Month: December 2022

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Hey, folks, welcome back! Below we’ve got some 2022 roundups and even some news. I suspect it’ll get even leaner as the week wears on, but no matter! There will always be stories to share. Now, here is your Wednesday edition of the Daily Crunch. — Hank

The TechCrunch Top 3

Sports on Amazon: The tech giant wants to continue its march into broadcasting live sports, adding to its current lineup of Thursday Night Football, Premier League soccer and the like, Aisha reports. Pro tip, Amazon: Add cricket to your plans.
Ring true: Movano beat the CES rush and launched Evie, a smart ring focused on women’s health, Brian reports.
In the water: Earlier this month, Boundary Layer pivoted to producing personal watercraft that will run interested parties upward of $60,000 once they’re ready. Haje reports that the company has more than $1 million worth of orders.

Dear Sophie: Do employees have to stop working until they get their EAD?

Dear Sophie,

One of our employees is on an H-4 visa and has an Employment Authorization Document. It’s been five months since he filed to renew his EAD, which will expire next month. Is there any way to expedite this process? Does he have to stop working if he doesn’t receive his new EAD card before his old one expires?

Because it’s taking so long to get EAD cards, we’re worried about another of our employees, who has an L-2 visa with an EAD scheduled to expire early next year.

In addition, the H-4 visa employee wants to visit his family in India because it’s been more than three years since he last went. Will he and his family be able to return to the U.S. after four weeks?

— Mindful Manager

We also rounded up the best of our climate coverage on TC+ this year. And Tim had a couple more favorites:

Disclose your Scope 3 emissions, you cowards
The biological theory that explains why investors are bullish on fusion

TechCrunch+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription!

Big Tech, Inc.

Twitter trimming: A Norway-based developer told Ivan that she created a tool to help you cull the list of accounts you follow, because she was reaching the follow limit on the platform.
Political … tick tock: The U.S. House of Representatives has ordered all staff and lawmakers to delete TikTok from their gov-issued phones, citing “security issues,” Carly writes.
Bitcoin mining deal: Galaxy Digital has agreed to acquire Argo Blockchain’s bitcoin mining facility, Helios, for $65 million, Jacquie writes.
Code-generating AI: Sounds cool, right? Well, Kyle wrote about a study that found code-generating AI can introduce security vulnerabilities.

2022 in Review

Good news!: Amanda, Kyle, Tim, Devin and Rebecca have a roundup of some good news in tech for you. This crop of TC reporters put their heads together to mine 2022 for some tech goodness. Climate tech bolstered by the Inflation Reduction Act and the James Webb Space Telescope are on the list.
On the move: Rebecca has compiled the biggest transportation stories that drove the year.
Surveying investors: And Karan and Ram give you a glimpse of the investor surveys that we ran on TC+ this year.

Daily Crunch: Startup says it has received $1M in preorders for its $60K hydrofoiling personal watercraft by Henry Pickavet originally published on TechCrunch

2022 was the kind of year that made us think, “What a time to be alive and reporting on transportation.” This year was absolutely dominated by conversations around the realities of bringing self-driving cars to market, the potential upheaval of the gig worker economy, micromobility dramas and, of course, all things Tesla.

We took a look back at our top-performing transportation stories to determine what stood out as important to you, our dear readers.

Ford, VW-backed Argo AI is shutting down

Autonomous vehicle startup Argo AI came onto the scene in 2017 with a $1 billion investment. Today, the company is no more after Ford and Volkswagen pulled out their investments.

This one shocked the AV world, in particular because Argo had been in the middle of running a robotaxi pilot with Lyft in Austin and testing fully driverless technology in Miami. The shutdown of the company signaled two things: (1) Another round of consolidation is coming for self-driving tech companies and (2) Deploying Level 4 self-driving technology at scale is still far away.

Both Ford and VW decided to put their investments toward more near-term paths to profitability, specifically Level 2 and Level 3 autonomy, or advanced driver assistance systems. Jim Farley, Ford’s CEO, also said he didn’t think the automaker would need to develop L4 technology itself but could instead outsource it down the line.

Bolt Mobility has vanished, leaving e-bikes, unanswered calls behind in several US cities

It’s the transportation mystery of the year. What happened to Bolt Mobility, the Miami-based micromobility startup co-founded by Olympic gold medalist Usain Bolt? Back in August, we reported that the company up and vanished from several of its U.S. markets, leaving cities with abandoned equipment, unanswered calls and emails and lots of questions. It also left at least one city, Portland, with outstanding fees.

