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Twitter held talks with Clubhouse around a potential acquisition of the live drop-in audio networking platform, with a deal value somewhere around $4 billion, according to a report from Bloomberg. TechCrunch has also confirmed the discussions took place from a source familiar with the conversations.

While the talks occurred over the past several months, they’re no longer taking place, though the reason they ended isn’t known according to the report. It’s also worth noting that just a few days ago, Bloomberg reported that Clubhouse was seeking to raise a new round of funding at a valuation of around $4 billion, but the report detailing the potential acquisition talks indicate that the discussions with Twitter collapsed first, leading to a change in strategy to pursue securing additional capital in exchange for equity investment.

Twitter has its own product very similar to Clubhouse — Spaces, a drop-in audio chatroom feature that it has been rolling out gradually to its user base over the past few months. Clubhouse, meanwhile, just launched the first of its monetization efforts, Clubhouse Payments, which lets users send direct payments to other creators on the platform, provided that person has enabled receipt of said payments.

Interestingly, the monetization effort from Clubhouse actually doesn’t provide them with any money; instead, it’s monetization for recipient users who get 100% of the funds directed their way, minus a small cut for processing that goes directly to Stripe, the payment provider Clubhouse is using to enable the virtual tips.

While we aren’t privy to the specifics of these talks between Twitter and Clubhouse, it does seem like an awfully high price tag for the social network to pay for the audio app, especially given its own progress with Spaces. Clubhouse’s early traction has been undeniable, but there are a lot of questions still remaining about its longevity, and it’s also being cloned left and right by other platforms, begging the age-old startup question of whether it’s a feature or a product on its own.

Whatever went down, the timing of this revelation seems likely to prime the pump for Clubhouse’s conversation with potential investors at its target valuation for the round it’s looking to raise. Regardless, it’s exciting to have this kind of activity, buzz and attention paid to a consumer software play after many years of what one could argue has been a relatively lacklustre period for the category.

Pinterest today hosted an event focused on its creator community, where the company announced a series of updates including the launch of a $500,000 Creator Fund, a new content policy called the Creator Code, as well as new moderation tools, among other things. With the changes, the company says its goal is to ensure the platform continues to be a “inclusive, positive and inspiring place.” The new content guidelines put that into more specific terms as it requires Pinterest creators to fact-check content, practice inclusion, be kind, and ensure any call to action they make via the site doesn’t cause harm.

Creators will be required to agree and sign the code during the publishing process for Story Pins, where they tap a button that say “I agree” to statements that include “Be Kind,” “Check my facts,” “Be aware of triggers,” “Practice inclusion,” and “Do Not Harm.”

Image Credits: Pinterest

The code will be enforced the same way Pinterest today applies its rules for its other content policies: a combination of machine learning and human review, Pinterest tells us. However, the site’s algorithm will be designed to reward positive content and block harmful content, like anti-vaccination sentiments, for example. This could have a larger impact on what sort of content is shared on Pinterest, rather than a pop-up agreement with simple statements.

The Creator Code itself is not yet live, but will roll out to creators to sign and adopt in the weeks ahead, Pinterest says.

Image Credits: Pinterest

Pinterest today also introduced several new creator tools focused on the similar goal of making Pinterest a more positive, safe experience for all.

It’s launching comment moderation tools that will allow creators to remove and filter comments on their content, as well as tools that will allow them to feature up to three comments in the comment feed to highlight positive feedback. New spam prevention tools will help to clear out some of the unwanted comments, too, by leveraging machine learning technology to detect and remove bad comments.

Also new are “positivity reminders,” which will pop up asking Pinterest users to reconsider before posting potentially offensive comments. The notification will push users to go back and edit their comment, but doesn’t prevent them from posting.

Image Credits: Pinterest

Related to these efforts, Pinterest announced the launch of its first-ever Creator Fund at today’s event. The fund is specifically focused on elevating creators from underrepresented communities in the United States, and will offer a combination of creative strategy consulting, and compensating them with budget for content creation and ad credits. At least 50% of the fund’s recipients will be from underrepresented groups, Pinterest says.

The company tells us it’s initially committed to giving creators $500,000 in cash and media throughout 2021.

