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OnePlus unveils new hardware, Apple updates its educational offerings and Facebook reveals plans for its next developer conference. This is your Daily Crunch for March 23, 2021.

The big story: OnePlus announces its first smartwatch

The Chinese smartphone maker announced the OnePlus Watch today, a $159 smartwatch with a minimalist design and a new operating system. It also comes with a number of different sensors to measure things like heart rate and blood oxygen level.

In addition, the company also announced its OnePlus 9 series of phones, its first phone built in partnership with legendary camera company Hasselblad, with a primary camera that includes a 48-megapixel Sony sensor. Pricing starts at $729, with pricing for the Pro starting at $969.

The tech giants

Apple launches the Apple Teacher Portfolio recognition, updates Schoolwork and Classroom apps — Teachers who complete a total of nine lessons will be able to submit their portfolio of lesson examples to earn the Apple Teacher Portfolio designation.

Facebook will bring back F8 on June 2 as a pared-back, single-day, virtual-only conference for developers — There will be no Mark Zuckerberg keynote this year.

New York’s Department of Financial Services says Apple Card program didn’t violate fair lending laws — This follows an investigation triggered by online complaints back in November 2019.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Robinhood files confidentially to go public — The company may be closer to a public debut than we anticipated.

‘Instant needs’ delivery startup goPuff raises $1.15B at an $8.9B valuation — Last fall, delivery startup goPuff made a big splash by raising $380 million in funding and acquiring West Coast beverage retailer BevMo shortly afterwards.

Roll still doesn’t know how its hot wallet was hacked — Move fast, break things, get hacked.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Discord’s reported $10B exit; Compass and Intermedia Cloud Communications set IPO price ranges — Discord is a well-financed unicorn that has raised significant capital and reportedly sports rapidly expanding revenues.

Pre-seed round funding is under scrutiny: Is VC pandemic posturing here to stay? — New data from the DocSend Startup Index show that for early-stage fundraising, particularly in the pre-seed round, founders need to approach VCs with much more than a great idea to secure funding.

Clubhouse UX teardown: A closer look at homepage curation, follow hooks and other features — Most startups would kill for hockey-stick growth, but it also means that UX problems can only be addressed while in “full flight.”

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Everything else

Top tech CEOs will testify about social media’s role in the Capitol attack this week — Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Google’s Sundar Pichai will all appear virtually before a joint House committee Thursday at 12 p.m. Eastern Time.

‘Black Widow’ and ‘Cruella’ will get Premier Access releases on Disney+ — That means Disney+ subscribers will have the option to pay an additional, one-time $29.99 fee to watch the live action remake of “Cruella” at home on May 28, or to do the same for “Black Widow” on July 9.

Extra Crunch Live’s April slate features speakers from Forerunner, Accel, Fifth Wall and more — April showers bring May flowers, and by “flowers” I mean actionable insights and advice from some of the top minds in tech.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

When Amazon announced last month that Jeff Bezos was moving into the executive chairman role, and AWS CEO Andy Jassy would be taking over the entire Amazon operation, speculation began about who would replace Jassy.

People considered a number of internal candidates such as Peter DeSantis, vice president of global infrastructure at AWS and Matt Garman, who is vice president of sales and marketing. Not many would have chosen Tableau CEO Adam Selipsky, but sure enough he is returning home to run the division he left in 2016.

In an email to employees, Jassy wasted no time getting to the point that Selipsky was his choice, saying that the former employee who helped launch the division when they hired him 2005, spent 11 years helping Jassy build the unit before taking the job at Tableau. Through that lens, the the choice makes perfect sense.

“Adam brings strong judgment, customer obsession, team building, demand generation, and CEO experience to an already very strong AWS leadership team. And, having been in such a senior role at AWS for 11 years, he knows our culture and business well,” Jassy wrote in the email.

Jassy has run the AWS since its earliest days taking it from humble beginnings as a kind of internal experiment on running a storage web service to building a mega division currently on a $51 billion run rate. It is that juggernaut that will be Selipsky to run, but he seems well suited for the job.