No one — not TechCrunch nor many city officials — was able to get in contact with the company to ask what happened and what it planned to do with all the gear the company left on the ground.

The company appears to have shut down — it hasn’t been active on social media since July — despite having been on a growth streak the year prior. Bolt started out 2021 by acquiring the assets of Last Mile Holdings, which opened up 48 new markets to the startup. It just goes to show, micromobility is a tough game to win, even if it looks like the odds are in your favor.

If anyone has any information about Bolt Mobility, I’m still dying to know what went down there.

The 10 EVs and plug-in hybrids that stood out at the New York Auto Show

Because who doesn’t love a roundup? In April at the New York Auto Show, automakers legacy and startup came together to show off their electric vehicle offerings. Here are the ones that got our attention this year:

Alfa Romeo’s first compact crossover, the 2023 Alfa Romeo Tonale.
The Chrysler Airflow Graphite Concept, a sleek crossover with Level 3 capabilities.
Jeep’s Grand Cherokee High Altitude 4xe, a full-size hybrid SUV.
Deus Automobiles’ curvy roadster, the Vayanne EV hypercar.
Indi EV’s Indi One, the “lifestyle-focused” crossover with a built-in gaming computer.
Kia’s subcompact SUV, the 2023 Niro, available in a hybrid, PHEV or EV powertrain.
Kia also showed off its EV9 concept, a boxy SUV that is expected to hit the U.S. market by 2023.
The Genesis X Speedium Concept, a coupe with a bold design.
Vinfast’s two SUVs, the VF8 and VF9.

Musk reveals plan to scale Tesla to “extreme size”

A day before Tesla opened its Berlin gigafactory in March, CEO Elon Musk teased the release of Tesla’s “Master Plan Part 3,” which leans heavily on themes of artificial intelligence and scaling operations to “extreme size.”

“Main Tesla subjects will be scaling to extreme size, which is needed to shift humanity away from fossil fuels, and AI,” Musk tweeted at the time. “But I will also include sections about SpaceX, Tesla and The Boring Company.”

Part 3 of Tesla’s master plan is the first to include mention of Musk’s other companies. Note: This was published before Musk bought out Twitter.

A quick refresher on parts one and two. Part one was published in a 2006 blog post that outlined Tesla’s proof of concept and involved building a sports car and using the funds to build more affordable cars, while simultaneously providing zero-emission electric power generation. Part two, which came out a decade later, discussed plans to develop battery storage and launch new models, including a pickup truck and SUV.

Later in the year, Musk revealed more details about his Master Plan part three. Per a companywide meeting, the plan’s raison d’etre is: “How do you get to enough scale to actually shift the entire energy infrastructure of earth?”

Uber and Lyft drivers say fuel surcharge is “an insult to drivers”

Russia’s war in Ukraine caused gas prices to skyrocket globally earlier this year. In March, at the start of the war, Uber and Lyft responded by adding temporary fuel surcharges to rider fares to help drivers cover the rising cost of fuel.

The Rideshare Guy, a blog and podcast dedicated to helping ride-share drivers earn more money and stay up to date with industry news, polled its community of Uber and Lyft drivers in the U.S. and found that 43% quit or were driving less due to high gas prices. Before the fuel surcharges were announced, that number was at 53%.

Many drivers said the surcharge wasn’t enough and they’d have liked to see a per-mile surcharge to account for the increased fuel expenditure on long trips rather than a flat fee.

One Lyft driver told TechCrunch the surcharge is “an insult to drivers.”

This article is important today because it encapsulates many themes — our ability as a species to panic the moment prices for hot commodities increase; the ongoing aggravation of gig workers; the subtle dance Uber and Lyft play as they try to appease drivers but seemingly never in a way that’s actually meaningful.

Another big story this year was the Department of Labor’s proposed ruling on gig worker status, and the subsequent tanking of app-based companies’ stock prices. The rule, if passed, will make it easier for gig workers to claim employment status if they can prove they’re financially dependent on a company. Drivers who feel they’ve not only been consistently shafted by macroeconomic events but also barely protected by Uber and Lyft might be praying for real change on a federal level.

The transportation stories that drove 2022 by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch

More than half of professional developers have CI/CD, DevOps and automated testing tools and services available at their organization, Stack Overflow’s 2022 developer survey uncovered.

