blogger better: 2019-03-24

Saturday, March 30, 2019

Mark Zuckerberg actually calls for regulation of content, elections, privacy

It’s been a busy day for Facebook exec op-eds. Earlier this morning, Sheryl Sandberg broke the site’s silence around the Christchurch massacre, and now Mark Zuckerberg is calling on governments and other bodies to increase regulation around the sorts of data Facebook traffics in. He’s hoping to get out in front of heavy-handed regulation and get a seat at the table shaping it. The founder published a letter simultaneously on his own page and The Washington Post, the latter of which is an ideal way to get your sentiments on every desk inside the...

Jason Rowley Contributor Jason Rowley is a venture capital and technology reporter for Crunchbase News. More posts by this contributor To get big faster, younger unicorns start buying startups sooner Small VC funds continue to raise, despite pressure from above After years of fierce competition as private companies, Uber and Lyft are going public on U.S. markets. Scooter service providers, the transportation trend du jour, raised hundreds of millions of dollars to scatter scooters on city sidewalks (to the chagrin of residents...

Lyft completed its long-awaited IPO this week, trading 21 percent higher Friday than its initial offering price of $72 per share. It closed its first day of trading at about $78 per share, up roughly 9 percent. I spoke to IPO guru Brian Hamilton, the CEO of banking software company Sageworks, about Lyft’s offering to get a sense of how Wall Street views the buzzworthy tech unicorn. As I wrote earlier this week, Wall Street doesn’t seem to care about profitability, prioritizing growth instead. Lyft is definitely growing, quickly, and working hard...

Toast, the restaurant management platform, has raised $250M at a $2.7B valuation

Restaurant sales hit $825 billion last year in the U.S., but with margins averaging at only three to five percent per business, they’re always looking for an edge on efficiency and just generally running things in a smarter way. A startup called Toast, which has built a popular platform for restaurant management, has closed a hefty round of funding to double down on that opportunity to do that. The company has raised $250 million on a valuation of $2.7 billion, money that it will use to invest in building technology to help restaurants with marketing,...

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Sure, we just aired a new episode, but things keep happening, and after talking about this crop of IPOs for so long, we can’t help ourselves. (You can follow us on Twitter, here and here, by the way, if Equity isn’t enough for you.) Lyft, as you know, started trading today, closing the loop on a long saga that brought the smaller of the two domestic ride-hailing unicorns to the public markets. After so much speculation...

Amid calls for a dozen different global cities to replace Silicon Valley — Austin, Beijing, London, New York — nobody has yet nominated “nowhere.” But it’s now a possibility. There are two trends to unpack here. The first is startups that are fully, or almost fully, remote, with employees distributed around the world. There’s a growing list of significant companies in this category: Automattic, Buffer, GitLab, Invision, Toptal and Zapier all have from 100 to nearly 1,000 remote employees. The second trend is nomadic founders with no fixed location....

Pink confetti fell from the ceiling Friday as Lyft co-founders Logan Green and John Zimmer celebrated their company’s IPO. The stock offering was a bonafide success, with shares selling for $87.24 apiece Friday morning — 21 percent higher than Lyft’s initial $72 share price — and closing at about $79 per share. Lyft raised roughly $2.3 billion Thursday evening, hours before ringing the opening bell of the Nasdaq on Friday around noon Pacific. The IPO gave Lyft an initial market cap of about $24 billion, representing an 11x revenue multiple and...

1stdibs began pushing the antiques business into the 21st century long ago. Apparently, investors think it can push further and faster with $76 million in new funding. That’s how much the now-18-year-old, New York-based company says it just closed on for its Series D round, led by T. Rowe Price Associates, with participation from earlier backers Index Ventures, Benchmark and Spark Capital. The company now boasts a valuation of well over $500 million, it tells the WSJ. 1stdibs has always been an interesting startup, one that’s both loved by the...

Political parties, campaigns and brands can’t get an accurate and cost-effective understanding of opinion in small geographic areas, like the constituencies of lawmakers. This is a big problem in political campaigning. And all political campaigning now has a huge online element, as we know. We also know political turbulence is one of the defining themes of our age. But one thing is clear: All the players want faster, cheaper, more accurate and a more granular understanding of consumers and voters. In the age of AI, survey predictions are influenced...

I’ve never had a meeting quite like the one I had with Built Robotics. Within about 10 minutes of meeting Built’s co-founder Noah Ready-Campbell, we’re steering an 80,000-pound construction excavator around what is basically his company’s back yard. He wants me to see what it’s like to drive one; how much skill and finesse it takes to safely and efficiently move mountains of dirt around with this massive machine. The answer? Lots. That’s why his company wants these machines to drive themselves. Built is taking the concepts and technology that others...

Nativo has acquired SimpleReach, a move that Nativo CEO Justin Choi said will pair his company’s distribution system for native ads with SimpleReach’s measurement tools. “If you can’t measure the impact of something, it’s difficult to scale spend in that area,” Choi told me. “When we say measurement we’re actually talking about connecting content to outcomes.” To be clear, Nativo already offers measurement tools of its own, but apparently they’re limited to content that the brand or marketer is publishing on their own sites. SimpleReach, on the...

If you took the photos and videos out of pornography, could it appeal to a new audience? Caroline Spiegel’s first startup Quinn aims to bring some imagination to adult entertainment. Her older brother, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel, spent years trying to convince people his app wasn’t just for sexy texting. Now Caroline is building a website dedicated to sexy text and audio. The 22-year-old college senior tells TechCrunch that on April 13th she’ll launch Quinn, which she describes as “a much less gross, more fun Pornhub for women”. TechCrunch...

{rss:content:encoded} Snap CEO’s sister Caroline Spiegel starts a no-visuals porn site https://ift.tt/2CJ7i5z https://ift.tt/2V5wbzg March 29, 2019 at 03:15PM If you took the photos and videos out of pornography, could it appeal to a new audience? Caroline Spiegel’s first startup Quinn aims to bring some imagination to adult entertainment. Her older brother, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel, spent years trying to convince people his app wasn’t just for sexy texting. Now Caroline is building a website dedicated to sexy text and audio. The 22-year-old...

It’s not uncommon to hear CEOs and business leaders talk about focusing on the consumer. But the only way to build for the consumer is to hear what they want, which can be a resource-intensive thing to retrieve. User Interviews, an ERA-backed company out of New York, is looking to lighten that load with a fresh $5 million in seed funding from Accomplice, Las Olas, FJ Labs, and ERA. User Interviews actually started out as Mobile Suites, an amenities logistics platform for hotels. It was a dud, and the team — Basel Fakhoury, Dennis Meng and Bob Saris...

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week we had the full gang around, with Connie Loizos in the studio with Kate Clark and our guest Barrett Cohn from Scenic Advisement. Alex was on the line from Providence. Lucky for us, news of Lyft’s IPO pricing broke right before we hit record. That shook things up a bit, but it was far better to have it break as we were getting our notes together rather than after we kicked off. Let’s start there. Lyft...

Facebook’s handling of Alex Jones is a microcosm of its content policy problem

A revealing cluster of emails leaked to Business Insider offers a glimpse at how Facebook decides what content is objectionable in high profile cases. In this instance, a group of executives at Facebook went hands on in determining if an Alex Jones Instagram post violated the platform’s terms of service or not. As Business Insider reports, 20 Facebook and Instagram executives hashed it out over the Jones post, which depicted a mural known as “False Profits” by the artist Mear One. Facebook began debating the post after it was flagged by Business...

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