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Becoming a venture capitalist is notoriously difficult. One part timing, one part experience, another part network. Rarely can someone provide succinct instructions on how to break into the field of private market investing or how to create your own VC fund.

On stage at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco, established VCs Theresia Gouw, the founder of a new firm called aCrew Capital, and Floodgate co-founder Ann Miura-Ko explained what they see as two distinct paths to the top of VC.

On path is long, calculated and requires endurance. The first step is to become an associate at a venture capital fund (this typically requires a college degree and a few years working in investment banking or in the greater finance industry). Next, you spend several years learning the ins and outs of the trade. And finally, once you’ve developed a portfolio and reputation in startups investing, you can rise to the partner ranks or raise your own VC fund.

“When I was starting in 2008 everyone said ‘no one starts a venture capital firm,'” Miura-Ko, who launched Floodgate nearly a decade ago after a stint as an analyst at CRV and seven years obtaining a Ph.D. in cybersecurity, told TechCrunch’s Connie Loizos. “Today, there are so many different paths into the market and that’s both an opportunity and a huge challenge … The question is how do you stand out? … You have to figure out what’s your schtick?”

Gouw, for her part, was a managing partner at the renowned firm Accel from 1999 to 2014 after consulting for Bain & Company. In 2014, she co-founded one of the first female-run venture capital firms, Aspect Ventures, alongside Jennifer Fonstad. Last month, however, the pair announced the firm would be splitting up, with Gouw launching aCrew and Fonstad starting Owl Capital.

Gouw, said to be one of the wealthiest women in venture thanks to several high-profile bets, says raising your own fund is all about relationships: “I think there are many great entry paths into [venture] now,” she said. “Remember what makes you stand out as an investor is investing in great companies… These people are going to be the references for you when you want to raise your first fund. It’s about investing in great people who are trying to do great things.”

The other route to venture is newer and simpler. Just start making investments, the two explained. This only works if you have money to invest, i.e. if you’ve sold your startup for a decent sum or you’re being paid an exorbitant sum by one of the tech giants.

“There’s some great investors who went out and started building their own individual track records as either advisors or angels,” Gouw said. “And, you know, there’s obviously a lot of great entrepreneurs who then go and start venture funds.”

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1. Facebook is being leaned on by US, UK, Australia to ditch its end-to-end encryption expansion plan

U.S. Attorney General William Barr, acting U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan, U.K. Home Secretary Priti Patel and Australia’s minister for home affairs, Peter Dutton, have co-signed an open letter to Facebook calling on the company to halt its plan to roll out end-to-end encryption across its suite of messaging products.

Facebook isn’t the only messaging company using end-to-end encryption, but it’s in governments’ crosshairs on account of a plan to expand its use of e2e crypto.

2. Bird raises $275 million Series D round at a $2.5 billion valuation

The scooter startup’s new round comes a few months after TechCrunch reported Bird was looking to raise a Series D round at a $2.5 billion valuation.

3. Instagram launches Threads, a Close Friends chat app with auto-status

What if Instagram could automatically tell your Close Friends you’re home, working, on-the-move or chilling and might want to hang out? That’s the idea behind its new companion app Threads.

4. Startups ‘are staying private way too long’ says Salesforce founder Marc Benioff

“What public markets do is indeed the great reckoning,” Benioff said while onstage at Disrupt SF. “But it cleanses [a] company of all of the bad stuff that they have.”

5. Kitty Hawk reveals its secret project, Heaviside

HVSD (named after renowned physicist and electrical engineer Oliver Heaviside) is an electric aircraft designed to go anywhere and land anywhere fast and quietly. Sebastian Thrun’s aviation startup has been working on the aircraft for two years.

6. TikTok explains its ban on political advertising

This isn’t really a new ban, but rather a reiteration of an existing one. The company says it won’t allow ads supporting a candidate, political party or issue, because they don’t fit with the “light-hearted and irreverent feeling” that the app is aiming for.

