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Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here — and be sure to check out our riff on whether SoftBank has another 20 DoorDashes waiting in the wings.
This morning was a more relaxed Monday than I can recall in months, thanks to a holiday in many parts of the world. But that didn’t stop us from parsing the news:
- The Weekend: This investigation into Clubhouse’s data security is getting results, while over the weekend Dispo got huge in a hurry, and the Apple-Facebook dynamic got a better explaining. Increasingly the tech giant world feels like ad engines (Facebook, Alphabet) in opposition to software-and-hardware shops (Microsoft, Apple).
- This morning: GM has new electric cars, TechCrunch reports. VW isn’t worried about Apple. And every EV company in the world is going public via a SPAC. Who will win? You can place your own bets. And India is loosening some tech regulation. The American stock market is closed.
- Funding Rounds: We chatted about the recent Libeo round, and the latest on Nymbus, both of which are more than cool.
And, finally, read this if you want feel let down by American VCs. (American media, to be clear, has similar issues.)
Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
India said on Monday local firms will no longer need license or other permission to collect, generate, store and share geospatial data of the country, bringing sweeping changes to its earlier stance that it admitted hindered innovation.
Until now, New Delhi required Indian firms to seek licenses and additional approvals to create and publish topographical data. India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi said today’s “deregulation” step will help the country become more self-reliant and reach its $5 trillion GDP goal.
“The regulations that apply to geospatial data and maps henceforth stand radically liberalised. The Department of Science and Technology is announcing sweeping changes to India’s mapping policy, specifically for Indian companies. What is readily available globally does not need to be restricted in India and therefore geospatial data that used to be restricted will now be freely available in India,” New Delhi said in a statement.
In its guidelines, New Delhi said local firms will be permitted access to “ground truthing/verification” that includes access to Indian ground stations and augmentation services for real-time positioning. Indian firms will also be provided access to terrestrial mobile mapping survey, street view survey and surveying in Indian territorial waters.
New Delhi said in the guidelines that only Indian firms shall be permitted access to the aforementioned surveys. Google has previously made unsuccessful attempts to launch its Street View service in India. A Google spokesperson told TechCrunch that the company was reviewing the guidelines and had no immediate comment to offer.
“Foreign companies and foreign owned or controlled Indian companies can license from Indian Entities digital Maps/Geospatial Data of spatial accuracy/value finer than the threshold value only for the purpose of serving their customers in India. Access to such Maps/Geospatial Data shall only be made available through APIs that do not allow Maps/Geospatial Data to pass through Licensee Company or its servers. Re-use or resale of such map data by licensees shall be prohibited,” the guidelines added.
Devdatta Tengshe, who works in the GIS space, told TechCrunch that the government’s move today was significant for the local ecosystem including citizens as previous restrictions had created an uncertainty on what precisely was permitted.
“Today’s announcement makes it explicitly clear that Indian entities can perform any location data collection and we can collect data on our own,” he said. “Additionally, the location data from agencies like municipality will be made available to Indian entities.”
Flipkart-backed 25-year-old firm MapMyIndia said today’s move by the government is “historic” as it opens up maps and the geospatial sector and ushers the self-reliance era in “strategic areas of maps to empower all 1.3 billion Indians and give unprecedented opportunities and growth for Indian companies.”
Modi said: “The reforms will unlock tremendous opportunities for our country’s start-ups, private sector, public sector and research institutions to drive innovations and build scalable solutions. India’s farmers will also be benefited by leveraging the potential of geo-spatial & remote sensing data. Democratizing data will enable the rise of new technologies & platforms that will drive efficiencies in agriculture and allied sectors. These reforms demonstrate our commitment to improving ease of doing business in India by deregulation.”
GM revealed Sunday a refreshed Chevrolet Bolt EV and a new, bigger — yet still compact — crossover called the Chevrolet Bolt EUV as part of the automaker’s goal to introduce 30 electric vehicles in the next four years.
The vehicles, which are expected to go on sale this summer, are like siblings: the pair share much of the same DNA but have their own distinct differences. The 2022 Chevy Bolt EUV is bigger than the Chevy Bolt hatchback. GM lengthened the wheelbase of the EUV by about 3 inches. In all, the EUV sits some 6 inches longer than the Bolt EV. The result is a compact crossover with 39.1 inches of rear seat legroom.
The EUV — a GM acronym that means electric utility vehicle — also has the notable distinction of being the first Chevrolet to have the hands-free driver assistance system known as Super Cruise. The hands-free system won’t come standard, however. Drivers will have to upgrade beyond the EUV’s $33,995 base price.
That $33,995 price point stands out because it’s actually slighter cheaper than the 2021 Chevy Bolt that is currently sitting in dealerships. The new refreshed Chevy Bolt, which is described in greater details below, has also received a price cut.
The takeaway: GM is using its scale to keep prices low in hopes of attracting customers who have a growing pool of EV options.
2022 Chevrolet Bolt EUV
The EUV will have an estimated range of 250 miles, which is a few miles lower than the Bolt EV. The vehicle will also come with a standard dual level charge cord with a changeable plug that lets drivers choose 120V and 240V charging.
The EUV will also come with native navigation. That’s an important addition in this two-member Bolt portfolio. The Chevy Bolt EV, which first debuted in 2016, doesn’t have a native in-car navigation and instead relies on either Android Auto or Apple CarPlay for maps and driving directions.
Importantly, neither one of these vehicles is part of the new Ultium battery platform that GM revealed in spring 2020. The Ultium platform is designed to support a wide range of products across its brands, including compact cars, work trucks, large premium SUVs, performance vehicles. The Bolt EUV and Bolt EV should be viewed as an important placeholder, two vehicles that will help keep it in the game while it works on its more ambitious EV strategy.
The 2022 Chevrolet Bolt
2022 Chevrolet Bolt EV
The Bolt EUV wasn’t the only vehicle GM revealed Sunday. The automaker has also refreshed the Chevrolet Bolt, the hatchback electric vehicle that first debuted more than four years ago.
The upshot: many of the specs stayed the same, the interior got an upgrade and the price dropped by $5,500.
The 2022 Chevy Bolt’s underlying battery platform, the BEV2, has remained unchanged.
The car, which goes on sale this summer, has a 65 kilowatt-hour battery pack that provides an estimated 259 miles of range. It is also still powered by a single motor — just like the original — that generates 200 horsepower and 266 pound-feet of torque. The vehicle is the same width as before, but gained a skosh in height and is now 63.4 inches taller, while losing less than an inch in length.
2022 Chevrolet Bolt EV
The 2022 Chevy Bolt, which starts at $31,995, is a couple grand cheaper than the new Bolt EUV. For that price, GM tried to pack in a bit more such as an updated modern interior and “more comfortable” bucket seating, according to the company. GM said the improvements were based on customer feedback.
The vehicle includes a touchscreen display that is a bit larger at 10.2 inches as well as an 8-inch digital instrument cluster. Just like the previous version, the 2022 model comes standard with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. As mentioned before, the 2022 Chevy Bolt still doesn’t come standard with in-car navigation, relying instead on CarPlay or Android Auto.
One new feature is a button in the center console that when engaged allows one-pedal driving. The driver depresses the accelerator pedal to move; once the driver’s foot leaves the pedal, the vehicle’s regenerative braking kicks in and will bring the vehicle to a stop.
The Chevy Bolt doesn’t come with GM’s hands-free driver assistance system known as Super Cruise. GM chose the Chevy Bolt EUV for that system, which has been corralled over in Cadillac for the past several years. The Bolt hatchback does come standard with the “Chevy Safety Assist,” six features that includes lane keeping assist and a warning if the vehicle leaves the lane.
The only people who truly understand a relationship are the ones who are in it. Luckily for us, we’re going to have a candid conversation with both parties in the relationship between Ironclad CEO and cofounder Jason Boehmig and his investor and board member Accel partner Steve Loughlin.
Loughlin led Ironclad’s Series A deal back in 2017, making it one of his first Series A deals after returning to Accel.
This episode of Extra Crunch Live goes down on Wednesday at 3pm ET/12pm PT, just like usual.
We’ll talk to the duo about how they met, what made them ‘choose’ each other, and how they’ve operated as a duo since. How they built trust, maintain honesty, and talk strategy are also on the table as part of the discussion.
Loughlin was an entrepreneur before he was an investor, founding RelateIQ (an Accel-backed company) in 2011. The company was acquired by Salesforce in 2014 for $390 million and later became Salesforce IQ. Loughlin then “came back home” to Accel in 2016, and has led investments in companies like Airkit, Ascend.io, Clockwise, Ironclad, Monte Carlo, Nines, Productiv, Split.io, and Vivun.
Not entirely unsurprising for a man who has dominated the legal tech sphere, Jason Boehmig is a California barred attorney who practiced law at Fenwick & West and was also an adjunct professor of law at Notre Dame Law School. Ironclad launched in 2014 and today the company has raised more than $180 million and, according to reports, is valued just under $1 billion.
Not only will we peel back the curtain on how this investor/founder relationship works, but we’ll also hear from these two tech leaders on their thoughts around bigger enterprise trends in the ecosystem.
Then, it’s time for the Pitch Deck Teardown. On each episode of Extra Crunch Live, we take a look at pitch decks submitted by the audience and our experienced guests give their live feedback. If you want to throw your hat pitch deck in the ring, you can hit this link to submit your deck for a future episode.
As with just about everything we do here at TechCrunch, audience members can also ask their own questions to our guests.
Extra Crunch Live has left room for you to network (you gotta network to get work, amirite?). Networking is open starting at 2:30pm ET/11:30am PT and stays open a half hour after the episode ends. Make a friend!
As a reminder, Extra Crunch Live is a members-only series that aims to give founders and tech operators actionable advice and insights from leaders across the tech industry. If you’re not an Extra Crunch member yet, what are you waiting for?
Loughlin and Boehmig join a stellar cast of speakers on Extra Crunch Live, including Lightspeed’s Gaurav Gupta and Grafana’s Raj Dutt, as well as Felicis’ Aydin Senkut and Guideline’s Kevin Busque. Extra Crunch members can catch every episode of Extra Crunch Live on demand right here.
You can find details for this episode (and upcoming episodes) after the jump below.
See you on Wednesday!
The tech industry has long grappled with an overwhelming lack of diversity among employees, executives, venture-backed founders, venture capital firms and board members. And despite recent efforts to increase diversity throughout the industry, tech still remains predominantly white and male.
Over the years, many have argued that the lack of diversity in tech is caused by a so-called pipeline problem: that there is little diversity in tech because there is not enough qualified talent from diverse backgrounds.
Today, there is well-established data that proves the lack of diversity in tech cannot be attributed to a pipeline problem, Uber Chief Diversity Officer Bo Young Lee told TechCrunch.
“If we want to claim that it’s a pipeline issue, we would first have to claim that we’ve hired what is available in the pipeline,” she said. “It’s not a pipeline issue as much as it is a recruiting process challenge.”
But the notion that there is a pipeline problem, despite the evidence showing there is not one, at least partly remains in the public psyche. Courri Brady, director at diversity, equity and inclusion consulting firm Paradigm, recognizes there are still some folks who have yet to rid themselves of the myth of the pipeline problem.
“There’s still a perception to some degree that there’s a pipeline problem within some companies that I’m personally supporting,” Brady told TechCrunch. “But there are a couple of dynamics at play.
One of those dynamics, Brady said, pertains to recruiting processes, which are relatively fixed inside tech companies.
If companies are convinced only certain schools, programs or other companies are the only places that produce good talent, and those people are not diverse, Brady said, “then those issues are going to perpetuate themselves.”
