Google employees accuse the company of making an internal tool to monitor attempts to organize meetings; Google says it's only to prevent calendar spam — - Company says it's an effort to curb calendar, meeting spam — Allegation underscores tensions between employees, leadership
Enlarge / Black ants marching along the stem of a leaf. Unlike humans, ants don't experience traffic jams, even at high densities. (credit: Bosca78/Getty Images)
Ants are notoriously much better than humans at organizing their collective traffic flow when foraging for food, but how they manage to do so isn't fully understood. Even in dense, crowded conditions, ant colonies still manage to maintain a smooth and efficient traffic flow, primarily by adjusting their behavior to adapt to changing circumstances, according to a new paper in the journal eLife.
Ants are a textbook example of collective behavior. A few ants spaced well apart behave like individual ants. But pack enough of them closely together, and they behave more like a single unit, exhibiting both solid and liquid properties. There has been a number of studies over the last decade or so involving the collective behavior of these fascinating insects.
For instance, in 2008, German scientists built a tiny ant motorway in the lab, complete with the equivalent of highway interchanges, so that ants could navigate between their nest and a sugary food source. Then the scientists monitored how the ants quickly found the shortest possible route between the two. You'd expect jams to form near interchanges, as they do on human highways. Instead, whenever a route started to clog, the ants returning to the nest blocked ants traveling in the opposite direction, forcing them to find an alternate route.
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Tesla continues to produce the Model S and Model X more for “sentimental reasons than anything else,” CEO Elon Musk said Wednesday during a call with investors, calling the electric vehicles “niche” products.
“They are really of minor importance to future,” Musk added.
Sales of Tesla Model 3 vehicles far outpace its the company’s older Model S and Model X vehicles. Tesla delivered 17,483 Model S and Model X vehicles in the third quarter, compared to 79,703 Model 3 cars. And Musk anticipates the Model Y, which has yet to be produced, could surpass Model 3 sales.
Still, while the Model S and X are more expensive and lower volume than the Model 3, the vehicles have been important to the financial health of the company for years. Tesla’s automotive gross margins have been buffeted in the past by sales of the higher-priced (and better margin per vehicle) Model S and X vehicles.
The vehicles might not be part of the company’s long-term future. But for now, Tesla is sticking with the two vehicles.
Tesla is increasing production on Model S and X lines for this quarter in response to increasing demand for the electric vehicles, CFO Zach Kirkhorn noted during the call.
As Tesla has launched, ramped and stabilized Model 3, the company is now able to focus its attention on the rest of its products, Kirkhorn said.
Tesla continues to see a strengthened order rate, which the company anticipates will be reflected in Model S and X deliveries in the fourth quarter, Kirkhorn added.
Musk did take time to rave about the Model S, particularly the newer version, which has a new “Raven” power train.
“It’s so easy to drive, it makes you feel like Superman driving that car,” he added. “And it’s incredibly safe.”
Musk then described the X as “the faberge of cars,” before adding that “it’s an art piece basically.”
Industrial IoT company PTC to acquire Onshape, maker of a SaaS product development platform for CAD, for $470M; Onshape has received over $150M in VC funding — The $470 million deal should help PTC, a major industrial IOT player, accelerate its transition to a SaaS-based business model.
Limited partners or LPs — the pension funds, the university endowments, the family offices that largely provide venture firms with their spending money — are receiving a lot of attention from venture capitalists, some of it unwanted. VCs have begun knocking down their doors with requests for fresh capital commitments so they’ll have money to invest if the market cools down.
The problem is, many of these LPs are already over-allocated. LPs traditionally invest in many asset classes, such as public equities, and they allocate a small percentage of their portfolio to venture capital. Suddenly, they’re finding they’ve forked over more than they’d intended to VCs.
There are several reasons for this situation. First, VCs are returning to them ever faster for more capital — sometimes in less than two years’ time — because they are in vesting at such a furious pace.
Compounding the problem, not all LPs have received returns from their VC investments that they can recycle into new venture capital allocations. In some cases, this capital is still tied up in startups that are raising much more money than in the past and staying private longer. “We have some large exposures to blue chip names where IPOs have been rumored to be coming for a long time already, and now it’s maybe 2021, maybe 2022,” says one endowment manager who asked not to be named. In other cases where startups have gone public, falling prices have prompted VCs to hang on to their shares instead of distribute them.
The result is that LPs are having to cut back on the number of managers they can fund, and that could mean bad news for venture capitalists and startups alike. These LPs don’t have much choice. As the LP explains it, “We have a pretty structured allocation process, and we’re really trying to be creative,” she says. One venture manager who reappeared too quickly for more money was “easy to walk away from,” says this person. “Others, we’re having to do financial backflips for them to remain strong partners.”
Either way, this LP adds, “We can’t add any new relationships right now,” meaning new venture teams in particular are out of luck. “When [VCs] shorten their fundraising cycle by nine months to a year, you can only squeeze the balloon so much.”
Backing up the truck
SoftBank’s $100 billion “Vision Fund” is one big reason LPs find themselves in their current predicament. From the moment SoftBank began waving money around several years ago, it launched a vicious cycle. According to Chris Douvos, whose investment firm, Ahoy Capital, owns stakes in such venture funds as True Ventures and First Round Capital, “When Andreessen Horowitz hit the scene a decade ago, they changed the tempo of investing and everyone got more aggressive in their dealmaking as a response. Then SoftBank entered the picture in a big way, and it was like a16z on steroids.”
In order to compete with SoftBank’s money cannon, other funds supersized their own investment vehicles, and startup valuations soared. Uber and WeWork were prime examples. Uber went public, pricing below expectations, and its shares have been falling ever since. WeWork and its unconventional S-1 filing never made it past the starting gate.
Competitors are enjoying some schadenfreude: they can’t help but delight in SoftBank’s pain. But WeWork’s slow-motion implosion comes at an uncertain moment in time. If a second massive Vision Fund doesn’t come together — and that seems more than likely at this point — it would mean a sharp drop-off in startup funding. That alone might be fine. It might even be healthy for the ecosystem. But the world is also grappling with a U.S. administration that appears increasingly unhinged. More, a recession that seemed far away as recently as early July but could be around the corner.
Collectively, these elements could change the picture dramatically for LPs. Specifically, if LPs aren’t getting enough money back from VCs and their public holdings fall in value because the markets hit the skids, their commitments to venture funds could become even larger as a percentage basis of their overall portfolio. That would create even more imbalance in their asset allocation. Which would mean even less money for new funds. Which would translate into less money for startups.
It’s a vicious cycle of another kind, in short.
Maybe it won’t happen. We aren’t there yet. But VCs of all sizes would be wise to take a lesson from their entrepreneurs and perfect their pitches. As is becoming clear, LPs can’t dole out capital at the same pace forever, especially without more money coming back to them. If VCs want to continue raising new funds, or raising funds as fast, they’d better have a very good story to tell.
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