The recovery came after an outage that lasted three days, a somewhat rare streak of blackout for a tech firm of Roblox’s colossal size. The company said earlier that the cause was an “internal system issue.”
“A core system in our infrastructure became overwhelmed, prompted by a subtle bug in our backend service communications while under heavy load,” David Baszucki, Roblox’s founder and CEO explained in a post after operations were restored.
“This was not due to any peak in external traffic or any particular experience. Rather the failure was caused by the growth in the number of servers in our datacenters. The result was that most services at Roblox were unable to effectively communicate and deploy.”
Recovery “took longer” than expected due to “difficulty in diagnosing the actual bug,” Baszucki said.
Rumors had it that a promotional partnership between the gaming platform and Chipotle, which planned to give out $1 million worth of free burritos to Roblox players around Halloween time, led to the crash. Roblox denied in a tweet that the disruption was caused by any “experiences or partnerships” on the platform.
The Roblox crash also came on the heels of Facebook’s rebranding announcement to become Meta. Roblox, which allows users to build and play games, is often seen as the emblem of metaverses.
The outage is not just causing impatience among young users over Halloween weekend but also Roblox’s millions of developers who make money by touting games to kids and teens. Roblox had more than 43 million daily active users as of August.
It remains to be seen whether the three-day disruption will dent Roblox’s investor confidence in the company’s technical capacity once the market opens on Monday.
On the last Gang recording session in early October before the birth of our first grandchild, I tried to stir the pot by attacking Democratic Progressives for capsizing the second of two Infrastructure bills. The moderates, led by the recalcitrant Joe Manchin and his silent sidekick Kyrsten Sinema, were successfully gumming up the Democrats’ best chance for holding control of the House and perhaps Senate. What else is new, you say?
In tech news, Facebook was busily exploiting the tone deaf policy of getting slightly irritated with growing pressure from whistleblowers, former venture capital critics who built their careers on the company’s early success, and a two-fisted teamup from a Congress in over its head and the media looking for a good story to replace Donald Trump’s devolution as credible threat. Today, Facebook ads talk of reforming Section 230 and otherwise providing rules for the company to follow. Infrastructure bingo has whittled down the cost by 60%; the plan is to get it passed in time to influence the election of the Governor of Virginia.
As I write this, it’s the end of October. I went to Ray Wang’s CCE conference down the coast in Half Moon Bay. The Ritz exists in a time warp, where the details of the outside world fade into the sound of the Pacific Ocean lapping up against the gentle lawns. Like the Ritz, conferences are testing the principles of the last economy against the shimmer of the next one. We could call it Work from Anywhere or Build Back Better or the last Beatle record, but I suggest we dig in to the fundamental shift and play in the surf of a new reality.
It’s a reality where each of us with a little coin in our pockets and a phone can participate in the new media. It’s not quite an even playing field, as accumulating a meaningful audience is not provided with the available cloud tools. But what is provided is plenty to start with: a free newsletter tool, free social audio tools to broadcast and evangelize the newsletter’s editorial agenda, and tickets to a dazzling array of services and streaming choices to distribute your stuff. So, a few freemium products to jumpstart things and then look out, hold on to your wallets. The net result of this is called the creator economy by vendors and prospective producers, but it’s more likely a consumers economy.
We saw this with blogs and then podcasts, born out of RSS and its attachment extension. The RSS readers gave us civilians the ability to aggregate the stuff we wanted in what looked like an email client but also a newsgroup. Twitter added a layer of social graph which broad- or narrowcast our preferences to an emerging social cloud, a sphere of influence that both aggregated media and inserted us into that media flow on equal terms. As someone who was lucky enough to find access to the technology press pre-blog, I knew full well what a powerful hand-hold this new technology proffered. I can see the same fingerprints in this new economy as certain newsletter nodes create a pecking order for what I and our virtual cohort deems valuable. Social signals provide clues and notification trails to identify, amplify, and negotiate tickets to what I perceive as the new post-pandemic conference.
At CCE, a Salesforce colleague allowed as how he’s stopped watching the Gang because our Trump talk is too depressing. Of course, who really needs another podcast anyway. To be fair, Trump has been largely replaced by Manchin, but the pain point is more and more the media’s difficulty in defining a rationale for coverage that doesn’t descend into picking fights and promoting a lifestyle of anxiety and anger for ratings. This should be good news for the new economists, but secretly we all want to become the “real” media and are subverted into a similar editorial model. So my complaining about conflict of interest in the media is about as inconsequential as worrying about Trump. If I don’t like it, build it back better.
Well, I’d like to, but I have to wait a while longer for the promised Record/Replay function to ship on Clubhouse, Twitter, and everywhere. I’ve had the ability to record for months, but what I’m waiting for is everybody to have access to the marketplace. Talent will out, and not just talent in words or one-directional podcasts but in marketing, analytical insights, pure promotion, and actionable ideas that shape all these domains. And this means holding these folks accountable to their promises. Clubhouse said “weeks” more than a month ago.
A day ago, Twitter announced new features for its Twitter Labs early look subscription service, unfortunately only available currently in Canada and Australia. I’d gladly pay $4.95 a month to test out new features. And more importantly, who else would? C’mon, @jack, I’ll even pay with bitcoin if I have to. But things are moving quickly: Twitter just announced record tools are now in beta and will ship to creators and listeners in a couple of weeks. Et tu, Clubhouse?
