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Go to Blogger edit html and find these sentences.Now replace these sentences with your own descriptions.This theme is Bloggerized by Lasantha Bandara - Premiumbloggertemplates.com.
Go to Blogger edit html and find these sentences.Now replace these sentences with your own descriptions.This theme is Bloggerized by Lasantha Bandara - Premiumbloggertemplates.com.
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Khatabook, which helps small Indian businesses record financial transactions digitally, raises $25M Series A from investors including GGV Capital, Sequoia India — Even as tens of millions of Indians have come online for the first time in recent years, most businesses in the nation remain offline.
Uber is testing a safety feature to let passengers record and send audio to the company if they are “uncomfortable” during a ride — Uber is testing “Record Audio” in case the rider is uncomfortable with the ride https://twitter.com/...
Dave, which offers money management tools to let its 4M users avoid overdraft fees, raises $50M, says it now has a valuation of $1B+ — Two years after the Los Angeles-based fintech startup Dave launched with a suite of money management tools to save consumers from overdraft fees …
Adam Neumann’s fall from grace was astonishingly swift once his company, WeWork, filed to go public in August. Even while his spending was fairly well-documented across time (as were his apparent conflicts of interest), he was humiliated for enriching himself, then ultimately kicked out of the corner office before the company, in the least surprising turn of events in recent weeks, today yanked its S-1 registration.
Neumann never exactly hid who he is or how he operates, so what suddenly sparked the ire of reporters — and investors — around the world? What, exactly, in an ultimately unsurprising IPO filing had people coughing up their morning coffee? Boiled down to the worst offense (including selling his own company the trademark “We” for $5.9 million in stock) was very likely the lock on control that Neumann had set up through a multi-class voting structure that aimed to cement his control. And by ‘cement,’ we mean he would enjoy overwhelming control for not just for 5 or 10 years after the company went public but, unless Neumann sold a bunch of of his shares, until his death or “permanent incapacity.”
Given that Neumann is just 40 years old and (mostly) abstains from meat, that could have been an awfully long time. Yet this wasn’t some madcap idea of his. There are plenty of founders who have or who plan to go public with dual or multi-class shares designed to keep them in control until they kick the bucket. In some cases, it’s even more extreme that that.
Consider at Lyft, for example, Logan Green and John Zimmer hold high-voting shares entitling them to twenty votes per share not until each is dead but both of them. If one of them dies or becomes incapacitated, Lyft’s so-called sunset clause enables the remaining cofounder to control the votes of the deceased cofounder. Even more, after the lone survivor bites the dust, those votes still aren’t up for grabs. Instead, a trustee will retain that person’s full voting powers for a transition period of 9 to 18 months.
The same is true over at Snap, where cofounders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy have designated the other as their respective proxies. Accordingly, when one dies, the other could individually control nearly all of the voting power of Snap’s outstanding capital stock.
Unbelievably, that’s not the worst of it. Many dual class shares are written in such a way that founders can pass along control to their heirs. As SEC Commissioner Robert Jackson, a longtime legal scholar and law professor, told an audience last year, it’s no academic exercise.
You see, nearly half of the companies who went public with dual-class over the last 15 years gave corporate insiders outsized voting rights in perpetuity. Those companies are asking shareholders to trust management’s business judgment—not just for five years, or 10 years, or even 50 years. Forever.
So perpetual dual-class ownership—forever shares—don’t just ask investors to trust a visionary founder. It asks them to trust that founder’s kids. And their kids’ kids. And their grandkid’s kids. (Some of whom may, or may not, be visionaries.) It raises the prospect that control over our public companies, and ultimately of Main Street’s retirement savings, will be forever held by a small, elite group of corporate insiders—who will pass that power down to their heirs.
Why public market investors haven’t pushed back on such extremes isn’t clear, though they’re far from an homogenous group, of course. Surely, some aren’t aware of what they’re agreeing to when they’re buying shares, given that dual-class structures are far more prevalent than they once were. Other investors may plan to churn out of the shares so quickly that they’re uninterested in a company’s potential governance issues later in time.
A third possibility, suggests Jay Ritter, who is a professor of finance at the University of Florida and an I.P.O. expert, is that even with dual-class structures, shareholders have legal rights that limit that ability of an executive who has voting control to do anything he or she wants. Further, the board of directors, including the CEO, has a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value.
