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President Biden published an op-ed yesterday in the Wall Street Journal putting Big Tech on notice that his administration was working — in fact, has been working — to rein in its worst abuses. But these “broad principles for reform” sound pretty familiar.

The op-ed begins by thanking the tech sector for its hard work (and contributions to the GDP, it is understood) and immediately begins deploring its depredations of children and the otherwise vulnerable.

“I’m concerned about how some in the industry collect, share and exploit our most personal data, deepen extremism and polarization in our country, tilt our economy’s playing field, violate the civil rights of women and minorities, and even put our children at risk,” writes the president.

He cites three major areas where the federal government needs to intervene: privacy, algorithmic responsibility, and competition.

Regarding privacy, his worry is that companies “collect, use and share highly personal data,” mostly for ad targeting. He says the White House is “developing new privacy rules for commercial data.” Good! The industry has been calling for federal rules for years — sure, it was because they didn’t like California’s, but they’ve definitely been asking for it. The time to establish these was a long, long time ago — they take forever to figure out and then lead to dozens of court cases that define their finer contours, as we’ve seen in the European Union’s GDPR efforts.

We’ve seen privacy bills come and go, but like everything else, they fall prey to partisan politics and that seems unlikely to change. But at least we’re getting a preview of what challenges await with the California Consumer Protection Act and other state-led efforts. And the FTC may be gearing up to take its shot too.

The second matter is that tech must “take responsibility for the content they spread and the algorithms they use.” For this he proposes reforming Section 230, which is a can of worms everyone has had on their desk for years but no one seems to want to open. Do too little and nothing changes; do too much and the tech sector falters under a hail of lawsuits. Easier to complain than try to thread that needle, it seems. Transparency of algorithms may be easier to accomplish, especially if one were to connect it with AI-related policy and questions of protected classes and categories.

Last is the need to “bring competition back to the tech sector.” On this Biden is clearly banking on the ascendant Lina Khan, FTC chair and archenemy to Amazon, Meta, and now Microsoft.

“We recently secured a significant funding boost for our antitrust enforcers,” Biden writes. Khan and others have complained that the FTC has lacked the funding, authority, and headcount (not to mention inclination, under some administrations) to take on industry giants buying up competitors like it’s nothing. Spinning up a new antitrust team with a new antitrust philosophy (ask Khan about it) could actually accomplish what Biden wants.

But of course this is hardly the first time someone has complained about things like Facebook buying Instagram and WhatsApp. Systemic advantages awarded to those who can afford to lobby the government have allowed all this to happen — don’t forget that many of the “great American companies…smothered by the dominant incumbents” came and went while Biden was vice president or senator. So we’ve heard this song before. What comes next? Usually nothing.

While Biden’s op-ed adds nothing to the debate over tech’s excesses and potential remedies, it isn’t meant to. Instead, it serves as a public declaration of his (grudging) opposition to the problems of the tech world. “You brought this on yourselves, my friends,” he seems to say. Perhaps this legislative period will be full of the long-promised nips and tucks tech has desperately needed and indeed asked for. Unfortunately, as he notes in the last paragraph:

“There will be many policy issues we disagree on in the new Congress, but…let’s unite behind our shared values” for tech reform, he writes. Good luck, Mr. President! This time for sure.

Biden’s call to ‘unite against big tech abuses’ sure sounds familiar by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch

SmartNews, a Tokyo-headquartered news aggregation website and app valued at $2 billion as of 2021, today announced a 40% reduction of its U.S. and China workforce, or around 120 people, according to sources familiar with the company’s plans. The news was announced on Thursday in an All-Hands meeting attended this evening by SmartNews staff. The company confirmed the layoffs to TechCrunch, saying the “current economic conditions” were to blame.

Impacted roles in the U.S. and China include those in engineering, product, and data science, we understand. SmartNews employees in Japan, meanwhile, will soon undergo a “voluntary departure program,” but they weren’t yet offered specifics about what that will entail. Laid-off employees will be offered standard severance packages and benefits. In the meeting, staff were told they’d get an email within 15 minutes if they were among those being let go.

In total, SmartNews employs nearly 900 people, including its contract workforce, one-third of which work outside Japan.

Sources also told TechCrunch that the company had opted to close its U.S. offices for two days, Thursday and Friday, without giving a reason, which worried employees ahead of the remotely streamed All Hands meeting.

“This isn’t your fault and I am sorry to see you leave,” remarked SmartNews CEO, Ken Suzuki, when making the announcement.

After the announcement was made, the meeting quickly ended, leaving no time for Q&A, frustrating some staff.

Founded in 2012 in Japan, the company arrived in the U.S. in 2014 and expanded its local news footprintin early 2020 to cover thousands of U.S. cities. It has relationships with more than 3,000 global publishing partners whose content is available through its service on the web and mobile devices.