However, Stack Overflow noted, only 38% of the 34,906 respondents reported having a developer portal to make it easy to find tools and services. Similarly, data observability tools are only available to a minority of developers.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

These findings show that best practices that have become the norm at startups and tech companies are gaining ground more broadly, but also that there is still a lot of margin for progress to improve the efficiency and work environment of developers.

“It’s kind of crazy that having CI/CD tooling in place, a DevOps function and Automated Testing are the only categories that are above 50%,” Boldstart Ventures partner Shomik Ghosh told TechCrunch. “That means [that] for what is considered table stakes at most startups and tech companies, more than half of developers (presumably in other industries) still don’t have these core building blocks in place.”

The rise of platform engineering, an opportunity for startups by Anna Heim originally published on TechCrunch

In horse racing, the most reliable tips about which horse will likely win often come from the stable boys, since they’re the ones closest to the source.

So when we thought about the best ways to find out what’s happening in a particular sector, we figured why not get it straight from the horse’s mouth — the investors?

At TechCrunch+, we see investor surveys as a way to dig deep and put together a snapshot of a sector that founders and investors can use to understand their market. We ran 30 surveys this year, and the feedback we’ve received has certainly helped us improve our game and widen our scope.

With the end of 2022 right around the corner, here’s a look at some of the more interesting answers some of our surveys unearthed this year.

10 investors discuss the no-code and low-code landscape in Q1 2022

Where are you skeptical about no-code/low-code? Which aspects are overhyped?

Sri Pangulur, partner, and Paul Lee, partner, Tribe Capital

There are a few areas where we have some concerns about the no-code/low-code thesis at the moment. First, we do not think that pre-coded element interfaces are going to cover every edge case, and it’s really the edge cases that make the user depend on their current specific workflow.

Second, we think the no-code/low-code category is horizontally getting a little bit saturated. There is some level of user confusion, where a set of co-workers on a team may be pushing for collaboration to be done in one specific application and another set of workers may be pushing for a competing solution. This can slow down productivity.

No-code may work well in verticals with well-defined use cases and a huge pull from non-developers, or in cases where the target user is also the buyer. For example, there are several companies that now make it easy for designers to turn their designs into live mobile or web apps quickly through a drag-and-drop approach. This is highly desirable for designers.

However, when serving larger enterprise customers that require much greater customization, development resources are needed, as a drag-and-drop approach won’t be sufficient.

Read the full survey here.

8 investors weigh in on the state of insurtech in Q3 2022

Which insurtech business models have the most in-market traction today, and are those the same models that venture investors are investing in?

Clarisse Lam, associate, New Alpha Asset Management

Embedded insurance is taking off. The embedded model makes even more sense in an industry where “insurance is sold, not bought.” A number of players have emerged in the field, most targeting the ballooning gig economy, but embedded insurance can be applied to so many more verticals like recruitment or mass retail. The sector has already attracted millions in investor money, and it will continue to do so as the value of embedded insurance is unlocked across all markets.

Insurance is still a very underdigitized industry. There is a big market opportunity for B2B SaaS players to drive innovation across the value chain (e.g., by improving claims processing, risk management, underwriting, pricing). Incumbents are still early in their digital transformation, and there’s a strong need for insurtech to address this.

We’re widening our lens, looking for more investors to participate in TechCrunch surveys, where we poll top professionals about challenges in their industry.

If you’re an investor and would like to participate in future surveys, fill out this form.

Martha Notaras, general partner, Brewer Lane Ventures

There are several MGAs and technology-driven, full-stack insurance carriers that have built impressive premium bases, including in newer risk categories like cyber. Venture investors have recently become more selective about investing in MGAs before they achieve scale. This caution reflects current public-market trading, as investors project forward to exit.

[Editor’s note: As David Wechsler previously noted in a guest post, “a managing general agent (MGA) is a hybrid between an insurance agency (policy sales) and insurance carrier (underwriting and assumption of the risk).”]

I see investor enthusiasm for B2B insurtechs with a recurring revenue model. Many of these startups are delivering efficiency and cost savings to traditional insurers, and those existing insurers have become more receptive to bringing in startups to solve difficult operating problems.

Read the full survey here.

5 construction tech investors analyze 2022 trends and opportunities

The construction industry has been fairly reluctant when it comes to adopting bleeding-edge tech. Is this a marketing problem or a product-market fit problem?

Momei Qu, managing director, PSP Growth

I think it’s a stakeholder problem. What owners want may be different than what GCs, subs, architects or lenders want. Technology that tries to cater to them all may struggle with a killer use case, while those who target one of those parties may struggle with scale and willingness to pay. When you have a solution that all (or many) stakeholders love, you get something special and a flywheel effect.

