Monday, February 3, 2020
Safest place to hide a dead body is the second page of Google search results, says Elon Musk
Electronics manufacturing set to get ₹45k-crore boost
Import duty hike to drive local manufacturing capacity: Handset makers
Asana says it has confidentially filed to go public via a direct listing; the startup has raised about $213M to date and was last valued at ~$1.5B in 2018 (Lucas Matney/TechCrunch)
Asana says it has confidentially filed to go public via a direct listing; the startup has raised about $213M to date and was last valued at ~$1.5B in 2018 — Workplace productivity toolmaker Asana announced late Monday that they have confidentially filed their S-1 and said in a statement …
Behind Amazon’s HQ2 fiasco: Jeff Bezos was jealous of Elon Musk
Asana files to go public via direct listing
Workplace productivity toolmaker Asana announced late Monday that they have confidentially filed their S-1 and said in a statement that they plan to enter the public markets via a direct listing.
Direct listings enable a company to go public without issuing new shares, instead allowing existing shareholders to sell shares on the chosen exchange. Direct listings have been an awfully hot topic as of late, seen as a means of reducing the friction and expenses of going public. Slack debuted publicly via a direct listing in 2019 and Spotify did the same the year before. Airbnb has also reportedly expressed interest in a direct listing.
Asana, co-founded by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein, builds productivity software that allows teams to assign tasks, track progress and set deadlines for projects.
Direct listings have been lauded by many in Silicon Valley as a way to strip the steep bank underwriting fees, lengthy roadshows, and some regulatory hoops from the process. Last year, venture capitalist Bill Gurley hosted a one-day conference devoted to preaching the gospel of direct listings. The New York Stock Exchange filed paperwork in November to the SEC, hoping to expand direct listings and allow companies pursuing them to raise new capital during the process. The proposal was rejected weeks later, though the NYSE seems determined to double down on efforts to evolve the direct listing process.
Asana is interestingly a much smaller company than Slack or Spotify and has raised much less capital. The startup has raised about $213 million according to Crunchbase. In late 2018, Asana raised a $50 million Series E at a $1.5 billion valuation. Debuting via a public listing suggests that the company may be satisfied with the cash it has on hand.
Twitter says it has suspended "a large network of fake accounts" and many others for abusing an API feature that let them match phone numbers to usernames (Devin Coldewey/TechCrunch)
Twitter says it has suspended “a large network of fake accounts” and many others for abusing an API feature that let them match phone numbers to usernames — Twitter announced today that over the holidays it identified and shut down “a large network of fake accounts,” …
UK's Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation recommends that the UK regulates how tech platforms use AI in targeting users (Ryan Browne/CNBC)
UK's Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation recommends that the UK regulates how tech platforms use AI in targeting users — - The U.K.'s AI advisor has called for regulation on how social media firms target users with posts, videos and ads. — It also wants the government to force tech firms …
New ransomware doesn’t just encrypt data. It also meddles with critical infrastructure
Enlarge (credit: An Energy Company / Flickr)
Over the past five years, ransomware has emerged as a vexing menace that has shut down factories, hospitals, and local municipalities and school districts around the world. In recent months, researchers have caught ransomware doing something that's potentially more sinister: intentionally tampering with industrial control systems that dams, electric grids, and gas refineries rely on to keep equipment running safely.
A ransomware strain discovered last month and dubbed Ekans contains the usual routines for disabling data backups and mass-encrypting files on infected systems. But researchers at security firm Dragos found something else that has the potential to be more disruptive: code that actively seeks out and forcibly stops applications used in industrial control systems. Before starting file-encryption operations, the ransomware kills processes listed by process name in a hard-coded list within the encoded strings of the malware.
In all, Ekans kills 64 processes, including those spawned by human-machine interfaces from Honeywell, the Proficy Historian from General Electric, and licensing servers from GE Fanuc. The same 64 processes, it turns out, are targeted in a version of the MegaCortex ransomware. That version first came to light in August.
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Josh Kopelman on how to start and run an early-stage fund in a hypercompetitive market
Last week at the Upfront Summit in Pasadena, there was no shortage of glitz, from the venue (the Rose Bowl) to the catering (Wolfgang Puck) to the guest list (Ice Cube, Paris Hilton and John Legend, to name just a few). Still, there were also plenty of sessions that provided the investors and founders in the audience practical advice, including, notably, a session led by Upfront co-founder Mark Suster, who interviewed his longtime peer Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital.
