Technology

In an early-evening press conference, President Donald Trump tapped Vice President Mike Pence to lead the U.S. response to the COVID-19 outbreak that has spread through Europe, Asia and Latin America.

The new coronavirus strain, which has infected about 81,000 people around the world and killed 3,000, has already wrought havoc on the global economy. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned yesterday that the U.S. will likely not be able to escape the spread of the virus.

&Itnot a question of if this will happen but when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illnesses,& said Dr. Nancy Messonier,director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, in a press conference given by the Centers for Disease Control on Tuesday. &Disruption to everyday life might be severe.&

Earlier this evening, California reported its first case of community transmission, which was confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control, according to The New York Times. Thata case where an infected person was not exposed to anyone known to be infected with the virus and had not traveled to countries where the virus had spread.

Speaking alongside Pence; Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar; National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases head Dr. Anthony Fauci; and principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control Dr. Anne Schuchat, the President stressed that the U.S. government was &very, very ready& to respond to the disease.

Vice President Pence said that the White House would continue to work closely with state and local officials, add additional personnel and work with Congress to ensure that the necessary resources are available. &The threat to the American public remains low,& Pence said.

The White House is asking Congress for $2.5 billion to support efforts to stop the spread of the virus in the U.S. while Senate Democrats led by Chuck Schumer have put an $8.5 billion price tag on the coronavirus fight.

Secretary Azar outlined five areas where the government would look to spend money including: monitor the spread of the virus, cooperate with local governments, develop therapeutics, develop vaccines, and manufacture and purchase personal protective equipment.

Diagnosing the illness has been a particular problem for the U.S. According to multiple reports, the CDC isn&t prepared to test for a potentially rapidly expanding number of cases in the U.S.

Only 12 of the 100 public health labs in the U.S. are able to diagnose the coronavirus because of problems with a test developed by the CDC, according to a Politico report.

Better diagnostics tools are going to be one of the critical areas where startups could play a role in combating the spread of the virus.

&Where startups are going to make contributions is in detection, monitoring, epidemiological predictions, sequencing, supply chain [and] distribution logistics,& wrote James Birch, an entrepreneur and former researcher with the American College of Surgeons.

Scott Gottlieb, the former Food and Drug Administration chief and an investor with New Enterprise Associates, has advocated for the expansion of Emergency Use Authorizations from the organization he used to lead as a way to respond to the need for more, better diagnostic tests.

The lack of effective tests available to public health facilities calls into question exactly how prepared the government is for the potential health crisis. In fact, the White House got rid of the pandemic response group in the Administration in a cost-cutting measure in 2018.

Californiarecently diagnosed new case also casts doubt on the governmentability to effectively respond to the emerging illness. As the University of California Davis Medical Center wrote in an internal document:

&Upon admission, our team asked public health officials if this case could be COVID-19. We requested COVID-19 testing by the CDC, since neither Sacramento County nor (the California Department of Public Health) is doing testing for coronavirus at this time. Since the patient did not fit the existing CDC criteria for COVID-19, a test was not immediately administered…&

On Sunday, the CDC ordered COVID-19 testing of the patient and the patient was put on airborne precautions and strict contact precautions. The positive test results were announced on Wednesday.

Also troubling to some healthcare observers is Penceown track record when it comes to healthcare crises.

As governor of Indiana, Penceinaction led to an outbreak of HIV in one of the statemore rural counties, according to a report in HuffPost. As drug use soared in the state during the opioid crisis, addicts in the county were also becoming infected with the virus because they were sharing needles. Pence opposed a needle-sharing program, which could have limited the spread of the virus.

Fears about how the new coronavirus would impact the economy rattled stock markets earlier this week as news of the diseasespread to Europe were confirmed. The marketslide and the political response in Washington played a role in the presidentdecision to hold a press conference today, judging by the presidentown Twitter account.

It seems like everyone wants student entrepreneurs. Entrepreneur First makes startups out of raw student material, for instance. Most countries want high-skilled students to stick around and make new companies. Only the U.K. likes to charge them a fortune for an education and then kick them out if they don&t earn enough. But I digress!

In its long march to gradually cover several aspects of the U.K.startup scene, Founders Factory has invested in Creator Fund, the student-led venture capital fund. It launches today in the U.K. but plans to spread abroad to unearth startup innovation within European universities. It will use a network of &student VCs& in university campuses to invest in new technology ventures and student founders.

The idea here is that students invest in their peers, offering an alternative route to growth for university-based startups.

So far it has people signed up in 14 U.K. universities and offers up to £30,000 investment per startup. Equity is determined on a &case-by-case& basis. Pretty paltry for the average startup, but a kingransom for the average student starting, I guess.

While Creator Fund thinks that &the best person to find and support the most promising student founders is their classmate next to them in the laboratory or classroom,& I have a feeling this might end up tying them in a few interesting knots that may end up in some conflicts of interest. We shall see.

The fund intends to make about seven investments over the next 12 months. The VC has already made an investment in Imperial College London-based, Refund Giant — a service that syncs with credit and debit cards to automatically issue fast, hands-free VAT refunds for travelers.