At CCE I met with Paul Greenberg, who, with his partner (and Gillmor Gang member) Brent Leary, are building a series of what he calls live streaming shows around the CRM Playaz banner. Paul says he looks forward to this column/newsletter and that I should write more and more often. I recognize what Paul and Brent are doing in live streaming as the leading edge of what this moment is about, so I understand what they mean by encouraging this work I’m doing. These tools, together with the experiences and network of colleagues and friends I’ve accumulated along the way, give me an extraordinary opportunity to extend ideas, styles, and the actual music of what we crave as the consumer economy. When what I do works, even I appreciate it, and in truth has always been my northern light in talking with an audience no matter how large or undetectable. And the rewards on the upside can be astonishing.
We all know how the Grateful Dead spawned a forest of recorders and microphones at their concerts, not just allowing but encouraging it by letting some of them plug into the group’s live mixing board. By the late Eighties, a band that was largely a touring outfit had transcended the record business and stood as the largest grossing live act on the planet. It also spawned a hit album and only Top Ten single, Touch of Grey, through the force of the Dead micro-community, not the other way around.
Two 19-year-old entrepreneurs, who have previously collaborated on a number of projects including a ride-hailing commute app for school kids and last year left Stanford to pursue a new startup, said on Sunday they have raised $60 million to disrupt India’s overcrowded and highly-competitive grocery delivery market.
Glade Brook Capital led the six-month-old app Zepto’s first institutional financing round, the startup’s founder and chief executive Aadit Palicha told TechCrunch in an interview. Nexus and Y Combinator as well as angel investors Lachy Groom, Neeraj Arora, and Manik Gupta participated in the round — which according to two people familiar with the matter values Zepto between $200 million and $300 million.
Zepto, which has largely operated in stealth mode until today, has been the talk of the town for the past four months. The startup, whose name playfully uses a mathematical term to describe the business, offers a 10-minute grocery delivery service, beating many of its heavily-backed rivals on speed.
To achieve this feat, Zepto has set up dark stores across the cities where it operates (Mumbai, Bangalore, and as of this week, Delhi.) Palicha said these dark stores, which the startup has set up and owns, are designed and optimized for fast deliveries. (Zepto’s approach, for which Palicha said he looked at other markets and spoke with the operators running those firms, is different from many Indian startups that rely on regular grocery stores for inventory.)
“The way we are growing right now, and the current penetration and frequency of usage we are seeing, the opportunity is just massive,” he said. The startup plans to soon expand to Hyderabad, Pune, and Kolkata and grow the number of dark stores it has to over 100 by early next year, he said.
A dark store operated by Zepto. (Image credits: Zepto)
The idea to create Zepto came, said Palicha, when he and Kaivalya Vohra (the other founder) were locked in their houses in Mumbai last year because of the pandemic. “We just had been exposed to the entrepreneurial and tech startup world in a very deep way in California. Now we were in Mumbai and the biggest problem for the two of us bachelors was securing grocery and essentials,” he said.
Maharashtra — like every other Indian state — had enforced lockdown to contain the spread of the virus, which among other things, meant that deliveries were taking two to three days to reach their customers. “We were extremely frustrated,” he said.
“We felt that the online play of the Indian grocery delivery space, which is one of the world’s largest, was grappling with some gross execution errors,” he added, without naming any firm.
Zepto competes with a number of heavily-backed startups including SoftBank-backed Swiggy and Grofers and Google-backed Dunzo, many of which have expanded to the fast grocery delivery category in recent quarters.
“We’ve been ignoring the noise and executing heads- down for a long time to perfect this model, and our efforts are paying off. Today, we’re consistently growing 200% every single month with an unstoppable team, robust product infrastructure, and deep access to institutional capital,” said Palicha.
Kathryn Kosmides is a survivor of gender-based violence and the founder of nonprofit background check Garbo.
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen’s message about Instagram’s impact on teenage girls was unequivocal: Facebook’s studies found that 13% of British teens said Instagram prompted thoughts of suicide, and 17% of teen girls say Instagram makes eating disorders worse.
These statistics, however, are only one part of the bigger picture when it comes to the general safety of teenagers online.
It’s estimated that there are over 500,000 sexual predators active on the internet each day. In 2020, there were over 21.7 million reports of suspected child sexual exploitation made to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s CyberTipline. Online enticement reports — which detail when someone is communicating with a child via the internet with the intent to exploit them — increased by more than 97% from the year before.
Reports of online predators are on the rise, but predatory behavior online is as old as Netscape.
My family got our first PC in 1999. I started on gaming platforms like Neopets and Gaia Online. Soon, I was posting thoughts and communicating with other users on Myspace and Tumblr. As my online world expanded, I encountered old men pretending to be preteens. At one point, I began a “relationship” with a 17-year-old boy when I was just 12 years old. Of course, I didn’t talk about any of this, mostly out of shame. I didn’t know I was being groomed — I had never heard the word used until I started doing gender-based violence work myself.
Grooming is subtle, and for a teen unfamiliar with it, undetectable. An individual grooms to build trust and emotional connection with a child or teen so they can manipulate, exploit and abuse them. This can look like an older teen asking to webcam and slowly prodding a child or teen to do inappropriate things such as spin around for them or change clothes to something “cuter,” or a digital “friend” pressuring someone to engage in cybersex. Predators sometimes pretend to be a young person to obtain personal details such as photos or sexual history; they then weaponize this information for their own pleasure.
I only recently realized that there is CSAM — or child sexual abuse material — of me out there on the internet. Footage of me may still reside on someone’s old cell phone or on a hard drive collecting dust. It could one day be shared onto private Discords or Telegram channels.
My individual experience as a teen girl on the internet is part of what led me to build a nonprofit online background check that allows anyone to see if someone they are speaking with has a history of violence — ideally before the first in-person meeting. We recently made the decision to allow users as young as 13 to access our public records database in the future. While we may never be able to entirely stop children and teens from being exploited online, we can at least arm them with tools and technology to understand whether someone they meet online has a record of bad behavior.
