Tag: pay

Coinbase’s $100 billion lPO provides an alternate investment to bitcoin

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Coinbase , the San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange, is going public on April 14. The company will trade under the ticker COIN and list 114,850,769 shares on the NASDAQ with an initial valuation of $100 billion. Instead of following the traditional initial public offering (IPO) route, Coinbase plans to post its shares straight on the NASDAQ exchange via a direct listing, a technique pioneered by big names like Spotify and Palantir in recent years. Whereas an IPO involves a company creating new shares and having an underwriter that buys them for a set price and then sells them to the market, in a direct listing a company sells existing shares and has no underwriter. But what is Coinbase and why is this such as important development in the cryptocurrency market? The Coinbase business model Coinbase was founded in 2012 by Brian Armstrong, a former engineer at Airbnb, and Fred Ehrsam, who was a trader at Goldman Sachs. Their mission was to make investing and transacting in cryptocurrencies easier, more efficient, and fairer. The company has since risen to become the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the U.S. Even though there are numerous other exchanges around the world with considerably larger trading volumes, including Binance, Huobi, and OKEx, Coinbase’s growth has been incredible lately. Read More …

Amazon’s healthcare push is a threat—and an opportunity—for the industry

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That Amazon Prime membership could soon come with a free same-day doctor’s appointment. The COVID-19 pandemic has made it clear that we need a robust digital healthcare system that extends from the doctor’s office into the home—and the e-commerce Goliath just jumped into the ring prepared to win it all. Investors have flocked to the sector over the past 12 months, and some Wall Street analysts have projected several years of robust growth. However, between last December, when news of Amazon’s planned move into healthcare began leaking in the media, and this March when the company officially announced its plans , stock prices for legacy health companies such as CVS, Walgreens, and digital-first disruptors along the lines of GoodRx lost billions of dollars in value and reshuffled the presumed leaderboard. What can existing healthcare providers do to survive and thrive in the face of what will surely be heated competition? The simple answer is to take a page directly from Amazon’s playbook: Create an incredibly easy-to-use one-stop digital shop for everything prospective patients could ever need and pay obsessive attention to customer experience and satisfaction. Amazon is renowned for taking costly business expenditures—cloud computing, logistics, and fulfillment—and developing solutions that solve internal challenges while also becoming profitable to the company. Next up on the list is healthcare. Amazon plans to offer 24/7 chat access to clinicians, nationwide telemedicine access, in-home diagnostics, health provider house calls in select cities, and prescription drug delivery, all within an easy-to-use interface. Consumers have come to expect frictionless experiences online and in the physical world. Want a ride somewhere? Press a button. Need your groceries? Press a button. However, today, far too many people seeking healthcare must navigate an endless sea of paperwork, providers, insurance companies, and websites from the mid-’90s. And after all that, they often don’t walk away with what they need. Because healthcare in America is not user-friendly, people defer or delay care and let prescriptions go unfilled or unused. Thousands of lives are lost as a result, and these challenges cost the U.S Read More …

We’re not getting a national vaccine passport. Here’s why it never stood a chance

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Political arguments about vaccine passports have been raging for months : whether we need them, if they could be built equitably , and if they are ultimately an infringement on Americans’ rights to keep their health information private. But while other countries experiment with rolling out digital vaccination credentials, the U.S. national effort was doomed before it ever began. Security experts had hoped that the government would develop a national system for credentialing vaccine recipients. A national vaccine passport would create a single standard that could be used everywhere and would be potentially difficult to fake. But on Tuesday, the White House announced the federal government would not be “supporting” a vaccine credential system. Part of what that means is that there will be no centralized database where all vaccination records live—a crucial feature of vaccine verification systems in other countries like Israel and Estonia. “Unless there was a major change in how health data is viewed from a public and government perspective, it wouldn’t even be possible to create the database,” says JP Pollak, cofounder and chief architect of the Commons Project, which has developed a globally available mobile app for storing COVID-19 testing results. “States have the mandate for maintaining vaccination registries and states are required to report things like how many people have been vaccinated for COVID-19, but they actually are not permitted to transmit the personal information of people back to the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention].” . @PressSec Jen Psaki on possibility of the federal government supporting vaccine passports: “The government is not now, nor will we be supporting a system that requires Americans to carry a credential.” Full video here: https://t.co/TLFF718hVo pic.twitter.com/jJP0Ph95jH — CSPAN (@cspan) April 6, 2021 Since states are charged with maintaining vaccine registries, some, like New York, are creating their own credentialing systems Read More …

Tracy Chou’s Block Party is fighting online trolls—and the startup ecosystem itself

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In January 2021, prominent software engineer Tracy Chou opened up registrations for her company’s first product. The service—like the company, called Block Party—is designed to help people who experience harassment online, starting on Twitter but with the ambition to expand to other platforms. By giving users more control over what they see on Twitter, Chou is hoping to solve one of the biggest and most intractable problems with social media. The problem is also deeply personal. “I have some dedicated harassers who are proud to have been harassing me for six or seven years,” says Chou, who grew up in Silicon Valley as the child of Taiwanese immigrants. “Platforms are really bad at detecting this and don’t really care.” Chou’s experiences with online abuse began when she was in high school, she recalls, but slowly escalated when she became an early employee at Quora and then Pinterest. While at Pinterest, she published a blog post encouraging tech companies to reveal how many female engineers they employed, sparking a movement toward publishing diversity metrics. In 2016, she cofounded Project Include, solidifying her position as an outspoken advocate for equity and inclusion in the tech industry. But as her profile has risen—she now has more than 100,000 Twitter followers —the more she has been forced to deal with trolls, stalkers, and serial harassers sending her abusive, horrifying messages everywhere she goes online. “My whole life is oriented around how I can be safe, psychologically, mentally, and physically,” she says. Now, as Block Party’s founder and CEO, Chou is confronting a new challenge: a well-capitalized competitor offering a free alternative to Block Party. Just a few weeks after Chou opened Block Party to the public, another startup called Sentropy announced a similar product. Like Block Party, Sentropy Protect is designed to help Twitter users manage online harassment by filtering out abusive messages. While Chou ultimately plans to sell subscriptions to Block Party, Sentropy, whose core business is enterprise software, says it will always offer Protect to individual users for free. My whole life is oriented around how I can be safe, psychologically, mentally, and physically.” Tracy Chou, Block Party The financial disparity between the two companies is stark. Though both launched their consumer products in early 2021 and were founded around the same time in 2018, Sentropy has raised a total of $13 million in funding. Block Party has raised less than $1.5 million, from Precursor Ventures and a handful of angel investors including Project Include CEO Ellen Pao, former Facebook executive Alex Stamos, and former TechCrunch editor Alexia Bonatsos. When we spoke in early March, Chou was her company’s only full-time employee and she’d built most of the product on her own. Sentropy, meanwhile, has a team of 26. For some in Silicon Valley, news that Sentropy would be competing with Block Party touched a raw nerve Read More …