Tech Brew Ride Home - (Bonus) Are NFT's Bad For Artists? And An Interesting Raise Sampler

Episode Date: March 20, 2021

Last weekend a listener to this show, Ti Zhang, (@zero_chill_tea) tagged me on twitter around a conversation they were having about NFTs and the degree to which, lots of folks in the art world are not so thrilled with the advent of NFTs. They said, sure, we see all the headlines around famous artists and celebrities and all the money being made. But was I aware that artists were seeing their work stolen and sold as NFTs? That artists were taking their work down from the internet to make sure it wasn’t scraped and used on a blockchain somewhere? I was not. They started sending articles and links, some of which I posted in the show notes and I was like, hey, instead of just educating me about the NFT thing from the artist perspective, come on the show real quick and educate us all. So, the first half of the show is that. Thank you Ti, for being such a great resource. Then, after a break, the second half of the show will be just some of the Interesting Raises from the Interesting Raises episode that RideHome+ subscribers got this weekend. Less than half the content. If hearing these gives you a bit of FOMO, of course you can always sign up for the RideHome+ feed anytime, at tech.supercast.tech. As always, link to sign up for that feed is in the bottom of the show notes. Sponsors: ManlyBands.com/techmeme Subscribe to the RideHome+ Feed by tapping this link, right here in your podcast app: tech.supercast.tech Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to another weekend bonus episode of the Techmeme Ride Home. I'm Brian McCullough. So here's what happened. Last weekend, a listener to this podcast, Tijong, tagged me on Twitter around a conversation she was having about NFTs and the degree to which,

apparently lots of folks in the art world are not so thrilled with the advent of NFTs. He apparently runs in art circles that I do not, so I was not aware of this. She said, Sure, we all see the headlines around famous artists and celebrities making all the money they're making, but was I aware that artists were seeing their work stolen and sold as NFTs? That artists were taking their work down from the internet to make sure it wasn't scraped and used on a blockchain somewhere. I said I was not, so she started sending articles and links, some of which I posted in the show notes, and I was like, hey, instead of just educating me about this aspect of the NFT story, why not come on the show real quick and educate us all.

So the first half of the show today is that. Thank you, T, for being such a great resource. And then the second half of the show, after a break, the show will be just some of the interesting raises from the interesting raises episode that Ride Home Plus subscribers got already this weekend. Less than half of the raises, because, you know, people are paying for the whole thing.

But if hearing this gives you a bit of fomo, of course, you can always sign up. for the Ride Home Plus feed anytime at tech.supercast.tech. As always, link to sign up for that feed is in the bottom of today's show notes. In the Twitter thread that you shared with me, it basically was saying that there seems to be a growing backlash among artists, a growing fear among artists that NFTs might be exploitative to the art community, a raw deal for artists. And I want to be clear, when we talked about this, it's not that you were advocating this position necessarily yourself. It's just that you swim in art circles that I

apparently don't. And so I wasn't aware of this. And so since you were educating me, I said, please come on and educate all of us about this. So among artists, what are the concerns that you see being raised around NFTs right now? For sure. So I didn't want to suggest that the intent. of everybody who is participating in NFTs is to exploit where the technology itself has this purpose of exploitation. And you know, like you said, I'm by no means a subject matter expert on NFTs, crypto, or even art for that matter. And also inferring intent on a non-monolith can be a pretty imprecise act. So thank you for this opportunity here. I am here as a software engineer with an art hobby to bridge some of that communication gap between, you know, our two communities.

And when I did say that NFTs could be exploited to the art, community. I'm pointing merely to the impact on artists that we're kind of observing here, not the intent. So with that being said, I think, you know, we're all kind of aware that the income structure of any, any kind of like job is not a linear line. And for artists, that's, that's probably especially the case. You have the vast majority being, you know, kind of like, okay, I can cover my bills. And some have to, you know, work another job to supplement this income. And, you know, it's one of those jobs that have a apologize, apologies for the, uh, the crows in the background, by the way. So it's one of those jobs where you do have to have a lot of passion for it. And sometimes folks do, you know, have this passion-based drivenness towards their work, which, you know, and you have some folks at the tip of the pyramid, like Beeple and Grimes. For the artists that reside towards the top of the pay structure, you could say that NFTs did enable them further. You can make that argument.

But these are also some of the most enabled people in the art world or just in our world in general. So this is icing on top for them. They're already doing pretty well. So for the artists around mid-range, or the ones who are still kind of struggling, NFTs effectively take away the control, right? So, you know, to participate in something new, you would have to be, first of all, willing,

and second of all, ABLE. So let's skip the willing part for now and talk about the ABLE part. So the barrier of access for tech, right? That's always been a thing to kind of get down to the nitty-gritty, owning a laptop, first of all, having, say, the $72, $100 to pay a website, hit to mint a token, having the time to figure this out when you're kind of not immersed in the topic. All of this is very new. You know, the barriers of access. I think being in tech for so long,

a lot of us take our access for granted. So if this thing doesn't really make sense to me, I'll just go look it up, sit down, read some docs, watch some tutorials, implement some pet projects myself. But, you know, when you don't spend the majority of your waking time working with tech or thinking about tech, the entry takes that much longer. And it's, you know it's it's a mental hurdle to cross as well so when say you're doing commissions for 30 to 80 bucks a piece and takes you half a day to make a piece having that 40 to 100 dollars laying around to mint a piece is a much bigger investment say someone on the tech salary so this able part is you know i feel like blogging a vast number of artists from so now let's talk

about the willing part there are ethical and environmental considerations around crypto in general and nepte's but that's not the focus of our discussion here today so so I'm not going to dive into it. But I think a big point of tech is respecting that kind of free will. You should be able to choose to not participate in something. Being it whether that you're able to or willing to, you should have the freedom to say, no, I don't want to participate. So however, what happens to the art of the artists that are either unwilling to or unable to participate?

So to mint an art piece, a lot of places do ask you to kind of register as a listed artist. For example, you want to get your Twitter verified that that's kind of recommended by some of the more serious places. In some places, you know, like foundation app, they're by invite only. However, that does not really result in any guarantee between the association of the piece of work that's being minted and the person who is minting the piece. Effectively, anybody could still kind of take this digital asset and minted, claiming that this is my work. Until the original artist decides to do something about it, there are effectively no consequences. So what happens when the original artist does find out? Well, you're going to have to do the

legwork to take it down. And this does not ensure that the profits generated, if any, would be returned to either the artist or the person who purchased art. So let me interrupt right there, because I have been seeing some stories about this already, that essentially, like the system is set up now, and in theory, it's like, well, you have ownership of stuff like this. But there's not necessarily as strong a system in terms of the, the, ironically the provenance from the artist themselves. There's already stories of bots that are going out there, like scraping art from other people, going out and tokenizing it and selling it and things like that. And then it's on the, it's incumbent on the artist to find out that that is

happening, file takedown requests and things like that. So that again, this is, this is almost like the YouTube thing, which was, you know, is an early thing of, well, stuff is, or even Napster, like stuff is going digital and the rights holders can't control it. And we're already seeing that in this and it doesn't seem to be that that was anticipated in terms of this whole NFT scheme so far. Yeah, for sure. So like you said, art theft is a problem that has been around since forever. So to say that this is a uniquely post-NFT phenomenon, that would be very unfair. But for those who are already familiar with the technology, like people with, you know, the ability

to use bots to scrape, this is very low effort and very high incentive. which means, you know, you just want to do it, right? Certainly in the middle of a bubble, like we're saying right now for sure, yeah. Yeah, for sure. So if you're an artist, what would you do? Like, what are your options, right? You could either choose to, yeah, okay, well, I'm all in. I'm going to participate.