In its markets, the app grew to become a top news aggregator due to how it personalizes the reader’s experience using machine learning technology to pick which articles are displayed. In the U.S., it also differentiated itself from others with a “News From All Sides” feature, which allows users to access news from across a range of political perspectives. In addition, during high-profile events like the Covid-19 pandemic or U.S. elections, SmartNews would offer in-app dashboards that offered critical information at a glance.

The company managed to attract investors, raising more than $400 million since its founding in 2012, despite hefty competition from built-in aggregators like Apple News and Google News, on iOS and Android. In its most recent funding round, a Series F, investors poured in $230 million into the business, valuing it as a “double unicorn” ($2 billion), the company’s press release stated. New investors included U.S.-based Princeville Capital and Woodline Partners, as well as JIC Venture Growth Investments, Green Co-Invest Investment, and Yamauchi-No.10 Family Office in Japan. Existing backers ACA Investments and SMBC Venture Capital also participated.

The SmartNews app globally reached 30 million monthly active users with 20 million in Japan and 10 million in the United States, we understand. However, those numbers have been trending down in both markets by around 10-20%, a source said. Since January 2014, SmartNews reached nearly 81 million worldwide installs from across the App Store and Google Play, according to estimates from Sensor Tower. As of 2022, its biggest markets by downloads were Japan (58%) and the U.S. (38%), Sensor Tower said.

SmartNews, unfortunately, was impacted by the same macroeconomic factors that have led to a number of tech industry layoffs in recent months, in addition to complications that arose from Apple’s implementation of App Tracking Transparency, or ATT. The iOS new privacy measure introduced in 2021 hurt companies whose business models relied on advertising, including Meta and Snap, while boosting Apple’s own ads business.

The company could have gone public back in 2019, but leadership pressed for additional funding and a higher valuation. Now that opportunity could be slipping.

Reached for comment, SmartNews confirmed the layoffs and offered the following statement:

Unfortunately, we are not immune to the current economic conditions that have negatively affected so many businesses. In order to maintain the health of our company and to ensure future growth, we decided to conduct a reorganization that has impacted many of our incredible employees. This was a last resort decision for us, and we hope the severance packages and career transition management services offered to impacted employees will help in their search for a new role.

News aggregator SmartNews lays off 40% of US and China staff, with further reductions planned in Japan by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

It’s a new year, but the industry’s struggles are showing no signs of abating. Big firms are as susceptible — if not more so. This week, Alphabet joined the growing list of tech giants making staff cuts amid ongoing economic struggles. Following a wave of layoffs from the likes of Amazon, Meta and Salesforce, Alphabet has begun letting people go.

The company’s “Other Bets” division is the first to see impact. As the name not so subtly implies, these divisions operate outside key focuses like search and ads. With many of the firms having graduated from the Alphabet X moonshot factory, the operation has taken on an almost in-house accelerator style role.

Earlier this week, life science firm Verily got hit with a 15% cut, amounting to around 240 people.

“While these programs are promising and led by talented Veeps, and some of their innovations will integrate into our other core solutions, we cannot do everything and have had to make some difficult choices,” CEO Stephen Gillett said in a blog post. “Some Veeps will be redeployed to other teams; others will unfortunately be leaving us. These people have helped make Verily the company it is today, and I know how hard it is to see valued friends and colleagues depart.”

Alphabet’s robot software firm, Intrinsic, has also been impacted. It will be laying off 40 employees TechCrunch has confirmed. It’s a big hit for the young division, amounting to around 20% of headcount. It’s also, frankly, a bit of an about-face for an area that appeared to be growing quickly. In fact, our last two conversations with the company have centered around acquisitions. In less than a year, Intrinsic has acquired both Vicarious and Open Robotics — the latter having been announced less than a month ago.

“Intrinsic’s leadership has made the difficult decision to let go a number of our team members,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We have communicated the news directly with them. We fully acknowledge how hard this will be and are offering as much proactive support as possible. This decision was made in light of shifts in prioritization and our longer-term strategic direction. It will ensure Intrinsic can continue to allocate resources to our highest priority initiatives, such as building our software and AI platform, integrating the recent strategic acquisitions of Vicarious and OSRC (commercial arm Open Robotics), and working with key industry partners. While incredibly tough to do, we believe this decision is necessary for us to continue our mission.”

At the very least, it’s a big hit for an organization just getting its sea legs. There are a lot of companies competing in the same space as Intrinsic, so it’s hard to say how much of a step back such news will ultimately be.

Earlier this week, fellow X robotics alum Mineral announced that it had just graduated from the lab.

Alphabet robotics division Intrinsic hit with layoffs by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch

Citizen laid off 33 staff members on Wednesday, the company confirmed to TechCrunch.

