Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 03/04 - Are Fleets On Fleek?

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 TechMeme ride home for Wednesday, March 4th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. You already know tweets, but let me introduce you to fleets.

Starting point is 00:00:43 Robin Hood explains its outages. Google Assistant can now read you webpages out loud. Netlify is an interesting raise, and why getting a big-named VC in your seed round might actually be detrimental to your startup. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Twitter is starting to test what it is calling fleets, which is a new feature that will allow users to make posts that will disappear over a short period of time.

Starting point is 00:01:12 Fleets cannot be retweeted or liked. If you post fleets, the only way you can get feedback is via direct message. Instead of showing up in your regular timeline, fleets will only be viewable if you tap on a user's avatar. Testing is beginning in Brazil only for now. But yes, even Twitter admits that this is its effort to create its own version of stories. Here's a tweet storm from Twitter's Kavon Bickpour explaining their thinking. Quote, everyday people come to Twitter to see what's happening. One of the unique things about Twitter is that what's happening is fueled by people sharing their thoughts openly through tweets.

Starting point is 00:01:51 But sharing your thoughts publicly can be intimidating. People often tell us they don't feel comfortable tweeting because tweets can be seen and replied to by anybody. Feel permanent and performative. How many likes and retweets will this get, etc? He then went on to explain fleets and how they work, quoting again from later in the thread. I know what you're thinking. This sounds a lot like stories. Yes, there are many similarities with the stories format that will feel familiar to people. There are also a few intentional differences to make the experience more focused on sharing and seeing people's thoughts. We're hoping that fleets can help people share the fleeting thoughts that they would have been unlikely to tweet.

Starting point is 00:02:31 This is a substantial change to Twitter, so we're excited. to learn by testing it, starting with the rollout today in Brazil, and seeing how our customers use it, end quote. Robin Hood says that the recent outages on its platform and app were caused by an unprecedented load on its system. Quoting the next web, rumors had circulated that an apparent failure to code for the advent of leap years in the Robin Hood app was the cause of the outage. An unofficial Robin Hood Twitter account refuted those claims, instead blaming unprecedented load spurred on by, quote, highly volatile and historic market conditions and record volume

Starting point is 00:03:12 and record account signups. We now understand the cause of the outage with stress on our infrastructure, which struggled with unprecedented load, said Robin Hood in a blog post. That, in turn, led to a thundering herd effect, triggering a failure of our DNS system, end quote. Yesterday's outage on Robin Hood went from 6.30 a.m. Pacific to 9 a.m. Pacific, quoting TechCrunch. The $912 million-funded FinTech giant will provide compensation to all customers of its Robin Hood Gold premium subscription for borrowing money to trade plus access to Morning Star Research Reports, NASDAQ data, and bigger instant deposits.

Starting point is 00:03:50 It's offering them three months of service, end quote. Today in coronavirus news, Google has basically canceled their IO developers conference. I say basically because they're just not going to hold any in-person. events, but we expect them instead to offer a series of online events, quoting 9 to 5 Google. Those that purchase tickets will be fully refunded by March 13th, while registered guests this year, will automatically be able to purchase I.O. 2021 passes via Twitter. Looking forward, the company is going to, quote, explore other ways to evolve Google I.O. to best connect with our developer community, end quote. At this time, Google does not look to be committing to the original May 12th through May 14th timeframe.

Starting point is 00:04:38 Meanwhile, Google will be providing $1 million to local Mountain View organizations to help with the lack of IO, and it's more than 7,000 attendees. This is specifically aimed to help to raise awareness about the coronavirus, as well as aiding small businesses, increasing STEM education, and supporting organizations working with unhoused neighbors, end quote. As just mentioned, specifics of what we would expect would be now online sessions offered for IO and even keynotes. They have not been shared yet, though basically Google's statement leaves that open-ended. Next, Amazon has emailed their staff that an employee at its Seattle headquarters has tested positive for COVID-19 and that the affected employee is currently in quarantine, quoting Geekwire. The employee went home sick on Tuesday, February 25th, and later tested positive for COVID-19. Amazon notified employees who came into close contact with the individual.

