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I’m sure you’re familiar with the co-working behemoth WeWork at this point but if not, here’s a quick primer: The real estate business posing as a “tech startup” offers office spaces to individuals and companies across thousands of co-working spots scattered across the globe.
Led by an eclectic chief executive by the name of Adam Neumann, WeWork made headlines this week after announcing its acquisition of building access app Waltz. The deal represents WeWork’s third M&A transaction of 2019, following that of spatial analytics platform Euclid and office management system Managed By Q. As is often the case, WeWork didn’t disclose terms of the deal.
In the last few years, WeWork has acquired nearly a dozen startups, making it one of the most — if not the most — acquisitive unicorn in the valley. Those acquisitions, a revolving door of venture capital investment and an eventual IPO are all part of WeWork’s world domination plan.
Adam Neumann (WeWork) at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2017
WeWork filed confidentially to go public this spring shortly after securing new capital from the SoftBank Vision Fund. Now, WeWork is preparing itself for Wall Street’s scrutiny by buying growth, investing in new technologies and doubling down on talented teams. As we’ve pointed out before, WeWork isn’t profitable nor anywhere near profitability. Rather, the company’s value (a laughably high $47 billion) is based on its potential future growth, not its current revenue. Making strategic investments to expand its revenue streams is good business.
WeWork could be a bit more choosy with its deals, though. I will never forget when it took a big stake in Wavegarden, a company that makes wave pools. Yes, really, that happened.
Now that WeWork has officially entered the pre-IPO stage, it must take a closer look at its leadership. The 9-year-old company has an all-male board, something Canvas Ventures’ Rebecca Lynn pointed out to me on this week’s episode of Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast. We were discussing a new lawsuit filed by former WeWork executives that alleges age and gender discrimination when she noted the troubling statistic.
For a company of that stature to not have appointed a woman to its board by now is mind-boggling. It may be one of the most highly-valued companies in the world on paper, but to succeed as a public company, it has more than one thing to figure out.
Anyways…
IPO Corner: The Real Real:The marketplace for luxury consignment jumped 50% Friday in its Nasdaq IPO. The company, led by founder and CEO Julie Wainwright, raised $300 million in the process.
Livongo: The digital health business submitted paperwork for an IPO this week, joining a long line of companies opting to go public in 2019. Livongo posted $68.4 million in revenue last year.
Postmates: Google’s vice president of finance Kristin Reinke joined Postmates’ board of directors this week in what was the latest sign the on-demand food delivery startup is prepping for an imminent IPO.
Data!
Social Capital co-founder Chamath Palihapitiya is spinning out a company from his venture capital fund-turned-family-office, TechCrunch has learned. The new entity, temporarily dubbed CaaS (short for capital-as-a-service) Technologies, will focus on providing data-driven insights to VC firms. We’ve got the scoop here.
Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the now-defunct biotech unicorn Theranos, will face trial in federal court next summer with penalties of up to 20 years in prison and millions of dollars in fines. Jury selection will begin July 28, 2020, according to U.S. District Judge Edward J. Davila, who announced the trial will commence in August 2020 in a San Jose federal court Friday morning.
Extra Crunch:
If you’ve been unsure whether to sign up for TechCrunch’s awesome new subscription service, now is the time. We’ve been publishing a lot of great content, here are my favorites this week:
#EquityPod:
If you enjoy this newsletter, be sure to check out TechCrunch’s venture-focused podcast, Equity. In this week’s episode, available here, TechCrunch editor Connie Loizos, Canvas Ventures general partner Rebecca Lynn and I discuss Brandless’ current dilemma and big rounds for Cameo and StockX.
U.S. President Donald Trump has handed Huawei a lifeline after he said that U.S. companies are permitted to sell goods to the embattled Chinese tech firm following more than a month of uncertainty.
It’s been a pretty dismal past month for Huawei since the American government added it and 70 of its affiliates to an “entity list” which forbids U.S. companies from doing business with it. The ramifications of the move were huge across Huawei’s networking and consumer devices businesses. A range of chip companies reportedly forced to sever ties while Google, which provides Android for Huawei devices, also froze its relationship. Speaking this month.
Now, however, the Trump administration has provided a reprieve, at least based on the President’s comments following a meeting with Chinese premier Xi Jinping at the G20 summit this weekend.
“US companies can sell their equipment to Huawei. We’re talking about equipment where there’s no great national security problem with it,” the U.S. President said.
Those comments perhaps contradict some in the US administration who saw the Huawei blacklisting as a way to strangle the company and its global ambitions, which are deemed by some analysts to be a threat to America.
President Trump has appeared to soften his tone on Chinese communications giant Huawei, suggesting that he would allow the company to once again purchase US technology https://t.co/4YNJCyKLTgpic.twitter.com/jr45f40ghP
Despite the good news, any mutual trust has been broken and things are unlikely to be the same again.
America’s almost casual move to blacklist Huawei — the latest in a series of strategies in its ongoing trade battle with China — exemplifies just how dependent the company has become on the U.S. to simply function.
Huawei has taken steps to hedge its reliance on America, including the development of its own operating system to replace Android and its own backup chips, and you can expect that these projects will go into overdrive to ensure that Huawei doesn’t find itself in a similar position again in the future.
Of course, decoupling its supply chain from US partners is no easy task both in terms of software and components. It remains to be seen if Huawei could maintain its current business level — which included 59 million smartphones in the last quarter and total revenue of $107.4 billion in 2018 — with non-US components and software but this episode is a reminder that it must have a solid contingency policy in case it becomes a political chess piece again in the future.
Beyond aiding Huawei, Trump’s move will boost Google and other Huawei partners who invested significant time and resources into developing a relationship with Huawei to boost their own businesses through its business.
Indeed, speaking to press Trump, Trump admitted that US companies sell “a tremendous amount” of products to Huawei. Some “were not exactly happy that they couldn’t sell” to Huawei and it looks like that may have helped tipped this decision. But, then again, never say never — you’d imagine that the Huawei-Trump saga is far from over despite this latest twist.
Independent restaurant owners may be doomed, and perhaps grocery stores, too.
Such is the conclusion of a growing chorus of observers who’ve been closely watching a new and powerful trend gain strength: that of cloud kitchens, or fully equipped shared spaces for restaurant owners, most of them quick-serve operations.
While viewed peripherally as an interesting and, for some companies, lucrative development, the movement may well transform our lives in ways that enrich a small set of companies while zapping jobs and otherwise taking a toll on our neighborhoods. Renowned VC Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital seemed to warn about this very thing in a Financial Times column that appeared last month, titled “The cloud kitchen brews a storm for local restaurants.”
Moritz begins by pointing to the runaway success of Deliveroo, the London-based delivery service that relies on low-paid, self-employed delivery riders who delivery local restaurant food to customers — including from shared kitchens that Deliveroo itself operates, including in London and Paris.
He believes that Amazon’s recent investment in the company “might just foreshadow the day when the company, once just known as the world’s largest bookseller, also becomes the world’s largest restaurant company.”
That’s bad news for people who run restaurants, he adds, writing, “For now the investment looks like a simple endorsement of Deliveroo. But proprietors of small, independent restaurants should tighten their apron strings. Amazon is now one step away from becoming a multi-brand restaurant company — and that could mean doomsday for many dining haunts.”
The good news . . . and the bad
He’s not exaggerating. While shared kitchens have so far been optimistically received as a potential pathway for food entrepreneurs to launch and grow their businesses — particularly as more people turn to take out — there are many downsides that may well outweigh the good, or certainly counteract it. Last year, for example, UBS wrote a note to its clients titled “Is the kitchen dead?” wherein it suggested the rise of food delivery apps like Deliveroo and Uber Eats could well prove ruinous for home cooks and as well as fresh food providers, including restaurants and supermarkets.
The economics are just too alluring, suggested the bank. Food is already inexpensive to have delivered because of cheap labor, and that will cost center will disappear entirely if delivery drones every take off. Meanwhile, food is becoming cheaper to make because of central kitchens, the kind that Deliveroo is opening and Uber is reportedly beginning move into, as well. (In March, Bloomberg reported that Uber is testing out a program in Paris where it’s renting out fully equipped, commercial-grade kitchens to serve businesses that selling food on delivery apps like Uber Eats.)
Yes, the businesses using the spaces are paying less than they would for traditional restaurant real estate, but the reality is also that most of the businesses moving into them right now aren’t small restaurateurs but quick service brands that aren’t particular known for emphasis on food quality but instead for churning out affordable food, fast.
As Eric Greenspan, an L.A.-based chef who has appeared on many Food Network shows and has opened and closed numerous restaurants over the course of his career, explains in a new, independent documentary about cloud kitchens: “Delivery is the fastest growing market in restaurants. What started out as 10 percent of your sales is now 30 percent of your sales, and [the industry predicts] it will be 50 to 60 percent of a quick-serve restaurant’s sales within the next three to five years. So you take that, plus the fact that quick-serve brands are kind of the key to getting a fat payout at the end of the day . . .”
During an age when fewer people frequent them traditional restaurants — with their overhead and turnover and razor-thin margins — running one simply makes less and less sense, Greenspan continues.
“[Opening] up a brick-and-mortar restaurant these days is just like giving yourself a job. Now [with centralized kitchens], as long as the product is coming out strong, I don’t need to be there as a presence. I can quality control remotely now. I can go online and [sign out of a marketplace like Postmates or UberEats or Deliveroo] and not piss off any customers, because if I just decided to close the restaurant one day, and you drove over and it was closed, you’d be pissed. But if you’re looking for [one of my restaurants] in Uber Eats and you can’t find it because I turned it off, well, you’re not pissed. You just order something else.”
Big players only need apply . . .
The model works for now for Greenspan, who is running numerous restaurant “concepts” from one cloud kitchen in L.A. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that facility belongs in part to Uber cofounder Travis Kalanick, who was early to grok the opportunity that shared kitchens present. In fact, it was early last year that he announced he was investing $150 million in a startup called City Storage Systems that focused on repurposing distressed real estate assets and turning them into spaces for new industries, like food delivery.
That company owns CloudKitchens, which invites chains, as well as independent restaurant and food truck owners, to lease space in one of their facilities for a monthly fee, along with additional fees for data analytics meant to help the entrepreneurs boost their sales.
The pitch to restaurateurs is that CloudKitchens can reduce their overhead, but of course, the company is also amassing all kinds of data about its tenants in the process that one could seeing using over time. Little wonder that Amazon wants in or that these outfits have at least one serious competitor in China — Panda Selected — that is doing exactly the same thing and which raised $50 million led by Tiger Global Management earlier this year.
No one can fault these savvy entrepreneurs for seizing on what looks like a gigantic business opportunity. Still, the kitchens, which make all the sense in the world from an investment standpoint, should not be embraced so readily as a panacea, either.
Most obviously, they rely on the same people who drive Ubers and handle food deliveries — people who aren’t afforded health benefits and whose financial picture is forever precarious as a result. As with Uber drivers, Deliveroo employees tried to gain status as “workers” last year with better pay and paid but they were denied these rights because they have the option of asking other riders to take their deliveries. The EU Parliament more recently passed new rules to protect so-called gig economy workers, though the measures don’t go far.
Meanwhile, in the U.S, Uber and Lyft continue to fight legislation, including in California, that would turn their drivers and other gig workers into employees. In fact, though a bill passed the California assembly late last month that would give employee status to contract workers, Uber and Lyft are worried enough about its possible passage now in the state’s senate that the fierce rivals have teamed up to battle it.)
Ripple effects . . .
As Moritz suggests, shared kitchens stand to benefit some far more than others. While big chains, and renowned chefs like Greenberg, can take advantage of them given their brand recognition, smaller restaurants are more likely to be adversely impacted by them, and if they disappear, there are other ripple effects, including on housing markets.
Even Matt Newberg, a founder and foodie from New York, could see the writing on the wall when he recently toured CloudKitchen’s two L.A. facilities, along with the shared kitchens of two other companies: Kitchen United which last fall raised $10 million from GV, and and Fulton Kitchens, which offers commercial kitchens for rent on an annual basis.
Newberg is responsible for the aforementioned documentary (which you can also watch below), and he suggests that he most taken aback by the conditions of the first facility that CloudKitchens opened and operates, on West Washington Boulevard in South L.A. Though most restaurant kitchens are chaotic scenes, Newberg said that as “someone who loves food and sustainability” the easy-to-miss warehouse didn’t feel “very humane” to him. It’s windowless for one thing (it’s a warehouse). Newberg says that he also counted 27 kitchens packed into what are “maybe 250-square-feet to 300 square-foot spaces,” and a lot of people who appeared to be in panic mode. “Imagine lots of screaming, lots of sirens triggered when an order gets backed up, tablets everywhere.”
Adds Newberg, “When i walked in, I was like, holy shit, no one even knows this exists in L.A. It felt like Ground Zero. It felt like a military base. I mean, it seemed genius, but also crazy.”
Notably, Newberg says CloudKitchen’s second, newer location is far nicer, as are the facilities of Kitchen United and Fulton Kitchens. “That [second CloudKitchen warehouse] felt like a WeWork for kitchens. Super sleek. It was as quiet as a server farm. There were still no windows, but the kitchens are nicer and bigger.”
Growing pains . . .
Every startup has growing pains, naturally, and presumably, shared kitchen companies are not immune to these. Still, Moritz, the venture capitalist, recalls a telling story in that FT column. He says that in the early 2000s, his firm, Sequoia, invested in a chain of kebab restaurants called Faasos that planned to delivery meals to customers’ homes but was getting crushed by high rents and turnover among other things, so opened a centralized kitchen to sell kebobs. Now, he says, Fassos produces a wide variety of foods, including other Indian specialities but also Chinese and Italian dishes under separate brand names.
It’s the same playbook that Eric Greenspan is using, telling Food & WIne magazine last year that his goal was ultimately to have six delivery-only concepts running simultaneously, with two menus each for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Greenberg, who is obviously media savvy, can probably pull it off, too, as has Fassos. But for restaurants that are not known franchises or have the star appeal of celebrity chef, the future might not look so bright.
Writes Moritz: “In some markets there is still an opportunity for hardened restaurant and kitchen operators — particularly if they are gifted in the use of social media to build a following and refashion themselves. But they need to move quickly before it becomes too expensive to compete with the larger, faster-moving companies. The mere prospect of Amazon using cloud kitchens to provide cuisine catering to every taste — and delivering these meals through services such as Deliveroo — should be enough to give any restaurateur heartburn.”
It should also worry people who care about their neighborhoods. Cloud kitchens may make it easier and cheaper than ever to order take-out, but there will be consequences, some of which most of us have yet to imagine.
Google’s vice president of finance, has joined Postmates’ board of directors, the latest sign that the on-demand food delivery startup is prepping to take the company public.
Postmates announced Friday that Kristin Reinke, vice president of Finance at Google, will join the San Francisco startup as an independent director.
Reinke has been with Google since 2005. Prior to Google, Reinke was at Oracle for eight years. Reinke also serves on the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco’s Economic Advisory Council.
Her skill set will come in handy as Postmates creeps towards an IPO.
Earlier this year, the company lined up a $100 million pre-IPO financing that valued the business at $1.85 billion. Postmates is backed by Tiger Global, BlackRock, Spark Capital, Uncork Capital, Founders Fund, Slow Ventures and others. Spark Capital’s Nabeel Hyatt tweeted the news earlier Friday.
“Postmates has established itself as the market leader with a focus on innovation and route efficiency in the fast‐growing on‐demand delivery sector. Given their strong execution, accelerating growth, and financial discipline, they are well positioned for continued market growth across the U.S.,” said Reinke. “I’m thrilled to join the board.”
The startup has been beefing up its executive quiver, most recently hiring Apple veteran and author Ken Kocienda as a principal software engineer at Postmates X, the team building the food delivery company’s semi-autonomous sidewalk rover, Serve.
Kocienda, author of “Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs,” spent 15 years at Apple focused on human interface design, collaborating with engineers to develop the first iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch.
SpaceX is only getting started launching Falcon Heavy commercial missions, but it already has its eyes on the next prize – launching Starship. Now, we know that it’s hoping to start commercial service for this next-generation, fully reusable rocket by 2021, according to SpaceX Vice President of Commercial Sales Jonathan Hofeller.
Hofeller was speaking at a conference in Indonesia (via SpaceNews), and noted that the private space launch company is currently talking to three different telecom companies about selecting which will be the first mission aboard the new spacecraft. Starship, formerly knowns as ‘BFR’ or ‘Big Falcon Rocket’) is currently in development at two separate SpaceX facilities, one in Texas and one in Florida, in what amounts to an internal company ‘bake-off’ to see which team can delivery the better solution faster. An engineering show-down of this kind is not uncommon among tech companies, and often produces results from both efforts that complement or enhance whatever the final product ends up being, rather than being a ‘winner take all’ scenario.
Starship, once complete, will include a launch system propelled to orbit by a ‘Super Heavy’ booster, with even more lift capacity than the existing Falcon Heavy rocket. It’ll be able to delivery as many as 20 metric tons to geostationary transfer orbit, or over 100 tons to low-Earth orbit. It’s also intended to be the spacecraft that enables SpaceX to achieve its goal of running crewed missions to Mars.
Previously stated target dates for Starship milestones include achieving orbital launches by 2020, though based on this new info those will be test or demonstration missions rather than for paying customers. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk also previously said that the company is looking at 2023 as the earliest target date for providing a Moon circuit space trip to his first paying tourist customer, Japanese entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa.
Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the now-defunct biotech unicorn Theranos, will face trial in federal court next summer with penalties of up to 20 years in prison and millions of dollars in fines.
Jury selection will begin July 28, 2020, according to U.S. District Judge Edward J. Davila, who announced the trial will commence in August 2020 in a San Jose federal court Friday morning.
Holmes and former Theranos president Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani were indicted by a grand jury last June with 11 criminal charges in total. Two of those charges were conspiracy to commit wire fraud (against investors, and against doctors and patients). The remaining nine are actual wire fraud, with amounts ranging from the cost of a lab test to $100 million.
According to Bloomberg, Holmes’ legal team plans to argue that The Wall Street Journal’s John Carreyrou “had an undue influence on federal regulators,” and “went beyond reporting the Theranos story.”
“The jury should be aware that an outside actor, eager to break a story, and portray the story as a work of investigative journalism, was exerting influence on the regulatory process in a way that appears to have warped the agencies’ focus on the company and possibly biased the agencies’ findings against it,” her attorneys wrote, per Bloomberg. “The agencies’ interactions with Carreyrou thus go to the heart of the government’s case.”
Theranos, founded in 2003 by then 19-year-old Stanford dropout Holmes, raised more than $700 million from private market investors in what’s been referred to by the Securities and Exchange Commission as an “elaborate, years-long fraud in which they exaggerated or made false statements about the company’s technology, business, and financial performance.”
Theranos first came under scrutiny in October 2015, when Carreyrou published his first of many investigative pieces questioning the efficacy of Theranos’ blood-testing technology. At the time, Theranos was one of the most buzzworthy companies in Silicon Valley, boasting a valuation of $9 billion and the support of high-profile investors like Tim Draper and Robert Murdoch.
Theranos, as a result of Carreyrou’s reporting, was discovered to be a threat to public health. Its technology, as it turns out, was light years away from processing an expansive range of laboratory tests from just a few drops of blood.
According to The Wall Street Journal, federal prosecutors have collected more than 2 million pages of evidence for the defense teams. Holmes, despite ample evidence, has maintained her innocence since the grand jury indictment last year.