“We are grateful to all of our departing team members for their contributions to Citizen and are committed to supporting them through this transition with a generous severance package that includes accelerated option vesting and extended exercise window, six months of COBRA payments, career services support, and other benefits,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch.

Citizen did not share what departments at the company were impacted; one laid off employee told TechCrunch that at least ten engineers were let go.

Launched in 2016, the app was initiallybanned from the App Store over concerns about vigilantism — it was called Vigilante at the time. Now, Citizen uses public police blotters to notify users about verified incidents in their area, but users can upload their own reports of suspicious activity and livestream from crime scenes as well.

According to data from SensorTower, an app analytics firm, Citizen has seen about $30.3 million in consumer spending and over 14 million downloads since its launch. The private company most recently raised a $73 million Series C funding round in early 2021, which included a $23 million convertible note.

Citizen has been criticized for encouraging a culture of surveillance that lends itself to racial profiling and harassment; another neighborhood social app Nextdoor has exhibited similar issues. But the most egregious example of these dangers came from the company’s CEO himself. In 2021, Andrew Frame offered Citizen users $30,000 to track down a suspected arsonist while livestreaming on the Citizen app. He shared a photo of the suspect on a live feed which racked up 800,000 views, but it turned out he had the wrong guy. According to a report on the incident from Motherboard, Frame saw this as an elaborate marketing opportunity for the app’s livestream feature.

“We deeply regret our mistake and are working to improve our internal processes to prevent this from happening again,” the companywrote in a statement at the time.

Later that year, Citizen launched a service called Protect. For $20 per month, users get 24/7 access to a “protect agent” who can connect them with first responders or police. But critics have questioned whether Citizen’s alerts stoke panic and fear moreso than they keep people safe — and that fear can encourage people to purchase access to their own personal security agent.

According to SensorTower data, in-app purchases on Citizen increased 17% year-over-year after the introduction of Protect. But Citizen saw an average of $1.4 million in monthly spending on its app in 2022, which likely isn’t enough to make the company profitable. Citizen did not share a reason for conducting layoffs, but letting go of 33 employees could afford the company a bit more runway. According to its website, Citizen is currently hiring for five roles.

Crime reporting app Citizen lays off 33 employees by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch

Greenlight, a fintech startup offering debit cards to kids, has laid off 104 employees — or over 21% of its total headcount of 485 employees — to “better align with ongoing operating expenses” amid the economic slowdown.

TechCrunch learned about the layoff that was announced to its employees earlier this week. The startup later confirmed the development over an email.

“The macroeconomic environment has impacted virtually all businesses, including Greenlight. We recently made the difficult decision to better align our ongoing operating expenses with the current environment,” a Greenlight spokesperson said in a statement emailed to TechCrunch.

The spokesperson said the impacted employees would receive severance, extended medical coverage, and career transition support. The startup announced the decision on Tuesday and now has a workforce of 381 employees.

“The company remains committed to its mission to help parents raise financially-smart kids. Moving into 2023, Greenlight will be focused on continuing to serve its growing customer base and finding new, impactful ways to improve financial literacy for families,” the spokesperson said.

Greenlight offers kids a debit card, banking app and financial education to make them financially smart and independent. Community Federal Savings Bank issues the Greenlight debit card.

In December, the Atlanta-headquartered startup introduced a web-based financial literacy library aligned with the K-12 national standards that will be free to schools, teachers and students. It also in October added family safety features to its subscription plan called Greenlight Infinity which is priced at $14.98 per month for the whole family.

According to the data available on Crunchbase, Greenlight has raised about $556.5 million in total since its inception in 2014. The funding included the $260 million Series D round that was announced in 2021 at a valuation of $2.3 billion.

Greenlight has emerged as one of the latest startups laying off its staff during this challenging time. In the last few days, startups such as Career Karma, Carta and Coinbase let their tens and hundreds of employees go to reduce expenses. Big tech companies including Amazon and Salesforce have also laid off thousands of workers this month as the economy continues to struggle. Additionally, the growing economic slowdown has impacted prominent fintech startups including Stripe, which laid off 14% of its workforce in November. The startup also cut its internal valuation yet again to $63 billion, TechCrunch reported earlier on Thursday.

Greenlight, kids-focused fintech startup, lays off 104 employees to optimize expenses by Jagmeet Singh originally published on TechCrunch

It hasn’t decided on a name, it’s still on the hunt to fill some important roles and its early alpha has less than 100 users as of today. But, riding the wave of interest in the current state of Twitter, a startup hoping to disrupt it has raised $1.1 million in funding. T2, the project being led by Gabor Cselle, has closed its first outside investment from a group of angels that includes Bradley Horowitz, Rich Miner and the former CEO of Wikipedia, Katherine Maher.

