Month: February 2021

Tracy Chou’s resume is impressive. She interned at RocketFuel, Google and Facebook before becoming a software engineer at Quora and Pinterest. She is also a major advocate for diversity within the tech industry, launching Project Include in 2016.

Now, she’s the founder and CEO of Block Party, a platform aimed at making people feel safer on social media platforms.

Obviously, we’re absolutely thrilled to announce that we’ll be sitting down with Chou at TechCrunch Sessions: Justice in early March.

Block Party was born specifically out of Chou’s experience working at places like Quora — building a block button was one of the first things she built after being harassed on the platform. As an advocate for diversity, and a big name in the tech sphere in general, Chou has had her fair share of experience with online harassment.

Chou will join us as part of our Founders in Focus series, talking to us about the process of spinning up and launching Block party, as well as her strategies around growing the business. We’ll also talk through how Chou makes product decisions for a platform like Block Party, which tackles sensitive issues of safety and well-being.

Chou joins an outstanding cast of speakers at TC Sessions: Justice, including Arlan Hamilton, Brian Brackeen and a panel that includes the likes of Netflix’s Wade Davis and Uber’s Bo Young Lee.

The event goes down on March 3, and will explore diversity, equity and inclusion in tech, the gig worker experience, the justice system and more in a series of interviews with key figures in the technology community.

You don’t want to miss it. Get a ticket here.

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Source: Tech Crunch

We’re less than two weeks away from TC Sessions: Justice 2021, a day-long deep dive into the state of diversity, inclusion and equity in tech. March 3 is your opportunity to hear from and engage with the people who, through entrepreneurship, venture capital, labor organizing and advocacy, are both using and challenging tech to disrupt the status quo for the betterment of all.

This programming-packed day features presentations, breakout sessions and interactive Q&As with the leading movers, shakers and makers who are laser focused on, well, justice. Peruse the agenda and plan your day accordingly.

We’re stoked about showcasing the participating members of our TC Include Program. Do not miss meeting and connecting with these impressive early-stage founders, nominated by our partner founder organizations, Black Female Founders, Latinx Startup Alliance, Startout and the Female Founders Alliance.

TechCrunch, in collaboration with these organizations and VC firms like Kleiner Perkins, Salesforce Ventures and Initialized Capital, provide these young founders with educational resources and mentorship over the course of a year.

What’s more, the TC Include founders will take the virtual stage for a live pitch feedback session with a TechCrunch staffer during the conference. Tune in a get ready to take notes — the advice you hear could help you improve your pitch deck.

We already turned the spotlight on the startups nominated by Black Female Founders, and today we focus on these awesome, early-stage founders in the Female Founders Alliance cohort.

I-Ally: I-Ally is a community-driven app that saves millennial family caregivers time and enables informed decision-making by providing services that fulfill their unique needs. Founded by Lucinda Koza.

Proneer: Proneer is virtual try-on and size-recommendation software that helps reduce returns in apparel retail. Founded by Nicole Faraji.

Tribute: Tribute is the only mentorship platform that creates a continuous learning and development environment by connecting employees together for mentorship using the power of personal stories. Founded by Sarah Haggard.

Cirkled In: LinkedIn for Gen Z students, Cirkled is a 21st century online profile and portfolio platform connecting Gen Z with best-fit colleges, employers and endless win-win opportunities. Founded by Reetu Gupta.

Datacy: Datacy is a consumer to business insights data marketplace. We connect consumers and businesses to enable high-quality, ethical and transparent data exchange. Founded by Paroma Indilo.

We’ll be highlighting the cohorts from the Latinx Startup Alliance and Startout soon, so stay tuned!

TC Sessions: Justice 2021 takes place on March 3. Join this essential discussion, infuse justice into the DNA of your startup and make tech better for everyone. We can’t wait to get started.

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Source: Tech Crunch

Photomath, the popular mobile app that helps you solve equations, has raised a $23 million Series B funding round led by Menlo Ventures. The app is a massive consumer success, and chances are you might already know about it if you have a teenager in your household.

The app lets you point your phone’s camera at a math problem. It recognizes what’s written and gives you a step-by-step explanation to solve the problem. You might think that it’s the perfect app for lazy students.

But there are many different use cases for Photomath. For instance, you can write an equation in your notebook and use Photomath to draw a graph.

Typing an equation on a keyboard is quite difficult. That’s why bridging the gap between the physical world and your smartphone is key to Photomath’s success. You can just grab a pen and write something down on a piece of paper. Essentially, it’s an AR calculator.

GSV Ventures, Learn Capital, Cherubic Ventures and Goodwater Capital are also participating in today’s funding round.

Behind the app’s success, there’s an interesting story. Photomath was originally designed as a demo app for another company called MicroBlink. At the time, the team was working on text recognition technology. It planned to sell its core technology to other companies that might find it useful.

In 2014, they pitched MicroBlink at TechCrunch Disrupt in London. And things changed drastically overnight as Photomath reached the first spot of the iOS App Store.

Photomath has now attracted over 220 million downloads. As of this writing, it is still #59 in the U.S. App Store, one rank above Tinder. Other companies tried to build competitors, but it seems like they didn’t manage to crush the tiny European startup.

The app seems even more relevant as many kids are spending more time studying at home. They can’t simply raise their hand to call the teacher for some help.

Photomath is free and users can optionally pay for Photomath Plus, a premium version with more features, such as dynamic illustrations and animated tutorials.

Source: Tech Crunch

Uber today notified employees that it will extend its work from home policy through September 13.

“In considering the extension, we took into account the latest scientific data and experts’ views; the fact that different countries are at different stages of recovery; and the start of the school year,” Uber Chief People Officer Nikki Krish wrote in an email, viewed by TechCrunch, to employees. “[…] We know that some CommOps, IT, or other roles require physical presence in an office, so please continue to work within the policies your teams have developed—however, as always, we won’t force anyone to go into the office if they have medical concerns.”

Uber is also encouraging employees to get vaccinated when it’s possible to do so. In the email, Krish said Uber employees will be able to take time off in order to get vaccinated.

In August, Uber notified employees that they should expect to work from home through June 2021. As for other tech companies, Google in July extended its work from home policy through the end of June 2021, while Facebook in August extended its remote work policy until July 2021.

Post-COVID, Uber will likely have a hybrid work model, Krish said, but it’s still a work in progress.

“We’re taking a number of aspects into consideration, such as how being physically together benefits or reduces productivity, collaboration, and engagement,” she wrote. “We’ll update you on where things stand in a few weeks, and along the way as we make progress.”

Source: Tech Crunch

If you use Office, Microsoft would really, really, really like you to buy a cloud-enabled subscription to Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365). But as the company promised, it will continue to make a stand-alone, perpetual license for Office available for the foreseeable future. A while back, it launched Office 2019, which includes the standard suite of Office tools, but is frozen in time and without the benefit of the regular feature updates and cloud-based tools that come with the subscription offering.

Today, Microsoft is announcing what is now called the Microsoft Office LTSC (Long Term Servicing Channel). It’ll be available as a commercial preview in April and will be available on both Mac and Windows, in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.

And like with the previous version, it’s clear that Microsoft would really prefer if you just moved to the cloud already. But it also knows that not everybody can do that, so it now calls this version with its perpetual license that you pay for once and then use for as long as you want to (or have compatible hardware) a “specialty product for specific scenarios. Those scenarios, Microsoft agrees, include situations where you have a regulated device that can’t accept feature updates for years at a time, process control devices on a manufacturing floor and other devices that simply can’t be connected to the internet.

“We expect that most customers who use Office LTSC won’t do it across their entire organization, but only in specific scenarios,” Microsoft’s CVP for Microsoft 365, Jared Spataro, writes in today’s announcement.

Because it’s a specialty product, Microsoft will also raise the price for Office Professional Plus, Office Standard, and the individual Office apps by up to 10%.

“To fuel the work of the future, we need the power of the cloud,” writes Spataro. “The cloud is where we invest, where we innovate, where we discover the solutions that help our customers empower everyone in their organization – even as we all adjust to a new world of work. But we also acknowledge that some of our customers need to enable a limited set of locked-in-time scenarios, and these updates reflect our commitment to helping them meet this need.”

If you have one of these special use cases, the price increase will not likely deter you and you’ll likely be happy to hear that Microsoft is committing to another release in this long-term channel in the future, too.

As for the new features in this release, Spataro notes that will have dark mode support, new capabilities like Dynamic Arrays and XLOOKUP in Excel, and performance improvements across the board. One other change worth calling out is that it will not ship with Skype for Business but the Microsoft Teams app (though you can still download Skype for Business if you need it).

Source: Tech Crunch

When Wendell Brooks stepped down as managing partner and head of Intel Capital last August, Anthony Lin was named to replace him on an interim basis. At the time, it wasn’t clear if he would be given the role permanently, but today, six months later, the answer is known.

In a letter to the firm’s portfolio CEOs published on the company website, Lin mentioned, almost casually that he had taken on the two roles on a permanent basis. “Personally, I want to share that I have been appointed to managing partner and head of Intel Capital. I have been a member of the investment committee for the past several years and am humbly awed by the talent of our entrepreneurs and our team,” he wrote.

Lin takes over in a time of turmoil for Intel as the company struggles to regain its place in the semiconductor business that it dominated for decades. Meanwhile, Intel itself has a new CEO with Pat Gelsinger returning in January from VMware to lead the organization.

As the corporate investment arm of Intel, it looks for companies that can help the parent company understand where to invest resources in the future. If that is its goal, perhaps it hasn’t done a great job as Intel has lost some of its edge when it comes to innovation.

Lin, who was formerly head of mergers and acquisitions and international investing at the firm, can use the power of the firm’s investment dollars to try help point the parent company in the right direction and help find new ways to build innovative solutions on the Intel platform.

Lin acknowledged how challenging 2020 was for everyone, and his company was no exception, but the firm invested in 75 startups including 35 new deals and 40 deals involving companies it had previously invested in. It  has also made a commitment to invest in companies with more diverse founders. To that end, 30% of new venture stage dollars went to startups led by diverse leaders, according to Lin.

What’s more, the company made a five year commitment that 15% of all of its deals would go to companies with Black founders. It made some progress towards that goal, but there is still a ways to go. “At the end of 2020, 9% of our new venture deals and 15% of our venture dollars committed were in companies led by Black founders. We know there is more progress to be made and we will continue to encourage, foster and invest in diverse and inclusive teams,” he wrote.

Lin faces a big challenge ahead as he takes over a role that had the same leader for the first 28 years in Arvind Sodhani. His predecessor, Brooks, was there for five years. Now it passes to Lin and he needs to use the firm’s investment might to help Gelsinger advance the goals of the broader firm, while making sound investments.

Source: Tech Crunch

Update: There’s an entire second session of this? My lord.

Today the House Financial Services Committee dragged the CEO of Reddit, a Cato wonk, social media icon DeepFuckingValue, the CEO of Citadel Kenneth Griffin, a hedgefund bro who got whomped by DeepFuckingValue, and the CEO of Robinhood Vlad Tenev, who got womped when individual investors joined DeepFuckingValue in his womping of the hedge fund and thus womped his capital requirements leading to general market chaos, before them virtually for questioning.

It was not very useful. Between a cascade of Zoom failures — mutings, incorrect unmutings, a green screen that was not actually in use, and an actual gavel — members of Congress largely took five minute slots to embarass themselves, and not make material points.

The format was not conducive to real questioning, and most questions were both too long and either too precise, and misguided in their direction, or too imprecise, even if they landed in the strike zone. Sitting here I am trying to recall a single thing that I learned. I suppose that Robinhood’s CEO was not sure on the details of his company’s arbitration agreement with users. And perhaps a little bit about how many of its users trade options. And that Reddit’s CEO has a nice suit.

Some members of Congress mocked the proceedings, calling them political theater. That earned a rebuke by Maxine Waters, Chair of the House Financial Services Committee.

Some members of Congress nearly got around to asking something useful. But largely the method of asking questions was bilge, the responses canned, and nothing much uncovered.

What would have worked? I suppose Congress could have brought in a few actual experts and a more limited number of guests, and then hammered them with questions about the ethical reality of payment for order flow, Robinhood’s app mechanics and how easily it offers access to exotic trading tools, and the like. That would have helped.

Instead, we got great stuff like this:

Which was not very helpful. That said, there were some good memes and jokes, so, let’s have some fun instead of being annoyed with our elected representatives:

The rest of it was a waste of time. As I write this sentence to you, a member of Congress just asked how Robinhood go its name. Which is dumb, as the name is so obvious it nearly makes your head hurt with how earnest it is.

So there’s that. This was a waste. Real questions remain. They largely didn’t get asked, and certainly didn’t get answered.

Source: Tech Crunch