Of course, a background check is only one tool in the safety arsenal — people frequently lie about their names and identities. If a child is being groomed, or an adult is exploiting them, they are often doing so in ways that are anonymous, isolated and secret.
This is why educating young people about avoiding the dangers that lurk online is key. This can involve teaching them to identify early red flags like love bombing, extreme jealousy, pushing boundaries, etc. We can also communicate to young people what a healthy, safe, consensual relationship looks like — with “green flags” as opposed to red ones.
There are various practical skills that we can incorporate into kids’ education as well. Teach them to be selective about what photos they share and whose follow requests they accept and to bring an adult if they meet people they know online in real life.
When the adults in their lives discuss the dangers of online dating and internet communication openly and consistently, children and teens learn how to recognize the risks. This can go a long way toward preventing serious trauma. Conversations about safety online, like sex education, are often left to parents, while parents assume kids are having them at school. It can be difficult to navigate these discussions, especially for parents who don’t always understand online culture, but it is essential that parents seek out resources to educate themselves.
As Haugen pointed out, online platforms also have a responsibility. Trust and safety departments at online platforms are relatively new, and there’s still a lot to learn and improve on.
On most digital platforms, content moderators are understaffed, underpaid and undertrained. Online platforms need to put protection over profit and invest in additional training and support for the mental health of those responsible for keeping their platforms safe. By giving safety teams the tools and time they need to think critically about questionable content, they can execute on their mandate effectively and with care.
Though the internet can create environments that lead to abuse, it can also be a powerful tool in educating young people about early warning signs and the realities of the world, including arming them with access to information about who they’re talking to online.
Reactive measures to combat abuse — from the criminal justice system to platform moderators — are a Band-Aid on a bleeding wound. Preventing sexual abuse before it happens is the best protection we can give our kids. By taking responsibility — whether as platforms, politicians or parents — for the potential harm caused online, we can begin to create a safer world for all of us.
Angel investing has traditionally been mostly open to men, who travel in certain circles and have access to certain networks, but Amanda Robson, a principal at Cowboy Ventures, is attempting to change that by building an informal network of women and non-binary folks who have the means to write checks, but for whatever reason have not been able to easily move into this type of investing.
Robson says that when it comes to angel investing, women and non-binary people have been left out. “I had a number of friends who had recently within the past couple of years become VP-level at different companies, and they had an interest in angel investing, and they had the means to at that point, but they didn’t have access,” she said.
That was in contrast to males in a similar position. “They found that a lot of their male counterparts who were also execs or male founders were getting pinged by their VC friends to join in on deals, and they weren’t getting the same treatment,” she said.
Robson says that she found this surprising at first because at her firm, they try to fill the cap table with a diverse set of angels. As she looked around, she found that wasn’t the case at all firms, but it wasn’t always because of a lack of desire to be more diverse. It was also a sourcing problem. They didn’t know where to look.
Amanda Robson, principal at Cowboy Ventures
So if you had one group looking to invest, and another looking for diverse investors, it seemed that something could be done to bridge the gap. “I just found myself in a unique position having been in venture for almost six years and having a bunch of VC relationships because of that, and then also having access to awesome female [and non-binary] founders and operators that I could kind of bridge that gap in a pretty seamless way,” she said.
Her experience is not uncommon. Diana Murakhovskaya, general partner and co-founder at the Houston-based Artemis Fund, told TechCrunch recently that prior to launching the fund in 2019, she and her co-founders attended networking events in the Houston area and noticed a dearth of women. She started hosting dinners to find out why.
“I said, ‘Where are all the women?’ [ … ] And so we started doing these dinners to bring together women and asking them why they’re not investing, what they’re doing. And these were all corporate women [who had the money to invest].” Like Robson, Murakhovskaya found that these women had never been invited to invest, and they started a firm to change that.
Robson took a different approach. She has a day job, but she knew that she could make some introductions when it made sense. “So I’m the conduit between the two [groups]. I have this database with angel investors and other VC relationships and then also deal flow that I see that will come from other angel syndicate groups or deals that Cowboy can’t invest in because we’re conflicted out, and I try to connect those two,” she said.
Robson, on her own, created this database of people, many of whom she knew previously or learned about when she put out a call for female and non-binary angel investors on Twitter. “I chatted with them and got a sense of their background and what they were interested in, if they truly understood the risks and dynamics of angel investing, and added folks that way.”
There are now 50+ female & non-binary angel investors in our database
VC friends: would love to help you add these incredible to your deals!
She said going outside her network would also help create a more diverse database that went beyond people she had known personally. “I also knew that my network would be limited, and the whole point of this is increasing access, so I wanted to be a little bit more public about it so folks who wanted to be angels could see those messages on Twitter and then join in,” she said.
The database includes the names, check sizes they are willing to invest, sectors they want to invest in and previous investments (if any). She says that typical check sizes are between $15,000 and $50K, but she has seen checks as small as $5K or less as she attempts to get more people involved.
“In some cases recently there have been newer female [and] non-binary angel investors who have wanted to write checks that are $5K, some even below, and some founders and VCs have been open to those smaller check amounts because they want to add diversity to the cap table,” she said.
Lisa Wallace, who is co-founder at pay equity startup Assemble, says that she had been an angel for a couple of years when she responded to one of Robson’s tweets. She also found that when her company was raising a seed round, it was difficult to find a diverse group of angels for her cap table. She says that Robson’s network solves both problems.
“I think that there’s actually two parts of the problem. First of all, I’m a diverse angel, and I want to make sure that I [can access] dealflow, selfishly. But on the other side of it, it would have been really easy had Amanda had this when I was raising my round because I would have just pinged her,” Wallace said.
Stella Garber is another angel in Robson’s network who is former CMO at Trello, and started angel investing in 2016. She too came across one of Robson’s tweets and says that it’s always good to find other sources of possible deals as an angel investor.
“It’s really great to see all the different types of deals that come through that channel. There’s been a mix of all types of different industries, mostly early stage I would say. But obviously as an angel, you have to do your own due diligence, but it’s just nice to have that channel to get deals from,” Garber said.
While these two had experience in angel investing, not everyone does, so Robson has also been helping set up workshops to explain what’s involved to those who are expressing interest and want to learn the mechanics of this type of investing.
We have a group for our Angel Investing 101 session with @gilpenchina tomorrow!
Last call for female or non-binary angels (or potential angels) who'd like to join us
Robson admits that quite a bit overhead is required to run the network because she is the sole conduit. But she says that it’s the kind of job that is hard to outsource because she has the first-hand knowledge of both firms and angels that the role requires.
“I do want to get some help to grow it, but I also think that there are limits to how much I can outsource any parts of this because the access piece is super important. I’ve been doing this for four to five months and I’ve only sent 18 deals through, but all of those ended up getting a lot of interest from the group because they’re highly curated.”
She says the ultimate purpose is to build this network of successful angels. “I want to have these rockstar angels who’ve gotten access to amazing deals and have amazing track records. And so that’s really the ultimate goal. And it’s more about that and in making these angels successful than me leading this group.”
African e-commerce fulfilment startups backed by Y Combinator seem to be piquinginvestors’ interest this year for their niche e-commerce play.
Summer batch graduate ShipBlu is the latest on that list and confirmed to TechCrunch that it has raised $2.4 million in seed funding.
The company, founded by Ali Nasser, Ahmed ElKawass, Abdelrahman Hosny in 2020, operates a delivery and fulfilment model.Itdelivers packages of all kinds for merchants and retailers — ranging from mom and pop stores and social media to fashion retailers who make thousands of shipments and international brands — to customers in Egypt.
On the fulfilment side, ShipBlu stores merchants’ products in warehouses it leases. Then it connects with merchants’ online stores and monitors orders via a dashboard, so when they come in, ShipBlu picks and packs the orders from the warehouse and sends them to the customers.
ShipBlu charges its customers per package, depending on two standard sizes, destination and shipping speed.
While these three factors are common in e-commerce and fulfilment, CEO Nasser said shipping speed is not prioritized the same way as the other two in Egypt.
According to him, ShipBlu is one of the few e-commerce fulfilment companies that offers that service to customers in the country.
“We let the merchant decide: Do they need to get that product to their customer overnight, andtherefore, pay or charge the customer for overnight fees?” Nasser said to TechCrunch in an interview.
“Or are they willing to for a morebudget-friendlyoption and would like to ship that package in three to five days? We offer that option to merchants, who in turn can decide to offer that to customers. So it could be the customer’s choice or the merchants’ choice.”
ShipBlu onlyfullylaunched this August. Per its YC profile, ShipBlu signed on more than 40 merchants during its first month. And since then, the company has managed to double its clientele while tripling revenues in the same period, said Nasser without stating hard numbers.
Within the next couple of months, Nasser says he wants ShipBlu’s network and infrastructure to reach 99% of Egypt’s population.
“Whether you’re living in a small village or a large town or a large city, we want to be able to get to you and have the infrastructure in place to get to your delivery to you,” the CEO remarked.
The idea behind such a daring move — which appears to be a bit of a stretch considering the timeline — comes from the founders’ ambition to change an industry that has lagged behind other regions in the wider GCC, such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE, in terms of e-commerce penetration.
Over 100 million people live in the North African country compared to Saudi Arabia’s 30 million+ people, yet the e-commerce market in Egypt is a third of Saudi Arabia’s.
A significant reason this gap has always existed is that the infrastructure needed tofacilitatethe process of e-commerce in Egypt is abysmal.It runs deep even on an elementary level where zip codes arebarelyaccurate or non-existent, presenting many challenges to last mile or delivery providers.
The zip codes were one of the issues Nasser observed from Egypt’s fragmented e-commerce and fulfilment market during his return from the US to the country months before the pandemic broke out.
As online payments boomed globally and in Egypt and upon finding out via research that the market size for last-mile delivery in MENA stands at over $3.1 billionannually, Nasser and his co-founders ElKawass, Abdelrahman Hosny got together to start ShipBlu.
“It was that period that it hit us and we realized how much more canbe donefor delivery services in the standard of service and the features that are available today. Compared to Europe and the US and other parts of the world, there wasjustso much more that we could bring to the market.”
But Egypt is an entirely different market compared to these developed regions. For instance, 40% of deliveries fail in the country, while the global benchmark for the latter is about 8%.The high rate of delivery failure makes the operating costs for over 150 providers in Egypt generally high. ShipBlu, differentiating itselffrom the market, says it has developed AI and ML algorithms to“reduce costs, meet delivery constraints, and refine its operating assumptions.”
The CEO says ShipBlu’s end goal is to make customers choose a three-hour delivery window for their packages and know what date to expect them, which contrasts how most traditional e-commerce fulfilment companies function.
“Roughly 56% of the time when someone in Egypt places an order online, they don’t even have a delivery date. After you place your order and you get an email confirmation, it’s complete silence until, on a random day, you’re going to get a call from the agent who’s on your on their way to you asking if you are available to pick up the package. We’re changing that,” he said.
ShipBlu has competition with the likes of Flextock and Bosta in Egypt. And following the completion of its seed round, the company now has a mutual investor with Flextock in Flexport, the billion-dollar freight and logistics company YC backed in 2014. The unicorn also invested in Nigerian e-commerce fulfilment startup Sendbox this year.