Cselle himself has founded and sold startups to Twitter and Google, and he spent a number of years at both companies building products. In recent times, he has also been a popular presence on Twitter on subjects like building companies and products. His track record shows in the list of people who have pitched in money to back him and his latest efforts.

Horowitz, a seasoned exec at Google, has led and built a number of products there (including some ill-fated social efforts like Google+); he also wrote the first check for Slack. Miner is one of the co-creators of Android and also helped build out the powerhouse that is Google Ventures (now known as GV).

Others in this early seed round — 17 in all — include Kayak’s Paul English, Hubspot’s Dharmesh Shah, Twitter’s ex-engineering director Vijay Pandurangan, Mercury CEO Immad Akhund, Paul Lambert (an ex-Twitter, ex-Google director), Jackie Bernhelm (a director of Area 120 at Google), Coco Mao of OpenArt.ai, Yelp’s ex-SVP of engineering Michael Stoppelman, Brian McCullough of the Techmeme Ride Home Podcast, the ex-product lead of Twitter’s consumer division Jeff Seibert, YC partner Jared Friedman, the former head of news partnerships at Google Natalie Gross, Squarespace’s Janani SriGuha, and CEO and co-founder of Byteboard Sargun Kaur.

T2, to be clear, is not the company’s final name.

It is the working title for the startup and its new service. That service had a somewhat unlikely beginning. It started life as a series of Cselle’s Tweets, where he thought aloud about the missed opportunity at Twitter in the wake of Musk’s takeover. Those eventually evolved into statements (Tweets) about what Caselle saw as a prime opportunity to build on that potential. Those then became his battle call, and he launched the T2 effort in earnest last November.

Since that early public commitment, T2, based out of the Bay Area, has launched a very early-stage closed beta. It has already brought together a staff of seven, including some Twitter alums like Cselle himself. He tells me the plan is to use the funding both to continue hiring in a range of roles, some of which are pretty big — he’s in the market for a CTO — and to continue developing the product and the concept behind it.

That concept is less set in stone than you might think. Speaking to Cselle, the idea with T2, he said, is to create a “familiar place that is very close to the original.”

But what version of “the original” he means is still up in the air, since Twitter has shifted quite a lot over the years, and T2 is being selective on what it’s prioritizing to build and what it might leave out altogether. (For one thing, the character count on the “original” Twitter was 140 characters. In the purple-hued T2 it’s 280.)

The overriding aim seems to encourage use of T2 by making it as easy as possible to use, and the route to that ease is coming from tapping into familiarity. The hope is that activity will breed conversations and connections. “In consumer social, it’s all about the community,” said Cselle.

There is probably a key critical mass that it will need to reach, too. Right now, there are still less than 100 people in this early version. But Cselle tells me that the sign-up list is in the region of tens of thousands already, and it wants to onboard more of them.

“We have a product and we are going as quickly as possible,” he said.

Growth will be intrinsically connected not just to T2 understanding whether it has something here worth building and the makings of that community, but to it raising more money. He told me that he’s already having early conversations with VCs and other institutional investors. But they will be unlikely to back T2 until it reaches some milestones.

Specifically the metrics they are looking for are 5,000 active users.

In the meantime while the product is being developed, there is a second track of messaging happening over a publicly accessible Google Spreadsheet, titled “What Would It Take To Build Another Twitter.” which not only is meant to steer the effort (Twitter is the north star) but to serve as a kind of out-in-the-open brainstorm for Cselle and his team and those watching.

(If the world is roughly divided into people who like to write out plans/put things into forms and lists; and those who do not; Cselle is in the former category. “I plan family vacations in spreadsheets,” he told me.)

T2 may be one of the first to close (modest) funding in the wave of services out there, established and emerging, that are looking to dethrone Twitter, but it’s not the only one that will be looking to capitalize on the situation. Among them, Spill, founded by Twitter alums, is also looking to raise some $1.3 million; Post, already well backed, is looking to raise more at a $250 million valuation.

The big questions for T2, or whatever it will be eventually called, will be the same faced by other would-be competitors. Will Twitter face a sustained exodus of users and will it be to another product similar to it or something else entirely?

Twitter rival ‘T2’ raises its first outside funding, $1.1M from a group of high-profile angels by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important crypto stories delivered to your inbox every Thursday at 12 p.m. PT,subscribe here.

Welcome back to Chain Reaction.

For the first time in a long time, there was less talk circulating about a certain three-letter crypto exchange, ahem, FTX. But of course, that didn’t last long as the former FTX CEO (who also goes by three letters — SBF) created a Substack and shared his perspective on Thursday — in a 2,300-word overview — detailing what FTX and Alameda were “pre-mortem.”

Over the past seven days, there have also been a handful of cuts announced across the crypto space, from the second-largest exchange Coinbase cutting 20% of its workforce to NFT marketplace SuperRare axing 30% of its staff.

