Ideaforge

Funding for Black entrepreneurs in the U.S. hit nearly $1.8 billion in the first half of 2021 — a fourfold increase from the previous year. But most venture-backed startups are “still overwhelmingly white, male, Ivy-League-educated and based in Silicon Valley,” according to a study conducted by RateMyInvestor and Diversity VC.

With venture investors committing to funding Black and minority founders, alongside the growing availability of government-backed proposals, such as New Jersey allocating $10 million to a seed fund for Black and Latinx startups, can we expect to see fundamental change? Or will we have to repeat the same conversations about representation failings within VC funds?

Crunchbase examined the access to capital in the venture-backed startup ecosystem and proved that many industry leaders still worry that nothing will drastically shift. As a Black fintech founder, I believe that venture investors are making safe bets and investing in late-stage founders instead of early or even pre-seed stages.

But what about those minority founders who don’t have family, friends or connections to lean on for the first $250,000? Venture funding does remain elusive, but here are some tricks for startup founders to hack the system.

Realize you are up against an outdated system

Getting your foot in the door with new venture capitalist partners is challenging, and it is often easy for minority founders to be naive at first. I thought that reading TechCrunch and analyzing other VC deals I saw in the news would help me land multiple responses and speak the language of those who managed to score million-dollar deals for their startups. However, I didn’t receive a single response while other founders received VC investment for basic ideas.

This is something I had to learn the hard way: What you hear in the media or read on a company blog post often simplifies the process, and sometimes fails to cover the trajectory that minority founders, in particular, must follow to secure funding.

I experienced hundreds of rejections before raising $2 million to start a mobile payment platform, Bleu, using beacon technology to drive simple and secure payments. It is a huge mountain to climb and a full-time job to continuously pitch your vision and yourself to reach the first meeting with a VC fund — and that’s still miles away from a funding discussion.

These discussions then bring further biases to the surface. If you sat in the conference rooms or on those Zoom calls and heard the types of deals proposed to minority founders, you’d see how offensive they can be. Often, these founders are offered all the money they have requested — but don’t be fooled. It is usually not given all at once due to what I consider to be a lack of trust. Essentially, interval funding equates to being babysat.

Therefore, as a minority founder, you have to realize that it will be a long ride, and you will face rejections because you are at a disadvantage before even opening your mouth to pitch your idea. It is all possible, but patience is key.

Think of the worst-case scenario

Once I figured out how complicated the funding process was, my coping mechanism was to figure out how to capitalize on the business ideas I already had in place in case I never received any VC funding.

Think: How could you make money without an institutional investor, friends, family or internal networks? You’ll be surprised by your entrepreneurial thirst for success when you’ve experienced 100 rejections. This is why minority businesses caught in these testing situations can quickly gain the upper hand, whether through ancillary and side businesses or crowdfunding over GoFundMe and Kickstarter.

Although generally considered non-essential, ancillary companies do provide a regular flow of income and services to assist your core business idea. Most importantly, a recurring revenue stream outside your core business demonstrates to investors that you can create valuable products and acquire loyal customers.

Make sure to find a niche market and carry out surveys with potential clients to find out what specific needs they have. Then, build a product with their feedback in mind and launch it to beta clients. When you publicly release the product, find resellers to keep internal headcount low and generate recurring revenue.

Don’t take ancillaries lightly, though; they are not just a side business. There can be payment issues if you get hooked on them for revenue, distractions from clients or partners wanting custom requests, and supply chain problems.

In my case, I built a point-of-sale (POS) software platform to sell to merchants, which gave me a different revenue stream that could integrate with Bleu’s payment technology. These ancillary businesses can help fund your core business until you manage to plan how to launch fully or source further funding.

In 2019, The New York Times published an article headlined “More Start-Ups Have an Unfamiliar Message for Venture Capitalists: Get Lost.” It highlights how more and more entrepreneurs shunned by the VC funding route are turning to alternatives and forming counter-movements. There are always alternatives to look at if the fundraising process is proving to be too arduous.

Make serious headway with accelerators

Accelerators allow ventures to define their products or services, quickly build networks and, most importantly, sit at tables they wouldn’t be able to on their own. Applying to accelerators as a minority founder was the real turning point for me because I met a crucial investor who allowed us to build credibility and open up to new networks, investors and clients.

I would suggest looking out for accelerators explicitly searching for minority founders by using platforms such as F6S. They match you with accelerators and early growth programs committed to innovation in various global industries, like financial technology. That’s how I found the VC FinTech Accelerator in 2016, where one-third of founders were from minority backgrounds.

Then, Bleu earned a spot in the 2020 class of the IBM Hyper Protect Accelerator dedicated to supporting innovative startups in fintech and health tech industries. These types of accelerators offer startups workshops, technical and business mentorship, and access to a network of partners, customers and stakeholders.

You can impress accelerators by creating a pitch deck and a company video less than two minutes long that shows your founder and the product, and engaging with the fintech community to spread the news.

The other alternative to accelerators is government funds, but they have had little success investing in startups for myriad reasons. It tends to be a more hands-off approach as government funds are not under significant pressure from limited partners (LPs, either institutional or individual investors) to perform.

What you need as a minority founder is an investor who is an active partner but, with government-backed funds, there is less demand to return the capital. We have to ask ourselves whether governments are really searching for the best minority-owned startups to help them get sufficient returns.

Tap into foreign markets

There are many unconscious social stigmas, stereotypes and unseen biases that exist in the U.S. And you’ll find those cultural dynamics are radically different in other countries that don’t have the same history of discrimination, especially when looking at a team or assessing founders.

I also noticed that, as well as reduced bias, investors out of Southeast Asia, Nordic countries and Australia seemed far more likely to take risks on new contactless payment technology as cash use decreased across their regions. Take Klarna and Afterpay as examples of fintech success stories.

First, I engaged in market research and pored over annual reports to decide whether I should look abroad for funding, instead of applying to funds closer to home. I looked at Nielsen reports, payment publications, PaymentSource and numerous government documents or white papers to figure out the cash usage globally.

My investigations revealed that fintech in Australia was far ahead of the curve, with four-fifths of the population using contactless payments. The financial services sector is also the largest contributor to the national economy, contributing around $140 billion to GDP a year. Therefore, I spoke to the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in the U.S., and they recommended some regulatory payment groups.

I immediately flew to Australia to meet with the banking community, and I was able to find an Australian investor by word of mouth who was surrounded by the demand for mobile payment solutions.

In contrast, an investor in the U.S. still using cash and card had no interest in what I had to say. This highlights the importance of market research and seeking out investors rather than waiting for them to come to you. There is no science to it; leverage your network and reach out to people over LinkedIn, too.

The need to diversify the VC industry internally

VC funding needs to become more inclusive for women and minority groups by tackling the pipeline problem and addressing the level of diversity within VC funds. All of the networks that VCs reach out to first tend to come from university programs at Stanford, MIT and Harvard. These more privileged and wealthy students are able to easily leverage the traditional and outdated networks built to benefit them.

The number of venture dollars flowing to Black and Latinx founders is dismally low partly due to this knowledge gap; many female and minority founders don’t even know that VC funding is an option for them. Therefore, if you do receive seed funding, spread the news about it within your networks to help others.

Inclusion starts at the educational level but, when the percentage of Black and minority students at these elite colleges are still low, you can see why minority representation is needed in the VC ranks. Even if representation rises by a percent, that would be a significant change.

There are increasing numbers of VC funds announcing initiatives and interest in investing in minority businesses, and I would recommend looking at these in-depth. But what about the demographics of the VC firms? How many ethnicities are present in the executive ranks?

To change the venture-backed startup ecosystem, we need to start at the top and diversify those signing the checks. Looking toward the future, it is Black-led funds, like Sequoia, or others that focus on diversity, like Women’s Venture Fund, BackStage Capital and Elevate Capital Inclusive Fund, that are lighting the way to solutions that will reflect the diversity of the U.S.

It’s up to the investor community at large to be intentional about building relationships with, and ultimately providing funding to, more women and minority-led startups.