The topic was how to raise a debut venture fund — as well as keep the whole operation afloat over time. The bottom line, suggested Kopelman, is that it’s a lot harder than it looks. Indeed, according to other investors at the event with whom we chatted, the seed and early-stage funding environment has grown especially brutal. As more debut funds have sprung up on the scene, more established firms have begun throwing elbows.
Part of Kopelman’s chat with Suster made its way around the Silicon Valley last week, when Axios’s business editor, Dan Primack, tweeted a part of the conversation about First Round’s accelerated deal-making pace. We were also in the audience and think other aspects of the conversation worth flagging, too, including how to establish a brand, how to think about valuations when they’re soaring out of control and how to approach institutional limited partners (or LPs) when trying to raise a fund.
Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital: we can look at every company we’ve ever funded, and learned that the time from first email/contact to term sheet has shrunk from 90 days in 2004 to just 9 today.
— Dan Primack (@danprimack) January 29, 2020
Suster first began by talking about the crowded market, asking Kopelman how First Round has adapted to the resultant pace of dealmaking.
The biggest thing you mentioned is that something that we actually measure is time for decisioning. We’re pretty data driven, so we use Salesforce, [and] we can go back and look at every single company we funded since 2004: the date of that first email with a founder, the date we signed the term sheet. And it’s fascinating. You just see sort of what was a 90-day process shrink to an average of nine.
So that just creates real challenges in terms of your ability to make high-quality and high-confidence decisions. We now have partner meetings twice a week, rather than once a week, because we want to be able to make sure that we’re communicating and talking with our partners in order to be able to, to be able to move quickly enough.
Also, just the proliferation of funds has made brands far more important. You know, when we started, there were just a handful of funds [including those of] Ron Conway, Mike Maples, Jeff Clavier. There were, like, six funds. So imagine if you walked into a Foot Locker, and there were six sneakers on the wall. That was it. You could just try every one to see what fits, which feels the best. [Now imagine] you walk into a Foot Locker, and there are a thousand sneakers on the wall. You’re not going to try all of them. You’re going to have to use proxies. You’re going to have to say, ‘I want the Nike.’ ‘I want the Adidas.’ You’re going to [pick out something] based on brand and that brand is based on persistency, so there are benefits. There are benefits to having been associated with [particular] athletes, in the sneaker metaphor.
And so it’s helped change a little bit the way we [do things] and led us to create things, like the First Round Review; it’s why our [annual] holiday video was so important to us in the first 10 years.
One million healthcare records leaked
Govt to notify social media cos in two weeks about IT intermediary guidelines
Watch experts from Boston Dynamics, Built, Dusty and Toggle discuss robotic construction at TC Sessions: Robotics
After recently doing a survey of the top robotics investment rounds, it became pretty clear: construction is going to be huge for this industry. Global construction is expected to hit $13 trillion by 2022 (with China alone hitting that number in 2030), and there are plenty of dull, dirty and dangerous jobs that seem well positioned for potential automation.
With that in mind, we’ve put together a fantastic — and packed — panel set to examine how robotics, AI and automation are poised to transform the industry. There’s a wide range of potential opportunities for the right startup, from producing construction materials to surveying sites. The latter, in particular, could amount to a big market for a company that can help correct mistakes before they become too costly.
Today we’re excited to announce that Boston Dynamics’ Construction Technologist Brian Ringley will be joining an already packed panel that includes Built Robotics’ Noah Campbell-Ready, Tessa Lau of Dusty Robotics and Toggle’s Daniel Blank at TC Sessions: Robotics+AI on March 3.
A longtime robotics pioneer, Boston Dynamics is a recent entrant into the construction space. The company’s now commercially available Spot robot is currently being piloted at construction sites. With LIDAR and other imaging technologies mounted on its back, the robot is able to give a more complete picture of in-progress construction sites.
Save $50 when you book your tickets today as prices go up at the door. We still have a small handful of Startup Exhibitor Packages available that can be booked here. Each package comes with 4 tickets so you can divide and conquer the show to increase your network.
Docs: Israeli AI chip startup Hailo is pursuing an urgent IPO via a SPAC merger at a valuation of less than $500M; it was last valued at $1.2B in 2024 (Meir Orbach/CTech)
Meir Orbach / CTech : Docs: Israeli AI chip startup Hailo is pursuing an urgent IPO via a SPAC merger at a valuation of less than $500M; ...
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The first project we remember working on together was drawing scenes from the picture books that our mom brought with her when she immigrate...
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Sohee Kim / Bloomberg : South Korean authorities are investigating a data leak at e-commerce giant Coupang that exposed ~33.7M accounts; ...