Dr. Joy Lisi Rankin, a research lead for gender, race and power in artificial intelligence at the AI Now Institute, is actively researching the history of the pipeline problem. In the next six months, the plan is to publish it as a report and potentially turn it into a book. Rankin was kind of enough to give TechCrunch a sneak peek into some of her research so far.
“The very high-level view is, people have been talking about a pipeline problem in some form since the seventies,” Rankin told me. “And before that, often, it was like a quote, manpower problem, by focusing on who has PhDs or master’s degrees in a field or who has elite jobs in a field. But that focus is always on individuals. It’s on tracking people, not institutions and not structures. So this is why I think it continues to be a convenient excuse for a host of sins, because talking about a pipeline makes it seem as if all things are equal in the United States, and we just have to find a way to keep people in. But the truth is, when we think about a STEM pipeline, we don’t talk about the fact that education in the United States is by no means equal from birth onwards.”
There are, of course, programs like Black Girls Code, Girls Who Code, Code.org and others that aim to step in to help introduce kids to technology. But these issues go deeper than just STEM education, Rankin said.
“For a long time, it was you had to have a certain SAT score to get in somewhere or a certain GRE score for graduate school,” Rankin said. “But we know, literally decades of research have shown SATs correlate in no way with how you’re going to do in college or how you might be as a student, but correlate everything with how wealthy your family is, which also then correlates with race and access to all other sorts of things like tutoring and etc. But that same time of credentialing pops up time and time again.”
The entire education system has historically functioned as a gatekeeper to knowledge through credentialing, she said.
“Credentialing is a form of gatekeeping and protecting who has access to power and who doesn’t,” she said. “There’s this term that I think was coined a few years ago about how Silicon Valley tech companies are not meritocracies, but ‘mirrortocracies,’ so you’re hiring people who have similar credentials to you, had the same sort of schooling, etcetera. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re more qualified. We know that all sorts of diversity often yields better work and better outcomes in a variety of situations, but focusing on certain types of quote, qualifications and credentials, don’t reflect that.”
Beyond education, however, there are also other pipelines at play. There’s the cradle to prison pipeline, which I’ve referred to as “the other pipeline,” as well as “the revolving door of H1B visa workers who are treated with lower status,” Rankin said.
“The pipeline is a way to silo all of that out and say, ‘we just need to get more Black women in tech,’ as opposed to saying, ‘actually, these companies are and have been racist and white supremacist and misogynist, and it’s those institutions and larger societal and global capitalist structures that need to change.”
What the idea of the pipeline also doesn’t capture is the fact that women were often tasked with doing manual computing in the 1950s and sixties, Rankin said. Back then, many considered coding to be a woman’s job.
“And it was only as it became clear how socially and economically and politically important that computing would be, that the profession over a decade or so became masculine. […] It clearly shows that as certain types of computing and programming became culturally valuable, more of those jobs that were better paying went to men. And it wasn’t that the work was any different but that because there was a prestige shift, there was also a shift in how it was gendered.”
Those are just some of the ideas Rankin will outline in her research paper, which she hopes will help to change the conversation happening in the tech industry about diversity, equity and inclusion. Instead of relying on the pipeline as an excuse, Rankin said she hopes the tech industry will focus more on inequities, structural racism, misogyny and how micro-inequities can lead to macro problems.
Rankin’s report will also have some recommendations, such as working to make education truly equitable and addressing surveillance, as well as the school to prison pipeline. She also believes salary data should be public information.
“As soon as we have more transparency around salaries, we can have more meaningful conversations,” she said.
Last week, former Pinterest employee Ifeoma Ozoma introduced legislation with the backing of California State Senator Connie Leyva to empower those who experience workplace discrimination and/or harassment. The Silenced No More Act (SB 331) would prevent the use of non-disclosure agreements in workplace situations involving all forms of discrimination and harassment.
“That’s certainly a step in the right direction,” Rankin said.
