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Bye bye, Altaba . The Yahoo spinout created to house Yahoo’s lucrative stake in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan, announced today that it will sell its lucrative stake in Alibaba and shut up shop.

The entity has long existed as a proxy to Alibaba — some might argue Yahoo was the same in its final years — and the sale is expected to net shareholders around $40 billion.

Altaba was formed following AOL’s 2017 acquisition of Yahoo to create Oath — disclaimer: that’s TechCrunch’s parent, and it is now called Verizon Media Group — to keep hold of the 15 percent stake in Alibaba and a 35.5 percent stake in Yahoo Japan that Yahoo owned.

Those Yahoo Japan shares were unloaded in September for over $4 billion, and now Altaba will shift its remaining Alibaba holdings — that’s around 11 percent of the company following a partial sale last year; Altaba is Alibaba’s second-largest stakeholder — and disappear from the world by Q4.

The sale is expected to generate a net return of around $40 billion for Altaba stockholders — the provided range is between $39.8 billion and $41.1 billion based on share prices and associated expenditure — and it’ll happen in two parts. The first will see up to 50 percent of the stake sold, the rest will be traded if Altaba receives approval from its stockholders.

Therein Altaba — and Yahoo’s long association — with Alibaba will be over. The reality is that this essentially happened following the Oath deal, Altaba was merely created to hold the asset and at some point that would mean liquidating it. That day is now confirmed and on its way.

“Since June of 2017 we have taken a series of aggressive actions designed to drive shareholder value and these have yielded measurable results as our trading discount has narrowed and our stock has meaningfully outperformed a composite of its underlying assets. The right next action for shareholders is the plan we are announcing today as it represents the most definitive step, generally within our control, that we could take to reduce the discount to net asset value at which our Shares trade,” said Altaba CEO Thomas J. McInerney in a statement.

“Stocks are for trading. Any shareholder has the right to deal stock anytime on the market, for any purpose. We’re happy to have had Yahoo invest in Alibaba in the past and to see it now collecting a strong return on its investment,” an Alibaba spokesperson told TechCrunch.

The story of Yahoo’s involvement with Alibaba is a legendary one.

Yahoo invested $1 billion for 30 percent Alibaba back in 2005 through a (now famous) story between Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and Alibaba president Jack Ma. Ma, a former English teacher who was then a government employee, was assigned to accompany Yang on a planned trip to see the Great Wall of China and their relationship went from there.

Yahoo infamously sold half of its stake back to Alibaba in 2012 through a deal that valued the shares at $13. Just two years later, Alibaba went public in a record-breaking U.S. IPO. Shares were $68 at the bell, and today they are worth around $181 so Yahoo missed out on an even greater fortune.

What happens when you’re working behind the scene with French President Emmanuel Macron and you suddenly become a minister? This is what’s happening to Cédric O this week who was appointed Minister for the Digital Economy on Sunday. I was the first journalist to interview him after his appointment.

While Cédric O has been talking with the French tech ecosystem for years, he usually stays away from cameras and microphones. At the Elysée, he was in charge of France’s stakes in companies and tech in general. I wrote about many of the things he’s been working on.

He invited 50 tech CEOs to meet with Emmanuel Macron and talk about ‘tech for good’. He invited dozens of venture capitalists and limited partners to Paris to convince them to invest more in the French tech ecosystem. He convinced Facebook to let French regulators investigate on moderation processes. And yet, you can’t find his name anywhere.

Now that he’s under the spotlight, the public figure of all things technology, it’s important to understand his views. Tech regulation is going to be a cornerstone of the economy and the fabric of society — and he has strong feelings about it.

Regulating big tech

For some reason, most of our conversation ended up being about regulating tech companies. On this topic, Cédric O has a subtle stance that involves cooperation between European countries, a clear regulatory framework and a new type of regulator. He doesn’t necessarily want to break them up.

“Platforms have to implement regulation in one way of another. And I completely agree with Mark Zuckerberg’s op-ed,” Cédric O told me. “Platforms shouldn't write laws about what's legal or not. However, they are responsible when it comes to implementing regulation and getting results.”

According to him, Zuckerberg shouldn’t write laws and French regulators shouldn’t focus on content. It should all be about moderating processes.

