Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Nearly 8,000 Amazon employees, many in prestigious engineering and design roles, have recently signed a petition calling on Jeff Bezos and the Amazon Board of Directors to dramatically shift the giant company’s approach to climate change.

By deploying a kind of corporate social disobedience such as speaking out dramatically at shareholders meetings, and by engaging in a variety of community organizing tactics, the “Amazon Employees for Climate Justice” group has quickly become a leading example of a growing trend in the tech world: tech employees banding together to take strong ethical stances in defiance of their powerful employers.

The public actions taken by these employees and groups have been covered widely by the news media. For my TechCrunch series on the ethics of technology, however, I wanted to better understand what participating actively in this campaign has been like some of the individuals involved.

How are employees in high-pressure jobs balancing their professional roles and responsibilities with being actively, publicly in defiance of their employers on a high-profile issue? How do leaders in these efforts explain the philosophy underlying their ethical stance? And how likely are their ideas to spread throughout Amazon and beyond – perhaps particularly among younger tech workers?

I recently spoke with a handful of the Amazon employees most actively involved in the Employees for Climate Justice campaign, all of whom inspired me– in similar and different ways. Below is the first of two interviews I’ll publish here. This one is with Rajit Iftikhar, a young software engineer from New York who moved to Seattle to work for Amazon after earning his Bachelor’s of Engineering in Computer Science from Cornell in 2016.

Rajit Iftikhar

Rajit struck me as a humble and precociously wise young man who could be a role model — though he seems to have little interest in singling himself out that way — for thousands of other software engineers and technologists at Amazon and beyond.

Greg Epstein: Your personal story has been key to your organizing with Amazon Employees for Climate Justice. Can you start by saying a bit about why?

Rajit Iftikhar: A lot of why I care about climate justice is informed by me having parents from another country that is going to be very adversely affected by [climate change]. Countries like Bangladesh are going to suffer some of the worst consequences from climate change, because of where the country’s located, and the fact that it doesn’t have the resources to adapt.

Bangladesh is already feeling the effects of climate crisis; it is much harder for people to live in the rural areas, [people are] being forced into the cities. Then you have the cyclones that the climate crisis is going to bring, and rising sea levels and flooding.

So, my background [emphasizes, for me] how unjust our emissions are in causing all these problems for people in other countries. And even for communities of color within our country who are going to be disproportionately impacted by the emissions that largely richer people [cause].

I played Pokémon GO this weekend, because I was babysitting my nephew, and I couldn’t help but be reminded what a cultural force it was when it launched three years ago. Hundreds massed near San Francisco’s Ocean Beach every day to hunt. Huge crowds sprinted through Central Park to catch a Vaporeon. Disapproving finger-pointers penned whiny moral panics and sermons about how it encouraged crime and provoking danger.

One thing that was not controversial, though, was the belief that it was a harbinger, the thin edge of the AR wedge, only the first of many crossover games and universes. If you had told anyone then that, three who years later, Pokémon GO would remain the only real example of a widely publicly successful AR / VR app, you would have been laughed out of most rooms.

And yet, here we are. Pokémon GO is still a hit (and remains fun!) but was not the vanguard of an AR/VR onslaught. Magic Leap — which by 2016 had already raised $1.4 billion! — remains at best a disappointment. Which is almost too kind a word for Oculus. AR as an industry has, to oversimplify, largely pivoted to business / work / industrial uses, in the hopes an actual market appears there. What happened?

Note that this isn’t unique to augmented / mixed / virtual reality. 2016 was also that Meerkat, 2015’s hottest app, died, because livestreaming video, while it has its valid niche, was not the future of communications. It was also, at the same time, the year that chatbots were going to take over the world. You may have noticed that in fact they did not.

Looking back, is it really that surprising that Pokémon GO was a one-off, rather than the first ripple of a massive wave of change? Or that AR/VR have faltered and failed to meet expectations? Or that Meerkat and chatbots did not define how we would communicate in the future?

