Tag: Finance

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Walmart launches two new credit cards offering 5% back on digital purchases

Walmart is partnering with Capital One to launch a new credit card program, which rolls on September 24, and includes both co-branded and private-label cards. The former, the Capital One Walmart Mastercard, includes 5% back on purchases made on Walmart.com or paid for in-store using Walmart Pay (the latter for the first 12 months.) The private label card, the Walmart Rewards Card, will offer those same perks, but is limited to being used only in Walmart stores and on Walmart.com.

After the 12-month introductory period, the co-branded Mastercard will drop to 2% on Walmart purchases in stores, instead of 5%. However, it will continue to offer 5% on Walmart.com purchases, including Walmart Grocery.

It also offers 2% back on restaurants and travel and 1% back everywhere else. The card doesn’t include any annual fee or foreign transaction feeds, and its rewards can be used any time, Walmart says.

Customers can apply for the new card via Walmart’s website or app, or through CapitalOne.com. The application itself can be filled out using a mobile device and, once approved, customers gain access to the card immediately. They can also load the card into Walmart Pay or into the Walmart app before the physical card arrives in the mail — similar to how Apple’s new Apple Card works.

Through Capital One, customers will receive purchase notifications, security alerts, 0% fraud liability, and the ability to lock/unlock a lost or stolen card from the Capital One app.

The new Walmart store card, meanwhile, also offers 5% back on purchases on Walmart.com, in Walmart app, and on Walmart Pay in-store purchases during the introductory period. It then offers 2% back on Walmart purchases afterward. It also earns 2% back at Walmart Fuel Stations.

Current Walmart cardholders will be converted to the Capital One Walmart Rewards Mastercard or the Walmart Rewards Card, starting October 11, with physical cards arriving in November. They’ll also earn 5% back through Walmart Pay through October 14, 2020.

Walmart’s prior card, from Synchrony Bank, offered smaller rewards, noted Sara Rathner, credit cards expert at NerdWallet, in a statement published this morning.

“The Capital One Walmart Rewards Mastercard is definitely helping to cement 5% back as the gold standard among retail cards. We already see this rewards rate with the Amazon Prime Rewards Visa card and the Target REDcard. The previous Walmart card issued by Synchrony Bank only offered 3% back on Walmart.com and a paltry 1% back in-store, so the new card is a huge step up,” she said.

Credit card partnerships are an area of importance to major retailers, including Walmart’s chief rival, Amazon. Its credit card program includes a variety of options, including store cards, travel cards, prepaid cards, no annual fee cards, reward points cards and more. And of course both retailers today are, to some extent, challenged by Apple, which just entered the credit card space, too.

Branded store cards not only help to increase customer loyalty, they also drive more purchases, reduce credit card processing fees, create additional profit in the form of interest, and generate records of customer purchases that can be used for targeted advertising.

“As our company has evolved to serve customers shopping in stores, online, and on the Walmart apps, we also recognized the need to fully digitally enable the cardholder experience,” said Daniel Eckert, senior vice president, Walmart services and digital acceleration, in a statement. “That’s why we’ve worked with Capital One to make it possible for cardholders to manage essentially every interaction with the program right from the palm of their hands,” he said.

 

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Indonesia’s Julo raises $10M to expand its P2P lending platform

Julo, a peer-to-peer lending platform in Indonesia, said on Wednesday it has extended its $5 million Series A raise to $15 million as it looks to scale its business in the key Southeast Asian market.

The $10 million Series A2 round for the Jakarta-headquartered startup was led by Quona Capital, with Skystar, East Ventures, Provident, Gobi Partners, and Convergence participating in it. The two-year-old startup, which has raised about $16 million to date, is now closing the round, Adrianus Hitijahubessy, co-founder and CEO of Julo, told TechCrunch in an interview.

