Month: April 2018

In life, they say you get what you pay for. That is no less true in politics, which is fueled by campaign donations and lobbying dollars that move policy on every important issue under the sun. The disclosed expenditures of the DC lobbying industry are more than $3 billion per year, while just the presidential political campaigns spent more than $1.5 billion in 2016.

Despite the key role that money plays in American politics, almost no one actually donates to a political campaign. According to the campaign finance watchdog OpenSecrets, just 0.68% of American adults donated more than $200 throughout the 2016 campaign cycle.

A $200 contribution may sound like an extraordinary sum, but it’s roughly $8.33 per month throughout the two-year election cycle. Compare the 1.67 million people engaged with politics against the subscription numbers elsewhere in the economy: The New York Times is approaching 3 million digital subscribers while Spotify and Netflix had 70 million and 118 million subscribers respectively in January this year.

Watching House of Cards is certainly more fun than funding the real House of Cards, but the lack of engagement from voters in the money side of campaigns has serious, deleterious effects. As The New York Times pointed out, just 158 families donated roughly half of the early dollars in the 2016 election, giving this remarkably small sliver of the American people extraordinary influence over the course of policies that affect all of us.

Unsurprisingly, the report cards for political institutions remain near their historical nadirs in the United States. Gallup polls show that just 15% of Americans approve of the work that Congress is doing, and cynicism increasingly runs rampant about the government’s ability to improve the quality of life for citizens.

At their heart, political campaigns are no different than any other organization: they need to raise revenues and then spend it to meet their objectives. Organizations are responsive to who pays them, and therefore, the only way to connect politics back to the everyday lives of people is to connect more pocketbooks of voters directly into the revenue model of DC.

Lawrence Lessig, in his book Republic, Lost, believed such a system would likely tamp down the passions that exist in the present system. He wrote, “Yet in a system that was exclusively a small-donor system, candidates could not afford to fund their campaigns from the extremes only. Instead, with, for example, a voucher system, they would need to reach a much wider range of citizens. That breadth would preclude extremism. Like a mandatory voting system, a small-donor-funding regime would put constant pressure on representatives to hew to the mainstream.”

Small donations have become popular on both the left and the right. Bernie Sanders raised tens of millions of dollars from donors giving less than $200, and Donald Trump has effectively leveraged his various platforms to drive Republicans to the highest small donor numbers in the party’s history.

Yet, it’s not just small donations that are needed, but reliable streams of small donations, so that politicians could start to transition from dialing-for-dollars around-the-clock to actually doing the actual work of politics. It’s the difference between selling songs one at a time, and a subscription service that has dedicated customers paying every month. In short, it is SaaS, but for politics.

That’s where startups like GiveMini become interesting. GiveMini, the product name of Progressive Labs, was started by Joel Aguero as a progressive-focused platform to help people donate their spare change to progressive candidates. Inspired by apps like Acorns and Digit, which help users save money for retirement, GiveMini’s algorithm looks at your credit card transactions using Plaid, and then rounds up each transaction to a whole dollar, aggregates all this change, and sends the check to a campaign.

In others words, it is change for change.

“All of these little purchases are small acts of civil engagement,” Aguero explained. His model works as follows. The average person has 32 transactions a month, and his rounding algorithm averages about 45 cents for each of those transactions. That comes out to about $14.40 a month, or just shy of $350 across a two-year election cycle. GiveMini scrapes a fee of 10% to cover its costs.

The typical victorious congressional campaign spent $1.3 million, so if campaigns could sign up about 4,200 people for the entirety of an election cycle, they could cover all of their costs without resorting to tapping high-net-worth individuals at all.

Aguero, who studied product design at Stanford, worked at such startups as Coursera and Nextdoor, as well as corporate behemoth Palantir. The 2016 election was a surprise to him, and he decided to find new ways to engage in politics using his background as a product designer. He was inspired by Bail Bloc, a cryptocurrency miner developed by The New Inquiry that generates money for people who couldn’t pay their court bail. “What if we did that, but for progressive political campaigns,” Aguero asked. He proceeded to build a prototype over the next few months that would become GiveMini.

The platform targets progressives, which as a term doesn’t necessarily mean any Democrat. Its website says that “GiveMini is for progressives. This includes many Democrats and Independents, and potentially some Republicans. We assess fit on a campaign-by-campaign basis and reserve the right to cease support for any campaign, candidate, or individual at any time.”

The platform has built its first partnership with the campaign of Bryan Caforio, a Democrat running in California’s 25th congressional district, which is located to the north of metro Los Angeles and is currently represented by Republican Steve Knight. “They are really excited about it because normally small donor donations go after existing supporters, and this has the potential to unlock an entirely different subset of donors,” Aguero said. As the 2018 election heats up, “I’d like to get 100 campaigns on the platform by summer,” he said. GiveMini has joined the most recent batch of Higher Ground Labs, which bills itself as an accelerator for progressive startups.

One hundred campaigns is an ambitious target in an industry where the idea of small dollar subscriptions remains anathema. Candidates, particularly those running for national office, need to prove that they can raise large checks from large donors early on to be “viable,” in what is commonly known as the money race. Strong early money will often be leveraged with additional campaign committee dollars from DC, making it of critical importance to electoral success.

Aguero understands that success around these new models of campaign financing may not pan out right away. “We have to be intentional about who we can really support and make sure it is a positive experience for them,” he said. “If we can walk out of this with some really compelling case studies, even if they are not very favorable,” then GiveMini will have met its goals.

Long term, Aguero hopes that “we can build an open source model among progressive campaigns.” He’s also not limiting his focus to politics, but hopes to include relevant non-profits on the network in the future, saying that “A lot of the lessons we take from politics can be applied to the non-profit world as well.” He thinks non-profits could be an important opportunity in the downtimes between elections.

Washington’s current expertise in stroking the egos of plutocrats will have to be replaced with more consumer-oriented marketing chops. Changing the capital’s spending habits is not going to be easy, but reliable subscription revenue could change politics just as much as it has changed software business models. There is an opportunity to bring Silicon Valley’s SaaS knowledge into DC, and in the process, affect lasting change that could transform our current political challenges.

Source: Tech Crunch

Behind every great woman, there is often another great woman who has encouraged her and listened to her and advised her, rather than tried to compete with her. That’s the way that it should be, according to Shine Theory, a concept that was crystalized by journalist Ann Friedman in 2013 and embraced by women in the last presidential administration at the urging of Barack Obama himself.

As Obama’s former senior advisor Valerie Jarrett recalls its genesis in the White House, numerous women who’d been hired into the largely male administration began voicing their opinions less and less over time. “You had to really push your idea in, and [it was] totally exhausting,” Jarrett recalls in a new interview with the founder of TaskRabbit, Leah Busque .

Jarrett — who’d recruited many of the female senior officials and knew they were the “best and the brightest” — felt responsible for their happiness, so she voiced her concern. “I said to President Obama, ‘Watch and see. These women aren’t talking as much as they did at the beginning; they’re shying away.’”

In response, he proposed an idea. “He said, ‘I want them to come over and have dinner with me at my home and we’re going to talk about it,’” says Jarrett. They did, and it was a “frank and open dinner, and everyone explained to him their perspective, and he said, ‘I have your back. And when I’m not there, Valerie has your back.’”

Obama then asked the women to commit to having dinner regularly with Jarrett and to come back if they felt they needed to speak with him again. They didn’t, says Jarrett. Over the dinners, she tells Busque, “We’d built our own community.” Attendees aired grievances about the male colleagues. They discussed their children. They found “safety in numbers,” says Jarrett. Most importantly, she says, they found strength that they carried into their work.

Little wonder that Busque, whose company sold to Ikea last year and who today works as a venture capitalist, now wants to help women across a broad range of industries more easily come together to learn, to laugh, and to amplify each other’s power.

Toward that end, Busque has formed a new initiative called Shine Together with Task Rabbit’s former VP of marketing, Jamie Viggiano, that plans to organize dinners with women, feature content at its site like Busque’s sit-down with Jarrett, and to help up-and-coming businesswomen connect with needed mentors.