“For the first participants of the program, we worked with eight emerging creators across fashion, photography, food and travel, and will be identifying ten more creators in the next few months for the next cohort,” noted Creator Inclusion Lead Alexandra Nikolajev.

“We’re on a journey to build a globally inclusive platform where Pinners and Creators around the world can discover ideas that feel personalized, relevant and reflective of who they are,” Nikolajev said.

Pinterest has been working to rebuild its image in the wake of last year’s allegations of a host of internal issues, including unfair pay, racism, retaliation, and sexism, which conflicted with its outside image of being one of the “nicer” places to work in tech. Despite this fallout — which included a lawsuit, employee walkout, petitions, and more —  the issues that had been raised weren’t always reflected in Pinterest’s product.

The company had previously launched inclusive features like “skin tone ranges” to help those shopping for beauty products find matches for their skin tone. It also allowed retailers and brands to identify themselves as members of an underrepresented group, which gave their content the ability to appear in more places across Pinterest’s platform, like the Today tab, Shopping Spotlights and The Pinterest Shop, for instance.

Evan Sharp, Pinterest’s co-founder and Chief Design and Creative Officer, referenced the company’s image as “a positive place” at today’s event.

“We’ve been building Pinterest for 11 years, and ever since our users routinely tell us that Pinterest is the ‘last positive corner of the internet.’ In that time, we’ve also learned that you need to design positivity into online platforms as deliberately as much as you design negativity out,” Sharp said. “The Creator Code is a human-centric way for Creators to understand how to be successful on Pinterest while using their voice to keep Pinterest positive and inclusive,” he added.

Today, Pinterest serves over 450 million users worldwide, but is challenged by large platforms serving creators like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and others, including newcomers like TikTok and those that are inching into the creator community with funds of their own, like Snapchat, which is paying creators for Spotlight content, and Clubhouse, which is now funding creators’ shows. The increased competition for creator interest has left Pinterest needing an incentive program of its own.

To kick of its announcement, Pinterest’s Head of Content and Creator Partnerships, Aya Kanai, interviewed television personality Jonathan Van Ness (Queer Eye) at today’s virtual event, where they talked about the need for positivity and inclusivity on social media. Other event participants included creators Peter Som, Alison Cayne, Onyi Moss, Oyin Edogi and Jomely Breton — the latter two who spoke about putting the Creator Fund to use for themselves.

Twitch will start holding its streamers to a higher standard. The company just expanded its hate and harassment policy, specifying more kinds of bad behavior that break its rules and could result in a ban from the streaming service.

The news comes as Twitch continues to grapple with reports of abusive behavior and sexual harassment, both on the platform and within the company itself. In December, Twitch released an updated set of rules designed to take harassment and abuse more seriously, admitting that women, people of color the and LGBTQ community were impacted by a “disproportionate” amount of that toxic behavior on the platform.

Twitch’s policies now include serious offenses that could pose a safety threat, even when they happen entirely away from the streaming service. Those threats include violent extremism, terrorism, threats of mass violence, sexual assault and ties to known hate groups.

The company will also continue to evaluate off-platform behavior in cases that happen on Twitch, like an on-stream situation that leads to harassment on Twitter or Facebook.

“While this policy is new, we have taken action historically against serious, clear misconduct that took place off service, but until now, we didn’t have an approach that scaled,” the company wrote in a blog post, adding that investigating off-platform behavior requires additional resources to address the complexity inherent in those cases.

To handle reports for its broadened rules, Twitch created a dedicated email address (OSIT@twitch.tv) to handle reports about off-service behavior. The company says it has partnered with a third party investigative law firm to vet the reports it receives.

Twitch cites its actions against former President Donald Trump as the most high profile instance of off-platform behavior resulting in enforcement. The company disabled Trump’s account following the attack on the U.S. Capitol and later suspended him indefinitely, citing fears that he could use the service to incite violence.

It’s hard to have a higher profile than the president, but Trump isn’t the only big time banned Twitch user. Last June, Twitch kicked one of its biggest streamers off of the platform without providing an explanation for the decision.

Going on a year later, no one seems to know why Dr. Disrespect got the boot from Twitch, though the company’s insistence that it only acts in cases with a “preponderance of evidence” suggests his violations were serious and well-corroborated.

Okta today announced it was expanding its platform into a couple of new areas. Up to this point, the company has been known for its identity access management product, giving companies the ability to sign onto multiple cloud products with a single sign on. Today, the company is moving into two new areas: privileged access and identity governance

Privileged access gives companies the ability to provide access on an as-needed basis to a limited number of people to key administrative services inside a company. This could be your database or your servers or any part of your technology stack that is highly sensitive and where you want to tightly control who can access these systems.

Okta CEO Todd McKinnon says that Okta has always been good at locking down the general user population access to cloud services like Salesforce, Office 365 and Gmail. What these cloud services have in common is you access them via a web interface.

Administrators access the speciality accounts using different protocols. “It’s something like secure shell, or you’re using a terminal on your computer to connect to a server in the cloud, or it’s a database connection where you’re actually logging in with a SQL connection, or you’re connecting to a container which is the Kubernetes protocol to actually manage the container,” McKinnon explained.

Privileged access offers a couple of key features including the ability to limit access to a given time window and to record a video of the session so there is an audit trail of exactly what happened while someone was accessing the system. McKinnon says that these features provide additional layers of protection for these sensitive accounts.

He says that it will be fairly trivial to carve out these accounts because Okta already has divided users into groups and can give these special privileges to only those people in the administrative access group. The challenge was figuring out how to get access to these other kinds of protocols.

The governance piece provides a way for security operations teams to run detailed reports and look for issues related to identity. “Governance provides exception reporting so you can give that to your auditors, and more importantly you can give that to your security team to make sure that you figure out what’s going on and why there is this deviation from your stated policy,” he said.

All of this when combined with the $6.5 billion acquisition of Auth0 last month is part of a larger plan by the company to be what McKinnon calls the identity cloud. He sees a market with several strategic clouds and he believes identity is going to be one of them.

“Because identity is so strategic for everything, it’s unlocking your customer, access, it’s unlocking your employee access, it’s keeping everything secure. And so this expansion, whether it’s customer identity with zero trust or whether it’s doing more on the workforce identity with not just access, but privileged access and identity governance. It’s about identity evolving in this primary cloud,” he said.

While both of these new products were announced today at the company’s virtual Oktane customer conference, they won’t be generally available until the first quarter of next year.

Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”

Extra Crunch members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.

Dear Sophie:

My startup registered two H-1B candidates in this year’s lottery. Sadly, neither was selected.

One is my co-founder, the other is on OPT. Help! We can’t afford for them to have to leave the U.S. What are our options?

— Lost in Los Angeles

Dear Lost:

Take a deep breath; I’ve got your back. There are many creative immigration pathways for you, your co-founder and your F-1 OPT employee to explore. We’ll take a look at several options, and you can also check out my recent podcast in which my colleague Nadia Zaidi and I explain them in greater depth.

I hope the below ideas inspire you and fill you with a sense of hope and possibility. As always, I suggest consulting with an experienced immigration attorney who can help you identify the strongest path forward, as well as backup options for your co-founder and employee. The particular immigration strategy that’s best for you is always an individual determination. It’s best identified through a personal consultation with an attorney such as myself based on a variety of factors, including each person’s immigration history and your particular startup’s goals.

Co-founder immigration options

For a funded startup, there’s a great H-1B Plan B: the Cap-Exempt H-1B. Especially if your co-founder has a STEM background (and possibly even for some founders who don’t have this), there’s a wonderful new triple-win option that supports startups, international candidates and even diverse U.S. STEM college students seeking better project-based learning opportunities.

What is this magical rainbow-striped unicorn option, you ask? Well, here’s the legal background: Some employers qualify to petition for an H-1B visa at any time without going through the lottery. These employers — called cap-exempt employers because they are not subject to the annual H-1B cap of 85,000 visas available to for-profit employers — include:

• Institutions of higher education.
• Nonprofits tied to institutions of higher education.
• Nonprofit research organizations.
• Government research organizations.

If your co-founder can get a part-time H-1B visa through one of these cap-exempt employers, your startup can concurrently sponsor your co-founder for an H-1B regardless of the recent lottery results.