Starting point is 00:05:33 The employee is based out of Amazon's Brazil. building at 409th Avenue north near downtown Seattle, end quote. And everybody is getting serious about travel, and what I have learned is being termed as social distancing. Social distancing, as I understand it, is just telling people to stay home.

Starting point is 00:05:52 Apple is restricting employee travel to Italy and South Korea, while Twitter has, quote, strongly encouraged. All of its more than 4,800 employees to work from home, if possible. That's the first major U.S. company to take this step. And finally, for the COVID-19 stuff, Tesla says it has installed older chips in some new

Starting point is 00:06:13 Model 3 cars sold in China because of supply shortages caused by the coronavirus. But Tesla says it will upgrade those chips for free when it can, quoting the BBC. The chip in question is used by the car's autopilot system. Owners of new Model 3 vehicles produced in China expected to find the 3.0 processor in their cars, but found the 2.5 version instead. The 3.0 chip has been included in new Tesla cars since April last year. It processes images 21 times faster than the 2.5 version, end quote. Google Assistant can now be asked to read web pages or Android app content out loud, a feature that is launching with support for 42 different languages, quoting Venture Beat. You can trigger the feature by simply saying, hey, you know, read,

Starting point is 00:07:05 it or hey, read this page. If you land on a web page in a language you don't understand, Google Assistant is also able to read and translate 42 languages into your preferred language. Both reading and translation work on Android phones version 5 and above. Google Assistant reading text speaks with a different voice than the average Google Assistant. Members of the Google assistant team said reading in a more natural voice is important for long form content, end quote. Somehow I miss this, but apparently this feature was first introduced in preview at CES back in January. The feature is focusing on articles and websites for now, but Google says it may expand to reading emails and other things in the future. Legal Tech startup Atrium is shutting down and laying off its more than 100 employees and returning some of the $75.5 million it raised to investors, which include Andresen Horowitz.

Starting point is 00:08:06 founder and CEO Justin Kahn told TechCrunch that the reason for the shutdown was that Atrium simply didn't find a way to be more efficient than traditional law firms. If you look at our original business model with the verticalized law firm, a lot of these companies that have this kind of full stack model are not going to survive, can explain. A lot of these companies, Atrium included, did not figure out how to make a dent in operational efficiency, end quote. Founded in 2017, Atrium built software for stuff. startups to navigate fundraising, hiring, acquisition deals, and collaboration with their legal team.

Starting point is 00:08:41 Atrium also offered in-house lawyers that could provide counsel and best practices in these matters. The idea was that the collaboration software would make its lawyers more efficient than traditional law firms so they could get work done faster, translating into savings for clients and Atrium. But keeping a large squad of lawyers on staff proved costly. Atrium priced packages of its software and legal assistance under subscriptions, with momentous deals like acquisitions incurring add-on fees. The model relied less on milking clients with steep hourly rates, measured down to the six-minute increment like most law firms,

Starting point is 00:09:14 yet eliminating the busy work for lawyers through its software didn't materialize into bountiful profits, end quote. By the way, Khan was previously the founder of Justin TV, which became Twitch and then was sold to Amazon for $970 million. Interesting raise for developers, I guess. Netlify, which has built a cloud-based platform for automating web development projects, has raised a $53 million Series C led by EQT Ventures. Quoting Silicon Angle.

Starting point is 00:09:51 Traditionally building a site required developers to set up production servers, a test server to validate code updates, a deployment pipeline for publishing those code updates to the website, and content delivery networks. Netlify has rolled up all of these features into a single-plice platform that promises to speed up programmers' workflow considerably. One of Netlify's banner features is that it directly integrates with code hosting services such as GitHub.

