Richard Dal Porto

December 6, 2021

Daily Crunch: Alibaba shakes up management team

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for December 6, 2021! The holiday news slowdown is very much not here yet. With changes at Alibaba, big startup news, SEC queries and a crypto selloff the other day that is still reverberating through markets, it’s busy out there. So, let TechCrunch catch you up! —Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

Alibaba shuffles its executive makeup: More changes are afoot at Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, which is said by some to be heading toward a delisting of its shares on U.S. exchanges. Didi is already making progress on that front. For Alibaba, the executive rearrangements are material, and speak to changes in how it operates.
SenseTime’s IPO could set tone for future AI listings: China-based SenseTime’s impending Hong Kong IPO could prove key for both AI listings and for high-growth, high-burn Chinese technology companies. If the decoupling of Chinese companies and global markets continues, Hong Kong could become one of just a few possible places for mainland companies to list, so how SenseTime performs matters. So far signals are mixed at best.
The SEC comes knocking: If you keep tabs on the EV market, you are familiar with Lucid Group. And if you keep tabs on the social media landscape, there’s a chance you are aware of TRUTH Social and the rest of the upcoming offerings from the Trump Media & Technology Group. Well, Lucid is under investigation by the SEC, while the Trump media concern’s SPAC partner is being asked questions. Keep an eye on both.

Startups/VC

To kick off our startup coverage today, news from our own Manish Singh that several venture groups are considering buying into the Polygon project, which is built atop the Ethereum blockchain. That a collection of investors is looking to buy tokens isn’t a shock per se, but is indication that crypto really has moved from fringe to the center of the venture capital world.

Smartphones as a service? Turns out it’s a thing. Evidence of that can be found in Berlin-based Everphone raising $65 million in yet another financing round. What does it do? Per TechCrunch reporting, the startup “takes care of the supply, support, repair/replacement and recycling of mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) for enterprise customers — billed under a per-user monthly subscription.”
Platzi’s edtech model raises even more capital: The Latin American edtech market is not just that — it’s also a hedge on the future. Platzi CEO Freddy Vega told TechCrunch that with much of the Latin American economy “based on natural resources,” there’s a time crunch to get ready for what’s next. Enter edtech and Platzi’s non-cohort based approach that just raised a huge $62 million Series B.
Cute robots get checks: The somewhat humorously named Serve Robotics has raised $13 million in new capital. Known as an Uber spinout, the startup builds little robots that make deliveries in urban areas. And, yes, its robots are cute. Which matters, I reckon, as otherwise folks would probably tip them over and generally be brats.
Nearside raises $58M for SMB neobanking: While we await the Chime IPO with bated-ish breath, neobanks with more narrow focuses are busy raising capital. This time it’s Nearside — once known as Hatch — which targets small businesses as its core customer demographic. Nearside just added $58 million to its accounts in a Series B.
Dispatch Goods may dispatch some good: Thanks to its model of reusing containers, limiting the amount of plastic that folks generate in landfills, communities and oceans. It’s a pretty neat idea, and one that is seeing its market move toward it; I think that we are all a bit more ecologically focused than we once were. Right?
TradeDepot raises $110M in debt, equity: The African and North American company operates a marketplace, warehouse network and BNPL solution. Which makes it investor catnip, we imagine. Hence its mega new raise.
OpenSea hires Lyft’s CFO to be its CFO: Normally when a company hires a CFO and makes it known, we start the IPO countdown. Which brings us to OpenSea, the NFT marketplace, now flush with CFO talent thanks to its pilfering from ride-hailing giant Lyft. Recall that Lyft is public, so its CFO knows a thing or two about going public. To which we must add, please go public OpenSea; we desperately want to see your numbers. We are so, so curious.

How Credit Karma, acquired amid COVID chaos, fared in its first year under Intuit

Image of a family, house, piggybank and bags of money stacked on top of coins to represent estate planning.

Image Credits: William_Potter (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

On the day in February 2020 that Credit Karma planned to announce that it had been acquired by Intuit for more than $7 billion, the stock market tanked, spooked by news that a novel new virus had the potential to start a pandemic.

“I remember waking up and the Dow futures were down something like 600 points because the COVID pieces were starting to hit the market,” Credit Karma CEO Ken Lin said. “I’m up at 5 o’clock in the morning, the Dow is flashing red … and we’re all like, ‘Are we going to do this?’”

They did, and they managed to weather the storm. Ryan Lawler spoke with Credit Karma and Intuit executives to get a full picture on how Credit Karma endured a gauntlet of challenges before returning to growth in 2021.

(TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

The private rocket boom continues: Perhaps we should say that the private rocket push continues its ascent? Boom seems suggestive and not in a nice way. Regardless, Astra will soon launch a rocket from Florida, for the first time since January, it turns out.
DoorDash tests full-time delivery workers: The company is working on a faster delivery system in New York, which makes its move to bring some of its delivery workers in-house pretty understandable. How far the model will penetrate the cohorts of DoorDash giggers who brought you dinner yesterday is not clear at this juncture.
Toyota to build batteries in North Carolina: Japanese auto giant intends to build a battery plant in the United States. Good news for folks in favor of more American manufacturing, and indicative, I’d say, of just how big electric vehicles have become in short order.
Apple teams up with Boys and Girls Club to teach coding: The youth of the nation will learn Javascript, I suppose. “Apple says the new collaboration will give students the chance to create and learn about the basics of app design and development,” TechCrunch reports. We dig it.
Argo AI teams up with cyclist group for AV guidelines: As you have read in Daily Crunch for some months now, the pace at which self-driving projects are dipping their toes into commercial operations is accelerating. Which puts folks atop two-wheeled, self-powered machines in a tricky spot. Folks are going to keep biking. And autonomous vehicle projects are going to keep progressing. Making the two groups play nice — and keep cyclists alive, let’s be clear — is a big job. So, we’re glad to see some work toward finding common ground for cyclist safety.

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December 5, 2021

Partnerships are key to scaling commitments from Biden’s Summit for Democracy

Vera Zakem Contributor

Vera Zakem is a senior technology and policy advisor at the Institute for Security and Technology where she leads efforts on democracy and technology and is the founder of Zakem Global Strategies. From 2020-2021, she served as a member of the bipartisan Task Force on U.S. Strategy to Support Democracy and Counter Authoritarianism.

The TechCrunch Global Affairs Project examines the increasingly intertwined relationship between the tech sector and global politics.

This week, President Biden will gather leaders from over 100 countries to attend his long-promised virtual Summit for Democracy. After a year of consultation, coordination and action, these leaders will come together once more for a second summit to report on progress on the initial set of commitments to protect human rights, counter authoritarianism and corruption.

Having been born in the former Soviet Union, I cannot help but feel a deep sense of optimism about the summit. Even as a very young child, I felt the chill that came from living in a place that restricted freedom of expression and speech and where information and just about every aspect of life were greatly controlled by the state or a select few in power. My personal experiences make me grateful to be an American citizen. But having lived under an authoritarian regime, I’m acutely sensitive to the reasons this summit is taking place: the democratic recession taking place around the world.

No area is as critical in this democratic competition as technology. If leaders hope to make progress on the three core tenets of the summit, they will have to ensure that technology serves democracy and human rights. This includes facilitating investments in open internet and critical infrastructure as a way to counter digital authoritarianism, countering disinformation, strengthening societal resilience and making greater investments in emerging technologies and tech entrepreneurship that are consistent with democratic values and diversity.

Reporting indicates that we are likely to see commitments made on strengthening the internet, increasing funds for media literacy and civic education and enforcing export controls for dual-use technologies, among other initiatives. These are all useful steps. But if they are to last beyond the summit, they will require public-private-civic partnerships to truly implement and scale. Here are three areas that merit our collective attention:

First, digital authoritarianism, the use of technology to repress citizens domestically via regulation, censorship and export of technologies, has become a pervasive global problem. We don’t have to look much farther than China and its pioneering state-controlled internet or Russia and its ever-tightening control over internet infrastructure, online content and privacy. What’s more, by exporting this form of authoritarianism to other regions of the globe, including Africa and Latin America, these countries are helping foster “system rivalry” between democracies and authoritarian regimes, as Ambassador Eileen Donahoe recently wrote.

There is much the private sector, civil society and governments can do together to counter this evolving threat. This includes working together to develop critical infrastructure in emerging markets while tightening export controls of repressive technologies. At the subnational level, the U.S. and its allies should work to increase access to the internet and promote internet freedom, with a particular focus on marginalized communities. Civil society in particular should use its voice to advocate for local regulations and practices to keep both governments and the private sector accountable. Multinational corporations, too, should harness their power for good by conducting human rights assessments in countries they are operating in, to ensure that they are neither committing human rights abuses nor inadvertently aiding authoritarian regimes in their business practices.

Second, disinformation, the intentional spread of falsehoods and half-truths, continues to be a serious threat to democracies globally. In recent years we have seen election and COVID-related disinformation in the United States and around the world spreading like wildfire on social media platforms, mainstream media and through our trusted networks. Russia, China, Iran and domestic actors have carried out disinformation campaigns not only to cause chaos and confusion, but as we saw during the January 6 insurrection, inflict serious harm. What’s more, these disinformation campaigns have bled over to hateful rhetoric against marginalized communities, including women and girls, the LGBTQ+ community, journalists and human rights defenders. This is one area where governments, private sector and civil society should and must act on their commitments in the coming year. Otherwise, democracies simply will not be able to keep up with information pollution — on or offline.

There are a number of ways to do that. The bipartisan Task Force on the U.S. Strategy to Support Democracy and Counter Authoritarianism, on which I served, proposed the establishment of a Global Task Force on Information Integrity and Resilience in order to build trust in the information environment. Our proposal was grounded in the belief that while this task force may be led by like-minded countries, both the private sector and civil society should have strong participation to collaborate and share information on disinformation, online hate and harassment in order to anticipate, preempt and counter these threats. Ultimately, the goal should be to build societal resilience for the long term.

Third, the private sector and civil society must invest in and scale partnership with governments to implement initiatives on digital and media literacy, and civics education in existing and nascent democracies, reaching citizens beyond the capitals. At the same time, in the coming year, the private sector, especially digital platforms and mainstream media, need to double down on providing credible, quality information to citizens, because, to put it simply, our lives depend on it. There have been a number of proposals on increasing transparency and accountability of digital platforms to prevent algorithmic bias, misuse of data and the spread of malicious content. Ultimately, as we seek to build the best information ecosystem possible, these principles are about building trust — between citizens, content providers, governments and industry.

We will not be able to move the needle on countering these threats without a deep investment in emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, machine learning and natural language processing. Investments in identifying and exposing these threats — and understanding their impact — should not be exclusive to the U.S. or Europe. As startups develop these technologies, they should ensure their products can safely scale to emerging markets.

Spurring innovation and entrepreneurship in emerging markets is the final area where the private sector and civil society have a meaningful opportunity to work with governments. Research shows that innovation and entrepreneurship create economic growth, and this is true for the technology sector as well. The surest way to inoculate developing countries from authoritarian tech is to invest in the next generation of talent, especially youth, women and girls, and other marginalized communities. Developing credible local voices, entrepreneurs and innovators who can use emerging technologies to counter the authoritarian threats posed to their countries just may represent the best way to reach our desired outcomes.

When it comes to technology, we are in a competition for influence between democratic values and the authoritarian-imposed way of life. This year’s summit paves the way for meaningful democratic resurgence. But as we move into a year of action and consultation, it is public-private-civic partnerships that will enable the scaling and implementation necessary for a technological agenda in service of democracy.

December 4, 2021

Fear, loathing and corporate gifting

Welcome to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.

Three themes this weekend, my dear friends. The first is fear, namely market concern. The second is loathing, or my gut reaction to a particular bit of corporate news. And, finally, corporate gifting, a dive into a fascinating startup war. Let’s go!

Fear

DocuSign took a gut punch this week, with the e-signature company’s stock price dropping by more than 40% on Friday as I write to you. That’s among the worst post-earnings share-price movements I have ever seen, aside from cases of fraud or other corporate shenanigans.

What happened? DocuSign beat revenue expectations in its most recent quarter (Q3 fiscal 2022). But the company’s billings — a proxy for future revenue — came in sharply under expectations. And the company’s CEO, Dan Springer, said this in its investor letter:

After six quarters of accelerated growth, we saw customers return to more normalized buying patterns, resulting in 28% year-over-year billings growth.

Springer thinks the market is overreacting and intends to buy DocuSign shares next week. Are the markets making too much of what appears to be a return to more regular growth at DocuSign?

