Technology

Jordi Greenham, the co-founder and CEO of Mexican long-term rentals startup Homie, has resigned after a sexual harassment investigation was carried out by the companyethics board.

On February 14, Homie launched an investigation into allegations of sexual harassment against Greenham, according to a corporate Facebook post. The message followed reports of sexual harassment that were posted to Facebook earlier the same day. In them, a woman, who has asked to remain anonymous to protect her privacy, claimed that CEO Greenham propositioned her in a WhatsApp message around 1:30 a.m. on February 14 to spend the night with him in exchange for 3,000 pesos (about $150 USD).

Below is a screenshot of her Facebook post, which translates to English as:

Today, Jordi Greenham Asensio, co-founder of Homie offered me money to spend the night with him. It should be noted that we do not have a personal connection and that he contacted me on LinkedIn a few months ago to offer me a job at his company, we communicated through WhatsApp to schedule the interviews and for his team to communicate with me. I carried out the process and I did not get the position and there, that is the extension of the &relationship&.

It is not correct that someone, in this case a man, thinks that it is acceptable to make these types of solicitations. It makes me angry that I delayed in saying something about this in thinking that there are no consequences for these types of actions. Attached evidence of the conversation.

The WhatsApp exchange can be translated to English here:

Homie CEO Greenham:

Hi

I would like to see you

Recipient:

Can you explain to me the random texts at strange hours?

Homie CEO Greenham:

No, there is no rational explanation.

It was irrational. But I understand that it doesn&t interest you

How much could I pay you for one night?

3,000?

The woman tells TechCrunch that she met Greenham once through a mutual friend five years ago but had no contact with him since that initial introduction until he reached out to her on LinkedIn in September 2019. She told TechCrunch she had been interested in a role at the fast-growing startup, and communicated with Greenham over WhatsApp to arrange interviews and discuss the position. Ultimately, after interviewing for the role, she says she never heard back from the company.

TechCrunch reached out to both Greenham and Homie on February 21. Homie responded to TechCrunchrequest for comment on the 23rd with this statement:

On the 14th of February, the Homie Board of Directors was informed of the unacceptable behavior of the CEO and took immediate action. The BoardEthics Committee carried out the necessary investigation and on the 16th of February, after having discussed it internally, Jordi Greenham Asensio resigned as CEO and President of the company. The fast and unwavering action of the Board reflects our commitment for the highest standard of conduct, in all levels of the organization. The opinions and comments of Jordi Greenham no longer represent that of Homie.

HomieFebruary 14 Facebook post detailed that its code of ethics deems harassment, discrimination and gender violence to be unacceptable and that those standards apply to &all levels of the organization.&

Homie, which has raised $8.2 million, is currently active in more than 100 Mexican cities. According to Crunchbase, the company employs between 100-250 people. Homie recently raised a $7 million Series A round in December 2019 led by Equity International, a fund founded by American billionaire Sam Zell.

The week is kicking off with a major piece of M-A in the world of financial technology startups. Today Intuit — the accounting, tax filing and financial planning software giant behind QuickBooks, TurboTax and Mint, confirmed that it plans to acquire Credit Karma — the fintech startup with more than 100 million registered users, 37 million of them active monthly users, which lets people check their credit scores, shop for credit cards and loans, file taxes and more. Intuit said it would pay $7.1 billion for Credit Karma, making this Intuitbiggest-ever acquisition to date, and one of the biggest in the category of privately-held fintech companies.

The news confirms a report from the WSJ that surfaced over the weekend noting that Intuit was finalising a deal to buy the startup for $7 billion in a cash and share offer, in the first big acquisition to be made by CEO Sasan Goodarzi since he took the role just over year ago. Intuit also announced itsquarterly earnings todayin which it reported revenue growth of 13% on revenues of $1.7 billion, beating analyst estimates of $1.68 billion. However, it missed analysts& average expectations for earnings per share: it reported non-GAAP EPS of $1, while they were forecasting $1.03.