Despite the barriers and hurdles minority founders face when searching for VC funding, more and more avenues for acquiring funding are appearing as the disparities are brought to the media’s attention.

As the outdated system adjusts, the key is to continue preparing yourself for rejections and searching for appropriate accelerators to build vital networks. Then, if you aren’t having any luck, consider what you could do with your business idea without the VC funding or turn to foreign markets, which may have a different setup and varied opportunities.

Source: Tech Crunch

The venture world is growing faster than ever, with more funding rounds, bigger funding rounds, and higher valuations than pretty much any point in history. That’s led to an exponential growth in the number of unicorns walking around, and has also forced regulators and venture law researchers to confront a slew of challenging problems.

The obvious one, of course, is that with so many companies staying private, retail investors are mostly blocked from participating in one of the most dynamic sectors of the global economy. That’s not all though — concerns about disclosures and board transparency, diversity among leaders as well as employees, whistleblower protections for fraud, and more have increasingly percolated in legal circles as unicorns multiply and push the boundaries of what our current regulations were designed to accomplish.

To explore where the cutting edge of venture law is today, TechCrunch invited four law professors who specialize in the field and securities more generally to talk about what they are seeing in their work this year, and argue for how they would change regulations going forward.

Our participants and their arguments:

• Yifat Aran, an assistant law professor at Haifa University, argues in “A new coalition for ‘Open Cap Table’ presents an opportunity for equity transparency” that we need better formats for cap table data to allow for portability. That will increase transparency for shareholders including employees, who are often left in the dark about the true nature of a startup’s capital structure.
• Matthew Wansley, an assistant law professor at Cardozo School of Law, argues in “The next Theranos should be shortable” that private company shares of unicorns should be able to be scrutinized and traded by short sellers. Since venture investors have little incentive to sniff out frauds post-investment, short sellers could bring a valuable perspective into the market and increase capital efficiency.
• Jennifer Fan, an assistant law professor at the University of Washington, argues in “Diversifying startups and VC power corridors” that in addition to board mandates related to diversity (which have passed in a number of states), startups need to create more incentives around diversity in all their relationships, including with their employees, with VCs, and with the LPs of their VCs. A more comprehensive and systematic approach will better open the tech world to the many folks it overlooks.
• Finally, Alexander I. Platt, an associate law professor at the University of Kansas, argues in “The legal world needs to shed its ‘unicorniphobia’” that we should scrutinize the rush to change our securities regulations when we’ve created so much value with startups. For every Theranos, there is a Moderna, and adding more rules and disclosures may not prevent the problems of the former, and may actually stop the progress of the latter.

The once quiet research literature of venture law has been energized with the arrival of a reform-minded camp in the halls of power in DC. TechCrunch will continue to report and bring diverse perspectives on some of the most challenging legal and regulatory issues facing the tech and startup world.

Source: Tech Crunch

Once upon a time, a successful startup that reached a certain maturity would “go public” — selling securities to ordinary investors, perhaps listing on a national stock exchange and taking on the privileges and obligations of a “public company” under federal securities regulations.

Times have changed. Successful startups today are now able to grow quite large without public capital markets. Not so long ago, a private company valued at more than $1 billion was rare enough to warrant the nickname “unicorn.” Now, over 800 companies qualify.

Legal scholars are worried. A recent wave of academic papers makes the case that because unicorns are not constrained by the institutional and regulatory forces that keep public companies in line, they are especially prone to risky and illegal activities that harm investors, employees, consumers and society at large.

The proposed solution, naturally, is to bring these forces to bear on unicorns. Specifically, scholars are proposing mandatory IPOs, significantly expanded disclosure obligations, regulatory changes designed to dramatically increase secondary-market trading of unicorn shares, expanded whistleblower protections for unicorn employees and stepped-up Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement against large private companies.

This position has also been gaining traction outside the ivory tower. One leader of this intellectual movement was recently appointed director of the SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance. Big changes may be coming soon.

In a new paper titled “Unicorniphobia” (forthcoming in the Harvard Business Law Review), I challenge this suddenly dominant view that unicorns are especially dangerous and should be “tamed” with bold new securities regulations. I raise three main objections.

First, pushing unicorns toward public company status may not help and may actually make problems worse. According to the vast academic literature on “market myopia” or “stock-market short-termism,” it is public company managers who have especially dangerous incentives to take on excessive leverage and risk; to underinvest in compliance; to sacrifice product quality and safety; to slash R&D and other forms of corporate investment; to degrade the environment; and to engage in accounting fraud and other corporate misconduct, among many other things.

The dangerous incentives that produce this parade of horrible outcomes allegedly flow from a constellation of market, institutional, cultural and regulatory features that operate distinctly on public companies, not unicorns, including executive compensation linked to short-term stock performance, pressure to meet quarterly earnings projections (aka “quarterly capitalism”) and the persistent threat (and occasional reality) of a hedge fund activist attack. To the extent this literature is correct, the proposed unicorn reforms would merely amount to forcing companies to shed one set of purportedly dangerous incentives for another.

Second, proponents of new unicorn regulations rely on rhetorical sleight of hand. To show that unicorns pose unique dangers, these advocates rely heavily on anecdotes and case studies of well-known “bad” unicorns, especially the cases of Uber and Theranos, in their papers. Yet the authors make few or no attempts to show how their proposed reforms would have mitigated any significant harm caused by either of these companies — a highly questionable proposition, as I show in great detail in my paper.

Take Theranos, whose founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes is currently facing trial on charges of criminal fraud and, if convicted, faces a possible sentence of up to 20 years in federal prison. Would any of the proposed securities regulation reforms have plausibly made a positive difference in this case? Allegations that Holmes and others lied extensively to the media, doctors, patients, regulators, investors, business partners and even their own board of directors make it hard to believe they would have been any more truthful had they been forced to make some additional securities disclosures.

As to the proposal to enhance trading of unicorn shares in order to incentivize short sellers and market analysts to sniff out potential frauds, the fact is that these market players already had the ability and incentive to make these plays against Theranos indirectly by taking a short position in its public company partners like Walgreens, or a long position in its public company competitors, like LabCorp and Quest Diagnostics. They failed to do so. Proposals to expand whistleblower protections and SEC enforcement in this domain seem equally unlikely to have made any difference.

Finally, the proposed reforms risk doing more harm than good. Successful unicorns today benefit not only their investors and managers, but also their employees, consumers and society at large. And they do so precisely because of the features of current regulations that are now up on the regulatory chopping block. Altering this regime as these papers propose would put these benefits in jeopardy and thus may do more harm than good.

Consider one company that recently generated an enormous social benefit: Moderna. Before going public in December 2018, Moderna was a secretive, controversial, overhyped biotech unicorn without a single product on the market (or even in Phase 3 clinical trials), barely any scientific peer-reviewed publications, a history of turnover among high-level scientific personnel, a CEO with a penchant for over-the-top claims about the company’s potential and a toxic work culture.

Had these proposed new securities regulations been in place during Moderna’s “corporate adolescence,” it’s quite plausible that they would have significantly disrupted the company’s development. In fact, Moderna might not have been in a position to develop its highly effective COVID-19 vaccine as rapidly as it did. Our response to the coronavirus pandemic has benefited, in part, from our current approach to securities regulation of unicorns.

The lessons from Moderna also bear on efforts to use securities regulation to combat climate change. According to a recent report, 43 unicorns are operating in “climate tech,” developing products and services designed to mitigate or adapt to global climate change. These companies are risky. Their technologies may fail; most probably will. Some are challenging entrenched incumbents that have powerful incentives to do whatever is necessary to resist the competitive threat. Some may be trying to change well-established consumer preferences and behaviors. And they all face an uncertain regulatory environment, varying widely across and within jurisdictions.

Like other unicorns, they may have highly empowered founder CEOs who are demanding, irresponsible or messianic. They may also have core investors who do not fully understand the science underlying their products, are denied access to basic information and who press the firm to take risks to achieve astronomical results.

And yet, one or more of these companies may represent an important resource for our society in dealing with disruptions from climate change. As policymakers and scholars work out how securities regulation can be used to address climate change, they should not overlook the potentially important role unicorn regulation can play.

Source: Tech Crunch

Almost every American adult remembers, in vivid detail, where they were the morning of September 11, 2001. I was on the second floor of the West Wing of the White House, at a National Economic Council Staff meeting — and I will never forget the moment the Secret Service agent abruptly entered the room, shouting: “You must leave now. Ladies, take off your high heels and go!”

Just an hour before, as the National Economic Council White House technology adviser, I was briefing the deputy chief of staff on final details of an Oval Office meeting with the president, scheduled for September 13. Finally, we were ready to get the president’s sign-off to send a federal privacy bill to Capitol Hill — effectively a federal version of the California Privacy Rights Act, but stronger. The legislation would put guardrails around citizens’ data — requiring opt-in consent for their information to be shared, governing how their data could be collected and how it would be used.

But that morning, the world changed. We evacuated the White House and the day unfolded with tragedy after tragedy sending shockwaves through our nation and the world. To be in D.C. that day was to witness and personally experience what felt like the entire spectrum of human emotion: grief, solidarity, disbelief, strength, resolve, urgency … hope.

Much has been written about September 11, but I want to spend a moment reflecting on the day after.

When the National Economic Council staff came back into the office on September 12, I will never forget what Larry Lindsey, our boss at the time, told us: “I would understand it if some of you don’t feel comfortable being here. We are all targets. And I won’t appeal to your patriotism or faith. But I will — as we are all economists in this room — appeal to your rational self-interest. If we back away now, others will follow, and who will be there to defend the pillars of our society? We are holding the line here today. Act in a way that will make this country proud. And don’t abandon your commitment to freedom in the name of safety and security.”

There is so much to be proud of about how the country pulled together and how our government responded to the tragic events on September 11. First, however, as a professional in the cybersecurity and data privacy field, I reflect on Larry’s advice, and many of the critical lessons learned in the years that followed — especially when it comes to defending the pillars of our society.

Even though our collective memories of that day still feel fresh, 20 years have passed, and we now understand the vital role that data played in the months leading up to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. But, unfortunately, we failed to connect the dots that could have saved thousands of lives by holding intelligence data too closely in disparate locations. These data silos obscured the patterns that would have been clear if only a framework had been in place to share information securely.

So, we told ourselves, “Never again,” and government officials set out to increase the amount of intelligence they could gather — without thinking through significant consequences for not only our civil liberties but also the security of our data. So, the Patriot Act came into effect, with 20 years of surveillance requests from intelligence and law enforcement agencies crammed into the bill. Having been in the room for the Patriot Act negotiations with the Department of Justice, I can confidently say that, while the intentions may have been understandable — to prevent another terrorist attack and protect our people — the downstream negative consequences were sweeping and undeniable.

Domestic wiretapping and mass surveillance became the norm, chipping away at personal privacy, data security and public trust. This level of surveillance set a dangerous precedent for data privacy, meanwhile yielding marginal results in the fight against terrorism.

Unfortunately, the federal privacy bill that we had hoped to bring to Capitol Hill the very week of 9/11 — the bill that would have solidified individual privacy protections — was mothballed.

Over the subsequent years, it became easier and cheaper to collect and store massive amounts of surveillance data. As a result, tech and cloud giants quickly scaled up and dominated the internet. As more data was collected (both by the public and the private sectors), more and more people gained visibility into individuals’ private data — but no meaningful privacy protections were put in place to accompany that expanded access.

Now, 20 years later, we find ourselves with a glut of unfettered data collection and access, with behemoth tech companies and IoT devices collecting data points on our movements, conversations, friends, families and bodies. Massive and costly data leaks — whether from ransomware or simply misconfiguring a cloud bucket — have become so common that they barely make the front page. As a result, public trust has eroded. While privacy should be a human right, it’s not one that’s being protected — and everyone knows it.

This is evident in the humanitarian crisis we have seen in Afghanistan. Just one example: Tragically, the Taliban have seized U.S. military devices that contain biometric data on Afghan citizens who supported coalition forces — data that would make it easy for the Taliban to identify and track down those individuals and their families. This is a worst-case scenario of sensitive, private data falling into the wrong hands, and we did not do enough to protect it.