Maybe not? I’ve been talking to folks about this since it happened — including my dear friend Ron Miller, who keeps me sane at work — trying to work out if we’re seeing Wall Street impatience or something else. I’m leaning toward the latter.

Per Yahoo Finance data, DocuSign is worth around $27 billion after its huge declines. Or about 12.4x its current run rate. For an already-public tech company showing strong hints at future revenue deceleration, who among us will stand up and say that that is too low?

A lot of folks, but that’s because the general climate for SaaS multiples has been so hot for so long. Not too long ago, DocuSign at 12.4x its present-day run rate after posting billings growth of 28% would have been fine, if not good. So, a return to prior norms could be in the air?

Fear. That’s what I expect to taste if we are seeing multiple compressions among software companies. So very many private-market bets have been placed on the expectation that public valuations for comps would stay high. But after a few awful days for tech stocks more generally this week, the climate in tech could finally be shifting away from a 100% risk weighting toward something more balanced.

Loathing

Better.com pulled three-quarters of a billion dollars from its SPAC debut forward, giving it access to ample funding for its operations. Then it fired a chunk of its staff. The CEO said 15% during a call with the laid-off staffers. Better insists that the number is actually 9%. The discrepancy is wild, given that the CEO was reading from notes and claimed that he had made the call to execute the layoffs. If he made the decision, how did he get the number wrong?

Regardless, here’s a master class in how not to fire a huge stack of your workers:

(We’ve preserved a copy of the video, of course, in case that version gets yanked.)

Don’t forget: You are not family at your place of employment. You are an asset that it wants to leverage and derive profit from!

Corporate gifting

Turn the clock back to early 2020. In February of that year, right before the turn of the pandemic, I covered Sendoso’s $40 million Series B. The company is in the corporate gifting space and has since gone on to raise a $100 million Series C.

Separately, an investor I know connected me to another player in Sendoso’s market, Postal.io, or just Postal. The two compete for market share in the send stuff to current and potential customers market, which is, it turns out, huge.

Regular Exchange readers will already be wondering if we didn’t touch on this recently. We did! Back in September, taking a look at Postal and its progress right before Disrupt.

But I’ve since extracted some growth metrics from Postal and Sendoso that I wanted to append to our continuing coverage of the space. Why do we care? Because akin to the OKR software space, or the instant grocery delivery market, there’s an interesting startup cluster to track.

Sendoso and Postal compete with Alyce and Reachdesk, for example, among others. That’s a lot of startup activity for the online-to-offline market channel. And the market is big enough — Sendoso told The Exchange that the “U.S. corporate gifting market is projected to reach $242 billion by the end of this year,” citing Coresight — for several players to grow at once.

Postal was the most free with metrics, sharing that it has seen 70% subscription revenue growth for the last five consecutive quarters. The startup has also seen GMV scale 3,765% from Q3 2020 to Q3 2021, as customers rose from 35 to 286. That’s why it managed to raise capital in September, we figure.

Sendoso was more coy with numbers regarding its recent performance. The startup grew 330% in 2019, recall, but regarding its recent results did not deign to share an updated figure. Instead, Sendoso said that it has 900 customers (north of 20,000 seats at those companies, for detail), and that its warehouses “in North America, Europe and Asia [have] handled upward of 3 million sends in over 165 countries.”

We didn’t get new numbers from Alyce or Reachdesk in time for publication, but if they do share results, we’ll bring them to you next week.

Also like the OKR startup market, there’s variation within the larger theme. In the case of corporate gifting, Postal is building a more digital offering, connecting goods companies to buyers, while Sendoso has a larger IRL footprint including its own physical item aggregation points. We do love to have business cases battle it out in real time.

Don’t forget, however, that intense competition doesn’t leave all parties unscathed. In the OKR market Koan failed to make it to its next fundraising milestone, and Microsoft scooped up one of the startup cohort. In the instant grocery space, 1520 just went kaput. Not that Sendoso or Postal are in danger of running out of cash, but if and when their market does find a point of consolidation will be interesting to see.

—Alex

December 4, 2021

Is tech hurting American soft power?

Scott Bade Contributor

Scott Bade is special series editor of the TechCrunch Global Affairs Project and a regular contributor on foreign affairs. He's a former speechwriter for Mike Bloomberg and co-author of "More Human: Designing a World Where People Come First."

Daily Crunch: Oura Ring offers a smaller wearable for tracking fitness data

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for December 3, 2021! I don’t know about you, but after watching stocks get hammered all day, I mostly want to snag a nap and breathe. But things were worse for DocuSign and Didi than they were for us, so we can take solace in that. What did Didi do? Well, let’s talk about it. —Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

Didi to delist: The latest detail from the dada-esque Didi disaster came today, with the Chinese ride-hailing giant announcing that it will delist from U.S. markets. It will, instead, list in Hong Kong. The Didi IPO, akin to the failed Ant debut, may become timeline markers of further decoupling of the Chinese market with the larger world.
Read this Amanda Silberling piece on the creator economy: The worldwide success of Netflix’s “Squid Game” has spawned a cottage industry of me-toos. None, perhaps, more notable than an entry from YouTuber MrBeast. I once saw a clip of him burying himself alive for laughs. Regardless, Silberling digs into the YouTube economy and how stunts can leverage already-created content. It’s worth reading.
SPACs challenge Amazon, Microsoft: The blank-check company circus continued this week with news that Rumble — the video hosting platform that has ridden right-wing personalities to prominence — will go public via a SPAC. And like the Trump Technology deal, it has a long-term vision to take on the internet’s major platform companies. To which we say, good luck.

Startups/VC

How to think about the Oura Ring: Our own Brian Heater has a great dig into the Oura Ring 3, which he argues is not an Apple Watch replacement. Instead, he says, it’s a replacement for a fitness band. Given that I have turned my Apple Watch into a fitness band by nuking all of its notifications aside from those prompting me to move my lard about, I do not mind Heater’s view.
Vinehealth raises pre-Series A money: A $5.5 million round was once Series A scale. Now it’s seed, or something a little later. No matter how Vinehealth wants to describe its latest round, the London-based digital health startup that’s built an app offering personalized support for cancer patients while also making it easier to gather patient-reported outcome data now has the capital it needs to reach its next round. Let’s see how it scales.
Umamicart has a great name: What does Umamicart do, if you had to guess? Would you reckon, say, the delivery of Asian ingredients? Bingo! That’s what it does, and the company just raised $6 million to keep the growth coming.
Zindi is using community solve data questions: What happens if you blend community and AI and deploy the result to tricky data problems? You get Zindi, it turns out. TechCrunch has a toothsome look at the South African concern that you should read.
If you need a weekend listen, there’s new Equity (here) out for your audio enjoyment.

3 ways to recruit engineers who fly under LinkedIn’s radar

Close-up of binoculars on table by the sea during sunset, the sunset is reflected in the glass of the binoculars (Close-up of binoculars on table by the sea during sunset, the sunset is reflected in the glass of the binoculars, ASCII, 113 components,

Image Credits: the_burtons (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

This week, LinkedIn rolled out support for Hindi users, allowing it to reach approximately 500 million people in India and 100 million more around the globe.

Talented developers abound in emerging markets, but few of them use the same social network that so many startup recruiters rely upon. Additionally, many devs simply don’t like social media — so what’s your plan for reaching them?

We’re in the midst of a talent drought, so it’s a good idea to draw water from more than one well. To bring in a broader mix of candidates, use the three ideas laid out here to elevate your startup’s hiring game.

(TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

Facebook Messenger tests payment splitting: When you reach Facebook’s scale, every product in the market is a potential add-on to your core service. So, that Big Blue is adding payment splitting to its Messenger service is not a huge surprise. What can users do with the ability to “share the cost of bills and expenses through the app”? Well, most of what you can do with Venmo or Splitwise, we reckon.
Tech stocks get hammered (again): Leading the downward charge, DocuSign was the first horseman of the tech valuation unravelling this Friday. Shares of tech stocks took a number of blows this week, pushing software stocks into bear market territory. Sure, valuations are still high, but the hype could be evaporating atop the market’s warm climate.
Why is Pinduoduo growing food? This was a surprise to my eyes. Chinese e-commerce giant Pinduoduo unveiled a huge agricultural effort in August, where it is seemingly putting both capital and focus. “The program won’t be profit-driven, the company promised, and all profit from the second quarter and ‘any potential profits in future quarters would be allocated to the initiative,’” TechCrunch reported. My first take is that this is how tech companies in China can keep being tech shops while also fitting into the top-down demand for “common prosperity.”

TechCrunch Experts

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December 2, 2021

Taiwan’s bargaining chips?

Ciel Qi Contributor

Ciel Qi is a research assistant at the Rhodium Group's China Practice and an M.A. candidate in Georgetown University's Security Studies Program, with a concentration in technology and security. She also holds a master's degree in religion, ethics and politics from the Harvard Divinity School.

The TechCrunch Global Affairs Project examines the increasingly intertwined relationship between the tech sector and global politics.

Over four days at the beginning of October, almost 150 Chinese military aircraft flew into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, provoking criticism from Taiwan and the U.S. Amid such heightened tensions across the Taiwan Strait, Taiwan’s leader, Tsai Ing-wen, confirmed that U.S. forces are training with Taiwanese soldiers on the island; the Chinese foreign ministry countered with a warning that supporting Taiwanese independence would only lead to a “dead end.” At the end of the month, another eight Chinese aircraft, including six J-16 fighter jets, entered Taiwan’s air defense zone on the same day U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, urging China not to change the status quo in the region.

That status quo in cross-strait relations dates back to 1979, when the U.S. switched diplomatic recognition from the Republic of China, based in Taiwan, to the People’s Republic of China that had taken over the mainland. China has long wanted to reunite with the island, which it views as a “rogue province,” but while Beijing has never ruled out the possibility of achieving this goal by force, it has been deterred from doing so by Washington’s strategic ambiguity as to whether it would come to the island’s defense. In recent years, the situation has become even more complex because of Taiwan’s essential role in the semiconductor industry.

Taiwan’s importance to the global semiconductor industry

According to TrendForce, a Taipei-based research firm, Taiwan’s semiconductor contract manufacturers accounted for 63% of total global foundry market share in 2020. A detailed breakdown shows that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, alone contributed 54% of the global foundry market share. More recent data shows that even with its Fab 14 (P7) experiencing manufacturing disruptions, TSMC still made up almost 53% of global foundry market share for the second quarter of 2021.

In addition to producing the most chips, Taiwan’s foundries (including TSMC) produce the world’s most advanced chips, which can be found in all the highest-tech machinery — everything from cellphones to fighter jets. In fact, TSMC is responsible for an astonishing 92% of the world’s advanced chips production, making Taiwan’s semiconductor industry arguably the world’s most important.

And this means both the U.S. and China are dependent on it. According to a Nikkei report, TSMC produces computer chips used in F-35 fighter jets, high-performance chips for U.S. military suppliers such as Xilinx, and DoD-approved “military grade” chips. While the exact scale at which the U.S. military is dependent on Taiwanese chips is not known, it is significant enough that the U.S. government has pressured TSMC to shift its production of military-use chips to U.S. soil.

American industry, too, depends on Taiwanese semiconductors. It is believed that TSMC is the sole provider for Apple’s 5-nanometer processors, used in various Apple products including the iPhone 12, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. TSMC also manufactures the A15 Bionic chips found inside Apple’s newest gadgets: the iPhone 13 and iPad mini. Of course, it’s not only Apple; TSMC’s customers also include major American companies, such as Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD and Intel.

China is also dependent on foreign chips; in 2020, it imported around $300 billion worth. Unsurprisingly, Taiwan was the leading source. Despite a major effort to reduce its dependence on foreign chips, Chinese chip independence is a long way off; its most advanced homegrown semiconductor manufacturer, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), is several generations behind TSMC. As SMIC tests a 7-nanometer chip, its Taiwanese rival has already moved on to the 3-nanometer process.

As a result, Chinese firms have no choice but to go to Taiwan. For example, Huawei, one of China’s leading tech firms, is believed to have been TSMC’s second-largest customer in 2020, relying almost totally on TSMC’s supplies for its 5-nanometer and 7-nanometer processors. For a sense of scale, Huawei accounted for 12% of the foundry’s total revenue last year.

War by other means

One need only look to earlier this year to understand just how vulnerable the semiconductor industry is. A “relatively muted” quarter, caused in part by a power outage, lost TSMC 1.6% of its global market share and contributed to the ongoing semiconductor shortage. Active interference by geopolitical actors in the industry could have much greater consequences.

