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It may have been a weird feeling to watch Golden Globe Awards live on television this year. Last year, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), the organization that hosts the ceremony, was criticized for lacking diversity, so NBC announced it wouldn’t broadcast the awards show and the event’s winners were live-tweeted instead. The HFPA claims it’s more diverse this time around, recently reporting that the total voting body is 51.8% “racially and ethnically diverse.”

Last night, the 80th Annual Golden Globe Awards returned to the big screen.

From HBO’s “The White Lotus” and “Euphoria” to “House of the Dragon,” the combined HBO/HBO Max had a successful night with the most Golden Globe nominations and wins of any network. The company took home a total of four wins after being nominated for 14.

Meanwhile, Netflix managed to scoop up three wins, which included wins for Guillermo del Toro’s “Pinocchio,” “Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” and “Ozark.” The streaming giant was nominated for 14.

Hulu’s “The Dropout” won Best Performance by an Actress in a Limited Series, which was thanks to Amanda Seyfried’s interpretation of Elizabeth Holmes, the Theranos CEO and founder who was just sentenced to 11 years in prison. Hulu had ten Golden Globe nominations.

“The Bear” and “Abbott Elementary” were also on the Golden Globes winner list. Both shows have Hulu as their streaming home. “Abbott Elementary,” the most nominated TV series, also streams on HBO Max.

Although Apple TV+ pulled six noms this year, “Black Bird” was the only show to win an award, with Paul Walter Hauser (who plays Larry Hall) taking the trophy for Supporting Actor in a TV Drama.

Disney also had six nominations this year, however, the media company had just one win, even though “Avatar: The Way of Water” and “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” were among the highest-grossing films at the box office. Angela Bassett from the “Black Panther” sequel won Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in Any Motion Picture.

It’s important to note that the Golden Globes has been accused of being corrupt, with evidence of some HFPA members accepting gifts and bribes. It’s also been accused of heavily influencing Oscar nominations. A few celebrities didn’t even attend the award show this year, including Brendan Fraser and Tom Cruise. However, despite the controversies, the Golden Globes continues to be a hit, generating millions of dollars for Hollywood businesses.

HBO and HBO Max dominates Golden Globes with most wins by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch

Hello and welcome back toEquity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.

This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a single topic, think about a question and unpack the rest. This week,Natasha chatted with Haje Kamps and Brian Heater about CES which took place last week over in the ever-exciting Las Vegas area. All of our fantastic CES coverage can be found on the site, but for the purposes of today’s show, we tried to keep it analytical, chatty and, at times, even a bit robotic. (You’ll see what I mean).

Here’s what we got into:

Post-CES feelings and why the show has stayed relevant after all these years
How expectations of the show compared to the reality, robot pillows and all
Who did and didn’t show up
Brian’s new suggestion for what the conference should be called
The energy of innovation on the showroom floor, from sustainability to big swings to over-engineered blenders
Batteries!
And finally, how the downturn and COVID-19 may have impacted the way startups are pitching themselves to the public. Selection bias, it’s a thing!

You can follow Haje through his work on the Daily Crunch, and Brian through his work on Actuator.

As always, you can catch up with us on Twitter @EquityPod.

Equity drops every Monday at 7 a.m. PT and Wednesday and Friday at 6 a.m. PT, so subscribe to us onApple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotifyandall the casts. TechCrunch also has agreat show on crypto, ashow that interviews founders, ashow that details how our stories come togetherand more!

Will what happened at CES, stay at CES? by Natasha Mascarenhas originally published on TechCrunch

Depending on whom you ask, artificial intelligence will either vastly improve our lives or take away our jobs. For veteran venture investor Peter Wagner, it’s a little more nuanced than that.

We recently caught up with Wagner, who, along with fellow veteran investor Gaurav Garg, launched Wing Venture Capital. Combined, they have upward of 25 years of experience at storied investment firms: Wagner joined Accel as an associate in 1996 and stayed more than 14 years before leaving as a managing director to co-found Wing, and Garg spent 11 years as a partner at Sequoia Capital.

Since launching Wing in 2011, the two have been steadily growing their team and portfolio, backing such companies as Snowflake, Gong and Cohesity, among others, and “helping people do their best work,” as Wagner told us.

We initially reached out to discuss a list of enterprise angel investors that Wagner and his team recently assembled for the sake of the enterprise investing “community,” but we wound up talking for a bit about the firm’s growing focus on AI startups in particular and some of Wagner’s separate thoughts on the current state of the venture industry.

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

You’re investing in the “AI-first technology stack.” What does that mean?

We’re big believers that AI is not replacing humans, but that humans working with AI will replace humans who don’t work with AI. That set of types of products really empowers customers to do more and to reach their full potential. … The whole notion of helping founders and their customers do their best work through the application of AI-first technologies, that’s really my mission statement. And that is a lot of what is driving enterprise technology these days, the question of: How do I develop and apply that set of AI-first technologies to drive business results?

Veteran enterprise VC Peter Wagner on the opportunities for AI startups by Connie Loizos originally published on TechCrunch

Tesla notified Texas regulators this week it plans to invest about $770 million into an expansion of its factory near Austin.

The automaker registered plans with the Texas Department of Licensing and Registration. The Austin Business Journal and CNBC were the first to report on the filings.

The filings show Tesla intends to build new facilities at the site this year, including one for battery cell testing and another manufacture cathode and drive units. Tesla also plans to build a die shop at the factory site, according to the registration.

The expansion comes less than a year from the factory’s official opening. The Tesla factory in Austin officially opened in April 2022 with a “Cyber Rodeo,” a party attended by about 15,000 people.

Today, the factory is used to assemble some of its Model Y vehicles. Production at the factory was initially constrained by the availability of the more-efficient 4680 cells that comprise its new battery architecture. Panasonic has said it plans to resolve the bottleneck in early 2024 when it starts producing the advanced cells at the $4 billion battery factoryit’s building in Kansas.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said once the Texas factory achieves volume production, the company will focus on the long-delayed Cybertruck. Production of the Cybertruck, which has been postponed multiple times, is supposed to begin this summer.

Tesla plans $770M expansion at Texas factory by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch

Venom Foundation, a layer-1 blockchain licensed and regulated by the Abu Dhabi Global Market, and investment manager Iceberg Capital have partnered to launch a $1 billion venture fund, the two firms announced on Wednesday.

The $1 billion vehicle, Venom Ventures Fund (VVF), is a blockchain-agnostic fund that will invest in pre-seed to Series A rounds for web3 protocols and decentralized applications (dApps) that focus on trends like payments, asset management, DeFi, banking services and GameFi.

The fund’s leadership team includes Peter Knez, ex-CIO of BlackRock and former global CIO for fixed income at Barclays Global Investors, and Mustafa Kheriba, a board member for multiple family offices and long-term investment professional in the Middle East and North African regions.

The fund aims to be the intersection where “old money meets new,” according to its website. In general, the VVF team has experience growing both web3 funds and traditional funds as well as experience in providing growth capital for both startups and scaleups.

“Through the provision of our accelerator programs, grants and targeted capital injections, VVF provides the support and resources required to help its portfolio companies,” Knez said to TechCrunch.

VVF will also use Iceberg Capital’s resources to offer incubation programs, among other things. It will also assist projects with marketing, exchange listing, technical, legal and regulatory support, the two firms said in a press release.

“With a steadfast commitment to identifying and investing in highly promising, scalable and consumer-focused companies within the rapidly emerging web3 ecosystem, VVVF is actively investing and building a portfolio of leading-edge web3 firms that are poised to achieve widespread adoption and achieve significant growth,” Knez said.

Alongside the fund’s announcement, VVF also made its first investment leading digital world-focused Nümi Metaverse’s $20 million funding round.

Amid the current downward market, this fund is one of the few massive funds popping up in the space right now. During the last bull run, it seemed like a number of billion-dollar to multibillion-dollar funds were popping up frequently, but now, not so much.

“Venom Ventures is determined to make a meaningful impact by leveraging its financial strength to provide value in a number of key areas including regulation, technology and acceleration,” Knez said. “Recognizing that these are challenging times, VVF is committed to fostering innovation, driving growth and creating opportunities for its portfolio companies to succeed.”

Venom Foundation and Iceberg Capital launch $1B venture fund to invest in web3 by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch

Meta rescinded full-time offers from some job candidates, a spokesperson confirmed.

“As we continue to reassess our hiring needs, we’ve made the difficult decision to withdraw offers to a small number of candidates,” a Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch. “While this decision did not come lightly, it allows us to remain thoughtful as we readjust our hiring through 2023 to align with our highest-priority work.”

Meta did not comment on how many people were impacted or what departments had rescinded offers.

According to engineer and writer Gergely Orosz, about 20 recent grads had offers rescinded to work in Meta’s office. TechCrunch viewed LinkedIn posts from two rescinded candidates who had jobs lined up in software engineering.

Meta previously rescinded 2023 summer internship offers at its London office. Across the whole company, Meta laid off 11,000 workers (or 13% of its workforce) in November.

As Meta funnels billions of dollars into its unprofitable Reality Labs division, the company’s financial outlook has inspired uncertainty in its investors. In the second quarter of 2022, Meta posted its first-ever revenue decline; the following quarter, Meta’s revenue declined 4% year over year to hit $27.7 billion. Meanwhile, net income was just $4.395 billion, down from $9.194 billion year over year. Reality Labs, Meta’s division for augmented and virtual reality projects, lost $3.672 billion alone in Q3.

Meta’s situation is not helped by the overall state of the tech industry. Companies like Amazon and Coinbase have also rescinded job offers and waged large-scale layoffs.

Meta rescinded some full-time job offers by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch

Apple Maps today is gaining a new tool that will allow the decade-plus-old service to better compete with Google: it will now allow business owners to update and manage their own information on the platform, including key details like business hours and location, photos, logos, special offers and promotions, and more. To do so, the company is launching a new web portal called Apple Business Connect, which lets businesses manage their presence across Apple’s 1.5 billion devices from a single dashboard.

The service is a long time coming for Apple Maps. Although first launched in 2012, the mapping platform for years had relied on a simplified system, Apple Business Register, to update Maps listings with corrected information. And it leveraged third-party data from partners like Foursquare, Yelp, and Tripadvisor, to provide users with other business information, ratings, and reviews. For comparison, Google has allowed business owners to manage their listings since 2005 — though its product, now called Google Business Profiles, has gone through numerous name changes since then.

Apple says it won’t remove its integrations with Yelp as Apple Business Connect launches. Customers will see be able to see Yelp photos and reviews in the business place cards and will be able to choose Yelp as their provider for things like placing an order or viewing a restaurant’s menu, for example. However, the new system will allow business owners to now augment their listings with the important details they may lack, resulting in richer, more detailed, and more up-to-date listings.

After going through a verification process, business owners will be able to update their business place card with basic information like the business hours, phone numbers, address and more, including an “about” page, as well as with their business logo and photos. For the first time, they can also update the business’s category and even add subcategories to help Maps users find their business when searching. And they can customize the information that appears in the “Good to Know” section of their listing, which includes helpful info like whether a place is “good for kids,” has “free Wi-Fi,” offers “free delivery,” is “wheelchair accessible,” and the like.

If the location on the listing is wrong, the owner can move the pin on the map to a more precise location, as well.

In addition, some business listings on Apple Maps feature an “Action” button that allows a customer to take some sort of action, like booking a hotel room with Booking.com, ordering groceries with Instacart, or, as of recently, finding a parking spot with SpotHero. With Apple Business Connect, the business owner will now be able to add custom actions like these for themselves.

The listings can also for the first time be customized to display time-limited special offers and incentives, like food deals or tickets to a show. These updates, or “showcases,” can include some explanatory text, a photo, and even a custom action for the customers to take. They are free to use.

Apple will be working with partners, including Walmart, to enhance their business place cards in new ways, as well. For example, customers who visit the Walmart place card will be able to go to a “text to shop” feature by tapping on a “message us” button in the app. They’ll then be able to start typing in Messages for Business, the service that allows customers to connect with a business via iMessage.

After verification, business owners will also be able to designate other members of the team who are allowed to update their information and can configure their account to update multiple locations, if needed.

As owners use Apple Business Connect to make the updates, they’ll see a live preview on the screen so they know how their listing will look before it’s published.

While keeping the business information current is the primary reason to interact with the product, Business Connect will also offer insights that allow them to learn how their place card is performing over time. These can be viewed in an insight dashboard where they can learn how customers find their business and how they interact with the place card.

While many Apple device owners still prefer using Google Maps over Apple Maps for a number of reasons, Apple points out that the updated place cards won’t only live in the Maps app itself. These updates will flow across Apple’s ecosystem, to enhance business listings in other places like Siri Spotlight, Apple Wallet, Safari, and more.

While Apple says today it has no immediate plans to monetize this system to allow owners to elevate their listings in some way, like ads, the Business Connect platform seems to be setting the stage for some sort of future endeavor in that area. Apple in recent years has shown an increased interest in the digital advertising market and disrupting the Facebook-Google duopoly. Elsewhere on mobile, Apple’s privacy changes have helped to boost its own ads business, reports found. It wouldn’t be surprising to see Apple now considering an angle into the search ads market, too — particularly if it could leverage its iOS platform and various features, like Siri Spotlight, to help it along the way.

Apple Business Connect is launching to countries around the world as of Wednesday, initially in the following languages: English, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.

Apple Maps’ business listings are about to get more detailed with launch of ‘Apple Business Connect’ by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Last year was a painful one for startups and their employees. Venture capitalists tightened their investments, thousands of people lost their jobs and company valuations stalled or fell amid a protracted bear market.

An estimated 24% of startups on the Secfi platform reduced their fair market valuations in 2022, according to an internal analysis. For people working at those startups, that means some (in some cases, all) of their employee stock options spent 2022 underwater.

Separately, a Secfi analysis of 1,502 funding rounds at late-stage startups since March 2021 finds that startups are raising more flat rounds and down rounds than before.

A number of startups that raised money in 2022 did not disclose their post-money valuations, suggesting that the true number of startups that lowered their valuations in the past 12 months could be even higher than publicly reported.

Employee stock options are a meaningful factor in startup compensation, and underwater stock options have the potential to negatively impact hiring and retention across the startup ecosystem.

Underwater stock options

An analysis of more than 4,300 stock option grants uploaded to the Secfi platform in 2022 shows that nearly one of every four startups reduced their fair market valuations at some point during the year.

The highest-profile example of this phenomenon was Klarna, which raised venture capital in mid-2021 at a $45.6 billion valuation but was forced to raise a new round of funding in mid-2022 at a $6.7 billion valuation — an 85% decline. Other large companies that cut their valuations (without raising funding) include Instacart and Checkout.com.

Stock options are a high-risk, high-reward form of compensation and remain one of the most compelling drivers of startup employment and retention.

An analysis by Carta of employment data from 2018 suggested that the average startup employee works for just two years at a company before jumping to their next opportunity. Underwater stock options are a problem for people who joined a startup in 2020 or 2021, as they’re now finding that their shares are worth less than when they were hired.

The average startup employee in Silicon Valley received 12% to 14% of the value of their salary in the form of stock options, per Carta. In other words, a startup worker who earns a $150,000 annual salary could expect to earn an average of $21,000 worth of stock options as part of their total compensation package.

When a startup is successful, stock options rise in value — in some cases, by many multiples. Stock options make up 86% of the total net worth of the average startup employee, according to financial data that employees voluntarily shared with Secfi.

Underwater stock options can impact employee retention, as employees instead look to other startups with a stronger valuation growth. As a result, startup leaders who want to retain their employees may need to consider cash and retention bonuses, higher salaries or a stock option repricing program.

The average cost to exercise stock options remains high

Despite economic headwinds, the cost to exercise stock options remains high.

In 2022, the average Secfi client required $846,000 to exercise their stock options and pay associated taxes. Like in previous years, taxes continue to make up the majority of the total cost to exercise.

High costs remain a major reason why startup employees fail to exercise their stock options.

Inside Secfi’s 2022 state of stock options equity report by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch

Netflix will continue its foray into livestreaming with a new multi-year partnership with the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards. Beginning in 2024, the award ceremony will be broadcast live on the streamer, becoming the first major film and television awards show to air on Netflix.

As part of the new deal, Netflix will stream this year’s 29th annual SAG awards on Netflix’s YouTube channel. The award show will premiere online on February 26 at 8 p.m. ET.

“The SAG Awards are beloved by the creative community and viewers alike, and now even more fans around the world will be able to celebrate these talented actors,” Netflix Head of Global TV Bela Bajaria said in a statement. “As we begin to explore livestreaming on Netflix, we look forward to partnering with SAG-AFTRA to elevate and expand this special ceremony as a global live event in 2024 and the years to come.”

It was only a matter of time before the SAG Awards moved to a streaming service. Since 1998, the ceremony has broadcasted on TBS and TNT. However, SAG announced in May 2022 that it would no longer broadcast on the networks.

Moving to a streamer is a smart move for the award show and gives viewers a more affordable way to watch than cable. Notably, the 28th annual SAG awards only had 1.8 million viewers, a substantial decrease from 2 million in 2020 and 2.7 million in 2019.

However, even though Netflix has the largest subscriber base among its rivals, with 223.09 million global subs, the streaming giant hasn’t tested its livestreaming capability yet, which it only just announced in last year.

The company is set to test its first-ever livestreaming event early this year when it streams the live comedy special starring Chris Rock.

“We are thrilled to embark on this exciting new partnership with Netflix and we look forward to expanding the global audience for our show,” SAG-AFTRA National Executive Director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland added. “As the only televised awards program exclusively honoring the performances of actors, whose work is admired by millions of fans, the SAG Awards are a unique and cherished part of the entertainment universe.”

Netflix gets live streaming rights to SAG Awards in 2024 by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch

Jio Platforms said on Wednesday it has rolled out 5G to 101 cities in just as many days as the Indian telecom giant looks to court customers aggressively with faster data speeds.

The firm said on Wednesday that its 5G network is now live across at least one city each in 18 Indian states. Bharti Airtel, Jio Platform’s chief rival in India, in comparison has extended 5G to about 30 cities, it said earlier Wednesday.

Jio Platforms, part of Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries, is making a $25 billion bet to bring 5G to “every town” in the South Asian market by the end of 2023.

The firm spent over $11 billion to buy more 5G airwaves spectrum from the government than any other telecom player in the country in August last year.

Faster data access has become a key differentiator for telecom networks in India to lure customers away from their rivals, analysts say. Reliance entered the telecom market seven years ago and now commands the lion’s share, thanks to it being early with the rollout of 4G — and cutrate cheap data and free voice calls offerings.

“With such high expected data loads, Indian CSPs have pinned their hope on promise of 5G, which will allow them to bring in enhancement in capacities, efficiencies in their network, increase in ARPU and at the same time open new realms of revenue streams from the 5G play. The below table shows the expected roadmap, Indian 5G evolution is likely to undertake,” KPMG wrote in a report last year.

India’s Jio says it has rolled out 5G to over 100 cities in 100 days by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch