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TechCrunch’s flagship tech conference — Disrupt San Francisco 2019 — takes place on October 2-4. Disrupt is the OG of tech startup conferences, and it rolls old school in keeping with the feisty, do-what-it-takes spirit of Silicon Valley. Disrupt is the intersection of now and future tech. It’s where startuppers of every stripe gather to learn, share expertise and make connections to transform their business.

If you haven’t been to Disrupt, why not? The benefits are real, and they can change the trajectory of your business. Of course, we’re a tad biased. But your discerning startup peers aren’t. We asked Jana Rosenfelder, co-founder and COO of Actijoy — a TC Top Pick at Disrupt San Francisco 2018 — to share her TechCrunch Disrupt experience.

Based in the Czech Republic and founded in 2016 by Jana Rosenfelder and Robert Hasek, Actijoy aims to help dog owners keep tabs on the health of their canine companions.

The system consists of three connected devices. An activity tracker (think FitBit for dogs) records activity, intensity levels and sleep quality. Smart Wi-Fi bowls look like standard pet dishes, but they contain scales that measure a dog’s food and water consumption in real-time. The third component — an app — logs the data from the tracker and the smart bowls and reports any abnormalities.

Rosenfelder and Hasek attended both Disrupt San Francisco and Disrupt New York in 2017. Actijoy exhibited in one of Startup Alley’s many country pavilions as part of a contingent sponsored by Czech Invest — a governmental agency that supports startups by defraying conference costs.

Their positive experiences made the decision to go to Disrupt San Francisco 2018 an easy one. For their third Disrupt, Actijoy applied to be a TC Top Pick, which involves a highly competitive curation process. Roughly 40 exceptional startups — including Actijoy — won the coveted designation.

In addition to exhibiting for free in Startup Alley, TC Top Picks spend the entire Disrupt conference on the receiving end of intense investor interest and media exposure — including a live video interview with a TechCrunch editor on the Showcase Stage in Startup Alley.

“It was a real door-opener because the media paid so much attention,” said Rosenfelder. “Being a TC Top Pick made a big impression with people who visited our booth. It gave us more credibility, and everyone listened to us.”

Exhibiting in Startup Alley is networking on steroids and a phenomenal opportunity to make those critical connections. Rosenfelder noted that most startups on the expo floor focus on software or mobile apps. Exhibiting a hardware product helped Actijoy stand out and drew a lot of traffic to its table.

“Startup Alley was a great experience because we talked to people non-stop and collected so many potential customer contacts,” said Rosenfelder.

Networking happens everywhere at Disrupt, and Rosenfelder made the most of that opportunity by using CrunchMatch — the free business-matching service that investors and founders with similar funding interests use to vet, meet and greet at Disrupt.

“CrunchMatch is a great tool. The application made it simple to organize a meeting. We arranged about 10 meetings — mainly with investors and potential partners.”

Rosenfelder scored one of her most valuable connections while attending Female Founder Office Hours, an “ask-me-anything” series of meetings sponsored by All Raise VC and founder mentors (be sure to apply to the All Raise AMA this year).

Rosenfelder had been trying to network to a specific contact for more than a year. Within five minutes of talking with an All Raise mentor, the woman offered to make the introduction.

Team Actijoy has traveled from the Czech Republic to the United States for three different Disrupt events, and they hope to compete in the Startup Battlefield at Disrupt SF 2019.

“TechCrunch Disrupt is one of the best startup conferences, and it’s worth the money. The media exposure is much better than at other events. It’s a great place for startups to network for leads, investors, industry contacts and partnerships.”

Disrupt San Francisco 2019 takes place on October 2-4 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Come see for yourself what Disrupt can do for your business. Get your early bird tickets to the show today.

Cray has been commissioned by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to create a supercomputer head and shoulders above all the rest, with the contract valued at some $600 million. Disappointingly, El Capitan, as the system will be called, will be more or less solely dedicated to redesigning our nuclear armament.

El Capitan will be the third “exascale” computer being built by Cray for the U.S. government, the other two being Aurora for Argonne National Lab and Frontier for Oak Ridge. These computers are built on a whole new architecture called Shasta, in which Cray intends to combine the speed and scale of high performance computing with the easy administration of cloud-based enterprise tools.

Due for delivery in 2022, El Capitan will be operating on the order of 1.5 exaflops, or floating point operations per second, a measure of calculation often used to track supercomputer performance. Exa denotes a quintillion of something.

Right now the top dog is already at Oak Ridge: an IBM-built system called Sierra. At about 1.5 petaflops, it’s about 1/10th the power of Aurora — of course, the former is operational and the latter is theoretical right now, but you get the idea.

One wonders exactly what all this computing power is needed for. There are in fact countless domains of science that could be advanced by access to a system like El Capitan — simulations of atmospheric and geological processes, for instance, could be simulated in 3D at a larger scale and higher fidelity than ever before.

So it was a bit disheartening to learn that El Capitan will, once fully operational, be dedicated almost solely to classified nuclear weaponry design.

To be clear, that doesn’t just mean bigger and more lethal bombs. The contract is being carried out with the collaboration of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which of course oversees the nuclear stockpile alongside the Department of Energy and military. It’s a big operation, as you might expect.

We have an aging nuclear weapons stockpile that was essentially designed and engineered over a period of decades ending in the ’90s. We may not need to build new ones, but we do actually have to keep our old ones in good shape, not just in case of war but to prevent them failing in their advancing age and decrepitude.

The components of Cray’s Shasta systems.

“We like to say that while the stockpile was designed in two dimensions, it’s actually aging in three,” said LLNL director Bill Goldstein in a teleconference call on Monday. “We’re currently redesigning both warhead and delivery system. This is the first time we’ve been doing done this for about 30 years now. This requires us to be able to simulate the interaction between the physics of the nuclear system and the engineering features of the delivery system. These are real engineering interactions and are truly 3D. This is an example of a new requirement that we have to meet, a new problem that we have to solve, and we simply can’t rely on two dimensional simulations to get at. And El Capitan is being delivered just in time to address this problem.”

Although in response to my question Goldstein declined to provide a concrete example of a 3D versus 2D research question or result, citing the classified nature of the work, it’s clear that his remarks are meant to be taken both literally and figuratively. The depth, so to speak, of factors affecting a nuclear weapons system may be said to have been much flatter in the ’90s, when we lacked the computing resources to do the complex physics simulations that might inform their design. So both conceptually and spatially the design process has expanded.

That said, let’s be clear: “warhead and delivery systems” means nukes, and that is what this $600 million supercomputer will be dedicated to.

There’s a silver lining there: Before being air-gapped and entering into its classified operations, El Capitan will have a “shakeout period” during which others will have access to it. So while for most of its life it will be hard at work on weapons systems, during its childhood it will be able to experience a wider breadth of scientific problems.

The exact period of time and who will have access to it is to be determined (this is still three years out), but it’s not an afterthought to quiet jealous researchers. The team needs to get used to the tools and work with Cray to refine the system before it moves on to the top secret stuff. And opening it up to a variety of research problems and methods is a great way to do it, while also providing a public good.

Yet Goldstein referred to the 3D simulations of nuclear weapons physics as the “killer app” of the new computer system. Perhaps not the phrase I would have chosen. But it’s hard to deny the importance of making sure the nuclear stockpile is functional and not leaking or falling apart — I just wish the most powerful computer ever planned had a bit more noble of a purpose.

Google today announced that it is bringing a new font to Docs, Sheets and Slides that was explicitly designed to improve reading speeds. The new font, Lexend, was developed by Thomas Jockin, who is probably best known for his Quicksand font. While Google stresses how this will benefit students, most of us could probably benefit from a font that helps us read faster.

To do this, the Lexend family, which comes in eight variations, doesn’t do anything fancy with the actual form of the letters. Indeed, it’s a pretty standard variable sans serif font. But Hockin applied data from a number of in-depth studies, which themselves were based on the research of Bonnie Shaver-Troup.

The fact that it’s sans serif already reduces noise, making it faster to scan the letters. In addition, using variable font technology, Lexend features expanded character spacing and font-outline shapes.

To try these new fonts, you first have to head to the Font menu in the toolbar and look for the ‘more fonts’ option. From there, you can search for Lexend and, once you’ve found it, add the new font to your list of saved fonts for use in Docs, Sheets and Slides.

Allbirds is now selling socks.

The shoe brand that’s de rigueur for investors, entrepreneurs, and aspirants in Silicon Valley has been bitten by the sock bug.

But, because this is Allbirds (and Silicon Valley), the company didn’t just launch a new line of socks. They’re using a “brand new material” called Trino that uses a yarn which includes Allbirds’ tree and wool blend.

The company is claiming that its new socks are made with natural ingredients and a combination of recycled plastic bottles, plant fibers and are 100% carbon neutral.

The socks are priced at $16 for tube socks, $12 for “no-show’ socks, and $14 for quarter-length socks. There are six different colors, a blue, grey, black, brown, pink and green option and they’ll be available at stores in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Boston, and Seattle.

Allbirds isn’t the only company to sell sustainable socks. Osom makes its socks from up-cycled clothing materials and sells at a similar price point. Repreve, Zkano, and Thought are also brands that use recycled materials to make their socks.

The shoe company has raised $77 million to date and is backed by investors including Lehrer Hippeau, Tiger Global Management, Fidelity Management, and T. Rowe Price.

Oregon this week became the 15th state (plus the District of Columbia) to sign onto a lawsuit seeking to stop a T-Mobile/Sprint merger. The suit, co-signed by 16 attorneys general, argues that a merger between the country’s third and fourth largest carriers would greatly reduce competition in the wireless industry.

“It’s important that Oregon join other states in opposing the Sprint -T-Mobile merger,” said Oregon AG Ellen Rosenblum said in a statement. “If left unchallenged, the current plan will result in reduced access to affordable wireless service in Oregon — and higher prices. Neither is acceptable.”

Texas joined the suit earlier this month, marking one of only two Republican AGs who have signed onto the deal. Conservative voices have largely come out in favor of a merger, suggesting that by joining forces the new company (also named T-Mobile) would increase competition for AT&T and Verizon by getting a leg up in the race to implement 5G.

New York State AG Letitia James says the signee has added “momentum” to push again the merger, which was green lit by the U.S. Department of Justice in late July.

“Oregon’s addition to our lawsuit keeps our momentum going, and ensures that there isn’t a single region of this country that doesn’t oppose this anticompetitive megamerger,” said James. “We welcome Attorney General Rosenblum to our 16-member coalition that now includes states representing almost half of the U.S. population. We remain committed to blocking the merger of T-Mobile and Sprint because it would bad for consumers, bad for workers, and bad for innovation.”

Over the past 15 years, I’ve seen a pernicious disease infect a number of marketplace startups. I call it Marketplace Paralysis. The root cause of the disease is quite innocent and seemingly harmless. Smart people with good intentions fall victim to it all the time. It starts when a platform has sufficient scale — such that there is a good amount of data on things like performance, quality rankings, purchase rates, and fill ratios. What a platform implements as a result of that data, and how it’s received by their user base, is what can lead to marketplace paralysis.

In this post, I will detail what Marketplace Paralysis is and what startups can do to avoid it. Before I get into the nitty-gritty, here’s a snapshot of the lessons you’ll learn by reading this post:

1. Segment and focus on high-value users
2. Remember the silent majority
3. Modify company goals to include quality components
4. Empower small, autonomous teams

The easiest way to explain Marketplace Paralysis is with a hypothetical example. So allow me to introduce you to Labor Marketplace X (LMX).

Equipped with the aforementioned data, the well-intentioned product managers at LMX will think about policies or features to try and improve a KPI, like fill ratio or job success rate. They might craft a policy that would separate users into two tiers.

