Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 02/11 - Facebook Wants To Copy Clubhouse Too.

Episode Date: February 11, 2021

Facebook wants to copy Clubhouse too, and meanwhile I got to try out Twitter Spaces last night. Did Microsoft make a run at acquiring Pinterest, and would the government let that happen? Is Peacock the sick man of the streaming wars? And an interesting raise around the creator economy. Sponsors: CalderaLab.com code TECHMEME at checkout AirMedCareNetwork.com/tech offer code TECH Links: Facebook Is Said to Be Building a Product to Compete With Clubhouse (NYTimes) Microsoft approached Pinterest about a takeover (Financial Times) iOS 14.5 Beta Directs 'Safe Browsing' Traffic in Safari Through Apple Server Instead of Google to Protect Personal User Data (MacRumors) Bumble makes Wall Street debut in a milestone moment for female founders (CNN Business) NBCUniversal’s Streaming Strategy Raises Prospect of WarnerMedia Merger (The Information) Andreessen Horowitz Wins Deal for Creator Economy Startup Stir at $100 Million Valuation (The Information) Machines Are Inventing New Math We've Never Seen (Motherboard) 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 the Tech meme right home for Thursday, February 11th, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. Facebook wants to copy Clubhouse naturally. And meanwhile, I got to try out Twitter spaces just last night. Did Microsoft make a run at acquiring Pinterest? And would the government even let that happen?

Is Peacock the sick man of the streaming wars and an interesting raise around the creator economy? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Surprising almost nobody, sources are telling me. Mike Isaac in the New York Times that Facebook is building an audio chat product currently in its earliest stages of development to, what do you know? Clone Clubhouse, quote, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive has been interested in audio communication forums, said the people with knowledge of the matter, and he appeared in the Clubhouse app on Sunday to chat about augmented and virtual reality. Facebook executives have ordered employees to create a similar product,

said the people who are not authorized to speak publicly. The product is in its earliest stages of development, they said, and the product's code name could change. We've been connecting people through audio and video technologies for many years and are always exploring new ways to improve that experience for people. Emily Haskell, a Facebook spokeswoman, said, end quote. One important thing to take note of here, Andresen Horowitz is Clubhouse's big investor, and Mark Andreessen himself is on Facebook's board of directors. If this was five years ago, I'd say slam dunk. That would mean that Clubhouse was going to get acquired by Facebook probably tomorrow. But in this regulatory environment, I'd say that's nigh on impossible, and Facebook and Clubhouse both likely know that.

Now, just last night, friend of the podcast, Alex Cantowitz, managed to get access to Twitter's Clubhouse competitor, known as Spaces, and he pinged a bunch of us to come on and chat with Twitter's Kvon Bakepour to pepper him with lots of nerdy questions like, how can I do this? Why can't I do that? How does this even work? One of the main things that Kavon pointed out is that people tend to be more willing to go on live audio as opposed to live video. They just feel more comfortable with it. For most people, it's literally terrifying to be on live video, he told us, which is an interesting, learning to bring to a project like this, since he was obviously a co-founder of Periscope. I'm going to quote from Willa Ramos, who was taking notes on Twitter while we were all chatting,

quote, asked by Kantowitz, his reaction to Facebook reportedly building a Clubhouse clone six days after Zuckerberg appeared on Clubhouse, Kavon quipped, my reaction is, I'm surprised it took him this long. I think Facebook has a pretty standard playbook here, he said. I'm pretty sure they're going to build the capability in a way that works as cohesively as it can within in the big blue app, do the same thing in Instagram, throw a separate app at it just for good measure. They've shown in the past that they're very good at waiting for interesting things to happen and then shamelessly build their own version of it, he said of Facebook. That has worked out well for them, end quote.

He added that he thinks the competition will be great for consumers, end quote. So I talked about all of this before in terms of substack when I said it's the social networks that actually have the distribution, right? So maybe they're more powerful than any disruptor could hope to be in this space. But also, in the context of Clubhouse specifically, what if voice chat rooms are the new stories, i.e., every platform will just add voice chat, and it just becomes a table stakes feature for any digital platform.

I guess we're about to find out. This is also pretty interesting. Sources are telling the financial times that Microsoft made an offer to acquire Pinterest in recent months, but apparently they didn't offer enough because the talks are not active right now. Quote, Microsoft has been pursuing an acquisition strategy aimed at amassing a portfolio of active online communities that could run on top of its cloud computing platform. Pinterest, whose market value has increased more than 600% during the coronavirus pandemic, has signaled in the past that it desired to remain an independent company.