The worst-case scenario, of course, is a cross-strait military confrontation, which would likely sever the chip supply chain altogether. But this isn’t the only possibility. As Taiwan is well aware, by exporting chips en masse to China, it is bolstering China’s technological development along with growing its own economy. If Taiwan were to take steps to reduce its reliance on China, for example by signing a free trade deal with the U.S., Taiwan might decide to cut off its chip trade with China entirely.

This would be an unaffordable situation for Beijing. Consider this: Since TSMC halted new orders from Huawei in response to the Trump administration’s tighter U.S. export controls, Huawei has had to stop the production of its high-end Kirin 9000 chipset using the 5-nanometer process. Moreover, the shortage of high-end chips will soon make Huawei unable to continue providing 5G-enabled cellphones, according to one company official.

A total loss of chips from Taiwan would call into question the ongoing development of China’s entire tech industry. This would not only infuriate China but pose a threat to its domestic stability, giving the Chinese government more incentive to take the island by force.

If some scenarios cut China off from Taiwanese chips, others would cut off the U.S. In a “peaceful reunification” scenario (where Taiwan is reunited with China without the use of force), Taiwanese foundries would likely find themselves under control of the Chinese government, posing a strategic problem for the U.S. The Chinese government could ask the foundries to stop exporting chips or put restrictions on how many chips they can export — chips the U.S. government needs to mobilize America’s most advanced military equipment.

And if TSMC stopped or limited providing chips to American companies, these companies could well find themselves in a situation similar to that of Huawei now (无芯可用 or “no chips to use,” as the new phrase goes in Chinese). While it is unlikely this would spur the U.S. to invade Taiwan to “de-unify” it, it may seek other means such as imposing sanctions on China to retaliate, further escalating tensions.

Needless to say, any of these scenarios would cause disruptions in global supply chains, leading to serious consequences for the entire world.

Taiwan’s semiconductor industry — shield or Achilles’ heel?

While Taiwan undoubtedly enjoys its current semiconductor dominance and the leverage that gives it over both China and the U.S., neither feel comfortable with the status quo — and both have taken measures to make the situation more favorable to themselves. The U.S. has persuaded TSMC to build chip factories in the country while China has hired more than 100 veteran engineers and managers from TSMC to boost its own pursuit of cutting-edge chip manufacturing.

This leaves an uncomfortable future for Taiwan. If Taiwan produced more of its semiconductors offshore, the island itself might attract less international attention. However, this could also give the U.S. less incentive to support Taiwan’s defense. A more widely distributed supply chain might also lessen a major barrier for China to take the island by force. For Taiwan, these are difficult but existential questions to answer.

Amid all this uncertainty, at least Taiwan’s position seems secure in the short term: Its nearest competitors in both China and the U.S. are still years behind, and even if they did catch up, fabs famously take years of planning and investment to get running. Absent any change in the status quo, it is unlikely either will be able to shift away from the island’s chip supply in the near term. But what is certain now more than ever, is that Chinese and American strategies on Taiwan will have to factor in the role of the island’s semiconductor industry.

December 1, 2021

Daily Crunch: Spotify packs its 2021 year-end recap with new sharing, social features

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for December 1, 2021! Yes, we’ve made it to the final inning of the year, which means that the news cycle will slow and we all get some time off? Right? Probably not, but in alternative good news, Brian Heater’s robotics newsletter launches tomorrow. It’s called Actuator and it is going to kick maximum backside. Snag it here! —Alex

P.S. Blue Origin’s Ariane Cornell is coming to TC Sessions: Space 2021!

The TechCrunch Top 3

China may ban foreign IPOs: Big news from a leading startup market as reporting indicates that the Chinese government may block a method by which domestic tech companies are listed on foreign exchanges. Alibaba and others have used the technique, which opens the door for further economic and technological decoupling between China and the rest of the world.
Match settles with Tinder co-founders: Allegations that “IAC and its then-subsidiary Match Group had manipulated financial data” to put a low valuation on Tinder when it was folded into the larger company have been settled for more than $400 million. That’s a right bucket of duckets.
Taxpayer money to support Chinese surveillance? In a critical piece of reporting, TechCrunch’s Zack Whittaker writes that “at least three U.S. federal agencies, including the military, have purchased China-made video surveillance equipment banned from use in the federal government.” Not good!

Startups/VC

Before we dive into a bevy of discrete pieces of startup news, another 3D printing company is going public! Via a SPAC! This time it’s Austin-based Essentium. Recall that Desktop Metal went public via a SPAC previously. Its stock traded as high as $34.94. It is worth $6.08 per share today.

From coaching to SaaS: Providing coaching to corporate staff is big business, but it remains, at its core, a human game. That means modest margins. Sounding Board is moving from the coaching world into the coaching software industry, which helped it land a $30 million Series B. Jazz Venture Partners led the round, which is a firm I had not heard of before.
Butter wants to cut the churn: To avoid making an extensive butter/churn joke that would surely get cut before this newsletter reaches you, let it suffice to say that Butter, a startup, is in the anti-churn game. Yes, Butter doesn’t want you to have to churn all by yourself. See? Impossible to avoid. Regardless, the company just added $7 million to its accounts to help companies avoid losing revenue to payments issues.
What’s AI good for? A lot, it turns out. Our own Devin Coldewey has notes on how AI is showing promising signs as a solution for both protein generation and mathematics. Startups, take note!
And speaking of AI, Sydney-based Harrison.ai has raised $129 million (AUD) for its work to build medical tech using artificial intelligence.
Goalsetter is taking on youth financial literacy: Let’s be clear, most people are bad with money. This is for a number of reasons, including the simple fact that financial education in the U.S. is weak at best. Kid-focused financial platform Goalsetter wants to work on the matter by tying child access to allowances and the like to learning more about money.
Republic buys Seedrs: Republic helps private-market shares trade in the United States. Seedrs helped U.K.-based companies crowdfund equity rounds. Now, thanks to a $100 million deal, the American company will own the European concern.
Do you want a weed credit card? Buying legal cannabis is a pain in the neck in the United States, thanks to both historically racist laws and neo-Puritan forces. Regardless, SuperNet has built a credit card that will work for, and with, dispensaries. A small step, but a welcome one.
Nuro + 7/11 = autonomous deliveries in California: Yes, another week, another news item of a small-scale self-driving service making its way to market. While I am not sure that Slurpee delivery is the real killer app for autonomous delivery, I would try this out for no other reason than to encourage more of the same.
And if you need even more, the Equity crew recently dug into the matter of founders, CEO status and when a company might outgrow its progenitor as chief exec.

How to execute an amplified marketing strategy

Hand of hispanic man holding megaphone over isolated blue background.

Image Credits: AaronAmat (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Every blog post, Tweet and Instagram Story is an opportunity to explain to customers (and the board) how the company creates value or is a step ahead of the competition.

But quality will always beat quantity when it comes to content marketing; Googlebot may be hungry for new links, but potential customers demand expertise and insights.

“Marketers need a new plan of action that puts creativity before quantity, audience before engine, and sets connection as the top priority,” says Lindsay Tjepkema, CEO of audio and video content marketing platform Casted.

(TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

Today is the day! Yes, it is Spotify Unwrapped 2021, which means that we’ve spent the afternoon posting to Twitter all about our excellent musical tastes. TechCrunch has more here on what’s new.

Facebook talks kid safety after delaying E2E encryption: In theory, Facebook — Meta, but whatever — is moving to roll out end-to-end encryption to its messaging service in 2023. That’s thanks to a delay. And, in a move seemingly set up to head off criticism from the usual suspects, is talking up its child protective work in the meantime.
Niantic buys Lowkey: The gaming company is snagging the team behind Lowkey, which helps users “capture and share gameplay moments,” TechCrunch reports.
Social media updates! TikTok has added new creator monetization features, while Reddit has rolled out a number of platform updates. Perhaps, in time, Reddit will find a way to un-break its web experience.

And, yes, even more from Amazon:

TechCrunch Experts

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If you’re curious about how these surveys are shaping our coverage, check out this article on TechCrunch+ from Marjorie Radlo-Zandi, “4 key strategies for succeeding at international expansion.”

November 30, 2021

Daily Crunch: AWS unveils new open source autoscaling tool Karpenter at customer conference

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Tuesday, November 30, 2021! This is the last newsletter of the month, which means that tomorrow is December. Get ready for the last few weeks of news before the Christmas/holiday news freeze sets into place. There are still a few IPOs to go, so don’t log off yet! —Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3 4

Nubank cuts IPO price range target: Bellwether Brazilian tech company Nubank has reduced its price range ahead of its public offering. In short, the neobank will sell its shares for less than it expected, lowering the size of its impending capital raise and also cutting its public-market valuation. TechCrunch dug into whether the news matters for Latin American startups more broadly. (More on the company’s economics here.)
Facebook told to sell Giphy: Remember when Facebook bought Giphy, the GIF search engine? Well, the Competition and Markets Authority, the U.K.’s competition watchdog, is telling the U.S. social networking giant to reverse that purchase. A rare moment in which a major tech company is told no.
Also, Facebook’s crypto exec is leaving: Another Facebook exec is taking off, crypto leader David Marcus. The news comes after “Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer announced he was stepping down from his role after 13 years at the company” this September, TechCrunch notes.
Digital sales disappoint during shoppy fauxliday: After disappointing online sales on Black Friday led TechCrunch to look into e-commerce sales growth more generally, “consumer awareness of supply chain shortages and even earlier deals may have contributed to a slight decline in U.S. e-commerce sales during Cyber Week,” Sarah Perez reports.

Startups/VC

Before we get into our daily digest of startup happenings, HashiCorp’s IPO is shaping up to be a right corker. The U.S. cloud infra management concern is targeting a pretty high price point for its shares, at least in revenue-multiples terms. Good news for open source startups more generally? We think so. (More on its economics here.)

BeerOrCoffee raises $10M: Notably BeerOrCoffee is not an artisan, DTC, free-range consumer beverage outfit. Instead, the São Paulo-based startup offers flexible office space. TechCrunch dug into its operations and recent Series A raise.
Money, attention or compute? Massive, a startup, wants to offer the world’s consumers a different way to pay for apps. Not with their currency (subscriptions) or attention (ads), but with their spare compute time. We had questions, but the model sounds pretty neat.
Fundbox shows that SMBs can build unicorns: Forget the old VC rule that selling to SMBs is bad business. There are just too many successful startups out here looking to sell to small businesses for the old saw to be anything but toothless. Fundbox’s new $1.1 billion valuation is evidence of the fact, with the SMB-focused fintech adding nine figures to its accounts in a single gulp.
The other way to make tech money from trucking: Sure, we read a lot about self-driving semis and how computers will soon drive our big trucks. But, in the meantime, CloudTrucks is raising a treasury to grow its software business aimed at trucking firms that still employ human drivers. The company just closed a massive $115 million Series B.

And for startups out there looking to raise, a little venture fund news for your diversion:

Sapphire Ventures raises $2B: For its sixth main fund and third “opportunity “ fund, Sapphire Ventures has banked 10 figures worth of capital. That’s a Smaug-level haul, and indicative, I believe, that I will annoy the firm’s Jai Das at least four times per quarter in 2021 for notes on what he’s seeing in the market.
Partech raises $750 million for second growth fund: Normally a venture capital concern raising hundreds of millions of dollars doesn’t get my pulse up even a single BPM. However, as Partech is based in Paris, I have to admit that I found the news more than a little notable. Recall when Europe’s startup scene was considered an also-ran? That was a while ago now.

3 views on Jack Dorsey’s decision to step down as Twitter’s CEO

MIAMI, FLORIDA - JUNE 04: Jack Dorsey creator, co-founder, and Chairman of Twitter and co-founder & CEO of Square speaks on stage at the Bitcoin 2021 Convention, a crypto-currency conference held at the Mana Convention Center in Wynwood on June 04, 2021 in Miami, Florida. The crypto conference is expected to draw 50,000 people and runs from Friday, June 4 through June 6th. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Image Credits: Joe+Raedle (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Jack Dorsey was Twitter’s first CEO — and also its fourth.

He led the platform from its launch in 2006 until he passed the torch to co-founder Ev Williams two years later. In 2015, Dorsey returned to the role, even though he was simultaneously serving as CEO of fintech platform Square.

“There’s a lot of talk about the importance of a company being ‘founder-led,’” he wrote in a letter to employees.

“Ultimately I believe that’s severely limiting and a single point of failure. I’ve worked hard to ensure this company can break away from its founding and founders.”

