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We crawled into an abandoned school bus, trespassed through dilapidated hallways, dodged fleeting thunderstorms and wandered through empty streets of Chinatown late into the evening. For two summery weeks, I couldn’t have been happier.
New York City was in lockdown. I’d been quarantined in my dinky apartment, disheartened and restless. I was anxious to do something creative. Thankfully, the Hasselblad X1D II 50C arrived for review, along with approval from the studio heads for socially-distanced, outdoor shoots.
Taking pictures of the mundane (flowers, buildings, and such) would’ve been a disservice to a $10,000 camera kit, so instead, my friends and I collaborated on a fun, little project: we shot portraits inspired by our favorite films.
Image Credits: Veanne Cao
Equipped with masks and a bottle of hand sanitizer, we put the X1D II 50C and 80mm F/1.9 lens (ideal for close-ups without actually having to be close up) through its paces in some of NYC’s less familiar backdrops.
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Before I get into any trouble for the last photo – Alex and Jason are professional stuntmen and that’s a rubber prop gun. They were reenacting the penultimate scene from Infernal Affairs – a brilliant piece of Hong Kong cinema (much better than the Scorsese remake).
While the camera is slightly more approachable in terms of cost and ease of use with a few upgrades (larger, more responsive rear screen, a cleaned-up menu, tethering capabilities, faster startup time and shutter release), the X1D II is essentially the same as its predecessor. So I skipped the standard review. 
Image Credits: Veanne Cao
What it is, what it isn’t
The most common complaint about the X1D was its slow autofocus, slow shutter release and short battery life. The X1D II improved on these features, though not by much. Rather than seeing the lag as a hindrance, I was forced to slow down and re-wire my brain for a more thoughtful shooting style (a pleasant side effect).
As I mentioned in my X1D review, Apple and other smartphone manufacturers have made shooting great pictures effortless. As such, the accessibility has created a culture of excessively capturing everyday banalities. You shoot far more than you’ll ever need. It’s something I’m guilty of. Pretty sure 90% of the images on my iPhone camera roll are throwaways. (The other 10% are of my dog and he’s spectacularly photogenic.)
The X1D II, however, is not an easy camera. It’s frustrating at times. If you’re a beginner, you may have to learn the fundamentals (ISO, f-stops, when to click the shutter), but the payoff is worth it. There’s an overwhelming sense of gratification when you get that one shot. And at 50 megapixels, it’s packed with details and worthy of hanging on your wall. Shelling out a ton of money for the X1D II won’t instantly make you a better photographer, but it ought to encourage you to become one.
Without the contrived studio lights and set design, our outdoor shoots became an exercise in improvisation: we wandered through the boroughs finding practicals (street lights, neon lights… the sun), discovering locations, and switching spots when things didn’t pan out.
We explored, we had purpose.
My takeaway from the two weeks with this camera: pause and be meaningful in your actions.
Reviewed kit runs $10,595, pre-taxed:
Hasselblad X1D II 50C Mirrorless Camera – $5,750
Hasselblad 80mm F/1.9 XCD Lens – $4,845
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/06/hasselblad-x1d-ii-50c-out-of-the-studio-and-into-the-streets/
Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday morning? Sign up here.
Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors.
It’s been a bizarre few weeks, with Robinhood raising a torrent of new funds to keep its zero-cost trading model afloat during turbulent market conditions, other neo-trading houses changing up their business model and more. But amidst all the moves in startup-land, something has been itching in the back of my head: Why are several rich people pumping crappy assets?
It’s fine for a retail investor to share trading ideas amongst themselves; it has happened, will happen, and will always happen. But we’ve seen folks like Elon Musk and Chamath Palihapitiya use their broad market imprint to encourage regular folks — directly and indirectly — to buy into some pretty silly trades that could lose the retail crowd lots of money that they may not be able to afford.
Think of Elon coming back to Twitter to pump Doge, a joke of a cryptocurrency that is highly volatile and mostly useless. Or Chamath putting money into GameStop publicly, a move that he is better equipped than most to get into and out of. Which he did. And made money. Most folks that played the GameStop casino have not been as lucky, and many have lost more than they can afford.
