Month: July 2021

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.

Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors.

Hey! It’s going to be a long weekend here in the United States, which means that this newsletter is in between myself and being done with work. So, we’re going to hit on even more topics than usual as I am a glutton for both punishment and writing. But I repeat myself.

Up first: Startups and culture.

Something that I very much enjoyed this week was the Robinhood IPO filing. You can read our first look here, and a deeper dig into the numbers here. But today we’re going to riff on culture. Observe the following excerpts, the first from the company’s notes on its goals via its S-1 filing:

Over time, we strive to make Robinhood the most trusted, lowest cost, and most culturally relevant money app worldwide.

Surprised that “culturally relevant“ made it into the mix? Then check this out, from the prospectus’s overview section (emphasis added):

Cultural Impact. We pioneered commission-free stock trading with no account minimums, which the rest of the industry emulated, and we have continued to build relationships with our customers by introducing new products that further expand access to the financial system. We believe we have made investing culturally relevant and understandable, and that our platform is enabling our customers to become long-term investors and take greater control of their finances. Over half of 18-44 year olds in the United States know who Robinhood is according to an internal brand study that we conducted in March 2021. As a further sign of our relevance today, Robinhood reached the number-one spot on the Apple App Store multiple times in the first quarter of 2021 and was frequently ranked number one in the Finance category on the Apple App store during 2020 and the first quarter of 2021.

The app store bragging is whatever. The focus on culture caught me up.

I’ve often enjoyed watching culture evolve more and more rapidly over time; TikTok further accelerated the trend. And amongst the youths of the world, I’d hazard, the line between brand and culture is blurring as brands work to move more and more into cultural territory. The Robinhood S-1 is forward-looking in a number of ways, but to see a company going public discuss culture in this manner feels like the future.

Up second: American manufacturing is not dead.

That’s what The Exchange learned this week from a conversation with the CEO of Xometry. The company recently went public. You can read more of our notes on its numbers here, but like Robinhood the former startup raised lots of venture capital and this fits into our broader remit.

What doesn’t, really, is what we learned about manufacturing thanks to the chat. Per CEO Randy Altschuler, his business of connecting companies in need of manufacturing with those able to build stuff is nearly an entirely U.S.-based business. That’s to say that, yes, there is still stuff made here in America.

What Xometry does is actually pretty cool — including offering financial services as part of its role as marketplace middleperson — but what got us the most hype was the idea that a digital service was going to help connect folks in need with folks with tools here in the United States. If Xometry’s vision of the future works out, it could help sustain, and dare we say grow, domestic manufacturing in this nation. Who would have thought that that was possible?

Xometry’s IPO was also a huge success, we should add. It priced above range, and then shot higher. That’s what you want as a company.

And third, some fun odds and ends:

• More tech money in F1: Every race weekend in the Formula 1 calendar helps me notice yet another tech company putting money into racing’s most bonkers series. Zoom has a lot of branding out there, for example. And this week we got news that Crypto.com has closed a five-year, $100-million deal with the racing league. That’s a lot of duckets. Notably Tezos already sponsors some teams, and you can spy both Amazon and Microsoft branding here and there in the series. Oh, and the Splunk-McLaren tie-up was just extended. New life goal: Make lots of money, sponsor F1 team, get paddock access. What could possibly go wrong?
• Unqork has hired a CRO. Not a CFO, so we can’t make too many IPO noises concerning the no-code service that helps big companies build apps. But the news still matters for you no-code fans.
• Finally, Apptopia has download numbers for neobanks. Can you guess which was number one?

— Alex

Source: Tech Crunch

Until children reach a certain age, enrichment programs are somewhat limited to school, sports, and camps, while money-making opportunities are largely non-existent.

Now, a year-old, L.A.-based startup called Mighty, a kind of Shopify that invites younger kids to open a store online, aims to partly fill the void. In fact, Mighty — led by founders Ben Goldhirsh, who previously founded GOOD magazine, and Dana Mauriello, who spent nearly five years with Etsy and was most recently an advisor to Sidewalk Labs — hopes to woo families with the pitch that it operates at the center of fintech, ed tech, and entertainment.

As often happens, the concept derived from the founders’ own experience. In this case, Goldhirsh, who has been living in Costa Rica, began worrying about his two daughters, who attend a small, six-person school. Because he feared they might fall behind their stateside peers, he began tutoring them when they arrived home, using Khan Academy among other software platforms. Yet the girls’ reaction wasn’t exactly positive.

“They were like, “F*ck you, dad. We just finished school and now you’re going to make us do more school?’”

Unsure of what to do, he encouraged them to sell online the bracelets they’d been making, figuring it would teach them needed math skills, as well as teach them about startup capital, business plans (he made them write one), and marketing. It worked, he says, and as he told friends about this successful “project-based learning effort,” they began to ask if he could help their kids get up and running.

Fast forward and Goldhirsh and Mauriello — who ran a crowdfunding platform that Goldhirsh invested in before she joined Etsy — say they’re now steering a still-in-beta startup that has become home to 3,000 “CEOs” as Mighty calls them.

The interest isn’t surprising. Kids are spending more of their time online than at any point in history. Many of the real-world type businesses that might have once employed young kids are shrinking in size. Aside from babysitting or selling cookies on the corner, it’s also challenging to find a job before high school, given the Department of Labor’s Fair Labor Standards Act, which sets 14 years old as the minimum age for employment. (Even then, many employers worry that their young employees might be more work than is worth it.)

Investor think it’s a pretty solid idea, too. Mighty recently closed on $6.5 million in seed funding led by Animo Ventures, with participation from Maveron, Humbition, Sesame Workshop, Collaborative Fund and NaHCO3, a family office.

Still, building out a platform for kids is tricky. For starters, not a lot of 11-year-olds have the tenacity required to sustain their own business over time. While Goldhirsh likens the business to a “21st century lemonade stand,” running a business that doesn’t dissolve at the end of the afternoon is a very different proposition.

Goldhirsh acknowledges that no kid wants to hear they have to “grind” on their business or to follow a certain trajectory, and he says that Mighty is certainly seeing kids who show up for a weekend to make some money. Still, he insists, many others have an undeniably entrepreneurial spirit and says they tend to stick around.  In fact, says Goldhirsh, the company — aided by its new seed funding — has much to do in order to keep its hungriest young CEOs happy.

Many are frustrated, for example, that they currently can’t sell their own homemade items through Mighty. Instead, they are invited to sell items like customizable hats, totes, and stickers made by Mighty’s current manufacturing partner, Printful, which then ships out the item to the end customer. (The Mighty user gets a percentage of the sale, as does Mighty.)

The budding tycoons on the platform can also sell items made by global artisans through a partnership that Mighty has struck with Novica, an impact marketplace that also sells through National Geographic.

The idea was to introduce as little friction into the process as possible at the outset, but “our customers are pissed — they want more from us,” says Goldhirsh, explaining that Mighty fully intends to one day enable its smaller entrepreneurs to sell their own items, as well as offer services (think lawn care), which the platform also does not support currently.

As for how it makes money, in addition to collecting transaction-based revenue, Mighty plans to layer in subscription services eventually, even while it’s not prepared to discuss these publicly quite yet.

It’s intriguing, on the whole, though the startup could need to fend off established players like Shopify should it begin to gain traction. It’s also conceivable that parents — if not children’s advocates —  could push back on what Mighty is trying to do. Entrepreneurship can be alternately exhilarating and demoralizing after all; it’s a roller coaster some might not want kids to ride from such a young age.

Mauriello insists they haven’t had that kind of feedback to date. For one thing, she says, Mighty recently launched an online community where its young CEOs can encourage one another and trade sales tips, and she says they are actively engaging there.

She also argues that, like sports or learning a musical instrument, there are lessons to be learned by creating a store on Mighty. Storytelling and how to sell are among them, but as critically, she says, the company’s young customers are learning that “you can fail and pick yourself back up and try again.”

Adds Goldhirsch, “There are definitely kids who are like, ‘Oh, this is harder than I thought it was going to be. I can’t just launch the site and watch money roll in.’ But I think they like the fact that the success they are seeing they are earning, because we’re not doing it for them.”

Source: Tech Crunch

A CEO’s fiduciary duties to their company and its shareholders do not end when they are off the clock — they must always act in good faith. However, navigating the boundaries between a company’s official communications and a personal voice can be difficult in today’s social-media-connected environment.

What a CEO posts on Twitter can raise not only serious reputational issues for themselves and their companies but posting the wrong things at the wrong time can also cause breach of fiduciary duties and may even run afoul of securities laws.

Fiduciary duties can be divided into three buckets: (1) duty of care — CEOs must act in good faith with the care of a reasonable person in a like position with a reasonable belief that their decisions are in furtherance of their company’s best interest; (2) duty of loyalty — CEOs must put the interest of shareholders and the company above their own self-interest; and (3) duty of good faith — CEOs must act with honesty and fairness to shareholders and the company.

There is no denying that Twitter can be leveraged as a powerful tool. Used appropriately, it can fortify the reputation of a company and its CEO, forge stronger consumer relationships and drive business profits. For example, Tim Cook’s habit of tweeting about his interactions with Apple customers demonstrates his customer-service values and effort to connect with consumers, which can potentially lead to a bigger and more loyal following.

Lately, more and more CEOs are communicating their stance on issues that are important to their consumer base to exhibit authenticity, relatability and demonstrate their personal and corporate values through social media. Following last year’s murder of George Floyd and rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, nearly 60% of all S&P 100 tech CEOs, unicorn CEOs, and Fortune 500 CEOs tweeted, “Black Lives Matter.” This was the first time CEOs active on Twitter overwhelmingly voiced their position on racial and social justice issues.

Twitter can also be an opportunity to show transparency in policy. CEOs can use social media to announce new management initiatives, capability expansions and new investments in employees (diversity initiatives, new roles for women, organizational changes) that are positive in tone and speak about the future direction of the company. These can have a positive correlation with stock prices.

It wasn’t that long ago that the world was fixated on Donald Trump’s Twitter posts and their correlation with the stock market. Words have permanence and their impact can be catastrophic. Given their elevated role as a leader and representative of the company and the fiduciary duties they owe, CEOs must watch what they say and when they say it. What it all boils down to is awareness, common sense and the law.

Don’t break the law and stick to the facts

For U.S. publicly traded companies, SEC Regulation Fair Disclosure (Reg FD) says that “an issuer may not disclose material nonpublic information to certain groups, either intentionally or unintentionally, without disclosing the same information to the entire marketplace.” If companies use social media to announce key information, to comply, they must alert investors that social media will be used to disseminate such information.

Regardless of whether it is a public or private company, CEOs are corporate officers and owe fiduciary duties to their companies and their shareholders. Fiduciary duty requires CEOs to act in good faith, apply their best business judgment and to act in the best interest of the company. This is true whether they are in the boardroom or on Twitter.

Source: Tech Crunch

Yesterday, enterprise computing corporation Zebra Technologies announced its plan to acquire Fetch Robotics. The San Jose-based startup has been a mainstay in warehouse and fulfillment robotics for a number of years, offering a modular system designed to automate companies behind the scenes.

The full deal is valued at $305 million, with Zebra acquiring the remaining 95% of the company for $290 million. It comes as interest in the category is at an all-time high, following widespread labor shortages during the pandemic.

After the news broke, we sat down with Fetch co-founder and CEO Melonee Wise to discuss the deal and the future of warehouse robotics.

Why was this acquisition the right move for Fetch?

When you look at it, over the last seven years, we’ve been building a pretty compelling cloud robotics platform. About two years ago, Zebra invested in Fetch, and we started working together through our partnership. One of the first things we did was integrating their mobile computing devices, for an out-of-the-box experience on our cloud robotics platform. When our customers got robots, they could take the hand scanner they already had today, scan a barcode and call a robot to them.

As we were fundraising for our Series D, this opportunity came out of that. I think when you look at it, over the last couple of years, we’ve had a good relationship with them. With the pandemic, there’s been a huge draw for more and more automation technology. Before the pandemic, there were already labor shortages for warehouse and logistics, and the pandemic only exacerbated it. One of the other great things about us joining Zebra is they have a strong go-to-market engine, and they can amplify our sales capability. They’re already in all of the customers we want to be working with. It helps us reach a much broader, wider and deeper audience.

I’d assumed Fetch was a good potential candidate for an acquisition, but I’d always imagined it would be something like a Walmart looking to compete with Amazon robotics. I suspect that you’ve been approached by companies over the years. Why does this kind of acquisition make more sense, ultimately?

I think the acquisition made sense because it aligns with more of our long-term vision. When we built our platform, we built it to be unifying. Not just our robots. Over the years we’ve been slowly bringing in other partners on the platform. We have a partnership with SICK, we have partnerships with other MWS providers like VARGO. That isn’t going to change. We’re still going to be partner friendly and we’re still going to bring other devices into the ecosystem. When you look at the options and the opportunities, this was a good opportunity and was well aligned with the team we wanted to build.

I know Zebra has developed their own robot and invested in other robotics companies. Are you the cornerstone of an ecosystem play? Is this Zebra building a a robotic retail and fulfillment ecosystem around Fetch?

Yes, that so far has been the discussion. It’s still evolving. I don’t have all the details for you, obviously. And of course, we still have 30 days or 35 days ‘till closing, so we’re still operating as independent businesses. In terms of vision of how we’re thinking about it, Zebra is very excited to kind of make Fetch the centerpiece of this whole new offering that they’re building out. It’s a high strategic priority for them.

Will the Fetch brand remain? Will the company stay in San Jose? Are you staying on board?

Fetch is not moving. We’re kind of becoming the centerpiece, so they want to keep the team together, in San Jose. My plan is to stay. We’re still working out the details [ … ] Fetch has a very strong brand, and so how do we get the best of both worlds.

Is acquisition something that a company like Fetch works toward? Do you consider it to be kind of an inevitability?

I think it’s complicated. When I started the company, I never really planned on anything. I just wanted to go build something. I mean that in the most sincere way. I wanted to go build something and not fail. And the question is, what does not failing look like? I think the facts are that in the last 20-something years, almost no robotics company has IPO’ed. Now we’re starting to see SPACS, but there hasn’t been a robotics company that’s IPO’ed through the traditional route.

I would say that if you were to ask me on any given day, what I thought the probability of IPO versus acquisition, I probably would have said acquisition, because there’s just not a history of robotics companies IPO’ing. That’s for lots of reasons. It’s a hardware intensive business. It takes a lot of technology and investment. Typically, they’re held privately. It’s hard for large corporate entities to have the P&L to invest in this deep technology. I think that’s starting to change. And I think now that there’s SPACs, you’ll see a lot changing in that regard. But I would say you’re still going to see more acquisitions than you’re going to see IPOs for the next 10 years.

Had you been approached about acquisition in the past?

Yeah. In the past we had been, but many times before it was just too early.

What does it mean to be too early?

It just didn’t feel like the right time for lots of reasons. Some of it has to do with what I want. Some of it has to do with what the team wants. And some of it has to do with what our investors want. There are a lot of people at the table. This is always a hard question. Previously when those things had come up, the market was so undefined and so new, we just wanted to see where it went. Now we’re starting to see more structure to the environment, and we’re starting to see an inflection point.

Is additional international expansion part of the plan?

Yeah. We’re in several companies in Europe. We’re in APAC and expanding in that region. Right now, we aren’t placing any large bets in any of those countries. We’re waiting to see how the market develops, but we’re looking to expand.

Source: Tech Crunch

Lordstown Motors continues to stumble. The beleaguered electric vehicle startup is now being investigated by the Department of Justice, in addition to an ongoing investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The investigation, first broke by the Wall Street Journal on Friday, is still in its early stages, according to unnamed sources. It is being conducted by the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan.

“Lordstown Motors is committed to cooperating with any regulatory or governmental investigations and inquiries,” a company spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We look forward to closing this chapter so that our new leadership – and entire dedicated team – can focus solely on producing the first and best full-size all-electric pickup truck, the Lordstown Endurance.”

The probe is just the latest in a series of woes for the startup, which recently said it had to cut production volumes for its debut electric pickup, Endurance, by half — from around 2,200 vehicles to 1,000. Just a few weeks after it made that announcement, there followed news of a corporate shakeup: the resignation of founding CEO Steve Burns and CFO Julio Rodriguez. Burns started the company as an offshoot of his previous startup, Workhorse Group.

Lordstown had a strong start, with investments from General Motors that helped it purchase a 6.2-million-square-foot factory from the leading automaker in late 2019. Lordstown made positive headlines last August, when it announced it would go public via a merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). The deal injected the EV startup with around $675 million in gross proceeds and skyrocketed its market value to $1.6 billion. Less than a year later, Lordstown informed the SEC that it does not have sufficient capital to manufacture Endurance.

Then, in March, the short-seller firm Hindenburg Research released a report disputing the company’s claims that it had booked 100,000 pre-orders for the electric pickup. It wrote that “extensive research reveals that the company’s orders appear largely fictitious and used as a prop to raise capital and confer legitimacy.” The SEC opened its investigation in the wake of these accusations.

The WSJ story is unclear on the scope of the inquiry and the company declined to provide details. TechCrunch will update the story if it learns more.

Source: Tech Crunch

For a brief moment, earlier this week, it seemed as though Pittsburgh might be the center of the tech universe. Just as Carnegie Mellon alum Duolingo was announcing its IPO. Senators Bob Casey and Pat Toomey were in town, as Vice President Kamala Harris paid a visit to the City of Bridges to talk infrastructure.

The morning of TechCrunch’s City Spotlight, the Pittsburgh Robotics Network held its own event to announce a new alliance with members of the local government and faculty from nearby universities.

“The alliance brings together leaders from top robotics companies, research institutions and universities in the Pittsburgh area, including Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Argo AI, Aurora, the University of Pittsburgh, Kaarta, RE2 Robotics, Neya Systems, Carnegie Robotics, HEBI Robotics, Near Earth Autonomy, BirdBrain Technologies, Omnicell and Advanced Construction Robotics,” a press release noted. “The Richard King Mellon Foundation commemorated this membership milestone with a grant of $125,000 to support the continued growth of the PRN.”

Our own Spotlight event, held later that afternoon, was designed to highlight the city’s continued evolution. To many, Pittsburgh is still very much the plucky but troubled city reeling from the deindustrialization of the 70s and 80s, as the factory and industry jobs that formed its foundation moved out of town and shipped overseas. The rust belt veneer is a hard one to leave behind, but the city’s biggest cheerleaders are working hard to transform the image of Pittsburgh into one of robotics, AI, autonomy and other cutting-edge technologies.

Carnegie Mellon has — and continues to be the cornerstone of that Pittsburgh. A world-class research school by any metric, CMU is the crown jewel of the area’s dozens of colleges and universities. While the University of Pittsburgh is a huge driver for the city’s medical and science communities, CMU is the reason it can count itself among the leaders in robots and self-driving cars.

Speaking at our event, Farnam Jahanian cited the school’s The Swartz Center as a major driver in its efforts to support the startup ambitions of students and faculty alike.

“The Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon is a system of programming activities that offers a unique path of entrepreneurship, education, engagement, collaboration and opportunities for students, faculty and staff that are interested in entrepreneurship, from the Innovation Scholars Program, to the corporate startup lab, to essentially garages that students and faculty can essentially sign up for to launch their companies from plus a host of other programmatic things, resources that you would need,” says Jahanian, who was appointed CMU’s president in 2018.

The Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship was founded in 2015, courtesy of a $31 million donation from CMU alumnus and Accel Partners co-founder, James R. Swartz. The center built on previous efforts like 2012’s Carnegie Mellon Center and Project Olympus, founded in 2007. The Swartz Center and its recent precursors list among their success stories Duolingo, DataSquid and AbilLife.

Dave Mawhinney recently told TechCrunch that he took the role as the center’s executive director in an effort, “to make it on par with Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, Harvard and other great entrepreneurial universities.” CMU certainly isn’t outclassed by any of the above in terms of its position as a world-class research university, but Mawhinney concedes that the school and the city have traditionally grappled with entrepreneurial retention.

“You can always learn from what you have and build on it,” says Jahanian. “I would stress it is really about the entire ecosystem. It’s not about just what CMU does — that’s a critical part of it. It’s University of Pittsburgh, it’s other universities that are in our region that are also contributing significantly to our ecosystem.”

Mawhinney says that CMU’s ability to incubate and foster tech startups hit an inflection point roughly a decade and a half ago, as Big Tech took an increasing interest in the research the school was doing around things fields like AI and automation.

“Really, the seminal event was when Google put an office in Pittsburgh in 2006. They have over 1,000 employees,” he says. “Every major tech company — Amazon, Facebook, Apple — have all embedded hundreds of engineers in our community, so we’re growing really, really rapidly. Artificial intelligence was invented at Carnegie Mellon — and that sort of set off the robot revolution [ … ] Now we’re the center of the automated vehicle community. Aurora is co-located here, Argo is here, Aptiv is here. We have a very vibrant community and we do want to continue to grow it.”

Building a successful company requires a lot more than engineers, of course (there’s a decent chance you wouldn’t be reading this if that weren’t the case). In the lead up to our event, I asked several interested parties what the biggest hurdle was in continuing to attract and grow the city’s startup ecosystem. The overwhelming answer was simple: venture capital.

“What we need is more capital — angel funds, venture funds so that entrepreneurs have a variety of funding sources to go to locally,” Yvonne Campos of Next Act Fund LLC told TechCrunch. “We definitely need more funding for women-led businesses — women raise about one-third less capital than men-led companies. Not because of the business idea or leader, but because we invest in companies where we have the most comfort — we invest in people that look like us. Nationally, only about 20%-25% of all angel investors are women. We need more women to become active as investors.”

The city’s mayor, Bill Peduto, who also appeared at our event, echoed the sentiment.

“I think the biggest hurdle remains access to venture capital, especially in this stage. I think we’ve been able to convince investors from the coast that the companies don’t need to leave Pittsburgh in order to be highly successful and see their investment pay off,” he told me in an interview. “However, I believe if we had more venture capital arriving here to help to take early-stage companies into that critical next stage of expansion, it would build off itself and it would excel growth in all of the industry cluster, significantly.”

During our conversation, however, Jahanian pushed back on the sentiment. “I respectfully disagree,” he told me. “Funding is important, but great ideas get funded. I’ve seen it my entire career. They get funded at levels that really show that these companies have a shot at being really successful.”

CMU’s president points to another problem, entirely. “You need a lot more than just cool technologies or new research ideas or new concepts or products just to launch a company,” Jahanian says. “You need a lot more around it. You need marketing, product management, you need to be able to develop a business plan. So those are a lot of the resources that we do provide.”

Kleiner Perkins CPO Bing Gordon reflected the sentiment, speaking to me over email. “[Pittsburgh needs] to import CFOs, product managers, ad sales,” he wrote. Another historical concern for the city is attracting that talent. CMU hasn’t had an issue on that front, because location is less of a key concern for students applying for research universities. When it comes to careers after college, settling down and starting a family, on the other hand, suddenly quality of life rockets up the list.

Jahanian says he has long championed green spaces and other communal gathering places in his conversations over the years with Peduto. He adds that the subject should continue to be top of mind for whoever the city’s new mayor is next year.

“One of the most important things about the startup and high-tech community in Pittsburgh is the quality of life for citizens across this town,” says Jahanian. “I can tell you as a university president, an overwhelming majority of the faculty that we recruit want to live in the city and enjoy it. That’s an important part of it. Obviously, there’s a lot more going on beyond the quality of life. The more that the city does to bridge the gap between those who are prospering and those who are potentially left behind in the economies that are created the high-tech economies is important. That’s a responsibility of the private sector and the public sector. I’m really optimistic that we’ll have a great partnership with our future mayor, as we’ve done in the past mayors to catalyze the economy and lift all boats.”

Source: Tech Crunch

Twitter has a history of sharing feature and design ideas it’s considering at very early stages of development. Earlier this month, for example, it showed off concepts around a potential “unmention” feature that would let users untag themselves from others’ tweets. Today, the company is sharing a few more of its design explorations that would allow users to better control who can see their tweets and who ends up in their replies. The new concepts include a way to tweet only to a group of trusted friends, new prompts that would ask people to reconsider the language they’re using when posting a reply, and a “personas” feature that would allow you to tweet based on your different contexts — like tweets about your work life, your hobbies and interests, and so on.

The company says it’s thinking through these concepts and is looking to now gather feedback to inform what it may later develop.

The first of the new ideas builds on work that began last year with the release of a feature that allows an original poster to choose who’s allowed to reply to their tweet. Today, users can choose to limit replies to only people mentioned in the tweet, ony people they follow, or they can leave it defaulted to “everyone.” But even though this allows users to limit who can respond, everyone can see the tweet itself. And they can like, retweet or quote tweet the post.

With the proposed Trusted Friends feature, users could tweet to a group of their own choosing. This could be a way to use Twitter with real-life friends, or some other small network of people you know more personally. Perhaps you could post a tweet that only your New York friends could see when you wanted to let them know you were in town. Or maybe you could post only to those who share your love of a particular TV show, sporting event, or hobby.

Image Credits: Twitter

This ability to have private conversations alongside public ones could boost people’s Twitter usage and even encourage some people to try tweeting for the first time. But it also could be disruptive to Twitter, as it would chip away at the company’s original idea of a platform that’s a sort of public message board where everyone is invited into the conversation. Users may begin to think about whether or not their post is worthy of being shared in public, and decide to hold more of their content back from the wider Twitter audience, which could impact Twitter engagement metrics. It also pushes Twitter closer to Facebook territory where only some posts are meant for the world, while more are shared with just friends.

Twitter says the benefit of this private, “friends only” format is that it could save people from the workarounds they’re currently using — like juggling multiple alt accounts or toggling between public to protected tweets.

Another new feature under consideration is Reply Language Prompts. This feature would allow Twitter users to choose phrases they don’t want to see in their replies. When someone is writing back to the original poster, these words and phrases would be highlighted and a prompt would explain why the original poster doesn’t want to see that sort of language. For instance, users could configure prompts to appear if someone is using profanity in their reply.

The feature wouldn’t stop the poster from tweeting their reply — it’s more a gentle nudge that asks them to be more considerate.

These “nudges” can have impact. For example, when Twitter launches a nudge that suggested users read an article before they amplify it with a retweet, it found that users opened articles before sharing them 40% more often. But in the case of someone determined to troll, it may not do that much good.

The third, and perhaps most complicated, feature is something Twitter is calling “Facets.”

This is an early idea about tweeting from different personas from one account. The feature would make sense for those who often tweet about different aspects of their lives, including their work life, their side hustles, their personal life or family, their passions, and more.

Image Credits: Twitter

Unlike Trusted Friends, which would let you restrict some tweets to a more personal network, Facets would give other users the ability to choose whether or not they wanted to follow all your tweets, or only those about the “facet” they’re interested in. This way, you could follow someone’s tweets about tech, but ignore their stream of reactions they post when watching their favorite team play. Or you could follow your friend’s personal tweets, but ignore their work-related content. And so on.

This is an interesting idea, as Twitter users have always worried about alienating some of their followers by posting “off-topic” so to speak. But this also puts the problem of determining what tweets to show which users on the end user themselves. Users may be better served by the algorithmic timeline that understands which content they engage with, and which they tend to ignore. (Also: “facets?!”)

Twitter says none of the three features are in the process of being built just yet. These are only design mockups that showcase ideas the company has been considering. It also hasn’t yet made the decision whether or not any of the three will go under development — that’s what the user feedback it’s hoping to receive will help to determine.

Source: Tech Crunch

It’s a sweltering day here in New York City, and that means Wall Street is on fire, and so is Robinhood, apparently. The popular stock trading app officially filed its Form S-1 with the SEC a few hours ago to go public, where it will trade under the ticker “HOOD.”

The Equity crew has been yammering about Robinhood for years now, and we have been chomping on the bit to see those S-1 results for what feels like ages. Well, we finally got the numbers, we chomped that bit (or at least Alex and Danny did, since Natasha went on vacation about 15 minutes before the IPO hit the wires), and so here’s a special Equity Shot to talk about all the highlights.

We talked about so much in an itsy-bitsy 15-minute episode: crazy revenue growth, crazy revenue concentration from two major sources, regulatory hurdles that the company has been clearing up, better financials with a bit of nuance on the company’s Q1 finances, and the company’s special plan for its IPO.

Wowza.

Here’s what we got up to:

• Historical growth and profitability.
• Revenue mix and revenue concentration, along with constituent concerns.
• The importance of options-related incomes for the company.
• Dogecoin.
• Why the company’s adjusted income may help it assuage investors who have their eyes pop out of their skulls when they see its GAAP Q1 2021 results.

And a lot more. Of course, if you hate Robinhood, we will be back with our normally-scheduled Friday episode of Equity tomorrow.

Source: Tech Crunch