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Read more Ray Holgado, a former employee of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, recently filed a racial discrimination complaint with the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing. Holgado, who is Black, worked at CZI from September 2018 through August 2020.
“Despite its social justice rhetoric, CZI is not a welcoming environment for Black employees,” Holgado’s complaint states. “Black employees are underpaid, undervalued, denied growth opportunities, and marginalized. Black employees who want to advance within the organization are shut down and labeled as too assertive or aggressive, while non-Black employees are favored and encouraged. When Black employees have communicated these concerns to CZI leadership, CZI has responded defensively and failed to address the underlying issues. CZI has utterly failed to ‘build a more inclusive, just, and healthy future’ for its Black employees.”
In his complaint, Holgado alleges he was paid less than some of his colleagues doing similar work to him. According to the complaint, a recruiter denied Holgado’s request to negotiate his salary but later found out other, non-Black employees had been able to negotiate a higher salary. Holgado went on to describe other instances in which he was allegedly denied opportunities for promotions and growth, and was treated differently because of his race.
In addition to his own experiences, Holgado says the alleged issues of discrimination at CZI are systemic. According to the complaint, Holgado told CZI co-founder Priscilla Chan that the organization’s approach to diversity was successful in retaining Black people but didn’t do enough to empower Black employees “or integrate their perspectives into the work,” the complaint states. In response, according to the complaint, Chan acknowledged it was concerning but said “DEI may look different for each of us.”
In a statement to TechCrunch, CZI denied the claims.
“While we take any allegation of discrimination seriously and will do so here, this former employee’s specific allegations were previously raised internally, independently investigated, and found to be unsubstantiated,” the spokesperson said. “The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is committed to fair treatment, access, and advancement for all members of the CZI team. We do not tolerate discrimination of any kind, full stop.”
This complaint comes after a group of more than 70 employees in June asked CZI to commit to 12 changes that would make the philanthropy more inclusive. Then, in August, The Washington Post reported that some Black employees were pushing CZI to approach more work through a racial equity lens. They wrote a letter to Chan, describing how CZI has issues with systemic racism, discrimination and anti-Blackness. Holgado was part of that group.
“Unfortunately, Chan once again failed to grasp the seriousness of the issues the letter raised, refusing to meet several of the group’s requests, most notably declining to provide transparency into CZI’s pay equity data as it related to Black employees,” Holgado wrote today on the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy.”Instead of working through the plan of action that was put forth by Black employees, she tasked a recently hired chief operating officer with devising and implementing an alternative course of action. Having witnessed the dynamics of passing the buck and placating employees with half measures play out multiple times at the foundation, I recognized that further efforts would be in vain.”
TechCrunch has reached out to CZI and will update this story if we hear back.
In the past several weeks we’ve seen refreshes and product expansions from about every facet of the smart home virtual assistant world. Apple launched the HomePod Mini, Google offered a long-overdue refresh of the Google Home and Amazon found even more speaker shapes to shove Alexa into.
Today, we’re getting an addition from a startup competitor. Josh.ai has aimed to build out a niche in the space by building a smart assistant product that’s designed to be professionally installed alongside other smart home wares, and they announced a new product this afternoon.
The device, Josh Nano, fully buys into a more luxury home-focused niche with a low-profile device that appears to be a little bit bigger than a half-dollar, though the bulk of the device is embedded into the wall itself and wired back to a central unit via power-over-ethernet. The device bundles a set of four microphones eschewing any onboard speaker, instead opting to integrate directly with a user’s at-home sound system. Josh boasts compatibility with most major AV receiver manufacturers in addition to partnerships with companies like Sonos . There isn’t much else to the device; a light for visual feedback, a multi-purpose touch sensor and a physical switch to cut power to the onboard microphones in case users want extra peace of mind.
Image via Josh.ai
The aim of the new hardware is to hide the smart features of a home and move away from industry-standard touchscreen hubs with dated interfaces. By stripping down a smart home product to its essential feature, Josh.ai hopes it can push more users to buy in more fully with confidence that subsequent hardware releases won’t render their devices outdated and ugly. The startup is taking pre-orders for the device (available in black and white color options) now and hopes to start shipping early next year.
Powering these devices is a product the company calls Josh Core, a small server which basically acts as a hub for everything Josh talks to in a user’s home, ensuring that interactions between smart home devices can occur locally, minimizing external requests. The startup will also continue selling its previously released Josh Micro, which integrates a dedicated speaker into the wall-mounted hardware.
Though Josh.ai partners directly with professional installers on the hardware, the startup has been scaling as a software business, offering consumers a license to their technology on an annual, five-year or lifetime basis. The price of that license also differs depending on what size home they are working with, with “small” rollouts being classified as homes with fewer than 15 rooms. In terms of hardware costs, Josh.ai says that pricing varies, but for most jobs, the average cost for users works out to be something like $500 per room.
Massive tech companies naturally design their products for massive audiences. For startups like Josh.ai this fact provides an in-road to design products that aren’t built for the common needs of a billion users. In fact, the selling point for plenty of their customers comes largely from the fact that they aren’t buying devices from Google, Amazon or Apple and hard-wiring microphones that feed back to them inside their home.
Though 95% of the startup’s business today focuses on residential, going forward, the company is also interested in scaling how their tech can be used in commercial scenarios like conference rooms or even elevators, the startup tells me.
Apple announces “One More Thing” before the holiday season, Uber lets you reserve rides 30 days in advance and Spotify makes another podcast acquisition. This is your Daily Crunch for November 10, 2020.
The big story: Apple unveils new Macs
During an unusually brief and focused “One More Thing” event, Apple announced three new Macs that will all use the M1 chip, its first chip for Macs. This is the beginning of a previously announced shift of the Mac lineup to Apple silicon.
What about the actual Macs? Well, there’s a new MacBook Air, which still costs $999 but is supposed to be 3.5x faster than the previous generation — and it doesn’t include a fan! There’s also a new Mac Mini with a base price of $699, and a 13-inch MacBook Pro that starts at $1,299.
Oh, and Big Sur, the latest version of the Mac operating system, will be released this Thursday, November 12.
The tech giants
Uber will now let users book rides 30 days in advance and pick a favorite driver — The new option, called Uber Reserve, will begin to show up on the app in the next week.
Google adds COVID-related health and safety info to Google Travel — When users search for hotels and vacation rental properties through Google Travel, they may see new information about COVID-19 safety precautions at the property.
Spotify buying podcast hosting and ad company Megaphone for $235M — Spotify already had an existing partnership with the company, including use of its hosting services.
Startups, funding and venture capital
Hopin raises $125M for its online events platform on the back of surging growth — TechCrunch is one of the customers for Hopin’s online events platform.
Spearhead launches $100M fourth fund to transform founders into top-notch VC investors — The premise remains simple: offer founders with great networks and hustle $1 million in capital to go out and start writing angel checks and build their own portfolio.
Carbon Health raises $100M with plans to expand pop-up clinics ahead of COVID-19 vaccination programs — The company plans to open 100 pop-up clinics in 20 markets across the U.S.
Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch
Five VCs discuss the future of SaaS and software after Pfizer’s vaccine breakthrough — SaaS stocks sold sharply on good vaccine tidings, but do VCs care?
Accelerators embrace change forced by pandemic — We spoke with the heads of three accelerators about the challenges and opportunities presented by the new virtual environment.
What I wish I’d known about venture capital when I was a founder — TheVentureCity’s Andy Arieto shares some knowledge.
(Reminder: Extra Crunch is our membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)
Everything else
All Slingbox devices will stop working in two years — All Slingbox products will become less and less functional, leading up to a full shutdown two years from today.
House Reps ask FCC to ‘stop work on all partisan, controversial items’ during transition — This likely includes the FCC’s effort to reinterpret Section 230, an important protection for internet platforms, at the Trump administration’s request.
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.
Shares of Lyft are riding high, popping more than 7% in after-hours trading today after the American ride-hailing giant reported its Q3 earnings.
Lyft, which competes with Uber for rideshare, reported revenues of $499.7 million in the third-quarter, a 48% drop from the $955.6 million in the same year-ago period. That lackluster result is still a 47% improvement over last quarter when Lyft reported $339.3 million in revenue. That’s good?
Investors were heartened by the improvement and Lyft’s ability to beat analysts revenue expectations of $486.45 million. The company’s net loss of $1.46 per share was worse than expected, but investors appeared more bullish than bearish, buying up Lyft equity and boosting its value after the company’s earnings report.
Lyft’s quarter is a story of year-over-year declines and sequential-quarter gains. On that theme, the company’s active riders fell 44% compared to the year-ago quarter, and rose 44% compared to Q2 2020. Its revenue per active rider fell 7% compared to Q3 2019, but rose 2% from the sequentially preceding period.
Like Uber, Lyft is enjoying patience from investors as it digs its way out from a ride-hailing market pummeled by COVID-19; Uber has enjoyed a delivery business and international operations to buffer its ride revenue declines. Lyft, which is focused on the U.S. market and lacks a delivery program like Uber, has been more impacted by the domestic market.
Rising COVID-19 cases and ratcheting lockdowns could threaten Lyft’s recovery. Still, its core economics are not falling to pieces despite the pandemic. In Q3 2020, Lyft’s contribution margin — a metric that is akin to an adjusted gross margin result — was 49.8%. In the year-ago quarter it was 50.1%.
Lyft will return as long as ride volume recovers. Lyft’s next big hurdle is profitability. The company is still on track to achieve adjusted EBITDA profitability by the fourth quarter of 2021, even with a slower recovery, Logan Green said during the company’s earnings call Tuesday, adding that Lyft is taking an extremely disciplined approach to increase its operating leverage. Lyft is positioned to achieve that profitability goal with about 30% fewer rides than what was required when it originally issued its Q4 2021 profitability target last fall, Green said.
Lyft wrapped Q3 with $2.5 billion in cash and equivalents. Its operations have consumed $1.1 billion in cash so far this year, up around $156 million in the third quarter. At $50 million a month, Lyft has lots of room to get back to more pedestrian losses, and year-over-year growth.