Jamie Macfarlane, founder and CEO, said in a statement: &In the US, many of the great tech companies were born on college campuses & Facebook, Google, Snapchat - Yahoo were all started by student founders. The UK has some of the worldbest universities and the same potential for students founders to be creating great businesses. For those high potential students to pursue this path, they need better access to three things & capital, business support and community. We, at Creator Fund, are delivering a new VC model specifically focussed on delivering this. We&re training students at top universities to find and invest in deals with their peers and give them the early-stage support they need. And creating a community where they look around and see other people taking this entrepreneurial path.&

Henry Lane Fox, co-founder and CEO of Founders Factory, added, &What Creator Fund is doing is very special. They are challenging the VC landscape and we are excited to be part of it. It is giving highly-educated students the skills to be the investors of the future and uncover the founders of tomorrow.&

Creator Fund launches with a mix of students from a wide range of backgrounds. Current members of the team include Richa Bajpai from India who has previously built a global CSR company that raised over £20 million and Toyosi Ogedengbe from Nigeria, who has built a platform to help investors deploy capital in West Africa.

At launch, Creator Fund has teams across 14 U.K. universities: Oxford, Cambridge, LSE, UCL, Kings, Imperial, LBS, Warwick, Newcastle, Nottingham, Edinburgh, Leeds, Aberdeen and St Andrews.

TikTok is one of the hottest social media platforms but the CEO of Reddit had some harsh words for the popular app, calling it &fundamentally parasitic& at an event Wednesday.

The comments from Reddit CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman were some of the more controversial offered up during a panel discussion with former public policy exec Elliot Schrage and former Facebook VP of Product Sam Lessin. During a brief conversation about the feature innovations of TikTok, Huffman pushed back hard on the notion that Silicon Valley startups had something to learn from the app.

&Maybe I&m going to regret this, but I can&t even get to that level of thinking with them,& Huffman said. &Because I look at that app as so fundamentally parasitic, that italways listening, the fingerprinting technology they use is truly terrifying, and I could not bring myself to install an app like that on my phone.&

&I actively tell people, ‘Don&t install that spyware on your phone,'& he later added.

The comments were made in front of a large group of Silicon Valley investors and entrepreneurs gathered for a one-day conference called &Social 2030& put on by Lightspeed Venture Partners and LessinVC firm Slow Ventures. The event aimed to highlight and identify trends in social apps that would be shaping the next decade of the space.

Huffmancomments critiqued how TikTok tracks the actions of its users. The social media app was a hot topic of discussion throughout the event, and while Lessin asserted that the app had made a number of notable innovations, Huffman was one of the few at the event to offer deep criticisms of the app.

TechCrunch has reached out to TikTok owner ByteDance for comment.

Made Renovation, a new, San Francisco-based company, thinks it has found a profitable way to help homeowners get done something that busy general contractors in the Bay Area won&t otherwise make time for, which is bathroom remodels.

Why they typically pass on these: they have too many entire homes, or, at least, entire floors, to build for affluent regional homeowners who&ve kept the construction industry buzzing for years.

Ita problem that founders Roger Dickey, who previously co-founded Gigster, and Sagar Shah, who previously founded Quad, think they can solve through technology, naturally. Their big idea: create bathroom templates that customers can customize but whose scope and costs are generally understood, line up these customers, then hire general contractors who are willing to focus only on these bathrooms.

Itan idea thatpicking up traction with these GCs, says Dickey, who explains it this way: &General contractors generally see net margin of 3%& no matter the size of the job, owing to unforeseen hurdles, like pipes that suddenly need to be rebuilt, drains that need to be dug and materials that don&t ship on schedule.

In addition to timing issues, GCs are also often dealing with frustrated building owners who might underestimate a projectcosts, particularly in California, where construction bills often cause sticker shock.

Made Renovation sees an opportunity to make both the lives of GCs and homeowners easier. Through pre-negotiated pricing, volume and materials handling (it right now rents part of a warehouse where it receives goods), itpromising GCs a &reasonable margin& so they can not only pay their crews but live a higher quality of life themselves.

Meanwhile, per the plan, customers need only choose from the company&modern& collection, its more traditional &heritage&design or its &artisan& collection — all of which can be customized — then sit back while their long-neglected bathrooms are remade.

Whether Made Renovation can pull off its grand vision is a giant question mark. The construction industry is nothing if not messy, and in addition to convincing GCs of its merits, Made Renovation — like any marketplace company — has to strike the right balance between customer demand and supply as it gets off the ground.

In the meantime, investors clearly think it has promise. Led by Base10 Partners and with participation from Felicis Ventures, Founders Fund and some individual investors, the company has already raised $9 million in seed funding across two tranches.

Part of that capital is on display right now in San Francisco, where Made Renovation today opened its doors to customers who want to check out its design ideas and, if all goes as planned, will begin lining up their own home improvement projects. Customers simply pick a collection, Made Renovation then puts together a &mood board& of materials from that collection, sends out a 3D rendering of what to expect, then goes into build mode with its GC partners.

As for what happens when that build goes awry, Dickey says Made Renovation has it covered. Most notably, while it guarantees the work to its own customers, the GCs with whom it works guarantee their work to Made Renovation.

Dickey also notes that while the startup &may lose money on some projects,& he stresses there are caveats that customers agree to at the outset. Among these, he says, &We can&t X-ray their walls and see if they don&t have wiring up to code. We don&t cover dry rot in walls.& Technology, suggests Dickey, can only do so much.

If you&re in the Bay Area and want to check out its new storefront, iton Chestnut Street in SF, in the cityMarina district. The company hopes to perfect its model in the Bay Area, says Dickey, then expand into other regions. As for why Made Renovation decided to tackle one of the most challenging U.S. markets first, he suggests itthe best way to test its mettle. &I like the idea of starting a company here, because if we can make it work here, I think we can succeed anywhere.&

Online gaming platform Roblox, now home to 115 million largely Gen Z players per month, announced today it has raised $150 million in Series G funding, led by Andreessen HorowitzLate Stage Venture fund. The company will also open a tender offer for up to $350 million of common and preferred shares, it says.

The company has previously offered stakeholders and employees liquidity through periodic secondary offerings, as it believes in its long-term potential. Roblox is also cash-flow positive, according to its CFO Michael Guthrie.

Others participating in the Series G include new investors Temasek and Tencent Holdings Limited, as well as existing investors Altos Ventures, Meritech Capital, and Tiger Global Management.

The funding comes at a period of significant growth for the gaming platform. Just last summer, it was being visited by 100 million users, topping Minecraft, and its developer community of over 2 million actives earned $110 million in 2019 — up from around $70+ million in 2018 and $40+ million in 2017.

Since then, Roblox has further invested in its developer business, with the launch of new tools for building more realistic 3D experiences and a marketplace where creators can sell their own development assets and tools to others, among other things.

Roblox offers a platform for its developers to build upon, similar to the App Store. Many of its most popular games are free, instead monetizing as players spend on in-game items using virtual cash called Robux. Some of its largest games average over 10 million users monthly. Over 10 games have seen more than 1 billion visits.

Players on Roblox often do more than just focus on completing a goal or task — they go online to hang out with friends in a gaming environment. Half of weekly active users go to Roblox to play with friends. In addition, half of Roblox users update their avatar every month.

In recent months, Roblox has also been working to take its platform further outside the U.S. including most notably China. Last year, Roblox entered a strategic partnership with Tencent in an effort to bring its platform and coding curriculum to the region, including by adding support for Chinese languages and running coder camps. Today, Roblox has players and creators in over 200 countries, it says.

As of last year, Roblox was valued at $2.5 billion, with roughly half of U.S. children ages 9 through 12 playing on its platform, according to comScore. This remains true today. In addition, its user base overall skews younger, with over 40% 13 and up.

The company is now valued at $4 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported. (TechCrunch additionally understands this to be true. Roblox isn&t commenting.)

Today, Roblox says its user base is spending a collective 1.5 billion hours per month on its service. And because itaccessible across platforms, users often move from PC to smartphone to continue to play — a newer trend in online gaming, and one thatalso driving adoption of games like Fortnite, PUBG, and others.

&We are big believers in Robloxlong-term vision, and are confident in backing the team as they enter this next inflection point,& said David George, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, of the firminvestment. &Roblox is one of those rare platform companies with massive traction and an organic, high-growth business model that will advance the company, and push the industry forward for many years to come,& he added.

Roblox plans to leverage the new funds to continue its growth, including international; further build out its developer tools and ecosystem; and invest in engineering talent and infrastructure.

&We&ve stayed true to our vision of creating a safe and civil place where people come together to create, learn, and have fun, and itamazing to see what we&ve built together with our global creator community,& said David Baszucki, CEO and co-founder of Roblox, in a statement. &Looking ahead, we&re doubling down on our commitment to building the most advanced tools and technology to take our creators and players into the metaverse of the future.&

Updated, 2/26/20, 7:30 PM ET with more updated statistics.

On the heels of her conversation-driving Twitter thread on 2020venture fundraising climate, Hustle FundElizabeth Yin converted her thoughts into an op-ed for TechCrunch. In keeping with her expansive thread, we asked her to adapt her thread for a TechCrunch column and join us for an extended conversation.

What follows is an interview between Yin and myself that came after I read her piece (which you can find here), digging into venture capitalist fear, the ability of established founders to raise outsized rounds, her advice on growth and how some Series A and Series B-stage companies posting impressive revenue expansion might be nigh-unfundable in this, the new fundraising reality.

What follows is an edited, occasionally condensed transcript of our chat. Letgo!

TechCrunch: Okay, question one. You said, &VCs have gotten scared, almost to a fault.& Aside from the WeWork IPO implosion, what are the leading drivers of this recent increase in fear?

Elizabeth Yin: Taking a step back, I think we have to ask ourselves, what is even the place of venture capital in the first place? And when you think about the original venture capital industry, you know, decades ago, those VCs were taking big, big bets, like at those moments in time during the 90s, or even before that, for some of the chip companies or even Apple Computer, there were many bets happening there.