Through its eponymous Android app, Julo provides loans of about $300 to users at aggressively competitive rate of 3-5% per month — one of its key differentiating factors. Julo has managed to keep its interest rate low because its credit scoring system is more efficient than those of its rivals, claimed Hitijahubessy, who has amassed more than a decade of experience in credit scoring system using alternative data from his previous stints.

“There are lots of players in this market. Not just Indonesia, but globally. But it comes down to who actually knows what they are doing. The bar is becoming higher and it is increasingly becoming difficult for digital lending companies to just launch an app and charge high interest rate,” he said.

Julo works with banks and individuals to finance loans to customers. It says it has disbursed about $50 million to date.

Hitijahubessy said Julo will use the fresh capital to expand the team and enhance its credit score system. The startup intends to focus on growing its business in Indonesia itself.

In a statement, Ganesh Rengaswamy, co-founder and partner of Quona Capital, said, “a significant majority of JULO’s loans are used for productive purposes that can enhance the economic well-being of families and small businesses — driving financial inclusion in Indonesia, which is a cornerstone of Quona’s focus.”

Digital lending is becoming an increasingly crowded space in South Asian markets. In India, for instance, a growing number of digital mobile wallets including Paytm and MobiKwik have recently started to offer credits to customers.

Indonesia’s KoinWorks raises $12 million to grow its P2P SME lending platform

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The founders of Robin Healthcare think doctors need smart assistants too

Robin Healthcare,  a new startup founded by serial entrepreneurs Noah Auerhahn and Emilio Galan, is hoping to harness the power of personal assistants to make the business of healthcare easier for the physicians who practice it

The company’s technology, which works much the same way as a Google Home or Amazon Alexa or Echo, is placed in hospital rooms and transcribes and formats doctor interactions with patients to reduce paperwork and streamline the behind-the-scenes part of the process that can drive doctors to the point of distraction, the company’s co-founder said.

“I had a background doing claims data work in healthcare was at UCSF and finishing my clinical training,” says Galan. “And I was hearing lots of doctors telling me not to practice.”

The problem, says Galan, was the overabundance of paperwork. After school Galan doubled down on his work in claims and billing launching a company called HonestHealth where he worked with institutions and companies . like The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Consumer Reports, and the New York State Department of Health to analyze health care claims data and develop consumer applications.

Galan met Auerhahn at the HLTH conference a few years ago just as Auerhahn was looking for his next challenge after the sale of his previous company, ExtraBux.

The two men saw the wave of smart devices coming and figured there must be a way to use the technology to build a fully billable clinical report from monitoring the conversations with patients.

The company currently has dozens of its smart devices installed in hospitals around the country including a large surgical practice in Tennessee, the Campbell Clinic; Duke University Medical Center’s Private Diagnostic Clinic; the University of California San Francisco Medical Center; and Webster Orthopedics in Northern California.

Robin integrates with the major electronic health records companies, Epic and Cerner, through third party integrations that are designed to make it easier to input data automatically as doctors are assessing a patient’s condition and delivering treatments.

“Part of why Robin exists is to avoid technology interrupting care,” says Auerhahn. “Having fewer interactions with EMR is a good way to do that.”

Robin’s service is human-assisted natural language processing to make sure that the data is input correctly.

The company’s early vision has been enough to attract investors like Norwest Venture Partners, which led the company’s $11.5 million Series A round.

In all, Robin Healthcare has raised $15 million in financing. The company’s other investors include Social Leverage, the early stage investment firm founded by Howard Lindzon.

 

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India bans e-cigarettes citing youth health concerns

India’s government has announced an immediate ban on e-cigarettes — citing youth-focused public health concerns.

In a news statement following a cabinet meeting today finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said the ban covers production, manufacturing, import, export, transport, sale, distribution, storage and advertising of e-cigarettes.

Sitharaman suggested India’s youth are viewing e-cigarettes as a “style statement”, implying it’s encouraging them to get hooked on nicotine — whereas she noted that companies behind the vaping trend have pitched their products as a way to ween existing smokers off cigarettes.

