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Reading the spreadsheet detailing the investment portfolio of Alameda Research, the investment arm of fallen crypto exchange FTX, you wonder how they had time to do anything other than invest given the sheer number of deals recorded. Perhaps that was part of the problem.

FTX and its sister company (or parent company, depending on how you look at it) Alameda had their hands in a bunch of different startups. The depth of its roster wasn’t very transparent until now.

A spreadsheet first shared by the Financial Times showed Alameda’s private equity portfolio, with some FTX positions included. The document includes just shy of 500 investments across 10 holding companies for a total of $5.276 billion. (Like the Financial Times, TechCrunch has yet to confirm all data shared in the spreadsheet, meaning that when we discuss aggregates, we’re speaking directionally. We reached out to FTX and its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, for comment but haven’t heard back.)

This spreadsheet, dated from early November, raises a number of concerns surrounding the extent to which FTX and Alameda — and their affiliated companies — invested in the crypto industry.

“I scratched my head at the FTX investments/acquisitions (i.e. Dave Inc/Storybook) last year and thought maybe SBF (as a genius) saw the market differently, and maybe I was losing my touch,” Vance Spencer, co-founder of Framework Ventures, tweeted on Tuesday. “Looking at it all together in 2022: nope, they were idiots, they lit all the money on fire.”

FTX and Alameda’s massive investments will take a long time to unwind from crypto industry by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch

Apple has talked a big game about its future plans to break into the automotive market. But a report from Bloomberg says that Apple has had to scale back its plans. Last year, Apple said it would debut a fully self-driving car in 2025, but now, the vehicle is delayed until 2026 and will not be autonomous.

Apple sought to build the first completely autonomous vehicle, without the need for a steering wheel or pedals. But according to the report, engineers working on the project (known internally as Titan) no longer think that vision is possible with current technology.

Apple has experienced a number of executive shakeups on the Titan team, which could have influenced this delay. Last year, Ford Motor snagged Doug Field, the engineering executive who was in charge of this special projects team at Apple. A few months before that, several other key players on the Titan project departed the company.

Even companies with a long history in the automotive space have struggled to make the dream of autonomous driving a reality. Of course, Tesla has also strived toward this feat with its misleadingly named “full self-driving” feature, which launched in beta in October 2020 and is now the subject of a Department of Justice criminal investigation. Launched last year, the inquiry was initiated following over a dozen accidents involving the active use of Tesla’s Autopilot system, some resulting in fatalities.

Meanwhile, TechCrunch reported in October that Argo AI, the autonomous vehicle unicorn with backing from Ford and Volkswagen, would be shutting down. Ford later said in its earnings report that it would focus more on advanced driver assistance systems than self-driving technology.

Apple’s first car, delayed until 2026, won’t be self-driving by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch

It’s been a pretty rough week for Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff and the folks at his company: Three talented executives – co-CEO Bret Taylor, Tableau CEO Mark Nelson, and Slack CEO and co-founder Stewart Butterfield – announced their resignations in quick succession.

It’s fair to ask what exactly is going on at Salesforce to lose three accomplished people so quickly, but it’s also important to parse each exit to determine whether they are part of a political battle or just some odd confluence of unconnected events.

The news seems to have spooked investors, with the company’s stock down nearly 17% over the last five days. But what do these departures mean to Salesforce and to the companies it spent so much money to acquire over the last several years? Further, how does it impact the executive depth that Benioff has worked so hard to build up? Finally, does he look for another co-CEO to help him run the company, or does he continue running it alone for the foreseeable future?

And another one gone, another one gone

Let’s start with Nelson. He’s the least well-known of the three. Salesforce bought his company, Tableau, in 2019 for almost $16 billion. At the time, the company was run by Adam Selipsky, who left last year to become CEO at AWS when Andy Jassy was promoted to Amazon CEO after Jeff Bezos stepped back from that role

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction in the C-suite, apparently.

As Butterfield exits stage left, it’s fair to wonder what’s happening at Salesforce by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

Google announced today that it’s making it easier for users to drill down on a search and explore related topics. Search currently has a few filters to help you refine and separate your search results between videos, news, images or shopping results. Now, the search giant is going to start showing users a scrollable list of related topics alongside its current filters at the top of the search results page.

For example, if you’re searching for dinner ideas, you might see filter topics like “healthy” or “easy” pop up in the new scrollable list. If you tap on one of the filters, it will add it to your search query. You can add or remove topics, which are designated by a + symbol, to quickly zoom in or backtrack on a search.

Topics are dynamic and will change as you tap in order to give you more options and help you explore new areas, Google says. For instance, if you tapped on a “healthy” filter, you may see “vegetarian” or “quick” appear next. Google says the new change will roll out for English users in the U.S. on iOS, Android and the web in the coming days.

“When you conduct a search, our systems automatically display relevant topics for you based on what we understand about how people search and from analyzing content across the web,” Google said in a blog post. “Both topics and filters are shown in the order that our systems automatically determine is most helpful for your specific query. If you don’t see a particular filter you want, you can find more using the “All filters” option, which is available at the end of the row.”

Today’s announcement comes a day after Google introduced a “Continuous Scrolling” experience on desktop so users don’t have to navigate across pages to find relevant search results, expanding a feature the company has offered on mobile for some time.

Google Search’s new topic filters make it easier to refine results or expand searches by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch

It would be nice to say that we’ll miss SPACs. But as blank-check companies fade from our view, we have to say we really won’t.

Many companies that went public via a SPAC, or special purpose acquisition company, have seen their valuations implode post-combination. The resulting public-market mess meant that regular investors, not merely the more sophisticated professional investing cohort, took a bath.

Even more, it appears that the best startups out there that may be eventual candidates for a traditional public offering did not pursue the SPAC route while it was open — we can infer this from the ever-rising number of yet-private unicorns — while some less-prepared companies rode the wave straight into a wall. This meant that the average quality of a company going out via a blank check combination was lower than we might have hoped.

The EV SPAC boom? A mess. Fintech SPAC? A mess. So on and so forth.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

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

This week, we saw the Circle SPAC deal die on the vine (TechCrunch originally somewhat liked the pitch; it appeared that the stablecoin-focused company was actually a good fit for a blank-check combination). The Footprint deal also came apart before it could consummate. Bloomberg noted this week that in addition to the 11 figures of SPAC deals falling to pieces yesterday, there have been nearly five dozen SPAC deals killed this year. (Surf Air called off its deal a few weeks ago, and the list goes on.)

Circle and Footprint’s aborted debuts are the final nail in the SPAC coffin by Anna Heim originally published on TechCrunch

Apple is loosening its requirements around how developers have to price their apps as legal and regulatory pressure over its tight control of the App Store intensifies. The company announced today it’s expanding its App Store pricing system to offer developers access to 700 additional price points, bringing the new total number of price points available to 900. It will also allow U.S. developers to set prices for apps, in-app purchases or subscriptions as low as $0.29 or as high as $10,000, and in rounded endings (like $1.00) instead of just $0.99. Similar new policies to reduce restrictions around price points will roll out in global markets, alongside new tools aimed at helping developers better manage pricing outside their local market.

The changes will initially become available starting today, Dec. 6, 2022, for auto-renewable subscriptions. They’ll become available to paid apps and in-app purchases in Spring 2023.

Apple has historically been heavy-handed when it comes to App Store pricing — a decision it believed allowed for a consistent consumer experience. But as the app ecosystem shifted away from paid app downloads to instead monetize via subscriptions, developers began demanding more pricing flexibility. Staunch Apple critics, like Spotify for example, have argued for years that the lack of pricing flexibility hinders their business. After Apple back in 2016 dropped the pricing for subscription apps from 30% to 15% in year two, Spotify complained the move didn’t go far enough, as Apple’s price rules didn’t allow the company a way to provide special offers or discounts to its customers at the various price points it wanted to set.

The new rules — while not a complete free-for-all — are meant to help address that concern, while also giving developers across Apple’s 175 markets a wider range of options in general.

For comparison, non-subscription in-app purchases previously offered a smaller range of price points. In most developed markets, there were 87 price points to choose from, while emerging markets had 94. For auto-renewing subscriptions, there have been 200 price points available. With this change, developers will have access to 900 total price points — including 600 new price points that are broadly available and 100 higher price points that are available “upon request.”

Developers who want access to the higher price points — those between $1,000-$10,000 — will have to justify their request in an online form which will be reviewed by Apple. But the company notes any App Store developer can request access to the highest price points, as it won’t be limited only to certain categories of apps.

In another big change, Apple says developers will now be allowed to set prices that end in $.00 instead of those that only end in $.99 or €X.99. And in other markets, they’ll be able to set prices that begin with two repeating digits, like ₩110,000. These new pricing options can be useful for managing things like bundles or annual plans, the company said.

U.S. consumers may have noticed some App Store prices already ended in other digits besides just $0.99. But that’s because auto-renewing subscriptions had access to a slightly wider range of price points than other consumables — including the ability to set their prices as low as $0.49. But these same rules did not apply to non-subscription app pricing, which added to consumer and developer confusion. The new system is looking to simplify the pricing so it’s more consistent across the board.

For U.S. apps in the lowest tiers, price points can increase in $0.10 increments up to $10.00 going forward. These price steps become less granular when you move into higher price points. For example, between $10 and $50, they then can increase by $0.50 increments. Between $50 and $200, the price steps would be $1.00, and so on.

The new pricing policies come as lawmakers and regulators around the world are examining Apple’s App Store for anti-competitive practices. In the U.S., for example, the Department of Justice is working to file an antitrust lawsuit against the company and even testified in the Epic Games vs. Apple appeal to advise the panel of judges as to how the lower court had misunderstood antitrust law when making its ruling.

Notably, Apple also last year settled a class action lawsuit with U.S. app developers, which included a number of concessions, including those around in-app communications, an appeals process for app rejections, and an agreement to expand the number of price points available from fewer than 100 to more than 500. When asked if today’s changes were related to this settlement, an Apple spokesperson deflected, saying that this was simply another step in the company’s long line of commerce investments made over the years.

In addition to the updated pricing policies, Apple is also now rolling out tools to help developers better manage currency and taxes across storefronts. Starting today, developers will be able to set their subscription prices in their local currency as the basis for automatically generating pricing across the other 174 storefronts and 44 currencies, or they can choose to manually set prices in each market. When pricing is set automatically, pricing outside a developer’s home market will update as foreign exchange and tax rates change.

This functionality will expand to all other apps beyond subscription apps in Spring 2023.

Also coming in 2023, developers with paid apps and in-app purchases will be able to choose to set local territory pricing, which isn’t impacted by automatic price adjustments based on the changes in taxes and foreign exchange rates. And all developers will also be able to define the availability of in-app purchases by storefront.

These changes are among the biggest made to Apple’s App Store pricing policies since the launch of subscriptions, but some may argue Apple hasn’t fully ceded control here as it’s still setting price minimums and maximums and the increments between price points, instead of simply letting developers set the prices they choose.

Apple loosens grip on App Store pricing with 700 new price points, support for prices that don’t end in $.99 by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups.

This week the show kicks off a new season and welcomes a new co-host. In this episode, Darrell is joined by Becca Szkutak to chat with Valentina Milanova, the founder of Daye, a gynecological health company creating CBD infused tampons. Valentina talks about why she decided to take on tampon behemoths like Tampax, the horrors she found when researching the industry and what it was like to pitch her startup to male investors. She also talked about how she’s approached mental health and avoiding burnout for Daye employees.

Subscribe to Found to hear more stories from founders each week.

Connect with us:

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Via email: found@techcrunch.com

Starting the tampon revolution with Valentina Milanova by Rebecca Szkutak originally published on TechCrunch

If you ask three different people whether we’re in a recession, you could easily get three different answers.

As often as the ‘R’ word is bandied about in tech, a survey of 450 early-stage founders found that only 12% plan to hire fewer workers and 6% have laid people off.

“The data is proving that early-stage founders are seeing a more gradual approach to the downturn,” said January Ventures founding partner Jen Neundorfer.

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“It’s in contrast to some of the memos you see from the Sequoias of the world that say, ‘cut immediately and cut deep.’”

Eighty percent of the seed-stage and pre-seed founders who responded to January’s survey have less than a year of runway left. Only half of the respondents said they planned to cut costs, “compared to 2020, when 81% of companies reported doing so,” writes Rebecca Szkutak.

Thanks very much for reading,

Walter Thompson
Editorial Manager, TechCrunch+
@yourprotagonist

December 8 Twitter Space: Immigration law for startups

On Thursday, December 8 at 9 a.m. PT/noon ET, I’m hosting a Twitter Space with Sophie Alcorn, an immigration attorney based in Silicon Valley and the author of Dear Sophie, a column that appears on TechCrunch+ each Wednesday.

If you’re a visa worker who’s been laid off, or if you just have questions about working and living legally inside the United States, please join the conversation.

This Space is open to everyone: click through to set a reminder and submit your immigration-related questions so we can raise them during the Q&A.

Use customer health data to grow and forecast future NRR

When investors are more interested in organic growth than in writing follow-on checks, desperate founders may launch a quest for One Metric to Rule Them All, like one of the rings of power in Middle Earth.

Net revenue retention is a powerful yardstick for startups seeking to reduce churn rates, which is why Kellie Capote, chief customer officer at Gainsight, recommends using the DEAR framework:

Deployment
Engagement
Adoption
ROI

“The DEAR customer outcomes score enables you to connect workflows to leading indicators and lagging outcomes,” writes Capote.

“If you’re looking for a data-driven way to build confidence in your modeling with your executive team and board, this is it.”

Which way is up? The end of free money and the importance of keeping cash on hand

In simpler times, founders could often satisfy investors just by showing how quickly their company was meeting growth expectations.

“Well, investors today care about the less-distant future,” according to Max Schireson, an operating partner at Battery Ventures.

“They care about how much money they need to put into your company to get to that future and when it will arrive.”

In a guest post for TC+, he shares frank advice and multiple scenarios that can help founders meet investor exceptions during tough times.

“They say time is the one thing you can’t buy, but in fact, time is the easiest thing to buy at a startup.”

If you’re a bootstrapped startup, turn to user-centered design to thrive during adversity

I began paying more attention to a CEO who’s using surveys to ask platform users about which features are most important to them.

So far, it’s not going very well.

With true user-centered design, product managers gather as much information as they can to make sure they’re building for an audience — not themselves.

“Now that investors are more demanding and writing smaller checks, UCD can be the difference between your business launching or never making it off the drawing board,” says Adam Sandman, founder and CEO of Inflectra.

How companies can slash ballooning SaaS costs

A study conducted by purchasing management platform Vertice found that one of every eight dollars spent by enterprises go to SaaS products.

“It’s not surprising when you consider the average organization now uses around 110 SaaS solutions,” reports Kyle Wiggers. As a result, customers are spending 53% more on software licensing today than in 2017.

“Most organizations have grown their portfolio of software vendors dramatically over the past 10 years,” said Stephen White, senior director-analyst, Gartner. “It’s not uncommon to have more than doubled that vendor portfolio.”

TechCrunch+ roundup: The end of free money, how to forecast NRR, slashing SaaS spending by Walter Thompson originally published on TechCrunch

Today, Warner Bros. Discovery and Amazon announced that HBO Max is back on Prime Video Channels in the United States after it leftas an Amazon offering in 2021.

Prime subscribers can sign up for HBO Max for $14.99 per month via the Prime Video app or at amazon.com/channels/hbomax. The channel can be canceled at any time.

The companies also noted in an announcement that customers would have access to the upcoming “enhanced” streaming service when it launches in 2023, which will combine HBO Max and Discovery+ content.

“Now, with the addition of HBO Max again, customers can easily add this subscription and enjoy even more award-winning and fan-favorite entertainment on Prime Video,” said Cem Sibay, vice president of Prime Video, in a statement.

“Warner Bros. Discovery is committed to making HBO Max available to as broad an audience as possible while also advancing our data-driven approach to understanding our customers and best serving their viewing interests. Today, we are thrilled to take an important step forward by announcing that HBO Max is returning to Prime Video Channels,” added Bruce Campbell, chief revenue and strategy officer, Warner Bros. Discovery.