Or my other option is to, you know, just risk art theft. And my third option would be to, say, lock my account, to protect my artwork, so that only people that I trust, my potential clients, people who are already vetted, can see my art. you basically have three options offered to you. And that's, you don't have... And from the point of view of an artist, like, oh, my God, that would be so insane to me. Because you sent me links to examples of artists that are literally taking down their accounts

on various sites and, like, portfolio services and things like that, because they... Like, as opposed to how it's being sold in the press in the last few weeks, says, well, this will solve not only getting artists paid, but it'll solve control. And what we're saying is that, like, there's so many artists that never signed up for this sort of thing to invade their little circle of creativity, that they're almost having to run, to flee from it because it's all of a sudden becoming more invasive than anyone anticipated. Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think I'm probably one of those crypto-ideal.

and I'm a little ashamed to admit it. But I still remember us as kind of a community being excited about decentralized technology, resulting in more individual freedom, right, benefiting the underdog. And while that is still kind of the dominating official narrative for NFTs, and there's a lot of goodwill in it, you examine what's actually going on within the artist community, what the artists are actually saying, this is not the case. Those who have already kind of benefited from the structure, the art world, you know, they continue to benefit and they benefit, and they benefit

fit more. They're the ones with the existing state and reach and network and capital. And the rest of the artists kind of stand to get their art exploited and capitalized and they don't really have the freedom of opting out. And I feel like that's almost against what we were setting

out to achieve here when we things. I'm going to come back to something that you said right at the beginning, which was the idea that only artists that already have, that are that already at the top are benefiting because they have this existing stature and capital.

And, you know, I don't know if you listen to every episode this week or not, but like, that's literally that art, that's the same argument that was coming up in substack to a certain degree. I mean, specifically in the substack, Bruhaha, it's having to do with certain artists are getting paid by the platform and other artists art. But at the same time, I literally said that, I think from the day one of talking about substack, that, yeah, it's sort of like the early days of blogging where if you get there first, you end up having the huge audience and then everyone else has to scrape their way up, which is, I mean, that's fine. The world kind of works that way to a certain degree. But it's interesting to me that this is a model that continues where

it's like, yes, if you're a Madaglacius and you've got 300,000 followers on Twitter and you've made your brand by saying provocative things that people will want to debate, it's easy to go over to substack and make what people are speculating is, you know, a ton of money right now. But that doesn't mean that everyone can just open up their storefront, set out their shingle, and be successful. So we're seeing this also with NFTs in the sense that this doesn't mean that, you know, I don't know. I don't mean to sound like I'm diminishing any sort of artist. But some artists making a moderate living doing, I don't know, stuff out in Wisconsin, in rural Wisconsin somewhere,

can suddenly go on and have a bid for a million dollars. It's almost like we keep seeing this pattern of all of these new innovations are just innovations that instead of reshuffling the deck are almost reinforcing the pyramid power structures and like fame structures. Yeah, for sure. I mean, the structure of artists with their patrons, that's been around for hundreds of years. You know, if you're a well-connected artist, your work is just going to sell for that much more money and more people are going to want to buy your art. So this is not a new thing. We're kind of just reinforcing the

existing dynamic that's always been happening. So for something that's aimed to be kind of more disruptive and innovative, you really have to think about the specific impact that it's creating. know, this is not what we set out to do. And yeah, like you said, that's a really good point to make. Yeah. Well, I also think, you know, it's, it's, you hadn't, you turned me onto the idea that this is almost, you know, arts, uh, Napster moment. But, um, the obvious counter devil's advocate to that. And this is literally the argument that, you know, Sean Fanning and Sean Parker and kids like me at the time made was like, no, man, this is just disruption. This is what the future is. And of course, the, the, the, the, the, the, the incalding. incumbents in any space will fight back against this disruption. And so what do you say to the argument that, like, okay, this is just arts Napster moment in the sense that this is where the future is going,

this is what happens to be digitized, and if it's inevitable, you just have to find a way to sort of roll with it or something. That's a really valid point. So if we think about folks who are just generally incumbents to, new technologies, you're kind of, you know, the quality for that, the central quality is fear of the new, fear of development, fear of change, right? So, but when you when you specifically examine why artists are refusing to participate, a lot of this has none to do with rejection of the new, and it's more stem from either, like, first of all, like we discussed, the lack of general ability to do so. You know, the barrier of entry is relatively high. And second of all, the willingness, it has less to do. with fear of the new, perhaps it does, perhaps that's part of it. But a really large part of it

is ethical and environmental concerns. Now, I don't want to make a comment there, but I think as folks in tech, we all kind of respect that freedom a lot. So I feel like when people refuse to out of their ethical considerations, their personal preferences, we should just accept that, but NFTs don't really, like you don't have the freedom to opt out. And I think for that, yeah, That's the problem that we really need to think about how we can solve. There's also, and since you know more about the crypto space than me, I've seen this in several places now where the idea, we're familiar with link rot on the web, where if you go to a web page from 20 years ago, half the things that it links out to are broken.

And so like sort of for all the ways that people think that the web and the internet is eternal, It's really way more fragile than a lot of people consider. So explain this to me because I'm not sure that I have a handle on this. I've seen several places people talk about how it's likely that a decade or 20 years from now, every NFT that was sold this month will be pointing on to either a chain that doesn't exist or a link that doesn't exist. Like, I keep, you know, originally as this was described to me, well, it's going to be on the blockchain.

So it's non-fungible, it's immutable, it's eternal, except for the fact that am I understanding this the right way? There's no really one chain. So like, for example, my podcast NFT, if Rarable isn't around in 20 years, does that mean that whoever bought that NFT won't be able to point to the fact that they bought it? So I definitely wouldn't say that I know more about the crypto space than you, but I can give a little bit of an explanation around the, you know, the concerns that you just brought. And I think we do have some excellent references around that too, folks want to dig in. But basically, what you're purchasing when you buy an NFT, you're purchasing the token itself. So if you look at the, I think I saw in one of the articles where if you examine the contract for, you know, the selling of people's artwork by Christie, it's pretty clear that, like, they're not clear.

They're not very definitive on what you can do, what rights you have. in terms of this piece of artwork, what you're purchasing is the token itself. And here, it specifically points to a IPFS hash. And if you examine the hash, you can fetch the JSON metadata using a public gateway. So now IPFS is a relatively new technology. So and it's one of those things where it's like,

you can have access to the file that this JSON file is referring to, as long as the node on the IPFS network, is specifically hosting it. So I think we do have a couple of resources where they explain this better than I do. This is not one of the technologies that I work with on a day-to-day basis. But yeah, like you said, there's a very big possibility that in a couple of even shorter than that, because we all kind of have an idea of the statistics, statistics around startups survival rate. If one of these startups are, they just stop hosting the file that's being pointed by the IPFS URL,

then you effectively no longer have access to the piece of artwork. You're not purchasing. When you purchase an NFT, you're not really purchasing the art itself. You're purchasing the reference to the art. You're buying a pointer, and that pointer could break. Right, just like a link can break. And also, I think the way I'm understanding it is that it's, it's like there's all these competing projects. In theory, one of them will win out and will be like the standard. It's like we're existing in a world where there's been an explosion of like 50 different programming languages, but we don't know the one that people will still be using 50 years from now, right? And so that's also sort of like a risk to these early adopters is that there's no guarantee.

Not only could the link be broken to use that analogy 20 years or now, but like you could have picked the wrong horse in terms of, well, that's not the standard for NFTs these days or something like that. Yeah, for sure. And who knows? This is so early days in the technology and there's this psycho nature to everything happening in crypto space. Maybe it'll go it'll go best, but then it'll go boom again. And somebody really smart is going to come along and solve these problems around authenticity, but art theft, but until all of those things are certainty, you know, purchasers do kind of face that risk. And in addition to this, you know, what if my file is no longer hosted? You think about what if you purchase a piece and that is, not actually authentic. And then you have no way of kind of getting your money back. And your art is also at this point worthless. You can't resell it. So you do. The art theft doesn't really just impact artists. It impacts art collectors as well. But yeah, hopefully somebody really smart is going to come along and be like, hey, I have a solution to this.