7. Google-backed Dunzo raises $45M to expand its hyperlocal delivery startup in India

An Indian startup that is increasingly posing a threat to established food and grocery delivery businesses, as well as to e-commerce giants, just closed a new financing round.

Apple has reportedly acquired UK special effects studio IKinema, a startup that may be useful in Apple’s quest to bolster its mobile devices with AR special effects and in its more far-flung attempts to enter the AR/VR headset market.

The company issued its standard confirmation for the deal to several other publications, “Apple buys smaller companies from time to time, and we generally don’t discuss our purpose or plans.” The news was first reported by FT after rumors were floated by MacRumors. TechCrunch has reached out to Apple.

IKenema has used motion-tracking work to live animate the bodily movements of digital characters, but the team has also stockpiled this information to create realistic models of movements of digital characters in digital environments, specifically in the context of games and virtual reality titles.

These models were highlighted in the startup’s RunTime product that integrated into game engines like Epic Games’ Unreal Engine. RunTime was powering avatar interactions in experiences like The Void’s “Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire,” a virtual reality experience at Disney resorts, as well as in works by studios like Capcom Linden Lab, Microsoft Studios, Nvidia, Respawn and Square Enix.

RunTime being used in Impulse Gears’ PSVR game, Farpoint

The company’s Orion product, allowed motion capture with lower-cost input, essentially syncing limited input like head and hand movement  with motion models that could allow for a hybrid solution that still looked realistic. The technology was being used for visualizations by teams at NASA, Tencent, and others.

What does Apple want with this company?

There are a handful of spots that this tech could prove helpful, the most obvious of which would be bringing special AR effects to the iOS camera, juxtaposing the spatial data that the camera can gather from a real-world space with digital AR models. This could theoretically allow something like an AR figure to walk up your stairs or sit on a chair. The issue iKenema doesn’t solve in these scenarios is computer vision segmentation to be able to tell what surface is a table versus a floor versus a couch cushion, but enabling digital models to interact with these spaces is a big advance.

Where else?

Well, a little bit more of a reach for Apple would be using this tech in the context of a VR or AR avatar system. iKenema worked a lot with motion capture, but they did so with the explicit purpose of designing models for digital humans to interacted with digital environments in real-time. Their solution was already being used by virtual reality developers to give VR gamers a way to visualize how their own bodies moved in VR given limited inputs.

Facebook Horizon’s legless avatars

Virtual reality systems typically only know the location of your head and hands given trackers on the controllers and headset, but IKinema’s solution allowed developers to make the rest of users in-game bodies look more natural inside games. This is a pretty difficult challenge, and it’s the reason plenty of VR titles have made avatar systems that are missing legs, necks, arms and shoulders, because everything looks awful if the movements are off.

Apple’s computer vision needs are only heightening as they bowl forward on AR and VR devices while also aiming to bolster the camera on the iPhone as a point of differentiation from Google and Samsung devices.

Project Include CEO Ellen Pao, who has been working to foster diversity, inclusion and ethics in the tech industry, called out Twitter’s “public square” model as flawed — and a decision that indicates a lack of ethical consideration, on Twitter’s part.

The topic of Twitter came up on a panel at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2019 this morning, when Pao was asked her opinion as to whether Twitter should make exceptions to its platform rules for public figures — like President Trump, for example.

She said doesn’t believe that it should. And not just because the decision in and of itself raises ethical questions, but because of how these decisions can ultimately shape the direction of Twitter’s platform as a whole.

“I think it’s a question of ethics to break these exceptions — because you want to drive this growth that you want to use to fuel your stock price and to fuel recruiting, and to fuel this capitalism — that’s driving all sorts of decisions without thinking about the long-term direction of where your platform is going,” Pao explained.

She also questioned whether Twitter has been successful in creating an online version of the public town square, which is how Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has repeatedly described the social media platform.

“Jack talks about this public square, where you have this digital version of the public square. But people aren’t screaming at you on the public square, they’re not calling you racist things, they’re not throwing pictures of like horrible things…I don’t want to be in a public square like that,” Pao said. “And I don’t want to have a public square that’s digital create these horrible events in real life,” she added.