Says Ritter, “I don’t think it’s accidental that with the We Company, the board of directors let [Neumann] get away with various things, and as it was transitioning to a public company, a lot of [outside participants] pushed and said, ‘This is a company where we’re worried about corporate governance and we’re willing to apply a big discount to people with inferior voting rights.'”
Of course, some investors believe visionary founders should be left to control their companies as long as they wish because, in the case of Alphabet and Facebook specifically, their founders have produced asymmetric returns for many years. But we’re still fairly early into this experiment. Do we really want more situations like we saw with Sumner Redstone of Viacom, with trials over founders’ mental capacity playing out in the media?
For his part, Alan Patricof — the renowned venture capitalist who founded the private equity firm Apax Partners before cofounding the venture firm Greycroft — say he isn’t looking forward to that future. Instead, he think it’s time the exchanges that list these companies’ shares do something about it. “I”m not holier than thou in this industry,” says Patricof, “but if you want to be a publicly traded company, you should act like a public company.” To Patricof, that means one vote for one share — period.
There’s a precedent for intervention. Patricof notes that dual-class stock first emerged in 1895 and by that 1926, there were 183 companies with such stock. It became so widespread, that the New York Stock Exchange banned the use of non-voting stock until 1956, when it made changed its rules for the Ford Motor Company, which granted only partial voting rights to new shareholders. In the ensuing years, few companies took advantage of dual-class listings until Google bounded onto the scene and now, 15 years after its IPO, it’s like 1926 all again.
Indeed, while Patricof is sympathetic to the argument that founders might need protection for a few years after an IPO, things have gone way too far, in his estimation, and he thinks the best solution would be for the NYSE and Nasdaq to meet for lunch and decide to ban multi-class shares again.
There aren’t a lot of other options. VCs aren’t going to force the issue by turning away founders with whom they want to work. Neither are bankers or large institutional investors like mutual funds; they’ve also shown they’re more than happy to look the other way if it means money in their pockets. “I could be wrong,” says Patricof, “but I don’t think it would that tough for [the big exchanges] to impose a ban that keeps founders from wielding so much power at the expense of the company’s other shareholders.”
Given how fiercely competitive the exchanges are, it’s certainly hard to imagine, this meeting of the minds. But the only other plausible path back to a saner system would seemingly be the Securities & Exchange Commission, and it seems disinclined to do anything about the issue.
Indeed, while Commissioner Jackson has advocated for change, SEC Chairman Jay Clayton would clearly prefer to leave well enough alone. After the S&P Dow Jones Indices and another major index company, FTSE Russell, decided to ban all companies with multiple classes of stock a couple of years ago — they’re uncomfortable with forcing popular index funds to buy stakes in companies that give investors little say in corporate decisions — Clayton reportedly called the moves “governance by indexation” at a conference.
It’s easy to see his argument that the indexes are being heavy handed. On the other hand, a lot of market participants might rather see companies forced to do away with dual-class structures — or at least forced to dismantle their multi-class structures after a fixed period or specific event — to watching those with with unchecked power be broken into pieces afterward.
The reality is that neither WeWork, nor Neumann, are not the zany outliers they’ve been made to seem. They’re very much a product of their time, and if shareholders don’t want to see more of the same, something has to be done. It might be incumbent on the exchanges to do it.
What to expect from Microsoft's event on October 2: Surface Pro 7, Surface Laptop 3, an ARM-based Surface, and at least a teaser of a dual-screen device — Surface Pro 7, Surface Laptop 3, and some mysterious new hardware — Microsoft is holding a big Surface hardware event in New York City on Wednesday, October 2nd.
Twitter is rolling out a filter that moves unwanted DMs containing questionable language or spam to an “additional messages” folder on Android, iOS, and the web — Twitter is quickly acting on plans to filter potentially offensive direct messages. It's rolling out the filter to all users on Android, iOS and the web.
Even as tens of millions of Indians have come online for the first time in recent years, most businesses in the nation remain offline. They continue to rely on long notebooks to keep a log of their financial transactions. A nine-month old startup that is helping them digitize their bookkeeping and accept online payments just raised a significant amount of capital to expand its operations.