“This decision is taken keeping in mind the impact that [e-cigarettes are] having on the youth of today,” she said of the ban order. “The data that we have largely is derived from the US’ experience and it the US the latest stats that I have before me states that there has been a 77.8% growth among school students who are at the 10th and 12th level.”

She also pointed to “surprising” growth in e-cigarette use among US middle school students — up 48.5%, per stats she cited. 

India has some 106M adult smokers, making it a major market for cigarette companies of all stripes. But with the e-cigarette ban, vaping startups like Juul are set to be shut out entirely — even as traditional tobacco giants are allowed to continue to operate.

According to the World Health Organization the use of tobacco in Indian, which includes both smoked and smokeless products, kills close to 1M people per year.

The ban on e-cigarettes will need formal approval when India’s parliament returns this fall, though this step is typically considered a formality.

Penalties for breaching the ban order include up to one year in jail and a fine of 100,000 rupees ($1,405) for first-time offenders, per Reuters. Repeat violation risks up to three years and a penalty of up to 500,000 rupees. It’s not clear whether users of e-cigarettes will risk any penalties for the act of vaping itself.

India’s ban comes at a time when the US is also preparing to tighten regulation in response to concerns around youth vaping. This month the Trump administration said it’s working on a compliance policy for flavored e-cigarettes that are especially appealing to children.

Trump administration is readying tighter regulations on e-cigarettes, including ban on flavorings

The US’ CDC public health agency also recently warned against using e-cigarettes — as it investigates a lung condition associated with vaping, following hundreds of cases and a suspected death in August.

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With its third fund, Revolution Ventures stays true to its mission

Most of the venture capital firms covered in TechCrunch and other tech publications compete for a spot on the cap table of the hottest Bay Area, New York or Los Angeles companies of the moment. Few seek out companies in Indianapolis, Milwaukee or Tampa.

AOL co-founder and former chief executive officer Steve Case’s venture capital fund, Revolution, deploys capital to companies “outside of the hotbeds.” Revolution, the parent company of Revolution Ventures, the Rise of the Rest Seed Fund and Revolution Growth, has evangelized its approach to backing companies in emerging markets, helping promote entrepreneurialism in geographies often overlooked by Silicon Valley’s Patagonia vest-wearing venture capitalists.

Tige Savage Rev Ventures

Revolution Ventures managing partner Tige Savage.

“When we started doing this, it was heretical,” Revolution co-founder Tige Savage tells TechCrunch. “People who were investors thought, ‘Why would you do this? It’s not where the talent is. It’s a flawed strategy.’ Well, nobody says that anymore. Lots of firms are now talking about this pretty actively.”

Today, Washington, DC-based Revolution is announcing its latest fund. Revolution Ventures, its Series A and Series B-focused outfit, has raised a $215 million third fund, almost precisely the size of Revolution Ventures I and II, which each closed on $200 million. The firm’s portfolio includes Detroit’s direct-to-consumer plant startup Bloomscape, Chicago-based Paro, which provides a network of on-demand finance professionals, DC’s custom framing business Framebridge, Milwaukee-based monthly wine club Bright Cellars and New York insurtech company Policygenius.

Since Revolution launched in 2005, venture capital activity in underrepresented markets has grown significantly. Utah’s Salt Lake City and Provo have garnered a reputation for churning out great tech businesses, earning it the nickname Silicon Slopes . Austin and Denver have emerged as VC hubs, rapidly becoming formidable opponents to Silicon Valley’s upstarts.

Historically there’s been a reluctance to get on an airplane for that $3 million to $5 million check. - Revolution Ventures managing partner David Golden

VC firms like NEA, which invests in companies across industries and stages, has made a concerted effort to tap into the Atlanta startup ecosystem, another market that has seen considerable growth thanks to the corporations headquartered there and the network of universities producing top-notch engineers.

“We look at areas that have one legacy industry in the region, where some Fortune 500 companies have established career opportunities to retain talent, where there is a supportive angel and seed network to get folks going and where the costs to scale a company are more reasonable,” Clara Sieg, who was promoted to partner for Revolution Ventures’ third fund, tells TechCrunch. Sieg recently joined us on Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital podcast, to explain the firm’s “rise of the rest” philosophy.

Competition for access to deals in the Bay Area, however, has priced many investors out of the most sought-after rounds. This has encouraged many VCs, who perhaps don’t have access to a seemingly endless pool of capital, to search elsewhere for potential “unicorns.”

“Historically there’s been a reluctance to get on an airplane for that $3 million to $5 million check, but once the company is seasoned and they are getting ready for that Series B or Series C, that’s worth getting on an airplane for,” Revolution Ventures managing partner David Golden tells TechCrunch. “We see more activity there from the traditional East Coast and West Coast firms.”

We looked back and realized we drove the greatest returns in these off the beaten path geographies. - Revolution co-founder Tige Savage

As for Revolution’s competition, Golden says that tends to come from within the local ecosystem in a given city: “I think that’s likely to change in the years ahead thanks to the work that Revolution and Steve Case have done to shine a light on areas outside the hotbeds,” he adds.

Revolution began nearly 15 years ago as Steve Case’s balance sheet fund, in essence. Quickly realizing the untapped opportunity to reap big returns by investing in second and third-tier markets, co-founders Savage, Case and Donn Davis formalized the strategy. Ultimately, the team built three firms under the Revolution umbrella, allowing them to invest across all stages.

“We were not seated in Sand Hill Road so we knew we would have to get on airplanes,” Savage said. “Then we looked back and realized we drove the greatest returns in these off the beaten path geographies.”

Investing elsewhere with Revolution’s Clara Sieg

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IEX’s Katsuyama is no flash in the pan

When you watch a commercial for one of the major stock exchanges, you are welcomed into a world of fast-moving, slick images full of glistening buildings, lush crops and happy people. They are typically interspersed with shots of intrepid executives veering out over the horizon as if to say, “I’ve got a long-term vision, and the exchange where my stock is listed is a valuable partner in achieving my goals.” It’s all very reassuring and stylish. But there’s another side to the story.

I have been educated about the realities of today’s stock exchange universe through recent visits with Brad Katsuyama, co-founder and CEO of IEX (a.k.a. The Investors Exchange). If Katsuyama’s name rings a bell, and you don’t work on Wall Street, it’s likely because you remember him as the protagonist of Michael Lewis’s 2014 best-seller, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt, which explored high-frequency trading (HFT) and made the case that the stock market was rigged, really badly.

Five years later, some of the worst practices Lewis highlighted are things of the past, and there are several attributes of the American equity markets that are widely admired around the world. In many ways, though, the realities of stock trading have gotten more unseemly, thanks to sophisticated trading technologies (e.g., microwave radio transmissions that can carry information at almost the speed of light), and pitched battles among the exchanges, investors and regulators over issues including the rebates stock exchanges pay to attract investors’ orders and the price of market data charged by the exchanges.

I don’t claim to be an expert on the inner workings of the stock market, but I do know this: Likening the life cycle of a trade to sausage-making is an insult to kielbasa. More than ever, trading is an arcane, highly technical and bewildering part of our broader economic infrastructure, which is just the way many industry participants like it: Nothing to see here, folks.

Meanwhile, Katsuyama, company president Ronan Ryan and the IEX team have turned IEX into the eighth largest stock exchange company, globally, by notional value traded, and have transformed the concept of a “speed bump” into a mainstream exchange feature.

Brad Aug 12

Brad Katsuyama. Image via IEX Trading

Despite these and other accomplishments, IEX finds itself in the middle of a vicious battle with powerful incumbents that seem increasingly emboldened to use their muscle in Washington, D.C. What’s more, new entrants, such as The Long-Term Stock Exchange and Members Exchange, are gearing up to enter the fray in US equities, while global exchanges such as the Hong Kong Stock Exchange seek to bulk up by making audacious moves like attempting to acquire the venerable London Stock Exchange.

