Month: August 2021

Among Apple’s more recent social good initiatives is the Impact Accelerator, an effort launched about a year ago intended to find and elevate minority-owned small businesses taking on sustainability and climate change. The program now has its first 15 participants, gathered from all over the country for a three-month program and a shot at an Apple contract.

The Impact Accelerator is part of the company’s $100M Racial Equity and Justice Initiative, which is being divided between a number of efforts, some directly funding existing programs, some going to venture firms owned by people of color, and generally whatever the Initiative’s team thinks is a good investment.

These companies will take part in a three-month-long virtual program (the details are not discussed in Apple’s announcement post) and then will have the opportunity to become suppliers for Apple’s carbon neutral supply chain goals.

Apple profiles all 15 companies in this list, but here are five that caught my eye:

• Volt Energy Utility (Co-Founder: Gilbert Campbell III) – Developer of utility-scale solar projects with a focus on underserved communities.
• Bench-Tek (Founder: Maria Castellon) – A manufacturer of lab benches that focuses on using environmentally friendly materials.
• Vericool (Founder: Darrell Jobe) – Aims to make sustainable alternatives to Styrofoam and other packaging products, and makes a point of hiring formerly incarcerated folks.
• Oceti Sakowin Power Authority (Chairman: Lyle Jack) – Not a company per se, but an NGO formed by six Sioux tribes dedicated to developing renewable energy in the Midwest and on reservations.
• Mosaic Global Transportation (Founder: Maurice H. Brewster) – Supplies employee and event shuttles and other vehicles with an aim to replace gas-operated ones with EVs.

“The businesses we’re partnering with today are poised to become tomorrow’s diverse and innovative industry leaders, creating ripples of change to help communities everywhere adapt to the urgent challenges posed by climate change,” said Apple’s VP of Environment, Policy, and Social Initiatives, Lisa Jackson, in the announcement.

Source: Tech Crunch

Something strange is afoot in Brazil, and it promises great changes for how merchants get paid.

This the story of one regulator, the Brazilian Central Bank, and how it has taken center stage in creating a framework that will have far-reaching effects across merchants and fintechs in this fast-growing Latin American nation.

But first, some background: Unlike in the rest of the world, when a credit card is used for payment in Brazil, the merchant does not receive the funds owed to them all at once. Instead, nearly 50% of card sales are completed in monthly installments, leaving the sellers to manage a difficult cash flow process.

The most common solution for merchants is that they end up selling the remaining receivable at a discount — taking less than they are owed — in order to get their money sooner. And we’re not talking about a small-volume market: Some R$2 trillion (Brazilian Reais) in card transactions were processed in 2020.

Here’s what this looks like in practice: Let’s say Maria purchases a few articles of clothing from retailer Clothing Incorporated. When paying via her credit card at checkout, Maria can choose to pay in two to 12 installments. Maria decides to pay the balance of R$620 over six installments.

While Maria is happy with the products in hand, Clothing Incorporated is without the full payment — and for small merchants in particular, the difficulties associated with limited working capital can be acute. Clothing Incorporated can either wait the full six months to be paid, receiving payments from their merchant acquirer each month until they are paid in full, or they can choose to dramatically discount the amount they are owed and not have to wait the six months.

Let’s say Clothing Incorporated merchant acquirer is ExMarko — instead of receiving R$620 over six months (net of any merchant discount rates), they could receive R$520 within days after the purchase, with ExMarko pocketing the rest when it comes in. This comes at a steep cost of doing business to the merchant, with an implied annualized interest rate that sometimes can reach  ~70% — for a risk-free operation, since the acquirer is only liquidating earlier its own obligation to pay the merchant.

Source: Tech Crunch

Ford-owned micromobility company Spin has announced an integration with Google Maps. Now, users planning their trips in 84 cities, towns and campuses across the U.S., Canada, Germany and Spain will be able to view Spin’s electric scooters and bikes on the app while planning their trip.

Spin joins its top competition on the popular mapping app, Lime, which also recently announced an integration with transit planning app Moovit. We can expect to see further integrations of micromobility operators with mapping apps as shared mobility becomes part of the broader transit ecosystem.

