Author: Megan Rose Dickey

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Dockless bikes, except for JUMP’s, are still on hold in SF

In light of Lyft filing a lawsuit against the city of San Francisco regarding dockless, the city is holding off on its permitting process for additional dockless bike providers at least until later this week. Although Uber-owned JUMP’s pilot was set to expire today, it is now extended until 10 days after the court’s order, SFMTA spokesperson Benjamin Barnett told TechCrunch.

In June, Lyft sued the city, claiming San Francisco was in violation of its 10-year contract with Lyft that would give the company exclusive rights to operate bike-share programs. The lawsuit was in light of SF announcing it would take applications for operators seeking permits to deploy additional stationless bikes.

San Francisco, however, said the contract does not apply to dockless bike-share, but only station-based bike-share. In its lawsuit, Lyft is seeking a preliminary injunction or temporary restraining order to prevent the city from issuing permits to operators for stationless bike-share rentals.

“We opened up the stationless e-bikes permit process, but legal action by Lyft/Motivate has put that process on the hold,” Barnett said.

The court order could happen as early as July 11 and as late as October 11, Barnett said. Additionally, the SFMTA is not able to issue permits until at least five days after the order.

I’ve reached out to Lyft and will update this story if I hear back. Lyft previously told TechCrunch it did try to avoid litigation, but that the SFMTA refused to participate in its dispute process.

“We are eager to continue investing in the regional bikeshare system with the MTC and San Francisco,” a Lyft spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch back in June. “We need San Francisco to honor its contractual commitments to this regional program — not change the rules in the middle of the game. We are eager to quickly resolve this, so that we can deliver on our plans to bring bikes to every neighborhood in San Francisco.”

Lyft deploys its pink-wheeled bikes and rebrands Ford GoBike as Bay Wheels

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Glitch is bringing remix culture back to the web with a $30 million Series A round

Building apps and tools on the web shouldn’t just be for the technically inclined. In the early days of the web, it was easy to make your MySpace account, for example, unique to your personal aesthetic. Glitch is doing that for the modern era.

Glitch, formerly known as Fog Greek Software, is an online community where people can upload projects and enable others to remix them. Dash likens coding on Glitch to working together inside Google Docs.

“The biggest thing I see is the creative impulse for recreating the web never went away,” Glitch CEO Anil Dash told TechCrunch. “There was a latent desire, so we didn’t need to do much.”

Glitch started inside Fog Greek Software as Gomix, which similarly aimed to democratize app building. In March 2017, Gomix became Glitch and has since ballooned into a community that has created more than 2.6 million remixed apps. These apps range from tools to tidying up your Twitter timeline to randomizing who is forced to take notes or do other tasks during the meeting to creating animations using CSS, and much more.

Screen Shot 2019 07 08 at 12.24.39 PM

This 2.6 million-plus remixed apps milestone is notable, Dash said, because Glitch crossed 1 million apps just one year ago. It shows that “people are building stuff all day, every day.”

Hitting this milestone is partly why Glitch waited to announce its $30 million Series A round from Tiger Global, Dash said. The round — the first-ever institutional investment for the 19-year-old company — closed in November 2018, but Dash said he wanted to be able to show people that the company did what it said it would do: grow the team, which has doubled in size in the last year, and grow the community.

“We wanted to show people that you can judge us by what we did over the last year,” Dash said. “If anything, we have only gotten more outspoken and thoughtful about how we grow.”

As Glitch has grown the team, Dash says the company has been pushing hard to set the bar around diversity and inclusion, as well as tech ethics.

On the D&I side, 47% of the company identifies as cisgender women, 40% identify as cisgender men, 9% identify as non-binary/gender non-conforming/questioning and 4% did not disclose. On the race and ethnicity front, the company is 65% white, 7% Asian, 11% black, 4% Latinx, 11% two or more races and 2% did not disclose. Meanwhile, 29% of the company identifies as queer and 11% of people reported having a disability. These numbers are pretty good.

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“[Diverse representation] is not impossible,” Dash said. “It’s not science fiction. It’s not this thing that exceeds your grasp, and you can do it while going through massive growth in the community and on the team.”

On the ethics side, Dash says the company thinks deeply about privacy and ensuring school kids, for example, never have to log in in order to use it. While Glitch is free to the masses, it does charge companies who are looking to reach developers, like Slack and Google. Google, however, has been under heavy scrutiny as of late for a variety of reasons pertaining to ethics. Dash, himself, has been an outspoken critic of Google.