And we agreed that neither of us are going to get into the environmental costs right now because I'm not sure that I have a good enough understanding of that. And that goes for all of crypto, not just NFTs. Thank you, T. Did you want to plug anything, a GitHub, accounts, or just you're happy to be a listener and a member of the community, as it were? Yeah, yeah, I'm just one person on the Internet. I think I'm pretty happy to get a chance to talk to you about something that we're all pretty concerned about and kind of just be that bridging voice. Yeah, if folks wanted, they can follow my Twitter, but I don't really have anything to plug.

Okay. Well, listen, I mean, T, I'm just one person on the internet, and I'm just a nerd. And that's the point is that we're helping each other learn about all this stuff. So thank you so much. Thank you, Brian. The global pandemic has thrown the rental marketplace in many cities really upside down in weird ways. As people working from home have returned to the suburbs and beyond in search of less densely populated areas to live and work. Although, as vaccines are coming, we're seeing that

reversed. People are coming back to the cities. Rents are rising again. One company betting that people will return as COVID gets under control is housing anywhere. A European startup that matches students and young professionals with rental accommodation providers. It just raised a 24 million Euro Series C round of funding to expand its presence, hoping to establish market share as people return to city-bound offices. quoting from Payments.com. Saying his company wants to be a catalyst for the market in the post-pandemic future, CEO Jordy Sealman said that Housing Anywhere is entering 2021 feeling pretty confident about the year to come and the opportunities that will become available in the recovering market.

Quote, we're quite confident that when the pandemic fades away, rental prices will go back to previous levels because in the end, we're dealing with a lack of supply in general in many cities in Europe, Sealman said. We're almost at the same level we were a year ago when there was no epidemic at all. That means people are traveling, people are making life decisions to move to another country, which is the international mobile market we really serve, end quote. The company plans to use the funding to become a platform for property managers, bringing simplicity to what is currently a complex property management picture across Europe, quoting again from payments.com. The theme of 2021 for Housing Anywhere, according to Seelman, is expansion. Along with the company's

new funding, the firm announced its acquisition of Dutch real estate digital classified KamerNet, which Seelman said will be key to building up the housing inventory offering in the Netherlands going forward. Housing Anywhere is also expanding the number of focus cities going to 32 cities total from today's 15. The company will remain focused on its core countries, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, but will also be moving to France, Spain, and Portugal with local sales teams this year. Although the rental market has been battered a bit back and forth, the demand is there from clients. Housing Anywhere is seeing it in the inquiries on the site and the fact that bookings are already leveling out to the year ago level. And when that market recovers fully on the housing shortage that defines

the European rental market makes itself felt again, housing anywhere wants to be ready to jump in and compete any place on the continent consumers want to live. Quote, we really want to build out the platform in a way that we can have multiple products stacked on top of that and be able to support property managers across the entire rental lifecycle, Seelman said, end quote. Back on this side of the pond, Mighty Buildings has raised a $40 million series B-round to 3D-print homes, hoping to reduce the cost of new houses in markets where real estate prices are, despite the pandemic, still extremely high. TechCrunch has the details, quote, it claims to be able to 3D print structures two times as quickly with 95% less labor hours

and 10 times less waste than conventional construction. For example, it says it can 3D print a 350-square-foot studio apartment in just 24 hours. The four-year-old startup's efforts caught the eye of KOSLA Ventures, which co-led the financing along with Zeno Ventures. Rhino Bligno, an operating partner at Koso, believes that mighty buildings, which launched out of stealth last August, has the potential to cut both the cost and carbon footprint of home construction by 50% or more. The company takes a hybrid approach to home construction, combining 3D printing and prefab, meaning built off-site, building, according to co-founder and C.O. Alexei Dubov. It has invented a proprietary thermoset composite material