Nama Ventures led ShipBlu’s seed round with participation from 1984 Ventures; Orange Ventures, the venture capital arm of Orange Telecom; Starling Ventures and other VC funds and angel investors.The company says the investment will help grow its service offering and coverage across Egypt.
Welcome to Startups Weekly, a fresh human-first take on this week’s startup news and trends. To get this in your inbox,subscribe here.
I spent the past month interviewing current and former employees at Ro, a health tech unicorn, about rising tensions within the company as it struggles to grow into its $5 billion valuation. Many employees, who joined for Ro’s mission, said that the company’s execution began to struggle after raising a $500 million Series D. The co-founders began to amplify a new focus for the company: Become the “Amazon of healthcare.” Ro CEO and co-founder Zachariah Reitano, who was not made available for comment on my story, released a statement in response to my piece.
This story started because I was tipped off about a slew of departures. After conducting a few interviews, I realized that people who had joined for mission were leaving because of low morale and poor execution – different than 'the great resignation' https://t.co/ty2qXs0ayB
While my story gets into the specific problems that Ro is dealing with, from stagnating ARR to race-to-the-bottom competition, I want to focus on what other startups could learn from this story.
Let’s be clear: It’s not abnormal for a startup to go through trials and tribulations, especially in pursuit of profit and a moonshot of a vision. After all, every startup has a tipping point in which leadership has to take a step back and see what went wrong to avoid failure. The current and former employees that I spoke to for the story — as well as the more than dozen that reached out post-publication — felt like Ro needs a recalibration to truly get past its growing pains. The common solutions that came up? Transparency, more balance and openness to addressing failure so that lessons can be extracted for the future.
“The first year that I was there, I was like the happiest person on earth,” a recently resigned employee said. “The piece that needs to be recalibrated is ‘what is the end vision?’ What do you mean when you say ‘a vertically integrated, patient-centered health system?’ And are the actions moving you toward that? And that’s ultimately why I left, because I didn’t feel like what was being said externally was actually happening internally.”
As more startups get ballooned by venture capital and the incentives that come alongside with it, an industrywide recalibration between the Big Pitch and the actual product strategy of companies feels imminent.
Founders should prepare to have conversations about distributed work’s impact on culture and venture capital’s impact on priorities. Investors will have to question the pressure they put on portfolio companies and show value through navigating ups and downs. Press will need to go deeper than the funding round story and poke holes in the narratives that decision-makers craft. And employees, more emboldened than ever, will have to make choices on balance and the importance of self-advocacy.
This shift fits squarely into a perspective that I’ve leaned heavily on through the pandemic: It’s okay to change your mind about what’s important and unlearn what you thought was non-negotiable.
In the rest of this newsletter, we’ll talk about the future of VC, the AWS of crypto and the future of farming. As always, you can follow me on Twitter @nmasc_ or reach me on Signal (DM for number).
VSC, a public relations firm that has helped the likes of startups such as ClearCo, Poshmark, Tonal and Tile craft their stories, has raised millions to invest in the companies they work with. The move is further validation of a trend we’ve been on about in this newsletter for months: Venture is going full stack and one of the most in-demand services is storytelling.
Here’s what to know: While VSC’s move feels warranted, it’s somewhat unprecedented. Despite the blending of media and venture, PR firms may have avoided going down this route because their clients — other startups — need them as a shoulder, not an investor. In other words, one could argue that founders may feel less incentivized to be vulnerable with a PR firm about struggles if they are also their investors, the same people they are incentivized to impress.
“Because we’re not the lead investor, we don’t ever put that kind of peer pressure on them,” Chattha said. “We have enough skin in the game to be honest and vulnerable with them, but not so much that we’re going to guide them into the wrong for their business.”
Alchemy! As Mary Ann Azevedo reports, exactly six months after raising $80 million at a $505 million valuation, the blockchain and Web3 development SaaS startup has raised $250 million in a Series C funding round that values the company at $3.5 billion.
Here’s what to know: It’s the backbone of many of the major crypto platforms, including MakersPlace, OpenSea, Nifty Gateway, SuperRare, CryptoPunks, Dapper Labs and Axie Infinity. As we discussed on Equity, Alchemy is positioned especially well to ride the crypto wave considering the portfolio that it’s a part of.
For many researchers, activists and entrepreneurs, vertical farms have been the answer to growing worries about our climate crisis and its impact on food production. To understand a leader in the space, the inimitable Brian Heater took us all on a 12,000-word, vertical-farming rabbit hole with his Bowery Farming TC-1.
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy.
The app industry continues to grow, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices alone. And in the U.S., app usage surged ahead of the time spent watching live TV. Currently, the average American watches 3.7 hours of live TV per day, but now spends four hours per day on their mobile devices.
Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re also a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus. In 2020, investors poured $73 billion in capital into mobile companies — a figure that’s up 27% year-over-year.
This Week in Apps offers a way to keep up with this fast-moving industry in one place with the latest from the world of apps, including news, updates, startup fundings, mergers and acquisitions, and suggestions about new apps and games to try, too.
Apple’s new FaceTime feature SharePlay wasn’t immediately available with the iOS 15 launch, as it needed a bit more polish. But with this week’s release of iOS 15.1, SharePlay — and a number of mobile app updates ready to support it — have finally arrived. The feature makes using Apple’s video calling platform more interactive and could help to potentially lock in users to Apple’s ecosystem.