But when you sell such distinct advantages to one group that really can only benefit from that, it leads to the question of why anyone would want to trade on that market. It’s like walking into a playing field where you know that the deck is stacked against you.

As my discussion with Katsuyama reveals, IEX may have taken some punches in carving out a position for itself in this high-stakes war characterized by cutting-edge technology and size. However, the IEX team remains girded for battle and confident that it can continue to make headway in offering a fair and transparent option for market participants over the long term.

Gregg Schoenberg: Given Flash Boys and the attention it generated for you on Main Street, I’d like to establish something upfront. Does IEX exist for the asset manager, the individual, or both?

Brad Katsuyama: We exist primarily for the asset manager, and helping them helps the individual. We’re one step removed from the individual, and part of that is due to regulation. Only brokers can connect to exchanges, and the asset manager connects to the broker.

Schoenberg: To put a finer point on it, you believe in fairness and being the good guy. But you are not Robinhood. You are a capitalist.

Katsuyama: Yes, but we want to make money fairly. Actually, we thought initially about starting the business as a nonprofit, But once we laid out all the people we would need to convince to work for us, we realized it would’ve been hard for us to attract the skill sets needed as a nonprofit.

Schoenberg: Do you believe that the US equity market today primarily serves investors or traders?

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$100M Grant for the Web fund aims to jump-start a new way to pay online

Getting paid for providing content online isn’t simple, and as the ad-based economy continues to collapse pretty much everyone is looking for alternatives. One problem: While the web is great at moving images and audio and files around, it has a real problem with money. Coil, Mozilla, and Creative Commons hope to change that with a native web payments standard and $100M to get it off the ground.

“Web monetization” is the name of the game here, not just generally but also the specific new web protocol being proposed. It’s meant to be an open, interoperable standard that will let anyone send money to anyone else on the web.

That doesn’t mean it sprang fully formed out of nowhere, though. It’s based on a protocol called Interledger pursued by former Ripple CTO Stefan Thomas in his new company Coil.

“We were basically applying the concept of internet protocol to payments — routing little packets of money,” Thomas told TechCrunch, though he was quick to add that it’s not blockchain-powered. Those systems, he said, are useful in their place, but end up bogged down in upkeep and administration. And services like Flattr are great, he said, but limited by the fact that they’re essentially run by a single company.

Interledger, he explained, is a protocol for securely and universally connecting existing payment systems in a totally agnostic way. “It supports any underlying payment structure, bitcoin or a bank ledger or whatever, and any connection you use, satellite or wi-fi, it doesn’t care. We were working on on it for a long time, since like 2015, and last year were like, well, how do we get this out into the real world?”

300M-user meme site Imgur raises $20M from Coil to pay creators

The answer was a new company, for one thing, but also partnering with open web advocates at Mozilla and Creative Commons on Grant for the Web, a $100M fund to disburse with their input. Both have a seat at the table in selecting grant recipients, and the latter is a recipient itself.

“This is an opportunity for CC to experiment with optional micropayments in CC Search,” said Creative Commons interim CEO Cable Green. “If users want to provide micropayments to authors of openly licensed images, to show gratitude, we’re interested in exploring these options with our global community.”

“An open source micropayment protocol and ecosystem could be good for creators and users,” he continued. “Building a web that doesn’t rely on data acquisition and advertising is a good thing.”

The $100M fund is all Coil money, which makes sense as Coil was founded to promote and develop the Interledger and Web Monetization protocols. Huge funding pushes don’t seem like the ordinary way to establish new web standards, but Thomas explained that payments are a unique case.

“The underlying business model for the web is kind of broken,” he said. And that’s partly by design: Enormous companies with vested interests in existing payment and monetization structures are always working to maintain the status quo or shift it in a favorable direction — companies like Google that rely on advertising, or Visa and others that power traditional payment methods.