Caveat emptor and all that, but I do not love folks with savvy and capital leading regular people into risky trades or into assets that are not backed by long-term fundamentals, but instead a small shot at near-term returns. Yoof.
Finally, keeping up the theme of general annoyance, Senator Hawley is back in the news this week with an attention-focused announcement of an idea to block big tech companies from buying smaller companies. As you would expect from the insurrection-friendly Senator, it’s not an incredibly serious proposal, and it’s written so vaguely as to be nearly humorous.
But as I wrote here on my personal blog about all of this, what does matter out of the generally irksome pol is that there is bipartisan interest in limiting the ability of big tech companies to buy smaller companies. For startups, that is not good news; M&A exits are critical liquidity events for startups, and big companies have the most money.
It’s no sauté of my onions if startup valuations fall, but I think there’s been plenty of attention noting that some Democrats and some Republicans in the U.S want to undercut top-down tech M&A, and not nearly enough notice concerning what the effort might do to startup valuations and funding. And if those metrics dip, there could be fewer upstarts in the market actually working to take on the giants.
Food for thought.
Market Notes
The Exchange caught up once again with Unity CFO Kim Jabal. We did so not merely to make jokes with her about games that we like or don’t like, but to keep tabs on how Jabal thinks as the financial head of a company that was private when she joined, and public now. A few observations:
- GAAP v. Non-GAAP: I asked about Unity’s recent Q4 net income, measured using generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP. It was impacted by some share-based comp numbers. Jabal was clear that her team and investors are more focused on non-GAAP numbers. Why? They strip out non-cash charges like share-based comp and provide a different perspective into corporate performance. This is standard startup practice, but her comment shows how if your company is growing quickly post-IPO, you can stick to adjusted metrics and have no issue. If growth slows, I bet that changes.
- COVID: Will the COVID bump to gaming stick? Per Jabal, when her company has seen a bump in engagement historically, results don’t tend to fall back to prior plateaus. I wonder if this will be the case for all COVID-boosted parts of the startup and big-tech landscape. If so, it’s very good news.
- Know your metrics: Jabal said that her key metrics are non-GAAP operating margin and free cash flow — apart from growth, I’d add. That’s super clear and easy to grok. Startup CEOs, please have a similar distillation ready when we chat about your latest round.
And speaking of startups, let’s talk about a company that I’ve had my eye on that recently raised more capital: Deepgram. I covered the company’s Series A, a $12 million round in March 2020. Now it has raised $25 million more, led by Tiger, so this is a fun case of big money investing early-stage, I think. Regardless, Deepgram was a bet on a particular model for speech recognition, and, then, its market. its new investment implies that both wagers came out the right way up.
And I was chatting with the CEO of Databricks recently (more here on its latest megaround), who mentioned the huge gains made in AI, and more specifically around generative adversarial networks (GANs) NLP, and more. Our read is that we should expect to see more Deepgram-ish rounds in the future as AI and similar methods of approaching data make their way into workflows.
And fintech player Payoneer is going public. Via a SPAC. You can read the investor presentation here. Payoneer is not a pre-revenue firm going out via a blank check; it did an expected $346 million in 2020 rev. I’m bringing it to you for two reasons. One, read the deck, and then ask yourself why all SPAC decks are so ugly. I don’t get it. And then ask yourself why isn’t it pursuing a traditional IPO? Numbers are on pages 32 and 40. I can’t figure it out. Let me know if you have a take. Best response gets Elon’s dogecoin.
Various and Sundry
Wrapping up this week, TechCrunch has a new newsletter coming out on apps that is going to rule. Sarah Perez is writing it. You can sign up here, it’s free!
And if you need a new tune, you could do worse than this one. Have a great weekend!
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/06/what-are-these-rich-people-doing-pumping-crappy-assets/
You’ve landed on Human Capital, a weekly newsletter detailing the latest in diversity, equity, inclusion and labor. Sign up here to receive the newsletter every Friday at 1 p.m. PT.
The events of this week perfectly encapsulate the variety of worker and workplace-related struggles happening in the tech industry. Google settled some discrimination allegations with the Department of Labor, Amazon agreed to settle a complaint with the FTC over stolen tips from Flex workers and the Alphabet Workers Union filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board. It was quite the week so let’s get to it.
Grocery delivery startup Dumpling faces backlash
Dumpling workers said this week they have been misled by the Instacart alternative’s business model, Vice reported. Additionally, workers told Vice the company shut down their Facebook post where they were protesting pay changes.
From Vice:
But Dumpling is now in hot water with many of the gig workers on its platform, which it calls “business owners.” These business owners say the company has misled them about how much autonomy and control they’d have on the platform, and has shut down their Facebook group after workers on the platform spoke out against a series of changes the company made to its pay model in the latter half of 2020. When Dumpling closed the Facebook group, it said the group “ha[d]n’t lived up to its positive intent.”
Alpha Global walks back its announcement
Remember when Alpha Global announced an alliance of Alphabet workers around the world, including those affiliated with the recently-formed Alphabet Workers Union in the U.S.? Well, it turns out that wasn’t entirely true. Alpha Global has since issued a revised statement clarifying it did not have buy-in from AWU.
In our announcement of the Alpha Global alliance, UNI mistakenly included CODE-CWA and the Alphabet Workers Union (AWU) as members of the Alpha Global Alliance and a quote from AWU Executive Chair Parul Koul, without receiving proper authorization from CWA, the Alphabet Workers Union’s elected Executive Council, or Ms. Koul. We take full responsibility and have addressed this situation to prevent it from happening again.
But by the time Alpha Global made the announcement, the damage had already been done, according to The Verge. Some AWU members expressed their concerns with the way things went down, and some are now pushing to disassociate from the Communications Workers of America.
It’s a whole thing that you can read more about here.
Alphabet Workers Union files complaint with NLRB
In a filing with the National Labor Union, AWU alleged Google vendor Adecco violated the law by trying to silence employees. The complaint alleges employees were punished for discussing their pay. The complaint was filed against both Adecco and Google
Google CEO meets with HBCUs
In light of recent departures of Black leaders at Google, CEO Sundar Pichai met with five HBCUs last Friday. The meeting itself was relatively uneventful — they reportedly didn’t even talk about the allegations from Dr. Timnit Gebru and April Curley — but HBCUs and Google provided the following joint-statement to CNN:
“We are all encouraged about the future partnership. The meeting paved the way for a more substantive partnership in a number of areas, from increased hiring to capacity building efforts that will increase the pipeline of tech talent from HBCUs.”
Speaking of Dr. Gebru, Google’s lead of the ethical AI team, Margaret Mitchell, posted an email she sent to Google pertaining to Gebru’s exit.
Google settles discrimination allegations with DOL
Google agreed to pay $2.59 million to more than 5,500 current employees and former job applicants as part of a settlement with the U.S. Department of Labor over allegations of systemic discrimination as it relates to compensation and hiring.
Google also agreed to reserve $250,000 a year for the next five years to address any potential pay equity adjustments that may come up. That brings Google’s total financial commitment to $3.8 million — a drop in the bucket for the company, whose parent company Alphabet has a market cap of $1.28 trillion.
The settlement comes after the DOL’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs found pay disparities affecting female software engineers at Google’s offices in Mountain View, as well as in offices in Seattle and Kirkland, Washington. The OFCCP also found differences in hiring rates that “disadvantaged female and Asian applicants” for engineers roles at Google’s locations in San Francisco, Sunnyvale and Kirkland.
Two Google workers quit to show solidarity
Vinesh Kannan, a software engineer, quit Google in light of Dr. Timnit Gebru and April Curley’s negative experiences at the company.
In a tweet, Kannan said what they experienced “crossed a personal red line I wrote down when I started the job. I know I gained a lot from Google, but I also gained a lot from both of their work, and they were wronged.”
David Baker, who was a director focused on user safety, left Google last month, saying Gebru’s departure “extinguished my desire to continue as a Googler,” according to Reuters.
Amazon agreed to pay $61.7 million to settle FTC complaint over stolen tips from Flex workers
Amazon will pay $61.7 million to compensate the drivers who loss out on the tips they were owed.
