fortune--2020-09-15--‘How I Built This’ host Guy Raz on insights from some of the world’s most famous entrepreneurs

Think its a bad time to start a business? Think again. The list of companies created during financial downturns reads like a hit parade of some of the most admired brands: Fedex, Microsoft, Slack, Airbnb, Uber, Hewlett-Packard, even Trader Joes! The advantage these founders had was obvious—there was nowhere to go but up.
Financial crises and economic downturns force founders to be resourceful, efficient, and nimble. And once a fledgling business emerges from that downturn, it becomes more resilient to future setbacks.
This current crisis is a strange one on many levels. On the one hand, it has devastated parts of the economy (travel, leisure, entertainment, restaurants, to name a few) At the same time, it is estimated that there may be as much as trillion dollars in uninvested cash held by venture and private equity firms. Cash that is looking for opportunities. And the competition among investors to find attractive opportunities is fiercer than ever.
What it means for an entrepreneur with a promising idea is that—in some ways—it is easier to find “professional” money to fund your business than at any other time in recent history. But with that money comes strings and sometimes, it’s better to think long and hard about whether those strings are worth the trouble.
Below is an excerpt from my book How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success from the World’s Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs (Houghton Mifflin), available September 15.
‘How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success from the World’s Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs’ Courtesy of Houghton Mifflin
Not every founder can build a unicorn. Nor should they need to. There’s nothing wrong, for example, with running a small business with a few employees that you bootstrap until you retire and either hand down or sell out. Not only is it not wrong, it’s actually the norm.
The vast majority of American small businesses have fewer than twenty employees (if they have any employees at all) and generate annual revenues somewhere between $300,000 and $2 million. Indeed, most of the entrepreneurs I’ve met over the years aimed at just this kind of success. They weren’t particularly focused on all the things that come with scaling a business, such as limitless growth, total market disruption, and raising loads of professional money.
But if scale is your goal and bank loans and cash ow can’t get you
there, you will, at some point, and yourself engaging with the venture capital world. There are only so many ways to get a resource-intensive business off the ground, after all. This can be a daunting prospect for many entrepreneurs, since venture capital has a reputation as being a closed world that operates in small pockets on both coasts (Silicon Valley and Midtown Manhattan) with unwritten rules and unfamiliar terminology that feels impenetrable to anyone accustomed to speaking in plain, clear language.
There are angels and seed rounds; cap tables and exits; Series A, B, and C dilution and preferred shares; burn rate and run rate. There are VCs and PE guys; FINRA and NASD and the SEC. There’s vesting, investing, and just plain vests. So many vests! It’s enough to make a founder’s head spin. And that’s kind of the point. All these fuzzy, poorly defined terms are left deliberately vague in order to create and maintain opacity, lest you discover the one thing about VCs they don’t want you to know: that they’re human, just like the rest of us. And just like you and me, they aren’t seers or superheroes. In fact, the most successful ones are usually the luckiest ones—lucky to have access to promising businesses early on, and lucky to have access to so much money that they can make a lot of bad bets and still and success in the end.
To put it simply, VCs—even the most experienced ones—get it wrong more than they get it right. I mention this not to sow doubt in your mind, not to scare you, but rather to prepare you. Because this chapter isn’t actually about how to raise professional money; it’s about how to think about raising professional money once you’ve determined that you might need it. It’s about understanding the world of professional money and the mind-set of professional investors, from the perspective of those who’ve been through the process, so that you know what to expect when you walk in the room, for better or for worse.
They did not engage with this investor or his firm ever again, but the exchange was the most egregiously arrogant and dismissive example of a whole set of responses they received from the predominantly male venture capital class.
Like Jenn Hyman who, in 2009, went out to raise a $1.75 million seed round for an online designer dress rental business she called Rent the Runway, where women could browse dresses that might cost thousands of dollars to buy, but that they could rent for a fraction of the cost. A dress would then show up at a customer’s home, she’d wear it for whatever occasion had brought her to the site to begin with, and then she’d ship the dress back when she was done with it. It was like Zipcar meets Netflix meets Zappos, with what would eventually become the country’s largest dry-cleaning service on the back end. Today, Rent the Runway has more than 1,200 employees and does more than $100 million in revenue, but in 2009 the responses Jenn and her co-founder, Jennifer Fleiss, got from investors were less than encouraging, sometimes even startling.
“We had several different very condescending conversations,” Jenn told me, “one in which a partner at a very prestigious firm took my hand into his and said, ‘This is so adorable. You’re going to get to wear such pretty dresses. This must be so fun for you.’”
They did not engage with this investor or his firm ever again, but the exchange was the most egregiously arrogant and dismissive example of a whole set of responses they received from the predominantly male venture capital class.
“Most investors said, ‘Let me talk to my wife,’ ‘Let me talk to my daughter,’ or ‘Let me talk to my admin.’ Those were the three target customers that we would hear about,” Jenn said. On the surface, that sounds like a reasonable response, right? What do a bunch of men in their forties and fifties know about dresses? Probably nothing, but they are supposed to know about business, and they were ignoring that part of the equation in their responses to Jenn and Jennifer, as if the business model or the business plan were irrelevant. As if the business-worthiness of Jenn’s idea had already been foreclosed by the potential investors’ lack of familiarity with the underlying product. Not only that, in deferring to the women in their lives, these investors weren’t even consulting the right demographic cohorts.
