduced a fleet of robots that deliver food to people.

Innovators in this segment are focused on traceability, sustainability, improving freshness and eliminating food waste. For example, Good Eggs and Farmdrop deliver fresh and sustainably sourced grocery food in reusable packaging, while Full Harvest encourages the food supply chain to “shop ugly” by using imperfect or surplus produce that would have otherwise gone to waste.

Technology will continue to play an increasingly critical role in how the food we eat is produced, how it is packaged, how it is delivered, how it tastes, feels and smells and how it is reused and repurposed. Investments in food tech will continue to increase to help deliver on the promise of healthier, more sustainable food systems for the world. After all, we are what we eat.

The Snap-back continues. Snapchat blew past earnings expectations for a big beat in Q3, as it added 7 million daily active users this quarter to hit 210 million, up 13% year-over-year. Snap also beat on revenue, notching $446 million, which is up a whopping 50% year-over-year, at a loss of $0.04 EPS. That flew past Bloomberg’s consensus of Wall Street estimates that expected $437.9 million in revenue and a $0.05 EPS loss.

Snap has managed to continue cutting losses as it edges towards profitability. Net loss improved to $227 million from $255 million last quarter, with the loss decreasing $98 million versus Q3 2018.

CEO Evan Spiegel made his case in his prepared remakrs for why Snapchat’s share price should be higher: “We are a high growth business, with strong operating leverage, a clear path to profitability, a distinct vision for the future, and the ability to invest over the long term.” Snapchat’s share price had closed down 4% at $14.

That’s partially because of the high cost of Snapchat’s growth relative average revenue per user. While it notes that it saw user growth in all regions, 5 million of the 7 million new users came from the Rest Of The World, with just 1 million coming from the North America and Europe regions. That’s in part thanks to better than expected growth and retention on its reengineered Android app that’s been a hit in India. But since Snapchat serves so much high-definition video content but it earns just $1.01 average revenue in the Rest Of World, it has to hope it can keep growing ARPU so it becomes profitable globally.

Some other top-line stats from Snapchat’s earnings:

• Operating cash flow improved by $56 million to a loss of $76 million in Q3 2019, compared to the prior year.
• Free Cash Flow improved by $75 million to $(84) million in Q3 2019, compared to the prior year.

Interestingly, Spiegel noted that “We benefited from year-over-year growth in user activity in Q3 including growth in Snapchatters posting and viewing Stories.” Snapchat hadn’t indicated Stories was growing in at last the past two years, as it was attacked by clones including Instagram Stories that led Snapchat to start shrinking in user count a year ago before it recovered.

Since Stories viewership is critical to total ad view on Snapchat, we may see analysts insisting to hear more about that metric in the future.

Databricks is a SaaS business built on top of a bunch of open source tools, and apparently it’s been going pretty well on the business side of things. In fact, the company claims to be one of the fastest growing enterprise cloud companies ever. Today the company announced a massive $400 million Series F funding round on a hefty $6.2 billion valuation. Today’s funding brings the total raised to almost a $900 million.

Andreessen Horowitz’s Late Stage Venture Fund led the round with new investors BlackRock, Inc., T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. and Tiger Global Management also participating. The institutional investors are particularly interesting here because as a late stage startup, Databricks likely has its eye on a future IPO, and having those investors on board already could give them a head start.

CEO Ali Ghodsi was coy when it came to the IPO, but it sure sounded like that’s a direction he wants to go. “We are one of the fastest growing cloud enterprise software companies on record, which means we have a lot of access to capital as this fundraise shows. The revenue is growing gangbusters, and the brand is also really well known. So an IPO is not something that we’re optimizing for, but it’s something that’s definitely going to happen down the line in the not-too-distant future,” Ghodsi told TechCrunch.

The company announced as of Q3 it’s on a $200 million run rate, and it has a platform that consists of four products, all built on foundational open source: Delta Lake, an open source data lake product; MLflow, an open source project that helps data teams operationalize machine learning; Koalas, which creates a single machine frame work for Spark and Pandos, greatly simplifying working with the two tools; and finally, Spark, the open source analytics engine.

