Nitasha Tiku | The Verge The Verge is about technology and how it makes us feel. Founded in 2011, we offer our audience everything from breaking news to reviews to award-winning features and investigations, on our site, in video, and in podcasts. 2015-05-19T15:26:52+00:00 https://www.theverge.com/authors/nitasha-tiku/rss https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/verge-rss-large_80b47e.png?w=150&h=150&crop=1 Nitasha Tiku <![CDATA[Crashing the casting call for 94110, a show about San Francisco’s hottest zip code]]> https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/19/8622581/94110-tv-san-francisco-mission 2015-05-19T11:26:52-04:00 2015-05-19T11:26:52-04:00

Last month fliers began appearing on certain blocks of San Francisco advertising open auditions for a television pilot about “six leading technology executives living, learning, and loving together in San Francisco’s Mission District.” The shlocky concept was named 94110 after the neighborhood’s zip code, and was roundly ridiculed online. Nonetheless, nearly 100 hopefuls showed up for the casting call this weekend, which was held at SFAQ, a dinged-up, lived-in little art gallery in the Tenderloin.

For much of the afternoon on Saturday and Sunday, they sat on folding chairs in the gallery, waiting for a chance to screen test for roles such as the socially awkward engineer (“likes punk rock, addicted to vaping”), the wantrepreneur who relies on “alcohol-fueled bro-downs for brainstorming sessions,” and the venture capitalist “with lots of likes and followers,” who “puts out good vibes and gets good returns.”

The creators of 94110 have been tight-lipped about their plans, so if I wanted to find out more, my only choice was to try out. I auditioned for the venture capitalist role, briefly toying with the idea of performing under the alias Ellen Pao. On my way to the gallery, I got an iMessage out of the blue from Scott Vermeire, the show’s director of marketing and communications, who introduced himself only as “Scott from 94110.” We agreed to meet at the auditions where he turned out to be a dead ringer for Sal from Mad Men.

“Name a new media or technological tool . . . and it probably came out of that area code.”

“94110 is probably the hottest zip code in America right now,” Vermeire insisted, leaning against the building as we stood on the sidewalk outside. “Name a new media or technological tool that’s of any import in the last couple years and it probably came out of that area code.”

Vermeire is vastly overstating 94110’s importance to the world of tech. I should know — I live in the zip code. Before I saw the flier, I’d never heard anyone invoke those five digits as a status symbol. But Vermeire has a vested interest in a vision of San Francisco where the brightest minds in tech work hard — and play harder — all while sharing the same aspirational address.

The Real World: Gentrification

In truth, the Mission has become as synonymous with Bay Area class tension as Google’s shuttle buses, which roll through the neighborhood at regular intervals. Walk by at the right hour, and you can watch tech workers sheepishly shuffle onboard. The influx of hipster bars to entertain these workers and garish condos to house them is rapidly displacing working class residents and a deeply-established Latino community that goes back generations. I should know, I’m gentrifying the Mission myself.

In the midst of upheaval and evictions, 94110 conjured fears that it would come across as glibly as The Real World: Gentrification or Survivor: Rise of the Hacker Hostel. (The panic was exacerbated by pink fliers that recently surfaced advertising “a docu-series for a major American broadcaster” about the real girlfriends of Silicon Valley.) Vermeire, however, assured me that 94110 would be a sophisticated fictional take, combining “adult drama, tech, and San Francisco.”

The reason HBO’s Silicon Valley is set in Silicon Valley is because that’s where corporate tech campuses are located. In contrast, the Mission is more where those campus dwellers live and like to go out at night. I’m guessing that’s why the producers didn’t pick 94103, home to the headquarters of Uber, Twitter, Airbnb, and Pinterest. Or 94107, home to the SOMA tech takeover and popular daytime meeting spots like Small Foods, the Creamery, Caffe Centro, and Darwin Cafe.

94110 is blossoming under all that shade

To date, the residents of 94110 (at least the ones who spend their time on social media) have not appreciated the attention, rolling their eyes over the premise. I asked Vermeire how the producers felt about the negative response from the neighbors. “I feel great,” he said, without missing a beat. “I think it’s all buzz. I’ve seen buzz at launch like this, I’ve never seen it this early in development.” In other words, the iffy idea, which still doesn’t have a distribution deal and seems to be operating on a very limited budget, is blossoming under all that shade.

The creators have yet to reveal their identities, perhaps to stave off those haters or more likely because they have nothing in the way of name recognition. “There’s a handful of things I’m not at liberty to say and that’s one of them,” was all Vermeire would offer. He did, however, spill some new info about distribution. “We’ve gotten really excited about the idea of partnering with a Silicon Valley blog or a Silicon Valley media outlet . . . maybe like The Verge.”

You will not be viewing 94110 on TheVerge.com, but Vermeire emphasized that they’re down for whatever. “We’ve gone at this project with an open-doorway mind — an open-kimono mind — and so far that’s only brought us good fortune.”

“We’ve gone at this project with an open-doorway mind.”

One clue about the show’s worldview is at the top of the screen test guidelines, where it states there will be no casting preference toward age, race, or gender. “Only requirements are that you’re over 18, non-Union, and live in the Bay Area. We’re not flying anyone in for this,” Vermeire told me.

That’s savvy marketing. But reflecting the diversity of the Mission isn’t about who gets cast as a tech executive, it’s the fact that all these homies livin’ and lovin’ in 94110 work in tech. That’s not what you see if you walk down Mission Street. Some of the roles are also less open to interpretation, like the lead described as: “B R O in lifestyle and mindset.” In an even shrewder bit of propaganda, the producers have framed their focus on techies as an unwillingness to pander to their critics. A producer who wouldn’t give his last name told Mission Local: “This is not social realism, we don’t want to to talk down to anyone, there’s not going to be any condescending populistic messages in it (the show).” 94110 seems to think it can stop being polite and start getting real.

Getting in character

To that end, the character sketches were fairly finely drawn, even though the cast sounds like the makings of the most annoying Burning Man camp ever. The monologues accurately reflect the kind of ambition, anxiety, competitiveness, and utterly meaningless startup jargon that pervades San Francisco’s tech scene. The most unrealistic archetype was a supporting character who works for a number of on-demand apps and tries to rationalize making only $12/hour. The script for that role said: “Of course, I fucking love the freedom of the 1099 economy.” The spate of class action lawsuits against Uber, Handy, and Postmates offer a different perspective on the labor side of the sharing economy.

Pretending to be an asshole is empowering

Even after seeing the turnout for auditions and lights and cameras that greeted them, I still think it’s possible that 94110 is a piece of performance art that got out of hand. Vermeire seemed to present himself as a bit of a techie, but his personal website says he’s an artist from Oakland. I asked him to name some film projects the production company had been involved in, but Vermeire only mentioned his own stint at a group called Thunderball Media that was developing apps for Google Glass. “Of course Google wimped out, bailed on Google Glass, we lost our business model, game over,” he said. “That’s where [the show] hit home with me. I’ve seen success, I’ve seen quite a bit of success, but I’ve also seen failure.”

Failure had come up in my audition as well. When my name was called, I walked into a tiny white room with two men and one woman seated behind a folding table. The instructions warned that the panel “may ask some interview-style questions.” I expected them to inquire about me, not the fictional investor I was playing, but I found it easier than expected to stay in character. One could say I #crushedit.

What work-life balance?

With the number of venture capital funds growing, how do you pick a winner, they asked. Pattern-matching, I said. What’s your relationship with failure? Badge of courage, I wear it proudly even if the newcomers don’t. What do you think of the Mission, is it for work or play? There’s no work-life balance in the tech industry because we love what we do. What do you do when someone annoys you? Get up and leave. What if you see them out again? Nod politely. It’s not personal, it’s just business and my time is too valuable to waste.

Pretending you’re a rich, entitled asshole is very empowering. What’s more, fielding questions when you’re supposed to sound like an expert helped me “grok” the propensity for meaningless business babble. Sometimes you need to say “pivot” just to buy yourself time to think.

Before I exited, they zoomed in close and asked me to read the VC monologue again:

“Yeah, everyone is different. I’m not even talking about backgrounds or your place in society. That’s why I love this neighborhood— all the changing faces and good energy. These new waves of, uh, new people, uh, is a huge thing. The area can always regenerate. There is a fresh rate of money coming in, fresh ways of support, fresh food— isn’t that a great thing? Look, if I’m willing and ready to pay more for a coffee in the morning, then by all means, charge more for your coffee. I’m not alone in this. Don’t act like this is a radical idea. This is what pays the bills.”Vermeire told me that the producers wanted to “cast from a native geography” within the zip code, which is why they put up fliers targeting “micro-hoods” like The Quad and Mission Gulch. “That was absolutely intentional. We didn’t hire some flier-ing service who accidentally put all those fliers in the Mission,” Vermeire said with a laugh. Last year, SFist wrote about the invention of The Quad as a microhood and the realtor who named it. “It will make you want to rip off your eyelids,” they wrote, but “it’s important to note that she’s not entirely off the mark.”

]]> Nitasha Tiku <![CDATA[Twitter gives control of its hapless marketing department to its chief financial officer]]> https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/5/8542059/twitter-marketing-anthony-noto 2015-05-05T13:08:41-04:00 2015-05-05T13:08:41-04:00

As an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, Anthony Noto orchestrated Twitter’s initial public offering. Now Noto is Twitter’s chief financial officer, and he’s changing the score again, moving the social network’s hapless marketing department under his control. Marketing is not typically the purview of a CFO, and a source familiar with the situation told The Verge that the unusual structure was discussed in a meeting at Twitter headquarters Monday. “Noto is consolidating power, so to speak,” the source said.

During the dot-com bubble, Noto hyped troubled tech stocks like eToys and Webvan. These days, he’s better known as the Twitter exec whose direct message fail exposed a planned acquisition, and who later had his Twitter account hacked. Regardless, Noto is rewarded handsomely for his services. In 2014, he received a $72.8 million compensation package, mostly in stock, taking home roughly three times more than his predecessor.

Charged with boosting user growth

Last week, Noto co-starred with CEO Dick Costolo on the earnings call delivering bad news to shareholders. Twitter has been fending off Wall Street’s unhappiness with slower growth to its user base. The latest quarterly report showed that Twitter’s revenue growth also slowed, failing to meet expectations. The bad quarter, which caused a steep drop in the company’s stock price, reignited speculation that Costolo’s job could be in jeopardy.

Noto heads up several areas beyond finance, including corporate development, corporate strategy, and real estate. He took over marketing after months of fruitless searching for a chief marketing officer. Since January, marketing has fallen under the auspices of Kevin Weil, senior vice president of product. Before that, marketing was led by chief communications officer Gabriel Sticker.

Taking over at a key time

Noto takes over marketing at a key time: Twitter desperately needs to be able to explain itself to the masses. Given the company’s challenges with user growth, it does not bode well for the company that it keeps tossing the mic. When longtime employee Gabriel Stricker expanded his role to VP of marketing and communications in 2013, All Things D wrote:

Historically, Twitter hasn’t had a solid, unified consumer marketing team or a person to lead it for years. Pam Kramer did a short stint as VP of marketing back in 2011, but it didn’t work out so well; Kramer was shown the door after only three months.Stricker’s bio on Twitter’s executive team page says he’s now the chief communications officer. There’s no mention of marketing on the entire page, except to note that Stricker is the author of the bestselling book on guerrilla marketing Mao In the Boardroom.

The search for a CMO has dragged on for months and is still ongoing. According to one source, Kate Jhaveri, senior director of consumer marketing at Twitter, was passed over for the chief marketing role despite the fuss Twitter made over poaching her from Facebook, where she led consumer branding and mobile marketing for three years. The source told The Verge Jhaveri plans to resign, but she is still with the company. (She did not respond to requests for comment.)

A senior director was passed over for the job

The exodus of executives from Twitter has been an ongoing saga. The most tumultuous recent departure was chief operating officer Ali Rowghani, who resigned last June after “a dispute” with CEO Dick Costolo. If Jhaveri leaves, though, that will be at least the fourth high-level female leader to leave Twitter in the past 10 months.

That group includes Vivian Schiller, Twitter’s head of news, who split with the company in October after just 10 months. Schiller, the former CEO of NPR, who held top roles at NBC News and The New York Times Digital, was a high-profile hire. In February, April Underwood, director of product, departed the company. Chloe Sladden, Twitter’s vice president of media, left last August.

The women may be done with Twitter, but they still enjoy working together. In March, four current and two former female Twitter employees launched an investment group for investing in early-stage startups called #Angels. The same month, a former female software engineer named Tina Huang filed a class-action lawsuit against Twitter for gender discrimination, alleging that the company’s process for promoting employees favors men and the hiring process is controlled by largely male upper management.

Noto’s first task may be figuring out how to market himself a little better at the office. The same source told The Verge, “Twitter employees [are] asking why Noto gets $70 million, but the company can’t afford to give raises, or bring salaries closer to market rates.” Although engineers make around market rate, the source said, non-technical employees do not.

If you have additional information about changes at Twitter, please email nitasha@theverge.com

]]> Nitasha Tiku <![CDATA[Startup workers are tweeting about how much money they actually make]]> https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/1/8530189/talk-pay-international-workers-day-salaries 2015-05-01T14:43:35-04:00 2015-05-01T14:43:35-04:00

Happy International Workers’ Day, now tell Twitter what you get paid. A programmer named Lauren Voswinkel first proposed the idea of publicly tweeting your job title, experience level, and salary under the hashtag #talkpay earlier this week. And the topic just started trending in San Francisco.

Public debate about pay inequality has only recently begun to progress beyond telling women to “lean in.” That phrase, popularized by Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, suggests that if women assert themselves without seeming threatening, they can make as much as their male counterparts. But a couple weeks ago, The New Republic wrote about how the pay gap widens for women of color, pointing to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that showed Hispanic women earn 54 percent of what a white man makes, followed by black women at 64 percent. On Equal Pay Day last month, CNN explored how the pay gap impacts life outside the office, leaving women almost twice as likely to retire into poverty.

Around the same time, Ellen Pao, the interim CEO of Reddit, told The Wall Street Journal that she banned salary negotiations at Reddit because “men negotiate harder than women do and sometimes women get penalized when they do negotiate.” Pao lost a $16 million lawsuit for gender discrimination against Kleiner Perkins, alleging that the prestigious Silicon Valley venture capital firm failed to promote women to senior partner, a title that came with up to five times the amount of income.

Voswinkel proposed #talkpay in Model View Culture, a magazine that highlights feminist and minority voices from the tech industry. She argues that the absence of information, as well as the tendency to hire from one’s own network and apply pattern-matching to the hiring process all disproportionately benefit white males:

Exacerbating that problem, conceptions of what a “real” developer looks like impact people’s interactions with potential candidates, particularly more junior ones, causing them to be evaluated at lower skill levels which leads to lower rate of offers and lower initial salary offers.

The lack of knowledge regarding reasonable salaries and predatory behaviors in tech companies can be directly attributed to the social taboo surrounding people talking openly about their salaries.

Perhaps because of the origins of #talkpay, the bulk of participants on Twitter thus far seem to be from the tech sector. Silicon Valley corporations like Apple and Google paid a $415 million settlement in January for a class action lawsuit alleging that they colluded to suppress salaries and not poach each other’s employees. But rising income inequality and the wage gap are systemic issues faced across industries, especially compared to rising average salaries for the right kind of knowledge worker in the Bay Area.

Ultimately, change may start outside the so-called cradle of innovation. The city of Boston, for example, just began collecting wage data from participating companies, tying in the worker’s experience level to get a more holistic picture on salary discrepancies. Mayor Martin J. Walsh told company representatives, who were “almost all women” that it was “a culture that we have to change.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story stated that Microsoft was a defendant in the wage suppression case. We regret the error.

]]> Nitasha Tiku <![CDATA[This millennial yurt is nicer than my apartment]]> https://www.theverge.com/2015/4/28/8511267/millennial-yurt-goal-zero 2015-04-28T20:32:43-04:00 2015-04-28T20:32:43-04:00

Noble millennials Mollie and Sean Busby wanted to pioneer a more sustainable lifestyle, so they decided to go off the grid and live in a yurt. The couple’s Whitefish, Montana abode boasts 700 square feet of space on the ground floor, 300 additional square feet in a loft, and features a lovely half-moon-shaped kitchen countertop and homey-looking hearth. The Busbies are convinced, nay determined, that they will be able to raise a family in their current living situation.

Contrast that, if you will, with this 265-square-foot condo in San Francisco that just sold for $415,000 (39 percent over its asking price) because it contained a kitchenette and a Murphy bed.

The Busby family yurt seems sort of like a regular house, but circle-shaped and located in the kind of snowy wilderness where Jason Bourne might have a hiding cabin. The “yurt life” edition of Cribs (above) is a promotional video brought to you by Goal Zero, which manufactures solar-powered products. Goal Zero was recently acquired by NRG Energy, a publicly traded power company working on reducing its carbon footprint. Goal Zero products like the Yeti are prominently displayed in the video as essential tools for ideal yurt living.

Young people today may choose a more altruistic version of rebellion, but the basic motivation stays the same. “I want my parents to be questioning, like, what the hell are you doing,” Sean tells the camera.

One almost starts to covet a yurt-based existence until they get to the composting toilet in the bathroom. Mollie swears that it’s no different than going to the bathroom in an RV, “except you’re a little more hands on with the emptying.” Sean interrupts: “We had to get our hands into each other’s shit every now and then.”

Well that’s enough yurt for me. We’re in treacherous Style Section territory now.

]]> Nitasha Tiku <![CDATA[Uber is bringing its food delivery service to New York City and Chicago]]> https://www.theverge.com/2015/4/28/8505875/uber-ubereats-food-delivery-new-york-city-chicago 2015-04-28T06:00:02-04:00 2015-04-28T06:00:02-04:00

This week Uber is launching its food delivery service, UberEats, in New York City and Chicago. The company has already piloted the program in Los Angeles and Barcelona. UberEats will be accessible from within Uber’s existing app, although the food option only shows up when consumers are in the coverage area. The service promises dishes from “popular, iconic restaurants” delivered curbside — not to your door — “faster than it takes to boil water.”

An Uber representative told The Verge that UberEats has its own dedicated drivers. Lunch options will range from $9 to $12, while dinner options will range from $10 to $15. The Uber rep said meals come with a $3 delivery fee ($4 in New York City), regardless of the number of meals you order.

“Faster than it takes to boil water.”

In a blog post about the expansion, Uber says it plans to “curate” menus, which will change daily, just like any other artisanal app experience. For its inaugural run in New York City, UberEats will kick off with “an exclusive sandwich” from American Cut, Kale Caesar salad from Sweetgreen, the steak sandwich from Num Pang, and more. Chicago consumers can order the Pepito Torta from XOCO and Carne Asada Cemita from Cemitas, among other offerings.

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has been telegraphing his attempt at delivery domination since 2013, when he told Bloomberg: “Once you’re delivering cars in five minutes, there’s a lot of things you can deliver in 5 minutes.” Uber’s first foray into “things” began with courier service called UberRush tested in Manhattan. Next up was Cornerstore, a delivery service for household items beta-tested in Washington, D.C. that was renamed UberEssentials.

It’s only natural that the company, which raised $5.9 billion in funding, doubles down on UberEats while venture capitalists are salivating hundreds of millions over food delivery.

Uber claims that the response to UberEats has been “amazingly positive.” In Los Angeles, Uber now offers brunch on the weekends and claims delivery time is down to 10 minutes or less. According to Uber, its drivers “tell us they love having another way to earn more through the Uber platform,” although the $40 billion company and its contract workers don’t always see eye to eye. To promote its carpool offering, Uber is charging San Francisco customers only $7 to get anywhere in the city using UberPool, while drivers are compensated regularly. It’s unclear what kind of incentives Uber is offering drivers for UberEats.

Uber says the feedback from UberEats has been ‘amazingly positive’

In response to questions from The Verge about the status of of UberRush and UberEssentials, the company said that UberRush was still running out of New York City, adding:

We’re always experimenting and finding new, creative ways to leverage the Uber app and provide even greater value to our riders and driver partners. UberEssentials was one of those experiments and we’re already taking our learnings and using them to determine what’s next. What we found with UberEssentials is people loved the convenience of using the Uber platform to get their everyday household products on-demand. The experiment allowed us to identify what our users valued about the service, as well as areas where we can make the experience even better. We look forward to continuing to innovate and providing users with new and valuable ways to leverage the Uber app.To place an UberEats order, users just slide to appropriate tab and hit “view menu.” The idea is to make food delivery as gratuitously mindless as ordering a private driver. But before Sprig, DoorDash, SpoonRocket, or any of the other heavily-funded food apps start sweating, they can take comfort in the fact that when Cornerstore (sorry UberEssentials) first launched, it was supposed to keep Amazon’s Jeff Bezos up at night.

]]> Nitasha Tiku <![CDATA[The Pentagon is trying to recruit Silicon Valley to join ‘Team America’]]> https://www.theverge.com/2015/4/24/8484179/defense-department-ashton-carter-silicon-valley-pentagon 2015-04-24T14:57:00-04:00 2015-04-24T14:57:00-04:00

The Pentagon just closed out a two-day tour to win the hearts, minds, and technical talent of Silicon Valley.

At a lecture at Stanford yesterday, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter discussed plans to recruit engineers to the Pentagon’s new cybersecurity force, invest in startups, and establish a Defense Department outpost here in the hoodie of innovation. Next he dropped by Facebook to meet with Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. Today, Carter power-brunched at Andreessen Horowitz’s headquarters, where he met Peter Thiel and Ben Horowitz, as well as CEOs from security startups in the firm’s portfolio.

A Defense Department chief hasn’t stopped by Silicon Valley in 20 years

The visit represents what locals might call a “pivot” at the Pentagon. Critics call it “a long-delayed shift” in recognizing cyber attacks as a national security threat. The last time a Defense Department chief came to Silicon Valley was the mid-1990s, before everyone started walking around taking selfies with a tracking device in their hand.
Carter’s plan goes beyond repairing damaged relationships with tech leaders. In order to fight cyberterrorism, the Pentagon intends to take advantage of technological advancements by forging partnerships, investing, and setting up shop next door. While they’re at it, his agency would also love to borrow some of the Bay Area’s brainiac engineers.

“Startups are the leading edge of commercial innovation, and right now DoD doesn’t have many effective ways to harness the promising technology they come up with,” he told a packed auditorium at Stanford’s business school. Carter, who took over as defense secretary in February, said the agency struggles to recruit the best and brightest. “They don’t want to join Ford Motor Company, and they don’t wanna join a government agency; they want flexibility.”

The iPhone is full of technology that can be traced back to the Pentagon

That kind of realism pervaded Carter’s well-constructed plea to Silicon Valley, which emphasized that the government and private sector face the same threats when it comes to cybersecurity and that the Defense Department and tech industry have been intertwined all along. That’s not the creation myth startups likes to share, but there are plenty of examples. The Valley DoD office will be located in Moffett Field, the civil-military airfield where Google recently signed a 60-year lease. And the Pentagon’s role in startup financing will come from a “small investment,” in In-Q-Tel, the 15-year-old non-profit CIA venture fund that backed Palantir.
“Most technologies used throughout Silicon Valley — including many that Apple brilliantly integrated into the iPhone — can be traced back to government DoD research and expenditures,” said Carter, pointing to GPS, multitouch, and Siri, which grew out of a DARPA-funded project to “develop a virtual assistant for military personnel.”

The DoD isn’t the only agency suddenly sidling up to Silicon Valley. Earlier this month, the National Security Agency told tech companies it would willing to go through “the front door” to get to encrypted consumer data, offering the private sector more control over the digital key. (Experts say the plan will never work.) And just this week, the Department of Homeland Security said it’s opening up an office here as well in order to share threats with companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.

Facebook and Google are still fighting fears that they opened their back door to the NSA

Carter told the crowd he wants to “drill holes” to make the barrier between the Pentagon and the tech industry more “permeable.” Permeability may sound like a brazen pitch to a group of execs who are still fighting consumer fears that Facebook and Google opened their back door to the NSA — seeing their company’s logo plastered across those PRISM slideshows probably didn’t help. But the more lasting sore point for tech companies, post-Edward Snowden, seems to be that the surveillance program cost them business in Europe and South America.

Secretary Carter didn’t mention it in his talk, but there’s one very effective salve for that wound: money. The Los Angeles Times estimated that Silicon Valley received $12 billion from the Pentagon in 2013, from electronics and software used by defense contractors. Venture capital financing may be plentiful and easy, but what for-profit enterprise wouldn’t want to annex some territory from Lockheed Martin or Boeing?
Last week, the Pentagon’s acquisition chief mentioned seeking bids from companies that aren’t competing for government work, according to The Wall Street Journal. The guest list for today’s breakfast included the CEOs for security startups backed by Andreessen Horowitz, including Bromium, Illumio, Tanium, and Lookout. The CEO of GitHub was also invited.

What for-profit company would turn their noses at defense contracts?

The Defense Department will have a harder time playing the highly competitive game of recruiting engineers, especially without an arsenal of competitive salaries and unlimited perks. Carter’s solution there was to emphasize the exciting technical challenges the Pentagon is working on, like creating “a more resilient and less vulnerable” GPS, and using Nobel Prize-winning physics research “that uses lasers to cool atoms” in order to develop better timing and navigation technology.

His plea was delivered during a particularly interesting time, when the stakes seem high, but so does the sense of invincibility. Carter mentioned the Sony hack, which may be more relevant to the people he is trying to recruit. One question directed at him mentioned that the freshmen entering Stanford were four years old during 9/11.
Carter attempted to hammer home how advances in technology come with increasing risks. “The same internet that enables Wikipedia also allows terrorists to learn how to build a bomb,” he said, although this part sounded more convincing: GPS signals “provide navigation not only for ride-sharing apps like Uber and Lyft, but also our aircraft carriers and our smart bombs. Our reliance on technology has led to real vulnerabilities that our adversaries are eager to exploit.”

The US is trailing behind Russia and China to mitigate these risks, he said, noting increasing “blended state-and-non-state” cyber threats to the Pentagon.

To make fighting that battle appealing to the private sector, Carter also stressed the idea of popping in and out of public service, joining “our force of the future, even if just for a time.” As an example, he pointed to the “sprint team” of experts working on transferring electronic health records between the Pentagon and Veterans’ Affairs.

“The same internet that enables Wikipedia also allows terrorists to learn how to build a bomb.”

DJ Patil, who is working on that project, was recently appointed Chief Data Scientist by President Obama, after working for Silicon Valley institutions like LinkedIn, Greylock Partners, and PayPal. “We’re working on some of the most unsexy, high-impact things that — if we fix them — are game changers.” Patil said that when he looks back in five or 10 years, he hopes it will seem obvious that techies should spend a year or two in government. If you’re taking a sabbatical, why not recharge by doing something meaningful? “Take your skills and work for Team America!”

Other high-profile tech execs have recently enlisted. The White House recently appointed Google’s Megan Smith and Twitter’s Jason Goldman to chief digital positions. Whether that appeals to the rank-and-file remains to be seen. But Patil called Carter “one of the most progressive” people involved in those efforts to make it easier for smart people to do a stint in government.

“Take your skills and work for Team America!”

If that doesn’t convince the hoodies, how about a friendly reminder that Silicon Valley isn’t the center of the universe? The Department of Homeland Security has been using the same language about lacking talent. Patil said it “stems directly from POTUS,” who wants to harness this generation’s talent. “It’s not a Silicon Valley thing, it’s a tech and skills thing,” that spans across government, said Patil. “They’re gonna go out to Boston. They’re gonna go out to Chicago.”

Update: An earlier version of this article stated that Secretary Carter met with Marc Andreessen, but the investor was not able to attend.

]]> Nitasha Tiku <![CDATA[Startup behind the Lambo of vaporizers just launched an intelligent e-cigarette]]> https://www.theverge.com/2015/4/21/8458629/pax-labs-e-cigarette-juul 2015-04-21T08:00:02-04:00 2015-04-21T08:00:02-04:00

The office for Pax Labs, the San Francisco company behind the stylish and popular Pax loose-leaf vaporizer, is located in the same building as the headquarters for Burning Man. Sometimes the two tenants have joint happy hours and the Burners help out with costumes. It’s “a good cultural match for us,” Sarah Richardson, Pax’s director of communications said during a recent visit to the company. “They make us look conservative.”

Richardson was sitting at a conference table puffing on Pax’s newest product: a slim, rectangular e-cigarette called Juul. Seated around the table were the mechanical and electrical engineers behind Juul, including Pax’s research scientist Chenyue Xing, who has a PhD in chemical engineering and experience with inhalation products.

The key to smoker satisfaction is hitting peak nicotine five minutes in

The small team has helped create what Pax Labs (formerly known as Ploom) is calling “an intelligently engineered and intensely satisfying new vapor experience.” What makes it intelligent? “That’s up for personal interpretation isn’t it? Just kidding,” CEO James Monsees told me later, by phone.

In Monsees’ interpretation, Juul is smarter than the competition because of its ability to mimic the satisfaction of smoking a regular “combustion” cigarette. The key to that buzz is a sharp peak of nicotine in the consumer’s blood profile about five minutes after she takes her first puff. To recreate that spike, the team started with the chemistry of its liquid-nicotine cartridges, or “Juulpods,” which use nicotine salts, rather than “free-base nicotine.” Using salts allowed Pax to increase the nicotine concentration from two percent to five percent without being unpalatable. Adding organic acids were also a key part to make inhaling smoother. It’s not delivering more nicotine overall, it’s delivering it in a more satisfying way, the team told me.

“Juulpods” just rolls off the tongue

The other differentiator that makes Juul smarter is temperature control, using what they called a precision resistance measurement circuit to figure out the ideal temperature for vaporization. “When you’re able to control the temperature really well,” said Monsees, the flavor doesn’t change and you don’t create degradation compounds that you don’t want to inhale. Although tank-based e-cigarettes allow users to adjust the temperature, it’s less controlled because the liquids and device are from different companies and changes depending on whether the user puffs faster or slower.

To demonstrate Juul’s precision in this area Ari Atkins, an R&D engineer, connected Juul to his Macbook, started inhaling, and the graph below appeared on the conference room screen.

Juul is definitely not for the keep vaping weird crowd, who care about customization, but I found Juul’s design simple and intuitive. The disposable cartridges easily popped into the device. Each puff did seem standardized. Sure, I felt a little like an alien whipping it out at a bar, but a really minimalist alien. The device comes with a one-year warranty and uses a magnetic USB deck to recharge. It takes one hour to charge and that will last you for about one pod or 200 “puffs per charge,” the company says. To figure out whether it needs to be charged, you gently tap the device twice and a little light on the front glows red, yellow, or green.

A really minimalist alien

Consumers can purchase Juul starting June, 2015. Pax is selling the starter kit (the device, a multi-pack of Juulpods in four flavors, and a USB charger) for $49.99 and the 4-packs of the pods for $15.99.

For novices or fans of clean design, it’s less clunky than skeuomorphic devices like Njoys, which are built to look like a cigarette, and involves fewer parts than Blu’s rechargeable model. Plus, there’s no glowing light or specter of Jenny McCarthy.

Pax Labs recently released a new model of its vaporizer (happy belated 4/20, buddies). But it’s a dicey time to get into the e-cig business. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) formally proposed regulations for e-cigarettes last April. According to The Hill, the FDA is unlikely to act before June, but academics and researchers aren’t waiting around. In February, a study was published showing that exposing mice to e-cigarette vapor for just two weeks had damaged their immune system. For the study, they tested Njoy, one of the biggest brands in the market. The most alarming report came from a survey published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week, which found that e-cigarette usage was now more popular than cigarettes in middle and high schools. However as The New York Times pointed out, the shift could also suggest “that some teenage smokers may be using e-cigarettes to quit.”

E-cigarettes are more popular than cigarettes in high school

While the data is being debated, officials like the California Department of Public Health, which put out the video below, are already campaigning over advertising e-cigarettes to kids.

Pax Labs is very careful not to make any claims about health or smoking cessation. Monsees is the first to acknowledge that his company has “a vested interest” in calling itself a healthier cigarette, and therefore should not be the one to analyze its own risks. E-cigs have been popular for the past five years, but the industry still doesn’t have the kind of “conclusive studies” the agency requires for over-the-counter medications, food, or cosmetics, he said. “All I can do is encourage regulators.” When I pressed Monsees about how Pax thinks of the issue, he called combustion cigarettes “the most popular consumer product of all time that has known issues.” Pax’s goal is to make “compellingly better products.”

“The most popular consumer product of all time that has known issues”

Atkins, the R&D engineer, was a less diplomatic. “We don’t think a lot about addiction here because we’re not trying to design a cessation product at all,” he said, later noting “anything about health is not on our mind,” before his colleagues collectively winced. Atkins, who used to smoke close to half a pack of Marlborough Reds a day, may make a good poster boy for Juul regardless. While developing the product, “I just realized one day that I hadn’t smoked cigarettes in a month,” he said. Atkins didn’t think of it as quitting smoking, “I just like it better.”

Addiction and obligation are issues that Silicon Valley would rather avoid. Filings with the Security and Exchange Commission from earlier this month show that Pax has been trying to raise $25 million in funding, but has only sold investors on $6.5 million so far. Companies sometimes file Form D’s before the round has closed and Monsees would not disclose anything about ongoing funding efforts, but he did acknowledge that Sand Hill Road hasn’t welcomed him with open wallets. “Venture firms are generally set up to invest in innovation, but the kind of innovation that comes out of the Valley, and we’re not exactly that.” Although he declined to share revenue, Monsees said Pax was in a “growth phase” and now “well beyond” the milestone of selling half a million Pax devices, which the company announced in February.

Juul’s name is supposed to be a play on the word jewel because Pax wanted to create something more lasting and precious than throwaway cigarettes. “We didn’t want to spell it the same because we like being different,” said Monsees. The four flavors of the liquid — miint, fruut, bruulé , and tabaac — also exhibit the same devil may care attitude towards spelling. This contrarian impulse may serve Juul better when it comes to its thin, rectangular design. As Atkins put it: “I like to wear skinny jeans.”

Verge Video archive: This is what vape-hacking looks like (2014)

]]> Nitasha Tiku <![CDATA[Instagram institutes harsher guidelines to control harassment, porn, and nudity]]> https://www.theverge.com/2015/4/16/8431317/instagram-harassment-porn-nudity 2015-04-16T14:56:02-04:00 2015-04-16T14:56:02-04:00

Instagram revealed new community guidelines today that were designed to cut down on harassment and pornography. This is the biggest change to the guidelines since Instagram was acquired by Facebook in 2012, and it helps clarify rules that critics and parents complained were too lax and users complained were overreaching and enforced with double standards.

The photo-sharing app framed the changes as a tougher, less polite stance in an interview with The Wall Street Journal:

“In the old guidelines, we would say ‘don’t be mean,'” said Nicky Jackson Colaco, director of public policy for Instagram, which is owned by Facebook. “Now we’re actively saying you can’t harass people. The language is just stronger.”
For example, Instagram’s previous guidelines asked users to be polite and respectful. The revised version is much longer and specifies that “serious threats of harm to public and personal safely aren’t allowed.”The most useful updates, however, may be in spelling out the details about what can be shared and what won’t be tolerated, like the section on nudity:

We know that there are times when people might want to share nude images that are artistic or creative in nature, but for a variety of reasons, we don’t allow nudity on Instagram. This includes photos, videos, and some digitally created content that show sexual intercourse, genitals, and close-ups of fully-nude buttocks. It also includes some photos of female nipples, but photos of post-mastectomy scarring and women actively breastfeeding are allowed. Nudity in photos of paintings and sculptures is OK, too.The efficacy and fairness of the new rules will be tested by how they’re enforced, especially now that the service is up to 300 million monthly unique users. The app reviews images “that prompt complaints from users,” according to the Journal.

Update April 16th, 7:30PM: The headline has been updated to clarify that Instagram updated its public-facing community guidelines and not the company’s internal standards for taking down a photo.

 

]]> Nitasha Tiku <![CDATA[Help, I made a $57 million garbage food startup monster]]> https://www.theverge.com/2015/4/15/8421617/help-i-made-a-45-million-garbage-food-startup-monster 2015-04-15T17:35:02-04:00 2015-04-15T17:35:02-04:00

I’m Nitasha. I’m disgusting. I order weird food from an app because I don’t want to leave my apartment. Today the San Francisco-based company behind that app, Sprig, announced that it raised $45 million in venture capital, bringing its total funding to $57 million. I feel like I should apologize for my role in this latest round of financing, but chances are I’m not going to stop.

My first Sprig order happened last November after I complained to a fellow New York City transplant about the lack of inexpensive and non-greasy delivery options here. Girl, just order Sprig, she said. It’ll be there in 15 minutes, she said. You can get a salad, she said. This is how it starts. Six months later, I have spent $423.81 on items like Bagel & Lox ($12), Coriander Steak Salad ($11), and Goat Cheese Tart and Tomato Soup (served warm, $9).

That total does not include regular or “dynamic” delivery fees, Sprig’s pet name for surge pricing. Not because those fees don’t stack up, but because I signed up for Sprig Go, a premium service that charges $10 per month to avoid delivery fees and rush prices. Ordinarily the word “premium,” or even “prime,” wigs me out, but $10? It seemed so small. So reasonable. Especially compared to the rate at which Bacon Bourbon Chicken Sandwiches ($11.75) were arriving at my door just before the 2PM lunch cut-off.

An asshole tax should be levied upon me

What makes Sprig different from other food delivery apps? Nothing, really. The apps all benefit from beautifully shot food porn. Little labels indicate whether an item is spicy, gluten-free, or, God help us, “paleo-friendly.” At first, it seemed less luxe than Munchery, with its cashmere-clad couples by the fireplace. Sprig is certainly cheaper than Postmates, the Uber Black of takeout indulgences, which can easily double the price of a burrito delivered from a few blocks away. No judgments! An asshole tax is perfectly ethical and should be levied upon me.

Sprig was just easy. The food arrived so quickly it seemed like couriers must be driving around the Mission just waiting for my click. (Sprig has its own kitchens in San Francisco and Palo Alto.) I began to converse shamelessly with the smartphone app, always rating the delivery person as excellent, but sometimes complaining about the meals. The food was strange, but it was ours. We were in a domestic relationship. The app even wrote me back.

All was good in my hood, except for the great lox-and-cream-cheese travesty of February 27th. Never, no matter how homesick you are, order lox from a startup. Then Sprig began offering dinner and brunch. It was hard not to notice that chicken pieces in dinner entrees were cut the same as the ones from lunch, but served with different glops of vaguely ethnic sauce. Lunch came in clear plastic containers that snapped open. Dinner came in a recyclable brown container, which I suspected was leeching cardboard particles into my food.

How did I justify this to myself?

And yet, I continued ordering. How did I justify this to myself? Not well. The whole enterprise seemed unscalable. There’s no way this setup would work in every neighborhood in San Francisco, much less outside the Bay Area. Profitless-on-purpose only gets you so far — unless you raise $45 million in venture capital dollars from Social+Capital and Greylock Partners. That’s $10 million more than DoorDash, which raised $35 million last month at a $600 million valuation. And it’s $35 million more than SpoonRocket, which raised $10 million last year.

Fifty-seven is a lot of millions. You can seriously undercut the competition while staying profitless — all because investors believe other people will soon behave as mindlessly as early adopters like me. Now I stand, Daenerys Targaryen pressed against the catacombs, wondering what rough beast I have raised, knowing I will have to use it in the food wars to come. Like lunch today, for instance, which arrived in seven minutes. It was alright with me.

]]> Nitasha Tiku <![CDATA[New York’s expensive startup initiative only created 76 jobs]]> https://www.theverge.com/2015/4/10/8384259/startup-new-york-governor-andrew-cuomo-jobs 2015-04-10T19:30:47-04:00 2015-04-10T19:30:47-04:00

When Governor Andrew Cuomo launched Start-Up New York in late 2013, his office called it a “game-changing” initiative that promised “a windfall” of innovation. The program established 356 tax-free zones in order to “attract high-tech and other start-ups.” However, a new report from the state’s Department of Economic Development found that the initiative only created 76 jobs in 2014, despite a $28 million ad campaign.

Cuomo’s senior economic aide told Capital New York that 76 jobs was “a good number that we can stand behind,” and it was only a matter of time before the other jobs materialized.

The zones created by Start-Up New York were tied to 62 sponsoring colleges and universities. The program allowed companies to operate tax-free for 10 years “on eligible campuses and spaces.” According to the report, those 76 jobs came from 30 companies in industries like software, biotech, and manufacturing. The companies were supposed to invest $91 million over five years, but only invested $1.7 million.

Cuomo’s administration peddled much bigger numbers in February

Part of the reason the numbers are so pathetic is because pre-existing companies are only eligible if they expand into those zones. That stipulation led critics of the program to dismiss it as “tax cronyism.”

The program hasn’t been around for long. But Cuomo’s administration peddled much bigger numbers back in February. At the time, Cuomo’s tax commissioner claimed that Start-Up New York had benefitted 73 companies, pulled in $104 million in private investment, and created 2,300 jobs, Capital New York reports. Those promotional numbers, however, were merely commitments, not a sure thing.

This year an additional 26 businesses have been approved for the program, but 12 have withdrawn their applications.

Cuomo isn’t the only local politico inflating his economic impact. During his tenure as mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg tried to make creating “tech” jobs part of his legacy. Upon closer inspection, Bloomberg’s role was also smaller than it appeared.

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