Starting point is 00:10:17 Developers can connect the startup's platform to the repository in which they host a project's code files and, with a few commands, automatically turn those files into a functioning site. Netlify started out in 2015 with a focus on relatively simple static websites, but have since expanded its target market. The startup now has a user base of 800,000 developers, along with a... growing list of enterprise customers that includes the likes of Google, Facebook, Citrix, and Unilever. Netlify claims to have more than tripled revenue over the past 12 months, thanks to a threefold jump in the number of paying customers using its platform, end quote.

Starting point is 00:10:51 Netlify also claims 8% of the world's internet users visit at least one website powered by Netlify every month. This might be surprising, but data from Angelist shows that having a top 10 or big name VC investor in your seed round could have a negative effect on your startup's chances to raise a follow-on round, quoting TechCrunch. One of the big ongoing debates in VC and founder circles concerns whether to accept money from top-tier, later stage venture capitalists during a seed round. Even as their funds reach monstrous sizes, more and more top funds are investing in the earliest stages of a startup's life, intensifying the question for founders of so-called signaling risk.

Starting point is 00:11:36 If a later stage investor in your seed round doesn't actually do your later stage rounds, does that negatively signal to other potential investors that they should walk away from your company? The short summary of the data is that in the 2015 and 2016 cohorts, having a top 10 VC investor in your seed round appeared to improve a startup's chances to raise a follow-on equity round, particularly in 2016. However, that benefit seemed to reverse itself in the 2017 cohort and the negative effect was magnified in the 2018 cohort. The typical caveat mTOR applies.

Starting point is 00:12:12 Correlation is not causation. That said, we know signaling is a real mechanism for VCs to make an investment decision, so there is at least some form of causal path here in the data, end quote. Let's close out today with a grab bag of streaming wars stories. Quibi says it has closed a second round of financing worth $750 million. That includes $400 million raised at the end of 2019. This means that Quibi has raised a total of $1.75 billion. If you recall the episodes I did from CES,

Starting point is 00:12:53 Quibi is that short-form video startup, QuickBites from Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, that I was skeptical of originally, then the keynote at CES briefly impressed me, but then I got skeptical of all over again. but someone clearly sees something in Quibi, something to the tune of another $750 million on top of the original billion dollars could be raised. And that really is something considering I don't think anyone else understands why QuickBite

Starting point is 00:13:22 videos is something that people need. Next, you might recall that Sony made a decision to shut down their PlayStation View video streaming service while Hulu has stepped into the breach, making its live TV service available to PlayStation 4 users, quoting the verge. Hulu Plus Live TV, as it's called, is a $54.99 a month bundle that includes live television broadcast from a number of channels in addition to an ad-free standard Hulu subscription. You can also pay extra for additional channel options. Hulu with Live TV joins YouTube TV, the Google-owned video site's own pay TV offering,

Starting point is 00:14:00 as the only other option for live programming on Sony consoles right now. For years, Sony didn't allow certain streaming services onto its game consoles because it operated its own competing View service. But last fall, Sony announced it would be exiting the market and shutting down View in January 2020, primarily due to the steep licensing costs. Pay TV providers have to pay the channel owners to stay competitive and retain those channels, end quote. And sources are telling Digidae that Roku has held talks with media and entertainment companies about producing original shows for its ad-supported Roku channel. Quote,

Starting point is 00:14:34 These conversations appear to be exploratory. Some producers who have discussed original programming with Roku have left these meetings without a clear idea of what Roku's original programming plans are. Roku has not detailed in meetings with media and entertainment companies. What types of programming the company would be interested in or how much it would be willing to pay for shows, the people said. We aren't creating any original shows and don't have any plans to do so, a Roku spokesperson said in an email without denying the talks. Roku could be using the conversations with producers as due diligence while whether or not to commit to spend money on original programming.

Starting point is 00:15:08 Original programming can be a big investment with no guarantee of paying off. If you're spending under a billion dollars on originals, then you're not really in it, said one entertainment executive, who has not discussed original programming with Roku, end quote. That's all for today. Be excellent to yourselves and each other. Wash your hands. Don't touch your face so much. Maybe call your mom. She misses you. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 03/04 - Are Fleets On Fleek?

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