A recent report from the North American Bikeshare & Scootershare Association on the state of the micromobility industry found that 50% of riders reported using shared mobility to connect to transit, and 16% of all micromobility trips were for the purpose of connecting to transit.

Similar to Lime, the Spin icon will now show up under Google Map’s bike section when planning a journey — only in the mobile app, not on the desktop. A user will see the nearest available Spin vehicle, how long it will take to walk to it, what the estimated battery range is and the expected arrival time if using the vehicle. Choosing that option will direct users to the Spin app to pay for and unlock the vehicle.

“With this integration, Spin is making it easier for millions of Google Maps users to easily incorporate shared bikes and scooters into their daily trips,” Ben Bear, CEO of Spin, said in a statement. “Our goal is to make it as low friction as possible for consumers to plan multi-modal journeys. It needs to be just as easy, and even more convenient to get around with bikes, buses, trains and scooters as it is with a personal car.”

Bear also said this collaboration with Google is Spin’s largest yet, and he teased “many more in the pipeline.” Spin is already integrated into platforms like Citymapper, Moovit, Transit and Kölner Verkehrs-Betriebe. This news comes not long after Spin announced it would be adding e-bikes to the mix and trying to capture market share with exclusive or semi-exclusive city partnerships. A major app integration such as this one could be a vote of confidence for Spin looking to partner with more cities in the future.

Source: Tech Crunch

Tinder announced this morning that in the “coming quarters,” users will be able to verify their ID on the app. This feature was first rolled out in Japan in 2019, where Tinder users must verify that they are at least 18 years old. Aside from places like Japan, where this is mandated by law, ID verification will “begin as voluntary,” Tinder wrote in a blog post.

ID verification will be free for all users, similar to its photo verification feature. According to a Tinder spokesperson, the company will also use ID verification to cross-reference data like the sex offender registry in regions where that information is accessible. Tinder already does this via credit card lookup when users sign up for a subscription. Per its terms of use, Tinder requires that users “have never been convicted of or pled no contest to a felony, a sex crime, or any crime involving violence, and that you are not required to register as a sex offender with any state, federal or local sex offender registry.”

The existing photo verification feature adds a Twitter-like blue check to a user’s profile, while ID verification will yield another distinct badge. That way, users can tell whether or not a potential date has confirmed their identity via photo verification, ID verification, both or neither.

“Creating a truly equitable solution for ID Verification is a challenging, but critical safety project and we are looking to our communities as well as experts to help inform our approach,” the company wrote.

While Tinder has made continued investments in safety features, free ID verification can only go so far — especially when voluntary, putting the onus on individual users to decide whether or not they feel comfortable meeting up with unverified users. But in March 2021, Match Group, the parent company to Tinder, announced its seven-figure contribution to the nonprofit background check company Garbo. Garbo’s background checks could help detect dating app users with a history of violence or abuse, but we have yet to see how that will be integrated into Tinder, and if users will be charged for access. Notably, Garbo conducts “equitable background” checks, meaning that it will exclude drug possession charges and minor traffic incidents on its platform, citing the way that these charges are disproportionately levied against vulnerable communities.

Though Tinder said it will not be using Garbo’s tech to power its ID verification tools, the company noted to TechCrunch that it will have more information to share about background checks via Garbo in the fall. Tinder didn’t share whether or not access to information from Garbo will be paywalled. At the time of the acquisition, Match Group said it would determine pricing — if it does choose to paywall this information — based on factors like user adoption, how many people want to use it and how many searches they want to perform.

Tinder’s investment in safety features is encouraging, but if left behind a paywall, impact may be limited. Match Group faced serious scrutiny in December 2019, when an investigation by Columbia Journalism Investigations (CJI) and ProPublica found that the company screened for sexual predators on Match, a paid service, but not on free apps like Tinder, OkCupid and PlentyofFish. At the time, a spokesperson for the company said, “There are definitely registered sex offenders on our free products.”