On Twitter (or really, on social media in general) the hateful words and sentiments can often spill over into real-world action.

“I don’t think that’s an ethical decision. I don’t think that’s a values-driven decision. I don’t think that’s creating a good public square, I don’t think that’s doing a service for your users who are from the groups that are being hated on,” Pao said. “I think you really have to think about your whole community. You have to think about the types of conversations you want to have.”

She clarified that it’s not about censoring speech, but the challenges in creating a place where people can actually engage in conversations — even those in which they disagree, and even those where there may be conflict.

Twitter’s failure has been not understanding where free speech ends and moderation begins. And this is not a problem unique to its platform. All of social media is struggling with this same issue.

In Pao’s mind, it’s a question of where meaningful conversation ends and outright harassment begins.

“Using the F word, and the C word, and the N word? That’s not a conversation, right? That’s not an exchange of ideas,” she said. “I don’t think people think enough about what they want their platforms to be, what they want the platforms to encourage.”

Former Tinder CEO Greg Blatt has filed a defamation lawsuit against Sean Rad and Rosette Pambakian, seeking at least $50 million in damages and accusing them of having “conspired to make false allegations of sexual harassment and sexual assault against Blatt with the specific intent to damage Blatt’s good name, personal and professional reputation, and credibility.”

In response, Rad and Pambakian’s attorney Orin Snyder described the suit as part of a campaign “to retaliate against and smear a victim of sexual assault and the person who reported it.”

Last year, Rad (Tinder’s co-founder and former CEO), Pambakian (its former vice president of marketing and communications) and other Tinder founders and executives filed a lawsuit against Tinder’s parent company Match Group and its majority shareholder IAC, accusing them of financial manipulation to lower the company’s valuation and stripping the plaintiffs of lucrative stock options.

The suit also accused Blatt (pictured above) of groping and sexually harassing Pambakian at the company’s 2016 holiday party, when Blatt was still Tinder’s CEO. In response to the suit, Match and IAC said the claims were meritless.

At the time, Pambakian was still employed at Tinder. She later dropped out of the suit due to an arbitration agreement, and was fired a few months after, leading her to claim that Match did this “in blatant retaliation for joining a group of colleagues and Tinder’s original founding members in a lawsuit against Match and IAC, standing up for our rights, calling out the company’s CEO Greg for sexual misconduct, and confronting the company about covering up what happened to me.”

Pambakian is now pursuing a separate suit against Blatt and Match Group, accusing them of wrongful termination and sexual assault.

Blatt’s new suit, however, claims:

Rad and Pambakian have attempted to weaponize an important social movement, undermining the plight of true victims of sexual abuse by making false accusations in cynical pursuit of a $2 billion windfall … Blatt is expected to be a key witness for IAC and Match in the Valuation Lawsuit. Damaging Blatt’s credibility and tarnishing his character are important elements of Pambakian’s and Rad’s litigation strategy in that action.

The suit also says that the encounter with Pambakian at the Tinder holiday party involved consensual flirting and kissing, but that they “never engaged in any further physical encounters” and made mutual apologies the following Monday.

According to the suit, Rad filed a complaint months later accusing Blatt of harassing Pambakian, and the complaint “was thoroughly investigated by in-house counsel and two outside law firms,” who concluded that there was no harassment or abuse.

The holiday party and Rad’s subsequent complaint are also discussed in a draft of Blatt’s resignation letter from Tinder (which has been obtained by TechCrunch and other publications), in which Blatt said that after joining a “female executive” and other Tinder employees in a hotel room, he “engaged in some snuggling and nuzzling (I can’t come up with words that better describe what I would call the most superficial of human contact) with the female executive.”

Blatt went on to describe his behavior as “really dumb,” while also insisting that “the snuggling and nuzzling was consensual.”

Blatt’s complaint includes an email that appears to be from Rad to his financial advisor, written shortly before Rad’s complaint, in which he wrote about Blatt: “Fuck him. We’re at war. We will destroy him.”