Following criminal charges, Holmes stepped down from Theranos last year; shortly after, the company ceased operations. Carreyrou, for his part, released a best-selling book, ‘Bad Blood,’ documenting Theranos’ secrets and lies. A documentary chronicling Holmes’ and Theranos’ rapid rise and fall was released by HBO in 2019. A Hollywood production starring Jennifer Lawrence as Elizabeth Holmes is reportedly in the works.
TC Sessions: Mobility on July 10 in San Jose is fast approaching. Get ready for a superb lineup of speakers like Dmitri Dolgov (Waymo), Eric Allison (Uber) and Summer Craze Fowler (Argo AI). See the full agenda here.
In addition to the outstanding main stage content, TechCrunch is proud to partner with today’s leading mobility players for a full day of breakout sessions. These breakout sessions will give attendees deeper insights into overcoming some of mobility’s biggest challenges and answering questions directly from today’s industry leaders.
Breakout Session Lineup
How much data is needed to make Autonomous Driving a Reality? Presented by: Scale AI
We are in the early days of autonomous vehicles, and what’s necessary to go into production is still very much undecided. Simply to prove that these vehicles are safer than driving with humans will require more than 1 billion miles driven. Data is a key ingredient for any AI problem, and autonomy is the mother of all AI problems. How much data is really needed to make autonomy safe, reliable, and widespread, and how will our understanding of data change as that becomes a closer reality? Sponsored by Scale AI.
Think Big by Starting Small: Micromobility Implications to the Future of Mobility
A host of new micromobility services have emerged to address a broader range of transportation needs – bikesharing, electric scooters and beyond. The urban emergence of micromobility offers powerful lessons on finding the right balance between fostering innovations that will ultimately benefit consumers and broader transportation systems, while safeguarding public interests. Sponsored by Deloitte.
If You Build It, Will They Buy? – The Role of the FleetTech Partner in the Future Mobility Ecosystem with Brendan P. Keegan Presented by: Merchants Fleet
The future will bring a convergence of new technologies, services, and connectivity to the mobility space – but who will manage and connect it all? Explore how FleetTech is creating the mobility ecosystem to help organizations embrace technologies – adopting your innovations through trials and pilots and bringing them to market. Sponsored by Merchants Fleet.
The Economics of Going Electric: Constructing NextGen EV Business Models Presented by: ABB
How do we make the rapidly growing EV industry operational and scalable? Join ABB, HPE and Microsoft for a discussion on how government, industry, providers and suppliers are addressing market shifts and identifying solutions to build successful business models that support the future of mobility. Moderated and sponsored by ABB.
Bringing Efficiency to Closed-Course AV Testing with Atul Acharya Presented by: AAA Northern California, Nevada & Utah
Looking to jump-start or accelerate your automated vehicle test operations? AAA has built its expertise by operating GoMentum Stations and performing safety assessments on multiple AVs and proving grounds. Join AAA as it shares its collective technical and operational learnings and testing results that will bring efficiency to your testing efforts. Sponsored by AAA Northern California, Nevada & Utah.
What does the future of seamless, urban mobility look like? How do mobility-as-a-service providers and connected vehicles work together to power transportation in a smart city? And which platform will aggregate all of the providers? In what promises to be a thought-provoking discussion, Arrive’s COO Dan Roarty will lay the foundation for what a city’s connected future will look like and outline key steps needed to achieve it. Sponsored by Arrive.
Revolutionary things can happen when some of the brightest minds in technology come together in one room. This Breakout Session will offer key insights into Michigan’s mobility ecosystem: the people, places and resources dedicated to the evolution of transportation mobility. Following a brief discussion, attendees will have the opportunity to connect with the people and companies moving the world forward through technology innovation and collaboration. Sponsored by PlanetM.
We hope to see you at TC Sessions: Mobility on July 10. Tickets are still on sale but selling fast. Book your $395 general admission ticket here. Students, grab a $45 here.
A malfunction in Facebook’s Software Development Kit that lets apps add Login With Facebook, sharing, and other features is causing apps that integrate it like Timehop to repeatedly crash. TechCrunch received a tip that developers were receiving tons of user complaints and crash reports starting around noon pacific today due to a problem with the Facebook for iOS SDK. TechCrunch’s testing verified that products like TimeHop, Joytunes’ Simply Piano, Momento GIFs, and more keep breaking when users access Facebook features or in some cases just open the app.
This is a big issue for Facebook because it relies on these apps to drive user lock-in. If people use Facebook to log into or share from other apps, they’re less likely to delete their account. But if the Facebook developer platform screws up like this morning, developers could instead highlight sharing via Twitter or SMS, and divert ad buys to other platforms. Most problematically, the bug could push developers to other login platforms like Google’s or Apple’s new Sign In With Apple.
These crashes thwart normal usage of other apps, costing their developers ad views and in-app purchases, or leading their users to uninstall or abandon them. TechCrunch contacted Facebook requesting information on the cause of the bug, a timeline for a fix, and what developers should do in the meantime. The company’s PR team is investigating, a representative tells me.
The situation highlights the increasing centralization of the web as more and more companies depend on a small number of mobile, hosting, and social platforms. Earlier this month, a Google Cloud outage knocked down Snapchat and Discord. While these tools make it simpler to start a company or launch an app without having to build everything in-house, they introduce platform risk. Beyond technical outages, there’s also the concern that a platform could use its insights to copy its clients, or block them if they compete with the gatekeeper too vigorously as Facebook has done to chat and social media apps in the past.
After a minor hiccup this morning, Slack is down again — and this time it’s really for real. This morning, the popular workplace chat service experienced issues resulting in double posting. This time out, however, this appear to be more severe, with the company’s Status page moving from 9/10 to 10/10 service problems.
Deep Breaths! Deep Breaths! We're working in it, thanks for your patience!
This afternoon’s outage appears to be an escalation of this morning’s issues. The company has been updating throughout the day, and in spite of a hopeful “some signs of recovery” around 2PM ET, things have clearly gone from better to worse in the past couple of afternoon hours.
The company has confirmed the on-going issue via social media Muppet GIFs and its status page, writing, “Some users have reported intermittent connectivity issues. We remain hard at work to come to a full resolution.”
But this late on a Friday, honestly, it’s probably time we all go ahead and cut our losses. Happy forced summer Fridays, everyone. See you on the other side. We’ll update when things are back to normal. Or maybe not. I mean, it’s pretty nice outside. Don’t tell our bosses and we won’t tell yours. Deal?
Tesla owners will be better able to express themselves artistically using their in-vehicle infotainment touchscreen with the next update of their vehicle’s in-car software. Tesla revealed via Twitter today that the forthcoming software update will bring improved Sketchpad features, providing essential upgrades to an Easter Egg it first debuted over two years ago that lets Tesla owners doodle in their cars.
In response to a request from a fan asking for Tesla’s in-car drawing software (this is a weird phrase to be writing) to add a color picker, saturation controls and an undo history, Tesla noted that new features are coming in the next big update planned for Tesla vehicle software. It sounds like all of those could be on the menu, based on this tweet, and that might not be the end of the improvements in store.
Wish granted . New Sketchpad features are rolling out in our next software update.
In May, Tesla CEO Elon Musk responded to another Twitter fan who was requesting animation support. Musk replied just a simple ‘Ok’ but given his general meme love, I would not at all be surprised if the next version of Sketchpad supports GIF output.
Musk also noted at around the same time that “Every Tesla should have good art & music creation software” which does not actually seem like an essential accoutrement for a vehicle at all, but then again Musk is a billionaire and I am not.
I’m sure you’re familiar with the co-working behemoth WeWork at this point but if not, here’s a quick primer: The real estate business posing as a “tech startup” offers office spaces to individuals and companies across thousands of co-working spots scattered across the globe.
Great times ahead. 
. New Sketchpad features are rolling out in our next software update. 