“We talk about it a lot internally,” Dash said. “On one level, there’s the very pragmatic conversation of how do you be in it but not of it. The filter we’ve used is are we enabling what our community seriously wants to create.”

Glitch specifically works with the team at Google focused on the open web, open frameworks and web standards. But as Glitch moves toward products like Tensor Flow, an open source artificial intelligence library, the company makes sure every example includes education around responsible use of technologies, Dash said. Ultimately, it’s hard to completely discount Google from the experience because of how core its technologies have become.

“You can’t be credibly showing people how to make tools for their work or learning to code and not show them some of Google’s technologies,” Dash said. “For better or worse, that’s the web we live on. I think everyone engages with that on a real authentic level…The hard part is how do you strike the balance of being as ethical as you want to be while still existing in the ecosystem we’re in. We’re going to be a for-profit capitalist company until the revolution comes. But within that framework, can we be something that proves all the things people say about recruiting, business models, diversity — that those constraints they imagine are not true.”

The future of diversity and inclusion in tech

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Quip launches dental insurance alternative in NYC

Quip, maker of electric toothbrushes, is making use of its most recent acquisition to launch a dental insurance alternative to customers in New York City this summer. Called Quip Care, the service operates on the back of Afora, a dental insurance alternative startup Quip acquired last May.

With Quip Care, the goal is to modernize the dental care experience, Quip CEO Simon Enever told TechCrunch.

“People are used to being able to pick up their phone to book, pay for and track every aspect of their daily life,” Enever said. “We believe that seamlessness is something we can bring to dentistry.”

Additionally, the plan is to make prices more transparent so that people know exactly what they’ll pay before the treatment. There are two services as part of this launch: Quipcare and Quipcare+.

Basic Quipcare uses a pay-as-you-go model that enables you to find in-Quip network dentists, see pre-negotiated rates for non-preventative care upfront, pay for the care, accrue reward points and view dental records. Quip says Quipcare patients can expect prices of 30-40% less than the average dental care in their area. Enever said Quipcare can be an option for people without insurance or those with insurance who have already hit their annual maximum.

Quipcare+, on the other hand, is a preventative care plan that costs $25 per month. Quipcare+ includes two preventative check-ups annually as well as x-rays. This plan is more so geared toward people without dental insurance, though, Quipcare+ isn’t necessarily cheaper.

In San Francisco, I pay about $7 per month for dental insurance via my employer. But even if I didn’t go through my insurer, Covered California says I could get a comparable plan with covered preventive check-ups for $16.06 per month. What you’re essentially paying extra for are transparent pricing and the booking platform. Quipcare+ is similar to One Medical in that what you’re mostly paying for is convenience. One Medical is by no means cheaper than having regular insurance but the convenience they offer via app-based, same-day appointments and a plethora of locations can’t be beaten.

Quipcare is rolling out this summer in New York and plans to roll out more broadly next year. Thanks to the Afora acquisition, Quip already has hundreds of providers on board for Quipcare. And before launching Quipcare, Quip already had 40,000 providers on its Dental Connect platform.

“The key here is working with providers who are committed to making the finding, booking, paying experience as good as possible,” Enever said.

Quip began as a subscription-based electric toothbrush service that replaces toothpaste and brush heads, partly because you’re apparently supposed to change your toothbrush every three months. But Enever has said for years that Quip’s mission has always been to provide an end-to-end solution the makes preventative care simpler. Quipcare is just that.

To date, Quip has raised more than $60 million in funding from Sherpa Capital, TriplePoint Capital, NFP Ventures and others.

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In-depth with Freada Kapor Klein

It was more than 10 years ago when Freada Kapor Klein published her book “Giving Notice” about hidden biases. Fast forward to today, and it’s sometimes hard to say that anything has changed.

Kapor Klein, a long-time advocate for diversity, equity and inclusion in the tech industry, is the co-founding partner at Kapor Capital and co-founder of Project Include . TechCrunch had the privilege of chatting with her about diversity and inclusion over the last several years.

“I would characterize where we are now is a leap forward over the last ten years and several steps sideways and a few steps backwards,” Kapor Klein says. “And so I think it’s a very noisy time to be looking at D&I. Because any point you can make in a positive direction, there’s a countervailing negative. And similarly, any time you can raise a criticism, somebody can point to something hopeful. So, we’re still in the middle of it — I hope — although I worry about diversity fatigue, which people are talking about and writing about these days.”

What’s clear is that a comprehensive approach is needed, and in order for that to be successful, there needs to be unequivocal commitment from the top.

We also discuss the rebound effect for harassers, why heads don’t roll when companies don’t fulfill their diversity goals and where there’s hope in the push for more diversity, inclusion and equity in tech.

Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

MRD: I wanted to chat with you specifically, just because you’ve been working on this issue for more than a decade at this point. And I figured you would have some good perspective to add. So far, I’ve chatted with a handful of people and my plan is to try to see what the common themes and then go from there.

Freada Kapor Klein: Are there some, some emerging hypotheses or some emerging consensus or too early to tell?

MRD: So far, I’ve had some conversations that have centered around the heads of diversity and inclusion. And while the idea of them is great, often times, they’re not truly empowered within these companies. Looking at Google as an example, and some of the turnover they’ve seen throughout that role.

Also, I’m looking at how one of the changes has been that it’s become more acceptable to be vocal about this issue and speak out against it. But that doesn’t always translate into real work and actions, and progress being made.

And then also, of course, there are more worker-led initiatives, also using Google as an example. But then what may be the next step actually needs to be like, okay, well, you’re speaking out, you’re walking out, but now maybe it’s actually a matter of leaving these companies because the workers are the most important part of these companies. But it’s not always an option for some people who don’t come from wealth and really need these jobs. Those are kind of the high-level takeaways so far.

Freada Kapor Klein: That’s interesting, but maybe there is a call to action for those who are — I once long ago heard the term post economic.  And so maybe there is a call to action for those who are going to be the beneficiaries of the 2019 IPOs and who are in a position to vote with their feet.

MRD: Yeah, that’s a good point.

Freada Kapor Klein: So, great. Where would you like to start?

MRD: Looking back over the last ten years of your work in Silicon Valley across diversity and inclusion, what gives you hope that we’re moving in the right direction? Or, do you think we’re moving in the right direction?

Freada Kapor Klein: I would characterize where we are now is a leap forward over the last ten years and several steps sideways and a few steps backwards. And so I think it’s a very noisy time to be looking at D&I. Because any point you can make in a positive direction, there’s a countervailing negative. And similarly, any time you can raise a criticism, somebody can point to something hopeful. So, we’re still in the middle of it — I hope — although I worry about diversity fatigue, which people are talking about and writing about these days.

But I do remain hopeful for very specific reasons. And one of those is quite simply changing demographics in the US. The march of demographics is unstoppable. And we know the K 12 school-age population in the US, which has been majority kids of color for five years now. And so that is the future workforce. Changing demographics is certainly one cause for hope. And critical mass, which has been a concept around a long time in social science, has some real legitimacy.

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Uber brings bikes and scooters, including Lime’s, to the forefront

Uber is taking another step to more fully integrate micromobility into its core services. Today, Uber is now showing JUMP bikes, scooters and Lime scooters in the main map you see when you first open up the Uber app in Atlanta, Ga. and San Diego, Calif.

1 1This is the first time Uber has so prominently displayed a third party’s services within its own app. Uber has offered apps through its partner Lime for a few months now, but this is the first time it’s so prominently displayed. Additionally, Lime has added Uber branding to its scooters in these cities. This comes about one year after Uber and Lime officially partnered together.

“The hope is that people are aware of all the options they have and they can choose the best option for them,” Uber Head of New Mobility Platform Billy Guernier told TechCrunch.

With new mobility offerings displayed more prominently, Guernier expects to see some of the usage shift from cars to bikes and scooters. When Uber added JUMP bikes to the app in San Francisco, for example, Guernier said the company saw “real movement from the rides business to the new mobility business.”

Down the road, the plan is to roll out this feature more broadly but there’s no timeline on when that will be.

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Facebook civil rights audit says white supremacy policy is ‘too narrow’

Facebook’s second progress report pertaining to the civil rights audit conducted by former ACLU Washington Director Laura Murphy is here. Over the last six months, Facebook has made changes around enforcing against hate, fighting discrimination in ads and protecting against misinformation and suppression in the upcoming U.S. presidential election and 2020 Census, according to the progress report.

While Facebook has made changes in some of these areas — Facebook banned white supremacy in March — auditors say Facebook’s policy is still “too narrow.” That’s because it solely prohibits explicit praise, support or representation of the terms “white nationalism” or “white separatism,” but does not technically prohibit references to those terms and ideologies.

“The narrow scope of the policy leaves up content that expressly espouses white nationalist ideology without using the term ‘white nationalist,'” the report states. “As a result, content that would cause the same harm is permitted to remain on the platform.”

Therefore, the audit team recommends Facebook expand its policy to prohibit content that “expressly praises, supports, or represents white nationalist ideology” even if the content does not explicitly use the terms “white nationalism” or “white separatism.”

In Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s note today, she acknowledges the recommendation.

“We’re addressing this by identifying hate slogans and symbols connected to white nationalism and white separatism to better enforce our policy,” she wrote.

Sandberg also noted how Facebook recently updated its policies to ensure people don’t use Facebook to organize events intended to intimidate or harass people.

“Getting our policies right is just one part of the solution,” Sandberg said. “We also need to get better at enforcement — both in taking down and leaving up the right content.”

Sandberg is referring to the fact that Facebook has sometimes wrongfully taken down content meant to draw attention to racism and discrimination.

Facebook temporarily banned a social justice activist for commenting on racism

As Murphy noted in her report, “the definition and policing of hate speech and harassment on the platform has long been an area of concern. The civil rights community also claims that a lack of civil rights expertise informing content decisions leads to vastly different outcomes for users from marginalized communities.”

Facebook now says it’s taking steps to address this. One step, Sandberg says, is to have some content reviewers focus just on hate speech.

“We believe allowing reviewers to specialize only in hate speech could help them further build the expertise that may lead to increased accuracy over time,” Sandberg wrote.

Additionally, Sandberg has formalized a civil rights task force at Facebook. This task force will live on beyond the audit in order to continue building more awareness around civil rights issues on Facebook.

And ahead of the upcoming presidential election, Facebook says it is working on new protections against voter interference and is adding a policy that prohibits “don’t vote” ads. That policy is expected to go into effect before the 2019 gubernatorial election. On the census side, Facebook is working on an interference policy that it expects to launch this fall.

In March of this year, Facebook settled with the ACLU and others pertaining to discriminatory job ads. Just days later,  the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development said Facebook was in violation of the Fair Housing Act through its ad-targeting tools. This case is still pending.

In the meantime, Facebook has since begun working on a new system so that advertisers running US housing, employment and credit ads will no longer be able to target by age, gender, race, religion or zip code.

When this system launches, there will be a limited number of options by which to target. Additionally, Facebook won’t make any new terms available without first running it by the ACLU and the other plaintiffs from the March 2019 settlement.

In order to implement this new system, Facebook will ask advertisers to explicitly note if the ad involves housing, employment or credit opportunities. If it does, advertisers will be directed to the new system. Facebook is also putting tools in place to identify ads that advertisers failed to flag.

Additionally, Facebook is working on a tool that will let users search active housing ads by the advertiser and by location, whether or not they are in the target audience. This is expected to be available by the end of this year. Down the road, Facebook plans to make similar tools available for employment and credit opportunities.

“Given how critical access to housing, employment and credit opportunities are, this could have a significant impact on people’s lives,” Murphy wrote in her progress report.

This audit began in May 2018 following one scandal after the other pertaining to misinformation, and Facebook’s policies and people of color on its platform. The first six months entailed Murphy conducting interviews with civil rights organizations to determine their concerns. This last six months largely focused on content moderation and enforcement. The civil rights audit is far from over, and Facebook says we can expect to see the next update early next year.

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DoorDash double downs on controversial pay model

There’s seemingly no end in sight for DoorDash’s compensation model where it subsidizes driver wages with customer tips. The mildly bright side, however, is that DoorDash is now providing more transparency after each completed delivery, DoorDash CEO Tony Xu wrote in a blog post today.

“With our current pay model, Dashers see a guaranteed minimum — including tips — prior to accepting a delivery,” Xu wrote. “The guaranteed minimum is based on the estimated time and effort required to complete the delivery. Providing this guarantee upfront means that Dashers are more likely to accept all kinds of deliveries because they know what their earnings will be even if the customer provides little or no tip.”

That means DoorDash’s base pay is sometimes just $1.

“Talking about transparency is good,” labor rights group Working Washington said in a statement to TechCrunch. “And admitting you pay $1/job is better than denying it. But $1 is still $1.”

In light of pay controversies at Instacart, DoorDash and Postmates, Working Washington formed the Pay Up Campaign, which unites thousands of workers across all those gig economy platforms.

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“They continue to subtract tips from worker pay,” the organization said in its statement. “And they continue to mislead customers about where their tips are going. When a customer tips more, DoorDash pays less — in other words, the customer is tipping the company.”

Despite what DoorDash said in its blog post about what workers want, the Pay Up campaign says it wants a minimum pay floor of $15 per hour plus expenses for time with an active job, tips, and a detailed breakdown of pay.