Tier 1 gets a shiny gold star next to their name, along with extra pay, bonuses, and preferred job access. Tier 2 gets standard pay and standard job access. They’ve done their homework and feel this will benefit the marketplace.

So, they build the feature. They launch it and make an announcement to their users. And then… a revolt!

Brick & Mortar Ventures, a young, San Francisco-based venture firm that’s focused on startups innovating in or around architecture, engineering, construction, and facilities management, has closed with $97.2 million in capital commitments.

The fund is one in a sea or debut funds that have swung open their doors in recent years, though it’s also interesting for numerous, beginning with its founder, Darren Bechtel, who knows a thing or two about the building industry. He’s a scion of the family that built the 120-year-old, privately held company Bechtel into one of the largest construction and engineering firms in the world. In fact, his brother, Brendan, who was named CEO in 2016, represents the fifth generation of Bechtels to lead the company. (Their sister, Katherine, is a project controls manager with the powerhouse outfit.)

Brick & Mortar’s investors are just as notable. They aren’t the typical pension funds and university endowments that many VCs try hard to lock down. Instead, they comprise a long list of companies that are part of the “construction value chain” and so have an interest in the latest and greatest developments in their respective industries. Among the firm’s backers, for example, is the special materials maker Ardex; the software giant Autodesk; the building materials company CEMEX; Ferguson Ventures, which is the venture arm of a huge U.S distributor of plumbing supplies called Ferguson Enterprises; FMI, a management consulting company to the engineering and construction industry; Obayashi, a major Japanese construction company; Sidewalk Labs, which is Alphabet’s urban innovation organization; and United Rentals, one of the world’s largest equipment rental companies.

Brick & Mortar isn’t the first venture firm to focus on the so-called built world. Other firms that focus largely, if not exclusively, around the same themes include Fifth Wall Ventures, Navitas Capital, Corigin Ventures, Camber Creek, Metaprop, Starwood Capital, and Tamarisc Ventures.

In fact, Bechtel has ties to and is an individual investor in Fifth Wall, an L.A.-based firm that stormed onto the scene in 2017 with an equally impressive, and very different, roster of limited partners in the real estate industry from which it has already amassed more than $700 million in capital commitments across two funds.

As Bechtel told us on a call late last week, he was going to go into business with Fifth Wall’s founders initially, but they wanted to raise a lot of money, and Bechtel was thinking more conservatively — for a reason. “I’d done five deals on AngelList with [Fifth Wall cofounder] Brendan [Wallace] and we’d started putting together a pitch deck, and as we were thinking through ideal fund structure and size, Brendan said $500 million and I said $50 million,” says Bechtel.

Wallace was thinking big, says Bechtel, because “hospitality already had some massive players — Airbnb, WeWork. It was a far more mature landscape, and Brendan thought that if we were going to own a category, we needed the capital to secure a leadership position in the right deals.”

Bechtel thinks Wallace was right, too. He says he just came to realize that construction tech — which is what really interested him — was in its own league, and it was in its infancy. Though the construction software company PlanGrid took off like gangbusters — Bechtel wrote the largest check during the company’s seed round — it wasn’t so long ago that “there were great, billion-dollar ideas being formed but the rounds were small and the valuations were small,” says Bechtel. Because the “investment community didn’t understand what it was looking at, I had concerns about our ability to generate returns if we had too large a fund.”

In the end, the friends and former Stanford MBA classmates decided to split their respective focus on real estate and hospitality (Fifth Wall) and the actual construction of buildings (Brick & Mortar), and things seem to have gone well since. As Fifth Wall has gained traction, so too has Brick & Mortar, which is now a couple of years in the making. Indeed, though Bechtel is announcing the close of Brick & Mortar’s first fund today, he already works with two principals and two associates, and they’ve collectively sourced and funded 16 startups to date with capital they’ve been raising from investors along the way.

One of those checks went to Fieldwire, a maker of field management software for construction teams. They’ve also backed Serious Labs, which trains workers how to use heavy equipment and tools via virtual reality software, and Curbio, a real estate technology startup that orchestrates turnkey renovations for home sellers, then gets paid back once the home is sold.

Brick & Mortar even has an exit already, having helped fund the construction software platform BuildingConnected, which sold last December to Autodesk. (Bechtel’s earlier investment in PlanGrid, which also sold to Autodesk last year, was a personal investment, one of roughly 40 he made before setting out to create a traditional venture firm.)

As for whether Brick & Mortar ever hunts for companies that Bechtel — the firm founded by Darren’s great, great grandfather — might like to acquire or otherwise partner with, Darren is quick to note that the firm is not an investor in his venture fund or any or its portfolio companies, and he doesn’t have his finger on the pulse of what’s happening at the company.

” I don’t work at Bechtel or pretend to know what their intentions are, though my brother is CEO, so you could say I know a guy there.”

More, he notes, he doesn’t think it would make sense to fund a company that “a user would want to acquire. If one user buys [a startup’s tools] because they want exclusivity, they’re limiting the exit value of that company.” To underscore his point, he notes that “Bechtel does around $30 billion a year, but the construction market is an $11 trillion market.” In the end, he says, it’s “better to have a preferred relationship. Maybe you get the next year’s model released early; maybe you get custom colors.” But if you’ve developed a winning product, you want to make it accessible to everyone. “You benefit the most by having a technology adopted by the whole industry.”

Above, the Brick & Mortar Ventures team. From left to right: Austin Yount, senior associate; Alice Leung, associate; Curtis Rodgers, principal; Darren Bechtel, general partner; and Kaustubh Panda, principal.

Not one to let Face App and Snapchat steal its spotlight, Facebook announced today that it’s opening its closed beta of Spark AR on Instagram, letting any developer build and share an augmented reality filter on the platform.

The company announced this change was coming at its F8 keynote earlier this year.

Phone-based AR isn’t the piping hot platform it was when Mark Zuckerberg devoted the top-half of his 2017 F8 keynote to highlighting the company’s AR Camera Effects platform, but two-and-a-half years later the company is ready to let more developers give it a whirl.

Effects published via the Spark AR app can pop up in a few ways. If a user is following someone that has shared effects on the platform, they may pop up in the user’s effects tray in the camera section of the app. The company is also introducing a new Effects Gallery where users can search for new filters. Instagram isn’t exactly throwing the Effect Gallery front-and-center, to find it users will have to reach the end of the effects tray in the Instagram camera and click on it there. Users will also be able to see the effect being used in Instagram Stories, which is probably the real ticket to Spark AR features finding any sort of viral hype.

Ahead of the upcoming school year, Apple this morning announced it’s bringing contactless student IDs in Apple Wallet to several more U.S. universities. The expansion will allow over 100,000 college students to carry their student ID on their iPhone or Apple Watch, where it can be used for a variety of tasks including paying for their meals, snacks and for entry into buildings, like the student’s dorm and other campus facilities.

The expanded list of universities includes: Clemson University, Georgetown University, University of Tennessee, University of Kentucky, University of San Francisco, University of Vermont, Arkansas State University, South Dakota State University, Norfolk State University, Louisburg College, University of North Alabama and Chowan University.

These join the previously supported schools like Duke University, University of Oklahoma, University of Alabama, Temple University, Johns Hopkins University, Marshall University, and Mercer University.

Apple had first announced its plans for contactless student IDs at WWDC 2018, then rolled out to its debut schools last October.

The contactless IDs not only serve as a means of student identification, but also work as a payment mechanism for on-campus transactions — like meals at the cafeteria or textbooks and supplies at the college’s bookstore, for example. Contactless entry into buildings is also now common on college campuses, and these digital IDs can work to open doors, too, as an alternative to swiping an entry card.

Support for college student IDs is only one way that Apple is trying to replace the physical wallet. The company also support the ability to add your debit and credit cards, transit and loyalty cards, tickets, and even paper money through Apple Pay Cash. And now it’s launching its own credit card, too, which rewards you with cashback for shopping Apple and using Apple Pay.

“We’re happy to add to the growing number of schools that are making getting around campus easier than ever with iPhone and Apple Watch,” said Jennifer Bailey, Apple’s vice president of Internet Services, in a statement about the expansion. “We know students love this feature. Our university partners tell us that since launch, students across the country have purchased 1.25 million meals and opened more than 4 million doors across campuses by just tapping their iPhone and Apple Watch.”

Related to this launch, Apple says it’s also adding support for CBORD, Allegion and HID — solution providers for campus credentials and mobile access. With these technologies on board, Apple will be able to reach other schools integrated with these systems in the future.

Walmart is dominating the U.S. online grocery market, according to new research out this week from the analysts at Second Measure. The nationwide retailer today offers grocery pickup and delivery in nearly every U.S. state, and had 62% more customers in June than its next nearest rival. And no, in this case, that rival is not Amazon — it’s Instacart.

Like Walmart, Instacart also operates across the U.S., offering both pickup and delivery services.

The same is true for Amazon Prime Now and Peapod, while other competitors are limited to delivery only — like Target-owned Shipt and FreshDirect. Meanwhile, AmazonFresh offers delivery, plus pickup in Seattle.

While Walmart has been steadily capitalizing on its existing brick-and-mortar footprint and proximity to its customer base, Amazon’s strategy in the online grocery space appears to be one of confusion. The retailer is competing against itself by offering two services — Amazon Prime Now and AmazonFresh. The latter, an older service operated before Amazon’s Whole Foods acquisition, is actually one of the few online grocery businesses in decline, the report discovered. Founded over a decade ago, AmazonFresh has only grown to 15 U.S. cities and shut down in others.

This June, AmazonFresh sales were down by 19% year-over-year — the worst sales change in the new research report, the analysts noted.

Prime Now, on the other hand, is booming. Year-over-year sales nearly tripled in June. This is not only due to Whole Foods, whose assortment was added in February 2018, and is now a big driver for orders. Consumers also likely opt for Prime Now because it’s offered as part of their annual Amazon Prime subscription, while AmazonFresh is an additional $14.99 per month.

Prime Now has also been expanding to more U.S. markets, and is on track to reach even more as Amazon invests in building additional Whole Foods locations and possibly other non-Whole Foods stores. 

The new research also notes that Target’s Shipt could be doing better than its estimates indicate.

Since Shipt’s acquisition by Target in December 2017, Shipt’s customer base has grown by 69%. While a membership is required to shop the various grocers and stores offered in the app, Target deliveries don’t require a subscription.

In June, Target launched a dedicated online grocery shopping site on Target.com, powered by Shipt. Second Measure says it cannot distinguish any grocery orders that originate in the Target app or website, so Shipt’s customer counts may be higher than it’s able to determine.

Another question the report answers is to what extent Instacart has been impacted by the loss of Whole Foods.

Following its 2017 acquisition by Amazon, Whole Foods ended its relationship with its first and older delivery partner last year. The company recently claimed, however, that Whole Foods was only 5% of sales. Second Measure seems to back this up, finding that Instacart had 23% more customers in June than it had when the partnership ended in December 2018.  

Meanwhile, one exception to Walmart’s dominance in online grocery is in the unique urban metro that is New York. Here, locally headquartered FreshDirect has 31% of the NYC customer base for online grocery. (Note that Second Measure counts customers at each company they use — so customers who shop from more than one are counted twice.) Walmart only has 2% of the NYC metro, by comparison.

It also has small percentages in several other big metros, including San Francisco (2%), Boston (8%) and Los Angeles (9%). Walmart is huge in both Dallas and Phoenix, on the other hand — but both have been early markets for online grocery.

The report additionally found there’s strong loyalty among online grocery shoppers. Unlike with meal delivery services, no grocery delivery company shared more than 9% of another company’s customer base in the second quarter of 2019.

The market still has room to grow, as well. Only 12% of U.S. consumers have tried at least one of the grocery services the report analyzed, up from 9% in June 2018.