This is Coinbase’s second round of major layoffs, after eliminating 18% of its employees, or about 1,100 jobs last June, but there was “no way to reduce our expenses significantly enough, without considering changes to headcount,” Coinbase co-founder and chief executive Brian Armstrong wrote in a post Tuesday.

Amid the doomy and gloomy sentiment from these layoffs, a number of market players were trying to help those affected by the cuts, including Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, who tweeted, “If you are a departing Coinbase employee, reach out! I would love to find you a home in the ecosystem.”

See, not all hope in humanity has to be lost.

It was also a big week for partnerships as more crypto companies joined forces with mainstream Web 2.0 and financial companies like AWS and Mastercard. But instead of saying more here, I’ll let the stories speak for themselves. Read more about them below.

This week in web3

AWS partners with Avalanche to scale blockchain solutions for enterprises, governments

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has partnered with Ava Labs, the company building out layer-1 blockchain Avalanche, to help scale blockchain adoption across enterprises, institutions and governments, the two firms exclusively told TechCrunch. “Looking forward, web3 and blockchain is inevitable,” Howard Wright, VP and global head of startups at AWS, said to TechCrunch. “No one can call the time or date or quarter that it’s going to happen and it’ll be mainstream, but we’ve seen the cycles of growth before. The velocity of this one seems like it’s accelerating and we’re just excited to be a part of this.”

6 crypto investors talk about DeFi and the road ahead for adoption in 2023 (TC+)

The crypto venture capital industry has become more selective thanks to the general market downturn and wavering trust caused by a slew of scandals and market disruptions, but investors at major firms are still writing checks in the space. As the market looks toward the future, some venture capitalists are revamping their investing strategies, while others are holding to their current plans, with perhaps a small tweak or two. Read on to find out how active investors are thinking about DeFi, how they’re advising their portfolio companies amid the lack of funding, the best way to approach them and more.

Mastercard launches web3-focused artist incubator with Polygon

Mastercard, one of the biggest financial payments providers in the world, is launching a web3-focused incubator to help artists connect with fans through a new medium, the company shared. Mastercard partnered with Polygon, a scaling blockchain built on top of Ethereum, which has been making huge strides in the Web 2.0 ecosystem lately. After joining the incubator, participating artists should know how to mint NFTs, represent themselves in virtual worlds and establish a community, Raja Rajamannar, chief marketing and communications officer at Mastercard, said to TechCrunch.

Web3-focused Beacon launches flagship demo day with 13 crypto startups

We’re only in the second week of 2023, but demo days have already begun as founders try to keep momentum alive in the ever-changing crypto market. Beacon, a web3-focused early-stage accelerator program, launched last year, and its flagship cohort just graduated. The teams in the first cohort, known as Cohort 0, presented their ideas on Tuesday during a demo day, exclusively covered by TechCrunch.

When it comes to web3, investors say they’re in it for the long haul (TC+)

Hyped or not, web3 companies seem like they’re here to stay, and investors seem more than willing to keep backing them. To get a better idea of how the people writing the checks are thinking about web3, TechCrunch surveyed more than 35 investors, and it turns out the majority are not only actively investing in the category, they also harbor hopes of a shining future for what they feel is a potentially transformative technology.

The latest pod

Chain Reaction is back in action with the launch of Season 2!

For this week’s episode, I talked to Ryan Wyatt, president of Polygon Labs, one of the biggest market shakers and layer-2 blockchains in the crypto space that’s building on top of the Ethereum ecosystem.

The past year has been huge for Polygon as it partnered with big-brand names like Starbucks, Disney and Mastercard to launch loyalty rewards and accelerator programs. Now, Polygon is looking to 2023 and new opportunities, and Wyatt shares what’s in store for it and how the space still has room to grow.

We also discussed:

Polygon’s big themes and product vision for 2023
Mass adoption of crypto and what it takes to get there
Wyatt’s outlook for the gaming and NFT market

Subscribe to Chain Reaction on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite pod platform to keep up with the latest episodes, and please leave us a review if you like what you hear!

Follow the money

Venom Ventures Fund announced a $1 billion venture fund and made its first investment in Nümi Metaverse’s $20 million funding round
The Easy Company, a “social” crypto wallet, raised $14.2 million in a seed round
Cosmo blockchain-based DeFi protocol Quasar raised $5.4 million at a $70 million valuation
Open Forest Protocol raised $4.1 million to scale nature-based solutions
C14 raised $2.5 million to help build crypto payment flows

This list was compiled with information from Messari as well as TechCrunch’s own reporting.