The suit also claims that Rad and the firm Bench Walk Advisors offered Pambakian millions of dollars for participating in the lawsuit. (Snyder told The Verge there were no upfront payments for participation: “The only payments were triggered by IAC/Match retaliating against plaintiffs by stripping away their hard-earned equity.”)

Here’s Snyder’s full statement in response to Blatt’s suit:

This is a new low for IAC/Match and their former CEO. They continue to retaliate against and smear a victim of sexual assault and the person who reported it. Their attacks are based on lies and documents that are taken out of context. When all of the evidence comes to light, it will be obvious what happened here. It’s shameful that these public companies are continuing to cover-up the truth.

And you can read the full suit below.

2019-10-3 Blatt Dkt 18 Firs… by TechCrunch on Scribd

Microsoft said it has found evidence that hackers associated with Iran have targeted a 2020 presidential candidate.

The tech giant’s security and trust chief confirmed the attack in a blog post, but the company would not say which candidate was the target.

The threat group, which Microsoft calls Phosphorous — also known as APT 35 — made more than 2,700 attempts to identify consumer email accounts belonging to specific Microsoft customers. These accounts, he said, are “associated” with a presidential campaign, current and former U.S. government officials, journalists and prominent Iranians living outside the country.

“Four accounts were compromised as a result of these attempts; these four accounts were not associated with the U.S. presidential campaign or current and former U.S. government officials,” said Tom Burt, Microsoft’s vice president of customer security and trust.

The threat group tried to obtain access to secondary email accounts linked to a Microsoft account, which they would use as a way to break into the account, said Burt.

Some attacks involved gathering and targeting user phone numbers.

Burt said the attacks were “not technically sophisticated” but attempted to use a “significant amount of personal information” both to identify and attack the accounts.

This isn’t the first time Phosphorous has appeared on Microsoft’s radar. The tech giant sued the threat group, believed to be backed by Tehran, earlier this year to take control of several domains used by the hackers to launch watering hole attacks. The hacker group is also believed to be linked to former U.S. Air Force counter-intelligence officer Monica Witt, who defected to Tehran in 2013 and is now wanted by the FBI for alleged espionage.

In previous campaigns, the hackers have targeted academics and journalists with spearphishing campaigns designed to look like Yahoo and Google login pages but can defeat two-factor authentication.

Microsoft said it’s made more than 800 notifications of attempted state-backed attacks against users who are protected by the tech giant’s account monitoring service aimed at political campaigns.

Stephen Curry, along with SC 30, Inc. President Bryant Barr, just announced an investment in Guild Education, which helps Fortune 1000 companies, like Disney and Loews, offer debt-free degrees to their employees.

“We pioneered what we call education as a benefit,” Guild Education co-founder and CEO Rachel Carlson told TechCrunch. “We’re the tech platform and network of non-profit and public universities. We built those things together so that every employee at those companies has access to go back to school with the support of their employer.”

Guild Education aligns with Curry’s recently announced non-profit organization Eat. Learn. Play Foundation, Curry told TechCrunch.

“The timing was crazy because of our Eat. Learn. Play Foundation that launched last July,” Curry said. “This is an opportunity to really target that learn piece and explore how important it is in terms of college education and college completion. And we’re trying to attack that from elementary school and on.”

Guild Education’s mission also aligns with Curry’s personal goals to finish college. Curry didn’t have a chance to complete his degree in sociology from Davidson before getting drafted to the NBA in 2009.

“There’s a parallel there,” Curry said. “It’s a process I’ll have to go through very, very soon.”

Unfortunately, Davidson College’s process for accepting credits does not align with Guild Education. The college, Barr told TechCrunch, has a strict requirement for what transfers in as credits.

Although Curry will not be completing his degree via Guild Education, the company is available to more than three million Americans.

“Our students are the most underrated of the American workforce,” Carlson said. “There are 64 million Americans who have not gone to college. We both shared the belief that we have to offer pathways for underrated, talented people who haven’t had the opportunities they deserve. We can expand that opportunity through education.”