&Our mission is to power prosperity around the world with a bold goal of doubling the household savings rate for customers on our platform,& said Goodarzi, in statement. &We wake up every day trying to help consumers make ends meet. By joining forces with Credit Karma, we can create a personalized financial assistant that will help consumers find the right financial products, put more money in their pockets and provide insights and advice, enabling them to buy the home they&ve always dreamed about, pay for education and take the vacation they&ve always wanted.&

Intuit plans to keep Credit Karma — which makes more than $1 billion in revenues annually — as a standalone operation, run by CEOKenneth Lin, who cofounded the startup with Ryan Graciano and Nichole Mustard.

&We started Credit Karma with a goal to build a trusted destination for all consumers, to make financial progress regardless of where they are in life,& said Lin, in a statement. &We saw the opportunity to enrich peoplefinancial lives through transparency, simplicity and certainty.&

The acquisition is an obvious fit for Intuit, where it will serve two purposes. Intuit can tap Credit Karmacustomer base and range of services — it partners with some 100 financial service providers in its marketplace — to complement those it already offers, to help upsell those users to Intuitpremium, paid services. And Intuit can use it to grow its wider business by tapping a set of consumers — typically younger users — that Credit Karma has possibly been more successful in capturing than Intuit has.

Including this deal, Intuit has made some 31 acquisitions to date. It has a track record of acquiring startups with big potential and running with them. One of its major business units today, Mint (for personal financial planning and management), is based on a startup of the same name that it bought in 2009 (for the relatively modest sum of $170 million).

In reality, Credit Karma and Intuit have a lot in common in terms of what they do. While Intuit provides a set of services and software to professional accountants, perhaps its biggest claim to fame is that it helped build and popularise a movement in &DIY accounting& and related software: a set of easy-to-use online tools that ordinary people can use to manage their money, file their taxes and more.

Intuitcurrently has a market cap of over $77 billion, and while its share price was down about 3.75%in market trading today, it has over the last year (and more) seen a gradual rise in its share price — a reflection of its overall profitability, stability and dominance in its particular area of financial services. After market close, the share price was up 2.21% in the wake of the Credit Karma news.

And this is also where Credit Karma comes in. The company started out originally in 2007 providing free credit scores, later extending that to full credit reports. Eventually, it used the data and audience it had amassed as the basis for an expansion into a wider range of related services — which, like Intuit, Credit Karma built around the premise of ordinary consumers using the internet and cloud-based services to take charge of their financial lives.

Credit Karmalaunch of a financial planning tool in 2013 drew a direct comparison to IntuitMint. And since then, Credit Karma has launched other products that directly rival Intuit, for example a free tool to help people file their taxes. These not only represented direct competition, but a disruptive threat, since Credit Karmaproducts skewed younger and were built on a &free& premise (offering the products at no charge and instead making money off showing users and selling relevant, related products). The fact that Credit Karma partners with so many other financial services providers also means itsitting on a huge data trove that it leverages to build and personalise products, representing a data science angle for Intuit here, too.

The company reported crossing $500 million in revenues in 2017 (meaning itmore than doubled revenues in the last two years), and it used that momentum to move into international servicesand more. (I&d add that the diversification was significant for another reason: the Equifax breach of 2017 has cast a shadow on credit scores and credit histories; and how they are used and sometimes misused.)

Credit Karma over the weekend told us that it would not comment on rumours or speculation regarding the reports, but interestingly it had long eyed plans for an IPO, talking about the ideaas early as 2015, when it was valued at just $3.5 billion.

A$500 million secondary round in 2018, at a $4 billion valuation, helped put off those plans for a while. Credit Karma had raised just over $645 million to date, according to PitchBook, with investors including Silver Lake, Tiger Global, Capital G, Founders Fund, Felicis and others.

More generally, while we have seen some successes in the world of fintech IPOs — for example, both Adyen in Europe and Square in the US have definitely gone up in the last five years — the availability of large amounts of private capital from VCs and private equity have helped fintech startups, even the outsized ones like Stripe, stay private for longer, holding on for more profitability, and/or possibly another kind of liquidity event to come along.

Even within the trend for wider consolidation in the world of financial technology — where a number of smaller venture-backed startups, as well as more scaled up and mature fintech businesses, are getting snapped up by bigger fish in a bid for more economies of scale — Credit Karmasale to Intuit stands out as one of the bigger deals in terms of price.

CrunchBase has recorded around 150 fintech M-A deals in the years ittracked them, with some of the largest including the acquisition of First Data by Fiserv for $22 billion; PayPal acquiring Honey for $4 billion; Fiserv also acquiring CheckFree for $4.4 billion; and PayPal acquiring IZettle for $2.2 billion (see a pattern here)?

MWC may have been canceled on account of rising coronavirus concerns, but the party still went on for Huawei (albeit to what appears to have been a mostly empty room). A year after wowing crowds with the Mate X, the company is introducing the Mate Xs.

Rather than a proper successor, the device appears to be the result of Huaweidecision to go back to the drawing board, following Samsungvery public problems with its own original foldable.

The design looks nearly identical to the original version of the phone — which is a pro. Honestly, the one major downside of the device (aside from a lofty price tag) is the fact that it never fully arrived, outside of what appears to be a relatively small batch offering in China.

Like Samsung, Huaweiupdate focused a lot on the hinge; with increased mechanical components, the product should be more rugged than the original. Keep in mind that, while we were able to play around with the original Mate X, that was about it. Personally, I saw one at MWC and had an opportunity to try one for a few minutes during lunch, between meetings at Huawei HQ in Shenzhen.

Now that foldables have arrived, it seems Huawei is finally ready to take the leap. Of course, one ought not forget the companyongoing issues here in the States that will not only make it more difficult to procure here, but also blocks access to Android apps and services. That will continue to be a major issue for the companyproducts, going forward.

Price, too, will continue to be an issue, at around $2,700 when it goes up for sale in certain markets next month. That extremely inflated price gets you a 6.6-inch display, 5G, a beefy 4,500 mAh battery, the latest Kirin 990 chip, 8GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. Go big and/or go home, right?

Inspired by the work of Instacart shoppers over the last few years, a handful of workers at Target-owned Shipt, a grocery delivery service, are beginning to organize. With the help of two key Instacart shopper-activists, Vanessa Bain and Sarah Clarke, who goes by a pseudonym, Shipt workers are now demanding better wages and the elimination of what some describe as a culture of fear.

&We want to be the first responders,& Clarke tells TechCrunch. &Whenever gig workers find out there is a pay cut or some type of issue, they&ll feel comfortable coming to us.&

In January, Shipt started testing a new pay structure where, instead of basing it on cart size, Shipt takes into account the time it takes to complete and deliver an order. Shipt implemented these changes in Kalamazoo, Mich., San Antonio and Philadelphia. As Gizmodo reported earlier this month, there was some shopper backlash.

Prior to the changes, shoppers had received a $5 flat rate and 7.5% of the total store receipt, one shopper, who asked to remain anonymous, told TechCrunch.

&We are losing money as shoppers at a ridiculous rate,& a shopper from Kalamazoo tells TechCrunch. &A very good, close friend of mine told me in the three weeks since the new structure was implemented, she has lost the equivalent of a car payment. It is a lot of money. Our best guestimation is, we&re all losing about 30% or more. I did four orders this past weekend and I lost money on every single one.&

But Shipt says its goal is to maximize the earning potential for its shoppers and to make sure they get the most value for their time spent. Thatwhy Shipt is testing this new pay structure in certain markets to better account for time spent shopping and delivering orders,Shipt Director of Corporate Communications and Outreach Julie Coop told TechCrunch.

&In this structure, shoppers are guaranteed to make at least the minimum in the pay range shown at the time the order is offered to them,& Coop said. &That range is based on the estimated amount of time the order will take to complete. We&ve seen pay levels remain consistent overall, and in some markets slightly higher. As always, Shipt Shoppers receive 100% of their tips on top of order pay.&

Shipt connected me with Stacy Smith, who shops for Shipt in Kalamazoo, Mich. Smith tells TechCrunch she has no issue with the new policy, saying that sheactually seen a slight increase in her pay. While it was more attractive and economical for her to get bigger orders in the old pay model, the size of the order now doesn&t matter.

&I&m now getting a little less pay in larger-size orders and a little bit increase in the middle or smaller orders, which is the abundance of them,& Smith says. &If we&re not getting paid a little bit more for those smaller to mid-sized orders, that makes sense to me. The big picture is we used to get upset because we had these small or mid-sized orders. But now we get paid a little more for those orders.&

At this point, itnot clear how many of Shiptworkers are for or against this new pay structure. Still, a number of workers reached out to Clarke and Bain once the pay structure started rolling out.

&Shipt has been pretty under the radar,& Clarke said. &No one is really paying attention to them — mostly because the workers are scared to speak out.&

Willy Solis, who shops for Shipt in the Dallas area, is one of the shoppers who reached out to Clarke.

&I&ve followed Sarah and Vanessawork and their efforts over on Instacart, because I&m on that platform as well,& Solis tells TechCrunch. &I&ve been seeing what they&ve been able to accomplish, so when Sarah asked in our group lounge if anyone is interested in talking, I jumped at it.&

Solis says he had been thinking about organizing for some time, but there had been no catalyst for him and other workers to do something. Now, Solis is working with Clarke and Bain through their Gig Workers Collective to figure out their strategy moving forward.

&While I am afraid of being deactivated due to speaking out, I am hopeful Shipt will hear the Shipt shopper communityvoice as a collective whole, rather than censoring and ignoring dissenting concerns,& he says.

There are two main Facebook groups where Shipt shoppers interact. One is Shipt Shoppers United, which one shopper from Iowa, who asked to remain anonymous, describes as being &a little more real.& The group strictly prohibits people from Shiptcorporate team, but itmuch smaller in size. This group has just a little over 6,000 members.

The other group is the Shipt Shopper Lounge, which is administered by members from Shipt HQ. This group has more than 100,000 members. Itin this group where Solis says Shipt has created a &cult-like environment& where the company deletes any negative comments in Facebook groups for shoppers and only lets shoppers see &feel-good stories in an attempt to keep up shopper moral.&

Solis said his comments have been deleted from the Shipt Shopper Lounge Facebook group and his local Shipt group. This culture of fear, Solis says, leaves some shoppers feeling like they have to take every order, or else they&ll be punished in some way, like getting sent low-paying orders or getting deactivated. Or, if they speak out against the company in Facebook groups, some say they fear they&ll be deactivated.

&Shopper feedback has been incredibly important to improving the experience we create for our shopper community, members and retail partners,& Coop said. &We encourage ShiptShoppers to share their opinions and feedback about their journey withShipt, and we offer multiple feedback channels where shoppers are encouraged to speak freely toShipt about their shopper experience.&

But the Iowa-based shopper, for example, referred to the vibe of the group as brainwashing.

&Italmost like it tries to brainwash you into thinking the company can&t do anything wrong,& the shopper from Iowa says. &They won&t let you post negative things about it. If you do therea good chance you&ll be deactivated.&

This Iowa shopper says she saw someone question the pay model Shipt is testing, only for that comment to be deleted. Shipt, however, says it only deactivates people based on things like performance issues.

&Shipt does not make deactivation decisions based on shopper feedback that may be critical of Shipt, but is respectful and falls within our guidelines of appropriate actions,& Coop said in a statement to TechCrunch. &We do have written agreements with all shoppers that outline possible causes for deactivation including consistent performance issues resulting in a poor customer experience or unlawful behavior.&

While the culture and pay practices at Shipt are concerning to Solis, he says what really gets at him isthe amount of control he says Shipt tries to exert over him.

&I wake up in the middle of the night scared that I forgot an order and will get deactivated,& he said, &Thatthe type of fear they instill into you. I like being an independent contractor but I am not an independent contractor with Shipt in any sense of the word. The exercise of control and them telling me how to do my work and deliveries — it is control.&

Shipt, for example, requires shoppers to take certain training classes, such as Late Delivery refresher, which is sent to shoppers who have been late 10% of the time on their last 50 orders. If shoppers don&t get a perfect score, they risk being disabled from the platform. Herewhat the course, which Shipt has designed to take about 15 to 20 minutes, looks like.

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Smith, on the other hand, says she feels like she can truly be independent on Shipt. Smith pointed to how she can make her own schedule determine which orders she wants to take.

&I know people look into things quite a bit and come up with theories,& Smith says. &But at the end of the day, thereno way to say Shipt is trying to control this, that and the other. I&ve never felt controlled by them at all.&

Shipt is the latest company in the gig economy to find itself at odds with its workers. Last year marked a turning point among gig workers who deliver for Instacart and DoorDash, as well as people who drive for Uber and Lyft. Between the passage of gig worker protections bill AB 5 and workers at Spin unionizing, gone are the days where workers for these big tech companies can be silenced.

&We do have some headwinds in organizing,& Solis says. &The company is active in our groups. We have a lot of resistance from that standpoint so we need different strategies to let people know they can be anonymous and speak out and be heard.&

Max Q is a new weekly newsletter all about space. Sign up here to receive it weekly on Sundays in your inbox.

Busy week for SpaceX — across funding, space tourism and next-gen spacecraft. Therealso a space station resupply mission coming up that itgetting ready for, and signs (this time literally) continue to suggest that its first human spaceflight mission is imminent.

Lots of other news, too, including our own: We announced this week that NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine is going to be our guest onstage at TC Sessions: Space coming up in June.

Farewell to a legend

Katherine Johnson, a mathematician who defied prejudice in the &50s and &60s to help NASA send the first men to the moon, has died at the age of 101. She was a pioneer, a role model and an instrumental part of Americaspace program, and she will be dearly missed.

SpaceX plans to build Starships at a furious clip

SpaceX is serious about iteration — its strategy of building (and failing — and learning from its failures) fast is in full effect for its Starship development program. Elon Musk said on Twitter this week that the plan is to build them as frequently as possible with significant improvements between each successive spacecraft, with the aim of going through two or three iterations before flying an orbital mission later this year.

SpaceX seeking $250 million in new funding

The still-private SpaceX is going back to investors for more cash, likely to help it with the expensive proposition of building a bunch of Starships in rapid succession essentially by hand. Itsaid to be seeking $250 million in a round that could close as early as mid-March, according to a CNBC report.

SpaceX finds an experienced partner for Crew Dragon space tourism

One side of SpaceXbusiness that isn&t necessarily as obvious as its commercial cargo launch services is the space tourism angle. This week, the company announced a partnership with Space Adventures, the same firm that has arranged paid trips to the Space Station for private citizens aboard Soyuz capsules. The first of these trips, which won&t go to the ISS but instead will fly up to a higher orbit, take a trip around Earth and come back, is set to take off as early as next year. And if you have to ask about the price, you probably can&t afford it.

New platform headed to the ISS in March

The ISS gets a new platform next month that can support attached payloads — up to a dozen — from research partners, including academic institutions and private companies. It&ll go up aboard SpaceXnext resupply mission for the station, which is currently targeting liftoff on March 2. Also, Adidas is sending up a machine that makes its BOOST shoe soles, just to see how it works in space.

Japan is going to get and return a soil sample from a Mars moon

Japan is sending a mission to Phobos and Deimos to study the two moons of Mars, using a probe that will orbit the Red Planetnatural satellites loaded with sensors. It&ll also carry a small lander, that will itself deploy an even smaller rover, which will study the surface of Phobos directly. If all goes to plan, it&ll collect a sample and bring that back to Earth for further study here.

SpaceX talent is fueling the LA startup ecosystem

It turns out that SpaceX, not Snap, may be the most important young technology company for developing the Los Angeles startup ecosystem. Jon Shieber documents how SpaceX alum have gone forth and built a number of companies in the area that have gone on to raise big cash, as well as very young startups that have had a promising beginning. Extra Crunch subscription required.

Meanwhile, in Canada

Yes, LA has a bustling space tech ecosystem. But communications satellite startup Kepler calls Canada home, and it recently made the interesting decision to build its small satellites in-house — in its own facility in downtown Toronto. Founder and CEO Mina Mitry tells me why thatthe best choice for his company. Extra Crunch subscription required.

The new season of Fortnitesecond chapter finally landed last week, shaking up a reimagined map that burst dramatically out of a black hole in the game last year. Over the weekend, we scoped out whatchanged in a game now sprinkled with secret agents, laser beams and all manner of things dipped in gold. Happily, we can report that Epic returns the game to its true colors in season 2, with some innovative ideas that deepen the game for casual players.

The black hole event and subsequent total map makeover were exciting at the time, but as the months ticked by, Epicdecision to pare down the gameexcesses left the game feeling bare. In season 2, Epic piles a lot of new ideas onto the gamefoundation, and the game feels weirder and more chaotic with a map thatmuch more alive as a result. And bananas in suits. Did we mention bananas in suits?

In season 2, Fortnite takes its most committed stab yet at a coherent theme, with spies, secret societies, dapper bananas, bulky henchmen and… a really swole cat for some reason. Ita fun vibe and well-executed so far. That theme plays out everywhere, from a revamped battle pass menu designed as a spy headquarters to some very dynamic new high-risk/high-reward map hotspots chock full of special new weapons, locked vaults and laser beams.

Even better, the new locations are stocked with NPC versions of the boss-like characters the season introduces us to right off the bat, making for a fun and reasonably challenging way to mix up gameplay when you need a break from the sometimes lonely intensity of battle royale play.

The new season keeps the old map mostly intact while adding five main new locations, all heavily guarded, loot-rich fortresses. That means a new point of interest near each corner of the map, and one right on the central island (a spot inevitably destined for something more interesting than a suburban home). The rest of the map doesn&t have many visual changes, but a handful of smaller, old locations scattered around the map have been co-opted by spy organizations and staffed with henchmen, which makes for a chaotic surprise when you come across them in the heat of gameplay. Even Pleasant Park has its own underground spy hub now.

Down the line, the new season will also introduce two competing factions for players to join, Ghost and Shadow. Depending on which faction you choose, players can unlock some pretty cool variants on battle pass skins, including Meowscles, a shirtless, muscle-bound catman with a pec-flexing animation that might be the best thing to ever happen to Fortnite. Well, except for the new teleporting port-a-potties. You&ll find those soon enough.

As far as changes that will affect gameplay, there are many, many unvaulted weapons mixing things up relative to last seasonstripped-down arsenal. Traps are gone, chests no longer shower you with fishing rods (thankfully) and heavy assault rifles and all manner of silenced guns have made a comeback. And if you really want to be treated to the best weapons in the game, you can raid one of the five new spy headquarters to take down bosses, including an explosive-happy rocker named TNTina, a sharply dressed guy calling himself Midas and Meowscles (oh Meowscles!), who hangs out on his own gigantic, laser-guarded yacht.

As you work through the battle pass, you&ll also unlock these boss characters as skins. Ita fun way to drape some light narrative over a game loved mostly for its incoherent total cartoon chaos rather than a character-centric light and fluffy multiplayer shooter like Overwatch. And because Epic is tasked with the impossible — maintaining momentum on a game with such historic success it basically became a mainstream social network at its peak — carving out a deeper game under Fortnitecandy-colored shell can&t hurt.