Payments giant Stripe debuts a credit card in its latest step into the financing fray

“From our perspective, what the standard is ultimately competing with is proprietary platforms with billions in funding,” Thomas said.

The $100M fund will be spread out over five years or so, and will be awarded both to companies and people that use or plan to use the Web Monetization standard in an interesting way, and to content creators who are poorly served by existing monetization methods.

Long tail content that’s nevertheless important, like investigative journalism or documentaries from and by marginalized communities, is one of the targets for the fund. Grants could come in the form of direct funding, or matching subscribers’ contributions. There’s no quid pro quo, Thomas said, except for a hard minimum of half the content being released under an open license like Creative Commons — which that organization is likely excited about.

Right now a subscription-based browser extension that allows easy payments to sites that have implemented the standard is the only way to get in the door. Admittedly that’s not a very sexy onboarding experience. But part of the fund is intended to juice the development and adoption of the standard much more widely.

It’s a way — though an expensive one, sure — to show that an alternative model exists to the traditional ad-based or subscription-based methods of supporting content.

You can sign up now to be notified when they start accepting grant applications at grantfortheweb.org.

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Leeto helps works councils manage perks

French startup Leeto provides a service for French works councils, better known as comités d’entreprise. The fintech startup lets you hand out perks to employees using a simple web service combined with a payment card.

Leeto recently raised a $2.2 million funding round (€2 million) from Founders Future and various business angels, such as Thomas Rebaud (Meero), Benjamin Netter (October) and Vincent Luciani (Artefact).

If you’re not familiar with French works councils, every French company with more than 50 employees has to elect representatives to defend the interests of employees — starting in 2020, companies with more than 11 employees will have a works council. They act as the interface between members of the board and employees, and they vote on strategic moves.

In addition to that role, companies have to hand out a small budget to the works council every year. Works councils can then reimburse cultural or sports activities, hand out gift cards for Christmas, give movie tickets, etc.

And Leeto wants to manage that budget in particular. Many companies currently have a cumbersome process. You have to send receipts of your yoga lessons, find a store that accepts your gift cards… It’s even worse for representatives as they have to order paper gift cards and make sure everyone picks up their gift cards at their desk.

Leeto is a software-as-a-service the lets you manage all that from a web browser. You can add employees and then grant them perks.

Later this year, every employee will get a prepaid Mastercard that the works council can top up and manage. For instance, representatives can hand out €500 a year for vacation and cultural activities. Employees can then use this card to pay for a Netflix subscription, train tickets, museum tickets and more. It works a bit like Lunchr, but for works councils.

If employees go on vacation and forget their card, they can also upload eligible expenses to get reimbursed even if they paid with a personal card.

On the works council’s side, Leeto wants to make it easier to manage accounting and send notifications to employees. Leeto currently costs €3 per employee per month, but that’s directly taken from the budget of the works council so employees don’t pay that.

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Calculating sales efficiency in a start-up: The magic number that will help you scale

Ryan Floyd Contributor
Ryan Floyd is a founding Managing Director of Storm Ventures, investing in early stage enterprise SaaS companies, and the host of Ask a VC Youtube channel.

Sales efficiency is the best way to understand the economics of a business. To me, it answers the question as to whether a business can ever scale. The harsh truth is, if it can’t scale, investors won’t be interested.

Sales efficiency is more simple to measure than other related concepts like CAC (customer acquisition cost) or LTV (lifetime value). Here’s why:

  • CAC is harder to truly measure, especially new CAC. In a SaaS organization, sometimes it can be hard to allocate those costs to what that new CAC is, as opposed to upsell or cross-sell within the same organization. Salespeople are almost always trying to pursue two goals:
    • Trying to acquire new customers
    • Selling within an existing customer (more seats within an established department, or expanding to a new division)

These activities generate different CAC; trying to strip out only the new CAC can be tricky. Sales efficiency, on the other hand, looks at all net new ARR (annual recurring revenue), which includes new customer ARR as well as expansion ARR.

  • LTV tries to measure the value of a customer over time, assuming both repeat purchases and eventual churn; this gives you a good sense of the ultimate value of that customer to your business over time. The challenge with LTV in SaaS is that the data points that you might use to assume churn and repeat purchase behavior aren’t very robust — there are few SaaS businesses that have enough customers to really make these numbers reliable.

Enterprise businesses should focus on unit economics of sales early. When a business scales, it rarely buys you better economics — usually it just means more losses.

Gracphic for sales efficiency

Image via Ryan Floyd / Storm Ventures

The role of sales efficiency in your ‘go-to-market fit’

At Storm Ventures we use a concept we call finding ‘go-to-market fit’ (GTM fit).

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Ten questions for 2020 presidential candidate John Delaney

In November 2020, America will go to the polls to vote in perhaps the most consequential election in a generation. The winner will lead the country amid great social, economic and ecological unrest. The 2020 election will be a referendum on both the current White House and the direction of the country at large.

Nearly 20 years into the young century, technology has become a pervasive element in all of our lives, and will continue to only grow more important. Whoever takes the oath of office in January 2021 will have to answer some difficult questions, raging from an impending climate disaster to concerns about job loss at the hands of robotics and automation.

Many of these questions are overlooked in day to day coverage of candidates and during debates. In order to better address the issues, TechCrunch staff has compiled a 10-part questionnaire across a wide range of tech-centric topics. The questions have been sent to national candidates, regardless of party. We will be publishing the answers as we receive them. Candidates are not required to answer all 10 in order for us to publish, but we will be noting which answers have been left blank.

First up is former Congressman John Delaney. Prior to being elected to Maryland’s 6th Congressional District, Delaney co-founded and led healthcare loan service Health Care Financial Partners (HCFP) and  commercial lender CapitalSource. He was elected to Congress in 2013, beating out a 10-term Republican incumbent. Rumored to be running against Maryland governor Larry Hogan for a 2018 bid, Delaney instead announced plans to run for president in 2020.

1. Which initiatives will you prioritize to limit humankind’s impact on climate and avoid potential climate catastrophe?

My $4 trillion Climate Plan will enable us to reach the goal of net zero emissions by 2050, which the IPCC says is the necessary target to avoid the worst effects of climate change. The centerpiece of my plan is a carbon-fee-and-dividend that will put a price on carbon emissions and return the money to the American people through a dividend. My plan also includes increased federal funding for renewable energy research, advanced nuclear technologies, direct air capture, a new Climate Corps program, and the construction of the Carbon Throughway, which would transport captured carbon from all over the country to the Permian Basin for reuse and permanent sequestration.

2. What is your plan to increase black and Latinx startup founders’ access to funding?

As a former entrepreneur who started two companies that went on to be publicly traded, I am a firm believer in the importance of entrepreneurship. To ensure people from all backgrounds have the support they need to start a new business, I will create nonprofit banks to serve economically distressed communities, launch a new SBIC program to help provide access to capital to minority entrepreneurs, and create a grant program to fund business incubators and accelerators at HBCUs. Additionally, I pledge to appoint an Entrepreneurship Czar who will be responsible for promoting entrepreneurship-friendly policies at all levels of government and encouraging entrepreneurship in rural and urban communities that have been left behind by venture capital investment.

3. Why do you think low-income students are underrepresented in STEM fields and how do you think the government can help fix that problem?

I think a major part of the problem is that schools serving low-income communities don’t have the resources they need to provide a quality STEM education to every student. To fix that, I have an education plan that will increase investment in STEM education and use Title I funding to eliminate the $23 billion annual funding gap between predominantly white and predominantly black school districts. To encourage students to continue their education after they graduate from high school and ensure every student learns the skills they need, my plan also provides two years of free in-state tuition and fees at a public university, community college, or technical school to everyone who completes one year of my mandatory national service program.

