Many of the alleged crypto scams had a common tactic: savvy social media posts to draw victims in.
Read more Monaker Group, which builds booking platforms for the travel industry, is venturing into tokenized assets with the indirect acquisition of Thailand’s Longroot initial coin offering (ICO) portal. The Nasdaq traded company took an “indirect controlling stake” in the entity that owns Longroot on Thursday, one day after buying up a third of Longroot minority shareholder […]
Read more Bitcoin’s price pulled off the bull road for a rest stop Thursday while ether holders pull out of DeFi.
Read more It’s conceivable. Here are the scenarios where a $100,000 bitcoin valuation becomes feasible.
Read more Greg Leung had worked at Apple for years and was coming off of a stint at the smart lock company Otto, when he got the call to interview with Connect Homes.
The pitch — building a starter home for a much lower cost than other prefabricated houses on the market, and one that could be dropped in to locations in the urban core of most cities — was too good to pass up.
“Basically, it’s a beautiful product, but done in a way that disrupts and transforms the way homes are built,” said Leung.
The homes come in 14 standardized configurations and can scale from 460 square foot up to 3200 square feet. What differentiates the company from its competitors, says Leung, is the speed with which Connect Homes can build a house, putting up a full house in six days.
Not only that, but the homes are able to use standard shipping networks and rail transit to bring their homes anywhere in the country. “We build modules the size of a shipping container, so we can connect to the regular intermodal shipping network,” Leung said.
Interior view of a Connect Homes pre-fabricated home. Image Credit: Connect Homes
The company’s smaller homes run around $174,000 all-in, while a 3200 square foot home costs around $825,000. That’s about half of the cost for a custom home today, Leung said.
“What we’re doing is providing a beautiful, modern, product for half the price of a traditional custom homebuilder,” he said.
Currently, Leung said, there are three types of new construction getting build — new tract homes; multi-family housing units, and high rises. But, there’s an opportunity to infill housing. “70% of the Bay Area and LA were built in the 70s. That means there are millions of homes that are too small and out of date and energy inefficient,” Leung said. “It costs $1 million to $1.5 million to build a home… No one is addressing the urban infill market except for us.”
And Leung’s interest extended beyond the 88 projects that the company has completed for new homeowners. From its Los Angeles headquarters with a factory in San Bernadino, Calif., the company is also looking to change how municipalities and governments think about temporary shelters and living spaces for the unhoused.
Founded by Jared Levy and Gordon Stoddard, two architects who worked in the pre-fabricated building division of the firm Marmol Radziner, Connect Homes had raised $27 million to build out a vision of pre-fab future.
That capital includes a recent $5 million round that served to reboot the company and refocus it around its manufacturing technology that can create deployable shelters alongside its housing work. That was another draw for Leung, whose experience in Northern California made him acutely aware of the housing problem the nation faces.
The single module shelter that the company has developed can be transported and put on site in one day. Adding a generator to the 40 foot by eight foot module the company is building means that the shelter has the flexibility of a trailer, but can be ready for habitation in 24 hours.
“We designed this to sell to municipalities and third party service provider to house people,” Leung said.
Customers for the new product include the Thatcher School in Ojai and a project in Mountain View, Calif. done in partnership with Life Moves.
Prices for the shelters range between $20,000 and $30,000 per-bed, or $80,000 per module. Those prices compare incredibly favorably to the $500,000 to $1 million communities pay for a bed in permanent supportive housing, said Leung.
Still, the company’s fancy replacements for tent cities don’t do anything to address the underlying housing crisis that cities across the country.
“We’re trying to be the opposite of bespoke housing that we see as part of the problem. The shelters was a reaction to an urgent need. We had the ability to do something innovative to solve the problem,” said Leung. “I don’t see the amazing talent and innovation being applied to this problem. And it’s affecting the well-being and health of millions and millions of people… This is something that will last for possibly lifetimes.”
View of a Connect Homes house being installed. Image Credit: Connect Homes
The attempt to create a new fable for the reconstruction of the building industry is what drew Brick & Mortar Ventures back to the table to recapitalize the company with the new $5 million in cash the company recently secured, according to Darren Bechtel, the founder and managing director of the firm.
A scion of the Bechtel engineering and construction family, Bechtel has a deep knowledge of the industry and sees Connect Homes as one of the best bets to disrupt traditional construction.
“You cannot construct today cheaper than existing assets,” Bechtel said. But, the opportunity to rethink construction as manufacturing is creating an environment that can drive down costs more effectively, he said.
“It’s been a primitive form of manufacturing for some time,” Bechtel said of the housing industry. “The difference from traditional manufacturing and even automobiles, is that when you get to the scale of a house, you exceed the ability to transport that product efficiently from the manufacturing site to the end delivery site.”
That’s the key problem that Bechtel saw Connect Homes solving. “You have to standardize around intermodal shipping or you have to get permits. You are limited on which roads you use,” he said. “If you’re doing a true kit of parts, you’re requiring craft workers to do the finished work on site.”
Connect Homes, said Bechtel, is taking a different approach from the homebuilders that are looking to be mostly vertically integrated. He said Connect Homes was taking a more Apple-like approach where they oversee the product lifecycle and the customer experience. “That’s how you reach global scale and create the VW and Audi of housing,” he said. “A house is the most expensive purchase. The fact that this is still a bespoke product in the vast majority of scenarios doesn’t make sense.”
Bechtel also drew a distinction between the companies that are primarily targeting the accessory dwelling unit market in California and Connect Homes, which has broader aspirations.
“A lot of people who are buying and selling ADUs are getting an extra guest house. They want more space for themselves,” he said. “At a much larger scale if you can take existing housing stocks that are in medium or high density areas that are old properties with larger footprints and you can create two or three housing units in the same spot with new inventory, you’re drastically improving both the quality and the quantity of housing stock.”
That’s the ultimate goal, for Connect Homes, Bechtel said. And it’s going to be returning to market just as that market could be poised to rebound, said Bechtel.
“We believe you’re going to see a massive rebound in the need for housing,” said Bechtel. “The single family housing market will return.” And when it does, Connect Homes will be working on scaling up to meet the new demand.
Revolution, the Washington, D.C.-based investment firm founded by AOL co-founder CEO Steve Case and former AOL senior exec Ted Leonsis, is raising $500 million for its fourth fund, shows a new SEC filing.
Asked about the effort earlier today, the firm — one of whose executives leaves for the White House in January — declined to comment.
This new fund was expected. It has been more than four years since Revolution announced its third growth fund, a vehicle that closed with $525 million in capital commitments. That’s a longer time between funds than we’re seeing more broadly across the venture industry, where teams have tended to raise new funds approximately every two years, but Revolution’s pacing could tie to its mission. The firm tends to invest primarily in what it long ago dubbed “rise of the rest” cities, where the cost of living and talent is less extreme and where checks go a lot further as a result.
The outfit is also investing out of more than one fund at a time. In recent years, it formed a seed practice and has since raised two Rise of the Rest seed funds, the most recent of which closed last year with $150 million in capital commitments.
Presumably, the firm’s investors have further taken note of some recent exits for Revolution. Earlier this year, its Boston-based portfolio company DraftKings closed on a three-way merger and debuted on the Nasdaq. Meanwhile, BigCommerce, an Austin-based SaaS startup helping companies build, manage and market online stores, went public via a traditional IPO in early August and currently boasts a market cap of $4.2 billion. (Revolution provided the capital for the company’s Series C round in 2013 and continued to invest in subsequent rounds.)
Others of Revolution’s notable investments include Orchard, a tech platform that helps users sell their current home while simultaneously purchasing their next one and whose $69 million Series C round was led by Revolution in September; TemperPack, a maker of thermal liners meant to address the plastic waste that raised $31 million in Series C funding this past summer, including follow-on funding from Revolution; and sweetgreen, the fast-casual restaurant chain that has endured some ups and downs owing to the pandemic but that closed on $150 million in funding a year ago and which first received backing from Revolution back in 2013.
Last month, we talked at some length with Case, including about his involvement in the creation of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which helped create today’s internet giants.
We also talked at the time about whether COVID-19 will cause Silicon Valley to finally lose its gravitational pull. Said Case at the time, in comments not published previously:
Obviously the jury is out. I think a lot of people who decided to leave Silicon Valley to shelter someplace else, most of those will end up returning. I don’t think you’ll see a mass exodus from the city, whether that be Silicon Valley or New York or Boston, which some have predicted.
I do think some of the people who decided to leave at least temporarily will decide to stay, and most of them will end up still working for their current company, in part because some of the tech companies like Facebook and Square and many others have have made it easier to work remotely. But some, once they get settled in another place, and their family is settled, will likely will decide to do something different [and] I think it could be a helpful catalyst in terms of these rise-of-the-rest cities that were showing some signs of momentum. This could be an accelerant.
We had also talked with Case about data that suggests that women and other founders who are not in the networking flow of traditional venture firms are getting left behind as deals are being struck over Zoom. He’d also seen the data and was surprised by it. As he told us:
Yeah, that’s a concern. And it’s a concern about place. It’s also a concerned about people. If you just look at the the NVCA data, last year, 75% of venture capital went to just three states and more than 90% of venture capital went to men and less than 10% to women, even though women represent half our population. And last year, even though Black Americans are about 14% of the population, Black founders got less than 1% of venture capital. So if you just look at the data, it does matter where you live, it does matter what you look like, it does matter the kind of school you went to.
I would have thought that because of the pandemic and because suddenly, Zoom meetings for pitches were becoming increasingly commonplace . . .that that would open up the aperture for most venture capitalists. They would be more willing to take meetings with people in other places, and also be willing to get to reach out to some of the diverse communities that they haven’t traditionally have invested in.
Some of that has happened, for sure. We have seen more interest among coastal investors in opportunities in these in these rise-of-the-rest cities. I think the challenge more broadly, when you go beyond place toward people is what you hear from more of these venture capitalists. They say, ‘Yes, we understand that it’s a problem we need to be help solve. It’s also an opportunity we can potentially seize, because some of these entrepreneurs are going to build some really valuable companies. But we don’t really have the networks. We tend to be mostly situated where we live and have worked or went to school and also where we’ve previously made investments. So we just don’t have the networks in the middle of a country. We don’t have networks with Black founders,’ and so forth.
So that’s an area that we’re really focusing on now: how do we extend the networks. I do think most VCs realize they should be part of the solution, and not part of the problem.
Case mentioned during our call — ahead of the U.S. presidential election — his longstanding friendship with now President-elect Joseph Biden. Case isn’t the only one at Revolution with ties to Biden, however. Ron Klain, an executive vice president at Revolution, previously served as Biden’s chief of staff when he was vice president and, as the world learned last week, Klain is again heading into politics after being chosen to serve as the incoming White House chief of staff.
Said Case of Klain last week to the New York Times: “He can process a lot of information, focus on the things that matter and balance a lot of balls.”
It’s time for another episode of Mixtape, where we take a look at diversity, inclusion, equity and the human labor that powers tech. This week we spoke to Y-Vonne Hutchinson, the CEO of ReadySet, a consulting firm that works with companies to create more inclusive and equitable work environments.
Hutchinson tells us that the work she did for 10 years in international human rights, labor rights law and advocacy helped prepare her for the work she does today.
“My last job was in Nicaragua where I was working with sugarcane workers who were dying of occupational illness,” she says. “And it was generational…that’s the power of structural violence. And work is like an incredible vector for that.”
She tells us she began to research international labor protection and pursue doctorate work, but instead decided to move to Silicon Valley in 2015 and pursue the future of work with ReadySet .
“Diversity, equity and inclusion was the future of work issue — who gets access to high opportunity employment and how people are treated at work and what that means for their own personal outcomes.”
Five years on from the launch of ReadySet, Hutchinson says she sees companies change the way they approach equitable workplaces. And it’s hard to avoid the fact that the pandemic, having locked us all in place to watch the video of police killing George Floyd, has had an impact on the way people navigate society’s structures of racism and policing.
“In terms of how our companies are responding, I definitely do see more of an emphasis on having a structural response, and thinking about their complicity and structurally exclusionary systems. What does that mean for them?” she says. “I think now there are some positive indications that companies are looking at that. They’re looking beyond just ‘let’s do an unconscious bias training,’ which is what they were asking for in 2015. And asking for more structural work — more work exclusively focused on anti-racism and really unpacking harm. But is that sustainable? Is that something that’s going to be continuing to the long term? You know, at this stage? I don’t know.”
More on this as well as an examination of what we can expect under a Biden administration. Click play above and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Its long fruitful relationship with Apple may be sunsetting soon, but Intel’s still got a fairly massive footprint in the PC market. There’s never a good time to get complacent, though (a lesson the company learned the hard way on the mobile front).
This week the chip giant is debuting its own laptop, the NUC M15. More properly, the NUC M15 Laptop Kit; the device is actually a white-label system. It’s essentially a reference design so smaller device makers don’t have to commit to the long and expensive process of building a system from scratch.
It is, as The Verge notes, not the first time the company has created this sort of reference design. It recently created a gaming system to similar ends. But much like the recent MacBooks, the system is designed to offer high performance in a package designed more for productivity.
There are two configurations for the system, featuring either a Core i7 chip coupled with 16GB of RAM or a Core i5 with 8GB of RAM. That will, obviously, be complemented by Windows 10, which will take advantage of the 15.6-inch touchscreen.
Pricing and timing and all of that good stuff will likely depend on which vendors take the system across the finish line.
Sound Ventures, a fund co-founded by Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary, has filed paperwork indicating plans to raise a third fund at $150 million. Notably, the firm filed paperwork for the same total in 2018 for its second fund.
The firm did not immediately respond to a request for comment on its plans to raise a new fund. Sound Ventures was born to write bigger and later-stage checks, or at a minimum, be stage-agnostic. Despite Kutcher’s fame and high-profile stakes, the firm has operated somewhat quietly in the recent past.
On the firm’s website, it states that it has a fund dedicated to the “next generation of clean, circular, and sustainable businesses” titled SOUNDWaves. It’s unclear whether today’s filing is for SOUNDWaves or Sound Ventures’ main fund, or if those two have been combined under a new direction for the firm.
In 2018, Kutcher noted his love for scooters, instead of cars, on the TechCrunch Disrupt Stage. “There are cars parked everywhere! It’s ridiculous! They’re clogging the roads, they’re making it impossible to get anywhere you want to go,” Kutcher said. Notably, Sound Ventures invested in Bird, which this week announced its discussions to go public via SPAC.
Portfolio news continued this year when Root, an Ohio-based car insurance business, went public (and got a warm reception).
Beyond micro-mobility and insurance, Sound Ventures is looking for opportunities in fintech, enterprise, govtech and medtech infrastructure markets. The firm has invested in companies including Robinhood and Gusto.
The new fund filing come as Sound Ventures’ team continues to grow. In 2017, Sound Ventures hired Effie Epstein, who was leading global strategy at Marsh, to be the firm’s managing partner and COO. Epstein’s hire came as Sound Ventures itself looked to evolve past just consumer investors. Other hires include growth investor Susan Su, who led growth marketing at Stripe, and chief sustainability and strategy officer Katherine Keating, who previously clocked time at VICE Media and Maverick Management.
New technologies can optimize the way people work. When implemented thoughtfully, such innovations can improve overall business processes. Those changes are accepted as part of progress.
But when a technology changes how and where people live and their relationships to one another and upends economies, it merits the term “revolution.” Because it changes everything.
The technology behind the First Industrial Revolution was water and steam power, which mechanized textile production. The innovation made factories commonplace, which brought more people to cities and caused social upheaval. In the second, electric power made mass production possible. The third was based on semiconductors, which facilitated the data processing that automated production and spawned the digital age.
Now a fourth industrial revolution is taking shape. The technology behind it is the internet of things—networks of connected devices such as sensors, robots, and wearables. The data these devices produce across so many in-depth connections is the fuel for powerful digital applications, from weather prediction systems to smart buildings that regulate their own climates to self-driving cars.
“It’s a fusion of technologies,” says Landry Signé, professor and founding co-director of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and Globalization 4.0 Initiative at Arizona State University’s Thunderbird School of Global Management. “The fourth industrial revolution blurs the line between the physical, the digital, and the biological.”
This revolution isn’t particularly about the things that collect data. As with the other technological underpinnings in previous upheavals, it’s what we do with them. By using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to analyze data collections, says Andrew Dugan, chief technology officer at technology company Lumen, people can solve harder problems. For example, smart cities can use many types of sensors and other data technologies, with the goal of lowering emissions, reducing traffic, and doing better urban planning. “Just the data that will be available for cities to help manage what’s going on will be a big uplift,” Dugan explains.
This is more than a data-munching exercise. The newfangled hardware and the data it generates are the beginning of the innovation process, not the end result. By building applications that use sensors and other connected technologies as a foundation, organizations can derive real-world value from data and find new, creative ways to make the world better.
To determine how this is taking shape, MIT Technology Review Insights canvassed dozens of organizations that are using the internet of things to do things that weren’t possible before. What follows is a series of the best, most innovative examples. Some of these applications may inspire organization to rethink how they collect, analyze, and act on data—all of them contribute to a better or at least more efficient planet.
The future is closer than it appears
There are some underlying trends in the following vignettes. The internet of things and related technologies are in early use in smart cities and other infrastructure applications, such as monitoring warehouses, or components of them, such as elevators. These projects show clear returns on investment and benefits. For instance, smart streetlights can make residents’ lives better by improving public safety, optimizing the flow of traffic on city streets, and enhancing energy efficiency. Such outcomes are accompanied with data that’s measurable, even if the social changes are not—such as reducing workers’ frustration from spending less time waiting for an office elevator.
Early adoption is also found in uses in which the harder technical or social problems are secondary, or, at least, the challenges make fewer people nervous. While cybersecurity and data privacy remain important for systems that control water treatment plants, for example, such applications don’t spook people with concerns about personal surveillance.
Each example has a strong connectivity component, too. None of the results come from “one sensor reported this”—it’s all about connecting the dots. Whether they’ve been built for in-house use or sold by a technology vendor, these custom applications rely on input from multiple data sources.
Finally, these applications are being built through partnerships. Not every company has the right expertise in-house, so it’s common to develop alliances, work together, and use tools that aid in these projects. “Infrastructure and application platforms resolve some of the complexity and choices organizations are facing,” Dugan explains.
Download the full report.
This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.