called Lightstone Material or LSM as part of its effort to reduce the home construction industry's reliance on concrete and steel. The material can be 3D printed and hardens almost immediately, according to the company, while also maintaining cohesion between layers to create a monolithic structure. Mighty buildings can then 3D print elements like overhangs or ceilings without the need for additional support framework. That way, it's able to fully print a structure and not just the walls. Robotic arms can post-process the composite, which combined with the company's ability to automate the pouring of insulation and the 3D printing gives Mighty Buildings the ability to automate up to 80% of the construction process the company claims, end quote.

The company is now taking orders for Mighty Houses, which range from 864 to 1440 square feet. They cost between $300,000 and $400,000. A fraction of the price tag homebuyers in the Bay Area could usually expect to pay for homes of that size. But while the B2C play is important, Mighty ultimately wants to become a platform for developers, quoting from TechCrunch again. Mighty Buildings plans this year to market its Mighty Kit system and a new fiber-reinforced material for multi-story projects as part of a plan B2B platform for developers. In fact, the company already has secured contracts with developers for its single-family housing product line.

It also plans to use the new capital in part to scale its production capacity with increased automation. Ultimately, Mighty Buildings' vision is to provide production as a service with builders and architects designing their own structures and then developers using mighty factories to produce them at scale. Turning now to cyber attacks, there's been no shortage of those recently, nor a shortage of headlines about them, especially the solar winds and Microsoft Exchange hacks. Well, Cal Bell Cyber knows a growth industry when it sees one, because it's just raised a $20 million Series A to provide insurance to small and medium-sized businesses who may fall prey to these attacks.

Quoting from Crunch Base, founded in 2019, the company has raised $23.5 million to date. Cal Bell only started selling in early 2020, but has thousands of customers and a network of more than 4,000 agents and brokers that now sell Cal Bell Insurance, said founder and CEO Jack Kudale. Businesses having to change on the fly due to the pandemic and new headlines every day about the solar winds and Microsoft Exchange attacks has increased their desire for cyber insurance, he said. There just has been a heightened awareness about the threat landscape, he added, end quote. And while legacy insurers are starting to get into the game, as well. Kudale reckons Cal Bell's software-driven approach will differentiate it from the PAC,

quoting from Crunchbase again. Cal Bell offers policies to companies with less than $1 billion in revenue and with $15 million limits. The company uses AI and machine learning to more accurately assess risk, Kudale said. The new funding will be used to expand Cal Bell's 40-person staff to likely 90 by the end of the year, as well as invest in its platform, he said. The company also expects to expand into more states, as it is currently in 38, he added, with a market that has been estimated to be as high as $20.4 billion by 2025, Kudale sees few limits. There is space for us to be a standalone public company, he said, end quote. I think we mentioned on the show a while ago the idea that if a bunch of companies,

especially SaaS companies, come to rely on recurring revenue, then that revenue could end up looking a lot like revenue from, say, a bond. And if so, you could do all sorts of fun things, like securitize it or use that to raise capital without diluting equity. Somewhat down a similar road, conceptually, Pipe is a platform designed to offer companies with predictable recurring revenue streams access to capital in an alternative to equity or venture debt. It does this by operating a marketplace that pairs the companies with buyers, typically large financial institutions willing to pay a discounted rate upfront for the value of those revenue-generating contracts. It just raised

$50 million in a bid to become the dominant trading platform for revenue as an asset class. More details from TechCrunch. In conjunction with the new financing, Pipe said it is also broadening the scope of its platform beyond strictly SaaS companies to any company with a recurring revenue stream. This could include D to C subscription companies, ISPs, streaming services, or a telecommunications company. Even VC fund admin and management are being piped on its platform,

for example, according to CEO Harry Hurst. When we first went to market, we were very focused on SaaS, our first vertical, he said. Since then, over 3,000 companies have signed up to use our platform. Those companies range from early stage and bootstrapped with 200,000 in revenue to publicly traded companies. Pipe's platform assesses a customer's key metrics by integrating with its accounting, payment processing, and banking systems. It then instantly rates the performance of the business and qualifies them for a trading limit.