Its soaring stock price would present a hurdle to Microsoft, whose shares have risen nearly 80% from a pandemic low, though Pinterest's market value is only about 3% of Microsoft's $1.83 trillion. Pinterest shares were up just over 5% in early trading on Thursday morning after these rumors. A purchase of Pinterest, which would have amounted to the largest deal ever for Microsoft, would also have tested the Biden administration's appetite for allowing powerful technology companies to strike deals. However, Microsoft, which mainly sells to businesses and governments rather than consumers, has avoided most of the political backlash that has made it more difficult for Facebook and Google to make big acquisitions, end quote.

Yeah, given what I just said in the previous segment, wouldn't it be ironic if somehow Microsoft, of all people, got something like a tacit exception in the current antitrust climate? This surprises me. According to internal data seen by the information, only about 11.3 million U.S. US households regularly watch NBC Universal's streaming play, Peacock. I say this is surprising, because if you had asked me six months ago, I would have said that it would be HBO Max that was the most likely one to struggle, but that Peacock stood a good chance of being a contender if we're going to have a shakeout and maybe only four big players would be left.

Obviously, it would be Netflix, Disney Plus, and Hulu. And then I would have said, probably Peacock. But now who would get the fourth slot? Well, maybe I would was wrong. Maybe Wonder Woman has put HBO Max into a contender for that fourth spot. Quote, NBCU wants to ramp up Peacock's growth, particularly among paying users, but without spending a lot of money. Its solution is to strike deals with other entertainment companies to broaden either Peacock's programming or its distribution. Last month, NBCU unveiled programming deals for Peacock with World Wrestling Entertainment and A&E. And over several months, NBCU has pitched Viacom CBS, among other companies, about offering their streaming services in a bundle with Peacock at a

discounted rate, either in the U.S. or abroad, say people familiar with the situation. All these efforts raised the prospect that NBCU could pursue a merger with another firm, such as WarnerMedia at some point. And there's reason to think that may happen. Before Entertainment Industry veteran Jeff Schell became CEO of NBCU at the start of 2020, he told colleagues at NBCU that they needed to merge with WarnerMedia to have enough scale to compete, say people with direct knowledge of the discussion. quote, we believe it is time for both AT&T and Comcast to abandon the fools gold of vertical integration of content and distribution and merge NBC Universal with Warner Media. Media analyst Rich Greenfield with Lightshed Management wrote in a report last November, end quote. See, the logical thing here would be for Hulu to absorb any streaming service also runs, right? But the problem there is that Disney controls Hulu too. So if someone is going to bulk up and join forces to, to compete with Disney and Netflix.

They're going to need to do it quickly or risk missing the window to gain user adoption. Combining HBO Max with its slate of first-run movies now and NBC Universal with its own catalog of, you know, The Office would be a compelling play, I would think, and it would reunite that show with Friends and the West Wing, which ironically are both on HBO Max for various rights-holding reasons. Because if only one-third of your members are bothering to use your product, you're probably going to face some pretty bad churn in not too long. Real quick, I continue to try to keep an eye on the whole tech stock IPO bubble, which I think we're in for sure at this point. Dating app Bumble is supposed to go public today after raising $2.15 billion in their IPO.

they ended up pricing at $43 a share up from their initial range of $37 to $39 a share. So again, investor thirst seems to be unslaked at this point. But I've been waiting all morning for the first shares to actually hit the market in order to see if the first day pop trend continues. And if you're hearing these words, then that means that I gave up waiting and had to go ahead and go in and record. Starting with the upcoming iOS 14.5, Apple is apparently going to proxy all safe browsing sessions in Safari through its own servers instead of Googles in order to

protect user data from Google. Quoting Mac rumors. Safari on iOS and iPadOS includes a built-in feature called fraudulent website warning. As Apple describes it, having the feature enabled will prompt Safari to warn users if they're visiting a suspected fishing website or, in other words, a website attempting to steal your data such as username, passwords, and other information. In order to provide this feature, Apple relies on Google's safe browsing, a database slash block list of websites crawled by Google of websites that it deems to be suspected fishing or scam sites. In practice, Google sends Safari a list of hash prefixes of URLs that it determines to be malicious or fishing, and then Safari then checks the website you're trying to visit against

the list from Google. Any match in hashed prefixes will cause Safari to request the full URL link from Google, and by using the hash prefix, Google never sees the website URL you're trying to go to. While Google doesn't know which specific URL you're trying to visit, it may collect your IP address during its interaction with Safari. Now on iPad OS and iOS 14.5, that's no longer the case. As confirmed by the head of engineering for WebKit, Apple will now proxy Google's safe browsing feature through its own servers instead of Google's as a way to, quote, limit the risk of information leak, end quote. We are working hard on the next interesting raise episode, and we'll have that to you either this weekend or next, but I did want to note this because it ties into our recent discussions of the creator economy being one of the hottest investment spaces right now. Also, from the information, sources are saying that stir money whose software helps video and audio producers, writers, and performers manage their income. Think of it as quickbooks for creators, or maybe that's a little reductive because maybe it's more about managing income from various sources.