As with many Apple features, SharePlay is easy to use despite the complicated technology powering the new system that runs under the hood. With the tap of a button on FaceTime’s controls, you can start sharing your device’s screen on your call or you can just switch over to the app you want to co-watch with a friend — the app alerts you upon arrival that it supports SharePlay as well as how to get started.
While screen sharing, you can view your screen or other apps together. However, you won’t have a good experience trying to co-watch videos this way due to lags. Apple also smartly blocks other viewers from seeing your incoming notifications or any kind of application pop-ups or dialogs, as they may contain sensitive information. And everything is end-to-end encrypted, so you can feel comfortable screen sharing in a business setting, not just a personal one. (And this will be further improved when SharePlay arrives on macOS Monterey later this fall.)
If anything, the biggest obstacle to using SharePlay at launch is simply availability.
Apple has a robust lineup of launch partners for the new addition — but unless you’ve happened across the App Store’s editorial round-up of SharePlay-enabled apps (do a search for “shareplay” to find it), you may not know if your favorite app is “SharePlay ready” as of yet.
Initially, SharePlay is rolling out to apps, including Apple TV+, Apple Fitness, TikTok, NBA: Live Games & Scores, Paramount+, Showtime, Kahoot!, Cameo, SmartGym, Flow, Moon FM, MUBI, Digital Concert Hall, Piano with Friends, Relax Melodies, LookUp, Heads Up!, CARROT Weather, Apollo, Night Sky and others. Disney+ will soon support SharePlay, as will ESPN, HBO Max, Hulu, MasterClass, Twitch, Pluto TV and more.
While that’s pretty decent right out of the gate, it ismissing one key player: Netflix.
You have to wonder what’s going there — is it in the works? Being held back as a negotiating tactic? Is Netflix…just not interested? As you might recall, Netflix was one of the few streamers that didn’t add a native co-watching feature (or at least officially partner with another software maker) during the pandemic, while everyone else was busy building remote social experiences. Competitors like Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, Plex, HBO and others rolled out co-viewing experiences. But Netflix sat out the trend, despite the growing popularity of third-party co-viewing apps like Netflix Party. With Netflix’s more recent slower growth following the pandemic’s peak, you would think the company would see SharePlay as a potential source of new user acquisition.
After all, SharePlay can be used to offer a free user without an account a way to co-watch with a paid subscriber, if that’s what the developer wants. This, in turn, could then be used to push the free user to buy a subscription after some time has passed — like after they got hooked on some exclusive shows, perhaps. It seems like a no-brainer to offer support for this sort of thing — but perhaps Netflix is building out its own version where it can collect more data as a first-party experience. Time will tell.
In the meantime, the SharePlay feature could appeal to younger people who already use FaceTime the way older people use the Phone app, and who are comfortable multi-tasking on their devices.
In-App Events Go Live
Image Credits: Apple
A whole new way to market apps has now appeared on the App Store. On Wednesday, the first in-app events began appearing on the App Store, giving users a new way to find out what’s happening inside their favorite apps and games right now. At launch, Rise of Kingdoms and Pokémon GO are promoting Halloween special events, for example, as are others. But in-app events could also be used to promote things like movie premieres or live sports in the future. When users tap a new event card on the App Store (in iOS 15 or iPadOS 15), they’ll be taken directly to the event taking place. They can also tap “Notify Me” to get alerts when upcoming events go live, share events with friends or add them to their calendar app.
Other games adopting the feature include Call of Duty: Mobile, PUBG Mobile, Clash Royale and Genshin Impact and soon, so will apps like Tinder, TikTok, Disney+, Hulu, Paramount+, HBO Max and ESPN.
Weekly News
Platforms: Apple
Apple released iOS 15.2 and iPadOS 15.2 beta 1, as well as watchOS 8.3. One of the biggest new features to arrive in the iOS/iPadOS beta is the App Privacy Report. First announced at WWDC, the report will show users what apps are up to — that is, which sensitive data they request, which sensors they’re using and which domains they’re contacting to possibly share that information further. Other new features include an updated Emergency SOS call feature; and an easier to read, card-style Notification Summary.
Apple released iOS 15.1 and iPadOS 15.1 to the general public, bringing support for SharePlay, ProRes video capture, the ability to disable automatic camera switching to Macro mode, support for COVID vaccination cards and test results in Wallet and many other improvements.
Apple also released iOS 14.8.1 and iPadOS 14.8.1,with several critical security updates, making good on its promise to keep people on older software up to date with necessary fixes.
Apple now lets you review more of its default apps, including Phone, Messages, Photos and Safari, among others, including default Watch apps. The company had earlier rolled out a selection of its apps as standalone downloads with support for ratings and reviews, to put Apple on a more even playing field with regard to competitors amid regulatory scrutiny over its App Store. Most of the new apps are doing well in reviews so far, as people seem to appreciate the functionality provided by Apple’s default experiences.
Apple refreshed its set of design resources for iOS 15 on a revamped website that makes it easier to find the things you need, like templates or fonts. The site includes new templates, libraries, fonts and other iOS 15-specific resources and components.
The company also opened Apple Entrepreneur Camp applications for one of three newly announced online cohorts for Black, Hispanic/Latinx, or female founders starting late January 2022.
Platforms: Google
Google held its annual Android Dev Summit this week, where it announced a series of updates for developers. The summit included over 30 Technical Talks to help developers build apps that run across devices and learn about the latest in developer tools.
Google announced the 12L, an OS designed for large screens, along with a set of tools, at the Dev Summit event.
The company also released the first alpha of Compose Material 3, which offers “Material Design 3 styled components and theme, enabling Material You personalization features like dynamic color.” Google also released the first beta version of Jetpack Compose 1.1, which has features like “stretch overscroll for Android 12, improved touch-target sizing, experimental lazy layout animations,” and others. And Compose for Wear OS is now in developer preview.