Sungjoon Cho, general partner, D20 Capital

Construction is a sector where “move fast and break things” is a strategy that does not apply. There are extreme consequences for a new technology “breaking things,” and so the conservative approach to adopting new technologies makes sense. However, large construction companies often have central innovation teams that test new technologies and champion the adoption of new technologies.

We are seeing the pace of new technology adoption increase rapidly, but due to the conservative nature of the construction sector, a characteristic of construction tech is low initial ACV (average contract value) with strong NRR (net revenue retention) as customers deploy the technology on a handful of projects and expand usage as the technology has a chance to prove itself.

Read the full survey here.

A decade after the bubble burst, 5 climate tech investors explain why they’re all in

Which emerging climate techs, such as direct air capture or hydrogen-powered industrial processes, have the biggest potential for impact in the next 10 years? What are three climate techs that you see widespread by 2030?

Pae Wu, general partner, SOSV and CTO of IndieBio

Process-oriented technologies, like supplanting energy-intensive chemical production with scaled biology or electrically enhanced processes, will alter energy dynamics of heavy industry in the next 10 years.

2030 isn’t very far, so widespread adoption of what some may call bridge technologies is where I see real change coming. So many of our problems come down to human-level issues limiting implementation and a basic fear of change, so our disruptions need to keep chipping away at that fear of change.

What does that look like? Things like emissions-free, drop-in replacements for petrochemicals and materials for the built environment that are not dependent on a green premium. Some of these are far enough along to potentially make a run at petroleum.

Arguably, electric vehicles should be the easy answer to “widespread” by 2030. But look, this is still a huge problem that touches every facet of our lives, and 2030 is only eight years away. In 2014, Hong Kong pro-democracy protests were raging, Moderna was creating a vaccine for Ebola and Russia annexed Crimea and ratcheted up threats to Ukraine.

Not much changes in eight years. In 2030, the U.S. will have exceeded expectations if even 15% of our light-duty vehicles on the road are electric by then — 15% is tiny.

I sound very gloom and doom, but all I’m saying is it’s all hands on deck, and we need lots of solutions to hit at this from all sides. There won’t be a silver bullet, and if we investors are lucky/smart, we’ll get a whole bunch of climate tech Googles and Amazons — name your favorite giant disruptor — to bring to market while also successfully staving off the worst of climate change. We need everyone to be a winner.

Read the full survey here.

8 fintech VCs discuss the shifting investing landscape and how to pitch them in Q3 2022

Many people are calling this a downturn. How has your investment thesis changed in the last several months, and are you still closing deals at the same velocity?

Addie Lerner, founder and managing partner, Avid Ventures

We started slowing our investment pace in early Q3 2021, while many other firms were continuing to deploy rapidly, given the exacerbation in the disconnect we were seeing between valuations and traction achieved by early-stage companies. We have been measured in our deployment since our first investment in February 2020, and Avid Fund I will actually have a four-year deployment period given our unique investment strategy.

We believe our investment approach is uniquely suited for the current market environment. Our strategy is to get to know the best founders well ahead of their Series A, back them before or at the Series A with a flexible “toehold” check alongside top-tier lead and/or insider investors, and then add meaningful value as a “strategic finance adviser” post-investment. This enables us to earn the ability to write a much larger “double down” check in the next round, once we’ve built conviction over time. In a market environment with more time between rounds, as well as founder and insider openness to round “extensions” and “in-between” rounds, our flexible and patient investment strategy will enable us to pursue unique opportunities. So, we are actively making new investments at the same measured pace.

Read the full survey here.

7 first-time fund managers detail how they’re preparing to thrive during the downturn

We’ve heard that first-time fund managers will struggle to raise a second fund now that the business cycle has turned. Do you agree with that perspective? If not, why not?

Giuseppe Stuto, co-founder and managing director, 186 Ventures

It certainly may not be as easy to raise a second fund today as it may have been over the last two years. We do not look at it as binary or in the sense that it will be an absolute struggle for firms that have developed a great platform and differentiated approach to attracting early-stage founders to work with them.

It’s a multidimensional question that factors in many variables. Ultimately, professional LPs understand that although we’ve entered a market where assets, particularly alternative assets, may be priced lower, having meaningful access to the venture asset class is incredibly important over the next few decades.

Furthermore, we will likely see (and already are seeing) incredible pricing and terms in the months and years ahead. You could miss out on exposure to investor-friendly valuations if you aren’t deploying into firms that have developed a solid foundation.

Of course, LP commit sizes will naturally decrease, and they may instinctually favor managers who have been at it for a longer time. But we are in a multidecade arena, where getting access to newer managers will continue to be a priority for many professional LPs looking into alternative assets.

Read the full survey here.

7 investors discuss why edtech startups must go back to basics to survive

What sectors are you finding edtech crossing over with these days? What’s the latest overlap that has you amped up?

Jan Lynn-Matern, founder and partner, Emerge Education

We’re seeing some really interesting new players across fintech and edtech. Our latest investment, mattilda, is a Mexico City-based startup offering financial services to schools. Its core product is a guaranteed revenue SaaS platform in which schools receive a monthly fixed payment, and mattilda streamlines their invoicing and collection processes.

We’re also excited to see what’s happening at the intersection of health tech and edtech, entertainment and edtech, and productivity tools and edtech.

Ashley Bittner and Kate Ballinger, Firework Ventures

We are seeing edtech intersect with so many different verticals. Within our current portfolio, there are examples of businesses that operate at the intersection of edtech and fintech, HR tech, diversity, equity and inclusion, and many more. Right now, we are especially excited about edtech’s overlap with climate action and web3.

Climate action: We believe that climate action and economic mobility are the two most pressing challenges of our time. Addressing climate change not only requires the invention of new technology, discovery of new sources of energy, and adaptations to how we live and operate on a daily basis, but it will also create millions of new jobs.

The half life of most technical skills today is less than three years. Rapid innovation and the shift to a green economy is only decreasing the half life of skills further. It’s estimated that 85% of all jobs in 2030 haven’t even been invented yet. Preparing people to succeed in these new green jobs is key to addressing both the need for climate action and improved economic mobility.

Web3: There has been a rapid proliferation of web3 applications in the past few years. We are specifically looking for web3 applications that further our thesis (creating access and opportunity, and driving economic and social mobility). Specifically within our focus on skill building, we are looking at learn-to-earn models, metaverse learning (tangentially considered web3) and learning DAOs.

Read the full survey here.

5 cloud investors illustrate the various paths ahead for startups

How big is the market for cloud providers to provide extra services beyond their core offering?

Shomik Ghosh, partner, Boldstart Ventures

I’m not being facetious when I say infinite. For proof, just go to AWS and look at its product catalog for all the various services listed. It would take years to fully comprehend all that it offers.

And if we expand the terminology of “cloud providers” beyond the compute and storage layer, pretty much every public and private company delivering a cloud service has multiple product offerings at scale.

Liran Grinberg, co-founder and managing partner, Team8

It starts to diminish. Cloud providers get very good at most things they do, but they can’t build the best of everything. More and more non-cloud-provider vendors get a huge market share of components that traditionally used to be part of the cloud providers — Snowflake is a great example of this. I think this trend will continue given the increasing complexity of modern technology and the rate of innovation.

Read the full survey here.

The best TechCrunch+ investor surveys of 2022 by Karan Bhasin originally published on TechCrunch

Building an investor network from scratch sounds daunting. This is true particularly if, like many founders, you don’t happen to be part of a social or economic circle where striking up early conversations with potential investors is a no-brainer.

We recently sat down with three VCs who have also been founders to talk about different ways founders can approach this problem, how to land that first term sheet and what that term sheet should contain.

Today, we’re featuring the first part of that conversation. We spoke with investors James Norman of Black Operator Ventures, Mandela Schumacher-Hodge Dixon of AllRaise and Kevin Liu of both Techstars and Uncharted Ventures.

In part two, the investors cover more specifics about what to ask for in a term sheet and what to refuse.

(Editor’s note: This interview has been edited lightly for length and clarity.)

How do you start a network from zero?

James Norman: It’s pretty varied when you’re a first-time founder. Depending on what networks you come from, your situation can be different. Some people are able to start with friends-and-family money. For people in the demographic I invest in, it’s quite atypical for that to be a thing.

Getting to angel investors can be easier. If you’re not already in a network [that comes with] VCs and warm introductions and you want to get your initial capital from the best partners, angel investors can be a good place if you’re really early on and don’t have a product or you want to find someone who really believes in you.

If you do have something that’s working, and you really feel like you can scale this to be something very large, it’s okay to go and find a VC partner — someone like [the pre-seed stage fund] Precursor.

It all depends on your situation. You can go after VCs; some people [are open] to cold outreach if it’s cultivated in a thoughtful, meaningful way where it actually can be a connection.

Mandela Schumacher-Hodge Dixon: Success is planned, premeditated and on purpose. If you want to be successful at fundraising, you have to understand it is a game, and to win this game, you have to understand the rules, the culture, as well as the unwritten rules that you won’t read about in a blog post or hear in a podcast.

Be really clear about what you are building and if you are truly interested in making it “VC-backable.” Because when you make it “VC-backable,” you’re signing up to go as big and as fast as possible. You need to be aligned with the investors about the agreement they’ve made with their LPs on the returns they’re going to have for the fund. There was an agreement before you ever showed up to the pitch meeting.

How to spin up an investing network from scratch as a first-time founder by Connie Loizos originally published on TechCrunch

Galaxy Digital has agreed to acquire Argo Blockchain’s bitcoin mining facility Helios for $65 million, the two firms announced Wednesday.

The deal also includes Galaxy acquiring “related operations” from Argo Blockchain. Galaxy will also provide Argo with a $35 million loan as the company restructures, secured by a collateral package with Argo mining equipment. Argo will keep ownership of its machines at the Dickens County, Texas, facility and will enter a two-year hosting agreement with Galaxy to provide a place for its mining machines at the facility.

Through this deal, not only will Galaxy’s mining operations grow, but Argo will also avoid bankruptcy. The transaction will “strengthen Argo’s balance sheet” and improve its liquidity position so the company can “continue operations,” Argo said in a statement.

The financing will help to reduce Argo’s debt by $41 million and enhance its liquidity “to help ensure continued operations through the ongoing bear market,” Argo’s CEO Peter Wall said in a statement.

In recent months, bankruptcy has been lingering around the bitcoin mining industry as the market faces significant downturns due to energy prices rising and miner revenues dropping, which has tightened margins and increased profit losses.

Last week, Core Scientific, one of the largest publicly traded crypto mining firms in the U.S., filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. In September, bitcoin mining data firm Compute North filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after raising $385 million in strategic funding seven months earlier.

“The transaction will accelerate the expansion of Galaxy’s bitcoin mining operations and services, provide access to tax-efficient mining infrastructure and reduce reliance on third-party hosting providers,” Galaxy said in a statement.

Even though some miners are struggling, the Helios acquisition points to Galaxy’s intentions to grow its mining operations, as Helios will be its second facility that it will own and operate, alongside its first proprietary mining site that was announced earlier this year.

This acquisition is a “new stage” for Galaxy’s two-year bitcoin mining journey as it increases its operating scale and breadth of solutions, Chris Ferraro, president and chief investment officer at Galaxy, said in a release.

Argo shares rose 77.43% on the day to about $6.39 GBX on the London Stock Exchange. Meanwhile, Bitcoin’s price was down slightly on the day, around $16,750 in the same time frame.

Bitcoin miner Argo to avoid bankruptcy with $100M deal from Galaxy Digital by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch

Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”

TechCrunch+ members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.

Dear Sophie,

One of our employees is on an H-4 visa and has an Employment Authorization Document. It’s been five months since he filed to renew his EAD, which will expire next month. Is there any way to expedite this process? Does he have to stop working if he doesn’t receive his new EAD card before his old one expires?

Because it’s taking so long to get EAD cards, we’re worried about another of our employees, who has an L-2 visa with an EAD scheduled to expire early next year.

In addition, the H-4 visa employee wants to visit his family in India because it’s been more than three years since he last went. Will he and his family be able to return to the U.S. after four weeks?

— Mindful Manager

Dear Mindful,

Thanks for reaching out to me with all your questions about Employment Authorization Documents (EADs), otherwise known as work permits. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has introduced a few changes to reduce case backlogs and improve the quality of service, and one area it has been focusing on is lowering the processing times for EADs and extending their validity to avoid employment disruptions.

For the past couple of years, USCIS has been backlogged due to the pandemic, funding issues, and reliance on paper-based processing for most immigration benefits. Right now, USCIS is taking anywhere from five months to 9.5 months to process an H-4 EAD application or extension, depending on the USCIS service center handling the request.

While USCIS is working to expand premium processing to additional immigration forms, it remains unavailable for Form I-765, which is used to apply for and renew work authorization. With premium processing, USCIS guarantees to process an application within 15 days for a fee.

However, there’s good news for you and your employees!

Work permits for H-4 visa holders

H-4 visa holders, who are the spouses of H-1B visa holders, were offered some relief this year in the EAD process.