According to the complaint against Amazon and its subsidiary Amazon Logistics, the company had advertised that it paid 100% of tips to drivers. But in reality, Amazon used the customer tips to cover the difference after it lowered the hourly rate — a change it didn’t inform drivers about, the complaint says.
The FTC also alleged that Amazon didn’t stop this behavior until it became aware of the FTC investigation in 2019.
Amazon union vote on the horizon
Despite Amazon’s motion to postpone the Bessemer, Alabama union election, the National Labor Relations Board on Friday denied the company’s request. The election will go as planned via mail-in ballots beginning on Monday, February 8.
Context: Amazon has been vocally anti-union, with a website dedicated to convincing workers not to unionize, as well as fliers posted inside the workplace — even in bathroom stalls, according to The Washington Post.
Workers protest future Amazon fulfillment center
Over in Oxnard, Calif., workers protested at the site of a future Amazon fulfillment center, disrupting the construction efforts, Vice reported. The strike aimed to challenge the fact that Amazon contractor, Building Zone Industries, hired non-union workers from out of the state for the job. There were reportedly more than 100 people who participated in the strike and refused to cross the picket line to work on the project.
CA Supreme Court rejects lawsuit challenging Prop 22
The California Supreme Court shot down the lawsuit filed by a group of rideshare drivers in California and the Service Employees International Union that alleged Proposition 22 violates the state’s constitution.
“We are disappointed in the Supreme Court’s decision not to hear our case, but make no mistake: we are not deterred in our fight to win a livable wage and basic rights,” Hector Castellanos, a plaintiff in the case, said in a statement. “We will consider every option available to protect California workers from attempts by companies like Uber and Lyft to subvert our democracy and attack our rights in order to improve their bottom lines.”
The suit argued Prop 22 makes it harder for the state’s legislature to create and enforce a workers’ compensation system for gig workers. It also argues Prop 22 violates the rule that limits ballot measures to a single issue, as well as unconstitutionally defines what would count as an amendment to the measure. As it stands today, Prop 22 requires a seven-eighths legislative supermajority in order to amend the measure.
Don’t miss TC Sessions: Justice
I’m spearheading an upcoming virtual event, TC Sessions: Justice, that’s going to dive into all of these topics. You’ll be able to hear from speakers like AWU Executive Chair Parul Koul, former Amazon warehouse worker Christian Smalls, Uber Chief Diversity Officer Bo Young Lee, Backstage Capital founder and Managing Partner Arlan Hamilton and others.
Tickets are just $5 and you can snag yours here.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/06/amazon-google-pay-the-piper/
For the latest episode of the Original Content podcast, we looked back at “Soul,” which was released on Disney+ at the end of last year.
The new Pixar film tells the story of Joe Gardner, a high school music teacher and jazz musician voiced by Jamie Foxx. Joe seems to be on the verge of his big break when he accidentally falls down an open manhole, sending him to a distinctly Pixar-ish twist on the afterlife, and eventually on a metaphysical quest to return to his body before an important concert..
Anthony has been wanting to talk about “Soul” for a while — it was easily his favorite movie of 2020, but he watched it right after we recorded our discussion of the best streaming content of 2020.
And if you’re worried that this is nothing more than 40 minutes of praise, well … you’re not entirely wrong. Both of us liked it a lot, appreciating both its vibrant (and in retrospect, melancholy) portrayal of New York City life before pandemic lockdowns and social distancing, as well as its inventive portrayal of the worlds our souls go to before we’re born and after we die. (It was so inventive that Jordan had to wonder whether any unusual substances may have been involved in its genesis.)
Still, we did acknowledge some of the criticism of “Soul,” particularly certain viewers’ disappointment that even though it’s the first Pixar film with a Black protagonist, Joe actually spends a large portion of the film as a disembodied blue spirit — entertaining from a story perspective, but not quite an unambiguous victory for representation.
You can listen to our review in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You can also follow us on Twitter or send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)
If you’d like to skip ahead, here’s how the episode breaks down:
0:00 Intro
0:20 “Soul” review
18:35 “Soul” spoiler discussion