Can we get more crypto partnerships and less crypto layoffs, please? by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch

Are you thinking about getting a mechanical keyboard and asked a friend which one to get? Chances are, they said: get a Keychron. It’s basically a meme at this point. After making its name with affordable mechanical keyboards (with a bit of a focus for Mac users) — the company now has something on offer for every budget and in virtually every layout, ranging from the 40% Q9 to the 100% Q6 — and everything in-between. And while the Q-line gets a lot of press, the more affordable pre-built K and V lines go after the non-enthusiast market.

At this point, Keychron has so much of the potential market covered, it’s now starting to offer some more exotic layouts. The latest of these is the Q10, a 75% Alice board with a few twists. It’s probably no surprise that it, too, is an easy recommendation for anybody who is looking for this kind of board.

As a 75% board, the hefty Q10 (it comes in at just under five pounds), with its full aluminum body, offers function keys, number row and dedicated insert, delete, page up/down and home keys. As you would expect from a modern keyboard, there are hot-swap sockets so you can easily try new switches and there is a knob on the left side. And because there’s a bit of extra room here, Keychron added five macro buttons under the knob as well that you can map to anything you’d like, using what has now become the industry-standard VIA app. Like most modern keyboards, it’ll happily work with your Mac or Windows machine, but there’s no wireless option here (that’s coming to Keychron’s Q line soon, though, starting with the upcoming Q1 Pro). Oh, and there’s per-key RGB, too, if that’s your thing.

This is, of course, a board with an Alice layout — that is, the keys are not in a straight line but the left and right half are slightly angled, which some would claim makes for a more ergonomic typing experience. I don’t know about the ergonomics, especially since the keyboard doesn’t tent like something like an ErgoDox EZ would, but at its core, it’s not all that different from some of the more popular ergonomic keyboards from the likes of Microsoft. It’s quite easy to get used to, even for touch-typists, and quite comfortable to type on.

Otherwise, Keychron is going with its standard setup here: gasket mount for a bit of flex and silicon gaskets between the top and bottom cases to reduce ping and other noise. I never quite find that I notice the gasket mounting in daily use, because you really have to hammer on your keys to get any of that bounce you may have seen in YouTube videos, but then I switch to an older keyboard with a tray mount and notice how hard that feels. Your mileage may vary here, of course. At this point, gasket mounts are the industry standard, it seems, but I do look forward to some innovation here.

If all of this sounds familiar, then… yeah… basically everything I said in my review of Keychron’s other — but smaller — Alice-style board, the Q8, still applies here, too. Keychron had some early missteps with its Q1 but to the company’s credit, the team quickly learned from that and the community’s feedback. You can modify this keyboard to your heart’s content, but you don’t have to. Sure, you can improve the stabilizers by lubing them yourself (time to break out that dielectric grease), but the pre-lubed ones are good enough, especially because there’s no large rattling space bar to contend with here anyway.

One nice thing Keychron is doing now with its latest board is pre-modding it. One popular trick among enthusiasts is the tape mod, for example, which involves sticking some painters’ tape at the bottom of the PCB to absorb some of the higher-pitched frequencies as you type. On its new boards, Keychron already applies tape to the bottom of the PCB itself. I think the board could still benefit from some thicker foam at the bottom of the case (but there isn’t a lot of room there, so I haven’t tried yet).

Keychron also uses Gateron G Pro switches, which come pre-lubed (as you can see, there’s a lot of lubing going on in the mechanical keyboard world). And while I continue to hope that Keychron will offer more options than just the linear Red, tactile Brown and clicky Blue switches (yellow would be nice, Keychron…), those are competent options.

My review unit came with brown switches, which some people like, but I find to fall into the uncanny valley between tactile and linear. They just aren’t all that tactile, yet also not quite linear. I prefer linear switches, but if I use a tactile switch, I want to feel that tactile bump as I press down. I had a set of pre-lubed three-pin Gateron CAP Golden Brown switches lying around here (as one does), which are a bit more tactile and made me enjoy the keyboard quite a bit more. They also have a slightly lower pitch than the standard Geteron brown switches.

Keychron’s default keycaps, which come with the pre-built board, are fine. They are double-shot PBT keycaps in the OSA profile. That profile is higher and rounder than you may be used to from Cherry keycaps, but that’s easy enough to get used to. Keychron does make a nice set of $40 Cherry-style keycaps, though, which I prefer, both in terms of profile and sound. Maybe one day, Keychron will offer that as an option.

As usual, the company offers its keyboard as a bare-bones kit. That will set you back $195 plus shipping. That’s also the only way to get the dark purple colorway. Fully assembled, with switches and keycaps (stabilizers are included in both versions), you pay $215 plus shipping. Personally, I’d pay the extra $20 and get a set of switches and keycaps to try, but if you already know your preferences and have boxes full of keycaps just waiting to be used, then the bare-bones is probably the way to go (just make sure your own set supports Alice layouts, with their unusual double spacebars).

Keychron doesn’t really have a lot of competition in this space right now; 75% Alice-style boards are a bit of a rarity, though there is the Feker Alice 75 from the Epomaker group, with similar specs, but a $329 price tag (which includes keycaps but not switches). One advantage here is that it includes Bluetooth support. There aren’t a lot of other in-stock options available, though you may find some 75% Alice group buys every now and then and maybe KBDfans will bring back its Mountain Ergo at some point (but that was well over $450 for the bare-bones kit).

If you want a smaller board, there are a few more options, including Keychron’s aluminum Q8 (which is my daily driver) and the cheaper, non-gasket-mount V8. And like with all Keychron models, a $100 V10 is on its way, too.

Keychron gets it right with its Q10 Alice-style keyboard by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

Online publishing platform Medium, originally created by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, announced today it’s embracing the open-source Mastodon platform by creating its own instance to support its authors and their publications. The company said it’s launching me.dm, a Mastodon community that will offer reliable infrastructure, moderation, and a short domain name to make it easier for authors to share their usernames, among other things.

Though launched six years ago, Mastodon has more recently gained traction as users flee Elon Musk’s Twitter. Since acquiring the social network, Musk has made a series of controversial decisions, like re-enabling the accounts of white supremacists and former president Donald Trump and banning journalists, amid a reduction in Twitter’s content moderation teams. He’s also mucking around with Twitter’s product, promising to un-verify users who don’t pay for the service, while alienating advertisers, putting Twitter’s future at risk.

That’s left a subset of Twitter users seeking new places to serve as a place to post their thoughts and engage in public conversations. Mastodon is among those platforms that directly benefitted.

The social microblogging platform has grown to 2.5 million monthly active users in recent days, up from just 300,000 in October 2022. The service isn’t exactly a Twitter clone, however, because of its decentralized nature. Instead of joining “Mastodon” itself, members join communities, or instances, which have their own sets of rules, moderation guidelines, and home timelines. While this doesn’t prevent a user from following another user on a different community, it’s expected that many will choose to join a community that reflects their specific interests, like tech, music, security, gaming, or one of many other topics.

That seems to be the case here with Medium’s Mastodon entry. The company will open up Mastodon to Medium writers and readers as an additional perk of Medium membership, creating a place for discussions around Medium’s content. This will result in an “interesting local feed,” the company says. Medium also notes it will make it easier to find people and topics that match your interests when joining Mastodon, as a part of its onboarding workflow.

As a part of this effort, Medium will create a “sign-up with Medium” interface for joining Mastodon, which would help to address some users’ complaints about the difficulties with getting started on Mastodon, which can be confusing because of the instance selection process.

Though it may seem odd for a longer-form blogging platform to embrace a platform designed for much shorter posts, Medium believes it’s worth operating in both spaces.

“We think the mission of Medium — to deepen people’s understanding of the world by helping to share the best ideas and best information — transcends mediums,” company CEO Tony Stubblebine wrote in a blog post. (Williams exited Medium as CEO last year.)

“To date, we’ve focused on article-length writing. It’s how our company got its name: as a home for medium-length writing on the internet. By contrast, Mastodon is primarily for short-form writing of 500 characters or less… Today we are extending what we do into the short-form medium (lowercase m) with an instance on Mastodon,me.dm,” he said.

Medium’s move to embrace Mastodon isn’t only because it sees the platform as “an emerging force for good in social media,” as Stubblebine said.

In reality, businesses like Medium could suffer if Twitter were to experience a decline in the Musk era. To date, Twitter has served as a way for publishers to promote their work, engage in discussions with their readership and grow their followings. If more writers exit Twitter, platforms like Medium could lose traction, as well, if the writer didn’t have a strong flowing elsewhere on social media.

Newsletter publisher Substack recently addressed this concern with the launch of a discussions feature that enables short chats between writers and readers on its own app. Flipboard also last month launched a Notes feature for a similar purpose. And Tumblr owner Automattic’s CEO Matt Mullenweg said in November that Tumblr would adopt ActivityPub, the decentralized social networking protocol that powers Mastodon.

For Mastodon, however, the launch of a Medium instance could help further boost its numbers as Medium today touts a network of over 100 million readers. Even if only a tiny percentage of those joined Medium’s Mastodon, it could represent a decently-sized influx of new fediverse users.

Medium says it will begin inviting select authors and publications tomorrow to be in an early group of testers before inviting all writers and readers in the near future.

Medium embraces Twitter alternative Mastodon with launch of its own community by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Life has been pretty brutal in hospitality over the past couple of years, but that hasn’t stopped Mint House from bubbling to the top with a series of tech-forward apartments.

Under the slogan of “The comfort of home. The luxury of a hotel. Tech-enabled and tailored to you,” the company is trying to make being away from home a bit less crappy. Targeting high-end business and leisure travelers, Mint House recently raised a $35 million Series Bfrom Mohari Hospitality, with participation from Revolution Ventures, Allegion Ventures and Ingleside Investors. In this teardown, we’ll take a closer look at the deck the company used to land its Series B.