DoorDash subsidizes driver wages with tips

Instacart CEO apologizes for tipping debacle

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Electric scooter and bike startup Grow hits 10 million trips across Latin America

Latin America-based Grow, which formed after micromobility companies Grin and Yellow merged earlier this year, has hit 10 million rides. Grin, which first started operating about one year ago in Mexico, has since expanded into 23 cities across Latin America. That is, of course, thanks in part to its mergers with Yellow and Ride.

This milestone is notable in part because it shows Grow is, err, growing at about the same rate as Bird and Lime did in each of those companies first years. In September, Bird hit the ten million scooter rides milestone after about one year of operations. That same month, Lime hit 11.5 million bike and scooter rides after about 14 months of being in business.

It’s also notable given Lime just expanded into Latin America yesterday with an electric scooter presence in Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Mexico and Chile. Lime currently counts 65 million rides.

Grow, with $150 million in funding, Grow counts five million users across its shared scooter, bike and e-moped services in Latin America. Collectively, riders have traveled more than nine million miles on Grow’s micromobility vehicles.

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SF Pride says it won’t exclude Google from the Pride parade

Despite Google employees petitioning San Francisco Pride to exclude the company from participating in the Pride parade this weekend, SF Pride says Google will be allowed to march in the parade.

Earlier today, about 100 Google employees urged SF Pride to ban the company from participating in this weekend’s Pride parade and drop the company as a sponsor. That came after activists expressed concerns regarding Google’s participation in Pride in light of YouTube’s response to homophobic and racist content on its platform. Earlier this month, YouTube said conservative commentator Steven Crowder’s racist and homophobic remarks did not violate its policies.

“We feel we have no choice but to urge you to reject Google’s failure to act in support of our community by revoking their sponsorship of Pride, and excluding Google from official representation in the Pride parade,” the employees wrote on Medium. “If another official platform, YouTube, allows abuse and hate and discrimination against LGBTQ+ persons, then Pride must not provide the company a platform that paints it in a rainbow veneer of support for those very persons. On the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, in a Pride celebration whose very slogan is “Generations of Resistance”, we ask you to join us in resisting LGBTQ+ oppression on the internet, and the subjugation of our right to equality in favor of calculated business concerns. The first Pride was a protest, and so now must this Pride be one.”

“We appreciate the engagement of community members who reached out to San Francisco Pride with their concerns about Google,” SF Pride said in a statement. “Google and YouTube can and must do more to elevate and protect the voices of LGBTQ+ creators on their platforms, and we’ve found that Google has been willing to listen to this criticism and is working to develop appropriate policies. They have acknowledged they have much work to do to promote respectful discussion and exchange of ideas.”

SF Pride goes on to say Google has been a long-term supporter for years and that the company has historically been a good ally to the LGBTQ+ community. But employees feel otherwise. Despite claims from the company that it will look at the policies, employees say they’re never given a true commitment to improving.

“We ask that, even if you will not consider excluding Google so soon before Pride, that you will issue a determination, absent a real change in these policies and practices, and a strong position statement to that effect, that Google will not be permitted to sponsor or be officially represented in future San Francisco Pride celebrations,” the employees wrote.

I’ve reached out to Google and will update this story when I hear back.

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Barbershop management platform Squire raises $8 million Series A round

Squire, a Y Combinator-backed business management platform for barbershops, just raised an $8 million Series A round led by Trinity Ventures. Since launching in 2016, Squire has grown to operate in 28 cities across three countries with more than $100 million in transactions processed to date.

Across the 28 cities where Squire operates, the company says it sees the most traction in cities like New York, San Francisco, Miami, Atlanta, Los Angeles and Toronto.

“They’ve been very effective and efficient in acquiring these businesses,” Trinity Ventures General Partner Schwark Satyavolu told TechCrunch. “They’ve been very cost effective and figured out a product model that is efficient.”

With the funding in tow, Squire plans to recruit additional engineers, build out a sales team and start spending money on marketing.

Squire has a tiered business model that ranges from $30 per month to $250 per month, depending on the size and needs of the barbershop. The most basic plan includes features like booking capabilities and reports while the complete plan features all of that plus a custom app, support for multiple locations, loyalty rewards and a wait list.

Squire initially didn’t charge barbershops, but quickly realized shops were willing to pay for what it was offering.

“In talking to customers, we realized there was a lot of opportunity to build value in a backend management system,” Squire co-founder Songe LaRon told TechCrunch. “And when we started working on those features, they would often expect to pay something. When we said it was free, they were actually a bit skeptical.”

Down the road, Squire sees a future where it could extend its model into other verticals, but says it’s currently focused on barbershops and the $20 billion market opportunity in men’s grooming.