The proposed bill would expand the current protections workers have through the Stand Together Against Non-Disclosures Act, also authored by Leyva, that went into effect in 2019. Ozoma, along with former co-worker Aerica Shimizu Banks, came forward with claims of both racial and gender discrimination last year. They eventually settled with Pinterest, but the STAND Act technically only protected them for speaking out about gender discrimination. This new bill would ensure workers are also protected when speaking out about racial discrimination.
“It would be huge and not just for tech, but for your industry as well,” Ozoma told me earlier this week. “I believe that we don’t have real progress unless we approach things intersectionally and that’s the lesson from all of us.”
Meredith Whittaker, AI Now Faculty Director and co-organizer of the 2018 Google walkout, said this type of legislation absolutely necessary.
“From a structural perspective, it’s really evident we’re not going to change toxic, discriminatory tech environments without naming the problems,” Whittaker told TechCrunch. “We have decades of failed DEI PR, decades of people blaming the pipeline and decades of brilliant people like Ifeoma, Aerica and Timnit being harassed and pushed out of these environments. And oftentimes, people aren’t able to speak about their experiences so that the deep toxicity of these environments — the way it’s built into the structural operating procedures of these companies and workplaces — doesn’t get aired.”
There also needs to be more transparency around hiring and corporate recruiting, Rankin said. Pinterest, which was one of the first companies to set goals around diversity, disclosed last year that its hiring rates for women engineers, underrepresented minority engineers and underrepresented employees. But there’s room for even more transparency, like how many new hires come from those programs.
In Uber’s most recent diversity report, Uber talks about university recruiting, diversifying internship programs and more but the company’s reported data does not disclose how many hires came from those efforts.
Uber’s Bo Young Lee says the company is working on better tracking its top-of-funnel pipeline to ensure it’s representative of the available talent. This is called the Mansfield rule, which takes the Rooney Rule a couple of steps further. If Uber gets this right, then 14% of its recruiting pipeline would be Black and Hispanic, Lee said, citing a 2016 New York Times article about engineering graduates. It’s early days for Uber’s implementation of the Mansfield Rule, but the plan is to publish some of the data, Lee said. Though, she hasn’t yet decided exactly what that will look like.
Meanwhile, in Google’s latest diversity report, the company outlined how more than 1,300 women in Latin America were trained on web development and UX design with the help of Google volunteers and a Google.org grant. As a result, Google said 75% of the women who participated found jobs in tech. What Google did not mention, however, was how many women found jobs at Google.
In that same report, Google mentioned that it hired from 15 Historically Black College and Universities (HBCUs), 39 Hispanic-serving institutions and nine women’s colleges in the U.S. That all sounds good, but in December, former Google diversity recruiter April Curley came forward about how she was fired after she “became aware of all the racist shit put in place to keep black and brown students out of their pipeline.”
“We have a large team of recruiters who work incredibly hard to increase the hiring of Black+ and other underrepresented talent at Google, including a dedicated team that partners and strengthens our relationships with HBCUs,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch. “This work is critical – in 2019 we welcomed graduates from 19 HBCUs and over the past decade, we’ve expanded our recruiting efforts to more than 800 schools. At the same time, we are absolutely committed to maintaining an inclusive and supportive workplace. We don’t agree with the way April describes her termination, but it’s not appropriate for us to provide a commentary about her claims.”
Despite what may have happened at Google or what happens at other tech companies, it’s the overall lack of transparency around recruiting processes with which Rankin takes issue.
“It’s its own form of pipeline that is problematic and inequitable,” Rankin said. “[…] But how do you break down the scale of the problem so that it’s not just focusing on individuals.”
Rankin does not work inside tech companies and can’t speak to the inner workings of DEI departments, but said she does believe there are good people who are trying to make things better.
“I think this is a larger problem of education and perspective and how you can get to a point where you have an engineering degree or you get hired by a tech company and you’ve never had to think about race as a deeply rooted historical, structural problem,” she said. “[…] I think it’s convenient to disregard some of these larger issues and at some point, ignorance isn’t an excuse, especially given the events of the past few years.”
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/14/examining-the-pipeline-problem/