Augmented Reality
Image Credits: Snap
Snapchat rolled out Halloween AR Lenses, including those for finding a Halloween costume through AR in partnership with Walmart, a Halloween World Lens, one with The Home Depot’s 12-foot Skeletons, a transforming “Werewolf Lens,” a Lens for decorating your home in AR, a spooky fashion Lens, and others with candy brands like Mars-Wrigley, Skittles, Starburst and Reese’s.
Fintech
Robinhood reported a revenue miss for its third-quarter earnings, sending the stock down 8% in after-hours trading on Tuesday. The company reported total net revenue at $365 million, versus the $431.5 million Wall Street expected. Revenues were up 35% year over year but were below the second quarter’s revenue of $565 million.
Social
Image Credits: Instagram
Instagram will now allow all users to share links in their Instagram Stories via the new Link Stickers, making the final move away from the “swipe up to read” gesture. The feature was previously limited to select creators.
TikTok is testing a new direct tipping feature with select creators. The feature lets fans tip favorite creators outside of TikTok LIVE streams where gifting is already available.
TikTok brings its Video Kit feature to desktop, web and consoles, in addition to its previous support for mobile apps. The expansion will allow professional creators and others to use a variety of editing and collaboration tools to make their TikTok videos, which they can then publish directly using the “Share to TikTok” functionality provided by the SDK. Early adopters include Clipchamp, Combo, Grabyo, Kapwing, Mobcrush and LG U+.
Twitter’s subscription service Blue adds a “Labs” feature that provides early access to tools Twitter is considering for the premium service. The first two Labs features include the ability to pin favorite DM conversations on iOS to the top of your DM inbox and support for longer video uploads (up to 10 mins.) on desktop.
Twitter said it added 5 million users in its third quarter, to reach average monetizable DAUs (its own metric) of 221 million, up 13% year-over-year. Revenue increased 37% to $1.28 billion, as the company noted Apple’s privacy changes with ATT only had a “modest impact” on its business.
Snapchat now has 100 million MAUs in India, and is partnering with Flipkart and Android smartphone vendors to increase adoption.
Facebook reported a miss on revenue, citing Apple’s privacy changes as one cause, ahead of its big announcement about a shift to focus on its metaverse and VR products and a rebranding of the company to “Meta.” Facebook reported $29 billion in total revenue and earnings per share of $3.22, calculated on a diluted basis. Investors had expected revenues of $29.58 billion and earnings per share of $3.19.
Messaging
Google announced its Android 12 OS will now include the ability for users to transfer their WhatsApp chat history between devices, including from a WhatsApp account on iPhone to Android. WhatsApp had previously offered similar support for Samsung devices.
Streaming & Entertainment
Spotify says its service is now used more by U.S. podcast listeners than Apple Podcasts. The company made the announcement during its Q3 earnings, citing its own internal data and Edison Research (where it’s a client). It did not say how many podcast listeners it had, but noted MAUs overall grew 19% year-over-year to reach 381 million in the quarter, up from 365 million last year. Premium subscribers also grew 19% to reach 172 million, up from 165 million last year. Spotify revenue was $2.9 billion in the quarter, up 27% year-over-year, with ad sales rising 75% to reach $374 million, at the top end of its guidance.
Clubhouse added a new Pinned Links feature that allows room creators and moderators to share URLs at the top of the room’s pages, similar to how Twitter Spaces users can add tweets to their live audio sessions.
Amazon is working on a Clubhouse competitor codenamed Project Mic,The Verge reported. The new app would let anyone make and distribute live radio shows that include music, which users can listen to through Audible, Amazon Music, Twitch and Alexa devices.
Dating
Match-owned dating app Hinge introduces a new “Voice Prompts” feature that gives users a new way to interact, by answering a prompt through a 30-second recording. The company hopes the voice feature will give users a peek into someone’s personality and hint at what a first date might be like.
Chinese dating app Lesdo, designed for lesbian women, announced it was shutting down. This specific niche of online dating has failed to scale and make a profit in the country, despite a potential audience of 10 million in China. Contributing to the problem of scale is a hostile environment for the LGBTQ+ community, as Beijing has pressured charities not to work with queer activists and WeChat deactivated queer groups’ public accounts, Protocol reported.
Tinder continued to lead the dating app market with the highest number of paid subscribers, followed by Match.com, according to new data shared by Bloomberg’s Second Measure.
Image Credits: Bloomberg Second Measure
Gaming
Google Stadia rolls out a free, 30-minute game trial to woo people to its service. The option is being made available on its exclusive title Hello Engineer as a test, but Google confirmed it would expand the feature to other games in the next couple of months.
Amazon Luna’s game streaming service announced plans to add new titles in November,including Carrion, Gris and Mortal Shell: Enhanced Edition on the Luna+ Channel, and PHOGS! on the Family Channel. It also recently rolled out Alien Isolation, Amnesia: Rebirth, Far Cry 6, Olija, Riders Republic and others.
News & Reading
Apple News expanded its local news coverage to Charlotte, Miami and Washington, D.C., giving users access to numerous publications such as Axios Charlotte, the Charlotte Observer, Eater Miami, the Miami Herald, DCist, Washingtonian, The Washington Post and others. The company also said it’s expanding Fitness+ and its Apple One Premier subscription bundle to 17 more countries on November 3.
Health & Fitness
Apple rolled out support for COVID-19 vaccination cards and test results in Wallet with the release of iOS 15.1. Vaccination and test result records are downloaded in a verifiable format that’s digitally signed by a vaccine or test result provider, Apple says.
