What Kamala Harris has said about AI, tech regulation and more

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Kamala Harris

Image Credits: NOAH BERGER/AFP / Getty Images

With President Joe Biden dropping out of the race, Vice President Kamala Harris may become the Democrats’ new nominee.

In announcing his plans, Biden offered his “full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party this year,” while Harris said her “intention is to win and earn this nomination.” That said, it’s not clear whether other Democratic politicians will challenge her for the nomination at an open convention, or through some other selection process.

If Harris is selected, the Democrats will have a presidential nominee with roots in the Bay Area — she was born in Oakland — and a long relationship with the tech industry. (Donald Trump’s running mate JD Vance is also deeply connected to Silicon Valley.) She was San Francisco’s district attorney, then California’s attorney general, before being elected to the Senate in 2016.

VCs like John Doerr and Ron Conway were among her early supporters, and as a presidential candidate, she was quickly endorsed by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. Other industry figures, including Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, have been more circumspect or called for an open convention.

Some of the industry’s critics have complained that she didn’t do enough as attorney general to curb the power of tech giants as they grew.

At the same time, she has been willing to criticize tech CEOs and call for more regulation. As a senator, she pressed the big social networks over misinformation. During the 2020 presidential campaign, when rival Elizabeth Warren was calling for the breakup of big tech, Harris was asked whether companies like Amazon, Google and Facebook should be broken up. She instead said they should be “regulated in a way that we can ensure the American consumer can be certain that their privacy is not being compromised.”

As vice president, Harris has also spoken about the potential for regulating AI, saying that she and President Biden “reject the false choice that suggests we can either protect the public or advance innovation.”

Biden had issued an executive order calling for companies to set new standards around the development of AI, and Harris said these “voluntary commitments are an initial step toward a safer AI future with more to come, because, as history has shown, in the absence of regulation and strong government oversight, some technology companies choose to prioritize profit over the wellbeing of their customers, the safety of our communities, and the stability of our democracies.”

Venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz recently pointed to concerns that the Biden administration will “overregulate” AI as one of their reasons for supporting Donald Trump.

On another hot-button issue, a recent bill that would ban TikTok if its parent company ByteDance doesn’t sell it, Harris said, “We need to deal with the owner, and we have national security concerns about the owner of TikTok, but we have no intention to ban TikTok.”

Harris has been less vocal on the issues around cryptocurrency, though she would presumably support the Biden administration’s crypto regulations.

The Waymo-Zeekr robotaxi has come to San Francisco

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Rendering of Waymo-Zeekr robotaxi. Lilac colored minivan parked next to curb with lidar and cameras.

Image Credits: Waymo

Waymo has started testing on public roads in San Francisco a new robotaxi built by Chinese electric automaker Zeekr. 

Waymo has “less than a handful” of the Zeekr vehicles in San Francisco today and isn’t driving them autonomously yet. Still, the fact that Waymo has hit the roads with a roomier, custom-built robotaxi signals the next phase of the Alphabet-owned company’s autonomous vehicle technology journey. The public testing milestone has been several years in the making. Waymo first announced plans to build an electric autonomous ride-hail vehicle with Zeekr for the U.S. market in December 2021. 

Waymo uses Jaguar I-Paces, retrofitted with its fifth-generation Driver, for its commercial robotaxi operations. And for those who have ridden in one with a group, it can be a tight squeeze. 

The new minivan-esque vehicle, which appears to be modeled after Zeekr’s upcoming Zeekr 009 minivan, is outfitted with Waymo’s sixth-generation hardware — a more cost-effective set of sensors than previous versions that is also designed to operate in winter environments. 

“Our fourth generation, which was just on the [Chrysler] Pacificas, were vital to helping us prove that we can operate fully autonomously or go rider-only,” Waymo spokesperson Sandy Karp told TechCrunch. “The fifth-generation hardware was critical to help us scale to four cities as of now, as well as navigate dense urban environments. The sixth-generation hardware builds on those capabilities, but it has a much more simplified design. It brings down the cost significantly, and it will help us operate autonomously in colder cities.”

It’s not clear when Waymo will launch in cities that experience wintry weather conditions. Last winter, Waymo tested its robotaxis in Buffalo, New York and has since left the city. Karp said Waymo continues to test its Driver on winter roads in simulation during the summer months, and will test again in another cold climate later this year. 

Karp noted that while Waymo is laser-focused on scaling its Waymo One ride-hailing service in the cities where it currently operates — Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin — the sixth-generation Driver is what will help it expand.  

But first, the sixth-gen hardware needs to be rigorously tested. Waymo isn’t only testing its upgraded sensor suite — which includes in-house designed and built lidar, radar, cameras and microphones — in cold environments. The company has also been putting the hardware through its paces in extra hot climates like Death Valley and Las Vegas.

“Thermal stability is a huge thing for cameras to make sure they don’t get distorted by the extreme heat or the extreme cold,” said Karp. 

Waymo’s fleet of Zeekr test vehicles is still small. In San Francisco, Waymo said it has less than a handful of Zeekrs on the road today. But it’s an interesting moment to introduce a smart vehicle with ties to China. Zeekr is owned by Chinese auto giant Geely Automotive. 

Earlier this month, the U.S. Commerce Department said it plans to issue proposed rules on connected vehicles in August and expects to impose limits on software made in China and other adversarial countries. This comes a few weeks after U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin soft launched a bill that she plans to introduce to Congress that would limit or ban the introduction of Chinese connected vehicles.

To be clear, the Waymo-Zeekr vehicle doesn’t include software or sensors produced by Zeekr. The vehicles are designed and engineered in Sweden and the prototype vehicles are manufactured in China. The Waymo Driver, which includes hardware and software, is integrated into the base vehicles in the U.S. 

To that end, Waymo recently submitted public comments to the Commerce Department’s advance notice of proposed rulemaking on connected vehicles, explaining that the Zeekr-provided base vehicles “have no driving automation or telematics capabilities built into them.”

There are, of course, other AV companies with ties to China that are testing in California. The state’s Department of Motor Vehicles, which regulates testing and deployment permits issued to autonomous vehicle companies, told TechCrunch that it aligns its regulations with national regulations. Meaning that until Congress or the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration comes forward with a ruling about Chinese connected vehicles, the DMV will not change the way it issues permits. 

China connections aside, a spokesperson for the DMV told TechCrunch that Waymo would need to apply to add a new vehicle to its existing drivered and driverless testing permits if it wants to test the Zeekr autonomously. 

The California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates how AV companies can charge passengers for rides, said that novel vehicles don’t necessarily require a new authorization from the agency. The carrier may need to request certain exemptions to remain in compliance with CPUC regulations, though, like if a purpose-built AV were not equipped with things like a steering wheel or pedals.

The Zeekr prototype vehicle has a removable steering wheel, and the goal down the line is to operate it without one.

Mark Zuckerberg says WhatsApp has 100M monthly active users in the US

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WhatsApp Bubble

Image Credits: Meta

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Thursday on his channel that WhatsApp now has more than 100 million monthly active users in the U.S., a country where SMS/texts is a popular mode of communication.

The announcement is the first time WhatsApp has released data about users in the U.S. The company also noted that more than 50% of WhatsApp’s users have iPhones, which is not surprising given that iOS has the majority market share in the country.

WhatsApp is a popular app worldwide, with more than 2 billion active users monthly. The company has historically focused on countries like India, which is WhatsApp’s largest user base with more than 500 million monthly active users, and Brazil and Indonesia.

WhatsApp has recently ramped up its marketing push in the U.S. In the past few years, WhatsApp has placed ad campaigns, placements in Times Square and TV spots emphasizing privacy and end-to-end encryption protection. Most recently, it started a national campaign about WhatsApp by bringing back some of the cast of the TV show “Modern Family.”

Just like Google, Meta has emphasized in its marketing the differences between green bubble and blue bubble devices caused by Apple’s iMessage. But now that Apple has adopted Rich Communication Services (RCS), Android users can send and receive high-quality media files and have options to look at typing indicators and read receipts. The messages will still be green, though, according to screenshots of Apple’s website.

However, Meta is still pushing its cross-platform app by highlighting some other features, such as polls, high-quality video calling and reactions. The company is capping off the announcement with another marketing campaign by placing a 200-foot bubble between the Apple and Samsung stores in The Americana Mall in Los Angeles.

Digital marketing startup Plaiced has acquired Precursor Ventures-backed Clutch

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Madison Long, CEO of Clutch

Image Credits: Madison Long

Clutch, a marketplace for digital marketing services, has been acquired by the online social network Plaiced, Clutch’s co-founder, Madison Long, told TechCrunch. 

The deal closed earlier this week for undisclosed terms. 

“The creator economy is growing rapidly, we knew to remain competitive and really be able to take over market share, an acquisition would be the strongest next step,” Long told TechCrunch. 

Long and Simone May founded Clutch in 2020 to help connect people to businesses looking for marketing and content creation. We last spoke to the duo in August 2022 after they closed a $1.2 million pre-seed round led by Precursor Ventures. At the time, the company had more than 200 creators on the platform and a 3,000-person waitlist. Since then, over 600 people have signed up to use Clutch and the company worked with more than 70 brands, including Hearst Media, Long said. 

But the journey had its setbacks. Clutch restructured itself last June and conducted layoffs to prioritize profitability — which it ultimately did reach this year. During that time, May stepped down from her role as CTO to focus more on her family, leaving Long as CEO. Long said she thought about continuing to run the company independently, but, especially with GenAI in the picture, the content creation industry was changing rapidly. “The deciding factor to sell was finding the right partner who could take us further,” she said. 

She was introduced to Plaiced CEO Kaaveh Shoamanesh in early May at a networking event and from there, the talks of an acquisition began. She felt Plaiced was the right partner because she said it and Clutch aligned on its values. “There are very few platforms in our industry that prioritize paying creators what they deserve and not compromising on this,” she said. 

Shoamanesh said he’s also excited about the deal, saying it will help Plaiced expand its network by working with more creators. “It also offers more monetization opportunities for creators leveraging our existing network of online communities,” he told TechCrunch. 

As a new founder, Long found herself reading as many books as she could about M&A, talking to founders who recently exited, as well as weighing the pros and cons of letting a company she helped build go. “Nothing can fully prepare you for your first exit,” she said. “I’d been working on Clutch for 5 years, and 3 years full-time. Hired over a dozen people, raised $2 million, and yet, this was definitely one of the hardest chapters of our company’s journey so far.” 

The Clutch team is small — only four right now — and of the four, some have decided to stay while others have found other job opportunities and Long will stay on as an advisor for at least 18 months. 

“It’s our number one priority that their collaborations are not impacted due to the acquisition,” she said. 

Long says that her next personal goal is to spend more time with her family and “take time to take care of myself, rest, and reflect.”

This article was updated to reflect the correct spelling of May’s name.

Google Cloud now has a dedicated cluster of Nvidia GPUs for Y Combinator startups

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Lisbon , Portugal - 2 November 2022; Garry Tan, Initialized Capital, on Venture stage during day one of Web Summit 2022 at the Altice Arena in Lisbon, Portugal. (Photo By Harry Murphy/Sportsfile for Web Summit via Getty Images)

Image Credits: Harry Murphy/Sportsfile for Web Summit / Getty Images

Google Cloud is giving Y Combinator startups access to a dedicated, subsidized cluster of Nvidia graphics processing units and Google tensor processing units to build AI models. It’s part of Google Cloud’s effort to cozy up with promising early-stage AI startups, in hopes some of them will evolve into massive, compute-hungry businesses.

“We want to surround them with a lot of love and warmth early in their life cycle so they get familiarized with building and working on the Google Cloud Platform,” said general manager for Google Cloud’s startups and AI business, James Lee, in an interview with TechCrunch. “As they stick around, we grow as they grow, and we become a partner of theirs throughout their life cycle.”

Specifically, Google will provide a dedicated cluster with priority access for YC’s Summer 2024 startups, along with $350,000 in cloud credits over two years for each participating startup. The idea is that a future unicorn will fall in love with building on Google Cloud. Five percent of Y Combinator startups over the last 18 years have become unicorns with billion-dollar-plus valuations, YC group partner Diana Hu tells TechCrunch, so it’s a decent bet for Google to make on this partnership.

“There’s a lot of excitement that the next generation of startups will probably not just unicorn, but decacorn, and they’re getting built as we speak,” said Hu. “Cloud providers are still catching up in terms of how to price them, but they do know if you catch them early on, you’re going to ride the wave with them.”

On the flip side, Y Combinator says it can attract more AI startups to apply by offering generous compute resources alongside its investment and guidance. For early-stage AI startups, Hu says one of the most common issues she hears is that startups are compute-restrained. Large enterprises are able to strike multi-year, massive deals with cloud providers for GPU access, but small startups are often left out to dry. She says partnerships like these go a long way, especially when you have a dedicated cluster — that’s particularly important for training AI models.

“For GPU and AI workloads, they’re more like high performance computing workloads in batches. You don’t need the server running all the time, but you need a lot of them in a spiky workload,” said Hu. “So we have a dedicated cluster that YC companies can just use.”

As part of the partnership, Google will also offer YC startups $12,000 in Enhanced Support credits and a free year of Google Workspace Business Plus. YC startups can also connect with Google’s internal AI experts through monthly office hours.

Startup accelerators and venture capital firms are offering GPU clusters more and more these days. Andreessen Horowitz reportedly has a stash of 20,000 GPUs to attract AI startups. Google Cloud and Y Combinator would not reveal the exact number in this deal, but Hu says it’s sufficient for YC’s foundation model companies to train models on.

EXCLUSIVE: GrubMarket has acquired Good Eggs

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Image Credits: Good Eggs

The online food and grocery delivery space is seeing more consolidation. TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that GrubMarket, the startup that has quietly built a B2B empire in produce and grocery logistics and is now valued at $3.5 billion, has acquired Good Eggs, a once-feted fresh food delivery startup that has fallen on hard times recently.

The financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed, but sources with knowledge of the deal told TechCrunch that it was an all-stock transaction that valued Good Eggs slightly higher than its previous valuation of $22 million. The sources also said Good Eggs’ investors proactively approached GrubMarket looking for an exit.

TechCrunch has also confirmed that Good Eggs will be run by a new leader under GrubMarket: Keith Brewer, who was the COO of GrubMarket-owned Daylight Foods, will head Good Eggs. While a number of Good Eggs’ staff are expected to come over to GrubMarket, it’s not yet clear whether Rodrigo Arévalo, the Uber alum who is currently listed as Good Eggs’ CEO, will be staying on.

This is a pretty major turn for Good Eggs, and it serves as one more signal of how investors, who pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into perpetually loss-making startups, are now looking to draw a line under those activities and move on.

Good Eggs, for context, was valued as high as $365 million in November 2020, per PitchBook data (a round it announced in 2021), and had a vaunted investor list that included Benchmark, Index, Sequoia and Thrive, among many others. But as the COVID-19 tailwinds faded, it hit the rocks and was eventually marked down a whopping 94% last year, landing it at that $22 million valuation.

GrubMarket, meanwhile, is now valued at around $3.5 billion and has raised over $560 million in funding from various backers that include Tiger Global. Its $3.5 billion valuation was reported by CNBC earlier this year.

GrubMarket initially competed with Good Eggs but eventually started supplying the startup. The changing nature of that relationship may well provide a window into why some companies succeed in the grocery logistics and delivery space and some do not.

Good Eggs and GrubMarket launched in 2011 and 2014, respectively, with a focus on B2C, specifically delivering boxes of fresh food to consumers and businesses. But later, as Good Eggs kept its eyes on consumers, GrubMarket pivoted to concentrating on the B2B opportunity, and it scaled fast to work with smaller grocers as well as major ones.

Whole Foods is GrubMarket’s biggest customer. It also supplies groceries and other items to major department stores like Walmart, as well as to other big names like Stanford University. With a pretty relentless eye on margins, unit economics, KPIs and long relationships with suppliers, GrubMarket has been profitable for some time.

“Profitability is in our DNA,” GrubMarket CEO and founder Mike Xu said. “We know how to get things profitable. It’s a systematic approach.”

Xu added that the company’s focus remains on B2B — it has made more than 80 acquisitions, most of which bolster that business — but acquisitions like Good Eggs underscore how it could use its economies of scale to revisit B2C. Still, Xu described the deal as “optimistic” rather than opportunistic.

Grocery and food delivery startups have faced a lot of ups and downs, and some categories have been hit pretty hard. Getir, a major player in “instant” grocery delivery that aggressively raised hundreds of millions of dollars (from some of the same backers as Good Eggs, as it happens), earlier this year cut its losses and retreated to its home market of Turkey. Other startups are struggling to raise at strong valuations while a few like GrubMarket are playing consolidator to improve their cost structures. U.S.-based Instacart is due to announce its second-quarter results today, which could prove a bellwether for other companies in the space.

OpenAI’s Converge 2 program has been shrouded in mystery

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OpenAI logo with spiraling pastel colors (Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch)

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

OpenAI’s Converge 2 startup accelerator program did indeed take place, according to two sources familiar with the program, despite the silence that has shrouded it. TechCrunch has also confirmed that the Open AI Startup Fund has funded startups in the cohort.

Converge 2 has been an odd exception to what is normally a mundane bit of PR in the tech industry. Typically an accelerator program announces the startups accepted into, or graduated from, its programs. After all, once it invests, it has every reason to boost those startups’ chances for success with its public stamp of approval.

But for months, a tech forum ran wild asking if the Converge 2 accelerator program actually happened. Nobody on that forum, which included people who said they applied, heard anything. No one on the forum posted about getting in or even receiving rejection notices. And others in the Valley weren’t hearing about the program either, despite how high profile OpenAI is, various sources told TechCrunch.

This silence was odd because it was not how the first program worked. OpenAI held Converge I in the typical accelerator fashion in early 2023. It called for applications and then publicly announced its first four investments from the overall OpenAI Startup Fund. In December 2023, Open AI Startup Fund announced it would start accepting applications for the second cohort of its accelerator program, Converge 2, expected to begin in March 2024 and conclude by April. 

But then, silence. There was no press release from OpenAI about the companies that earned investments. And after multiple requests for comment over months, OpenAI refused to even confirm that the program took place. Founders took to pondering online — and messaging us — about it.

We still cannot get those close to the program to tell us why OpenAI won’t publicly announce the cohort grads. Are the NDAs draconian? Is it just a don’t-talk culture thing? Admittedly, even Converge 1 kept its communications low-key, and the companies that were said to have partaken in it, like Cursor.AI, were revealed slowly.

Certainly, between early 2023 and today, the whole world is paying much closer attention to OpenAI, especially as the company reportedly seeks to raise another round that would value it at $100 billion, according to the WSJ. In fact, between Converge 1 and 2, the fund removed Sam Altman as its owner, replacing him with Ian Hathaway. 

This move hasn’t impeded fund activity. Since January, the fund has cut checks into a few new companies, according to PitchBook, like AI chatbot Heeyo, wellness company Thrive AI Health, AI chatbot New Computer, and Ambience Healthcare, which created an AI assistant for healthcare organizations. At least two of these companies, a source tells us, participated in a Converge program, though the person would not confirm which ones, citing not wanting to incur OpenAI’s displeasure.

As to what happens inside the program, details are even more scarce. One person told us the main benefit is access to OpenAI’s researchers and to unreleased model technology. That kind of access would lend itself to the theory that these companies are locked into some brawny NDAs, a tool that OpenAI is fond of using on its employees, as Vox recently reported. 

Exclusive: Humidity sucks. Transaera has a new way to deal with it

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A child cools off in front of a fan.

Image Credits: simarik / Getty Images

“It’s not the heat that gets you, it’s the humidity,” said a dad, somewhere.

His kids might be rolling their eyes, especially if they’ve spent any time in the desert Southwest during the summer, but their dad is at least partly correct: Not only does high humidity make people less comfortable, it also strains air conditioning units. Half of the energy used to power a typical air conditioner is spent on removing moisture from the air.

For companies like Amazon, Walmart, UPS and FedEx, which operate enormous warehouses, air conditioning has been a growing concern. Temperatures inside warehouses can grow uncomfortably, potentially dangerously, hot.

One startup has been working to crack the humidity problem. Transaera is developing a unique air conditioner for homes and apartments that uses a special material to remove humidity before cooling the air. With more than 2 billion people in hot, humid regions still lacking air conditioning, the company hopes it can help meet that demand while reducing the amount of energy required.

But first, while it fine-tunes the product for consumers, it’s deploying larger units for commercial buildings like warehouses. On Tuesday, it installed the first of those on a customer’s rooftop, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. This dedicated outdoor air system (DOAS) dehumidifies fresh air coming into the building, reducing the load on the air conditioner.

Transaera's team stands in front of one of their DOAS units.
Transaera’s DOAS unit loaded on a flatbed, with the team for scale.
Image Credits: Transaera

“DOAS is a small piece of the market, but it is a growing segment,” co-founder and CEO Sorin Grama told TechCrunch. “It’s just an easier entry point.”

The Somerville, Massachusetts-based startup, which was founded in 2017, has raised $7.5 million to date, including a $4.5 million seed round, Grama said. It’s currently raising a $6 million round to support field trials of its equipment.

Transaera’s core technology is a proprietary material that coats its heat pump’s heat exchangers, which resemble a car’s radiator. In Transaera’s DOAS, air brought into the unit passes over the special material, which removes moisture from the air. The drier air then hits the evaporator coils, which cool the air to match the temperature inside the building.

Air conditioners and dehumidifiers all generate heat in the process of removing humidity from the air. Usually, that heat is wasted, but Transaera reuses it to drive moisture off its desiccant material, which sits on a porous wheel. As the wheel passes through incoming air, it absorbs moisture. The loaded desiccant then rotates away from the incoming air and through the waste heat coming off the evaporator coils. The warm air carries the unwanted moisture outside. In the winter, the system can reverse itself, helping to preserve indoor humidity as the heat pump warms the incoming air.

Many other DOAS systems that live on commercial rooftops today also use heat pumps to dehumidify incoming air, but because they rely on cold temperatures to condense the water on the coils, the air emerging from them can be overly cooled relative to what’s in the building (especially in spring and fall, when temps might not be warm enough to call for air conditioning). The units then have to reheat the air, often using natural gas. “It’s a really inefficient, stupid way of doing these dedicated outdoor air systems,” Grama said.

Transaera’s approach uses as much as 40% less energy than current top-end DOASs, he said. For now, the company’s technology lives on one commercial rooftop, but Grama said more are coming.

There’s some urgency: Because removing humidity requires so much energy, it’s responsible for 1% of all greenhouse gas emissions, according to a recent study. That’s about half what aviation generates, a sector that’s received far more scrutiny. Cutting dehumidification’s energy use by 40% would make a serious dent in that. Dad would approve.

Exclusive: Anysphere, a GitHub Copilot rival, has raised an over $60M Series A at  $400M valuation from a16z, Thrive, sources say

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Digital java code text

Image Credits: Oleksandr Hruts (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Anysphere, a two-year-old startup that’s developed an AI-powered coding assistant called Cursor, has raised over $60 million in a Series A financing at a $400 million post-money valuation, two sources familiar with the deal told TechCrunch. 

The round was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive Capital. Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO of Stripe, also participated in the round.

Anysphere, a16z and Collison didn’t respond to a request for comment. Thrive declined comment. 

The company was co-founded by Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark and Aman Sanger while they were students at MIT. Truell and Sanger later participated in Neo Scholars, a prestigious mentorship program for undergraduate students majoring in technical fields. Neo, which also runs an accelerator and a venture fund, led Anysphere’s pre-seed investment. Last year, the company raised an $11 million seed round led by OpenAI Startup Fund with participation from former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi and other angel investors.

Anysphere is part of an increasingly crowded field of AI coding copilot startups. Other startups that aim to make software writing more efficient include Cognition, Poolside, Magic and Augment, among others.

Investors’ interest in this area is not a surprise. During its earnings call last month, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that GitHub Copilot, an AI-powered tool that helps developers write code faster and more efficiently, “is already larger than all of GitHub was when it was acquired,” referring to its revenue. Reports estimate that GitHub’s revenue was as high as $300 million when the tech giant agreed to buy the software development platform for $7.5 billion in 2018.

That means about 3 million developers worldwide are paying Microsoft $100 a year (the annual cost of GitHub’s individual subscription) to be more productive coders, estimated a VC with an investment stake in one of the coding startups. “If you have that mountain of demand, you get a pretty competitive landscape,” he said.

Anysphere’s revenue and usage has also been growing fast, one person said. 

In July, Business Insider reported that Anysphere was in the process of raising a new round and aiming for a $400 million valuation.

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Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki has passed away at age 56

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Image Credits: Wikimedia commons

Tragedy has again struck a famous Silicon Valley family. Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki just passed away, according to social media posts by her husband, Dennis Troper, and by Google CEO Sundar Pichai. She was 56.

Wrote Troper on Facebook earlier Friday night, “It is with profound sadness that I share the news of Susan Wojcicki passing. My beloved wife of 26 years and mother to our five children left us today after 2 years of living with non-small cell lung cancer.”

“Susan was not just my best friend and partner in life, but a brilliant mind, a loving mother, and a dear friend to many. Her impact on our family and the world was immeasurable. We are heartbroken, but grateful for the time we had with her. Please keep our family in your thoughts as we navigate this difficult time.”

Pichai also sent a note to Google employees late Friday.

“By now you may have heard the news that Susan Wojcicki has passed away after two years of living with lung cancer. Even as I write this it feels impossible to me that it’s true. Susan was one of the most active and vibrant people I have ever met,” the note said.

Non-small cell lung cancer is one of two primary types of lung cancer and the most common kind, according to the Yale School of Medicine. Because its symptoms are often mistaken for common illnesses, 80 percent of people diagnosed with the condition have already progressed to advanced stages, according to a fact sheet associated with the university.

Wojcicki’s passing comes on the heels of another heart-breaking loss for Wojcicki and her husband in February of this year, when their 19-year-old son, Marco Troper, died of an accidental overdose in his dorm room at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a freshman.

Wojcicki rose to fame as the CEO of YouTube, a role she held for nine years before stepping down in early 2023, saying in a blog post at the time that she had “decided to start a new chapter focused on my family, health and personal projects I’m passionate about.”

Wojcicki was among the first 20 employees of Google, which went on to acquire YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion — what seemed like an astronomical amount at the time. She famously became involved with the company after renting the garage of her Menlo Park, Calif., home to friends Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who were Ph.D. students at Stanford at the time. (Google was restructured in 2015, at which point Alphabet became its parent company.)

According to reports over the years, it was after observing the early traction of YouTube that Wojcicki herself — then a marketing manager at Google — proposed to Page and Brin that Google buy the video streaming platform.

Under her leadership, YouTube became a multibillion dollar cash generator for Google. In 2023, YouTube posted $8.1 billion in revenue through ad sales — nearly 10% of Alphabet’s total revenue.

Wojcicki’s family has deep ties to Silicon Valley and to the Bay Area more broadly. One of her sisters is 23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki. Another sister, Janet, is a professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco. Meanwhile, their mother Esther Wojcicki, is a renowned educator who has written extensively on how to raise successful children.

Here is the full memo Pichai sent to Google employees:

Googlers,

By now you may have heard the news that Susan Wojcicki has passed away after two years of living with lung cancer. Even as I write this it feels impossible to me that it’s true. Susan was one of the most active and vibrant people I have ever met. Her loss is devastating for all of us who know and love her, for the thousands of Googlers she led over the years, and for millions of people all over the world who looked up to her, benefited from her advocacy and leadership, and felt the impact of the incredible things she created at Google, YouTube, and beyond.

Susan’s journey, from the garage she rented to Larry and Sergey … to leading teams across consumer products and building our Ads business … to becoming the CEO of YouTube, one of the world’s most significant platforms, is inspiring by any measure. But she didn’t stop there. As one of the earliest Googlers — and the first to take maternity leave — Susan used her position to build a better workplace for everyone. And in the years that followed, her advocacy around parental leave set a new standard for businesses everywhere. Susan was also deeply passionate about education. She realized early on that YouTube could be a learning platform for the world and championed “edutubers” — especially those who extended the reach of STEM education to underserved communities.

Over the last two years, even as she dealt with great personal difficulties, Susan devoted herself to making the world better through her philanthropy, including supporting research for the disease that ultimately took her life. I know that was very meaningful to her and I’m so glad she took the time to do it.

Susan always put others first, both in her values and in the day to day. I’ll never forget her kindness to me as a prospective “Noogler” 20 years ago. During my Google interview she took me out for an ice cream and a walk around campus. I was sold – on Google and Susan.

I feel so fortunate to have spent so many years working with Susan closely, as I’m sure many of you do — she was absolutely loved by her teams here. Her time on earth was far too short, but she made every minute count.

We’re in close touch with Susan’s family, including her husband and fellow Googler, Dennis. We will share more soon about how we’re going to celebrate her incredible life. In the meantime, let’s honor Susan’s memory by continuing to build a Google she would be proud of.