Alteryx, a publicly traded analytics company, announced this morning that it has acquired Feature Labs, a machine learning startup that launched out of MIT in 2018. The company did not reveal the terms of the deal.

Co-founder and CEO Max Kanter told TechCrunch at the time of the launch, that company had been based on research at MIT that looked at how to automate the creation of machine learning algorithms. “Feature Labs is unique because we automate feature engineering, which is the process of using domain knowledge to extract new variables from raw data that make machine learning algorithms work,” Kantor told TechCrunch in 2018.

It is precisely this capability that appealed to Alteryx . “Feature Labs’ vision to help both data scientists and business analysts easily gain insight and understand the factors driving their business matches the Alteryx DNA,” Alteryx co-founder and CEO Dean Stoecker said in a statement. It’s worth noting that the company acquired another machine learning startup, Yhat, in 2017 and launched a new feature, Alteryx Promote, based on that technology later that year.

As for Feature Labs, writing in a blog post announcing the deal, Kantor and chief data scientist Alan Jacobson saw a partner that could help it grow faster while fitting the long-term goals for the company. Kantor and Jacobson also sought to reassure its users that the mission will continue. “We plan to use this [acquisition] to expand our AI and ML efforts in both the Open Source data science community, as well as for line of business analysts that desire code-free tools that can guide them through the complex process to successfully implement AI and ML techniques with their domain knowledge,” they wrote in the post.

Feature Labs offers open source libraries for data scientists that have been downloaded over 350,000 times, according to the company. The company was founded in 2018 in Cambridge, Massachusetts and has raised $3 million, according to Crunchbase data. It will remain in Cambridge and form a new Alteryx engineering hub in the city.

Alteryx went public in 2017 after raising over $160 million from VC firms like Iconiq Partners, Insight Venture Partners and Sapphire Ventures. This represents its fifth acquisition and second this year.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where each week we discuss other people’s copious dollars and lacking sense.

This week was special! Kate and Alex at Disrupt where they recorded live in front of an audience. Equity has recorded at Disrupt before. Equity has taped before an audience before. But this was the first time that we taped it at Disrupt and in front of an audience that actually had chairs. Progress!

Charles Hudson of Precursor Ventures joined us as well, making for an excellent show. Astute listeners among us will recall that Hudson is a former guest on the show, having taken part back in mid-2017.

Onto the topics, we discussed the impending Precursor Ventures opportunity fund (more here). We wanted to know why it was of modest size, especially in an era of ever-larger venture capital funds.

Next, we turned to a trio of startup stories, starting with Rhino, a company that is working to shake up the rental deposit market. Hate paying deposits for an apartment? Would you rather pay a small, regular fee? Rhino hopes that you would, and has raised $21 million to build out the idea.

Also on our list of topics was a small upstart by the name of Knowable, our colleague Josh Constine profiled the business here. The company sells educational audio bits, and they want you to know, they are not a podcasting business. We’re still a bit unclear of the difference between educational audio and podcast but VCs seem confident enough in the company’s prospects, funneling $3.75 million in the project.

The last startup we riffed on is called oollee. The company provides people with an unlimited supply of filtered drinking water for a small monthly fee. It’s raised $1 million in pre-seed funding from investors, including Mission Gate Inc. and Columbus Holdings, and, of course, we have thoughts!

After that we touched on the most valuable Y Combinator companies, including Stripe (more here and here), Airbnb and DoorDash. The list of YC’s hits is getting long. And, it provided the perfect segue to Airbnb.

Airbnb intends to go public via a direct listing, according to a whole bunch of recent reports. Every VC in town seems to have opinions about direct listings as the next best path to the public markets, maybe they’re right. Finally, WeWork is selling off a bunch of stuff that it bought recently. Here’s a list of what it bought, but SpaceIQ, Teem, Conductor and more are said to be on the chopping block.

All that and we had fun! Back to normal next week.