Government & Policy
Image Credits: Samuel Corum/Getty Images
This week, reps from TikTok, Snap and YouTube faced Congress to talk about how their apps are addressing kids and online safety as the U.S. considers legislation that would require tech companies to offer a safer environment for kids online. One of the highlights from the hearing was listening to senators try to get the companies on the record as to whether or not they support specific legislation, like the upcoming COPPA revamp, which only TikTok fully said “yes” to. When asked about the KIDS Act, which would prevent manipulative marketing (like undisclosed influencer marketing), there was less support. Companies said they would be happy to “look” at the details as if the Act was new, and not something that had already been around for a while.
TikTok dodged questions about its plans for biometric data collection during its first-ever Senate hearing. In an update to the company’s U.S. privacy policy in June, TikTok added a new section that noted the app “may collect biometric identifiers and biometric information” from its users’ content, including things like “faceprints and voiceprints.” The company was questioned by multiple lawmakers on this matter during a hearing conducted by the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security, which was focused on social media’s detrimental impacts on children and teens.
The lawmakers also asked YouTube and Snap to defend their apps’ age ratings on the app stores, where they were sometimes rated 13 and up or 17 and up, depending on the platform. Snap was also pressed on whether its content was even appropriate for younger teens, given the app’s Discover page contained content that Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) deemed “wildly inappropriate” for a child, like “recommendations for…an invite to play an online sexualized video game that’s marketed itself to people who are 18 and up; tips on, quote, ‘why you shouldn’t go to bars alone;’ notices for video games that are rated for ages 17 and up; and articles about porn stars,” he said.
The senators also asked TikTok, Snap and YouTube how they handled eating disorder content, after Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen‘s document leaks exposed Facebook’s knowledge that Instagram could be dangerous for teenage girls with body image issues.
In non-hearing news, Apple is “very likely” going to face a DOJ antitrust lawsuit,The Information reported this week, citing sources with knowledge of the matter.
Security & Privacy
Malware-laden “Squid Game”-themed apps have been found in the Google Play Store, including an app for Squid Game wallpaper that infected phones with Joker malware, allowing hackers to sign up the user for premium services they profit from.
Funding and M&A (and IPOs)
Barcelona-based mobile keyboard software maker Fleksy raised $1.6 million in Series A led by Spanish asset management firm Inveready. The funds will be used to help the company pivot to B2B for its white-label SDK for iOS and Android.
Social networking app OneRoof, aimed at connecting people in residential buildings, raised $1.2 million in seed funding led by General Catalyst. The app offers a Slack-like hub for messaging with neighbors and is now live in around 400 buildings in NYC.
Indian payments app Paytm is planning to raise as much as $2.4 billion in what could be the country’s biggest IPO, valuing the business at $20 billion. The startup has raised more than $3 billion over the past decade and was last valued at $16 billion.
Celeb video app Cameo announced its first acquisition. The company is buying marketing and merch company Represent, which helps brands and celebs set up their own individualized storefronts and already has clients like Jennifer Lopez, Ed Sheeran, Leonardo DiCaprio, Matthew McConaughey and Kendall Jenner. Deal terms were not revealed, but Cameo plans to offer “gift bundles” that will allow users to pair videos with related merch.
Neobanking app Zolve raised $40 million in Series A funding led by DST Global, valuing the startup at $210 million. The app offers a bank account, and debit and credit cards for Indian users working in the U.S., or planning to.
Brazilian neobank Nu (aka Nubank) filed to go public. According to its filing, Nu plans to list in the U.S. with intent to “negotiate a program of Brazilian Depositary Receipts” in its home country. In June, Nu raised a $750 million round led by Berkshire Hathaway at a $30 billion valuation.
Brazilian startup Gringo, which helps drivers monitor and perform services related to their documents and vehicles, raised $8 million in new funding led by Kaszek. The app is used to manage and pay for things like driver licenses, registration and taxes, and now has 2.5 million users.
Digital physical therapy app Hinge Health raised $400 million in Series E funding led by returning investors Tiger Global and Coatue Management, valuing the startup at $6.2 billion. The app helps people treat chronic musculoskeletal (MSK) conditions, like back and joint pain, and now serves more than 575 enterprise customers.
Early-stage startup Groopit raised $2 million in pre-seed funding led by Ascend.vc to help companies crowdsource data from the information supplied by employees working in the field. The product can be customized for the individual businesses to gather the kinds of data it needs — and works across mobile and web.
Downloads
Pikmin Bloom
Niantic’s attempt to once again replicate the success of Pokémon GO, in a way that Harry Potter: Wizards Unite has not really been able to, arrived this week. The company announced the launch of a new AR game Pikmin Bloom in collaboration with Nintendo. The game, like Pokémon GO, encourages users to go outside and explore — but now, instead of capturing Pokémon, they’ll collect seedlings and a squad of “Pikmin” — a sort of plant-animal hybrid creature. As you walk, you’ll leave AR trails of flowers behind you. The game will also later host monthly “Community Days” for Pikmin so users can plant and play together. Overall, the game seems less competitive than Pokémon GO and may be aimed at someone who wants more casual gameplay. The game initially rolled out to Singapore and Australia, then the U.S., and will continue to roll out globally.
Matterport 3D Capture (Android)
Matterport brought its 3D capture app to Android users, which allows customers to digitize their home, office or hotel with any compatible Android device, for free. Homeowners can use the app to create a digital appraisal of their property and everything in it for insurance, space planning or just peace of mind. Meanwhile, builders can plan and manage their construction projects along with designers, contractors and clientele. And real estate agents and rental property managers can quickly capture and publish 3D virtual experiences online, then share them across websites and social networks. The Matterport App for Android is available now on Google Play and can be used with a free account.
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