In May, USCIS issued a temporary rule designed to reduce EAD backlogs as well as the stress on individuals holding H-4 visas and their employers. These visa holders can have their EADs extended for up to 540 days if the individual had a renewal application pending with USCIS on or after May 4 2022, or had filed a renewal application on or after that date.

Dear Sophie: Do employees have to stop working until they get their EAD? by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch

We’re excited to announce two more early-stage startups participating in the Cross Chain Coalition Web3 Demo Day on January 11. If you haven’t heard, this free online showcase features more than 12 of today’s most exciting projects building web3 infrastructure, DeFi, NFT and gaming applications.

Register today and join us as each startup team gets five minutes to pitch to judges in the audience, who include influential founders and many of the top investors in blockchain. We’re talking about folks like Jonathan King and Lisa Xu.

Bonus: Not only can you learn a lot by watching other founders pitch, but also the judges will be available live in our event chat. Don’t miss your opportunity to connect with them and expand your network!

Okay, let’s get down to revealing the next two startups that are ready to bring the heat.

Meet Omni X, a native omnichain NFT platform founded by Trenton Helton. He contends that NFTs, one of the most widely used dApps in the cross-chain market, should not be bound by liquidity restrictions. Helton’s team aims to solve the fragmentation of NFT communities and liquidity across multiple blockchains.

Meet SmartPiggies, transferable NFTs with smart contract functionality designed to behave as a price insurance policy for the holder. Founder Michael Arief — an ex-Barclays investment banker with a master’s in quantitative finance — contends this protocol will allow everyone to participate in a global OTC options market.

Join us on January 11, 2023, and see for yourself what the brilliant minds behind more than 12 up-and-coming projects are building. The Cross Chain Coalition Web3 Demo Dayis a joint production between the CCC and TechCrunch.

Register now for this free online event and reserve your seat at the virtual table.

Sneak peek: Look who’s pitching at the CCC Web3 Demo Day by Lauren Simonds originally published on TechCrunch

When you think of the biggest tech stories of the year, you probably think of something like Elon Musk buying Twitter, former crypto wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX filing for bankruptcy, all the people who lost their life savings when UST imploded, or the tens of thousands of tech workers who got laid off. It was not the most upbeat year we’ve ever had in the tech world. And yet, from progress in climate tech, to breakthroughs in AI technology, to the most awe-inspiring images of outer space we could dream of, there’s a lot to be excited about as we close out 2022.

Climate tech bolstered by the Inflation Reduction Act

After years of inaction, Congress finally took a step toward addressing climate change with a surprise — and surprisingly large — bill that funds everything from green hydrogen to cold-weather heat pumps. The Inflation Reduction Act seemed destined for failure, like every climate bill before it, until it suddenly wasn’t. Senator Joe Manchin’s (D-WV) intransigence looked like it was a calculated effort to kill the bill, but in reality, it may just have been an attempt to guarantee American competitiveness in some of the more consequential industries of the 21st century. The law provides $369 billion toward a variety of climate initiatives, and while it’s not nearly enough to address the scope of the problem, it’s far better than nothing. And if investor sentiment is anything to go by, it may be the lure needed to get them rushing into climate tech.
–Tim De Chant

Generative AI comes into its own

Generative AI has its problems, to be sure. But it also has undeniably positive disruptive potential. As generative AI came to the fore this year, bolstered by emerging AI techniques, we got a glimpse of the labor it can save across the art (see: Stable Diffusion, DALL-E 2), programming (GitHub Copilot) and writing world (GPT-3, ChatGPT). Art-generating AI can eliminate mundane work like sketching backgrounds for portrait photos, while code-generating AI can reduce the amount of repetitive coding a programmer has to finish. The jury’s out on whether it’s a net good, but if social media’s anything to go by, generative AI is already supercharging the workflows of the white collar workforce.
–Kyle Wiggers

Orbital internet helps bring the world online

The promise of satellite-based internet connections is coming true, though as usual the tech is not yet evenly distributed. But we’ve already seen Starlink connect Antarctica and war-torn Ukraine, both rather extreme test cases. If they can do it there (or on a yacht, for that matter), they can also do it in rural America, regions hit by natural disasters, or in far-flung villages in developing countries. We may even see pirate internet connections popping up in places like China and North Korea, circumventing their control over information. It’s a hugely enabling technology and 2022 was the year it went from experiment to product. And just wait until you can do it with your phone!
–Devin Coldewey

The Merge

One of the biggest mainstream critiques of crypto is just how energy-intensive it can be. Depending on how a blockchain validates its transactions, simply buying an NFT could use an outsized amount of energy, and as more people onboarded into the space in 2021, the environmental impact of the crypto industry has become increasingly concerning. For years, the team behind the Ethereum blockchain has promised a monumental event called The Merge, which would transition Ethereum from the energy-intensive proof-of-work protocol to the more environmentally-friendly proof-of-stake process. In September, this change – The Merge, with a capital M – finally succeeded after a multi-year coding effort.

Are we saying that crypto is inherently good? Don’t @ me. But is it good news that the second most popular blockchain recently became about 99% more energy efficient? Hell yeah.
–Amanda Silberling

A year of historic firsts in labor organizing

This year feels like it has been… several years, but believe it or not, it was this April when the Amazon Labor Union, led by future folk hero Christian Smalls, secured the first union election victory at Amazon in the U.S. People referred to this as a David and Goliath situation, and that’s not an exaggeration. Amazon pulled out all the stops – like violating labor laws and spending millions on anti-union consultants – to stop the Staten Island fulfillment center from advocating for themselves. But against all odds, Amazon now must contend with a union.

Meanwhile, in the video game industry, Raven Software QA testers at Activision Blizzard won the historic first union at a major U.S. gaming company. And just weeks ago, a second group of QA testers at the gaming behemoth formed a union as well. A handful of Apple Stores also won their first U.S. unions this year. Outside the tech sphere, we’ve seen over 250 Starbucks stores unionize in the last two years while union drives at franchises like Trader Joe’s are gaining steam.

And in the world of the gig economy, small gains are being made on the national level. Usually the fight among gig worker classification happens at the state level, but this year the Department of Labor proposed a ruling that if passed would make it easier for app-based ridehail and delivery drivers to become employees if they can prove they are economically dependent on a company.
–Amanda Silberling & Rebecca Bellan

Text-generating open source AI blossoms

Capable text-generating AI models were once the exclusive domain of well-financed labs and companies (think OpenAI and Alphabet’s DeepMind). But over the past year, the open source AI community has risen to the challenge of developing free, permissively licensed alternatives. BigScience, a community-powered project with the goal of making natural language systems widely available for research, released Bloom, which is roughly on par with OpenAI’s GPT-3 in terms of its capabilities. More recently, BigScience launched the Petals project, which allows volunteers to donate their hardware power to tackle a portion of a text-generating workload and tap others to complete larger tasks, similar to Folding@home and other distributed compute setups. It’s a promising turn of events, to be sure — particularly as progress in the text-generating domain accelerates.
–Kyle Wiggers

Galaxies galore

This summer, the JWST delivered its first deep field images, representing the culmination of 26 years of hard work. It’s difficult not to get lost in the breathtakingly beautiful images of Stephan’s Quintet or the Carina nebula, but what these incredible photographs represent is even more spectacular. As our own Aria Alamalhodaei put it, “these achievements are just the beginning. Scientists still have plenty of questions — about exoplanets, the formation of the universe and more — and now they have a new powerful tool in their arsenal to seek answers.”
–Amanda Silberling

A real braille tablet

The Dot Pad is a huge step forward in the world of Braille displays, which traditionally have been bulky, expensive, and limited in functionality. Not only can the Dot Pad show multiple lines of text at once, its tactile display can mirror a phone’s or computer’s, showing icons and images in touchable form. It’s still working its way from development to full-scale manufacturing, but the American Printing House for the Blind has already licensed the tech and is building its own version — we’ll be testing it out at CES.
–Devin Coldewey

Momentum for the fediverse

Here’s a not-so-hot take: maybe it’s not a good thing when the social media companies that drive the public conversation are for-profit entities that can be traded on the stock market and/or taken private by egomaniacal billionaires! It’s been a big year for Mastodon, a non-profit, open-source social network that is part of the fediverse, an ecosystem of interoperable platforms that run on ActivityPub. Since Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, Mastodon has exploded in popularity. According to data from Similarweb, traffic to joinmastodon.org (the directory of Mastodon servers) increased more than 1,500% year over year in November. In under two weeks, Mastodon’s monthly active user count doubled to over 1 million. The jury’s still out on whether the exodus to Mastodon is temporary or not – there’s a lot of friction in the onboarding process, which will make it hard for Mastodon to reach more mainstream audiences. But there has perhaps never been a moment when a social media landscape independent of tech giants has seemed more within reach.
–Amanda Silberling

Some good news from this year in tech by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch