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.

Data informs investment decisions at VC funds more than ever, as new technologies make way for increasingly quantitative approaches to deal-making. But when it comes to third-party data analysis tools, there are few options tailored to VCs.

Palihapitiya’s latest effort will operate as a standalone business, automating the time-sucking process of evaluating a company’s health prior to investing. Zafer Younis, former partner at San Francisco accelerator 500 Startups, has been named CEO of the business, which is expected to launch this fall.

Palihapitiya did not respond to a request for comment. Younis could not be reached for comment.

According to Younis’ LinkedIn profile, which indicates he spent nine months at Social Capital in 2018, CaaS Technologies is “a collection of quantitative diligence tools developed to help VCs evaluate investment opportunities and make better data-driven decisions. CaaS reduces diligence time and offers investors insights that are otherwise a burden to the founder and investment team to process and prepare. Founders are using CaaS to improve their pitches and drive investor conviction using transparent and defendable data.”

CaaS Technologies’ approach resembles that of Social Capital’s “magic 8-ball,” a quantitative tool for due diligence built by former Social Capital partner Jonathan Hsu several years ago. The goal of 8-ball was to develop a standardized method of determining product-market fit in early-stage startups. In 2016, Social Capital decided to open-source 8-ball, granting startups access to its basic features.

Palihapitiya is choosing to monetize Social Capital’s IP shortly after Tribe Capital, a relatively new fund managed by a trio of former Social Capital data wizards including Hsu, began investing in startups using 8-ball’s methodology.

Hsu declined to comment for this story.

In addition to hiring Younis, CaaS Technologies has formed a small team complete with engineers, raised capital and formed relationships with more than a dozen institutional venture funds, sources tell TechCrunch. We have not yet identified any of the venture funds working with CaaS Technologies.

Co-founder Social Capital, Chamath Palihapitiya, speaks onstage during “The State of the Valley: Where’s the Juice?” at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on October 19, 2016 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Michael Kovac/Getty Images for Vanity Fair)

‘Craftsman-at-scale’

Lightspeed Venture Partners’ Brad Twohig said he wasn’t aware of CaaS Technologies efforts to team with VCs, rather, LSVP has opted to develop a data science team in-house.

Twohig declined to disclose the size of LSVP’s data-focused team; a representative for LSVP said the size and scale of the team is part of the firm’s “secret sauce.”

“You have to strike a balance between being well-informed people with a data advantage by using all the tools and software while avoiding the temptation to go too far,” Twohig tells TechCrunch. “At the end of the day, this is still something where we are looking to take a craftsman-at-scale approach to our investing as opposed to just ‘hey, we’ve got an algorithm and it’s gonna spit out whether we fund you or not.'”

“When people are building stealth-fighter jets, they are handcrafted, they are highly informed by data and architectural drawings but they are still hand built with a lot of precision,” he added.

As data insights become an integral part of the diligence process for startup investing, firms like LSVP are tapping new talent, developing data-first investment theses or establishing funds reliant on algorithms. Tribe Capital recently launched with a data-supported strategy, for example. Spotify-backer EQT Ventures touts the success of its machine learning system Motherbrain, claiming the algorithm can identify future unicorns.

‘Augmentation of an analyst’

TruValue Labs, a startup headquartered in San Francisco, offers a third-party data analysis platform to Wall Street investors. The company sells a subscription-based AI product to investment managers at hedge and private equity funds, helping them lower the risk profile of a given investment by better understanding the health of a business using thousands of unstructured data sources.

“There’s a huge spur from large asset managers trying to build tools themselves using ML tech and AI but can all asset managers attract engineering talent to do this themselves? Absolutely not.” TruValue co-founder and CEO Hendrik Bartel tells TechCrunch. “I don’t think all asset managers have it in them to become a software company. I’ve seen more and more third party platforms come out of nowhere.”

TruValue focuses on evaluating public market investment opportunities on the basis of environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) issues. Recently, it’s seen a greater demand for transparency in the private markets.

“Private equity investors want to have greater transparency into their investments, and from a due diligence perspective, they want to know more about these companies before they invest in them,” Bartel said.

Bartel refers to his approach — and that of CaaS Technologies — as “an augmentation of an analyst.” At venture capital firms, analysts are often charged with researching businesses and perusing available business and financial records to help a firm decide whether to move forward with a startup.

“It’s virtually impossible for an analyst or an asset manager to cover all the companies in its portfolio,” Bartel said. “To read all the information about a publicly held company, it would take an analyst six years.”

Ultimately, leveraging a thoughtful tool and the expertise of an experienced team may make a lot more sense for a VC firm than building out their own data science teams. Not only are data scientists costly and competitive, but data scientists well-versed in the venture capital asset class are fewer and farther between.

As for CaaS Technologies specifically, an attempt to monetize the features that made Social Capital one of the top venture capital funds, albeit for a short time period, is a logical path forward for the team.

Google has always argued that the data it collects does more than provide power for its targeted ad empire — it also makes its services more useful. But not everyone thinks that Google should be able to suck up a never-ending stockpile of personal data on its users. Today, Google is taking a step towards giving users more control over some of their data with the launch of a new feature that automatically deletes Location History data on iOS and Android devices.

The company pre-announced the feature back in May, just ahead of its annual developer conference Google I/O.

Google had said at the time that location history could help it make better recommendations — like suggesting a restaurant you may like, for example. However, Google amasses what some would say is a “creepy” amount of user data, right down to a map of everywhere you’ve ever been.

The new controls will allow you to set Google to erase its collection of location data on your every 3 months or every 18 months, depending on your preference.

To do so, you’ll first visit your Google Account‘s My Activity section and tap the new “choose to delete automatically” option in the Location History area.

From the screen that appears next, you can choose which time frame you prefer — 3 or 18 months. You can also opt to delete data manually — something you can do at any time. This is the default setting.

The controls are rolling out today on iOS and Android, says Google.

These rollouts take time so you may not see the settings for yourself right away.

If you’d rather stop Google from gathering any data in the first place, you can still choose to entirely toggle off its various data collection settings one-by-one — including Web & App Activity, Location History, Device Information, Voice & Audio Activity, YouTube Search History, and YouTube Watch History.

Okay do you know how we can taste things and that was pretty special? It’s not special anymore, because researchers at UC Davis working with colleagues Carnegie Mellon have developed a way for an experimental soft robotic gripper to ‘taste’ things as well, using bacteria engineered to allow it to detect a specific chemical.

The robot employs a ‘biosensing module’ that’s built using an engineered strain of E. coli bacteria to indicate the presence of a chemical called IPTG by producing a protein, which in turn triggers a circuit built into the robot that’s designed to detect light. That signal is used to let the robot know whether the chemical is present in the water bath in the clip below, and so you can see that once the chemical is totally dissipated and no longer present, the robot can detect that and then it knows it’s safe to put the object (a ball in this case) into the water.

Basically, researchers have built a robot with integrated organic components, or what they call a ‘biohybrid bot.’ This one is somewhat limited in what it can do, because it can only detect a single thing, and it’s a challenge to build one that can track small changes in concentration over time, too.

But the researchers have hopes that once they can solve the challenge of building a microbial community that can exist and remain stable in size and makeup over time (like the ones that live in our gut and are crucial to digestion do, for instance), they can potentially do a lot. For example, they could provide ways for robots to not only detect chemicals, but also perform self-healing repairs by building polymers or even generate bioenergy to help power the robot independent of other sources.

Ready to tackle the colossus that is enterprise software? Join us and more than 1,000 attendees for TC Sessions Enterprise 2019 on September 5 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. We’re talking founders, technologists and investors digging deep into the challenges facing established and emerging enterprise companies today. Get your early-bird tickets now and save.

TechCrunch’s first ever event focused on Enterprise is a prime networking opportunity that will feature a crowd drawn to a day of intensive, on-stage interviews (led by TechCrunch editors) with the king pins of enterprise as well as breakout sessions, exhibiting startups, receptions and much more.  Naturally, we have a fantastic networking app to help attendees wring the most opportunity out of the show.

CrunchMatch (powered by Brella), is TechCrunch’s free business match-making service. Effective networking is more than just meeting people. CrunchMatch helps you search for the right people based on specific mutual criteria, goals and interests. The platform’s combination of curation and automation lets you easily find, vet, schedule and connect with the people you want to meet — founders, investors, technologists, researchers or MBA students. You decide, and CrunchMatch delivers.

CrunchMatch is available to all attendees. When the platform launches, keep an eye out for an email with a sign-up link. Fill out your profile with the pertinent details — your role (technologist, founder, investor, etc.) and who you want to connect with at the event. CrunchMatch will make meet-up suggestions, which you can approve or decline.

Now that you’re up to speed on the networking situation, all you need to do is buy a ticket to TC Sessions: Enterprise.  Early-bird passes cost $395, and you can save an extra 15 percent when you buy group tickets (four or more) for $335 each. Student passes sell for $245. Bonus: for every TC Sessions: Enterprise ticket you buy, we’ll register you for one free Expo Only pass to Disrupt San Francisco 2019. Holla!

There are a limited number of Startup Demo Packages available for $2,000, which includes four tickets to attend the event.

TC Sessions: Enterprise takes place on September 5 in San Francisco. Join your community of enterprise-minded founders, investors, CTOs, CIOs and engineers to talk machine learning, AI, intelligent marketing automation, the cloud, quantum computing, blockchain and so much more. Buy your early-bird tickets now.

Interested in sponsoring TC Sessions: Enterprise? Fill out this form and a member of our sales team will contact you.

Could you use a little summer startup fun? We’re rolling out our next round of tickets to the TechCrunch Summer Party at Park Chalet, San Francisco’s coastal beer garden. If you want to join your startup peers to eat, drink and be merry, don’t delay. These limited-release tickets will be snapped up before you can say “hold my beer.” Buy your Summer Party ticket today.

Our 14^th annual summer soiree offers an opportunity to connect and converse with like-minded entrepreneurs in a relaxed setting with ocean views. Take a break from the daily grind, have a local brew and strike up a conversation. You never know where it might lead or when lightning might strike — especially with Lead VC Partner Merus Capital along with firms August Capital, Battery Ventures, Cowboy Ventures, Data Collective, General Catalyst, and Uncork Capital in the house.

Party-planning details you need to know:

• When: July 25 from 5:30 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
• Where: Park Chalet in San Francisco
• How much: $95

Don’t miss your chance to enjoy a fun night that fosters both opportunity and community. We always mix it up with games and door prizes — like fun TechCrunch swag, Amazon Echos and tickets to Disrupt San Francisco 2019.

Remember, we release tickets to the Summer Party on a rolling basis and they sell out quickly. Buy your 14th Annual Summer Party ticket today. If you strike out this time, sign up to be notified when the next batch goes on sale.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at the TechCrunch 14th Annual Summer Party? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

It’s not every day the three biggest computers in a space join forces to denounced political action. Of course, this isn’t the first time the Trump administration has had this impact on a category.

Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony (collectively known as gaming’s “big three) penned a joint letter noting the harm the industry stands to face in the age of Trump administration tariffs on China. Addressed to Office of the United States Trade Representative General Counsel Joseph Barloon, the note asks for a modification the existing tariff list.

“While we appreciate the Administration’s efforts to protect U.S. intellectual property and preserve U.S. high-tech leadership,” the letter reads, diplomatically, “the disproportionate harm caused by these tariffs to U.S. consumers and businesses will undermine—not advance—these goals.”

The three companies highlight a broad range of cascading impacts the laws could ultimately have the vast industry, including,

• Injure consumers, video game developers, retailers and console manufacturers
• Put thousands of high-value, rewarding U.S. jobs at risk
• Stifle innovation in our industry and beyond.

The impacts of tariffs have already begun to take their toll on various technology sectors, with several leaders — including, notably, Apple’s Tim Cook — personally petitioning Trump for exceptions.

Reddit’s r/The_Donald subreddit has been a lingering issue for the site’s leadership.

The community, which was organized in the lead-in to Trump’s presidential run, has come to represent much of the site’s failures in uniformly enforcing content policies. Add in Russian election interference and a dollop of racism, sexism and xenophobia and you have the recipe for a long-simmering scandal that has finally coming to a head after the community hosted “threats against the police and public figures.”

Today, Reddit quietly quarantined the Donald Trump-focused subreddit, meaning that the content on the subreddit will stay self-contained at its URL for non-subscribers and will require an opt-in screen for visiting users.  Perhaps more notable, the quarantine removes the community from Reddit’s ad network, ensuring that the company isn’t making ad revenue from content on r/The_Donald.

In a lengthy, carefully-worded statement to TechCrunch regarding the action, a Reddit spokesperson said, “We are clear in our site-wide policies that posting content that encourages or threatens violence is not allowed on Reddit. As we have shared, we are sensitive to what could be considered political speech, however, recent behaviors including threats against the police and public figures is content that is prohibited by our violence policy. As a result, we have actioned individual users and quarantined the subreddit.”

The step is far from the ban that users have long requested from the company’s CEO Steve Huffman in his regular site-wide Q&As. Just last month, Huffman addressed some of the issues r/The_Donald had been causing:

“…Yes, we do see individual posts and comments that cross the line, but the offending content also gets removed as we ask and expect, and we also take action against those individual users and accounts with suspensions or full bans from the site as appropriate. I wish there was a solution that was as simple as banning the community—certainly it would make some things easier—but the reality is that banning a large political community that isn’t in violation of our policies would be hugely problematic, not just for Reddit, but for our democracy generally…”

Reddit has had a history of being conservative in its efforts to phase out controversial subreddits. The venture-backed only recently banned a subreddit called r/WatchPeopleDie in the wake of the New Zealand mosque shooting.

Just last month, the Trump administration shared a public survey asking Americans to respond if they had been censored by social media companies.

Compensation is the most intimate way a company can interact with its employees. For far too long, compensation managers and committees have operated behind closed doors, keeping pay guidelines shrouded in mystery. Developers with equal experience, performing at the same level, and huddled around the same table while trying to perfect autonomous ocean to table omakase experiences could receive drastically different pay packages. Those times are over.

Employment sits at historic lows, investors are pouring in money through massive rounds, and companies are stepping on, over, and around each other to attract the best talent. Silicon Valley sits at the epicenter of competitive labor markets, but we’ve heard the same story over and over: Big Company X is coming to town, and we can’t pay like them.

Heads up Seattle, Austin, Boulder, Boston, New York, Chicago, and most recently, Virginia! Recruiters must be aggressive, and it’s only a matter of time before an all-star employee mentions a 25% pay bump available at Company X. A team member hears the news and they’re suddenly browsing job boards as well. The dreaded churn switch is pushed a notch higher.

Today’s workforce is more connected than ever, having grown with technology since the days of Tetris, Shufflepuck, and Oregon Trail. What was once taboo to share with anyone beyond your significant other, is now being posted freely for the masses.

We won’t even start on the impacts of social media! Reviews and ratings began popping up for schools, restaurants, and workplaces. Glassdoor, Salary, and others provide deep insights to pay, work-life balance, and executive leadership approval ratings.

Then, things went a step further by detailing gender alongside compensation, most notably in the employee-led survey at Google in 2017. It was the shot heard round the world. How could a well-known organization which prides itself on diversity, and that some think is the entire internet, find itself with gender pay disparity?

Over the past year, I’ve visited and revisited the gender pay gap with various talent partners at prominent venture firms. Kelly Kinnard of Battery Ventures and Bethany Crystal of USV authored pieces on the topic. One theme was common when discussing pay disparity – What if we had real data? What if we had corporate-sourced data that wasn’t subject to disgruntled employees or selective reporting? Well, we do.

Advanced-HR hosts the world’s largest compensation database specific to venture-backed companies. For the first time, we took a deep dive into compensation and gender at privately held, VC-backed companies and we’re sharing the findings.

Thousands of companies and 10,000+ corporate-sourced employee data points. Nothing inferred. Though we analyzed the entire data set, this article only considers US Company data.

We do not display gender-based compensation data but VC-backed companies can access our database of 2800+ participants for free by completing a quick survey. Venture firms and all others interested in our data, contact us here.

About the data

Each year, we have the privilege of running the industry standard VC Executive Compensation Survey alongside 160+ top venture firms. All sponsoring firms and their participating portfolio companies receive the final report of detailed, aggregate, and anonymous compensation data. Before we review compensation, let’s visit gender representation at VC-backed companies.

The following slide is part of a more comprehensive 11-slide deck viewable at the end of this article, highlighting takeaways and key findings from our data.

Data is great. Now what?

It’s the hot topic and hiring managers are on red alert. Pay fairly or risk a PR nightmare. Here are some steps you may want to consider.

1. Founders need to hire. Owning the hiring process allows founders to gain valuable experience and exposure. By creating job descriptions, founders can be thoughtful and sensitive to the fact that connotations and tone can unintentionally isolate a specific segment of eligible talent.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. San Francisco takes the final steps toward becoming the first U.S. city to ban vaping product sales

San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors unanimously approved an ordinance that prohibits the sale of e-cigarettes within the city.

San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera, who co-sponsored the ban, told Bloomberg that products will be allowed to be sold in the city again if they receive approval from the Food and Drug Administration.

2. Lifestyle goods resale marketplace StockX raises $110M, pushing valuation past $1B

StockX rode the sneaker culture boom of the past half-decade or so, as the startup first focused exclusively on acting as a resale source for shoes with high levels of hype. Its unique value prop was offering a verification service, so that you knew when you were buying the real deal.

3. FTC, Justice Dept. takes coordinated action against robocallers

In the so-called “Operation Call It Quits,” the Federal Trade Commission brought four cases — two filed on its behalf by the Justice Department — and three settlements against parties said to be responsible for making more than a billion illegal robocalls.

4. 300M-user meme site Imgur raises $20M from Coil to pay creators

Coil is a micropayment tool for creators, and Imgur says it will eventually launch a premium membership with exclusive features and content reserved for Coil subscribers.

5. ‘The Office’ is leaving Netflix in 2021 because NBC wants it back

By far the most popular show on Netflix in 2018, “The Office” was bound to leave the service eventually — or, at the very least, see some huge contract renegotiations. NBCUniversal, meanwhile, sees it as an important asset for its upcoming streaming service.

6. MIT AI tool can predict breast cancer up to 5 years early, works equally well for white and black patients

MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab has developed a new deep learning-based AI prediction model that can anticipate the development of breast cancer up to five years in advance.

7. How to scale a start-up in school

If you’re serious about starting and scaling your business in school, treat your time in school like an extended incubator. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

Despite Google employees petitioning San Francisco Pride to exclude the company from participating in the Pride parade this weekend, SF Pride says Google will be allowed to march in the parade.

Earlier today, about 100 Google employees urged SF Pride to ban the company from participating in this weekend’s Pride parade and drop the company as a sponsor. That came after activists expressed concerns regarding Google’s participation in Pride in light of YouTube’s response to homophobic and racist content on its platform. Earlier this month, YouTube said conservative commentator Steven Crowder’s racist and homophobic remarks did not violate its policies.

“We feel we have no choice but to urge you to reject Google’s failure to act in support of our community by revoking their sponsorship of Pride, and excluding Google from official representation in the Pride parade,” the employees wrote on Medium. “If another official platform, YouTube, allows abuse and hate and discrimination against LGBTQ+ persons, then Pride must not provide the company a platform that paints it in a rainbow veneer of support for those very persons. On the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, in a Pride celebration whose very slogan is “Generations of Resistance”, we ask you to join us in resisting LGBTQ+ oppression on the internet, and the subjugation of our right to equality in favor of calculated business concerns. The first Pride was a protest, and so now must this Pride be one.”

“We appreciate the engagement of community members who reached out to San Francisco Pride with their concerns about Google,” SF Pride said in a statement. “Google and YouTube can and must do more to elevate and protect the voices of LGBTQ+ creators on their platforms, and we’ve found that Google has been willing to listen to this criticism and is working to develop appropriate policies. They have acknowledged they have much work to do to promote respectful discussion and exchange of ideas.”

SF Pride goes on to say Google has been a long-term supporter for years and that the company has historically been a good ally to the LGBTQ+ community. But employees feel otherwise. Despite claims from the company that it will look at the policies, employees say they’re never given a true commitment to improving.

“We ask that, even if you will not consider excluding Google so soon before Pride, that you will issue a determination, absent a real change in these policies and practices, and a strong position statement to that effect, that Google will not be permitted to sponsor or be officially represented in future San Francisco Pride celebrations,” the employees wrote.

I’ve reached out to Google and will update this story when I hear back.