4. Do you plan on backing and rolling out paper-only ballots or paper-verified election machines? With many stakeholders in the private sector and the government, how do you aim to coordinate and achieve that?

Making sure that our elections are secure is vital, and I think using voting machines that create a voter-verified paper record could improve security and increase voters’ confidence in the integrity of our elections. To address other facets of the election security issue, I have proposed creating a Department of Cybersecurity to help protect our election systems, and while in Congress I introduced election security legislation to ensure that election vendors are solely owned and controlled by American citizens.

5. What, if any, federal regulation should be enacted for autonomous vehicles?

I was proud to be the founder of the Congressional Artificial Intelligence Caucus, a bipartisan group of lawmakers dedicated to understanding the impacts of advances in AI technology and educating other legislators so they have the knowledge they need to enact policies that ensure these innovations benefit Americans. We need to use the legislative process to have a real conversation involving experts and other stakeholders in order to develop a comprehensive set of regulations regarding autonomous vehicles, which should include standards that address data collection practices and other privacy issues as well as more fundamental questions about public safety.

6. How do you plan to achieve and maintain U.S. superiority in space, both in government programs and private industry?

Space exploration is tremendously important to me as a former Congressman from Maryland, the home of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, major space research centers at the University of Maryland, and many companies that develop crucial aerospace technologies. As president, I will support the NASA budget and will continue to encourage innovation in the private sector.

7. Increased capital in startups founded by American entrepreneurs is a net positive, but should the U.S. allow its businesses to be part-owned by foreign governments, particularly the government of Saudi Arabia?

I am concerned that joint ventures between U.S. businesses and foreign governments, including state-owned enterprises, could facilitate the theft of intellectual property, potentially allowing foreign governments to benefit from taxpayer-funded research. We need to put in place greater protections that defend American innovation from theft.

8. Will U.S.-China technology decoupling harm or benefit U.S. innovation and why?

In general, I am in favor of international technology cooperation but in the case of China, it engages in predatory economic behavior and disregards international rules. Intellectual property theft has become a big problem for American businesses as China allows its companies to steal IP through joint ventures. In theory, U.S.-China collaboration could advance technology and innovation but without proper IP and economic protections, U.S.-China joint ventures and partnerships can be detrimental to the U.S.

9. How large a threat does automation represent to American jobs? Do you have a plan to help train low-skilled workers and otherwise offset job loss?

Automation could lead to the disruption of up to 54 million American jobs if we aren’t prepared and we don’t have the right policies. To help American workers transition to the high-tech, high-skill future economy, I am calling for a national AI strategy that will support public/private AI partnerships, develop a social contract with the communities that are negatively impacted by technology and globalization, and create updated education and job training programs that will help students and those currently in the workforce learn the skills they need.

To help provide jobs to displaced workers and drive economic growth in communities that suffer negative effects from automation, I have proposed a $2 trillion infrastructure plan that would create an infrastructure bank to facilitate state and local government investment, increase the Highway Trust Fund, create a Climate Infrastructure Fund, and create five new matching funds to support water infrastructure, school infrastructure, deferred maintenance projects, rural broadband, and infrastructure projects in disadvantaged communities in urban and rural areas. In addition, my proposed national service program will create new opportunities that allow young adults to learn new skills and gain valuable work experience. For example, my proposal includes a new national infrastructure apprenticeship program that will award a professional certificate proving mastery of particular skill sets for those who complete the program.

10. What steps will you take to restore net neutrality and assure internet users that their traffic and data are safe from manipulation by broadband providers?

I support the Save Net Neutrality Act to restore net neutrality, and I will appoint FCC commissioners who are committed to maintaining a fair and open internet. Additionally, I would work with Congress to update our digital privacy laws and regulations to protect consumers, especially children, from their data being collected without consent.