HBO Max launched in May 2020 without support for Amazon devices because former WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar wanted the streaming service to be available as a dedicated app on Fire TV devices rather than available through Prime Video Channels. A dedicated app gives Warner access to all customer data and subscription revenue as opposed to sharing it with Amazon. Despite this, however, HBO Max became available as a Prime Video Channel months later, likely so more consumers would subscribe to the service.

The streaming service then left Prime Video in 2021 due to the former parent company, AT&T, failing to reach an agreement to extend distribution. WarnerMedia lost 1.8 million subscribers that quarter due to no longer being available on Prime.

Aside from WBD CEO David Zaslav’s questionable content strategy, HBO Max’s return to Prime Video Channels is a smart move for the company. WBD fell short last quarter, missing Wall Street expectations after many titles disappeared from HBO Max.

While the reasoning behind the latest deal wasn’t disclosed, we guess that Zaslav wanted to strike a new deal with Amazon in order to gain new subscribers for the upcoming combined streaming service, which is rumored to be called “Max.”

HBO Max comes back to Prime Video Channels by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch

Lagos-headquartered venture capital firm Future Africa is teaming up with TLG Capital, a London-based open-ended credit fund, to launch a $25 million venture debt fund earmarked for portfolio companies.

The fund created from TLG’s existing funds will help Future Africa’s portfolio companies preserve their runway in an increasingly tight fundraising environment. Last year, African startups raised over $5 billion and one common theme from two mega-rounds that were announced was some dependency on debt funding: B2B e-commerce platform TradeDepot and fintech MFS Africa.

The event signaled that startups need debt irrespective of their business type. Over the last two years, we’ve seen startups such as mobility fintech Moove and B2B food supply chain platform Twiga – most recently through the yet-to-be-launched Hustler Fund in partnership with the Kenyan government – raise several million in debt to run operations.

Debt funding activity may have slowed down this year, but Future Africa founder and general partner Iyinoluwa Aboyeji told TechCrunch that the cost and risk appetite of equity capital coupled with rising interest rates will push founders toward embracing debt to run startup operations. He argued further that even when founders manage to raise equity it may come with terms that could heavily dilute their ownership of the business.

“Many founders want to keep growing through the downturn,” said the founder-cum-investor. “Debt is the best option provided that your unit economics are well defined and you have built the appropriate financial discipline which even equity investors are asking to see now.

Since its launch in 2016, Future Africa has invested in over 90 companies such as Flutterwave, Andela, Stears, and 54gene, worth over $6 billion, according to the firm. On the other hand, TLG Capital – with its strong debt structuring expertise spanning more than a decade – has invested in over 30 deals to date such as FairMoney and Branch, exiting over 20, it said in the shared statement. Future Africa intends to leverage the credit fund’s debt experience to build out this venture debt program. According to Aboyeji, the program seeks to help and reward founders who do a good job of building the right financial discipline as well as encourage founders to build good businesses rather than chase valuations.

“We have seen access to liquidity become increasingly challenging for founders, and are pleased to reiterate TLG Capital’s commitment to Africa’s early-stage entrepreneurs with Future Africa. Having already engaged with 13 of Future Africa’s founders we see common challenges: businesses contend with large currency devaluations in home markets while raising US Dollar equity, for instance,” said Aum Thacker, an investor at TLG Capital. “We are developing a suite of best-in-class products so founders can focus on operating and innovating – while TLG as a structuring partner helps ensure their businesses are best placed in response to macroeconomic headwinds.”

As Thacker’s quote reads, the structuring support from TLG has been offered to 13 of Future Africa’s portfolio companies so far (though the checks are yet to be written to these startups). They meet certain criteria, Aboyeji said, one of which is that selected startups must generate between $1-10 million in annual revenue.

TLG Capital intends to structure the debt in such a way that they are asset-backed and based on “proper fundamentals.” The firm will also work closely with the CFOs of Future Africa’s portfolio to prepare them to: maintain proper records and financial discipline, achieve proper unit economics and receive and manage leverage on their books. Thacker, who leads TLG Capital’s focus on originating and executing transactions within the growth equity space, will carry out the selection as both parties plan to expand this funnel in the coming months.

Future Africa teams up with TLG Capital to set up $25M venture debt fund for portfolio companies by Tage Kene-Okafor originally published on TechCrunch