“It's just like banking regulators. They check that banks have implemented systems that are efficient, and they audit those systems. I think that's how we should think about it.”

And he also says that it isn't (just) about deleting content. Social networks should also make sure that they don't delete content that isn't supposed to be deleted.

In a perfect world, Cédric O thinks there should be a central repository so that social networks can query the status of a specific post.

“For instance, when Marine Le Pen publishes a video of an ISIS slaughter, there should be a repository that isn't necessarily managed by a public administration. Platforms could query that repository and get a status very quickly,” Cédric O said.

You could imagine a neutral repository built by multiple platforms. Of course, that wouldn’t solve all the issues we have seen with the Christchurch terrorist attack. Many people re-uploaded the live stream with slight edits so that it wouldn’t be detected as a duplicate.

When it comes to French regulators, Cédric O says that nothing is set in stone yet. The CSA could gain some new responsibilities, or the ARCEP, or maybe multiple regulators could work together. And it’s unclear where the Hadopi would fit in all of this. Eventually the French government wants to improve regulation at a European level.

In all cases, Cédric O doesn’t want to rush things. Before implementing a new regulatory framework, the government needs to understand how social networks moderate content. French regulators have worked with Facebook to understand how Facebook’s processes work. The final report is coming soon.

Reaching new highs

Over the past few weeks, a handful of French startups have raised mega–rounds of funding, sometimes reaching unicorn status. This shouldn’t come as a surprise if you’ve been following the French tech ecosystem over the years. But Cédric O thinks he needs to improve the image of the tech industry in France because it has a bad reputation.

“The first question I received [at the parliament] was about digital inclusion. They were blaming the French Tech with something I hear a lot: ‘Startups are nice but it's not real life,’” Cédric O said in a speech at La French Tech in Paris.

“There's one thing we need to change and it's going to be my message for the coming days — the french tech ecosystem is important. If we want our children, our grand children to get jobs, we can’t do it without startups.”

Depending on the study, France and the U.K. are battling to be the first European country when it comes to the number of VC deals and the total amount of money raised. France also has some of the best engineering schools in the world. Evidence of this lies in all the French data scientists and AI experts who work in some of the biggest tech companies in Silicon Valley.

But if you look at French public companies, the vast majority of them have been created way before the internet and personal computers.

“[At the Elysée], I was a lot more worried for France's stakes in big companies than startups," Cédric O said. Over the morning, he kept repeating the same number. Nearly 50 percent of net job creations in the U.S. are related to the tech industry.”

“We give them the power. That’s the bad part. We buy their products. We sign up for these websites. Delete Facebook, right?”

That’s WhatsApp founder Brian Acton’s most recent quote about his former employer Facebook. Acton has seemingly been fueled by his experience running WhatsApp from within Facebook, which has been scrutinized for profiting from collecting data on users.

Which explains why now, two years after leaving Facebook, Acton has found a new groove as founder and executive chairman of the Signal Technology Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to doing the foundational work around making private communication accessible, secure and ubiquitous. Acton invested $50 million of his own money to start Signal Foundation in February of 2018.

At TechCrunch Disrupt SF in October, we’ll hear more from Acton about Signal Foundation and his predictions for the future of communication and privacy. And, of course, we’ll try to learn more about what Facebook was up to with WhatsApp, why he left, and how it felt leaving $850 million on the table.

Though he was rejected for positions at Facebook and Twitter in 2009, Acton is actually a Silicon Valley veteran, working in the industry (mostly as a software builder) for more than 25 years at places like Apple, Yahoo, and Adobe before founding WhatsApp.

The chat app he built with co-founder Jan Koum grew to 1.5 billion users and, eventually, saw a $19 billion buyout from Mark Zuckerberg in 2014. But when Facebook wanted to lay the basis for targeted ads and commercial messaging within the encrypted chat app he’d spent years building, he walked away.

The Signal Foundation is all about ensuring people have access to private communication that doesn’t cost their own personal data.

“We believe there is an opportunity to act in the public interest and make a meaningful contribution to society by building sustainable technology that respects users and does not rely on the commoditization of personal data,” Acton wrote when it was first announced. In many ways, the Signal Foundation is a symbol and a continuation of Acton’s most expensive moral stand.

We’re thrilled to hear from Acton about what’s next at Signal Foundation. We’ll also try to learn more about his exit at Facebook and his feelings about the products he spent so much time building there.

After all, unsavvy regulators, legions of competitors, and user backlash have all failed to compel Facebook to treat people better. But the real power lies with the talent that tech giants fight over. When people like Acton speak up or walk out, employers are forced to listen.

“No filter” is Acton’s style, so get ready for some fireworks when we sit down with him on stage at Disrupt SF.

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

Nvidia is partnering with TechCrunch Sessions: Robotics + AI to host a pre-conference workshop at UC Berkeley on April 17 titled Deep Learning for Robotics.

In this eight-hour, instructor-led workshop you’ll get an overview of the Robot Operating System(ROS) and its associated architecture, followed by hands-on simulation and coding experience using a live GPU-accelerated environment. At the end of completing your assessment, you’ll get an Nvidia Deep Learning Institute certificate. Learn more about the workshop here.

Learning Objectives

• Learn the general ROS paradigm of messages passing between nodes
• Learn to work with the robotic development workflow by taking a hands-on approach to simulation, development and deployment using a Gazebo simulator
• Learn to integrate an object detection inference model, trained with DIGITS, into a ROS network to build autonomous behavior for a Jetson-based robot

Why Deep Learning Institute Hands-on Training?

• Learn how to build deep learning and accelerated computing applications across a wide range of industry segments, such as autonomous vehicles, digital content creation, finance, game development, healthcare and more
• Benefit from guided hands-on experience using the widely used, industry-standard software, tools and frameworks
• Gain real-world expertise through content designed in collaboration with industry leaders such as the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, Mayo Clinic and PwC
• Earn a DLI certificate to demonstrate your subject matter competency and support professional career growth
• Access content anywhere, anytime with a fully configured, GPU-accelerated workstation in the cloud

Prerequisites:
Experience with deep neural networks (specifically variations of CNNs) and intermediate-level experience Python. Knowledge of Linux and C++ is helpful but not required.

Tickets are on sale now for $299 (normally $500) for this immersive workshop. Seating is limited, book your ticket today before we sell out.

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What: Nvidia Deep Learning for Robotics Workshop
When: April 17, 2019
Duration: 8 hours, 10:00am – 6:00pm
Where: UC Berkeley, CA
Type: In-person, instructor-led workshop
Cost: $299
Tools, Libraries, Frameworks: ROS, GAZEBO simulator, NVIDIA DIGITS

Raising venture capital isn’t easy; for some, it’s impossible.

Clearbanc offers startups a fundraising alternative — despite itself being well-capitalized by VCs — and is today launching a new campaign to back 2,000 businesses with $1 billion in non-dilutive capital by the end of 2019.

“Everyone is watching this flurry of tech IPOs this year, but no one is talking about how little of these companies the founders actually own,” Clearbanc co-founder and president Michele Romanow told TechCrunch. “Our vision is if Clearbanc is successful, there’s a world where founders can own a much greater percentage when they IPO.”

Here’s how Clearbanc’s new campaign ‘The 20-Min Term Sheet’ works: Clearbanc invests $10,000 to $10 million in ecommerce businesses with positive ad spend and positive unit economics after Clearbanc’s algorithm has reviewed the startup’s marketing and revenue data. Clearbanc sends the cash within 48 hours, doesn’t take a board seat or require a personal guarantee and continually invests in the company as it scales, so long as those two key metrics — ad spend and unit economics — remain positive.

Here’s the catch: Until the company has paid back 106 percent of Clearbanc’s investment, Clearbanc takes a percentage of the company’s revenue every month, depending on the size of the investment. If you have a higher margin business, like say a digital fitness app, and you’re willing to divert 20 percent of your monthly revenue, Clearbanc will invest a larger sum right off the bat.

The entire process takes 20 minutes, hence the name, a whole lot faster than the time it takes a typical VC to close a deal. But a VC may spend months researching a category and debating the potential of an investment. Clearbanc is cutting that process out entirely, relying on just two metrics and an algorithm.

Romanow, who made a name for herself as an angel investor on the Canadian version of Shark Tank, the Dragons’ Den, tells TechCrunch she and co-founder and chief executive officer Andrew D’Souza recognize the risk associated with this kind of rapid investing but having backed 500 companies with $150 million last year, they feel like they’ve accumulated enough data points to prove their strategy.

Romanow and D’Souza insist some 40 percent of VC dollars end up going to Facebook and Google for digital ad campaigns. Though TechCrunch couldn’t independently verify this claim, its widely known that those platforms soak up a lot of capital from startups, especially ecommerce businesses, like direct-to-consumer retailers for example, which rely almost entirely on digital marketing to attract customers.

Using Clearbanc, a company could, in theory, raise a $5 million round from VCs to scale its business and another $5 million from Clearbanc for ad spend. This strategy saves said business valuable equity.

“We are essentially a non-dilutive co-investor,” Romanow said. “VC takes time, it’s a lot of no’s, you’re really giving up equity that you can never get back. A lot of founders in the early days don’t calculate what their equity could be worth. Like the first $250,000 in Uber is worth $1 billion now.”

Clearbanc, founded in 2015, has itself turned to venture capitalists to fund its rapid scale. Its own funding model doesn’t work on a company in the financial category, given that the metrics of success are entirely different.

In November 2018, Clearbanc secured a $70 million round in seed and Series A funding from Emergence Capital, Chamath Palihapitiya of Social Capital, CoVenture, Founders Fund, 8VC and others. Just one month later, Clearbanc announced a $50 million fund backed by Seamless co-founder Jason Finger’s new firm, Upper90, to begin providing startups with ad money.

“We’ve just figured out how to scale up really quickly,” Romanow said.

The $1 billion it’s currently touting isn’t readily available. Romanow explains they’ve raised “enough to deploy $1 billion this year” but was careful to clarify they haven’t raised the full amount and don’t need to. Clearbanc is constantly raking in new cash from its revenue share agreements and is able to recycle and redeploy capital quickly. That, coupled with the several hundred million raised from limited partners including Upper90, other founders, family offices and university endowments that have not been made public, puts them in a position to invest 10 figures this year.

Clearbanc is amongst a new class of capital-as-a-service businesses catering to startups that have either been rejected by VCs or turned their back on the equity-driven funding model. BlueVine, for example, offers startups $5,000 to $5 million credit lines. Lighter Capital invests $50,000 to $5 million in non-dilutive capital to SaaS businesses. And Corl, another alternative funder, similarly backs businesses using the revenue share model.

“Venture capital makes sense if you are building a new crazy piece of AI, or creating a new product line and going into a new country,” Romanow said. “When you are doing something that’s repeatable and scalable like ad spend, it doesn’t make sense to give up equity.”

Verizon (which owns the company that owns TechCrunch) announced today that it’s activated its 5G Ultra Wideband Network in parts of Minneapolis and Chicago. The news is the first step for the carrier’s plan to bring the technology to north of 30 U.S. cities at some point this year.

It’s all still baby steps, of course. While the roll out has started a week ahead of schedule, it’s only available in “parts” of the two midwestern cities, according to the company. Those in the right spots, however, can expect top speeds of up to 1Gbps, per Verizon’s press materials.

Here are the areas that will get coverage,

In Chicago, 5G coverage is concentrated in areas of the West Loop and the South Loop, around landmarks like Union Station, Willis Tower, The Art Institute of Chicago, Millennium Park and The Chicago Theatre. Customers also have 5G Ultra Wideband service in the Verizon store on The Magnificent Mile and throughout The Gold Coast, Old Town and River North.

In Minneapolis, service is concentrated in the Downtown area, including Downtown West and Downtown East, as well as inside and around U.S. Bank Stadium, the site of this weekend’s NCAA men’s basketball Final Four. Verizon 5G Ultra Wideband service is also available around landmarks like the Minneapolis Convention Center, the Minneapolis Central Library, the Mill City Museum, Target Center and First Avenue venues, The Commons, areas of Elliot Park and in the Verizon store in The Mall of America.

The other big rub here is the extremely limited availability of 5G handsets at present. The phones were seemingly all over the place at Mobile World Congress back in February, but actually getting your hands on one is another question entirely. Currently the Moto Z3 is the only phone that can access those speeds on Verizon, when paired with the 5G Moto Mod.

Reminder: Live conference call today at 2pm EDT / 11am PDT

We have TechCrunch writers Kirsten Korosec and Kate Clark talking all things tech today — be sure to check your inboxes for dial-in details a bit later today, and come armed with questions!

A roundtable conversation on tech ethics

Our resident humanist and ethicist Greg Epstein published a roundtable conversation with three notable scholars of ethics, debating what exactly is tech ethics and what do the debates around it mean. Hilary Cohen, Kathy Pham, and Jessica Baron had much to offer on the subject, and why it is a bit more complicated than the term suggests.

The market for technology and services for clinical drug trials is expected to reach $68.9 billion over the next seven years. The trials, which are necessary to bring new healthcare treatments to market, are by necessity prolonged, complicated affairs.

Several companies are vying for a piece of this multi-billion dollar pie with the offer of new digital services that can scour anonymized patient records from hospitals and university research to optimize how candidates for trials are selected, and how trials are monitored and managed.

“A clinical trial is, on average, a journey of 12 years and $2 billion to $3 billion,” says Gadi Lachman, the chief executive of TriNetX — one company that’s working on making the clinical trial process more efficient. “In those twelve years more than half the trials get amended… We suggest tradeoffs to the researcher that maximizes the amount of patients that they can find.”

Part of the issue is scope. The pharmaceutical business is global, and demands global input, which is why TriNetX, recently raised $40 million to expand its operations in Asia, Europe, and Latin America. The first use of provceeds has been the acquisition of the European company Custodix, to integrate their candidate matching toolkits for research in the U.S. and Europe.

Belgian-based Custodix is active in 12 countries across Europe with a service that compliments TriNetX’s stateside offerings.

“The two companies have grown up in two separate geographies but are both committed to strong compliance, governance, and a global vision for clinical research,” said Lachman, in a statement. “We now offer the world’s largest platform for clinical research, providing a more powerful resource for pharma companies and healthcare organizations, and more hope for more patients. The expansion gives us local leadership, regional support, and increased resources in the European market.”

TriNetX installs its software in hospitals around the country (and increasingly around the globe) to hoover up information about patients who could be ideal candidates for clinical trials.

Through the Custodix acquisition, TriNetX now has a launchpad from which to start pitching services to geographies in Asia as well, according to the company.

As a result of the deal, the current Custodix chief executive, Brecht Claerhout, will become the managing director of TriNetX Europe — under the brand InSIte, a TriNetX company.

To date, TriNetX has raised $102 million from investors including Merck Global Health Innovation Fund (MGHIF) along with new investors Mitsui & Co, Ltd., ITOCHU Technology Ventures, ITOCHU Corporation, MPM Capital, F2 Ventures, and Deerfield Management.

When everyone always tells you ‘yes’, you can become a monster. Leaders especially need honest feedback to grow. “If you look at rich people like Donald Trump and you neglect them, you get more Donald Trumps” says Torch co-founder and CEO Cameron Yarbrough about our gruff president. His app wants to make executive coaching (a polite word for therapy) part of even the busiest executive’s schedule. Torch conducts a 360 interview with a client and their employees to assess weaknesses, lays out improvement goals, and provides one-on-one video chat sessions with trained counselors.

“Essentially we’re trying to help that person develop the capacity to be a more loving human being in the workplace” Yarbrough explains. That’s crucial in the age of ‘hustle porn’ where everyone tries to pretend they’re working all the time and constantly ‘crushing it’. That can leave leaders facing challenges feeling alone and unworthy. Torch wants to provide a private place to reach out for a helping hand or shoulder to cry on.

Now Torch is ready to lead the way to better management for more companies, as it’s just raised  $10 million Series A round led by Norwest Ventures along with Initialized Capital, Y Combinator, and West Ventures. It already has 100 clients including Reddit and Atrium, but the new cash will fuel its go-to market strategy. Rather than trying to democratize access to coaching, Torch is doubling-down on teaching founders, C-suites, and other senior executives how to care…or not care too much.

“I came out of a tough family myself and I had to do a ton of therapy and a ton of meditation to emerge and be an effective leader myself” Yarbrough recalls. “Philosophically, I care about personal growth. It’s just true all the way down to birth for me. What I’m selling is authentic to who I am.”

Torch’s co-founders met when they were in grad school for counseling psychology degrees, practicing group therapy sessions together. Yarbrough went on to practice clinically and start Well Clinic in the Bay Area while Keegan Walden got his PhD. Yarbrough worked with married couples to resolve troubles, and “the next thing i know I was working with high profile startup founders, who like anybody have their fair share of conflicts.”

Coaching romantic partners to be upfront about expectations and kind during arguments translated seamlessly to keep co-founders from buckling under stress. Yarbrough outlines how “I was noticing that they were consistently having problems with 5 different things:

1. Communication – Surfacing problems early with kindness

2. Healthy workplace boundaries – Making sure people don’t step on each other’s toes

3. How to manage conflict in a healthy way – Staying calm and avoiding finger-pointing

4. How to be positively influential – Being motivational without being annoying or pushy

5. How to manage one’s ego, whether that’s insecurity or narcissism – Seeing the team’s win as the first priority

To address those, companies hire Torch to coach one or more of their executives. Torch conducts extensive 360 interviews with the exec, as well as their reports, employees, and peers. It seeks to score them on empathy, visionary thinking, communication, conflict, management and collaboration, Torch then structures goals and improvement timelines that it tracks with follow-up interviews the team and quantifiable metrics that can all be tracked by HR through a software dashboard.

To make progress on these fronts, execs do video chat sessions through Torch’s app with coaches trained in these skills. “These are all working people with by nature very tight schedules. They don’t have time to come in for a live session so we come to them in the form of video” Yarbough tells me. Rates vary from $500 per month to $1500 per month for a senior coach in the US, Europe, APAC, or EMEA with Torch scoring a significant margin. “We’re B2B only. We’re not focused on being the most affordable solution. We’re focused on being the most effective. And we find that there’s less price sensitivity for senior leaders where the cost of their underperformance is incredibly high to the organization.” Torch’s top source of churn is clients’ going out of business, not ceasing to want its services.

Here are two examples of how big-wigs get better with Torch. “Let’s say we have a client who really just wants to be liked all the time, so much so that they have a hard time getting things done. The feedback from the 360 would come back like ‘I find that Cameron is continually telling me what I want to hear but I don’t know what the expectations are of me and I need him to be more direct.'” Yarbrough explains. “The problem is those leaders will eventually fire those people who are failing, but they’ll say they had no idea they weren’t performing because he never told them.” Torch’s coaches can teach them to practice tough-love when necessary and be more transparent. Meanwhile, a boss who storms around the office and “is super direct and unkind” could be instructed on how to “develop more empathic attunement.”

Yarbrough specifically designed Torch’s software to not be too prescriptive and leave room for the relationship between the coach and client to unfold. And for privacy, coaches don’t record notes and HR only sees the performance goals and progress, not the content of the video chats. It wants execs to feel comfortable getting real without the worry their personal or trade secrets could leak. “And if someone is bringing in something about trauma or that’s super sensitive about their personal life, their coach will refer them out to psychotherapists” Yarbrough assures me.

Torch’s direct competition comes from boutique executive coaching firms around the world, while on the tech side BetterUp is trying to make coaching scale to every type of employee. But its biggest foe is the stubborn status quo of stiff upper lipping it.

The startup world has been plagued by too many tragic suicides, deep depression, and paralyzing burnout. It’s easy for founders to judge their own worth not by self-confidence or even the absolute value of their accomplishments, but by their status relative to yesterday. That means one blown deal, employee quitting, or product delay can make an executive feel awful. But if they turn to their peers or investors, it could hurt their partnership and fundraising prospects. To keep putting in the work, they need an emotional outlet.

“We ultimately have to create this great software that super-powers human beings. People are not robots yet. They will be someday, but not yet” Yarbrough concludes with a laugh. IQ alone doesn’t make people succeed. Torch can help them develop the EQ, or emotional intelligence quotient, they need to become a boss that’s looked up to.