Image Credits: Joanna Buniak / Sophie Alcorn (opens in a new window)

To take advantage of this special law, I’m a huge fan of Open Avenues Foundation, which offers a Global Talent Fellowship. In this program, international talent can receive cap-exempt H-1B visas by leading university students for about five hours a week in real-world, project-based work within their field of expertise for the startup that nominated them for the fellowship. The candidate gets to stay in (or come to) the U.S., your startup gets a team of students working on a group project that benefits your company and increases diversity in your hiring pipeline, and U.S. students get the benefit of hands-on high quality STEM learning.

Once your candidate’s first cap-exempt H-1B is in place, your startup can petition for a second, concurrent Cap-Exempt H-1B for direct startup employment.

Interested in variations? If you’re not in STEM but have a university that would host you (free to the university), you can potentially partner with OAF. In addition, many universities in the U.S have global entrepreneur-in-residence programs that can help international co-founders qualify for concurrent Cap-Exempt H-1Bs. Your startup should also consider sponsoring your co-founder for an O-1A visa or change of status.

Another option to consider is for your co-founder to apply for International Entrepreneur Parole (IEP), a new 30-month immigration status in the U.S. The International Entrepreneur Rule (IER) was created by President Barack Obama and is the closest thing the U.S. has right now to a startup visa. The Trump administration tried to eliminate it, but the National Venture Capital Association, led by Jeff Farrah, successfully challenged the administration’s effort in federal court, so IEP remains on the books.

A lot of folks don’t believe it’s an option yet, so I’m currently looking for international startup founders with a strong case to file for IEP to test out this new program and demonstrate its existence to the world. We’re currently seeking global startup founders holding at least 15% equity in a U.S. startup that’s less than five years old and has raised at least $250,000 from U.S. investors. If you want to be on our free interest list, you can fill out this form. If we think you have a strong application, we’ll reach out.

If your co-founder wants to remain permanently in the U.S., consider starting a green card now such as the EB-1A green card for individuals of extraordinary ability or an EB-2 NIW (National Interest Waiver) green card for individuals of exceptional ability. Of these, the EB-1A is the quickest option, but its qualification requirements are tougher than for the EB-2 NIW.

F-1 OPT employee immigration options

If your F-1 OPT employee graduated with a qualified STEM degree, that employee can apply for a 24-month work extension, known as STEM OPT. That will allow the employee to remain in the U.S. to continue working for you. In the meantime, you can register them again next year for the H-1B lottery. If there’s no possibility for STEM, please check out the Cap-Exempt H-1B option explained above.

If your F-1 OPT employee only has a bachelor’s degree, they might want to consider pursuing an advanced degree. Individuals with a master’s or higher degree from a U.S. university have better odds of being selected in the annual H-1B lottery. That’s because 20,000 of the 85,000 H-1B visas available each year are earmarked for individuals with a master’s or higher degree from a U.S. university.

You should be aware, however, that next year’s H-1B lottery will likely shift from the current random selection process to one based on the highest wages. Unless the Biden administration changes the policy, which was devised by the previous administration, employers who pay their H-1B candidates a Level III wage or higher have the best chance of getting selected to file for an H-1B visa.

As you know, sponsoring employers must agree to pay an H-1B candidate the higher of either the actual wage paid for the job or the prevailing wage, which is broken down into four levels based on experience required for the position and location of the position. Level I wage is basically for an entry-level position, while a Level IV wage is for a position requiring the most experience. While this will add greater predictability to the annual H-1B “lottery,” early-stage startups and small businesses may have a difficult time competing against more established companies on salary, particularly because stock options and equity are not included in the salary calculation.

If you need to find alternative visa solutions, you can always consult with an attorney. I hope all of these options help you realize the control and agency you have in this situation. You have choices!

All my best,

Sophie

Have a question for Sophie? Ask it here. We reserve the right to edit your submission for clarity and/or space.

The information provided in “Dear Sophie” is general information and not legal advice. For more information on the limitations of “Dear Sophie,” please view our full disclaimer. You can contact Sophie directly at Alcorn Immigration Law.

Sophie’s podcast, Immigration Law for Tech Startups, is available on all major platforms. If you’d like to be a guest, she’s accepting applications!