You can download the open source version of all of these tools for free, but they are not easy to use or manage. The way that Databricks make money is by offering each of these tools in the form of Software as a Service. They handle all of the management headaches associated with using these tools and they charge you a subscription price.

It’s a model that seems to be working as the company is growing like crazy. It raised $250 million just last February on a $2.75 billion valuation. Apparently the investors saw room for a lot more growth in the intervening six months, as today’s $6.2 billion valuation shows.

California is in the midst of a serious housing crisis that’s ramifications stretch across the state. In the Bay Area, the crisis is often at its most visible due to the presence of tech mega-corps and the influx of highly paid tech workers that have exacerbated the problem.

It hasn’t been uncommon for some of these huge tech companies to take some responsibility for the issues and invest back into organizations seeking to promote affordable housing. In Seattle, Microsoft and Amazon have announced initiatives. In the Bay Area, Google announced a $1 billion ten-year-plan just a few months ago, and now Facebook is doing the same.

In a blog post attributed to Facebook CFO David Wehner, the company announced that they’ve set aside $1 billion to tackle affordable housing, and that they’re hoping this initiative will lead to the creation of “up to 20,000 new housing units.”

This–of course–isn’t going to be some lump sum check sent to the California government, it’s divvied up into a few different initiatives

• California state: $250 million is being devoted to a partnership with the California state government to subsidize development on excess state-owned land “where housing is scarce.”
• Bay Area: A $225 million chunk of the commitment is the value of Facebook-owned land that has been zoned for housing in Menlo Park. An additional $150 million is being contributed to The Bay’s Future Fund, an affordable housing investment fund. $25 million is going to help fund housing construction for essential workers in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties.
• California and elsewhere: The last major chunk, $350 million is being set aside for “additional commitments” to the other listed initiatives as well as new efforts to address housing issues near Facebook offices outside of California.

For its part, the California government seems appreciative to have some help from major companies, though even hundreds of millions in aid is a drop in the bucket for how badly the California state government has mismanaged this issue.

“State government cannot solve housing affordability alone, we need others to join Facebook in stepping up – progress requires partnership with the private sector and philanthropy to change the status quo and address the cost crisis our state is facing,” a statement attributed to California Governor Gavin Newsom reads.

Transportation services giant Penske Corp. is backing a new car-sharing service called Penske Dash that launched Tuesday in Washington D.C. and Arlington, Virginia.

The service is debuting at an awkward time for the industry. While some car-sharing operations, particularly peer-to-peer services, have expanded, others have struggled in the past year. GM’s Maven, BMW’s ReachNow, Car2Go and Lime are among the car-sharing companies that have scaled back or closed their businesses altogether.

In May, GM scaled back its Maven car-sharing company and stopped service in eight markets. BMW’s ReachNow service shut down so abruptly in Seattle and Portland that customers were still using the cars when the announcement was made. Meanwhile, transportation startup Lime closed its LimePod car-sharing service after less than a year of operations in Seattle and Car2Go pulled out of five North American cities.

Despite these headwinds, Penske Corp. Chairman Roger Penske seems keen to jump into the business.

“Penske Dash furthers our commitment to embrace new technologies while addressing the mobility needs for our consumers,” Roger Penske said in a statement, adding that the company intends to “remain at the forefront of new leading transportation solutions.”

Local operations will be led by Paul Delong, who previously served as president and CEO of Car2Go North America.

Penske Dash gives customers access to a fleet of Volkswagen Jetta SE vehicles that can be rented by the minute, hour or day through the app. The rental rates, which are $0.45 a minute or $15 an hour, include fuel, parking and insurance. Members are also supported with 24/7 access to a call center and a local fleet operations team.

Penske Dash describes itself as “free-floating,” although within Washington D.C. it’s a bit more constrained than some other services that allow customers to park anywhere within a geographic area. Customers can park their Penske Dash vehicle in a public, unrestricted, street parking space in Arlington identified by Penske Dash. In Washington D.C., customers must park in a parking spot marked by a Penske Dash sign in approved garages or lots, according to rules stated on its website.

Ridecell, a transportation software company, is providing the platform for the app. The startup, which developed a cloud-based mobility platform designed to help car-sharing, ride-sharing and autonomous technology companies manage their vehicles, raised $60 million in a Series B round in late 2018.