Khatabook, a Bangalore-based startup, said on Tuesday it has raised $25 million in a new financing round. The Series A round for the startup was funded by GGV Capital, Partners of DST Global, RTP Ventures, Sequoia India, Tencent, and Y Combinator. A clutch of high-profile angel investors including Amrish Rau, Anand Chandrasekharan, Deep Nishar, Gokul Rajaram, Jitendra Gupta, Kunal Bahl, and Kunal Shah also participated in the round. The startup has raised $29 million to date.
Khatabook operates an eponymous Android app that allows micro, small and medium-sized businesses to keep a digital log of their financial transactions and accept payments online. The app, which was launched on Google Play Store in December last year, has amassed 5 million merchants from more than 3,000 cities, towns, and villages in India, Ravish Naresh, cofounder and CEO of Khatabook, told TechCrunch in an interview this week.
The app, which does not charge merchants, was used to process transactions worth more than $3 billion in August, said Naresh. Most merchants in developing markets are currently not online. They continue to rely on logging their financial transactions — credit, for instance — on notebooks and pieces of paper. As you can imagine, this methodology is not structured.
Even as Reliance Jio, a telecom operator launched by India’s richest man Mukesh Ambani, upended the Indian market and brought tens of millions of Indians online for the first time in last three years, most businesses in the country are still carrying out their operations without the use of any technology, said Naresh. “Could we build an app that makes it very easy for merchants to digitize their bookkeeping?” he said.
“As soon as we launched the app, we instantly started to go viral,” he said. “These shop keepers and roadside vendors have an internet-enabled smartphone, they are just not using it in their businesses. All they needed was a simple-to-use app.”
For several months now, the startup has been seeing 20% growth each month, he said. In six months, the app has helped businesses recover $5 billion in previously unpaid credits, Naresh claimed. Without any marketing, the app has also gained a significant number of users in Nepal, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, said Naresh.
“At Khatabook, we have taken early but significant steps towards leveraging this trend to digitize India’s shopkeepers. For most of our merchants, we are the first business software they’ve used in their entire life. And we will continue to build more India-first innovations to further enable the growth of what is still a largely untapped sector,” he said.
In a statement, Hans Tung, Managing Partner of GGV Capital, said, “as a global investor, we seek out founders who understand the local market and respond to growth opportunities with speed and agility – we certainly see this with the Khatabook team.”
Naresh, a cofounder of property startup Housing, said Khatabook will use the capital to build new features such as billing and invoicing to serve merchants. In next 12 months, Khatabook aims to add 25 million businesses, he said.
A growing number of startups and major giants in India are attempting to help businesses. OkCredit, which raised $67 million last month, serves 5 million merchants. IndiaMART, a 23-year-old B2B firm that went public this year, led a round in a startup called Vyapar last month that is addressing similar problems. New Delhi-based BharatPe raised $50 million in late August to help businesses accept digital payments.
Last month, Google unveiled a version of its payment service for businesses that will allow them to quickly establish some web presence and accept online payments.
“India has more than 60 million small and medium-sized businesses, however only a fraction of them support digital payments. Imagine the transformation that is possible if more of these merchants could access payments online,” said Ambarish Kenghe, director and product manager for Google Pay, at the event.
Leaked images reveal the upcoming Surface Pro 7, Surface Laptop 3 (13-inch and 15-inch), and an ARM-powered Surface 2-in-1 device — Well dang, there they are — Microsoft's new Surface lineup appears to have leaked almost in its entirety, thanks to product images obtained by journalist and leaker Evan Blass.
Google confirms it is testing Duplex-powered Assistant for Chrome, initially with movie ticket booking websites like AMC and Fandango — Back at I/O, Google announced a major expansion to its Assistant-based concierge automation engine, Duplex. Up until then, it would help people book restaurant tables …
Twitter to leave up a tweet about a “full-blown “hot” civil war” by a far-right militia with almost 24,000 followers; the militia was quote-tweeting Trump — When is promoting violent extremism not promoting violent extremism? When Twitter says so.
Microsoft now lets OneDrive users expand 1TB storage in 200GB increments and launches OneDrive Personal Vault, to protect folders using 2FA, available globally — Microsoft announced two major features for OneDrive back in June: Personal Vault and expandable storage. Both of the features are launching worldwide today.
Videos of owners trying Tesla's new Smart Summon feature, which show Teslas autonomously driving to owners with varying degrees of success, go viral — Just a few days ago, Tesla announced their new Version 10 software update, which included such things as the ability to play Cuphead …
You may know Max Deutsch from Month to Master, his yearlong self-improvement program where he tried to master one “expert-level” skill each month, which ultimately saw him challenging world champion Magnus Carlsen to a game of chess (Deustch lost).
Now, Deustch and his co-founder Valentin Perez are launching Monthly, which Deustch told me is designed to “leverage technology to help scale this kind of learning to many more people.”
Specifically, Monthly offers 30-day classes taught by experts and celebrities— the instructors often have hundreds of thousands or millions of YouTube subscribers. For example, Andrew Huang is teaching a class on music production, Daria Callie is teaching a class on realistic portrait painting and Stevie Mackey is teaching a class on singing.
When you enroll in a class, you’ll be assigned a different task every day; you might watch an instructional video one day, and then do something more hands-on the next. While the classes are online, you have to enroll and take the class at set periods of time — currently, Huang’s class is the only one open for enrollment.
Deutsch acknowledged that this can seem “a bit antithetical to the benefit of online learning (that you can do it whenever you want),” but he noted that often, “‘whenever you want’ ends up offering most people too much flexibility and becomes ‘maybe some other time.'”
So by having explicit start and stop days for a class, he said, “the commitment you’re making to yourself is more significant and as a result you’re much more likely to stick with it and follow through on your aspirations.”
You’ll also be placed in peer groups with 20 other students, with whom you share work and give and receive feedback. And at the end of it, Deutsch said you’ll have produced “something tangible that you’ve made that you’re proud of and that you can share with the world” — a voice recording, a film, a painting, etc.
Pricing will vary from $179 to $279, depending on the class. Deutsch didn’t provide specific numbers on how the money is shared with instructors, but he noted that the split varies depending on whether students signed up via Monthly or via an instructor promotion. And either way, he said, “creators are getting a very compelling split.”
As for funding, Monthly has raised an undisclosed amount from Floodgate’s Ann Miura-Ko at Floodgate, Intuit founder Scott Cook (Deutsch worked as a product manager at Intuit), and OVO Fund’s Eric Chen.
When Confluent launched a cloud service in 2017, it was trying to reduce some of the complexity related to running a Kafka streaming data application. Today, it introduced a free tier to that cloud service. The company hopes to expand its market beyond large technology company customers, and the free tier should make it easier for smaller companies to get started.
The new tier provides up to $50 of service a month for up to three months. Company CEO Jay Kreps says that while $50 might not sound like much, it’s actually hundreds of gigabytes of throughput and makes it easy to get started with the tool.
“We felt like we can make this technology really accessible. We can make it as easy as we can. We want to make it something where you can just get going in seconds, and not have to pay anything to start building an application that uses real time streams of data,” Kreps said.
Kafka has been available as an open source product since 2011, so it’s been free to download, install and build applications, but still required a ton of compute and engineering resources to pull off. The cloud service was designed to simplify that, and the free tier lets developers get comfortable building a small application without making a large financial investment.
Once they get used to working with Kafka on the free version, users can then buy in whatever increments make sense for them, and only pay for what they use. It can be pennies worth of Kafka or hundreds of dollars depending on a customer’s individual requirements. “After free, you can buy 11 cents worth of Kafka or you can buy it $10 worth, all the way up to these massive users like Lyft that use Kafka Cloud at huge scale as part of their ride sharing service,” he said.
While a free SaaS trial might feel like a common kind of marketing approach, Kreps says for a service like Kafka, it’s actually much more difficult to pull off. “With something like a distributed system where you get a whole chunk of infrastructure, it’s actually technically an extraordinarily difficult thing to provide zero to elastic scale up capabilities. And a huge amount of engineering goes into making that possible,” Kreps explained.
Kafka processes massive streams of data in real time. It was originally developed inside LinkedIn and open sourced in 2011. Confluent launched as a commercial entity on top of the open source project in 2014. In January the company raised $125 million on a $2.5 billion valuation. It has raised over $205 million, according to Crunchbase data.