This is unacceptable. Twenty years later, we are once again telling ourselves, “Never again.” 9/11 should have been a reckoning of how we manage, share and safeguard intelligence data, but we still have not gotten it right. And in both cases — in 2001 and 2021 — the way we manage data has a life-or-death impact.

This is not to say we aren’t making progress: The White House and U.S. Department of Defense have turned a spotlight on cybersecurity and Zero Trust data protection this year, with an executive order to spur action toward fortifying federal data systems. The good news is that we have the technology we need to safeguard this sensitive data while still making it shareable. In addition, we can put contingency plans in place to prevent data that falls into the wrong hands. But, unfortunately, we just aren’t moving fast enough — and the slower we solve this problem of secure data management, the more innocent lives will be lost along the way.

Looking ahead to the next 20 years, we have an opportunity to rebuild trust and transform the way we manage data privacy. First and foremost, we have to put some guardrails in place. We need a privacy framework that gives individuals autonomy over their own data by default.

This, of course, means that public- and private-sector organizations have to do the technical, behind-the-scenes work to make this data ownership and control possible, tying identity to data and granting ownership back to the individual. This is not a quick or simple fix, but it’s achievable — and necessary — to protect our people, whether U.S. citizens, residents or allies worldwide.

To accelerate the adoption of such data protection, we need an ecosystem of free, accessible and open source solutions that are interoperable and flexible. By layering data protection and privacy in with existing processes and solutions, government entities can securely collect and aggregate data in a way that reveals the big picture without compromising individuals’ privacy. We have these capabilities today, and now is the time to leverage them.

Because the truth is, with the sheer volume of data that’s being gathered and stored, there are far more opportunities for American data to fall into the wrong hands. The devices seized by the Taliban are just a tiny fraction of the data that’s currently at stake. As we’ve seen so far this year, nation-state cyberattacks are escalating. This threat to human life is not going away.

Larry’s words from September 12, 2001, still resonate: If we back away now, who will be there to defend the pillars of our society? It’s up to us — public- and private-sector technology leaders — to protect and defend the privacy of our people without compromising their freedoms.

It’s not too late for us to rebuild public trust, starting with data. But, 20 years from now, will we look back on this decade as a turning point in protecting and upholding individuals’ right to privacy, or will we still be saying, “Never again,” again and again?

Source: Tech Crunch

Last weekend, a reader wrote to this editor, politely asking why tech companies should speak up about the abortion law that Texas passed last week.

“What does American Airlines have to do with abortion?” said the reader, suggesting that companies can’t possibly cater to both pro-abortion and anti-abortion advocates and that asking them to take a stand on an issue unrelated to their business would only contribute to the politicization of America.

It’s a widely held point of view, and the decision yesterday by the U.S. Department of Justice to challenge the law, which U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland has called “clearly unconstitutional,” may well reinforce it. After all, if anyone should be pushing back against what happened in the Lone Star State, it should be other legislators, not companies, right?

Still, there are more reasons than not for tech companies – and particularly Tesla – to step out of the shadows and bat down this law.

It’s a fact that abortion restrictions lead to higher healthcare costs for employers, but one consequence of the Texas law that could hit tech companies especially hard is its impact on hiring. According to a study by the social enterprise Rhia Ventures, 60% of women say they would be discouraged from taking a job in a state that has tried to restrict access to abortion, and the same is true for a slight majority of men, the study found.

Texas’s abortion law also creates an extra-judicial enforcement mechanism that should alarm tech companies. The new law allows private citizens — anywhere — to sue not just abortion providers but anyone who wittingly or unwittingly helps a woman obtain an abortion in the state, whether they have a connection to the case or not. More, there are significant financial awards should a plaintiff win: each defendant is subject to paying $10,000, as well as subject to covering the costs and plaintiff’s attorney’s fees.

Just imagine if this precedent were applied to an issue that directly involves tech companies, such as consumer privacy. As Seth Chandler, a law professor at the University of Houston Law Center, observed to ABC this week. “[The] recipe that SB 8 has developed is not restricted to abortion. It can be used for any constitutional rights that people don’t like.”