The organization, which quietly announced itself on Medium a few weeks ago, has already launched with a series of stories focused on notable women, including Jarrett; five-time Olympic medalist Nastia Liukin; and Ann Miura-Ko, the cofounding partner of the venture firm Floodgate.

Shine Together doesn’t merely feature women discussing their own paths, notably. It asks them to “shine a light on women who are behind the scenes but doing incredible stuff,” says Busque. Liukin, for example, talks in her interview about her mother. Miura-Ko talks about a sales executive, Stephanie Schatz, and their relationship.

For now, such video interviews will be published weekly and featured at Shine Together’s dedicated site. Over time, Viggiano — who is running the organization’s day-to-day operations — intends to work with distribution partners that are interested in making the content a part of their platforms, too.

As for the dinners, the idea is for powerful women to come and to bring a plus one — “someone who wouldn’t have access to this type of group,” Busque says. “We want to cast a wider net and give more women who deserve it [entrée] into these networking groups.”

It’s still early days, but you can learn more about the initiative here. Meanwhile, to learn more about Jarrett’s path in particular, you might check out Busque’s recent interview with her, below.

Source: Tech Crunch

In the run-up to Mark Zuckerberg’s first appearance before Congress, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden issued a warning to the company about what it can expect from lawmakers if it doesn’t radically alter course.

“Mr. Zuckerberg is going to have a couple of very unpleasant days before Congress next week and that’s the place to start,” Wyden said at the TechFestNW conference in his home state of Oregon on Friday.

“There are going to be people who are going to say Facebook ought to be broken up. There have been a number of proposals and ideas for doing it and I think unless [Zuckerberg] finds a way to honor the promise he made several years ago, he’s gonna have a law on his hands.”

The Senator added that he would support such a law.

For Wyden, concealing the truth about data sharing in the fine print is a deceptive practice that’s gone on too long.

“I think we got to establish a principle once and for all that you own your data, period,” Wyden said.

“What does that mean in the real world? It’s not enough for a company to bury some technical lingo in their [terms of service]… It’s not enough to have some convoluted process for opting out.”

While that might have been wishful thinking two weeks ago, the Oregon lawmaker believes that Facebook’s most recent scandal has creating the perfect opportunity for privacy reform.

“If there is a grassroots uprising about the issue of who owns user data, we can get it passed,” Wyden said, citing other pieces of bipartisan legislation that once seemed like a long-shot.

Wyden, one of the loudest digital privacy champions in Congress, wants the public to use Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica debacle to demand that social networks obtain “explicit consent” from users before sharing their personal data with anyone — including advertisers.

“It’s real basic. You have to give the okay for them to do anything with your data,” Wyden said.

Zuckerberg is slated to appear before the Senate’s commerce and judiciary committees on Tuesday and the House energy and commerce committee the following day.

To date, Facebook has always successfully squirmed out of seeing its chief executive with his right hand raised. This time, as pressure mounted from legislators, investors, advertisers and the public alike, the company conceded. The set of hearings is widely expected to be a milestone event in big tech’s reluctant shuffle toward getting its wings clipped in Congress.

Unfortunately for Facebook, its corporate willful ignorance around protecting user data echoes other recent privacy catastrophes — a context that won’t do it any favors.

“The reason that Facebook is in hot water is essentially the same reason that Equifax is in hot water,” Wyden said. “These companies have not gotten their heads around the idea that the data they collect is more than just their property.”

Source: Tech Crunch

It’s been a week filled to the brim with customer security compromises, and here’s one more to add to the pile. A day after Sears, Kmart and Delta confirmed that they’d been impacted by a breach of data firm, [24]7.ai, Best Buy issued a public statement noting that it’s in the same boat.

At last count, Sears, Kmart and Delta believe that thousands of customers have potentially had data exposed. In its own statement, Best Buy seems slightly more optimistic about its own numbers, but from the sound of things, it’s still relatively early in the investigation.

“Since we were notified by [24]7.ai, we have been working to determine the extent to which Best Buy online customers’ information was affected,” the company said in the statement. “We have done that in collaboration with our third-party vendor and have notified law enforcement. As best we can tell, only a small fraction of our overall online customer population could have been caught up in this [24]7.ai incident, whether or not they used the chat function.”

Of course, a “small fraction” of the company’s overall online customer population still has the potential to be a fairly large number. According to [24]7.ai, the “cyber intrusion” occurred some time between September 27 and October 12, 2017, exposing customer payment information in the process.

The information was exposed by a piece of malware impacting [24]7.ai’s chat tool on October 12. The service says it issued an immediate fix and began an internal investigation into the source of the malicious code.

Source: Tech Crunch

AggregateIQ, a Canadian advertising tech and audience intelligence company, has been suspended by Facebook for allegedly being closely connected with SCL, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, reported the National Observer.

News broke late last month that AIQ, which was deeply involved with (and handsomely paid by) pro-Leave Brexit groups, was not the independent Canadian data broker it claimed to be. Christopher Wylie, the whistleblower who blew the lid off the Cambridge Analytica story, explained it candidly to The Guardian:

Essentially it was set up as a Canadian entity for people who wanted to work on SCL projects who didn’t want to move to London. That’s how AIQ got started: originally to service SCL and Cambridge Analytica projects.

AIQ has maintained that it has operated independently. Dogged denials appear on its webpage:

AggregateIQ has never been and is not a part of Cambridge Analytica or SCL. Aggregate IQ has never entered into a contract with Cambridge Analytica . Chris Wylie has never been employed by AggregateIQ. AggregateIQ has never managed, nor did we ever have access to, any Facebook data or database allegedly obtained improperly by Cambridge Analytica.

But the reporting in the Guardian makes these claims hard to take seriously. For instance, a founding member was listed on Cambridge Analytica’s website as working at “SCL Canada,” the company had no website or phone number of its own for some time, and until 2016, AIQ’s only client was Cambridge Analytica. It really looks as if AIQ is simply a Canadian shell under which operations could be said to be performed independent of CA and SCL.

Whatever the nature of the connection, it was convincing enough for Facebook to put them in the same bucket. The company said in a statement to the National Observer:

In light of recent reports that AggregateIQ may be affiliated with SCL and may, as a result, have improperly received (Facebook) user data, we have added them to the list of entities we have suspended from our platform while we investigate.

That will put a damper on SCL Canada’s work for a bit — it’s hard to do social media targeting work when you’re not allowed on the premises of the biggest social network of them all. Note that no specific wrongdoing on AIQ’s part is suggested — it’s enough that it may be affiliated with SCL and as such may have had access to the dirty data.

I’ve asked both companies for confirmation and will update this post if I hear back.

Source: Tech Crunch

Last year, renowned VC Steve Jurvetson parted ways with his longtime firm, DFJ, in what appeared a painful split. Six months later, he’s back with a new firm, Future Ventures, Jurvetson tells us via email. (Recode was first to take notice of its new site.)

Says Jurvetson: “I am incredibly excited about the future — the future of entrepreneurship, disruptive technologies, and my [“future ventures”] to come. I strongly believe that mission-driven founders forge the future. At Future Ventures, we will support those passionate founders.

Jurvetson’s fast return to the venture scene isn’t a complete surprise. In November, we talked with numerous institutional investors who agreed that if they could invest behind a new Jurvetson effort, they would.

Largely, that interest ties to Jurvetson’s track record, which includes SpaceX, Tesla Motors and the satellite company Planet, among other bets.

The circumstances around Jurvetson’s departure from DFJ appear to have provided an opening for his return, too.

Though Jurvetson left DFJ as he was being investigated by the firm for harassment, the one person who had complained about DFJ publicly, at least, a founder named Keri Kukral, later made clear that her relationship to the firm was not in a professional context. Meanwhile, two women who’d previously worked at DFJ came to Jurvetson’s defense specifically, writing on Medium that, “The fact that we are in leadership positions in the industry today is a testament to Steve and DFJ cultivating an environment where women advance professionally.”

Ultimately, opacity around Jurvetson’s alleged transgressions, combined with his long history of success in Silicon Valley, appeared to embolden investors whose livelihood depends on betting on winning VCs.

Said one such limited partner to us back in November: “Are some of these VCs forever unbackable, or unbackable until the dust settles? As an LP, it’s easier to say right now, ‘I have a fiduciary duty to my investors’ [and pass]. But a family office doesn’t have to answer to anyone. If they think Steve is a great investor, shit, they’ll give him money. They understand he hasn’t [assaulted] anyone.”

When Jurvetson was leaving DFJ, he’d said he intended to “focus on personal matters, including taking legal action against those who have defamed me.” Now, it looks like Jurvetson may have simply decided to move on instead.

We hope to have more on this development soon.

Source: Tech Crunch

Postmates, the startup that offers on-demand delivery for anything in your city, now lets people order ahead for pickup. This comes about one year after Square’s Caviar expanded into pickups, following the acquisition of OrderAhead’s pickup business.

It’s not clear how many markets this is available in, but TechCrunch has reached out to Postmates to learn more.

Last November, Postmates shipped a revamped version of its app, which added a grocery service and scheduled deliveries to the platform.

Postmates’ pickup functionality comes on the heels of news it may be teaming up with DoorDash in an effort to better compete against Uber, GrubHub and Amazon, Recode reported earlier today.

Source: Tech Crunch

As part of Twitter’s efforts to rid its platform of abuse and hate, the company is teaming up with researchers Susan Benesch, a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and J. Nathan Matias, a post-doc research associate at Princeton University, to study online abuse. Today, Twitter is going to start testing an idea that if it shows people its rules, behavior will improve.

“In an experiment starting today, Twitter is publicizing its rules, to test whether this improves civility,” Benesch and Matias wrote on Medium. “We proposed this idea to Twitter and designed an experiment to evaluate it.”

The idea is that by showing people the rules, their behavior will improve on the platform. The researchers point to evidence of when institutions clearly publish rules, people are more likely to follow them.

The researchers assure the privacy of Twitter users will be protected. For example, Twitter will only provide anonymized, aggregated information.

“Since we will not receive identifying information on any individual person or Twitter account, we cannot and will not mention anyone or their Tweets in our publications,” the researchers wrote.

Last month, Twitter began soliciting proposals from the public to help the social network capture, measure and evaluate healthy interactions on the platform. This was part of Twitter’s commitment “to help increase the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation,” Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said in a tweet.

It’s not clear how widespread the test will be. I’ve reached out to Twitter and will update this story if I learn more, but it seems that the company won’t be releasing specifics.

In the meantime, holler at me (megan@techcrunch.com) if these rules show up for you.

Source: Tech Crunch

There’s always been a glaring issue with voice computing: Talking to a voice assistant with other people around makes you feel like a bit of a weirdo. It’s a big part of the reason we’ve been seeing the technology start to take off in the home, where people feel a little less self-conscious talking to their machines.

The advent of some sort of nonverbal device that gets the job done in a similar way, but without the talking, is a kind of inevitability. A team at MIT has been working on just such a device, though the hardware design, admittedly, doesn’t go too far toward removing that whole self-consciousness bit from the equation.

AlterEgo is a headmounted — or, more properly, jaw-mounted — device that’s capable of reading neuromuscular signals through built-in electrodes. The hardware, as MIT puts it, is capable of reading “words in your head.”

“The motivation for this was to build an IA device — an intelligence-augmentation device,” grad student Arnav Kapur said in a release tied to the news. “Our idea was: Could we have a computing platform that’s more internal, that melds human and machine in some ways and that feels like an internal extension of our own cognition?”

The school tested the device on 10 subjects, who essentially trained the product to read their own neurophysiology. Once calibrated, the research team says it was able to get around 92 percent accuracy for commands — which, honestly, doesn’t seem too far off from the accuracy of voice commands for the assistants I’ve used.

The potential for such a device seems clear from a consumer standpoint — once you get past the creepiness of the whole reading words in your head bit. And the fact that it looks like a piece of medieval orthodontic equipment. The team also added bone conduction for audio playback to keep the system fully silent, an element that could potentially make it useful for special ops.

Source: Tech Crunch