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Amazon announced today that it has beat Wall Street’s already optimistic Q1 projections. The e-commerce giant’s revenues have slowed a bit, contributing to moderate fluctuations in after hours trading, but the company’s greatly benefit by ever-increasing profit margins.

Net income for the quarter hit $3.6 billion, a new record for the company. Much of those inflated margins can be chalked up to online services, including advertising and, most notably, cloud services through AWS.

The earnings report demonstrates just how much the site has diversified its portfolio, with earnings that now include results from Whole Foods, which Amazon absorbed last year. The grocery store chain has seen the impact of multiple rounds of price cuts since becoming a part of Amazon, though growth on that side is slow compared to the company’s cloud offerings.

Jeff Bezos took the opportunity to note the company’s increased investment in education. Amazon’s been pushing to highlight its softer side of late, as its been the target of negative publicity over working conditions in its fulfillment centers and its since shuttered plans for opening an HQ2 in Queens.

“The son of a working single mom, Leo Jean Baptiste grew up speaking Haitian Creole in a New Jersey home without internet access. He’s also one of our inaugural group of 100 high school seniors to receive a $40,000 Amazon Future Engineer scholarship and Amazon internship,” he said in a statement. “Our passion for invention led us to create Amazon Future Engineer so we could help young people like Leo from underrepresented groups and underserved communities across the country.”

It’s a rosy picture for a company that’s been killing it on earnings, though the company was less bullish when it comes to Q2 as its growth has been slowing. Amazon offered guidance of as much as $1.6 billion below Wall Street’s $4.2 billion expectations. As CNBC notes, that could well point to the company’s intentions of making additional investments going forward.

Over the past few months, Sinemia has gone from promising MoviePass competitor to the source of frustration for moviegoers across the country. After rumors surfaced earlier this week that it would be backing away from its troubled subscription based movie ticket offering, it’s posted official word tonight that it will be shutting down operations.

“Today, with a heavy heart, we’re announcing that Sinemia is closing its doors and ending operations in the US effective immediately,” the company writes in a statement posted to its front page.

The service has also struggled with issues of monetization (not unlike MoviePass), leading on lookers to wonder ultimately how sustainable the subscription model is. Those issues have been coupled by increased competition from movie theater chains like AMC offering up their own services, even as Sinemia attempted to create a white label version for theaters.

In recent months, the company has been plagued by lawsuits from both MoviePass and moviegoers, the latter of whom took issue with app problems, hidden charges and policies of shuttering accounts.

“While we are proud to have created a best in market service, our efforts to cover the cost of unexpected legal proceedings and raise the funds required to continue operations have not been sufficient,” the company writes. “The competition in the US market and the core economics of what it costs to deliver Sinemia’s end-to-end experience ultimately lead us to the decision of discontinuing our US operations.”

Uber is reportedly looking to sell shares between $44 to $50, aiming to raise $8 to $10 billion in the offering. This would value the company between $80 billion to $90 billion, Bloomberg reports.

Previous reports had pegged Uber’s valuation at around $120 billion. Still, that valuation is higher than its last valuation of $76 billion following a funding round.

It’s likely this decrease in valuation is influenced by Lyft’s performance on the public market. Since its debut on the NASDAQ, Lyft’s stock has suffered after skyrocketing nearly 10 percent on day one.

While Uber has yet to officially set the terms of its IPO, the company is reportedly expected to do so as early as tomorrow. Even if Uber seeks the low-end of the expected range, it would be more than three time’s the amount of Lyft’s $2.34 billion IPO. It would also make Uber’s IPO the largest one in the U.S. since Alibaba’s in 2014.

In 2018, Uber reported 2018 revenues of $11.27 billion, net income of $997 million and adjusted EBITDA losses of $1.85 billion. Uber, which filed for its IPO two weeks ago, is expected to list on the New York Stock Exchange in May.

Third time lucky — unless you’re Facebook.

The social networking giant was hit by a trio of investigations over its privacy practices Thursday following a particularly tumultuous month of security lapses and privacy violations — the latest in a string of embarrassing and damaging breaches at the company, much of its own doing.

First came a probe by the Irish data protection authority looking into the breach of “hundreds of millions” of Facebook and Instagram user passwords were stored in plaintext on its servers. The company will be investigated under the European GDPR data protection law, which could lead to fines of up to four percent of its global annual revenue for the infringing year — already some several billions of dollars.

Then, Canadian authorities confirmed that the beleaguered social networking giant broke its strict privacy laws, reports TechCrunch’s Natasha Lomas. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada said it plans to take Facebook ti federal court to force the company to correct its “serious contraventions” of Canadian privacy law. The findings came in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which vacuumed up more than 600,000 profiles of Canadian citizens.

Lastly, and slightly closer to home, Facebook was hit by its third investigation — this time by New York attorney general Letitia James. The state chief law enforcer is looking into the recent “unauthorized collection” of 1.5 million user email addresses, which Facebook used for profile verification, but inadvertently also scraped their contact lists.

“It is time Facebook is held accountable for how it handles consumers’ personal information,” said James in a statement. “Facebook has repeatedly demonstrated a lack of respect for consumers’ information while at the same time profiting from mining that data.”

Facebook spokesperson Jay Nancarrow said the company is “in touch with the New York State attorney general’s office and are responding to their questions on this matter.”

Tesla is poised to open up orders for the Model 3 in several right-hand drive markets, starting with the UK by early May, according to a tweet from CEO Elon Musk.

The Model 3 order page will go live May 1 or 2 in the UK, followed by Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong. Tesla’s UK webpage says deliveries in right-hand drive markets will begin in the second half of 2019.

The first Model 3 vehicles were handed over to U.S. customers, beginning in July 2017 at a splashy event at its factory in Fremont, Calif. Those first vehicles went to Tesla employees and deliveries limped along for months due to production bottlenecks. Deliveries began in earnest in 2018.

The expansion into more right-hand drive markets follows a disappointing first quarter for Tesla.

The company reported Wednesday wider-than-expected loss of $702 million, which included $188 million of non-recurring charges.

Tesla’s Q1 revenues fell to $4.5 billion, compared to $7.2 billion in the fourth quarter, in part due to its failure to efficiently deliver Model 3 vehicles to customers overseas.

About 50 percent of Tesla deliveries in the first quarter occurred in the final 10 days of the period. “That’s insane,” Musk said Wednesday during an earnings call.

Musk said the company is changing how it delivers vehicles as a result of the challenges it faced last quarter. Instead of building cars in batches and sending that dedicated bunch to one region, Tesla plans to blend vehicle production customers throughout the quarter, said Musk, who added this strategy will put less strain on its logistics system.

“We don’t want a situation again like we had in Q1, where essentially, all the cars were arriving to customers worldwide, all at the same time.,” Musk said. “So it just makes sense to plan production, according to demand moving forward.”

E-commerce is one of the economy’s bright spots; U.S. e-commerce sales have nearly doubled in five years, and now exceed $500 billion. Unsurprisingly, Amazon has swooped in to claim a disproportionate share of the riches, gobbling up nearly 50 percent of the market share, driving competitors out of business and solidifying its position as one of the world’s most valuable companies.

As part of its complete transformation of the e-commerce landscape, Amazon has made two-day shipping the new industry standard — a standard which most would-be competitors can’t meet on their own without either investing millions in infrastructure or partnering with their greatest competitive threat. Fortunately for merchants, some exciting new logistics startups are emerging to help them compete with Amazon.

Amazon’s chokehold

In classic coopetition form, Amazon now enables more than a million merchants to sell through  Amazon Marketplace. It offers these merchants two-day shipping via a cheap flat fee per package — a fee so cheap, in fact, that no shipping provider can come close to matching it. Amazon is doubling down on its advanced fulfillment network by investing $700 million in Rivian, an electric truck company; augmenting its fleet of 50+ delivery planes; and rolling out 20,000 Mercedes-Benz delivery vans.

Two-day delivery is so compelling, often doubling sales, that many merchants are becoming increasingly dependent on Amazon despite the obvious risks of partnering with the juggernaut. This in itself is spurring startups that help merchants thrive on Amazon. Amazon forces those merchants who work with them to compete side-by-side with other brands, including the company’s own private-label collection that it promotes aggressively. Amazon also pressures merchants to provide their lowest prices on Amazon — despite the fact that Amazon takes a significant revenue percentage. Even then, Amazon still might suddenly kick merchants off its platform without prior notice.

Once merchants sell on Amazon, they often find it impossible to diversify to other platforms with higher margins and more control because they become reliant on Amazon’s unbeatable two-day delivery price. This pressure is making merchants increasingly nervous as Amazon squeezes them from all sides. Merchants are desperately seeking solutions to help them get out of Amazon’s chokehold. A new batch of startups is seizing the opportunity to provide just that.

Aggregated delivery routes

Transportation accounts for more than 75 percent of delivery costs. Merchants can save millions by pooling together their shipping, trucking and last-mile delivery costs. Traditionally, this pooling was done by expensive freight brokers on pen and paper. Today, companies like Flexport, which just raised $1 billion, and Convoy, which was just valued at more than $1 billion, can more effectively match shippers and carriers to combine packages and lower costs.

Last-mile delivery companies like ShipBob, which recently closed a $40 million investment round, are also beginning to offer Amazon-like two-day shipping solutions. Deliv* takes an even more aggressive approach by offering same-day shipping for retailers via its couriers. By combining volume, these startups allow merchants to save more than 20 percent by negotiating for larger bulk discounts with carriers and by optimizing routes.

Distributed warehousing

To deliver within two days, merchants must have access to warehouses located near their customers. While companies like Walmart and Amazon might be able to invest billions in multiple distribution centers located throughout the U.S., smaller merchants and distributors can rely on startups like Flexe and Darkstore to provide on-demand storage in pooled warehouses across the country. Rather than keeping everything in a central warehouse thousands of miles away, merchants can use artificial intelligence to predict consumer demand and ship inventory to nearby distribution centers. These startups will become increasingly important as retailers seek to go beyond two-day shipping and offer one-day and even same-day shipping.

Robotics and automation

Despite the heavy upfront costs, robotics offer a cheaper long-term alternative to manual labor in many distribution centers. RightHand Robotics, which just landed $23 million, uses a robotic arm to help pick and place items at warehouses. Each arm can operate at the same speed as an experienced packer, while working around the clock. Other startups use automation to reduce last-mile delivery costs through a variety of methods, ranging from self-driving cars to delivery drones. Starship Technologies, for instance, is building a fleet of small self-driving robots to deliver locally. Although individual merchants may not purchase robotic arms, they can leverage logistics startups to reduce costs and improve efficiencies via these new automation techniques.

Addicted to convenience, consumers keep demanding that their merchandise arrive ever more quickly. Amazon is king of convenience and is constantly pushing the bar higher — or faster in this case. Merchants are struggling to keep up. Fortunately for them, a new generation of logistics startups are helping them compete. By creating solutions for the logistics infrastructure of the future, these startups are helping merchants stay in the race against Amazon.

* Denotes Trinity portfolio company

The rumored IPO plans of $4 billion spinning brand Peloton marks the rise of a wave of interactive fitness startups like Mirror, Tonal, Hydrow, and At Home 360 that combine a monthly subscription to recorded and/or live video classes with workout hardware.

There’s opportunity beyond this initial “Peloton for X” model, however, when you look at where the gamification of at-home workout experiences can overlap with actual games. We’re in the midst of rapid growth in the gaming industry, the rise of esports, the mainstream-ing of socializing within games due to Fortnite. 

The virtual cycling business Zwift is a five-year-old startup that has raised over $170 million as a pioneer of fitness-gaming ― physical sport carried out in a virtual world. Athletes join together for group rides and races within a cycling game that hooks up to their own bike trainers at home in order to reflect their movements and physical exertion. Since users are represented as players within a social game, there is the benefit of network effects, opportunities for a in-game commerce, and audience viewing of the competition.

I recently sat with Eric Min, Zwift’s CEO and co-founder, at the company’s London office. We discussed why he founded Zwift and how the product has evolved, the potential revenue streams available to an interactive fitness brand, and Zwift’s rise as an esport with ambitions to enter the Olympics. Here’s the transcript:

Eric Peckham (TechCrunch): Do you view Zwift as a fitness company or as a gaming company where the bike trainer is just a controller?

Eric Min (Zwift): We’re the fitness company born out of gaming. While we’re a fitness brand, we’re also a game and social network, two things that are converging rapidly right now. What we’re trying to do, though, is build this social network around real-time experiences, physical experiences, and I think that’s far more interesting. Crucial to that is being hardware agnostic though. We work with a lot of equipment out there so our users can come to the game easily.

Last month, a New York Times piece heralded the arrival of Luminary. The story focused on the startup’s healthy funding (almost $100 million) and its “subscription-based business model that it hopes will push the medium into a new phase of growth.” You’d be hard-pressed to find a better circumstances under which to launch your startup.

A month and half later, Luminary is live, and most of that good will seems to have evaporated. A number of prominent podcast hosts have requested that their shows be pulled from the “Netflix of podcasts.”

The $8 a month premium service has added shows to its walled off network without the permission of creators. There are several TechCrunch shows up there, including Original Content, Mixtape, Equity and several now defunct titles. My personal podcast somehow mad it on there, as well.

In some ways, it’s not entirely dissimilar from the way services like iTunes provide podcasts, but many have complained about a key issue with how shows are served up. The service clarified on Twitter today that it’s not re-hosting files as initially suspected. “Luminary is not caching any audio content for any open feed podcast,” it writes. “The Luminary audio link is simply a reference link that is marking audio metadata as the file is called through our proxy.”

The company says it’s using this method to save download/streaming time, routing traffic through their own proxy servers is a good way to deprive creators of important metrics they use to attract sponsors. Others have complained that the service clips out links to fundraising campaigns in the body of the show notes.

Popular podcast The Joe Rogan Experience is among the growing number of shows that have been pulled from the service. “There was not a license agreement or permission for Luminary to have The Joe Rogan Experience on their platform,” a rep for the show told Nieman Lab.

After being pulled, the show’s artwork was replaced with a bold white on black lettering reading “This content is unavailable at this time. Learn why.” That explanation can be found in the show description, which reads,

The Joe Rogan Experience is not available on the Luminary service at this time. At Luminary, we’re investing in technology to improve podcast listening for fans like you so we built a free app that welcomes hundreds of thousands of public RSS feed podcasts. This publisher has chosen not to take advantage of this free distribution. Head to our homepage for other great podcasts we recommend. Thank you for choosing to listen with us.

That’s a bad look from Luminary. A simple “The Joe Rogan Experience is not available on the Luminary service at this time” would have sufficed here. Instead the service chose to grind its axe on the page of a show that never asked to be there in the first place. As a new startup in the space, Luminary would be well suited to listen to podcasters, as it hopes to draw in more talent for original content.

A statement that has since been offered to TechCrunch strikes a more consolatory tone,

Luminary appreciates the feedback we’ve received today about how our technology works. We’ve heard you and want to explain what we have done in response. To be absolutely clear: Luminary has never hosted or cached audio content for any open RSS feed podcast. We used a pass-through approach purely because we believed it would improve performance and speed for our users when listening to public feed audio files, particularly from smaller hosts. We now see that this approach caused some confusion. We have spoken with multiple hosting providers who suggested changes we could make to clarify that public feed audio is not being hosted or cached by Luminary, and ensure that hosts receive the data to which they are accustomed. We have already implemented those changes for iOS and Android, and are working to retool web player settings.

No specifics have been given for the changes, but there are likely to be some more growing pains as the company navigates its service around the medium’s highest profile creators.

Wing, a nine-year-old, Silicon Valley venture firm co-founded by veteran VCs Peter Wagner and Gaurav Garg, produces interesting research about its own industry every now and then, based on a smaller data set than firms like Pitchbook or CB Insights tend to use. Instead of looking at funding activity broadly, the firm tracks deal-making at the top 21 venture firms in the U.S. to “really focus on the signal,” as Wagner has explained to us in the past. Last year, for example, the firm determined that the funding pullback that everyone was worried about had actually happened in 2016.

More recently, Wing has been tracking deal sizes, capturing the details of 6,205 financings of 2,982 companies invested in by one of those 21 firms over the last nine years to discern the ways in which rounds sizes are changing, and the results, while not shocking, are still eye-opening.

Starting with seed rounds, last year, says Wing, the average company had raised a total of $5.6 million prior to raising a Series A, up from $5.2 million in 2017. That’s a lot of seed capital, especially for people in the industry who might have been investing in 2010, when the average amount of seed funding for a startup before it moved on to its Series A round was $1.3 million.

With greater money comes greater expectations. According Wing’s analysis, the days of raising a Series A round without first generating revenue are almost over entirely, with 82 percent of companies that raised Series A rounds from top investors last year selling something or other to their customers. Again, for the old gangsters of the industry, that’s a big shift from 2010, when just 15 percent of seed-stage companies that raised Series A rounds were already making some money. Even in 2016, says Wing, just 56 percent of the startups to nab Series A funding were generating revenue.

It isn’t merely a matter of nomenclature, says Wager. Yes, he acknowledges, Series A rounds are now more like Series B rounds, a point at which startups have long been expected to generating revenue. And yes, companies are also operating as “seed-funded” operations longer than they used to be. (On average, companies now live off so-called seed funding for three years.)

But Wagner theorizes that VCs have changed, too, influenced in part by information they’ve gleaned from firms like Bessemer Venture Partners that produce data on SaaS metrics and and events like SaaStr Annual that are laser-focused on ways to measure growth. “We now have a whole cohort of investors who’ve come into the business and been trained to make investments based on ratios around growth potential and expansion factors, among many other things.”

There is also much more metrics-driven criteria being applied to the Series A rounds in part because the Series A has grown so much bigger, notes Wagner. Many of the top performing firms have raised bigger funds than ever before in recent years, and that has changed their “investment strike zone,” notes Wagner. This “battalion of metrics” gives them greater confidence that the great amounts of money they are putting to work is safe.

How much more money, exactly? Among these top firms, says Wing, the average Series A reached $15.7 million last year, up from $11.8 million in 2017 and way, way up from the $5.1 million that went into the average Series A round in 2010.

What does it mean and why does it matter? There are many implications, some of which will take years to play out, but most immediately, it would seem that the very definition of seed investor has or will need to change. Whereas angel investing was long a more casual endeavor, often for operators with other pursuits, the burden is now on seed-stage investors and funds to not only handle due diligence, help with early hiring, and find early syndicate partners, but to whip their portfolio companies into fighting, revenue-generating shape, as well. The bar is clearly moving higher; their skills sets need to evolve along with that shift.

Wing, a nine-year-old, Silicon Valley venture firm co-founded by veteran VCs Peter Wagner and Gaurav Garg, produces interesting research about its own industry every now and then, based on a smaller data set than firms like Pitchbook or CB Insights tend to use. Instead of looking at funding activity broadly, the firm tracks deal-making at the top 21 venture firms in the U.S. to “really focus on the signal,” as Wagner has explained to us in the past. Last year, for example, the firm determined that the funding pullback that everyone was worried about had actually happened in 2016.

More recently, Wing has been tracking deal sizes, capturing the details of 6,205 financings of 2,982 companies invested in by one of those 21 firms over the last nine years to discern the ways in which rounds sizes are changing, and the results, while not shocking, are still eye-opening.

Starting with seed rounds, last year, says Wing, the average company had raised a total of $5.6 million prior to raising a Series A, up from $5.2 million in 2017. That’s a lot of seed capital, especially for people in the industry who might have been investing in 2010, when the average amount of seed funding for a startup before it moved on to its Series A round was $1.3 million.

With greater money comes greater expectations. According Wing’s analysis, the days of raising a Series A round without first generating revenue are almost over entirely, with 82 percent of companies that raised Series A rounds from top investors last year selling something or other to their customers. Again, for the old gangsters of the industry, that’s a big shift from 2010, when just 15 percent of seed-stage companies that raised Series A rounds were already making some money. Even in 2016, says Wing, just 56 percent of the startups to nab Series A funding were generating revenue.

It isn’t merely a matter of nomenclature, says Wager. Yes, he acknowledges, Series A rounds are now more like Series B rounds, a point at which startups have long been expected to generating revenue. And yes, companies are also operating as “seed-funded” operations longer than they used to be. (On average, companies now live off so-called seed funding for three years.)

But Wagner theorizes that VCs have changed, too, influenced in part by information they’ve gleaned from firms like Bessemer Venture Partners that produce data on SaaS metrics and and events like SaaStr Annual that are laser-focused on ways to measure growth. “We now have a whole cohort of investors who’ve come into the business and been trained to make investments based on ratios around growth potential and expansion factors, among many other things.”

There is also much more metrics-driven criteria being applied to the Series A rounds in part because the Series A has grown so much bigger, notes Wagner. Many of the top performing firms have raised bigger funds than ever before in recent years, and that has changed their “investment strike zone,” notes Wagner. This “battalion of metrics” gives them greater confidence that the great amounts of money they are putting to work is safe.

How much more money, exactly? Among these top firms, says Wing, the average Series A reached $15.7 million last year, up from $11.8 million in 2017 and way, way up from the $5.1 million that went into the average Series A round in 2010.

What does it mean and why does it matter? There are many implications, some of which will take years to play out, but most immediately, it would seem that the very definition of seed investor has or will need to change. Whereas angel investing was long a more casual endeavor, often for operators with other pursuits, the burden is now on seed-stage investors and funds to not only handle due diligence, help with early hiring, and find early syndicate partners, but to whip their portfolio companies into fighting, revenue-generating shape, as well. The bar is clearly moving higher; their skills sets need to evolve along with that shift.