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We’re only two weeks away from TC Sessions: Justice 2021, a virtual conference focused on making diversity, equity, inclusion and labor as integral to tech as data, software engineers, startups and venture capital.
Join your global community on March 3 for a day packed with presentations, panel discussions and fireside chats with the top social justice warriors, leaders and innovators in tech today. Just look at this speaker lineup. As always, we’ll have ample time for networking so you can connect and discover new people and new opportunities to change the world.
We believe accessibility and inclusion starts at home, which is why you can get a TC Sessions: Justice pass for $5. Here are just a few of the outstanding presentations on tap — be sure to read the TC Sessions: Justice 2021 agenda. We have a few surprises and more speakers in store, so check back in the coming weeks to see what’s new.
Meeting of the Minds: Diversity and inclusion as an idea has been on the agenda of tech companies for years now. But the industry still lacks true inclusion, despite best efforts put forth by heads of diversity, equity and inclusion at these companies. We’ll seek to better understand what’s standing in the way of progress and what it’s going to take to achieve real change. Wade Davis (Netflix), Bo Young Lee (Uber).
Identifying and Dismantling Tech’s Deep Systems of Bias: Nearly every popular technology or service has within it systems of bias or exclusion, ignored by the privileged but obvious to the groups affected. How should these systems be exposed and documented, and how can we set about eliminating them and preventing more from appearing in the future? Mutale Nkonde (AI for the People), Haben Girma (disability rights lawyer) and Safiya Umoja Noble (author of “Algorithms of Oppression”).
Demystifying First-Check Fundraising with First-Check Investors: There are so many ways to finance your startup that don’t include Y combinator or a traditional fund. In this stacked panel, founders will hear how to leverage unconventional communities and resources to get the first dollars they need to execute. Brian Brackeen (Lightship Capital), Astrid Scholz (Zebras Unite), Sydney Thomas (Precursor Ventures).
You’ll also get to meet some of the diverse early-stage startup founders participating in the TechCrunch Include program and watch them deliver their best pitch in a live feedback session.
TC Sessions: Justice 2021 takes place on March 3. Buy your pass, and spend the day listening to and learning from the people leading the charge for meaningful change in tech.
Is your company interested in sponsoring TC Sessions: Justice 2021? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/17/tc-sessions-justice-2021-kicks-off-in-two-weeks/
Gravy, a startup helping subscription-based businesses recover failed payments, has raised $4.5 million in Series A funding for its specialized combination of technology and a human workspace that works to reacquire customers lost to what’s known as “involuntary churn.” That means the customer didn’t choose to end their subscription, but — for any one of hundreds of possible reasons — their credit card payment failed.
Typically, subscription-powered businesses attempt to correct this issue with technology — like sending automated emails, for example. Gravy, however, has developed a different solution that pairs its U.S.-based retention specialists with technology that alerts them to the failed payments. It then sells this whole system as a package to clients who use Gravy as an extension of their own workforce.
The new funding round — Gravy’s first institutional money — was led by Birmingham-based Arlington Family Partners, one of the few family offices in the southeast. It’s also one with a personal connection to Gravy co-founders, CEO Casey Graham and Chief of Staff, Renee Weber, as it managed their earnings from a prior acquisition.
Gravy, in fact, actually got its start at that earlier business, The Rocket Company, a coaching and resource provider for churches, which exited to a private equity group, Ministry Brands.
“We spent two years fixing [the problem of failed payments] in the last company and created a tech-enabled solution where we leveraged actual human beings to win back failed payments for subscriptions. And by doing that, we got a 5x offer higher than the initial offer because we fixed the failed payment problem,” Graham notes.
He first assumed other subscription businesses were doing the same, but later discovered that many were not. Instead, they tended to use automated means to address the problem, which would only recoup about 15% to 20% of the failed payments.
These tech-only solutions don’t work as well because customers often dismiss automated emails from companies, Graham says. However, customers do respond to personal outreach — but that’s something many new and fast-growing businesses can’t afford as they’re investing more heavily in growth and scale.
Gravy offers them a middle ground between automation and hiring in-house. Companies contract with Gravy on a subscription basis by paying a flat fee, tiered based upon transaction volume. This fee ranges from $997 on the low end to $8,000 on the high end. Gravy then integrates with the client’s own payment products and processor, their subscription manager and any other solutions they may use for managing subscriptions — like Stripe, Braintree, Recurly, Keap (Infusionsoft) and others. It even sets up a Gravy channel on the company’s Slack in order to better communicate with company staff.