This is a breaking story. We will be adding to it.

Clubhouse, the social audio app that first took Silicon Valley by storm and is now gaining much wider appeal, is an interesting user experience case study.

Hockey-stick growth — 8 million global downloads as of last month, despite still being in a prelaunch, invite-only mode, according to App Annie — is something most startups would kill for. However, it also means that UX problems can only be addressed while in “full flight” — and that changes to the user experience will be felt at scale rather under the cover of a small, loyal and (usually) forgiving user base.

In our latest UX teardown, Built for Mars founder and UX expert Peter Ramsey and TechCrunch reporter Steve O’Hear discuss some of Clubhouse’s UX challenges as it continues to onboard new users at pace while striving to create enough stickiness to keep them active.

Homepage curation

Peter Ramsey: Content feeds are notoriously difficult to get right. Which posts should you see? How should you order them? How do you filter out the noise?

On Clubhouse, once you’ve scrolled past all the available rooms in your feed, you’re prompted to follow more people to see more rooms. In other words, Clubhouse is inadvertently describing how it decides what content you see, i.e., your homepage is a curated list of rooms based on people you follow.

Except there’s a problem: I don’t follow half the people who already appear in my feed.

Image Credits: Clubhouse

Steve O’Hear: I get it. This could be confusing, but why does it actually matter? Won’t people just continue to use the homepage regardless?

Peter: In the short term, yes. People will use the homepage in the same way they’d use Instagram’s search page (which is to just browse occasionally). But in the long term, this content needs to be consistently relevant or people will lose interest.

Steve: But Twitter has a search page that shows random content that I don’t control…

Peter: Yeah, but they also have a home feed that you do control. It’s fine to also have the more random “slot machine style” content feed — but you need the base layer.

The truth about aha moments

Peter: In the early days of Twitter, the team noticed something in their data: When people follow at least 30 others, they’re far more likely to stick around. This is often described as an “aha moment” — the moment that the utility of a product really clicks for the user.

This story has become startup folklore, and I’ve worked with many companies who take this message too literally, forgetting the nuance of what they really found: It’s not enough to just follow 30 random people — you need to follow 30 people who you genuinely care about.

Clubhouse has clearly adopted a similar methodology, by pre-selecting 50 people for you to follow while signing up.

Have you noticed that some people have accumulated millions of followers really quickly? It’s because the same people are almost always recommended—I tried creating accounts with polar opposite interests, and the same people were pre-selected almost every time.

And at no point does it explain that following those 50 people will directly impact the content that is available to you, or that if your homepage gets uninteresting, you’ll need to unfollow these people individually.

But they should, and it could look more like this:

Steve: Why do you think Clubhouse does this? Laziness?

Peter: I think in the early days of Clubhouse they just wanted to maximize connections, and by always recommending the same people (Clubhouse’s founders and investors), they could somewhat control the content that is shown to new users.

Social media executives will be answering to Congress directly for their role in January’s deadly attacks on the U.S. Capitol this week. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Google’s Sundar Pichai will all appear virtually before a joint House committee Thursday at 12 p.m. Eastern Time.

The hearing, held by the House’s Subcommittee on Communications and Technology and the Subcommittee on Consumer Protection and Commerce, will focus on social media’s role in spreading disinformation, extremism and misinformation. The Energy and Commerce Committee previously held a parallel hearing reckoning with traditional media’s role in promoting those same social ills.

Earlier this month, Energy and Commerce Chairman Frank Pallone Jr., joined by more than 20 other Democrats, sent a letter to Zuckerberg pressing the Facebook CEO for answers about why tactical gear ads showed up next to posts promoting the Capitol riot. “Targeting ads in this way is dangerous and has the potential to encourage acts of violence,” the letter’s authors wrote. In late January, Facebook said that it would pause ads showing weapon accessories and related equipment.

While the subcommittee has signaled its interest in Facebook’s ad practices, organic content on the site has historically presented a much bigger problem. In the uncertain period following the election last year, the pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” movement swelled to massive proportions on social media, particularly in Facebook groups. The company took incremental measures at the time, but that same movement, born of political misinformation, is what propelled the Capitol rioters to disrupt vote counting and enact deadly violence on January 6.