Of course it’s not. The history of innovation is a history of throwing new things at the wall and seeing if they stick — or, more accurately, throwing them into a crowd and seeing how the crowd reacts. Most bets on the big, household-name tech startups of the last two decades weren’t bets on their technologies but on how people would react to them. This especially applies applies to this year’s crop of IPOs — Uber, Lyft, Slack, Pinterest — but also to Twitter and Facebook, and even, to a lesser extent, Apple and Amazon. (Though interestingly not so much to Google, beyond the insight “people will use the Internet to search for stuff.”)

Of course sometimes the crowd ignores the offering flung into its midst. Or they choose one from an apparently similar array and turns its collective back on the rest. Are we really so surprised by this aspect of human nature?

We shouldn’t be. But to an extent we are — because, at least until 2016, the Valley’s techno-optimism had pervaded the rest of the world as well, journalists and politicians and the like. It was based on two pillars:

1. the genuine belief that technology was transforming erything around the world, including politics, culture, and finance, and these changes were almost invariably net positive
2. the surprisingly hard-headed financial analysis of venture capitalism, whose business model consists of being maximally optimistic about 100 different things while knowing that only 10 will actually succeed and 1 will succeed wildly, because in tech that one wild success more than pays for the 90 abject failures.

I don’t need to tell you that 1) is, at best way way more complicated that it seemed, and at worst horrifyingly wrong, while the worst aspects of politics / culture / finance as we knew them turned out to be ferociously intransigent and as able to infect the tech industry right back; meanwhile, the world has wised up to 2), now correctly recognizing VC optimism as a business model rather than a prophecy.

That doesn’t mean technology has lost its potential to be transformative in a positive way. But it means we’ve all grown more skeptical, more judicious, less reflexively optimistic. This is no bad thing. It means, for instance, if and when the next AR/VR hit finally arrives, we should all be better able to distinguish between silly moral panics and truly worrying consequences. At least let’s hope so. Because while the former are very real, so are the latter.

Just about anyone can come up with a good idea. Fewer people can execute on that idea and turn it into a prototype or MVP. But there is still one final challenge for most entrepreneurs that can prove challenging.

How do you secure that initial seed capital and take your idea to the next level?

At Disrupt SF in October, Redpoint’s Annie Kadavy, Docsend’s Russ Heddleston, and Precursor’s Charles Hudson will sit down together and chat it out on the Extra Crunch stage.

Kadavy, Heddleston and Hudson can offer a unique perspective on the process of early-stage fundraising.

Kadavy joined Redpoint in 2018 after a four-year stint at Charles River Ventures, where she sourced or led deals with ClassPass, Cratejoy, DoorDash, Lauren & Wolf and Patreon. She’s also spent time within firms like Bain & Company, Warby Parker and Uber Freight. She understands the importance of operational experience, and knows better than most how to take a company from point A to point B.

Heddleston, cofounder and CEO of DocSend, has a completely different perspective. DocSend is used to securely send and track documents, and one of the most prevalent documents on the platform happens to be pitch decks. Heddleston can tell us about what characteristics get (and keep) the attention of investors, as well as what turns them off.

Hudson, managing partner at Precursor Ventures, has been on both sides of the conference room table. He founded Bionic Panda Games, which was acquired by Zynga in 2010. He moved on to SoftTech VC (now Uncork Capital), where he spent eight years working on seed stage investments in the consumer internet space. At Precursor Ventures, he’s continuing to invest in early-stage companies that are tackling problems in new markets.

These three each have their own perspective on how to get the attention of investors and how to turn a conversation into a cap table.

“How To Raise Your First Dollars” is but one of many panels that will take place on the Extra Crunch stage at Disrupt SF. The Extra Crunch stage, much like Extra Crunch on the web, is meant to serve as a resource for aspiring entrepreneurs and VCs, offering practical, step-by-step advice on how to get to where you’re going.