Trading limits currently range from $50,000 for smaller early stage and bootstrap companies to over $100 million for late stage and publicly traded companies, although there is no cap on how large a trading limit can be. The best way to summarize it is we can work with any company that has a high degree of predictability around their revenue, Hurst said. Pipe, he added, aims to turn that monthly recurring revenue into annual recurring revenue. In the first quarter of 2021, tens of millions of dollars were traded across the Pipe platform. Between its launch in late June 2020 through years end, the company also saw tens of millions

in trades take place via its marketplace. Tradable ARR on the platform is currently in excess of $1 billion. We're helping companies grow on their own terms, her said. Or you could say we're building the NASDAQ for revenue. Virtually every company in the world has a recurring revenue model already, or if they don't, they're thinking about how they can shift to it, end quote. As I said, I'm skeptical, but I'm still watching the handful of companies that are developing competitors to Google in its main search business. The one that everyone has their eyes on is NEVA, which was founded by two X Googlers who grew disillusioned with the product choices. particularly around search quality and user privacy that Google made in pursuit of continued growth. Sridar Rameswami, Niva's CEO used to run Google's $15 billion advertising division.

Now he and co-founder Vivek Raghudh Nathan have turned their attention to building a search engine that won't depend on ad revenues or data tracking. Instead, they plan to charge users a subscription fee. Forbes has more details. Neva users will pay between $5 and $10 a month to get the search results they want rather than what advertisers want them to see. The challenge obviously is getting folks to pay for something they are used to getting for free. Sometimes I joke with people, listen. All of us pay for the water that comes through our tap, said Ramoswami, and they just don't care because you know what? It's a low-cost,

high-quality product. Why don't online services work the same way? End quote. The idea is getting traction. Niva announced today that is raised an additional $40 million in funding led by Greylock and Sequoia Capital. The round brings Niva's total funding to $77.5 million, with a valuation of $300 million. The funding will be used to expand beyond the invitation-only alpha testing they launched in June 2020 to a much wider beta release this spring. Neva is also bringing on Uday Manbur, Google's former head of search, to work with the startup two days a week. Additionally, Margo Giordiatis, Google's former president of Americas, is joining Neva's board.

In total, there are now about a dozen X Googlers among Neva's 45-person full-time staff. Neva is debuting at a time when Google and other digital advertising companies like Facebook are under unprecedented pressure as people become increasingly aware of their data privacy or lack thereof. The concerns have prompted a wave of newly proposed government regulations and antitrust investigations both in the U.S. and abroad. I don't think anyone that worked on ads or is working on ads even now built ads with the intention of, let's create an amazing misinformation engine, Ramoswami says. No one's that smart. But what happens over a very long period of time is when you push along a certain way and then you create systems, that are running at world scale, that's when you see problems, end quote.

Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn, who is now a partner at Greylock, says people forget how much room for innovation still exist outside of tech giants. Neva has this notion that all of this search is ad-driven, and that vectors a lot of things which are great for consumers and kind of for the ecosystem to have a kind of non-ad-driven search, Hoffman says. Just think about, for example, the pollution bias when you're looking for health care results about an ad-driven model versus a subscription to the model. And that extends across e-commerce trends and across organizations, end quote.

For example, Neva is working on prioritizing product reviews rather than advertisements for big box retailers. It tries to surface news stories based on a user's interest as gleaned from their subscriptions. And plugins from other sources let users more easily search for information in a single personalized dashboard, end quote. So look out for Neva's beta release later in the spring. I know I want to get one. The company is currently operating a wait list for access.