In January 2020, Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) launched an investigation into user safety policies on dating apps, sending letters to Match Group, The Meet Group, Bumble and Grindr. He wrote, “Protection from sexual predators should not be a luxury confined to paying customers.” The following month, U.S. Representatives Ann Kuster (D-NH) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) wrote a letter to Match Group, signed by nine other representatives, stating their concern that Match Group doesn’t cross-reference user responses with sex offender registries.

Around the same time, Match Group made several moves to invest more deeply in user safety — for example, it acquired Noonlight in January 2020, which allows users in the U.S. to share who, when and where they’re meeting someone. In dangerous situations, users can discreetly trigger emergency services — Noonlight will first reach out to the user, then call 911 if necessary (Noonlight’s basic version is free, but some features like connecting to an Apple Watch, Google Home or Alexa are only available by upgrading to a $5 or $10 monthly plan). Features like these can be controversial due to concerns about police intervention, but might help some users feel a sense of security. But blocking offenders prior to signup could lessen the need for such intervention in the first place.

Source: Tech Crunch

The past decade has seen several structural changes in know your customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) regulations in Europe and globally. High-profile money laundering cases and the penetration of illicit funds into global markets have caught the attention of regulators and the public, and rightfully so.

The Wirecard scandal was a particularly salacious example, in which the investigation into widespread fraud revealed a chain of shell companies involved in illegal distribution of narcotics and pornography. Over at Danske Bank, some $227 billion was laundered through an Estonian subsidiary, going virtually unnoticed for nine years.

In the United States, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed an action against Ripple Labs and two of its executives, claiming they had raised over $1.3 billion through an unregistered, ongoing digital asset securities offering. That case is ongoing.

As regulators and financial institutions improve their understanding of these criminal practices, AML requirements have likewise been improved. But these adjustments have been an overwhelmingly reactive, trial-by-fire process.

To address the challenges of the fast-evolving blockchain ecosystem, the European Union has begun to introduce more stringent financial regulations that further bolster the regulatory system in order to improve licensing models. Many member states now regulate crypto assets individually, and Germany is leading the way in being the first to regulate cryptocurrencies.

These individual regulations clearly prescribe the pathway for crypto companies, outlining the requirements for obtaining and maintaining a financial license from the regulator. Compliance naturally boosts investor confidence and protection.

As these financial crimes and crypto itself evolves, so have regulatory bodies’ efforts to monitor, address and enforce restrictions. Internationally, the most prominent monitoring body is the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), which outlines general guidance and determines best practices in anti-money-laundering practices and combating the financing of terrorism.

Although FATF is considered soft law, the task force sets the bar for workable regulations within crypto assets. Especially notable is FATF’s Recommendation 16, better known as the “travel rule,” which requires businesses to collect and store the personal data of participants in blockchain transactions. In theory, access to this data will enable authorities to have better oversight and enforcement of crypto market regulations. In other words, they’ll know exactly who is doing exactly what. Transparency is key.

The travel rule conundrum

FATF’s travel rule impacts two types of businesses: traditional financial institutions (banks, credit firms and so on) and crypto companies, otherwise known as virtual asset service providers (VASPs).

In its original incarnation, the travel rule only applied to banks, but was expanded to crypto companies in 2019. In 2021, many of the FATF member jurisdictions began to incorporate the travel rule into their local AML laws. This regulatory shift sent shockwaves through the crypto sector. The stakes of refusal are high: Failure to incorporate the travel rule results in a service provider being declared noncompliant, which is a major obstacle to doing business.

But, the travel rule is also a major hindrance that doesn’t take into account the novelty of crypto technology. It is problematic for crypto businesses to integrate due to the major amount of effort it poses when obtaining KYC data about the recipient and integrating it into day-to-day business.

In order for crypto businesses to obtain this information for outgoing payments, data would have to be provided by the client and would end up being virtually impossible to verify. This is highly disruptive to the crypto’s emblematic efficiency. Moreover, its implementation presents challenges regarding the accuracy of the data received by VASPs and banks. Also, it creates further data vulnerabilities due to additional data silos being created across the globe.

