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Day: June 8, 2021

Don’t trust that SPAC deck

by Alex Wilhelm

The continuing saga of Lordstown Motor’s struggles as a public company took a new turn today as the electric truck manufacturer made yet more news. Bad news.

Shares of Lordstown are down sharply today after the company reported in an SEC filing that it does not have enough capital to build and launch its electric truck. Here’s the official verbiage (formatting, bolding: TechCrunch):

Since inception, the Company has been developing its flagship vehicle, the Endurance, an electric full-size pickup truck. The Company’s ability to continue as a going concern is dependent on its ability to complete the development of its electric vehicles, obtain regulatory approval, begin commercial scale production and launch the sale of such vehicles.

The Company believes that its current level of cash and cash equivalents are not sufficient to fund commercial scale production and the launch of sale of such vehicles. These conditions raise substantial doubt regarding our ability to continue as a going concern for a period of at least one year from the date of issuance of these unaudited condensed consolidated financial statements.

Now, companies that are trying to invent the future are more risky than, say, established banking concerns that are generating stable GAAP net income. I’m sure that SpaceX looked dicey at times when it was busy crashing rockets on its way to learning how to land them on drone ships.

But in the case of Lordstown’s admission that it cannot “fund commercial scale production and the launch of sale” of its Endurance (Read more...)

Race to Net Zero: Carbon Neutral Goals by Country

by Sponsored Content

The following content is sponsored by the National Public Utility Council

Race to Net Zero: Carbon Neutral Goals by Country

The time to talk about net zero goals is running out, and the time to put them into action is well underway.

At the U.S. Climate Summit in April 2021, U.S. President Biden pressured countries to either speed up carbon neutral pledges, or commit to them in the first place.

It’s a follow-up to the Paris Agreement, which keeps signatories committed to reaching carbon neutrality in emissions in the second half of the 21st century. But 2050–2100 is a wide timeframe, and climate change is becoming both increasingly present and more dire.

So when are countries committed to reaching net zero carbon emissions, and how serious is their pledge? This infographic from the National Public Utility Council highlights the world’s carbon neutral pledges.

The Timeline of Carbon Neutral Targets by Country

The first question is how quickly countries are trying to get to net zero.

137 countries have committed to carbon neutrality, as tracked by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit and confirmed by pledges to the Carbon Neutrality Coalition and recent policy statements by governments.

But the earlier the pledge, the better, and most of the commitments are centered around 2050.

CountryTarget Year
BhutanAchieved
SurinameAchieved
Uruguay2030
Finland2035
Austria2040
Iceland2040
Germany2045
Sweden2045
Afghanistan2050
Andorra2050
Angola2050
Antigua and Barbuda2050
Argentina2050
Armenia2050
Bahamas2050
Bangladesh (Read more...)

Brian Chesky | People-First Capitalism

by Greylock Partners
This post is by Greylock Partners from Greymatter

While many CEOs choose to stay out of the public eye during times of crisis, Airbnb CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky has always opted for the opposite. It was no different during the Covid-19 pandemic, when travel came to a standstill and the company was forced to restructure. Chesky remained open, candid and transparent throughout the experience, and the company was able to navigate the crisis in stride. Chesky joined Greylock partner Reid Hoffman on Greylock's Iconversations speaker series to talk about how he guided Airbnb from an 80% loss within the first two months of the pandemic to a record-breaking IPO by the end of 2020; why Silicon Valley needs to redefine how it measures growth; how Chesky’s design background informs Airbnb’s business strategy; and, ultimately, the importance of putting people first.

People-First Capitalism

by Reid Hoffman
This post is by Reid Hoffman from Reid Hoffman

When COVID-19 upended the travel industry last year, Airbnb was among its earliest victims, losing 80% of their business in the first two months of the pandemic. Such a blow would leave any CEO reeling, if not prove fatal to the company as a whole.

While many travel industry leaders chose to “go dark,” as Airbnb CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky put it,  while they decided how to navigate next steps, Chesky took a different approach: He got candid.

“The biggest risk [for] the company is your stakeholders don’t trust you — not that you’ll say the wrong thing or get sued, but [that] people don’t trust you,” Chesky says. “[In a crisis], it’s really about being totally as transparent as you can be, trying to be incredibly compassionate, speaking from the heart.”

Chesky joined Greylock partner Reid Hoffman (who recently reflected on Airbnb’s 2010 Series A) for our Iconversations speaker series to talk about how he guided Airbnb from an 80% loss to a record-breaking IPO by the end of 2020, why Silicon Valley needs to redefine how it measures growth, how Chesky’s design background informs Airbnb’s business strategy and, ultimately, the importance of putting people first.

“Conventional wisdom says, ‘Don’t get too close, don’t get emotionally attached.’ Because if you do, it’s going to skew your decision making,” says Chesky. “I always saw it as the opposite.”

You can listen to the conversation on the Greymatter podcast here.

Greylock Partners · Brian Chesky | People-First Capitalism

EPISODE (Read more...)

The Apple Table is Set

by Robert Scoble
This post is by Robert Scoble from Scobleizer

The big meal is about to come. We’ve been waiting for years for Apple to reveal its mixed reality products, including visors and glasses. We’ve been seeing the potential coming in other products like the Oculus Quest, the Magic Leap 1, or Microsoft’s Hololens. For years we’ve dreamed about an augmented world. Steve Jobs called them “bicycles for the mind.”

Yesterday it announced a bunch of things to developers and a few of these “human helpers.” Techmeme has all the reports here: https://www.techmeme.com/210607/p22#a210607p22

The most interesting was that, as of yesterday, Apple Music now is available in Spatial Audio. In a way, its headphones that enable that feature are the first to use its new philosophy: “how many ways can we improve lives by including more AI and 3D visualization in products?”

Apple knows that great audio is the foundation of great experiences in visual apps, like video games, entertainment, virtual shopping, education, and concerts. So it makes sense to upgrade all audio, which Apple is in the middle of doing. Another major upgrade comes next year when audio gets locked to the real world.

Apple is confusing people with all the new audio terms. Lossless and Spatial Audio are two I hear a lot, but Apple hasn’t been clear about why we want either, or both. By this time next year it’ll be clear, or, rather, it won’t matter. Most new media will be available in the better of the two formats, Spatial Audio. That format gives you infinite (Read more...)

The Apple Table is Set

by Robert Scoble
This post is by Robert Scoble from Scobleizer

The big meal is about to come. We’ve been waiting for years for Apple to reveal its mixed reality products, including visors and glasses. We’ve been seeing the potential coming in other products like the Oculus Quest, the Magic Leap 1, or Microsoft’s Hololens. For years we’ve dreamed about an augmented world. Steve Jobs called them “bicycles for the mind.”

Yesterday it announced a bunch of things to developers and a few of these “human helpers.” Techmeme has all the reports here: https://www.techmeme.com/210607/p22#a210607p22

The most interesting was that, as of yesterday, Apple Music now is available in Spatial Audio. In a way, its headphones that enable that feature are the first to use its new philosophy: “how many ways can we improve lives by including more AI and 3D visualization in products?”

Apple knows that great audio is the foundation of great experiences in visual apps, like video games, entertainment, virtual shopping, education, and concerts. So it makes sense to upgrade all audio, which Apple is in the middle of doing. Another major upgrade comes next year when audio gets locked to the real world.

Apple is confusing people with all the new audio terms. Lossless and Spatial Audio are two I hear a lot, but Apple hasn’t been clear about why we want either, or both. By this time next year it’ll be clear, or, rather, it won’t matter. Most new media will be available in the better of the two formats, Spatial Audio. That format gives you infinite (Read more...)

ISEE brings autonomy to shipping yards with self-driving container trucks

by Devin Coldewey

Robotaxis may still be a few years out, but there are other industries that can be transformed by autonomous vehicles as they are today. MIT spin-off ISEE has identified one in the common shipping yard, where containers are sorted and stored — today by a dwindling supply of human drivers, but tomorrow perhaps by the company’s purpose-built robotic yard truck. With new funding and partnerships with major shippers, the company may be about to go big.

Shipping yards are the buffer zone of the logistics industry. When a container is unloaded from a ship full of them, it can’t exactly just sit there on the wharf where the crane dropped it. Maybe it’s time sensitive and has to trucked out right away; maybe it needs to go through customs and inspections and must stay in the facility for a week; maybe it’s refrigerated and needs power and air hookups.

Each of these situations will be handled by a professional driver, hooking the container up to a short-haul truck and driving it the hundred or thousand meters to its proper place, an empty slot with a power hookup, long term storage, ready access for inspection, etc. But like many jobs in logistics, this one is increasingly facing a labor shortage as fewer people sign up for it every year. The work, after all, is fairly repetitive, not particularly easy, and of course heavy equipment can be dangerous.

ISEE’s co-founders Yibiao Zhao and Debbie Yu said they identified the logistics industry as (Read more...)

Network security startup ExtraHop skips and jumps to $900M exit

by Ron Miller

Last year, Seattle-based network security startup ExtraHop was riding high, quickly approaching $100 million in ARR and even making noises about a possible IPO in 2021. But there will be no IPO, at least for now, as the company announced this morning it has been acquired by a pair of private equity firms for $900 million.

The firms, Bain Capital Private Equity and Crosspoint Capital Partners, are buying a security solution that provides controls across a hybrid environment, something that could be useful as more companies find themselves in a position where they have some assets on-site and some in the cloud.

The company is part of the narrower Network Detection and Response (NDR) market. According to Jesse Rothstein, ExtraHop’s chief technology officer and co-founder, it’s a technology that is suited to today’s threat landscape, “I will say that ExtraHop’s north star has always really remained the same, and that has been around extracting intelligence from all of the network traffic in the wire data. This is where I think the network detection and response space is particularly well-suited to protecting against advanced threats,” he told TechCrunch.

The company uses analytics and machine learning to figure out if there are threats and where they are coming from, regardless of how customers are deploying infrastructure. Rothstein said he envisions a world where environments have become more distributed with less defined perimeters and more porous networks.

“So the ability to have this high quality detection and response capability utilizing next generation machine (Read more...)