The end result is that Gravy’s team feels like a part of the business itself, not some contract workforce.
Once established, Gravy’s team will use email and text, per the client’s preferences, to personally reach out to customers with failed payments to try to get their card information updated. Because it’s operating closely with the client, the specialists can also offer things like “stay bonuses” and other deals that could help bring back a customer who may not have otherwise bothered to return. During COVID, for example, Gravy also offered additional options, like the ability for the customer to skip several months along with other more personalized options to meet the customer’s specific needs.
“When we’re onboarding [a client], we create an empathetic script of three different responses, or opportunities for us to negotiate with the customer to win that customer back,” Graham explains. This works because of the human component — people know when they’re talking to a real person and not an automated script, he says.
Image Credits: Gravy
Since its founding in 2017, Gravy has scaled to over 300 clients, whose businesses may be as small as $200,000-$250,000 in revenue up to $100 million in annual revenue from subscriptions. These clients either operate in the B2B space — like B2B content subscriptions or tech education and certification, for example — or in the B2C space. In particular, Gravy is leveraged by a number of “box” subscription services (which offer to ship a box of products to a customer’s home) and B2C education and online courses.
To date, Gravy has processed over 6 million failed payments and has won back $175 million in failed payment subscriptions. The company is now on a mission to return $1 billion in failed payments by 2023. Gravy is also expected to pass $1 million in MRR this year, Graham says.
Notably, Gravy’s retention specialists aren’t “gig workers” or contractors — they’re full-time employees with benefits. And they can be employed from anywhere, which Graham says is a competitive advantage.
Though technically an Atlanta-area startup, Graham and Weber live 50 miles north of downtown Atlanta.
“I live on a farm, and we were told we were at a disadvantage because we weren’t in the middle of the Atlanta tech scene,” Graham says. “But the reality is, it became a huge advantage for us because our strategy has been to recruit the best people in small towns across the United States. Besides, he adds, “Slack is our headquarters.”
This strategy has allowed Gravy to also employ several military family members, who often have a hard time finding consistent work because they have to move regularly. That leads them to often take gig work instead of full-time jobs.
Image Credits: Gravy
“The gig economy — those companies are not committed to those people. They don’t care about them, or if they work or not. It’s a gig,” Graham says. “Gravy is committed to them on salaries, benefits … that’s something we’re super proud of.” He says Gravy’s salaries start at $55,000.
With the new funding, Gravy plans to expand its team of 83 to about 150 by year-end, expand its client acquisition efforts and further invest into its product. Longer term, he believes Gravy could also help businesses with other needs, including voluntary churn, for starters, and even customer service and customer success in the future.
The news is awash with stories of platforms clamping down on misinformation and the angst involved in banning prominent members. But these are Band-Aids over a deeper issue — namely, that the problem of misinformation is one of our own design. Some of the core elements of how we’ve built social media platforms may inadvertently increase polarization and spread misinformation.
If we could teleport back in time to relaunch social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and TikTok with the goal of minimizing the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories from the outset … what would they look like?
This is not an academic exercise. Understanding these root causes can help us develop better prevention measures for current and future platforms.
Some of the core elements of how we’ve built social media platforms may inadvertently increase polarization and spread misinformation.
As one of the Valley’s leading behavioral science firms, we’ve helped brands like Google, Lyft and others understand human decision-making as it relates to product design. We recently collaborated with TikTok to design a new series of prompts (launched this week) to help stop the spread of potential misinformation on its platform.
Image Credits: Irrational Labs (opens in a new window)
The intervention successfully reduces shares of flagged content by 24%. While TikTok is unique amongst platforms, the lessons we learned there have helped shape ideas on what a social media redux could look like.
Create opt-outs
We can take much bigger swings at reducing the views of unsubstantiated content than labels or prompts.
In the experiment we launched together with TikTok, people saw an average of 1.5 flagged videos over a two-week period. Yet in our qualitative research, many users said they were on TikTok for fun; they didn’t want to see any flagged videos whatsoever. In a recent earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg also spoke of Facebook users’ tiring of hyperpartisan content.
We suggest giving people an “opt-out of flagged content” option — remove this content from their feeds entirely. To make this a true choice, this opt-out needs to be prominent, not buried somewhere users must seek it out. We suggest putting it directly in the sign-up flow for new users and adding an in-app prompt for existing users.
Shift the business model
There’s a reason false news spreads six times faster on social media than real news: Information that’s controversial, dramatic or polarizing is far more likely to grab our attention. And when algorithms are designed to maximize engagement and time spent on an app, this kind of content is heavily favored over more thoughtful, deliberative content.
The ad-based business model is at the core the problem; it’s why making progress on misinformation and polarization is so hard. One internal Facebook team tasked with looking into the issue found that, “our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness.” But the project and proposed work to address the issues was nixed by senior executives.
Essentially, this is a classic incentives problem. If business metrics that define “success” are no longer dependent on maximizing engagement/time on site, everything will change. Polarizing content will no longer need to be favored and more thoughtful discourse will be able to rise to the surface.
Design for connection
A primary part of the spread of misinformation is feeling marginalized and alone. Humans are fundamentally social creatures who look to be part of an in-group, and partisan groups frequently provide that sense of acceptance and validation.
We must therefore make it easier for people to find their authentic tribes and communities in other ways (versus those that bond over conspiracy theories).
Mark Zuckerberg says his ultimate goal with Facebook was to connect people. To be fair, in many ways Facebook has done that, at least on a surface level. But we should go deeper. Here are some ways:
We can design for more active one-on-one communication, which has been shown to increase well-being. We can also nudge offline connection. Imagine two friends are chatting on Facebook messenger or via comments on a post. How about a prompt to meet in person, when they live in the same city (post-COVID, of course)? Or if they’re not in the same city, a nudge to hop on a call or video.
In the scenario where they’re not friends and the interaction is more contentious, platforms can play a role in highlighting not only the humanity of the other person, but things one shares in common with the other. Imagine a prompt that showed, as you’re “shouting” online with someone, everything you have in common with that person.
Platforms should also disallow anonymous accounts, or at minimum encourage the use of real names. Clubhouse has good norm-setting on this: In the onboarding flow they say, “We use real names here.” Connection is based on the idea that we’re interacting with a real human. Anonymity obfuscates that.
Finally, help people reset
We should make it easy for people to get out of an algorithmic rabbit hole. YouTube has been under fire for its rabbit holes, but all social media platforms have this challenge. Once you click a video, you’re shown videos like it. This may help sometimes (getting to that perfect “how to” video sometimes requires a search), but for misinformation, this is a death march. One video on flat earth leads to another, as well as other conspiracy theories. We need to help people eject from their algorithmic destiny.
With great power comes great responsibility
More and more people now get their news from social media, and those who do are less likely to be correctly informed about important issues. It’s likely that this trend of relying on social media as an information source will continue.
Social media companies are thus in a unique position of power and have a responsibility to think deeply about the role they play in reducing the spread of misinformation. They should absolutely continue to experiment and run tests with research-informed solutions, as we did together with the TikTok team.
This work isn’t easy. We knew that going in, but we have an even deeper appreciation for this fact after working with the TikTok team. There are many smart, well-intentioned people who want to solve for the greater good. We’re deeply hopeful about our collective opportunity here to think bigger and more creatively about how to reduce misinformation, inspire connection and strengthen our collective humanity all at the same time.
Aeye, a lidar startup that developed its technology for use in autonomous vehicles as well as to support advanced driver assistance systems in passenger cars, is going public through a merger with CF Finance Acquisition Corp. III that will value the company at $2 billion.
The agreement marks the latest lidar company to turn to so-called blank check companies or SPACs in lieu of a traditional IPO process. Velodyne Lidar kicked off the trend last summer when it announced that it planned to go public through a merger with special purpose acquisition company Graf Industrial Corp., with a market value of $1.8 billion. Others soon followed, including Luminar, Aeva, Ouster and Innoviz.
Under this deal, Aeye said it was able to raise $225 million in private investment in public equity, or PIPE, from institutional and strategic investors that includes, GM Ventures, Subaru-SBI, Intel Capital, Hella Ventures, Taiwania Capital. Other undisclosed investors also participated. Through the transaction, Aeye will have about $455 million in cash on its balance sheet, proceeds that include $230 million in trust from CF Finance Acquisition Corp. III, a SPAC sponsored by Cantor Fitzgerald.
Lidar, light detection and ranging radar, measures distance using laser light to generate a highly accurate 3D map of the world around the car. The sensor is considered by many in the emerging automated driving industry as a critical and necessary tool. Velodyne long dominated the lidar industry and supplied most AV developers with its products. Dozens of startups have popped up in the past several years aiming to carve away market share from Velodyne, each one pitching its own variation on the technology and business approach.
In the past three years, lidar companies have tweaked their business models as the timeline to commercialize autonomous vehicles dragged on. Startups began to emphasize their perception software or pitched to automakers that the sensors could — and should — be applied to passenger vehicles to provide redundancy and push the capabilities of driver assistance systems.
AEye is one of several lidar companies that have expanded its focus beyond autonomous vehicles. The company said the capital raised by going public will be used to scale the company in key markets. Aeye’s pitch is that the company’s lidar technology along with its partnerships with Tier 1 and Tier 2 suppliers like Continental makes it well positioned to scale and to be adopted by major automakers. Aeye’s lidar sensor scans the surroundings and then, with help from its perception software, identifies and focuses on relevant objects.
Automotive, specifically to support ADAS in passenger vehicles and in the long-term within autonomous vehicles, is Aeye’s foundational market. But the company sees wider industrial and mobility applications in mining, trucking, traffic systems, aviation and drones.
“At the right price and reliability, we believe lidar will eventually be in everything that has a camera today,” CEO Blair LaCorte said during an investor presentation. “With expectations for broad adoption of lidar for consumer and industrial applications, we forecast a total addressable market of $42 billion by 2030.”
Aeye is at the earliest stages of that total addressable market. The company said it expects to generate $4 million in revenue in 2021 and a net loss (EBITDA) of $59 million. Aeye said commercial production of its sensors are expected in the fourth quarter of 2021, which will help increase revenue to a forecast $13 million in 2022. By 2024, Aeye forecasts $175 million in revenue and says it will be positive EBITDA by the second half of the year.
The combined company will be called AEye Holdings Inc. and is expected to be publicly listed on Nasdaq. The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of 2021. The management team, which includes Blair LaCorte as CEO, founder Luis Dussan as CTO and Bob Brown as CFO, will remain.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/17/aeye-becomes-latest-lidar-company-to-go-public-via-spac/
New York Attorney General Letitia James has filed a lawsuit alleging that Amazon failed to provide adequate safety health and safety measures in two New York facilities, and that it unlawfully disciplined and fired employees who complained.
James opened an investigation into Amazon in March of last year, which her office says initially focused on conditions at a fulfillment center in Staten Island and a distribution center in Queens — collectively employing more than 5,000 people — before expanding to look at the firing and disciplining of employees as well.
In a statement, James said:
While Amazon and its CEO made billions during this crisis, hardworking employees were forced to endure unsafe conditions and were retaliated against for rightfully voicing these concerns. Since the pandemic began, it is clear that Amazon has valued profit over people and has failed to ensure the health and safety of its workers. The workers who have powered this country and kept it going during the pandemic are the very workers who continue to be treated the worst. As we seek to hold Amazon accountable for its actions, my office remains dedicated to protecting New York workers from exploitation and unfair treatment in all forms.
Last week, Amazon preemptively sued James, arguing that workplace safety is a federal matter and that she did not have authority to bring her suit.
“We care deeply about the health and safety of our employees, as demonstrated in our filing last week, and we don’t believe the Attorney General’s filing presents an accurate picture of Amazon’s industry-leading response to the pandemic,” said Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel in a statement.
Among other things, the suit alleges that Amazon violated state laws around cleaning and disinfection protocols, as well as contact tracing, and that it failed to alter its productivity policies to allow employees “to take the time necessary to engage in hygiene, sanitation, social-distancing, and necessary cleaning practices.”
The suit also points to the firing of Christian Smalls (who has filed his own lawsuit against the company) and its warnings to Derrick Palmer as “swift retaliatory action against workers’ complaints.”
James’ office says that it’s seeking changes in Amazon’s policies, backpay/damages and reinstatement for Smalls, damages for Palmer and “requiring Amazon to give up the profits it made as a result of its illegal acts.”
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/17/amazon-ny-ag-lawsuit/