When it comes to international standardization measures rather than those isolated within certain communities, there is a wide gap between exclusively on-chain solutions (transactions that are recorded and verified on one specific blockchain) and cross-chain communication, which allows for interactions between different blockchains or for combining on-chain transactions with off-chain transactions that are conducted on other electronic systems, such as PayPal.

We must eventually find a halfway point between those with valid concerns about the anonymity crypto assets provide and those who see regulation as prohibitively restrictive on crypto. Both sides have a point, but crypto’s continued legitimacy and viability within the larger financial markets and industry is a net positive for all parties, making this negotiation nothing short of crucial.

Not anti-regulation, just anti-unworkable regulations

Ultimately, we need to regulate with efficacy, which necessitates legislation that is applicable specifically to digital assets and does not hinder the market without really solving any AML-related problems.

The already global nature of the traditional financial industry underscores the value of and need for FATF’s issuance of an international framework for regulatory oversight within crypto.

The criminal financial trade — money laundering, illegal weapons sales, human trafficking and so on — is also an international business. Thus, cracking down on it is, out of necessity, an international effort.

The decentralized nature of blockchain, which runs contrary to the central-server standard we know and use nearly everywhere, presents a formidable challenge here. Rules and regulations for traditional financial institutions are being implemented part and parcel onto crypto — a misstep and misunderstanding that ignores the innovation and novelty this economic ecosystem and its underlying technology entails.

Traditional forms of regulation from the fiat world do not reciprocally apply to every aspect of crypto nor to the fundamental nature of blockchain technology. However well intentioned they may be, because these imposed regulations are built on an old system, they must be adapted and modified.

The creation of fair restrictions on the technology’s use requires a fundamental understanding and cooperation within the limits and characteristics of those technologies. In traditional financial circles, the topic of blockchain is currently subject to more impassioned rhetoric than genuine understanding.

At the heart of the issue is the fundamental misunderstanding that blockchain transactions are anonymous or untraceable. Blockchain transactions are pseudo-anonymous and, in most circumstances, can offer more traceability and transparency than traditional banking. Illegal activity conducted on the blockchain will always be far more traceable than cash transactions, for example.

Technology with such immense potential should be made accessible, regulated and beneficial for everyone. Blockchain and digital assets are already revolutionizing the way we operate, and regulatory measures need to follow suit. The way forward cannot simply be delivering old-school directives, demanding obedience and doling out unfair punishments. There’s no reason a new way forward isn’t possible.

The end of the outlaw era

Activity can already be monitored through a collective database of users known to abide by international standards. This knowledge of approved users and vendors allows the industry to spot misconduct or malfeasance far sooner than usual, singling out and restricting illegitimate users.

By means of a well-thought-through tweaking of the suggested regulations, a verified network can collectively be built to ensure trust and properly leverage blockchain’s potential, while barring those bad actors intent on corrupting or manipulating the system. That would be a huge step forward in prosecuting international financial crimes and ensuring crypto’s legitimacy globally.

Crypto’s outlaw days are over, but it’s gained an unprecedented level of legitimacy that can only be preserved and bolstered by abiding with regulatory oversight.

That regulatory oversight can’t just be the old way of doing things copy-and-pasted onto blockchain transactions. Instead, it needs to be one that helps fight criminal activity, shores up investor confidence and throws a bone — not a wrench — to the very mechanics that make crypto a desirable financial investment.

Source: Tech Crunch

Pearson, a London-based publishing and education giant that provides software to schools and universities has agreed to pay $1 million to settle charges that it misled investors about a 2018 data breach resulting in the theft of millions of student records.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission announced the settlement on Monday after the agency found that Pearson made “misleading statements and omissions” about its 2018 data breach, which saw millions of student usernames and scrambled passwords stolen, along with the administrator login credentials of 13,000 schools, district and university customer accounts.

The agency said that in Person’s semi-annual review filed in July 2019, the company referred to the incident as a “hypothetical risk,” even after the data breach had happened. Similarly, in a statement that same month, Pearson said the breach may include dates of birth and email addresses, when it knew that such records were stolen, according to the SEC.

Pearson also said that it had “strict protections” in place when it actually took the company six months to patch the vulnerability after it was notified.