We’re looking for more unique pitch decks to tear down, so if you want to submit your own, here’s how you can do that.

Slides in this deck

Cover slide
Summary slide
Business model slide
Consumer product slide
Competitor comparison slide
Key metrics slide
Value proposition for real estate slide
Results slide
Corporate partnerships slide
Team slide
Appendices cover slide
Case Study appendix slide

Three things to love

Raising $35 million in the hotel space at the tail end of a pandemic? Good heavens, I’m curious how they pulled that one off. That is doubly true given that the deck has a Texas-sized red flag on what is universally accepted to be one of the most important slides of any deck (more about that in the “things that could be better” section below.

But hey! That’s what we’re here to examine! Let’s start with the big wins:

Excellent 1-page summary slide

I’ve made no secret of loving a good summary slide — it can really set the tone and pace of a presentation. This cover slide isn’t great to be used in a pitch setting, and for presentations, I would probably recommend simplifying it further, but for a send-ahead deck, this gets investors up to speed very quickly and explains the macroeconomics of what the company is doing and its traction and progress to date, and offers a brief summary of what the company is doing and whom they do it for.

I wish it also mentioned how much money it was raising, either here or on the cover slide — but apart from that, this slide is a beacon of perfection.

As a startup founder, the thing you can learn from this slide is how to get an investor filled in on the context for the company and the round at hyper-speed so you can focus the bulk of your pitch on the things that really matter: What you’re raising, what your plans are and where the market is going. This is particularly important for later rounds — dwelling on the past is important only to prove that you know what you’re doing. Investors are investing in what’s going to happen next, after all.

Front-load the longest pole in the tent

As a startup founder, you can probably predict what the biggest challenges are for the company you are about to pitch. In the case of Mint House, the third slide says something about what the company has been pushing against when it comes to investment. Hotels can be a lucrative business, but the business model is well-trodden ground. The company is promising to innovate on that model, and to investors, that’s both the biggest risk and the biggest opportunity.

In the cutthroat world of hospitality, it’s fantastically hard to stand out, and nonspecialist investors often don’t even look at the vertical. Finding a way of telling the story well and clearly differentiating yourself from the status quo is a crucial part of telling the story. Mint House does that beautifully here, touching essentially every part of the business model on a single slide. Is the slide itself good? Not exactly — the text is so small it’s practically unreadable. But it does the job of summarizing the key differentiators really well.

As a startup, what you can learn here is how to differentiate yourself from a wall of incumbents. If you cannot, well, you essentially don’t have a business at all.

Show me the numbers!

Businesses that are in operating and scale-up mode have metrics. Not showing them in your pitch deck is very silly indeed, and just as important as the numbers themselves are the numbers you select to represent your business to your potential investors.

The fact that this slide is here is great and encouraging — but investors are going to be looking very closely. Operating profit margin, revenue per available room, and occupancy numbers are crucial for the operating side of the business. In other words: If you are in charge of growing and developing Mint House for the next three months, those metrics are crucially important.

However, those aren’t necessarily the metrics investors care about. I’d have expected to see graphs here, including revenue, occupancy over time, and perhaps customer acquisition costs and other metrics that show what’s happening under the hood. Operational efficiency and cash flow might be another set of metrics worth a closer look.

The kind of metrics an investor would care about are directly linked to the fundraise itself. You’re raising $35 million? Great. Show what you’re going to do with the money and what the major milestones are for the next six to 18 months in the form of an operating plan.

There’s a deep orange, if perhaps not red, flag here, too, though: The net promoter score is represented as a percentage, which is incorrect. NPS is an absolute number ranging from -100 to 100, calculated using a formula you can find on every growth-hacking blog that ever existed. The fact that the founders (and everyone who looked at this deck) didn’t catch that — along with the strangely not-quite-right selection of metrics above — makes me wonder about the quality of the overall team.

Where my mind goes here is whether the team is made up of tech startup founders or hotel operators. Nothing wrong with being the latter, but Airbnb is able to run with much better profit margins than someone who is operating a suite of dozens of brick-and-mortar buildings. I’m not saying that this wouldn’t be a good investment, but I question whether it makes sense as a VC investment.

In the rest of this teardown, we’ll take a look at three things Mint House could have improved or done differently, along with its full pitch deck— and that big red flag I mentioned earlier.

Three things that could be improved

As good as Mint House’s pitch deck is, there are a few things that made me scratch my head — some mistakes that are serious enough that I was kinda curious how the company was successful in raising at all, if I’m being honest. Let’s take a look.

Pitch Deck Teardown: Mint House’s $35M Series B deck by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch