Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Sometimes, reading a lawsuit, it’s tempting to pick sides, to judge who is more right than wrong based on its contents. But a new lawsuit involving two venture-backed companies — both of which are rooted in machine intelligence — makes both sides sound surprisingly careless given their line of work.

The plaintiff is Quid, a now 12-year-old company that has raised roughly $108 million from investors, shows Crunchbase. Its newest, $38 million round closed in October, led by REV Ventures, the investment arm of LexisNexis owner RELX Group, and it included participation from some very heavy hitters, including Tiger Global founder Julian Robertson and KKR cofounder Henry Kravis.

Quid calls itself a “platform that searches, analyzes and visualizes the world’s collective intelligence to help answer strategic questions.” As company cofounder Bob Goodson has described the company, its software scours the internet, including company websites, news databases and social media postings to help its clients understand how their industries are changing.

What has Quid convening with lawyers —  including powerhouse attorney Patty Glaser (she has represented Harvey Weinstein, Kirk Kerkorian, and Conan O’Brien, among many others) — is small group of former employees who Quid says stole from the company to create a rival startup. That company, Primer.ai, says it “builds machines that can read and write, automating the analysis of very large datasets” in order to “accelerate” its understanding of the world, then sell those insights to clients in government, in finance, and to other companies.

It sounds similar, but Primer.ai – – founded four years ago in San Francisco and now venture-backed with $54.7 million, including from Lux Capital, Data Collective, and Avalon Ventures —  says it is fundamentally different than Quid. It says Quid’s product is a network-based data visualization and exploration tool, while it instead focuses on text-generation technologies using deep neural networks.

If there are actual trade secrets employed by Primer.ai that belong to Quid, it’s now for a judge to decide.  In the meantime, we rule the battle ridiculous sounding.

It’s a lot to read through, so we’ll just highlight some of the parts of this back and forth that we find particularly brow raising. Quid alleges corporate espionage that dates back to August 2014, saying the company told its then CTO — now Primer.ai founder – – Sean Gourley, that it wanted to let him go, but rather than terminate him,  it let him know he was going to be fired, then it asked him to stay with the company for five more months until it could close its next round of funding. On its face, that sounds . . .not smart, but Quid also insults Gourley’s intelligence in its legal complaint, which reads:

On June 23, 2008, Gourley joined [Quid precursor] You-Noodle pursuant to a consulting agreement where Gourley provided research, development and strategic advice to assist with creation of an earlier . iteration of the Quid platform known at “Startup Predictor.” After completion of this .consulting assignment, Gourley was offered and accepted a full-time position as Director of Data Tools, relocated to San Francisco and started employment in this capacity on November 1, 2009. On the same day, he executed his Confidentiality Agreement.

In September 2010, following the name change to Quid, Gourley was promoted to Chief Technology Officer and given the responsibility to direct a team of software engineers in the development of Quid’s next-generation platform. In January 2012, Gourley announced the new product ready for demonstration to Quid’s Board of Directors, but his presentation failed as the platform did not work as intended, and Gourley seemed to not comprehend its basic functionality. In the wake of this failed presentation, the Board demanded that changes in leadership and direction be made at the Company. Goodson stepped down as CEO and was tasked with sales and helping to reengineer the platform to get it back on track. With the benefit of new funding and the full-time efforts of a new Vice President of Engineering (who took over Gourley’s engineering responsibilities), the product deficiencies were corrected and Quid was able to release the product for commercial testing and use by late 2013.

By early August 2014, Quid’s new CEO, Kevin Freedman, saw no need to keep Gourley as a Quid employee but decided to maintain continuity by retaining Gourley until new investor funding—expected to be in place by mid-January 2015—could be secured. Accordingly, on or about August 8, 2014, Freedman proposed an arrangement to Gourley whereby he would be relieved of his position as CTO and would act as “Advisor to the CEO” until his effective termination date of January 15, 2015. Gourley accepted.

In short, Quid says, in its own complaint, that its cofounder and CEO, Bob Goodson, was demoted, then a new CEO who was brought in fired Gourley, the company’s CTO,  in what sounds like a completely knuckle-headed way. Unsurprisingly, a legal response since filed by Gourley — who, it’s probably worth noting, has a PhD in physics from Oxford — makes Gourley sound highly capable while painting the same picture of disorganization in Quid’s filing. Here’s Gourley version of events of that same period, taken from his response to Quid’s filing:

The board blamed CEO Bob Goodson for the lack of budgeting and demanded monthly financial reports. This was one of the primary topics in the January 16, 2012 board meeting where the consensus was that the business side of the company needed to be reformed. It was during this same meeting that Dr. Gourley demonstrated the functioning of Quid’s new software to the board. After the meeting, Mr. Goodson was demoted and relieved of his duties as CEO. The board then began the search
for a new CEO. Id. They located Kevin Freedman in February and he took the position in March 2014. Mr. Goodson was demoted to Chief Revenue Officer.

As for Dr. Gourley, far from “fail[ing]” as Quid suggests, on March 20, 2012 he presented the same technology he had presented to the board publicly at a “Data Driven NYC” event. The technology, which largely mirrors Quid’s functionality today, worked. Moreover, after Mr. Freedman was named CEO, Quid awarded Dr. Gourley a significant bonus and pay increase.

Despite the technical successes, Quid’s management remained a problem. Dr. Gourley decided to take action and in June 2014 met with the Chairman of the Board Charles Lho to discuss his concerns. While the board reviewed Mr. Freedman’s performance, Mr. Freedman decided to terminate Dr. Gourley. However, because Dr. Gourley was such an integral member of the company, they decided that the termination would be gradual so that he could continue to help Quid with sales and fundraising while seeking new projects.

Freeman was apparently fired eight weeks after firing Gourley and Neville Crawley, the company’s COO, was named CEO.

But whether Gourley is brilliant or was incapable of comprehending Quid’s technology seven years ago isn’t what’s really central to this fight anyway. The bigger question is whether Gourley, as Quid asserts, violated a confidentiality agreement with Quid by gathering up information, including Quid’s proprietary code, in the time after he was alerted he would be terminated. Quid’s big concern is that Gourley took and used it at Primer.ai, which also employs some former Quid employees who joined Gourley.

In fact, it’s out of fear that these trade secrets inform some of Primer.ai’s technology that Quid is asking a judge to put Primer.ai in a deep freeze while Quid tears through its assets. It says it only recently began suspecting Gourley after an IT manager at Quid last October discovered that Gourley- – over the four years following his Quid termination —  had repeatedly logged into the Quid computer network to “access Quid confidential data and use his Quid email address.”

From Quid’s filing:

This application is made on the grounds that Defendants —  all former employees of Plaintiff –accessed, copied, downloaded and made active use of trade secret and highly confidential  computer data of Plaintiff – both during and subsequent to their employment with plaintiff – all for  the purpose of benefitting their directly competing company Primer Technologies, Inc. (“Primer”) in the computer-generated analysis of large data collections. As set forth in the accompanying Ex  Parte Application, direct evidence confirms that Defendant Gourley – while still an employee of  Quid – repeatedly downloaded from Quid’s computer network a complete Google data archive of  his entire “Google Suite” of Quid accessible computer data including both his email and Google  drive, amounting to over 100,000 separate highly proprietary items at Quid, including source code  Thereafter, direct evidence also demonstrates that, during and subsequent to his Quid  employment, Defendant Gourley with the active assistance of the other Individual Defendants used his Quid email address for the purpose of soliciting and diverting business opportunities intended  for Quid to his new directly competing entity thereby enabling Primer to receive funding and  customers otherwise intended for Quid’s benefit. All of this conduct occurred in direct violation of  each of the Individual Defendants’ contractual commitments – – continuously in place until this very  day – – to preserve during employment and immediately return upon employment termination all Proprietary Information at Quid.

Here’s the thing, though: Quid — which, again, is an machine intelligence company — says it only stumbled into this discovery after Gourley was finally cut off from his Quid email account and asked Goodson (who was reinstated as CEO in late 2016) if he could continue to access it.

According to Quid’s complaint, Gourley told Goodson that he had personal communications and photos stored with the account, among other things. Goodson didn’t direct that the account be reinstated, however, and several months later, according to Quid’s complaint, a forensic team discovered “Gourley’s downloads of the 86 python source code files,” adding that “Quid continues to investigate the full scope of Gourley’s source code theft.”

We don’t have a horse in this race, and obviously, if Quid is proven right in its allegations that Gourley stole from the company while an employee of afterward, there should be appropriate consequences. We appreciate that there’s much on line for both parties, particularly given the opportunity ahead of each.

Still, Quid’s own complaint reveals much about how little the company had buttoned down over the years. In the meantime, Gourley insists that he has done nothing wrong and that Primer.ai is currently in the middle of its own forensic analysis to ensure as much. Relatedly, he says it was known to Quid management for years that was still accessing his Quid email, including because he was working for them on commission and communicating with them on it.  As for those communications he’d wanted to retrieve, Gourley says some were his last email exchanges with his mother, who has since passed away.

Here are all the filings we’ve seen thus far. We’ll keep an eye out and let you know how this story develops.

Quid Motion by TechCrunch on Scribd

Primer Corrected PI Opp (004) by TechCrunch on Scribd

4. Gourley Declaration by TechCrunch on Scribd

Google today announced that Google+ in G Suite, the last remaining remnants of what was once Google’s attempt to rival Facebook and Twitter, will now be called Currents. We don’t need to belabor the fact that Google+ was a flop and that its death was probably long overdue. We’ve done that. Now it’s time to look ahead and talk about what’s next for Currents. To do that, I sat down with David Thacker, the VP of Product Management for G Suite, at Google’s Cloud Next conference.

As Thacker told me, Google has shifted its resources to have the former Google+ team focus on Currents instead. But before we get to what that teams plans to do, let’s talk about the name first. Currents, after all, was also the name of the predecessor of Google Play Newsstand, the app that was the predecessor of the Google News app.

The official line is that “Currents” is meant to evoke the flow of information. Thacker also noted that the team did a lot of research around the name and that it had “very low recognition.” I guess that’s fair. It also allows Google to reuse an old trademark without having to jump through too many hoops. Since the Google+ name obviously now carries some baggage, changing the name makes sense anyway. “The enterprise version is distinct and separate now and it was causing confusion among our customers,” said Thacker.

“This allows us to do new things and move much faster in the enterprise,” Thacker explained. “To run a consumer social network at the scale of consumer G+ requires a lot of resources and efforts, as you can imagine. And that’s partially the reason we decided to sunset that product, as we just didn’t feel it was worth that investment given the user base on that. But it basically frees up that team to focus on the enterprise vision.”

Now, however, with consumer G+ gone, the company is going to invest in Currents. “We’re moving consumer resources into the enterprise,” he said.

The plan here clearly isn’t to just let Currents linger but to improve it for business users. And while Google has never publicly shared user numbers, Thacker argues that those businesses that do use it tend to use it expensively. The hope, though, surely, is to increase that number — whatever it may be — significantly over time. “If you look at our top G Suite customers, most of them use the product actively as a way to connect really broad organizations,” Thacker said.

Thacker also noted that this move now removes a lot of constraints since the team doesn’t have to think about consumer features anymore. “When Google+ was first designed, it was never designed for that [enterprise] use case, but organizations had the same need to break down silos and help spread ideas and knowledge in their company,” Thacker explained. “So while Google+ didn’t succeed as a consumer product, it will certainly live on in the enterprise.”

What will that future look like? As Thacker told me, the team started with revamping the posting workflow, which was heavily focused on image sharing, for example, which isn’t exactly all that important in a business context.

But there are other features the team is planning to launch, too, including better analytics. “Analytics is a really important part of it,” said Thacker. “When people are posting on Currents, whether it’s executives trying to engage their employee base, they want to see how that’s resonating. And so we built in some pretty rich analytics.”

The team also built a new set of administrative controls that help manage how organizations can control and manage their usage of Currents.

Going forward then, we may actually see a bit of innovation in Currents — something that was sorely lacking from Google+ while it was lingering in limbo. Google Cloud’s CEO Thomas Kurian told me that he wants to make collaboration one of his focus areas. Currents is an obvious fit there, and there are plenty of ways to integrate it with the rest of G Suite still.

Silicon Valley may have dealt with some rough hubris throughout the saga of Theranos, but Hollywood is basking in its downfall.

Weeks after the premiere of an HBO documentary chronicling Elizabeth Holmes’s grand blood-testing charade and in the midst of development of a film starring Jennifer Lawrence, Hulu has ordered its own Theranos limited series starring Kate McKinnon based on ABC Radio’s hit podcast series on Theranos, The Dropout.

The podcast, which debuted in January, followed the rise and fall of Stanford dropout Elizabeth Holmes’ Theranos, which raised roughly $900 million in venture capital before reality caught up with its unbelievable claims and the company dissolved into chaos and criminal charges.

With SNL mainstay Kate McKinnon donning the black turtleneck, one can only wonder what demeanor she will bring the easily-parodied Holmes character. McKinnon recently co-starred in Ghostbusters and has been a cast member on Saturday Night Live since 2012.

The series is expected to be 6-10 episodes, according to Deadline. The podcast’s producers Taylor Dunn and Victoria Thompson will be producers on the miniseries.

DARPA wants to be able to launch anywhere, any time, and several times in a row. Is that too much to ask? Not for Vector Space, Virgin Orbit, and an unnamed startup that just qualified to take place in the agency’s Launch Challenge, which will push their responsive and mobile launch capabilities to the limit.

In the challenge, the teams will be notified that they need to launch a payload to orbit from a given location only days beforehand. After doing so, they will then be told a second location from which they must launch again just days later. The winning team will receive up to $12M, with $11M and $10M available to the runners up, depending on how they perform.

Speaking at the 35th Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, DARPA program manager Todd Master announced the three companies that would be taking part in the competition, which the agency announced around this time last year. Interestingly, none of them has yet put a payload into orbit.

These are the potential locations for launches.

Vector Space recently raised $70M to pursue the first orbital launch of its Vector-R rocket and get manufacturing started at its Tucson facility. Its goal, to provide short-turnaround micro-launch services at a cadence measured in weeks.

Virgin Orbit — technically VOX Space — has a 747-based first stage that takes the two-stage rocket up to launch altitude, an assisted-launch strategy that has worked well for small payloads in the past. It may also be a uniquely good fit for this particular challenge, given that mobility of the rocket and payload are inherent to the aircraft first stage style.

The last company has requested anonymity for now, as it is still operating in stealth mode. I thought at first it might actually be Stealth, which is in fact a launch startup currently in stealth mode, but it could just as easily be one of the unknown number of companies quietly working on launch tech.

Each company received $400,000 for qualifying and making sure they’re legal (each needs FAA permission, among other things). The launches will take place sometime in 2020; A prize of $2M is available to each team that gets the first payload into the air, then $10M, $9M, and $8M prizes are available for completing the second task. They’ll be judged on a variety of metrics.

All told that’s somewhere around $34,000,000 up for grabs. Of course, it will probably cost more than that to accomplish what DARPA asks. But that’s kind of how these competitions work.

We’ll know more when DARPA gives us more. Obviously we won’t know the dates of the launch until they are announced, but it’ll be some time before that happens (these companies need to finish their launch vehicles) so you can relax for now. Unless you work at one of the participating teams, in which case get cracking.

When you buy cryptocurrencies on Coinbase, many users simply don’t know what to do with them. Customers in the U.K. can now get a good old plastic card and spend cryptocurrencies in-store and on any online website.

This is a Visa card so it should work with any merchant on the Visa network. The company is launching a separate mobile app called Coinbase Card to manage your cryptocurrency balances. For instance, you’ll be able to choose whether you want to use your Bitcoin, Ethereum or Litecoin balance with your card.

The app supports any cryptocurrency currently available on Coinbase. There’s no need to transfer crypto assets from the main Coinbase app to the Coinbase Card app — the card grabs cryptocurrencies directly from your Coinbase account.

The card supports contactless payments as well as ATM withdrawals. Transactions appear instantly in the app with the details of the exchange rate.

Now let’s talk about fees. Ordering a card costs £4.95 ($6.50) — the first 1,000 customers can get it for free. Each transactions costs 2.49 percent in fees — 1.49 percent in conversion fee and 1 percent in transaction fee. If you spend money in other European countries, it costs 2.69 percent in fee. Outside of Europe, it costs 5.49 percent per transaction — maybe you should consider using another card in this situation.

The chargeback processing fee is quite expensive as well as it costs £20 ($26.20). There’s no maintenance fee, no additional cost for ATM withdrawals as long as you withdraw less than £200 per month.

Behind the scene, Paysafe is issuing the card. Apto Payments, the company formerly known as Shift Payments, is developing the Coinbase Card app. You may remember that Coinbase previously partnered with Shift Payments to issue a card in the U.S. But you can’t get a Coinbase card in the U.S. anymore.

Eventually, Coinbase plans to roll out the Coinbase Card in other European countries.

Democratic lawmakers have proposed a bill to address the algorithmic biases lurking under the surface of tech’s biggest platforms. The bill, known as the Algorithmic Accountability Act, was introduced by Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR), Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Representative Yvette Clarke (D-NY) will sponsor parallel legislation in the House.

The bill is well timed. Over the last month alone, Facebook found itself settling over discriminatory practices that affected job ads as well as drawing civil charges from the Department of Housing and Urban Development over similar issues with its housing ad targeting tools. The present bill targets companies that make more than $50 million a year, though any company holding data on more than one million users would be subject to its requirements.

Like yesterday’s proposed Senate bill addressing dark pattern design, the Algorithmic Accountability Act (PDF) routes its regulatory specifics through the Federal Trade Commission. Under the bill, the FTC could require companies to perform “impact assessments” on their own algorithmic decision-making systems. Those assessment would assess potential consequences for “accuracy, fairness, bias, discrimination, privacy and security” within automated systems and companies would be required to correct any issues they uncovered during the process.

In a statement on the proposed legislation, Booker denounced discriminatory tech practices that lead to “houses that you never know are for sale, job opportunities that never present themselves, and financing that you never become aware of.”

“This bill requires companies to regularly evaluate their tools for accuracy, fairness, bias, and discrimination,” Booker said.

Bias on tech’s major platforms is a hot topic right now, though the political parties are approaching the issue from very different vantage points. Just today, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution held a hearing chaired by Senator Ted Cruz, who led Republicans in repeating recent unsubstantiated allegations that Facebook and Twitter disproportionately punish users on the right.

Democrats for their part have been more interested in the off-platform implications of algorithmic bias.

“By requiring large companies to not turn a blind eye towards unintended impacts of their automated systems, the Algorithmic Accountability Act ensures 21st Century technologies are tools of empowerment, rather than marginalization, while also bolstering the security and privacy of all consumers,” Rep. Clarke said.

The impending wave of San Francisco tech IPOs is substantial and will influence San Francisco real estate, but the hype about its impact is likely overblown. In particular, despite being centered on San Francisco instead of Silicon Valley, its impact is still likely to diffuse throughout the broader Bay Area. Rather than breaking with the past, the current wave of IPOs is likely to reinforce existing trends: undulating but maintained pressure on the gas pedal, not an abrupt kickdown.

Lyft’s recent offering, combined with a series of anticipated IPOs this year — headlined by Uber, Airbnb, Pinterest, Slack, Zoom and others — has prompted numerous alarming headlines suggesting a coming flood of stock-enriched home buyers. “[E]ven conservative estimates predict hundreds of billions of dollars will flood into town in the next year, creating thousands of new millionaires,” reports The New York Times. “And they want houses,” warns the report, quoting a real estate agent promising investors that single-family homes in the city selling for a mere one to three million dollars will soon be a thing of the past.

The estimated value of the companies going public sums up to about $200 billion, and their combined San Francisco workforce probably ranges somewhere from 10,000 to 15,000. But does that mean 15,000 new home buyers will descend on the City of San Francisco in 2019 and spend $200 billion on homes? Certainly not, for several reasons.

Employees’ share of the pie is but a fraction. Investors, founders and a few key executives usually own the lion’s share of stock before an IPO. The Information estimates that as of late 2017, only 17 percent of Uber shares were in the hands of employees (excluding its founder and two other key executives).*

The vast concentration of wealth going to investors, founders and key executives may result in a handful of grand estates exchanging hands, but it generally won’t find its way into the Bay Area’s common housing stock. If we conservatively take 25 percent of $200 billion to be employees’ share, we arrive at a $50 billion figure, but that too is an overestimate of the employees’ likely windfall in the wake of the offerings.

Most employee equity hasn’t fully vested, stock options need to be exercised and taxes need to be paid. Employees’ initial equity grants typically vest over a four-year period. Given the rapid growth of these companies over the past few years, most employees are relatively new and their equity grants won’t fully vest for years. Uber, for example, had about 5,000 employees in San Francisco in early 2018 — but in 2014, it had only 550 employees in total (not just in the Bay Area).

At best, those employees that joined more recently will have only a fraction of their full equity grant available to sell this year, diminishing their immediate buying power (and if the past is a good indication, many won’t stay long enough to see the full equity grant vest). In addition, many employees obtain their equity in the form of stock options, and for all but the earliest employees the strike price is not negligible, i.e. an employee exercising an option and selling $100 worth of stock will generally pocket far less. Finally, employees must pay tax on their IPO windfall, keeping yet another slice of it out of the housing market.

Not everyone receiving an IPO windfall will buy a home. Those compelled by the windfall to purchase a home in the next few years — and who wouldn’t have done so otherwise — are likely a small subset of the total employee pool. Suppose they number 5,000 and each buys a home during the next three years: That’s about 2 percent of the 243,575 homes purchased in the Bay Area over the past three years. Also: Some of these firms’ employees own homes already. And some employees may not want to buy a home: Maybe their personal life is in flux, maybe they appreciate the freedom of renting or maybe they would like to use the IPO cash for other purposes (ever dream of bootstrapping a startup?).

The IPOs won’t happen all at once, and many would-be buyers won’t buy immediately. Among those compelled to buy a home, many will wait: For the hype to pass, for their partner to say “yes” or for their second child to fully illustrate the inadequacy of their rent-controlled two-bedroom. And the IPOs themselves aren’t all going to happen on the same day either. In fact, part of the 2019 wave is already anticipated to take place in 2020.

A large portion of IPO-enriched home buyers will seek homes outside the city. Despite the stereotypes, not all San Francisco tech workers are young, city-dwelling millennials living nearby. Downtown San Francisco and adjacent SOMA (where the wave of IPOs is headquartered) are arguably within the single most accessible section of the Bay Area, drawing commuters from throughout the region. The immediate housing impact of the IPO windfall will extend in all possible directions: South along the San Francisco Peninsula, north along the ferry lines to Marin County and east past Oakland and Berkeley to the I-680 corridor. And the secondary impacts — those that occur if and when those selling to IPO-enriched buyers use the proceeds to make another home purchase — will extend even farther, diffusing the housing component of the IPO windfall throughout the region.

Newly wealthy employees are likely to bid up home prices only to a certain point. An early employee with $10 million in newfound wealth might decide to pay $4 million to ensure they get what is otherwise a $3 million home. But they probably won’t put down the full $10 million, because even very wealthy people don’t like to give away money. And despite this buyer’s personal $10 million infusion of wealth, it’s only the $1 million difference between the IPO-driven buyer’s bid and the price that would have been obtained otherwise that fuels appreciation.

Some spectacular bidding wars could make headlines when IPO-fueled buyers compete for homes against each other, but they will most often be competing with everyday buyers, and while they may have more resources to bring to bear, they won’t be eager to spend more than they must.

IPO-driven buyers will add an affluent but small contingent to the Bay Area buyer pool and they will help support the Bay Area’s ongoing price appreciation — perhaps even substantially — but they will be extending a long history of price appreciation in which IPOs have played a part, not breaking from it. Between 1970 and 2017 there were 1,987 IPOs by California-based companies, with a large share being in the Bay Area. The scale of the current wave of IPOs, although it is exceedingly large, is not very different from Facebook’s in terms of home-buying power. After its 2012 IPO, Facebook was valued at $104 billion — but because Bay Area housing prices have roughly doubled since, that’s equivalent to the same home-buying power as $200 billion-plus today.**

The underlying cause of concern around this latest IPO surge and housing — the long-term erosion of housing affordability in the Bay Area — is serious. But the wise way of mitigating the upward pressure of the IPO wave on home prices is not to stoke fear of it, and certainly not to demonize the employees rewarded for creating it. Indeed, IPOs are just one of many ways in which wealth arrives in the Bay Area. Instead, the wisest course is “simply” to add more homes, allowing the local housing stock to accommodate more people — the well-heeled and less well-off alike.

The short-term fears of an IPO wave flooding San Francisco with cash are overblown, but the long-term fears of the Bay Area failing to accommodate people and growing unaffordable to all but the most affluent — those fears are very real.

* Part of the reason current IPO valuations are so high is that IPOs are currently taking place later in the company life cycle, at which point employee equity tends to constitute a decreased fraction of the total.

** To put that $200 billion number into perspective, consider that only a small fraction of that wealth will find its way into the housing market — for the reasons spelled out here — and that as of 2018, residential real estate in the Bay Area was worth a total of about $2.38 trillion.

GoDaddy is making it easier for small businesses to list their products across Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Jet and Walmart.com today with the launch of GoDaddy Marketplaces.

As part of the launch, GoDaddy is also announcing that it’s acquired Sellbrite, the company whose technology is powering these new capabilities.

Greg Goldfarb, GoDaddy’s vice president of products, e-commerce and customer engagement, said the companies were already working together to create and test out the marketplace feature.

“As we proceeded through partnership, we got more and more convinced that it was a great fit, people-wise, experience- and product-wise,” Goldfarb told me.

While GoDaddy may still be best known as a domain registrar and web hosting company, it’s been expanding in recent years with a number of small business tools, including its GoCentral website builder. Goldfarb said that anyone running a GoCentral online store will now be able to sell their products on other marketplaces with just a few clicks, and also connect their existing marketplace listings to GoCentral.

“At this point, we’ve got the broadest capability in terms of how many marketplaces you can connect your online store too, and really the broadest and easiest-to-use capability across the website category,” he said.

He contrasted this to other website-building products, which are “really focused on their own sites and don’t enable connectivity to marketplaces.” Meanwhile, other e-commerce platforms might promise similar capabilities, but they “don’t offer connectivity out of the box” like GoCentral does.

“They viewed the ability to connect to marketplaces as an add-on,” he said. “Although they know it’s important … they do it as a plugin.”

Sellbrite co-founder and CEO Brian Nolan added that his team will be working to integrate Sellbrite more broadly “across the whole GoDaddy product,” while also serving existing customers with an standalone product. He also said that he and the entire Sellbrite team (of just under 20 people) will be joining GoDaddy.

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Amazon has acquired Boulder, Colo.-based warehouse robotics startup Canvas Technology, TechCrunch has learned. The deal makes a lot of sense from the outside, adding another important piece to Amazon Robotics’ growing portfolio of fulfillment center machines.

Amazon confirmed the acquisition with TechCrunch. “We are inspired by Canvas Technology’s innovations, and share a common vision for a future where people work alongside robotics to further improve safety and the workplace experience,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “We look forward to working with Canvas Technology’s fantastic team to keep inventing for customers.”

Founded in 2015, Canvas has already showcased some impressive technologies, including a fully autonomous cart system that positions the startup as a direct competitor with the likes of Bay Area-based Fetch. The startup raised a $15 million Series A led by Playground Global.

The Canvas Autonomous Cart was on display at Playground’s open house roughly this time last year, doing an impressive job avoiding people and obstacles in the crowded space. The system utilizes 3D imaging and an in-house software solution that can be applied to other hardware — essentially operating like a self-driving car in a warehouse setting.

Canvas should make a nice addition to Amazon Robots’ offerings. The division was created after the company’s 2012 acquisition of Kiva Systems, whose shelving robotics now serve as a kind of robotic epicenter to Amazon’s many fulfillment centers.

On our recent tour of the company’s JFK8 in Staten Island, the company noted that it currently has some 100,000 systems deployed across 25 fulfillment centers. That number is a combination of Amazon’s own systems, along with devices from third parties, including Japanese industrial giant, Fanuc. Clearly, however, the company is looking to put its own stamp on the systems going forward in a push to increase delivery efficiency through automation.

Safety has been a big factor, as well. It always is with these sorts of collaborative robotics, of course, but Amazon’s fulfillment centers have a built-in extra layer of scrutiny. Earlier this year we got a sneak peek at the company’s robotic safety vest, designed to give employees an added layer of protection when entering the fenced-off section of the floor that sports the Kiva systems.

Canvas, on the other hand, brings its own built-in safety with its autonomous vision system. The hardware is designed to more directly interact with workers on the floor. It’s easier to imagine the company adopting the technology for some of its existing systems, as well.

Notably, Canvas co-founder and CTO Nima Keivan will be onstage at our Robotics + AI event next week in Berkeley, where he will no doubt be able to provide some extra insight for his robotics startup panel.

Bump, the Y Combinator-backed marketplace for streetwear, is announcing that it has raised $7.5 million in Series A funding.

Bump’s Jack Ryder told me that even before starting the company, he and his co-founder Sam Howarth were active in buying and selling streetwear and sneakers — but he admitted that it took several tries before the startup found the right model. (He described a previous iteration, involving a reverse marketplace where people post the items they’re interested in buying, as “the world’s worst idea.”)

Now, however, Ryder said Bump has nearly 2 million registered users. It allows them to buy and sell jackets, T-shirt, sneakers and more among themselves. They can sort through the marketplace based on brand, color and size, and can chat one-on-one or in groups.

The startup it relies on moderators and crowdsourcing to determine when a listing looks fake — apparently there have been issues with less than 2 percent of listings in the app, and Ryder said most of the time it’s just young, inexperienced sellers “who didn’t understand how to ship the item.”

Ryder sees Bump’s social side as the real opportunity for growth. While he said the startup still has “tons of room in streetwear to keep going,” he suggested that the “bigger and more important mission” is to turns online shopping into “a multi-player experience.”

“There’s tons of places where you can buy streetwear online … but the real unique thing about Bump was the social side,” he said. “The average age of our users is 15 years old — that’s actually way younger than the demographic of people interested in sneakers and streetwear. The problem we’re solving isn’t making it easier to buy streetwear; it’s how teenagers, how Gen Z shops with their friends online.”

Ryder said that when he was at YC, he was told to shy away from the idea of social shopping, because there’s “almost like a graveyard” of failed startups. In his view, however, those startups were just “adding a like button or adding a follow button,” rather than really bringing the social and shopping experiences together.

Meanwhile, Instagram and other social networks have been adding shopping capabilities, but he said they face the need to juggle different kinds of content and users.

“We think people are getting a way better shopping experience [on Bump], just because it’s a marketplace first,” Ryder said.

With the new round, Bump plans to relocate from New York to London, where it already employs some contractors, and where Ryder and Howarth were initially based.

The funding was led by e.ventures, with the firm’s Brendan Wales joining the Bump board. Kleiner Perkins, Y Combinator and undisclosed angel investors also participated.

“Having been early investors in both Farfetch and TheRealReal, we have seen firsthand how luxury and streetwear have converged over the past five years,” said Wales said in a statement. “Bump is at the intersection of both, with a social product that enables Gen Z buyers and sellers of high-end streetwear to transact globally in a peer-to-peer fashion. Jack and Sam of Bump, exemplify founder authenticity for this category, and we are grateful to be partnering with the entire team going forward.”