Tech companies might well say that taking sides on the Texas abortion debate would be the political equivalent of jumping on a live wire, and it’s easy to sympathize with this viewpoint. Even though Pew Research reports that about 6 in 10 Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, passions are heated on both sides.

Still, corporations have safely stood up for their values on controversial issues before, and they’ve shown that corporate pressure works. In a 2016, for example, a group of roughly 70 major corporations, including Apple, Cisco, and, yes, American Airlines, joined a legal effort to block a North Carolina law that banned transgender people from using public bathrooms consistent with their gender identity, arguing the law condoned “invidious discrimination” and would damage their ability to recruit a diverse workforce. By 2017, facing severe economic consequences, the ban was rescinded.

A handful of CEOs, including from Lyft, Uber, Yelp, and Bumble have already taken very public positions against the new Texas law. Salesforce meanwhile told employees in a Slack message on Friday that if they and their families are now concerned about the ability to access reproductive care, the company will help them relocate.

A company like Tesla could have an even bigger impact on the state’s politics. Elon Musk’s move to Texas ignited a firestorm of interest in the Texas tech scene, and Texas Governor Greg Abbott was so cognizant of Musk’s influence that he said Musk supported his state’s “social policies” the day after the new law was passed.

Musk — whose many financial interests in Texas include plans to build a new city called Starbase and to become a local electricity provider — has so far refused to take a stand on the law. When asked about the issue, he responded, “In general, I believe government should rarely impose its will upon the people, and, when doing so, should aspire to maximize their cumulative happiness.” He also added that he would “prefer to stay out of politics.”

That could prove a mistake as lawmakers and executives in at least seven states, including Florida and South Dakota, closely review Texas’s new law and consider similar statutes.

In May 2019, nearly 200 CEOs, including Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Peter Grauer of Bloomberg, signed a full-page New York Times ad declaring that abortion bans are bad for business. “Restricting access to comprehensive reproductive care, including abortion,” the ad read, “threatens the health, independence and economic stability of our employees and customers.”

If Musk believes government should “rarely impose its will upon the people,” he should also take a public stand in Texas while the federal government fights what could be a protracted, uphill battle. He has little to lose in doing so — and much to gain.

Source: Tech Crunch

When we imagine what it will be like when we exit the pandemic, what we’re really wondering is what we want from the digital transformation we’ve seen overturn our understanding of work and living safely. As much as we long for the days of the office and collaboration with our peers, some of that is about the mental space we achieve from the constant disruption of home life. Parenting has shifted from an arms-length affair to a therapeutic maintenance of burnout, over-saturation of news, and anxiety — and that’s just us. Our kids in many ways have already made the digital transition we are all now forced to endure.

They don’t see work from home as a choice because they’ve already defined it as how things work. The shift from meetings to asynchronous threads (texting only, please) has put work into a kind of binge streaming model. You don’t go to the movies — you check in to the situation the characters find themselves grappling with. Conversations overlap in group chats, solving existing problems while foreshadowing the next set. Overriding themes like what am I going to do in life and who are my real friends joust for interaction time.

Voice calls are fundamentally transactional. Video (FaceTime) is used for pitches and demos. And the flow is in both directions. Our kids want reassurance, a sense that wiser heads will prevail as we learn the rules of the new society. Parents want reassurance too, that they will be able to balance the competing needs of kids, grandparents, and the constant pressure of a notification grid filled with breaking news. Interruptions in this new environment are the single biggest cost of loss of focus and diminished productivity.

Turning off notifications often creates more problems than it solves. You trade protection from the immediate crisis for reduced ability to respond to a broader one. Answers to the next question prove more effective. The permissions and posting privileges of a messaging layer guide the information flow, bubble to the top, and anticipate the aggregate value of the channel in follows and subscriptions. The patterns of social metadata — @mentions, retweets, private messages, likes— can be separated from the content to prioritize the distribution of threads.

The appeal of the creator economy and its emerging suite of tools for disrupting traditional media is moving from personal to professional. Mom and pop businesses can project sophisticated services to evangelize, market, and fund growth of their products. The same contours of notification personalization become the valuable data streaming juggernauts like Netflix hoard to run their production and publishing businesses.

On this edition of the Gang, Frank Radice sees parallels to the television industry grappling with digital for the first time.

That’s exactly about the same time that NBC decided that they needed to get into digital. And we had this gigantic meeting in California with all the executives in one huge room with the doors closed and nobody was allowed to have their phone on them so that we could talk about what digital was going to be and what it was going to do and how we were going to use it and what we were going to make of it. And in the end, everybody walked out of there saying, you know, we don’t understand anything about this, but I’ll tell you, we know we need to be there. And I think a lot of it started that way.

The problem with transforming industries is that the collapsing business models are a habit that’s hard to quit. As Michael Markman remembers:

My friend Hardie Tankersley [colleague in the early days at Apple] predicted this a decade ago when he was working for Fox. And they said, ‘Yeah, we all know that. Just don’t bother us now. We’re still making money.’

This is the lesson the record companies learned the hard way, by waiting too long to absorb the Napster threat. Are newsletters and live streaming the tip of the spear to do the same to the media companies?

Michael adds a note of caution:

Zuckerberg did his own version of this. He’s using AR to give you the feeling you’re sitting in a room at a conference table with a bunch of other people. And I’m remembering back to my old time working for corporations. That was the worst part of work, sitting in a room at a conference table with other people.

As the Beatles say, la-la-la-la life goes on.

the latest Gillmor Gang Newsletter

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The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, August 20, 2021.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang

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Source: Tech Crunch

Quizlet, a flashcard tool turned artificial intelligence-powered tutoring platform, is planning an initial public offering nearly a year after it was valued at $1 billion. According to people familiar with the matter, Quizlet is considerably far along in the process to go public. A recent job filing shows that it is hiring for senior roles to “help build the financial systems and processes as we move towards an IPO.”

In an email to TechCrunch, the San Francisco-based edtech startup declined to comment. Quizlet hasn’t said much about its revenue specifics or if it’s profitable. Last year, the still-private startup claimed it was growing revenue 100% annually. On its website, Quizlet says that it has 60 million monthly learners, up 10 million learners compared to its 2018 totals.

Quizlet has built a large-scale business around simple to share and simple to use products. Its free flashcard maker helps students spin up study guides on topics to prepare for exams. Those insights fuel Quizlet Plus, the startup’s subscription product that charges $47.88 a year for access to more features, including tutoring services.

Quizlet’s tutoring arm, also known as Quizlet Learn, is the company’s most popular offering, per CEO Matthew Glotzbach. As a student goes through the system, Quizlet Learn consistently assesses students to see where they are making mistakes — and where they are making progress.

“It obviously doesn’t yet replace and can’t come anywhere close to replacing a human, but it can provide that guidance and point you in the right direction and help you spend your time in the right places,” he said. “Just even helping you set goals is such a critical step in learning.”

Most recently, Quizlet announced the launch of explanations, a feature that offers a step-by-step solution guide for problem sets from popular textbooks. The feature is “written and verified by experts” and is aimed to help “students better understand the reasoning and thought process behind study questions so they can practice and apply their learnings on their own,” it said in a statement. It also reclaimed the Q from its less fortunate predecessor, amid an entire rebrand.

Quizlet’s quiet march toward the public markets has been slow yet steady. The startup was founded in 2005 by a 15-year-old, Andrew Sutherland. It was fully bootstrapped until 2015. Glotzbach, who was previously an executive at YouTube, then joined in 2016. The startup still doesn’t appear to have a CFO, which is rare for companies that are going public.

Quizlet has raised a majority of its $62 million in venture capital under Glotzbach. Now, investors in the company include General Atlantic, Owl Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Costanoa Ventures and Altos Ventures.

Quizlet’s pursuit of the public markets comes as other edtech companies are proving the market’s reception to the sector. Duolingo, for example, is another consumer-focused education company, albeit one that focuses on one vertical versus Quizlet’s choice to stay broad. Duolingo went public in July, and is currently trading above its open price at $169.75 per share.

Source: Tech Crunch