Tag: small-business

If DoorDash wins, what do we lose?

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In the first-ever season of Sesame Street , in 1970, cast member Bob McGrath appeared in a memorable sketch where he receives a delivery from his local grocer, a grumpy blue muppet. “Did you get everything I ordered?” McGrath asks. “No,” comes the reply, but he’s helpfully supplemented the delivery with other fresh veggies. McGrath breaks into song, a version of the now iconic “People in Your Neighborhood,” to explain to kids the role a grocer plays in the community. The grocer is the bearer of sustenance. A few weeks ago, during Super Bowl LV, “People in Your Neighborhood” got remixed into an anthem for the app-based delivery platform DoorDash to signal to the world that it is expanding from restaurants to convenience and grocery. In a crisp 60 seconds, a tap dancing Daveed Diggs ( Hamilton )—directed by French auteur Michel Gondry ( Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind )—wanders through a hyperrealized Sesame Street urbanscape with Big Bird, Elmo, and Super Grover, pointing out all the great local businesses. His message: Your neighborhood is a bounty of bakeries, grocery stores, restaurants, and smoothie stalls. And in 2021, DoorDash is the bearer of sustenance. For DoorDash, its Super Bowl bet paid off. It informed tens of millions of viewers that DoorDash could bring them everything from both “big shops and mom and pops,” as Diggs crooned. It told investors that the company had a strategic plan to live up to and grow into its lofty valuation. Finally, it put a happy face on what’s a highly challenging, cutthroat business which has yet to produce a successful company built to last. The ad may have cost somewhere north of $10 million to produce and air, including a $1 million donation to Sesame Workshop, but DoorDash’s market cap increased by $10 billion, to more than $65 billion, in the 10 days after the ad debuted. For almost all of DoorDash’s seven-plus years, two things about the company have been true: It has aspired to be a logistics company that did more than restaurant delivery—one of the first articles ever written about the startup, in March 2014, was headlined ‘DoorDash enters food-delivery fray with much grander ambitions’—and it’s been controversial as it’s pursued those dreams. It has been accused of “ swiping “delivery driver tips, and restaurants have sued it for listing their eateries on its platform without their consent. DoorDash has also fielded complaints from the restaurants it aims to serve for taking too fat a slice of their revenues. Finally, it took part in a $200 million-plus campaign last year to convince Californians to legalize the use of contract labor in delivery, via ballot Proposition 22, thereby preventing workers from attaining the protections that come with employee status. So when DoorDash went public just over two months ago and stock-market investors bid the company’s shares up to 92% higher than its IPO price on its first day, the fervor, which valued the company almost four-times higher than its last private fundraising in June 2020, only further stoked the debate around DoorDash. Read More …

What’s really at stake in Apple and Facebook’s war over user tracking

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While the PR and media layer of Apple’s dispute with Facebook over user tracking by apps may still be going, at a strategic level the drama’s pretty much over, and it’s looking like Apple won. In a nutshell, Apple will soon require apps that want to track user’s movements within other companies’ apps or websites to get explicit permission to do so from the user. Facebook’s apps have long done this without such explicit permission. When the new feature, which Apple calls App Tracking Transparency , was announced earlier this year, Facebook complained loudly that the loss of tracking data will hurt Facebook—and will hurt small businesses more by reducing Facebook’s ability to carefully target ads for them. Apple said it has a responsibility to its users to give them transparency and choice over the way their personal data is used. Neither of those statements is inaccurate, but they leave little room for compromise. This isn’t the first privacy row between the two companies, but this time it was more heated. Apple CEO Tim Cook condemned Facebook’s business model and implied that it’s designed to profit from misinformation . Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg ( reportedly ) said Facebook must “inflict pain” on Apple. But the fact remains that Apple plans to release iOS 14.5, which contains a feature requiring iOS developers, including Facebook, to get permission from users if they want to track said user’s movements across third-party websites and apps. The Apple-Facebook dispute is important for two reasons Read More …

Silicon Valley companies took $380 million in COVID-19 bailout money

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Silicon Valley tech companies took many millions in government bailout money this year via a program intended to allow employers to retain their employees during the pandemic. According to newly released Small Business Administration data, 885 Silicon Valley tech companies borrowed a total of $381.3 million via the Paycheck Protection Program . That figure excludes telecommunications companies and does not account for businesses based in San Francisco. Read More …

Black Friday is the perfect time to unsubscribe from pesky marketing emails

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For some of us, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are a good time to buy a new TV or a Bluetooth speaker. But for marketers, it’s the best time of the year to spam your inbox. Because none of them want to be left out of the consumer feeding frenzy, marketers devote untold hours to designing and strategizing their Black Friday emails. And as e-commerce plays a bigger role in our shopping habits, the volume of emails they send keeps increasing . The ongoing coronavirus pandemic means there will be an even bigger mess in your inbox, as marketers trip over themselves to make sure they’re part of the online shopping rush. But while this might seem like an annoyance, it can also be a gift in disguise. Read More …

Silicon Valley expects a chillier relationship with Biden than Obama

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Now that the Biden administration has announced a transition team and is gradually announcing key advisory and cabinet appointments, the posture of the new administration toward Silicon Valley is becoming clearer. And it’s not the look of a budding friendship. When Biden last worked at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., the White House had an open and friendly relationship with Silicon Valley. For example, the Obama administration also recruited talent from Silicon Valley to form the U.S. Digital Service , the elite technology “startup” within the White House that helped government agencies streamline systems and exploit new agile development methods. Obama also created the position of U.S. chief technology officer within the Office of Science and Technology Policy. From a regulatory standpoint, the tech industry enjoyed a light touch during the Obama years. Its relationship with the Biden administration will likely be different and less trusting. That’s one of the reasons it’s closely watching the formation of the new Biden administration, now in its beginning stages. There’s a lot to watch, since so many government agencies now impact the business of tech. Some high-level appointments, such as Ron Klain as chief of staff, will deal with a broad spectrum of issues, many of which don’t touch tech directly. But others, like the appointment of Janet Yellen as Treasury secretary could, for example, have implications for digital currencies and other financial tech. “There are enormous fintech issues that will be facing the financial regulators, most principally the office of the Comptroller of the Currency, but some issues that’ll touch upon the FDIC, Federal Reserve ,and Treasury as well,” says Jeff Hauser, founder and director of the Revolving Door Project, which tracks presidential appointees who come from various industries. Antitrust under Biden Of chief concern to Big Tech is the Biden administration’s thinking on antitrust. Proposals for breaking up big tech companies in the last couple of years from people such as Massachusetts senator and former presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren have ridden a wave of populist feeling in the country. The Department of Justice has already filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google in federal court, and the Federal Trade Commission is reportedly in the final stages of deciding whether to file its own suit against Facebook. The agencies are also conducting investigations into alleged anticompetitive aspects of marketplaces run by Amazon and Apple. The Valley is waiting for Biden to announce his attorney general and FTC chair , which could tell a lot about the new administration’s plans to control Big Tech. I don’t think this administration is going be kind to Big Tech in general.” Eric White, Seismic Capital Company Biden said precious little about antitrust on the campaign trail, but his statements on adjacent issues give some clues to his thinking Read More …