“As the order finds, Pearson opted not to disclose this breach to investors until it was contacted by the media, and even then Pearson understated the nature and scope of the incident, and overstated the company’s data protections,” said Kristina Littman, chief of the SEC Enforcement Division’s Cyber Unit. “As public companies face the growing threat of cyber intrusions, they must provide accurate information to investors about material cyber incidents.”

While Pearson did not admit wrongdoing as part of the settlement, Pearson agreed to pay a $1 million penalty — a small fraction of the $489 million in pre-tax profits that the company raked in last year.

A Pearson spokesperson told TechCrunch: “We’re pleased to resolve this matter with the SEC. We also appreciate the work of the FBI and the Justice Department to identify and charge those responsible for a global cyberattack that affected Pearson and many other companies and industries, including at least one government agency.”

Pearson said the breach related to its AIMSweb1.0 web-based software for entering and tracking students’ academic performance, which it retired in July 2019. “Pearson continues to enhance its cybersecurity efforts to minimize the risk of cyberattacks in an ever-changing threat landscape,” the spokesperson added.

Source: Tech Crunch

Roblox is using M&A to bulk up its social infrastructure, announcing Monday morning that they had acquired the team at Guilded that has been building a chat platform for competitive gamers.

The service competes with gaming chat giant Discord, with the team’s founders telling TechCrunch in the past that as Discord’s ambitions had grown beyond the gaming world, its core product was meeting fewer competitive gaming needs. Like Discord, users can have text and voice conversations on the Guilded platform, but Guilded also allowed users to organize communities around events and calendars, with plenty of specific functionality designed around ensuring that tournaments happened seamlessly.

The startup’s product supported hundreds of games, with specific functionality for a handful of titles, including League of Legends, Fortnite, CS: GO and, yes, Roblox. Earlier this year, the company launched a bot API designed to help nontechnical users build bots that could enrich their gaming communities.

Guilded had raised $10.2 million in venture capital funding to date according to Crunchbase, including a $7 million Series A led by Matrix Partners early last year. The company launched out of Y Combinator in mid-2017.

Terms of the Roblox deal weren’t disclosed. In an announcement post, Roblox detailed that the Guilded team will operate as an independent product group going forward. In a separate blog post, Guilded CEO Eli Brown wrote that existing stakeholders will be able to continue using the product as they have previously.

“Everyone – including communities, partners, and bot developers – will be able to keep using Guilded the same way you are now,” Brown wrote. “Roblox believes in our team and in our mission, and we’re going to continue to operate as an independent product in order to achieve it.”

Roblox has seen profound success and heightened investor attention in recent years as the pandemic has pushed more gamers online and brought more users into the fold, but that success has drawn the attention of competitors. In June, Facebook acquired a small Roblox competitor called Crayta, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg announcing just weeks ago that he planned to transform Facebook into a “metaverse” company, using a term many have come to associate closely with what Roblox has been building. Guilded represents an opportunity for Roblox to bring its user base deeper inside its own suite of products, creating a social infrastructure that keeps users engaged.

Source: Tech Crunch

After listening to others pitch me a few different job opportunities while still at Google in 2008, it became clear to me that I would make a better decision if I could fully explore the larger landscape of new companies emerging in Silicon Valley.

I had spent the last several years focusing on Google’s business outside the U.S., and I honestly felt out of touch with the startup world. Beyond my goal of becoming a CEO of my own company, I had two other ambitions: I wanted to help build a great consumer service that would delight people (potentially in e-commerce) and I wanted to build further wealth for myself and my family.

To better evaluate my options, I made the decision to quit Google first and find a way to study the wider ecosystem of companies before choosing where to go. Resolved to give myself a “blank slate” before making a final choice, I left Google when I was three months pregnant and joined Accel Partners, a top Silicon Valley venture capital firm and an investor in my previous startup, in a temporary role as CEO-in-residence.

In the months that followed, I helped Accel evaluate investment opportunities across a wide variety of digital sectors, with a particular focus on e-commerce, taking the opportunity to study those companies I might join or think of starting from scratch.