if you've got ads coming in, you know, Patreon payments coming in, all that stuff, T-shirts, all that. Anyway, Stur Money has raised a Series A led by A16Z at a $100 million valuation, quote, The Stur funding and another previously unreported financing of a startup called Carrot show how major investors are making bets on software and services for the booming creator economy made up of tens of millions of individuals who are building businesses from YouTube, social media and apps that help them generate subscription revenue. Stur previously raised $4 million in October from a who's-who of early-stage startup

investors in Silicon Valley and crater economy boosters, including YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley, former Andresen Horowitz partner Lee Jin, long-time YouTube video publisher Casey Nystatt, and Homebrew, an investment firm whose co-founder Hunter Walk is a former YouTube executive in the latest financing Andreessen beat out other interested investors. In Andresen Horwitz's spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Sturz CEO Joseph Albanese said the company's chief technology officer Kuchal Bayetnall, a former engineer at Brex and Google, had no comment on the deal. Stur's software resembles some aspects of QuickBooks, the Intuit-owned accounting app for small businesses.

Sturz shows customers their revenue and audience growth from each of the apps that help them make a living, including YouTube, and from merchandise sales powered by Shopify. For customers who collaborate with other individual content creators on videos or podcasts, for instance, Stur allows them to set up collectives so they can split revenue more easily. Stur's software isn't broadly available yet, but the firm has given access to some undisclosed creators. The startup appears to have just a handful of employees, according to LinkedIn. While QuickBooks charges a monthly fee of about $35 for its most popular small business product, Stur money is testing other models such as taking a percentage when creators split revenue with each other.

separately, Stur may charge a subscription fee for other features. As the creator economy has taken off, startups such as Stur emerged to offer software and financial services that help artists manage their growing businesses. Carrot, a financial startup that offers artists a credit card to use for business-related expenses, is led by a former Instagram manager recently raising money in a round led by venture firm Union Square Ventures, according to a person with direct knowledge of the deal. A different person with knowledge of the round said the valuation was at least 50.

million. Karate was part of the Y Combinator startup accelerator a year ago. For Andresen, the Stur deal is reminiscent of its investment last May in Clubhouse, an app that lets people listen to live audio discussions when the app had relatively few users, but was courted by multiple investment firms including benchmark. Andresen valued Clubhouse at $100 million at the time. Millions of people have since joined the app, and Andresen recently increased its investment valuing Clubhouse at about $1 billion, end quote. So, Someone want to set a calendar thingy for seven months from now, and let's see if a 16Z announces around at a billion dollar valuation for Stir.

And finally today, this is beyond my ability to grok, but apparently the AIs are now coming for the mathematicians, kind of. This is maybe more of a man-machine symbiosis kind of thing. In other words, maybe the machines will actually help man advance math. Quoting vice. A good conjecture has something like a magnetic pool for the mind of a man. mathematician. At its best, a mathematical conjecture states something extremely profound in extremely precise and succinct way, crying out for a proof or disproof. But posing a good conjecture is difficult.

It must be deep enough to provoke curiosity and investigation, but not so obscure as to be impossible to glimpse in the first place. Many of the most famous problems in mathematics are conjectures and not solutions, such as Fermat's last theorem. Now, a group of researchers from the Technion in Israel and Google in Tel Aviv presented an automated conjecturing system that they call the Raminujan machine, named after the mathematician Srinivasa Raminujan, who developed thousands of innovative formulas in number theory with almost no formal training. The software system has already conjectured several original and important formulas for universal constants that show up in mathematics. The work was published last week in nature. As the researchers explain in the paper,

higher discipline of mathematics can be broken down into two processes, crudely speaking, conjecturing things, and proving things. Given more conjectures, there is more grist for the mill for the mathematical mind, more for mathematicians to prove and explain, end quote. It is a bit of a long read, but if you're into math, click through to read more about all of this, about continued fractional expressions, arbitrary universal constants, and automated conjectures, all of which is way beyond me since I checked out on math back when we hit Long Division in the fifth grade. That's all for today. No more 80s nostalgia rants for this week at least. I've got a whole bunch of weekend episode content that I need to record,

so I need to actually get to that so I can get it to you later.