Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 01/27 – Apple To Block Block (Née Square)?

Episode Date: January 27, 2022

Apple is coming for Block’s Square dongle with a new ability to accept payments just using your iPhone. The dilemma that is the Spotify/Neil Young situation. OpenAI is an interesting raise. Fireblocks is an interesting raise. And why has the r/antiwork subreddit suddenly gone private? Sponsors: Smith.ai promocode techmeme for $100 off signup Linkedin.com/ride Links: Apple to Rival Square by Turning iPhones Into Payment Terminals (Bloomberg) Spotify Takes Down Neil Young’s Music After His Joe Rogan Ultimatum (WSJ) Facebook’s Cryptocurrency Venture to Wind Down, Sell Assets (WSJ) OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman ridicules start-up fundraising process (CNBC) Fireblocks raises $550 million in Series E funding, now valued at $8 billion (The Block) Anti-Work Subreddit Suddenly Goes Private to Clean Up After ‘Brigading’ (Bloomberg) Anti-work subreddit implodes after rough Fox News interview (Mashable) Valve will start selling the Steam Deck on February 25th (The Verge) 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 the Tech meme right home for Thursday, January 27th, 2022. I'm Brian McKele today. Apple is coming for Blocks Square Dongle with a new ability to accept payments just using your iPhone.

The dilemma that is the Spotify Neil Young situation. Open AI is an interesting raise. Fireblocks is an interesting raise. And why has the R-slash-ant-Work subreddit suddenly gone private? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Sources are telling Mark German that Apple is working to let business accept payments on their iPhones without extra hardware, thanks to tech from MobyWave, which Apple acquired back in 2020. In other words, why use some sort of hardware accessory like the square

dongle when you could just use your phone itself to accept payments? Quote, Apple is planning a new service that will let small businesses accept payments directly on their iPhones without any extra hardware, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The company has been working on the new feature since around 2020 when it paid about $100 million for a Canadian startup called MobyWave that developed technology for smartphones to accept payments with the tap of a credit card. The system will likely use the iPhone's near-field communications or NFC chip that is currently used for Apple Pay. In order to accept payments on an iPhone today, merchants need to use payment terminals that plug in or communicate with the phone via Bluetooth. The upcoming feature will instead turn the iPhone into a payment terminal itself,

letting users, such as food trucks and hairstylists accept payments with the tap of a credit card or another iPhone, onto the back of their device, end quote. Shares of Square, of course I mean Block, have been bouncing around because of this news, which, by the way, speaking of Square changing its name to Block, it is also no longer the Oculus Quest. Meta, which used to be Facebook, has officially switched out the Twitter account for Oculus, which is going forward to be known as the MetaQuest. Why? I don't know. If you ask me, Oculus was one of the coolest brand names of recent vintage, and yes, I was annoyed before about all the name changes because I thought they were dumb, but if I say meta-quest in a story now, do I have a reasonable expectation that you're going to know what I'm talking about? Even in that Bloomberg story we just quoted from, they had to jump through all sorts of hoops to explain that block was the thing you probably know of as square. I hope these name changes really do help attract Web3 talent, because I promise you, these companies are killing them. themselves with brand confusion. If it's hard for tech in the know people to keep track of all the name changes, I promise you that Normies, well, it's basically like New Deal era alphabet soup for

them at this point. Here's another interesting dilemma. Spotify is removing Neil Young's music from their service after he gave the company an ultimatum between continuing to host his music and Joe Rogan's podcast because of Neil Young's concerns about COVID-19 vaccine. misinformation on said podcast. Quote, Mr. Young's record label Warner Music Group Corpse, Warner Records, formally requested Spotify remove the music Wednesday. On Wednesday, Neil Young took more jabs at Spotify on his website, calling on others to join him in removing music from Spotify. I sincerely hope that other artists and record companies will move off the Spotify platform and stop supporting Spotify's deadly misinformation about COVID, he wrote, but added that he, quote, can't really expect that to happen, end quote.

