 |  | | Saturday, February 08, 2020 • By Walter Thompson | |
| | | My favorite quote from a Extra Crunch story in the last week comes from Chris Kemp, CEO of space startup Astra: “Nothing about my business plan requires this rocket to work, because if it did, I'd be back worried about funding and worried about what would they say about the company in TechCrunch. And I'm just not.” It’s rare to see that sort of candor from a founder, but our writers are skilled at eliciting authentic answers. This week, we also covered the news that labor unions are slowly making inroads with tech workers, interviewed 18 VCs about where they’re seeing opportunities in open source and dev tools and offered in-depth analysis of the Casper and One Medical IPOs, among other stories. Thanks very much for reading, and have an excellent weekend. Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, Extra Crunch Read more | | | |
| |  Image Credits: Busakorn Pongparnit / Getty Images | | Microsoft’s $40M AI for Good program is using data science to attack underfunded and poorly-understood health problems like SIDS, tuberculosis and leprosy, challenges that are far outside the company’s historical mission. TechCrunch reporter Devin Coldewey interviewed John Kahan, the project’s chief data analytics officer and AI lead, to find out how he decides “what constitutes a worthwhile investment of resources.” Read more | | | |
| |  Image Credits: Yuichiro Chino / Getty Images | | To learn more about opportunities investors are finding in open-source software, we spoke to 18 VCs at firms that fund early- and growth-stage startups. Their responses were so comprehensive and thoughtful, we divided the article into two parts. Read more | | | |
| |  Image Credits: zokara / Getty Images | | Ten leading open-source VC discuss the opportunities they’re seeing open source and dev tools in the conclusion to our latest investor survey. Read more | | | |
| |  Image Credits: Bloomberg / Getty Images | | "Ten billion dollars is the new mark for IaaS players, effectively the unicorn rating for them. And revenue/size matter, as the cloud business is an economies of scale business," Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research, told TechCrunch. With a run rate of $10.44 billion, Google Cloud is still behind rivals AWS and Microsoft, but it’s “picking up some much-needed steam,” writes reporter Ron Miller. Read more | | | |
| |  Image Credits: VCG / Getty Images | | Apple’s wearables division is comparable in size to a Fortune 500 company, according to CEO Tim Cook. To better understand the size of the market — and the race for hardware manufacturers hoping to lay claim to our wrists and ears — Brian Heater looked at the numbers. Read more | | | |
| |  | | With the San Francisco skyline in the background, space startup Astra has quietly built a rocket factory where perfection is not the goal, a policy that sets it far apart from the industry’s giants. Astra’s next launch is just one rung on a ladder, says CEO Chris Kemp. “Nothing about my business plan requires this rocket to work, because if it did, I'd be back worried about funding and worried about what would they say about the company in TechCrunch. And I'm just not.” Read more | | | |
| |  Image Credits: Thomas Barwick / Getty Images | | Will we see more billion-dollar companies led by female founders in the 2020s? Is a female investor more likely to invest in a female entrepreneur? Guest poster Claire Diaz-Ortiz says Latin America has taken the global lead when it comes to funding female entrepreneurs and the data backs her up. Read more | | | |
| |  Image Credits: Arthur Debat / Getty Images | | Ganes Kesari, co-founder and head of analytics at Gramener, has plenty of experience when it comes to building data science teams — which is why he’s uniquely qualified to offer advice about using AI ethically. In this post, he offers multiple examples of bias that emerged from AI algorithms, along with actionable advice for weeding it out. Read more | | | |
| |  Image Credits: Chicago Tribune / Getty Images | | For decades, results from the Iowa Democratic presidential caucus were tabulated by hand, but after organizers hurriedly pivoted to using an app, disaster ensued. To get a sense of what went wrong, staff reporters Brian Heater, Jonathan Shieber, Zack Whittaker, Devin Coldewey and Ingrid Lunden discussed the issue informally. Read more | | | |
| |  Image Credits: retrorocket / Getty Images | | Fintech founders have a steeper hill to climb than other entrepreneurs — if they fail to get fundamentals like privacy, security and technical architecture right, their sales process can break down. Even worse; they’ll attract negative attention from regulators. This guest post offers an overview of how to prepare your fintech startup for success, including best practices for auditing, insurance and other baseline competencies. First question: who’s your CISO? Read more | | | |
| |  Image Credits: Instacart | | Labor unions have played a major role in shaping American life, but their impact has waned in recent years. About 20% of all U.S. workers were union members in 1983, but today, that number has fallen to 10.3%. But in the last few months, workers at Instacart and Spin have organized and joined unions. As a result, more companies are now developing best practices and figuring the best way to move forward with their newly-represented workers. Read more | | | |
| |  Image Credits: Himanshu Bhatt / NurPhoto / Getty Images | | This week, Uber pledged to generate profits in Q4 2020, “earlier than it or investors previously anticipated,” reports Alex Wilhelm. He unpacks the company’s “profitability promise” by analyzing its Q4 2019 results, cash burn and profit definitions to see if “the halo effect from the good news could prove a boon to other on-demand companies.” Read more | | | |
| |  Image Credits: hanibaram / Getty Images | | The first notable VC-backed IPOs of 2020 — Casper and One Medical — are now in the rear-view mirror. Each IPO trumpeted unprofitable tech-enabled startups with sub-30% growth and gross margins under 50%, but what lessons do they offer for other unicorn debuts in the coming months? Read more | | | |
| |  | | “There is no shortage of public policy debates surrounding technology,” says Julie Samuels, founding executive director of Tech:NYC. In an interview with TechCrunch, one of New York’s most prominent tech advocates discussed several hot-button issues, including the controversy over Amazon’s canceled plans for a second headquarters and the challenge of representing the interests of tech titans along with scrappy startups. Read more | | | |
| |  | | Sarah Perez gathers top news from the app world, including the debacle over Iowa’s caucus, the new “CarKey” feature recently discovered in iOS and the latest stats about dating app usage (it’s on the rise), plus much more. Read more | | | |
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