We’re thrilled to have Kadavy, Heddleston and Hudson join us at the show.

Disrupt SF runs October 2 – October 4 at the Moscone Center in SF. Tickets to Disrupt SF are available here.

MobiKwik, a mobile wallet app in India that has expanded to add several financial services in recent years, said today it plans to enter international markets as it approaches profitability with the local operation. The company is kick-starting its overseas ambitions with cross-border mobile top-ups support.

The 10-year-old firm said it has partnered with DT One, a Singapore-headquartered payments network, to enable international mobile recharge (topping up credit to a mobile account), rewards, and airtime credit services in over 150 nations across some 550 mobile operators. The feature is now live on the app.

The feature is aimed at Indians living overseas and immigrants in India, Upasana Taku, co-founder of MobiKwik told TechCrunch in an interview. Millions of Indians go overseas to pursue education or look for a job. Currently, there is no convenient way for them to either help — or receive help from — their families and friends in India when they need to top up their phones.

Similarly, millions of people come to India in search for a job. The new functionality from MobiKwik will allow their families and friends to top up their mobile credit as well. Taku said there is no processing fee for customers as MobiKwik is absorbing all the overhead expenses.

For MobiKwik, mobile recharge is just the entry point to assess interest from users, Taku added. “This is the first service we are launching. We will eventually add other essential services as well. Mobile recharge will offer us good data points and will help us understand different markets,” she added.

MobiKwik is also studying different regulatory frameworks in overseas markets and holding conversations with stakeholders, she added.

The announcement comes at a time when MobiKwik is inching closer to profitability, a feat unheard of for a mobile wallet app provider in India. The firm, which claims to have grown its revenue by 100% in the last two years, expects to be profitable by this year and go public by 2022. (Interestingly, MobiKwik was looking to raise a big round at $1 billion valuation two years ago — which never happened.)

In the last one year, the firm has expanded to offer financial services such as loans, insurances, and investment advice. MobiKwik competes with a handful of payment services in India including Paytm, PhonePe, and Google Pay that either support, or fully work on top of a government-backed payment infrastructure called UPI. In April, UPI apps were used to carry out 782 million transactions, according to official figures.

The big numbers have attracted major investors, too. With $285.6 million in funding, India emerged as Asia’s top fintech market in the quarter that ended in March this year.

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. Huawei says US ban will cost it $30B in lost revenue

Following a string of trade restrictions from the U.S., China’s Huawei expects its revenues to drop $30 billion below forecast over the next two years, founder and chief executive Ren Zhengfei said today.

That said, Ren claimed that after a period of adjustment, Huawei’s output will be “rejuvenated” by 2021.

2. 5G reportedly coming to premium iPhones in 2020, all models in 2021

The latest report from renowned Apple leaker Ming-Chi Kuo claims that high-end iPhones are set to get 5G in the second half of next year. By 2021, all models are set to be on-board with the next-gen wireless standard.

3. Millions of Venmo transactions scraped in warning over privacy settings

A computer science student has scraped seven million Venmo transactions to prove that users’ public activity can still be easily obtained, a year after a privacy researcher performed a similar feat.

4. Meet TezLab, the Fitbit for Tesla vehicles

For the non-Tesla owner, the name TezLab is likely a foreign one. But among Tesla owners obsessed with understanding how their electric vehicle performs, TezLab is a familiar friend.

5. Target checkouts hit by outage for a second day in a row

In a statement, Target said it could “confirm that this was not a data breach or security-related issue” and “no guest information was compromised at any time.” Instead, the company blamed the outage on an “internal technology issue” without disclosing specifics.

6. Startup founders need to decide how much salary is enough

While the ultimate goal is a successful exit, not everyone gets there, and it begs the question: How much is fair to take out in the form of salary, especially in the early years when money is tight? (Extra Crunch membership required.)

7. This week’s TechCrunch podcasts

The Equity team has some thoughts on Silicon Valley’s “founder fetish,” arguing that it infantilizes public companies. And on the latest episode of Original Content, we review the new season of “Black Mirror.”

A little more than a year ago, Waymo surprised the industry and announced that its next big move in the world of autonomous vehicles would be a partnership with Jaguar Land Rover to add the automaker’s new all-electric I-Pace crossover to its fleet of self-driving cars.

Now, it appears self-driving Jaguar I-Pace vehicles are finally being tested on public streets around Waymo’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., TechCrunch has learned. A self-driving Jaguar I-Pace, with a safety driver behind the wheel, was spotted Monday morning. Waymo has confirmed that testing has begun.

Waymo, the former Google self-driving project that spun out to become a business under Alphabet, received its first three I-Paces in July 2018. Those vehicles have been driving around the San Francisco Bay Area collecting road data, but they were not operating in autonomous mode. Waymo plans to roll the I-Pace vehicles into its self-driving ride-hailing fleet in 2020.

The deal between Waymo and JLR is for up to 20,000 modified I-Pace vehicles to join the robotaxi service in the first two years of operation. The partnership is structured similarly to Waymo’s relationship with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, which supplied the tech company with its Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans.

Those minivans have become synonymous with Waymo’s testing and its Waymo One ride-hailing service in the suburbs of Phoenix.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a tech company that said it wished it had waited longer to implement on diversity and inclusion efforts. The examples of tech companies “doing it right” in this industry are few and far between, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying. And for those that want to try, there’s a clear playbook to follow.

Where tech companies seem to go wrong is around implementing one-off initiatives such as unconscious bias training, employee resource groups or hiring a head of diversity and inclusion. Alone, these initiatives are not effective. But implementing those together, along with other initiatives, can create lasting change inside tech companies.

More than 10 years ago, Freada Kapor Klein, co-founder of Kapor Capital and the Kapor Center for Social Impact, published her groundbreaking book, “Giving Notice,” about the hidden biases people face in the workplace. In it, Kapor Klein laid out five key strategies as part of a comprehensive approach to addressing inclusion within tech companies. In order for it to be effective, companies must implement every single initiative.

This approach, which is applicable to this day, entails instituting policies practices and principles; implementing formal and informal problem-solving procedures; devising customized training based on organizational needs; ask more specific questions on employee surveys and break down data demographically; and ensure accountability from the top.

Policies, practices and principles

Homeland Security’s cyber agency says it has tested a working exploit for the BlueKeep vulnerability, capable of achieving remote code execution on a vulnerable device.

To date, most of the private exploits targeting BlueKeep would have triggered a denial-of-service condition, capable of knocking computers offline. But an exploit able to remotely run code or malware on an affected computer — an event feared by government — could trigger a similar global incident similar to the WannaCry ransomware attack in 2017.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) confirmed in an alert Monday it had used BlueKeep to remotely run code on a Windows 2000 computer.

Although there have been no public exploits have been released, CISA’s alert is a warning that it’s a matter of time before malicious attackers could achieve the same results.

Both Microsoft and the federal government have sounded the alarm in recent weeks over the risks posed by BlueKeep.

The bug, also known as CVE-2019-0708, is a critical-rated bug that affects computers running Windows 7 and earlier, including several server operating systems. The vulnerability can be used to run code at the system level, allowing full access to the computer — including its data. The bug is also “wormable,” meaning it can spread from a single computer connected to the internet to every other affected device on the network.

Microsoft issued patches last month, but as many as a million devices remain vulnerable. Kevin Beaumont, a U.K.-based security researcher, said in a tweet that the number of affected devices “will be way, way higher” once exploit code hits inside an organization.

The National Security Agency earlier this month also issued a rare advisory, warning users to patch “in the face of growing threats” of exploitation,

If there’s ever been a time to patch, it’s now.

Microsft in 2017 said it would shut eventually down Wunderlist, a company it acquired, in order to forge ahead with its own “to do” app. It has since launched To-Do, as the app is called, on Windows, iOS, Android and the web and expanded its feature set. Today, it’s bringing the app to the Mac, as well.

The company announced this morning its To-Do app is live on the Mac App Store, where it will support most of the core features right away, including the ability to create and manage tasks, works offline, share lists, utilize tags, and more. It will also integrate with Microsoft Outlook to pull in your “Flagged” email list and will support integration with Planner soon, allowing you to see any items assigned to you.

The Mac version also takes advantage of its new platform to offer a handful of keyboard shortcuts, like ⌘2 to minimize the app so it only displays the list view, and ⌘1 to return to viewing all your lists. You can click on a task’s text to edit it directly from the list view, as well. 

It’s worth noting that Microsoft built this native Mac app using 100 percent AppKit, it says.

At Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference this month, the company announced a new set of tools — called Project Catalyst — that allow developers to bring their iPad apps to the Mac by leveraging their existing codebase. This is expected to bring more Mac apps to Apple’s Mac App Store over time, as it simplifies the process of maintaining multiple apps for various platforms. Twitter, for example, said on Friday that it would leverage Project Catalyst to bring its app back to the Mac.

Microsoft, however, went a different route.

A big question now is what today’s news will mean for Wunderlist — an app that has a near-perfect 4.9 out of 5 stars rating on the Mac App Store and the No. 21 most popular free app in the store’s Productivity category.

As of today’s launch, Microsoft To-Do has seen a surge of downloads and jumped ahead of its predecessor. It now claims the No. 11 spot in the same category (as of the time of writing).

Microsoft had earlier promised that it wouldn’t close down Wunderlist until it was confident that it has “incorporated the best of Wunderlist into To-Do.” Some of the company’s initial concerns were adding support for list sharing in To-Do and rolling out support for all platforms — which Microsoft has now done with this Mac app launch.

We’ve asked Microsoft if it will comment on its updated plans for Wunderlist and will update if the company has a response.

In the meantime, the new Mac version of To-Do is a free download from the Mac App Store here.

Cleo, the London-based “digital assistant” that wants to replace your banking apps, has quietly taken venture debt from U.S.-based Triplepoint Capital, according to a regulatory filing.

The amount remains undisclosed, though I understand from sources that the figure is somewhere in the region of mid-“single digit” millions and will bridge the gap before a larger Series B round later this year. Cleo declined to comment on the fundraising.

However, sources tell me that the need to raise debt financing is partly related to Cleo Plus, the startup’s stealthy premium offering that is currently being tested and set to launch more widely soon. The new product offers Cleo users a range of perks, including rewards and an optional £100 cash advance as an alternative to using your bank’s overdraft facility. The credit facility is, for the time bring at least, being financed from the startup’s own balance sheet, hence the need for additional capital.

The new funding also relates to Cleo’s U.S. launch, which began tentatively around a year ago. This has been more successful than was expected, seeing Cleo add 650,000 active U.S. users to date. The U.S. currently makes up over 90% of new users now, too. Overall, the fintech claims 1.3 million users have signed up to the Cleo chatbot and app, with 350,000 active in the U.K.

Accessible via Facebook Messenger and the company’s iOS app, Cleo is an AI-powered chatbot that gives you insights into your spending across multiple accounts and credit cards, broken down by transaction, category or merchant. In addition, Cleo lets you take a number of actions based on the financial data it has gleaned. This includes choosing to put money aside for a rainy day or specific goal, sending money to your Facebook Messenger contacts, donating to charity, and setting spending alerts and more.

Meanwhile, alongside Triplepoint, Cleo is backed by some of the biggest VC names in the London tech scene — including Balderton Capital, Entrepreneur First, Moonfruit co-founders Wendy Tan White and Joe White, Skype founder Niklas Zennström, Wonga founder Errol Damelin, TransferWise founder Taavet Hinrikus and LocalGlobe.