The Equity podcast team discussed his departure in a TechCrunch+ post yesterday afternoon:

Alex Wilhelm: A call to return to the old normal from the new normal
Natasha Mascarenhas: A reset would rewrite how VCs and entrepreneurs do business
Amanda Silberling: Founders aren’t rock stars

Big Tech Inc.

Today’s Big Tech news comes in two chunks. There’s the day’s news from huge tech concerns, and then there’s a whole mess of AWS-related news from our enterprise team.

European AI regulation may lack teeth: Per our own Natasha Lomas, a collection of civil society organizations has come to the view that “draft legislation” in Europe “falls far short of protecting fundamental rights from AI-fueled harms like scaled discrimination and blackbox bias.”
Mercedes invests in Factorial Energy: Sure, we could have put this entry in the startup section, but how frequently do we see the parent company of reigning F1 winning champions, the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team, in our pages? Infrequently. Regardless, Factorial is working on solid state batteries for cars, so you can see why the Silver Arrows corporate family was interested.
Twitter cracks down on abusive image/video posting: In baby’s CEO’s first PR crisis, Twitter announced today that it is moving to “ban sharing images or videos of private individuals without their consent.” At issue is the fact that some video, well, will never get consent of say, the cops, despite being in the public interest. Twitter noted a public interest nuance, but some folks were still mad.

And then, the Amazon/AWS news deluge:

Karpenter is a “new open source autoscaling tool for Kubernetes clusters.”
SageMaker Canvas is a “no-code ML service.”
AWS to highlight partners that “develop specialized solutions aimed at the energy industry.”
AWS analytics are now serverless.
There’s a new ML chip from Amazon, the Trn1.
But that’s not all! Amazon’s cloud team also has a new ARM chip called the “Graviton 3.”
And we have even more from AWS’ big shindig here, if that is your jam!

TechCrunch Experts

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If you’re curious about how these surveys are shaping our coverage, check out this article on TechCrunch+ from Kerry Cunningham, “Product-led growth and signal substitution syndrome: Bringing it all together.”

November 29, 2021

Daily Crunch: Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey steps down, board moves CTO Parag Agrawal to top spot

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here.

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for November 29, 2021! It’s Monday, we’re back, you are back and the news is back. If you had hoped that the post-Thanksgiving, pre-holiday break period was going to be relaxed, no dice. As you have already seen in the subject line, we have a lot to get into. —Alex

P.S. We’re having a little Cyber Monday sale for TechCrunch Sessions: Space tickets!

The TechCrunch Top 3

Jack logs off: From Twitter’s CEO role, that is. This morning, double-CEO Jack Dorsey announced that he will bounce from his perch atop Twitter, handing off the chief executive reins to the company’s CTO. TechCrunch’s take is that the elevation of Parag Agrawal to the top role bodes well for the company’s larger crypto efforts.
Clearview AI irks U.K.: While we may disagree with the United Kingdom on what to call the trunk of a car or its hood, we can agree with the island nation that Clearview AI is not our favorite company. The facial recognition shop has been given a “provisional notice” that it is to “stop further processing of U.K. citizens’ data and to delete any data it already holds.” It’s also set to receive a fine.
Is e-commerce growth slowing? New data from the fake U.S. shopping holiday “Black Friday” showed lower digital spending than in 2020. TechCrunch added to that data point by trawling a series of recent disappointing earnings from e-commerce companies to wonder if the online market for selling stuff is seeing its growth slow.

Startups/VC

Positive social networking? What if your social network was a series of self-improvement challenges that you could undertake and then share results with your friends? That’s what startup Alms is cooking up. It’s something akin to the anti-Twitter, we reckon.
Yassir wants to build the North African super app: Flush with a $30 million Series A, Yassir’s service that provides things like ride-hailing and delivery is building a huge marketplace for its region. The “super app for geographic region X” is a fun model to take on, as it is good in that the TAM is huge, but tough in that point-solution competitors could prove tough to beat.
Today in great opening paragraphs: Our own Rebecca Bellan has a brilliant way of explaining what Foundry Lab, which just raised an $8 million round and came out of stealth earlier today, is building. So, instead of paraphrasing, here is the paragraph in its entirety:

Remember Easy Bake Ovens? You’d mix up some colored powder and water until a dough or batter formed, put it in a mold, pop it in the oven and before you knew it — ding! A disgusting treat. Foundry Lab, a New Zealand-based startup with backing from Rocket Lab’s Peter Beck, has figured out how to do something similar, except instead of chemicals and an “oven,” it’s metals and a microwave.

YallaMarket hopes that quick commerce is a global wave: Sure, there are 2,349 companies competing for quick delivery of goods in the U.K., but YallaMarket is betting that the model will also scale across the Middle East. It has raised just a few million thus far but is a company to keep tabs on.
If cloud is good, are clouds better? One of our two enterprise gurus, Ron Miller, has a post up today about Upbound. The gist is that the company has built a tool that helps companies manage their multi-cloud setup. Why multi-cloud? Per Ron, because companies today don’t want to get locked into a single provider. Makes sense. Upbound just raised $60 million.
Thought Machine raises $200M: B2B cloud banking concern Thought Machine is now a unicorn. Uncork the sparkling apple juice. We might yammer on more regarding the valuation threshold that the startup has reached, but, it was not alone:
Today in Tiger: Two rounds today! First, Indian credit card startup Slice is now a unicorn. And, in evidence that no startup name can be too dumb to succeed — hello “Google” and “TechCrunch” — Mr Yum has raised $65 million for its mobile ordering service.
I have to stop, but there was even more announced today, including rounds from FJDynamics and Motorway.

Product-led growth and signal substitution syndrome: Bringing it all together

Image Credits: Halfdark (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Collecting data to optimize B2B marketing is notoriously difficult.

“Practitioners tend to see each new source of information about their potential buyers — each signal type — as a substitute for the last one that didn’t work,” according to Kerry Cunningham, senior principal at account engagement platform 6sense.

Embracing a product-led growth mindset allows organizations to look at users as signals, “just like form-fill leads, de-anonymized website traffic, visitors to your booth, and the rest,” says Cunningham.

(TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

Facebook whistleblower to chat about Section 230 with Congress: The leaker of a great number of internal Facebook documents will testify in front of Congress regarding U.S. laws relating to content moderation and the hosting of speech online. We are sure that Congress will ask substantive questions this time.
AWS wants to help robots: The major cloud computing platforms are a lot more than store-and-compute services. AWS has a new project called RoboRunner that wants to help fleets of robots work together more intelligently, for example. Also keep in mind that both AWS and Azure offer “ground station as a service” for satellite companies.
Today in big deals: One major bucket of hungry capital (Francisco Partners) is selling a morsel from its table (Quest Software) to another pile of cash (Clearlake Capital). The deal is worth $5.4 billion, far more than Francisco paid for the “legacy security vendor” back in 2012.

TechCrunch Experts

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TechCrunch wants you to recommend software consultants who have expertise in UI/UX, website development, mobile development and more! If you’re a software consultant, pass this survey along to your clients; we’d like to hear about why they loved working with you.

November 28, 2021

VC has a pivotal role to play in the climate fight, but it can’t do everything

Ion Yadigaroglu Contributor

Ion Yadigaroglu is managing partner of Capricorn Investment Group and a GP of Capricorn's Technology Impact Fund. He is an early investor in iconic deep tech companies including Tesla, SpaceX, Planet, Saildrone, QuantumScape, Joby Aviation, Helion Energy, Twelve, Electric Hydrogen, Redwood Materials and others. He serves on the board of nonprofit Ceres and the Technical Advisory Group of MethaneSAT.

VC’s strengths

At its best, the venture model enables young companies to take risks on early technology and pursue innovation in a way that large companies cannot. It might be counterintuitive, but venture-backed startups — beyond the magic created by their highly performing founders and organizations — also often outspend much larger and better-financed companies.

For a decade, Tesla, then an early-stage startup, easily outspent and outthought VW, Ford and the rest of the established car companies on engineering, designing and manufacturing electric vehicles (EVs). Similarly, startups Joby Aviation and Lilium are running circles around Boeing and Airbus on electric vertical takeoff (eVTOL) aircraft and QuantumScape is leading on next generation solid-state batteries.

Due to short-term horizons, CEOs at large companies focus on incremental growth, cost savings and other “market-driven” imperatives and cannot stomach the risks required to develop and commercialize disruptive innovation. Although history is filled with vivid lessons in disruption, big company CEOs still don’t lead. As a result, we continue to find areas where long time horizons, high risks and lack of leadership yield opportunities uniquely tailored to VC. A striking example is that 20 years after Tesla, there are still such opportunities in electrifying the transportation space. For instance, with the EV revolution now underway, the need to recycle EVs and their batteries is becoming critical to sustaining growth; the leadership position in this nascent endeavor to recycle batteries is once more occupied by a startup, Redwood Materials.

Venture investors can push forward climate-friendly disruption in many legacy industries. Take, for instance, the chemical and manufacturing sectors. The incumbent companies in these and other heavy industries are slow to act and culturally inept in reacting to disruption. VC money, on the other hand, is helping to develop technologies that will give them no choice but to adapt, such as sourcing hydrocarbons sustainably by using renewable energy to separate hydrogen from water and carbon from air and combining these elements into all the chemicals that we have until now made from coal, oil and gas. Young companies like Electric Hydrogen and Twelve are doing exactly that.

Venture is also well positioned to provide funding for experimental technologies, like fusion energy. Outside of government, there are essentially no incumbent companies in this area, and with no adjacent companies bold enough to seize the day, the field is reliant on startups. Several startups have this year attracted more than $500 million each of investment capital, including Helion Energy and Commonwealth Fusion Systems.

VC can’t solve everything

Despite my optimism about our ability to have an impact, we must remember that tech, let alone venture funding, is only one piece of the puzzle in addressing climate change. We must scale clean tech solutions unnaturally fast in order to combat the relentless march of climate change, and VC is not well structured as a sector to address some of those key challenges.

First, we need to see giant sums of capital, dwarfing anything in VC, flow to low-risk, already established solar, wind and storage technology, often in countries with weaker currencies and much higher financing costs than the nearly free money we can access in the United States. By our estimates, more than $30 trillion, and therefore more than 10% of all investable capital in the world, needs to be invested in the coming decade, at rates of return of no more than a few percent; otherwise, clean infrastructure will not proliferate fast enough to combat the relentless tide of climate change.

The good news is that giant sums of capital are currently languishing in bonds at rates of return below those in renewables. One of the challenges of this decade is to incentivize other sectors of the financial markets to reallocate some of that capital, especially in emerging markets where demand for power, transportation, materials and food is growing quickly. VC, with its demand for high returns and mismatched scale of capital, will have little bearing on this giant, but pivotal, infrastructure challenge and opportunity.

Many point to “impact investing” as a way around this problem. And it’s true: During our early years, we were often the only capital available to a new startup, and therefore we had the leverage to demand a high return. We could invest in high-impact initiatives without sacrificing our financial incentives.

But as we have been joined by many new funds in pursuing clean tech opportunities, the balance between impact and return has become harder to strike. We need to recognize the potential incongruence between high returns and high impact, and VCs today need to add singular value to justify a higher cost of capital and also remain disciplined amidst great enthusiasm in the sector. It’s very tempting to chase “hot” opportunities and shift focus to proliferating more mainstream technology. From my perspective, clean tech is still ripe for breakthrough technological innovation and the best and most impactful VCs will maintain a contrarian philosophy and focus on areas that are unpopular and unable to otherwise attract capital at an early stage.

Second, the importance of government intervention cannot be overlooked. The market is not pushing incumbents in the energy and other industrial spaces to transition away from dirty, fossil-based systems fast enough. Despite the promises of net-zero pledges and the growing accountability for results demanded by shareholders, government mandates likely remain necessary to speed up this process.

Finally, philanthropy has an important role to play. I am very proud that I helped launch the nonprofit MethaneSAT, an organization that will police methane leaks from oil and gas operations globally through satellite imaging. Though clearly impactful, the initiative’s role as an open and objective policy enforcement tool does not align properly with a for-profit endeavor. There are numerous other important nonprofit interventions to fund and pursue.

It has been a great privilege to have supported from an early stage some of the most iconic and important companies and technologies in clean tech. But enabling these technologies and the startups around them remains only one ingredient in our fight against climate change. We cannot let the excitement about new technology distract us from the monumental infrastructure tasks needed in the near future. A substantial portion of the world’s financial capital needs to turn its attention to this space, and other forms of capital — social, political, philanthropic — must also be deployed if we are to secure a more stable future for generations to come.