The hearing is likely to go deep on extremists organizing through Facebook groups too. Chairs from both subcommittees that will question the tech CEOs this week previously questioned Facebook about reports that the company was well aware that its algorithmic group recommendations were funneling users toward extremism. In spite of warnings from experts, Facebook continued to allow armed anti-government militias to openly organize on the platform until late 2020. And in spite of bans, some continued to do so.

The Justice Department is reportedly considering charging members of the Oath Keepers, one prominent armed U.S. militia group involved in the Capitol attack, with sedition.

Facebook plays a huge role in distributing extremist content and ferrying it to the mainstream, but it isn’t alone. Misinformation that undermines the integrity of the U.S. election results is generally just as easy to find on YouTube and Twitter, though those social networks aren’t designed to connect and mobilize people in the same way that Facebook groups do.

Facebook began to course-correct its own rules around extremism, slowly through 2020 and then quickly this January when the company removed former President Trump from the platform. Facebook’s external policy oversight board continues to review that decision and could reverse it in the coming weeks.

Over the course of the last year, Twitter made an effort to demystify some of its own policy decisions, transparently communicating changes and introducing ideas it was considering. Under Dorsey’s guidance the company treated its platform rules like a living document — one it’s begun to tinker around with in an effort to shape user behavior for the better.

If Twitter’s recent policy decision making is akin to thinking out loud, YouTube took the opposite approach. The company wasn’t as proactive in shoring up its defenses ahead of the 2020 elections and rarely responded in real-time to events. YouTube waited a full month after Biden’s victory to articulate rules that would rid the platform of disinformation declaring that the election was stolen from Trump.

Hopefully the joint hearing can dig a bit more into why that was, but we’re not counting on it. The subcommittees’ decision to bring Google CEO Sundar Pichai to testify is a bit strange considering that YouTube’s CEO Susan Wojcicki — who has yet to be called to Congress for one of these high profile tech hearings — would make the better witness. Pichai is ultimately accountable for what YouTube does too, but in past hearings he’s proven a very polished witness who’s deft at neutralizing big picture criticism with technical detail.

Ultimately Wojcicki would have more insight into YouTube’s misinformation and extremism policies and the reason the platform has dragged its feet on matters of hate and misinformation, enforcing its own policies unevenly when it chooses to do so at all.

All successful companies start off as a great idea, scribbled on the back of a cocktail napkin during a late-night meeting of the minds or gleaned from a fleeting inspiration that leaves you with a feeling of “I could do that better.”

For most, that’s as far as entrepreneurship ever goes, because, unfortunately, a great idea can’t raise money, develop a product or disrupt an industry.

It’s only an idea.

New data from the DocSend Startup Index show that for early-stage fundraising, particularly in the pre-seed round, founders need to approach VCs with much more than a great idea to secure funding. Our newest report on the state of pre-seed fundraising shows that investors became laser-focused on sections of the pitch deck that address monetization and business viability — signs that founders need to come to the table with better-defined businesses in order to succeed.

Do not pass go — VCs insist pitch decks meet 3 key criteria

According to the data, overall founder and VC activity took a nosedive in early 2020 once the serious nature of the pandemic became apparent. But as the year progressed and investors adjusted to the new market conditions and remote dealmaking, overall activity quickly surpassed pre-pandemic levels.

Despite this flurry of activity and an unprecedented appetite for new startup pitches, investors made it very clear that strong positioning in three sections of the pitch deck was nonnegotiable.

Image Credits: DocSend(opens in a new window)

1. Competitive landscape — When we published our 2019 pre-seed report, the competitive landscape section of pitch decks was firmly in the middle of the pack in terms of time spent reviewing by investors: They averaged around 35 seconds to clearly articulate their own uniqueness and product-market fit. In 2020, the VC time spent on the same section increased by 51% to an average of 53 seconds across both successful and unsuccessful decks (those that did or did not lead to a funding offer).