Month: January 2023

After updating its iOS app to display both algorithmic and chronological timelines side-by-side, Twitter is rolling out this update to the web interface.

Earlier this week, the company renamed “Home” (algorithmic timeline) and “Latest” (chronological timeline) to “For You” and “Following”. The “For You” timeline now appears first in both the iOS app and the web.

While you have to swipe between these timelines on the phone, you have to click on the timeline tabs to switch between them on the web. The good part is that at least in the web version, Twitter seems to remember users’ choices. So even if a user closes the tab or the window and reopens Twitter, they will see whatever timeline you selected earlier.

Twitter said in its announcement that this view is coming to the Android app soon, too. Algorithmic timeline for everyone!

One advantage of the new web view is that if you use Twitter lists, the revamped interface makes it easier to jump from one pinned list to another. Earlier, the only way to access lists on the web was to through More > Lists.Quite tedious.

On Friday, third-party Twitter clients started experiencing massive issues with users of many apps being unable to access content or log into their accounts. Developers of these apps said that they tried to contact Twitter but didn’t hear back. At the time of writing the issue is still persistent.

Twitter brings its “For You” and “Following” dual-timeline view to the web by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

Sealed built a business around predicting energy use and getting homeowners to ditch fossil fuels. So, naturally, the company’s first acquisition is a startup that tracks energy on a granular level.

Sealed did not disclose the terms of the deal, but said in a statement that scooping up Burlington, Vermont-based InfiSense would help it “cut home energy waste.”

Headquartered in Manhattan, Sealed finances and oversees electrification upgrades, such as replacing oil or gas heaters with electric heat pumps and insulation. Ridding homes of fossil fuels can lower energy bills, cut household emissions and improve your health. You may have seen this topic in the news recently, because potential stove regulations are now the latest flashpoint in a culture war over clean energy.

To that point, InfiSense’s sensors and software monitor air quality in addition to energy use in buildings, and Sealed plans to share this sort of air-quality data with customers down the line.

Sealed is unique in covering installation and weatherization costs upfront. Instead, it charges a fixed fee based on the energy its machine learning algorithms predict homeowners will save over time. If Sealed underestimates a homes’ energy use, it eats the cost — hence the need to hone those predictions.

The “lifeblood of our company is our ability to predict people’s energy usage over time, and that relies on great access to data,” co-founder and CEO Lauren Salz said in a call with TechCrunch. Currently, Sealed’s algorithms rely on monthly energy data from utilities, but buying InfiSense will give it “access to a deeper level of data from customers,” Salz said.

Sealed plans to install InfiSense’s sensors in some of its customers’ homes, but Salz said it won’t require them. The data Sealed gathers will inform its predictions as well as enable it to offer curious customers an up-close look at their energy usage and air quality.

Sealed buys sensor startup InfiSense to fuel energy-saving services by Harri Weber originally published on TechCrunch

Last night, at an industry event hosted in San Francisco by this editor, venture capitalist Alfred Lin of Sequoia Capital sat down for a fireside conversation about the evolution of his storied investment firm, which has enjoyed a largely unblemished record of stunning success — a record since marred by its roughly $200 million investment in the crypto currency exchange FTX.

The investment, once a source of pride for the firm, has tarnished not Sequoia but also Lin, who led the deal on behalf of Sequoia, was the firm’s point of contact with CEO Sam Bankman-Fried for a year-and-a-half and who spoke thoughtfully yesterday about how he feels today about a bet gone so wrong.

Asked, for example, whether looking back, there were signs that Lin sees now that he missed earlier, he answered after a pause: “I thought [Bankman-Fried] was very smart . . . he answers questions very logically and very succinctly. Could we have spotted any tells? I don’t know. There’s what I know today and what I knew at the time. If I knew at the time, we wouldn’t have invested. So today, I think the thing that gets me to reassess is . . . it’s not that we made the investment. It’s the year-and-a-half working relationship afterward, and I still didn’t see it. And that is difficult.”

If it was particularly challenging for Lin given that just a year earlier, he topped Forbes’s annual Midas List, he didn’t say so. But he suggested that experience remains disturbing to him because Bankman-Fried seemed to seize on what the venture industry sees as one of its greatest strengths.

Explained Lin, it’s “a trust business. And yes, we need to trust and verify, and we try to verify what we can. But we start from a position of trust, because if we don’t trust the founders that we work with, why would you ever invest in them?”

Lin had a lot more to say about FTX, including whether he has sympathy for Bankman-Fried. He defended Sequoia’s decision to manage its positions in its portfolio companies well past the point that they go public.

Lin also confirmed during the event that in a gesture to its limited partners, Sequoia last year reduced its management fees on two funds that it rolled out a year ago — a $950 million ecosystem fund that it uses to back other managers’ funds and a $600 million crypto fund. Lin said that rather than charge its backers on committed capital, which is standard in the industry, it is charging them management fees on their committed capital alone. (On that front, he said that just 10% of the crypto fund has been deployed, adding that Sequoia remains “long-term optimistic” about crypto.)

Lastly, Lin shared his views regarding how generative AI — one of the buzziest areas of interest for the venture industry right now — is changing the opportunity for both VCs and investors.

Full video of the conversation follows.

Sequoia Capital’s Alfred Lin in his first public interview since the implosion of FTX (video) by Connie Loizos originally published on TechCrunch