On Thursday, August 19 at 2 p.m. PDT/5 p.m. EDT/9 p.m. UTC

Managing Editor Danny Crichton will interview Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, author of “Choose Possibility,” on Twitter Spaces.

One of Accel’s key partners, Theresia Gouw, helped me brainstorm, joining my cadre of professional priests. We had known one another for over a decade (I originally met her as a young founder at Yodlee) and were at similar stages of our careers, so I knew she could identify personally with my career quandaries. Like me, Theresia was pregnant with her next child and at a similar life stage — yet another commonality.

Image Credits: Sukhinder Singh Cassidy

While at Accel, I spent a disproportionate amount of time testing my macro thesis that online shopping was about to explode in new ways. I had seen the rise of e-tailers at Google (many of these companies, such as eBay and Amazon, were Google’s largest advertisers at the time), but many of the leading e-commerce sites like Amazon and Zappos still had a utilitarian feel to them.

Meanwhile, new fashion and décor e-commerce sites such as Rent the Runway, Gilt, Houzz, Wayfair and One Kings Lane were popping up everywhere and growing rapidly. These sites sought to tap into a more aspirational and entertainment-oriented kind of shopping experience and move it online.

Expert investors like Accel and others were funding them, and my own observations suggested that this area would yield another big wave of online consumer growth. These lifestyle categories of shopping also appealed to me personally; I was the target customer for many of them.

I started to work on an idea for a new e-commerce service, a luxury version of eBay, while listening to the pitches of every e-commerce company that was looking for funding and talking to several that needed early-stage CEOs. I continued to listen to non-e-commerce pitches as well, simply to give myself a point of reference for evaluating online shopping opportunities.

At Yodlee and Google, I had been lucky enough to work with incredibly smart and talented people who shared my values, and I wanted to do the same at my next venture.

I wanted to work with great investors, too, and fortunately I had the ability either to work with Accel-funded companies, start my own or leverage other investor relationships I’d developed. I spent time with multiple company founders to try to discern who they were as leaders, in addition to what they were working on.

By this point in my career, I had a pretty clear idea of my own superpowers and values, so I looked to find companies that could make the most of my unique gifts and whose founders or senior leaders had strengths complementary to mine.

Specifically, I hoped to join a company with a very strong engineering and product management culture that needed a CEO with strategy, vision, business development, fundraising and team-building expertise. Applying these criteria, I turned down several opportunities at companies whose founders had skill sets too similar to mine, reasoning that this overlap might lead to conflict if I ever became CEO.

Finally, I used my time at Accel to think long and hard about the risks I would take in becoming a startup CEO and whether I could afford to fail. My biggest risk by far was ego- and reputation-related. Mindful of how precarious early-stage startups are, I feared that I would leave a successful role as a global executive only to suffer a very large and visible failure. But the more I thought about this, I faced this ego risk head-on and concluded that my reputation as an executive from Google would hopefully be strong enough to survive one failure if it came to that.

The personal risks of taking on a startup CEO role felt different but not greater than those associated with my job at Google. While I knew that serving as a first-time CEO while having another newborn at home (my son Kieran) would be immensely stressful, I would likely benefit from no longer traveling around the world for days and weeks on end and working across multiple time zones, as I had previously.

Last, I evaluated the financial risks of potential moves. Although my startup equity would have uncertain value for a long time, I judged this a risk worth taking, given how excited I’d feel to have more impact and responsibility as CEO. While I lost a large financial package in choosing to leave Google and switching to a startup salary, I could pay the bills at home while digging into my savings only slightly. Under these conditions, I was prepared to make the leap.

In early 2010, almost a year after I left Google, I finally found the right opportunity and decided to join fashion technology startup Polyvore as its full-time CEO. A precursor to Pinterest, Polyvore was based on the idea that women could “clip” online images to create fashion and décor idea boards digitally that were instantly “shoppable.”

Millions of young women (including influencers) were already using the service and loved it. The founding team was led by a rock star engineer, Pasha Sadri, along with three other product and technology folks he recruited from the likes of Yahoo and Google.

Pasha was known for his intelligence, and we had connected informally over the years for coffee, each time having great discussions about business strategy. In fact, Polyvore twice before had tried to recruit me to become its CEO, once when I was at Google and again when I departed that company in 2008. Back then, I’d spent a productive afternoon with the founding team, helping them think through their business model. I also knew Peter Fenton, one of Silicon Valley’s most successful investors and a leading funder of the company. Peter was the one who first introduced me to Polyvore and who continued afterward to passively court me.

Having spent so much time exploring my options from multiple angles, I was now poised to make a great decision. I felt convinced that e-commerce was starting its next wave of growth, and felt excited to be part of it.

Within that vision, Polyvore was among the companies best positioned to succeed, and I knew I could contribute in significant ways to building a service that would delight millions. I was impressed with the strengths of Polyvore’s founder and investors and anticipated that I would be able to complement their efforts nicely. Recognizing that my success as a startup CEO hinged on my relationships with the founder and board, I had also invested time to get to know them.

Meanwhile, I had faced my fear demons, taking financial risk but negotiating my offer aggressively to account for downside scenarios I imagined, and coming to grips with my ego risk. With all this work in place, I finally jumped.

After managing a multibillion-dollar profit and loss and leading a 2,000-person team at Google, I became the newly minted CEO of a 10-person fashion startup in February 2010.

As we tee up the bigger choices in our careers, we all face critical moments of decision. No choice we make will be perfect, and all the frameworks in the world won’t eliminate risk entirely. But we don’t need perfection or freedom from risk. We just need to take the next step.

By choosing thoughtfully, using all the tools at our disposal to maximize our upside and anticipate our downside, we can grasp the opportunities available to us while equipping ourselves to handle whatever challenges reality throws our way.

Excerpted from “Choose Possibility: Take Risks and Thrive (Even When You Fail)’ by Sukhinder Singh Cassidy. Copyright © 2021 by Sukhinder Singh Cassidy. Published and reprinted by permission of Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.

Source: Tech Crunch

Hello friends!

Lucas is still out for a few more days, so I’m filling in for him again on this week’s Week In Review. To recap: I’m Greg. I started at TC back when deciding who to put in your MySpace Top 8 was a very serious matter and being able to summon an Uber with a button press made people think you were a wizard from the future.

Before we dive into the news you might’ve missed this week, a heads up! Brian Heater’s much-loved robotics recap is becoming a weekly newsletter and getting a fancy new name: Actuator. The official launch date is still kind of up in the air, but you can already sign up for it right here.

And now, the news you might’ve missed this week.

The Big Thing

Whether or not you’ve ever dabbled with Unity, you’ve almost certainly interacted with something built with Unity. It’s the 2D/3D engine that powers so, so many of the video games out there, regardless of what console or platform we’re talking about. Studios use it to make animated movies. Automakers use it to help design cars.

This week Unity announced its intent to make a big acquisition — its biggest to date, in fact — with the $320M purchase of Parsec. And while one company buying another is hardly rare news around these parts, a Unity Senior Vice President suggests that it could be the beginning of a bigger shift for the co.

So what’s a Parsec? Besides a unit of measurement that Star Wars fans love to argue about.

Parsec started its life as a way to stream games from your powerful PC to your less powerful devices — or to your far away friends, allowing for long-distance multiplayer in games that otherwise didn’t support it. And it still works for that!

When the pandemic booted everyone out of the office, though, the company found that many of the features it had built for playing games remotely (like low latency streaming, support for input devices beyond keyboard/mouse, etc.) were also super important to the folks building games remotely. They embraced that newfound audience hard, quickly rolling out plans and features just for creative teams. The shift worked out well for them; the company went from raising $25M to being acquired for nearly 13x that in less than a year.

According to Unity SVP Marc Whitten, this is the beginning of Unity diving deeper into the cloud.

“I think you’re gonna see that Parsec is a great foundational block for a broad sort of cloud ambition that we have as a company,” he says. “You’re going to see a lot more from us in that particular regards.”

Even only considering what Parsec immediately brings to the table, there’s multiple potential paths to the cloud here. They could use Parsec to help Unity developers more easily add multiplayer to their games; they could use it to build a Stadia/Amazon Luna-style game streaming service that showcases Unity-powered games sans downloads; they could use it to offer up beefier hardware-in-the-cloud rentals to help smaller studios iterate more quickly or test on a wider range of devices.

Oh, and if you’re one of those aforementioned people using Parsec to game with friends from afar, don’t stress: The company says its free app isn’t going anywhere.

If you’re an Extra Crunch member, check out Eric Peckham’s deep dive on the rise of Unity here.

Other Things

Ariana Grande takes over Fortnite

The book written about the evolution of Fortnite will be a wild one. It began its life as a moderately popular tower defense game. When it shifted gears into a free-to-play Battle Royale game, it exploded into one of the biggest games the world has ever seen. Now it’s a remarkable example of how a game can be a place, and what can be when a developer has absolute control over their game engine and might-as-well-be-endless money to throw into content creation. Example #2,138,413: this in-game Ariana Grande “concert” in which players dogfight a demon, ride rainbows, and dance alongside a skyscraper-sized Ariana. The YouTube replay alone has already been seen by millions.

Twitter’s redesign

Twitter overhauled its website this week… and, as it tends to go when you change the look/feel of a popular thing, there was some user backlash. This time it went beyond the usual “I don’t like the radius of the rounded corners” complaints, though, with some users complaining that the new font Twitter chose gave them headaches.

Apple moves to clarify how its new child safety features work

Last week Apple announced that it would be rolling out a set of features meant to keep kids safe: One alerting parents if a minor is sending or receiving explicit images over iMessage, and another that would automatically compare generated hashes of iCloud Photos to detect and flag users who were storing known child abuse images. While protecting kids is undeniably and universally a good thing, security researchers have raised concerns about the potential for misuse by governments to scan for things beyond abuse imagery. It’s said to have caused a bit of a dustup within Apple, with “more than 800 messages” of back-and-forth posted by employees on the company’s internal Slack. The company has spent the last few days trying to clarify how the features will work, with Apple’s Craig Federighi admitting that it “got jumbled pretty badly in terms of how things were understood”. Read our interview with Apple’s head of Privacy here.

Xiaomi’s Robodog

Boston Dynamics’ Spot is no longer the only creepy dystopian robot dog in town. This week Xiaomi announced CyberDog, a four-legged bot meant to flex the company’s robo knowledge and serve as a platform for developers to build upon. Xiaomi says they’ll be selling them for around $1,500, with a catch: they’re only making a thousand of these, initially, and they’re only selling them to select “Xiaomi fans, engineers, and robotics enthusiasts.”

Lowercarbon raises $800M to “keep unf*cking the planet”

Lowercarbon Capital, the climate-focused fund run by Chris and Crystal Sacca, raised $800M to pour into companies that are taking on the climate crisis. “It turns out that raising for a climate fund in the context of an unprecedented heatwave and from behind the thick clouds of fire smoke probably didn’t hurt,” writes Sacca. Can tech save the planet? TBD. But continuing to do nothing definitely won’t.

FEMA tests the U.S. emergency alert system

If your phone was shouting about a test of the National Wireless Emergency System earlier this week, don’t panic: It was, in fact, just a test. Didn’t get it? Don’t panic about that, either — the test system is opt-in. If there’s an actual test, everyone will get it. Hopefully.

Image Credits: Xiaomi

Extra Things

More companies should shift to a work-from-home model

Is your company trying to drag everyone back into the office sooner than you’d like? Maybe send’em this article from Insightly COO Karl Laughton, outlining some of the findings and data-driven upsides the company has seen since going remote.

Dear Sophie: Can I hire an engineer whose green card is being sponsored by another company?

You’ve found the perfect job candidate and want to make an offer, but there’s a catch: they need an EB-2 green card, and another company has already started the sponsoring process. Can you make it work? It depends. In the latest edition of Dear Sophie, Immigration attorney Sophie Alcorn breaks down the EB-2 process and potential snags.

Source: Tech Crunch