Spotify represents 60% of the streaming of his music to listeners, Mr. Young wrote, and pointed listeners to where his music is still available to stream, including Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Kyoz, a high-res music streamer. Mr. Young also thanked his label for supporting him in his wishes to leave Spotify, end quote. Yeah, that's what I find interesting, that Warner supported. him in jumping off of Spotify. Because here's the dilemma. I kind of doubt that other artists will follow suit, but let's say they did. Let's say there was a steady drumbeat of controversy of some political stripe or another, not just from Rogan, but from all sorts of podcasts. Here's the thing. You've always been able to listen to podcasts on Spotify, but Spotify's strategic shift to buttress their music business with podcasting required that they own the content themselves. The idea is they'd get you

in the door with music, which is barely break-even for them or even a loss leader, and then make money on pods they could sell ads against. But if the musicians ever did revolt, then what would happen to that strategy? Here's the thing I would worry about if I were Spotify. Neil Young has just given artists a convenient, blunt object to hit Spotify with. Next time, Taylor Swift or whomever wants to go to war with them, suddenly they've got this controversy leverage now. P.S., it was a weird coincidence that I quoted from Heart of Gold. At the end of a show last week, I had no idea this was coming. When I checked last night, I could still play Neil Young albums, but right now this morning, I checked again, and it says unavailable. And a quick follow-up to this. The Wall Street

Journal says, the plan, as of right now, is for the Metabact DM Association to sell its technology to California Bank Silvergate Capital, which we mentioned, I believe, yesterday, as a startup that serves crypto companies, and the price tag will be in probably the $200 million range. Quote, the bank, Silvergate Capital, had earlier reached a deal with DM to issue some of the stable coins, which are backed by hard dollars and designed to be less volatile than Bitcoin and other digital currencies that were at the heart of the effort. The sale represents an effort to squeeze some remaining value from a venture that was challenged almost from the start. Facebook, now meta-platforms, launched the project as Libra in 2020.

2019, pitching it as a way for the social network's billions of users to spend money as easily as sending a text message. In 2020, the group recruited Stuart Levy, former U.S. Treasury official and top lawyer at HSBC Holdings as chief executive and ditched the Libra name in favor of Diem. The stable coin deal with Silvergate was part of a revamp last year meant to appease regulators, end quote. This one's an interesting raise for a whole bunch of reasons. Sam Altman says OpenAI has raised a $250 million series A but doesn't disclose a valuation for the company or the specific investors involved. I think most of you know OpenAI, but in case you don't, it was co-founded by Elon Musk. It was backed by Microsoft. And it's also that startup behind GPT3, the big AI advance that everyone has been talking about over the last year, quoting CNBC. Sam Altman, OpenAI's co-founder and CEO announced the Series A funding round on Twitter late Wednesday

without disclosing the valuation or the specific investors. After our pre-Friends and family round in 2016, our Friends and Family Round in 2017, our Angel round in 2018, our pre-SEED round in 2019, our seed round in 2020, and our seed extension in 2021. We're delighted to share that we've raised a Series A of $250 million, Altman wrote. Open AI ranked by AI researchers as one of the top three AI labs worldwide, did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment. Incorporated in San Francisco in 2015, OpenAI says it is trying to develop safe and friendly AI systems. The company's founders, Altman, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilyas Sutskev, Wojchev, Jaremba, and John Schulman pledged to invest over $1 billion into the venture when they set it up. Musk resigned from the board in February

2018, but remained a donor. In July 2019, Microsoft backed OpenAI with $1 billion. The investment made Microsoft the exclusive provider of cloud computing services to OpenAI, end quote. Also a really interesting one, Fireblocks, which lets users store, transfer, and issue digital assets, has raised a $550 million series E at an $8 billion valuation after raising $310 million back in July. I'm flagging this one because I hadn't realized that fireblocks had gotten this big. Mega unicorn alert. Also, notice this murderer's row of backers. Quoting the block, not to be confused with block, formerly square, about fireblocks, quote, D1 Capital Partners and Spark Capital co-led the round with General Atlantic, index ventures, mammoth, G, Alphabet's Independent Growth Fund, Altimeter, and Parify Capital also participating. Existing investors such as Sequoia Capital, Co2, Ribbett, Bank of New York Mellon, Paradigm, and SCB10X also joined the round. The Series E comes just five months after

Fireblocks raised $310 million in Series D funding at a $2.2 billion valuation. The company's valuation has soared over 10 times in the last year from $700 million to $8 billion today. Fireblock CEO Michael Shalov told the block. in an interview that the company has seen phenomenal financial results in the past year, with the number of customers growing from 150 to over 800, and revenues growing over 600%. Shalov declined to provide absolute revenue numbers, but said the firm isn't profitable yet.

Founded in 2018, Fireblocks provides institutions with an all-in-one platform that includes crypto services such as custody, access to decentralized finance or defy, staking, and tokenization. Fireblock says it has $45 billion in assets under custody, and over $2 trillion in crypto assets have been transferred securely through its platform. Its customers include Bank of New York Mellon, Revolut, Galaxy Digital, BlockFi, Deribit, E. Toro, coin shares, three arrows capital, and B2C2. Shalov said Fireblocks will continue to enhance its offerings and add more customers with fresh capital in hand. Earlier this month, Fireblocks

became the first whitelister for Ave Arc, a permissioned version of the popular Defi lending platform Ave. In other words, Fireblocks runs due diligence on institutions looking to participate in Ave Arc for lending and borrowing crypto assets to earn a higher yield, end quote. Reddit is conducting a small internal test, their words, of a feature that lets users set any NFT they own as their profile picture on Reddit, which, you know, so is everybody. But what I also wanted to tell you about is that Reddits are slash anti-work subreddit, the fastest growing non-default subreddit with over 1.7 million members suddenly went private on Wednesday, citing ongoing brigading. I've almost told you about R-slash anti-work a couple of times now.

If last year was about R-slash Wall Street Bats being ground zero for the height of the trading mania, the short way to put it is that R-slash-ant-Wark is ground zero for 2020's great resignation trend. Quoting Bloomberg. The forum's slogan is unemployment for all, not just the rich, although it's been around since 2013 subscriber growth spiked in the fall, doubling in the last three months alone. It's been fueled by discontent with the state of the labor market during the pandemic. More workers are refusing to accept conditions and pay that were previously the norm. Quote, the point of the movement is not to tell everyone to go quit your job immediately and don't think about the economic impact on yourself or your family. That's definitely not the message.

one of the forum's moderators, Doreen Ford, told Bloomberg last month, the central aim of our mission is to undermine and subvert capitalism as much as possible and make it so that people don't have to rely on their jobs as much to pay rent, end quote. First conceived as a place to undermine capitalism, many are now using the group as a place to discuss workers' rights, air grievances against employers and post-cathartic screenshots and videos of people quitting. The forum has more than 1.7 million members and was the fastest-growing non-deflicts. Reddit on January 26, according to the site's public metrics. Now it's locked from view with a post that reads, we're closed while we deal with the cleanup from ongoing brigading and we'll be back soon. You don't need to request to join. We'll be back real soon. I promise, end quote. On Reddit, brigading usually refers to users from another subreddit conducting a coordinated campaign to disrupt another group, end quote. But what's interesting is that maybe there's even more to it. see, that same moderator that we just quoted, Doreen Ford, went on Fox News apparently for an interview recently and got into a bit of a back and forth with the hosts that did not go well,

quoting Mashable. In the subreddit out of the loop, which helps users keep track of what's going on with Reddit, Potato Lantern, said that people on the anti-Works subreddit are indignant and frustrated that Ford was chosen to represent the movement and decided to do an interview with Fox News at all. A post on the subreddit preserved by the wayback machine, however, shows Ford explaining how the other moderators decided she'd be the best to do interviews because of her past media experience. This morning, the anti-work subreddit was still public, but as Ford's interview gained traction, it went private. According to user Lucia Grace in the out-of-the-loop subreddit, many of the posts and comments on R-slash anti-work were locked. Users were allegedly

getting banned for discussing the interview. Eventually, the page released an FAQ thread about the Fox News incident, according to one user on R-slash out-of-the-loop, but that was later deleted. Reddit user Mr.SFW.com said the entire segment was designed to make Ford and the anti-work movement look bad. Mission accomplished, end quote. And finally today, after supply chain issues delayed its launch last year, Valve now says it will release the Steam Deck on February 25th and says reservations will be filled in weekly batches going forward after that, quoting the Verge. The release date matches Valve's recent prediction that the game console would start heading out to gamers by the end of February. Valve says that the orders placed on the 25th will start shipping out on the 28th.

It's good to finally have a date for when the handheld console will be coming out, When Valve announced the Steam Deck in July 2021, it was originally slated to ship in December of that year. However, it was delayed by two months due to supply chain and shortage issues that have become standard with many product launches. Valve is still letting you reserve the Steam Deck for $5 if you haven't already. You could have quite a weight at this point, though. The order page currently says that you can expect to order after Q2 2022. If you're still on the fence, you can check out our hands-on impressions of the Steam Deck here and watch the video below. end quote. So obviously click through on the last link in today's show notes to check out that

video. But basically, imagine a less toy-looking version of the Nintendo Switch. Tonight, Twitter space, the usual time, 9 p.m. Eastern, 6 p.m. Pacific. We're going to have on the two guests that we didn't get to talk to last week. So second try is the charm, hopefully. A deeper, more intelligent dive into the recent stock market chaos and what it might mean for the startup ecosystem as a whole. See you there. Talk to you tomorrow.