Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Physical storage-turned-rentals startup Omni is dealing with layoffs today, two sources familar with the situation tell TechCrunch. Omni just shed seven operations team members. The startup is in talks to sell its engineering team to Coinbase after also receiving interest from Thumbtack.

Omni’s rental business was doing poorly without enough users paying a few bucks to borrow a tent, bike, or power drill. Omni had planned to launch a white-labeled platform allowing brick-and-mortar merchants to operate and market their own rental business.

But despite having plenty of cash left after raising $25 million from cryptocurrency company Ripple early last year, Omni feared the new platform would flop too and its prospects would worsen.

The company is in talks with Coinbase to hiring some of the engineering staff, who would have them work on Coinbase Earn, which rewards users with cryptocurrency for completing online educational programs. Some employees are interviewing at Coinbase today. However, a Coinbase spokesperson told me there’s currently no official deal before noting that theres’s nothing on the record they can share. Omni promised TechCrunch a statement but then refused to talk on the record.

Omni got its start in on-demand storage where it would come to your home, pick up and tag your stuff, store it in a warehouse, and bring it back whenever you wanted it. It grew popular in San Francisco and started to scale out to other cities. In April Omni began allowing users to earn money by renting out their stored goods to other Omni customers.

But by May, Omni was selling its storage business to SoftBank-funded competitor Clutter, and the transition was rocky. Users complained about changing prices and misplaced items, alarmed that suddenly a different startup had control of their possessions.

I was formerly a happy Omni customer of its storage business, but the transition to Clutter was botched and shook faith that users’ stuff would be taken care of. At one point they lost some of my belongings until C-level excecutives stepped in to figure out what happened.

Going forward, instead of storing goods itself, Omni would rely on local storefronts for pick up and drop off of rentals. But many users balked at the hassle of rentals when Amazon makes buying so easy.

Omni’s vision of cloud storage for the physical world and access over ownership had attracted capital from Flybridge, Highland, Allen & Company, Founders Fund, Precursor, and a wide array of angels. But efforts to change user behavior and operate a logistically complicated business matched with spotty execution led the startup to hit the skids and seek a soft landing.

On September 17, HTC announced that cofounder Cher Wang would be stepping down as CEO. In her place, Yves Maitre stepped into the role of Chief Executive, after more than a decade at French telecom giant, Orange.

It’s a tough job at an even tougher time. The move comes on the tail of five consecutive quarterly losses and major layoffs, including a quarter of the company’s staff, which were let go in July of last year.

It’s a far fall for a company that comprised roughly 11 percent of global smartphone sales, some eight years ago. These days, HTC is routinely relegated to the “other” column when these figures are published.

All of this is not to say that the company doesn’t have some interesting irons in the fire. With Vive, HTC has demonstrated its ability to offer a cutting edge VR platform, while Exodus has tapped into an interest in exploring the use of blockchain technologies for mobile devices.

Of course, neither of these examples show any sign of displacing HTC’s once-booming mobile device sales. And this January’s $1.1 billion sale of a significant portion of its hardware division to Google has left many wondering whether it has much gas left in the mobile tank.

With Wang initially scheduled to appear on stage at Disrupt this week, the company ultimately opted to have Maitre sit in on the panel instead. In preparation for the conversation, we sat down with the executive to discuss his new role and future of the struggling Taiwanese hardware company.

5G, XR and the future of the HTC brand

When Elizabeth Warren took on Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook earlier this week, it was a low moment for what New Yorker writer Andrew Marantz calls “techno-utopianism.”

That the progressive, populist Massachusetts Senator and leading Democratic Presidential candidate wants to #BreakUpBigTech is not surprising. But Warren’s choice to spotlight regulating and trust-busting Facebook was nonetheless noteworthy, because of what it represents on a philosophical level. Warren, along with like-minded political leaders, social activists, and tech critics, has begun to offer the first massively popular alternative to the massively popular wave of aggressive optimism and “genius” ambition that characterized tech culture for the past decade or two.

“No,” Warren and others seem to say, “your vision is not necessarily making the world a better place.” This is a major buzzkill for tech leaders who have made (positive) world-changing their number one calling card — more than profits, popularity, skyscrapers like San Francisco’s striking Salesforce Tower, or any other measure.

Enter Marantz, a longtime New Yorker staff writer and Brooklyn, N.Y. resident who has recently trained his attention on tech culture, following around iconic figures on both sides of what he sees as the divide of our time — not between tech greats whose successes make us all better and those who would stop them, but between the alternative figures on the “new right” and the self-understood liberals of Silicon Valley who, according to Marantz, have both contributed to “hijacking the American conversation.”

Marantz’s first book, “Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation,” will be released next week, and I recently had a chance to talk with him for this series the ethics of technology.

Greg Epstein: Congratulations on your absolutely fascinating new book Antisocial, and on everything you’ve been up to.

PayPal is the first company to walk away from Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency.

PayPal’s decision to take its ball and go home was first reported by The Wall Street Journal .

“PayPal has made the decision to forgo further participation in the Libra Association at this time and to continue to focus on advancing our existing mission and business priorities as we strive to democratize access to financial services for underserved populations,” PayPal said in an emailed statement. “We remain supportive of Libra’s aspirations and look forward to continued dialogue on ways to work together in the future. Facebook has been a longstanding and valued strategic partner to PayPal, and we will continue to partner with and support Facebook in various capacities.”

It could be that PayPal isn’t the only firm to walk away from the ambitious effort to transform the entire global financial system.

Mastercard, Visa and other companies may join PayPal in backing away from the Libra project, which has been the subject of mounting criticism since its launch.

As we reported when Libra first launched, Facebook doesn’t control the Libra organization or currency, but gets a single vote alongside the remaining partners which include Uber, Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm with roughly $10 billion in assets under management, Mastercard and Visa. Each partner has invested at least $10 million in the project and the association will promote the open-sourced Libra Blockchain.

The partners will not only pitch the Libra Blockchain and developer platform with its own Move programming language, plus sign up businesses to accept Libra for payment and even give customers discounts or rewards.

Facebook has a lot more riding on the success of the Association that just it’s Libra stake. The company has also launched a subsidiary company called Calibra that handles crypto transactions on its platform that would use the Libra blockchain.

Governments around the world have been up in arms about what they see as Facebook and its partners making an end run around the existing financial services.

And earlier this month, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg indicated that the company would  be willing to push back the launch of the cryptocurrency past its planned 2020 launch date, in an interview with the Japanese Nikkei news service.

We’re excited to announce a new partnership with Amazon Web Services for annual members of Extra Crunch. Starting today, qualified annual members can receive $1,000 in AWS credits. You also must be a startup founder to claim this Extra Crunch community perk.

AWS is the premier service for your application hosting needs, and we want to make sure our community is well-resourced to build. We understand that hosting and infrastructure costs can be a major hurdle for tech startups, and we’re hoping that this offer will help better support your team.

What’s included in the perk:

• $1,000 in AWS Promotional Credit valid for 1 year
• 2 months of AWS Business Support
• 80 credits for self-paced labs

Applications are processed in 7-10 days, once an application is received. Companies may not be eligible for AWS Promotional Credits if they previously received a similar or greater amount of credit. Companies may be eligible to be “topped up” to a higher credit amount if they previously received a lower credit.

In addition to the AWS community perk, Extra Crunch members also get access to how-tos and guides on company building, intelligence on what’s happening in the startup ecosystem, stories about founders and exits, transcripts from panels at TechCrunch events, discounts on TechCrunch events, no banner ads on TechCrunch.com and more. To see a full list of the types of articles you get with Extra Crunch, head here.

You can sign up for annual Extra Crunch membership here.

Once you are signed up, you’ll receive a welcome email with a link to the AWS offer. If you are already an annual Extra Crunch member, you will receive an email with the offer at some point today. If you are currently a monthly Extra Crunch subscriber and want to upgrade to annual in order to claim this deal, head over to the “my account” section on TechCrunch.com and click the “upgrade” button.

This is one of several new community perks we’ve been working on for Extra Crunch members. Extra Crunch members also get 20% off all TechCrunch event tickets (email extracrunch@techcrunch.com with the event name to receive a discount code for event tickets). You can learn more about our events lineup here. You also can read about our Brex community perk here.

At age 27, Jordan Fudge is quietly making a splash in the VC world.

Fudge is the managing partner of Sinai Ventures, a multi-stage VC fund that manages $100 million and has more than 80 portfolio companies including Ro, Drivetime, Kapwing, and Luminary. His 2017 investment in Pinterest — a secondary shares deal from his prior firm that was rolled into Sinai when he spun out — will have returned the value of Sinai’s Fund I by itself once the lockup on shares expires next week.

Fudge and co-founder Eric Reiner, a Northwestern University classmate, hired staff in New York and San Francisco when Sinai launched in early 2018. Today, they’re centralizing the team in Los Angeles for its next fund, a bet on the rising momentum of the local startup ecosystem and their vision to be the city’s leading Series A and B firm.

Fudge and Reiner have intentionally stayed off the radar thus far, wanting to prove themselves first through a track record of investments.

A part-time film financier who also serves on the board of LGBT advocacy non-profit GLAAD, Fudge describes himself as an atypical VC firm founder, an edge he’s using to carve out his niche in a crowded VC landscape.

I spoke with Fudge to learn more about his strategy at Sinai and what led to him founding the firm. Here’s the transcript (edited for length and clarity):

Eric Peckham: Tell me the origin story here. How did Sinai Ventures get seeded?

Jordan Fudge: I was working for Eagle Advisors, a multi-billion dollar family office for one of the founders of SAP, focused on the tech sector across public markets, crypto, and eventually VC deals. Two years in, I pitched them on spinning out to focus on VC and they seeded Sinai with the private investments like Compass and Pinterest I had done already, plus a fresh fund to invest out of on my own. It was $100 million combined.

Facebook’s relentless blatant feature copy of Snapchat have been seen as one of the chief examples of the company’s competitive overreach, but Snap CEO Evan Spiegel isn’t sure whether antitrust activity from the government is going to change the company’s near-term prospects of competing with Instagram.

“I mean the history of antitrust would basically say that these investigations last like seven to ten years or something like that and that basically nothing happens,” Spiegel said onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF. “I think a lot can change in the seven to ten years that this process will take.”

Though Spiegel didn’t seem to have the most faith in the process giving Snap a more level playing field to take on Facebook, he did say there were clear public concerns with how Facebook was responding to competition in the market.

“The thing that everyone’s concerned about is like is that they’ve seen that competition has been what has motivated Facebook to make those changes over time,” Spiegel said onstage. “So, if you look at Snapchat, the inventions that we create around ephemerality, around privacy, those have really motivated Facebook to dramatically change their product offering in order to compete.”

Whether Facebook was specifically suppressing Snapchat content, Spiegel said, “It’s hard to say and I you know I’d probably be stupid to talk about it here.”

“I think what everyone is concerned about is what they would characterize as anti competitive practices so for example, you know, people upload snaps they create on Snapchat to Instagram, all the time, and then Instagram suppresses you know the Snapchat hashtag or they suppress people’s ability to post snap codes as their profile picture or suppress their ability to link to Snapchat on their profile. And that’s an example of anti-competitive behavior.”

Spiegel also confirmed that the company had put together a list of some of Facebook’s competitive moments called Project Voldemort, noting that the list had been started several years ago. The initiative’s existence was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

“I didn’t make it, our legal team put it together,” Spiegel said. “I think just because they kept hearing from our partners all of these things that Facebook was doing and it was actually so many that people couldn’t actually remember them all so they started writing them down.”

As a concerns over the safety of vaping products for cannabis sweeps across the country, executives in the industry are passing the buck to regulators to come up with a solution.

The need for national regulation touches everything from how to bank cannabis businesses to how to manage the distribution of cannabis products, but the pain is most acute as vaping related illnesses sweep the United States.

To date, the CDC has recorded roughly 1,080 lung injury cases associated with using e-cigarette, or vaping products in 48 states and 1 U.S. territory. According to the agency, 18 deaths have been confirmed in 15 states, so far. And most of those patients report a history of using THC-containing products.

“I want the CDC and the regulatory bodies that are actually looking into the case to kind of investigate those causes and come back,” said Bharat Vasan, the former chief executive officer at Pax Labs, a marijuana vaporizer manufacturer,  speaking onstage at Disrupt San Francisco 2019. Vasan declined to address whether Pax Labs products could be considered 100% safe. “I think that’s a good question for the company,” said the former chief executive who had worked for Pax for over a year.

Both Vasan, who now runs a consumer and cannabis focused investment firm, Yellow Dog Ventures, and Eaze and Wayv founder Keith McCarty, think that more regulation would fuel growth and provide more stability for a market that’s already the fastest growing industry in the United States.

“It’s like the final stage of prohibition,” says Vasan. “It’s ending but it’s ending state by state by state for cannabis.”

New bills like the SAFE Act, which recently passed the House of Representatives, would allow national banks to work with cannabis companies. The lack of access to appropriate financial services has been one source of friction in the U.S. cannabis industry. Although it hasn’t stopped any number of entrepreneurs like Vasan, McCarty and others from launching businesses to serve the industry.

Still, it’s a bit of a scary time for many executives in the industry. Bruce Linton was ousted at Canopy Growth, and chief operating officer Ben Cook and General Counsel Lisa Sergi Trager, resigned from MedMen Enterprises. And there’s still a potentially toxic cloud of vapor hanging over the industry in the form of additives and chemicals that have been linked to wave of lung illnesses that swept through the country over the past year, according to the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control. From

Despite the headwinds for vaping, America is clearly becoming cannabis country. “It still happens to be the fastest growing industry in the world,” McCarty said. And even though venture capital investors can’t invest into the industry directly, the ancillary services, products,  and logistic requirements to build a fully functioning, mature industry, represents a significant opportunity for entrepreneurs.

“The market and the population is saying through sentiment that we want this,” said McCarty “[And] this industry continues to move in the right direction… up and to the right.”

At the same time, McCarty also sees the need for more government regulation to move the industry fully into the realm of legitimate, regulated enterprises and rid cannabis of the grey and black market operators that have far more freedom to sell harmful products, thanks to their under-the-table operations.

“We have three times as many illicit dispensaries as we do ones that are legal in the state of California,” says McCarty. “And what the voters voted in is safe access. Safe access is about availability of access points to be able to receive and consume cannabis based on the law and regulations.”

Ultimately, McCarty sees the support for the continuing integration of cannabis products as legal medical and recreational options as something that should have bi-partisan support.

“Our government should be looking at voter sentiment and the population . . . is overwhelmingly in support of cannabis  . . .well beyond that for medical and even for for recreational . . . so it’s probably one of the… only items on the agenda, too, that is bipartisan, like truly supported by parties,” McCarty says. “I’m talking about putting money towards schools, books, education as opposed to all the illicit things that we’re trying to break away from, like the illicit sale of things that you know that may be harming people from a health and wellness perspective.”

So you’ve had a data breach. Don’t worry, it’s not just you. These days it happens to everyone, no matter how large or small your company is. It’s almost inevitable, some might say, and not a case of if but when.

A lot is already out of your control. Whether a hacker broke in and stole customer data or someone on staff left a cloud server exposed without a password, the incident alone is bad enough. But then you’ll also face a stream of headlines, flack from your customers, and endless tweets and social media posts. Trust will invariably suffer, your brand will hurt, and recovery seems like a million miles away.

But as breaches become more commonplace, few companies remember the actual incident itself — or even the number of users or customers affected. No matter what kind of security incident you’re thrown into, what happens afterward is how you will be remembered.

Get it right, you can save face. Get it wrong, and you’ll never live it down. Here’s what not to do when you have a data breach.

Don’t try to cover it up

So you’ve had a data breach. Don’t worry, it’s not just you. These days it happens to everyone, no matter how large or small your company is. It’s almost inevitable, some might say, and not a case of if but when.

A lot is already out of your control. Whether a hacker broke in and stole customer data or someone on staff left a cloud server exposed without a password, the incident alone is bad enough. But then you’ll also face a stream of headlines, flack from your customers, and endless tweets and social media posts. Trust will invariably suffer, your brand will hurt, and recovery seems like a million miles away.

But as breaches become more commonplace, few companies remember the actual incident itself — or even the number of users or customers affected. No matter what kind of security incident you’re thrown into, what happens afterward is how you will be remembered.

Get it right, you can save face. Get it wrong, and you’ll never live it down. Here’s what not to do when you have a data breach.

Don’t try to cover it up