“Let me tell you why each [of the ‘target customers’] is problematic,” Jenn said. “Number one, the wife of a venture capitalist is a multimillionaire. She can afford to buy any dress she wants, so she is not my target customer, right? The daughter of a venture capitalist in most cases is about twelve, because most venture capitalists are, when they’re in the prime of their careers, in the forty-five-to-fifty range. So their daughter is not a great target either. And the admins who work in the venture capital industry, because it’s such a prestigious job, are often women who are in their fifties and sixties—again, not women who were in my target demo.”
If an investor didn’t have experience with the product and didn’t know anyone in the target demo, it seemed as if the idea wasn’t for them—or, worse, it wasn’t an idea worth pursuing at all. After enough of these conversations, Jenn and Jennifer began preempting investor responses to their pitch altogether. “We showed them videos and invited them to some of our pop-ups to show them who the customer was so that they really got a sense for who we were catering to,” Jenn said.
The pop-ups were revelatory. They were what convinced Jenn in the early going that this idea had legs, and they were ultimately what got the idea to click with a good number of investors. “You saw the facial expressions of women change,” Jenn said of her experience witnessing pop-up customers try on her dresses. “They threw their shoulders back, they tussled their hair, and they walked with a new sense of confidence.” Seeing this, enough of the know-it-all investors who knew nothing about her customers finally knew enough to engage with Rent the Runway as a business proposition. That’s when capital for the seed round finally started to trickle in.
This didn’t open the floodgates of professional money, however. There was still plenty of skepticism about these two twentysomethings and their repository of “pretty dresses.” It wasn’t until their story ended up in the New York Times business section, with their picture on the front page above the fold, that things changed. A hundred thousand people signed up for the site. They met their first-year sales projections in a matter of weeks. And wouldn’t you know it, they had “a clamoring of venture capital investors coming in to the office pitching us on Series A,” as Jenn described it. “We had gone from a very undesirable investment to people showing up at the elevator in our building to meet with us unannounced because they wanted to pounce on the deal.”
To be clear, while there are frustrating and nauseating elements of sexism and chauvinism in Jenn Hyman’s story, the way professional money came to her is not uncommon. Venture capitalists know money, but they don’t always know your business better than you do, and sometimes they don’t know your industry better than you do either. So many founders have told me that they’ve had to spoon-feed and connect all the dots for potential investors in order to show them the opportunity staring them in the face.
Not every investor is like this, of course, even when they don’t quite “get it.” And not every founder has had to deal with what Jenn Hyman endured, even when they are female and in the apparel space. Take Tyler Haney, for example, the founder of the athleisure company Outdoor Voices, based in Austin, Texas. When she went out to raise an initial seed round in 2014, the scrutiny she faced from (primarily male) investors was not cynical snark about girls playing dress-up, rather it was legitimate skepticism about whether the market had room for a brand like this.
“Pretty consistently, I’d get an email back or in the session it’d be like, ‘But we have Under Armour and we have Nike. Why do we need another activewear brand?” Tyler told me. “What I started to piece together was that I was in offices with men, and these traditional activewear brands had been built by men and really catered to the competitive athlete. And what I started to recognize was, me, over here pitching this activewear brand around play and freeing fitness from performance, didn’t make sense to these folks that had grown up as competitive athletes.”
She couldn’t keep going into these male-dominated offices and having the same conversations. They weren’t going to get her anywhere. So what Tyler did was get out ahead of being shunted to secretaries and daughters by confused investors, the way Jenn Hyman had. She went directly to their female support staff and to their girlfriends and wives before she even came in for her meetings.
“I started sending product to the women in the offices, and the wives of some of these investors,” Tyler described. “And I started to and that by getting the product onto the women in the offices and the wives, I started to [encounter investors] that were willing to hear me out and understood that this could be something real. I started to get more time with them.”
The first investor to bite was Peter Boyce, from a big VC firm headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, called General Catalyst. “He saw the product, saw the pitch,” Tyler said. “I had gotten product on his girlfriend, Natalia. She loved it, and he said, ‘I love this concept. I want to back it.’ ” General Catalyst ended up leading the $1.1 million seed round, which Tyler then used to hire three additional employees, open an office, and, of course, make more product.
Jenn Hyman’s and Tyler Haney’s experiences raising their first chunks of professional money occurred five years apart and were widely different in style as well as in substance, but they were very similar to the extent to which the professional investors they encountered had an outsized influence on their funding prospects, regardless of their subject matter expertise or their business experience. Some of that influence, while frustrating to live through, ultimately turned out to be incredibly helpful. Sometimes, though, for some people, it isn’t.
He laid out the market for them: ‘Folks of color spend more money on every single category of health and beauty than anyone else.’ He laid out the opportunity: ‘Folks of color, especially black folks, are the most culturally influential group on the planet.’
This came into sharp relief for me when I interviewed Tristan Walker onstage in Washington, DC, in September 2019. Tristan is the founder of the eponymously named Walker & Company, which makes health and beauty products for people of color. Much as Lisa Price recognized an unmet need in the skin care market for African American women in the early 1990s when she created Carol’s Daughter, Tristan recognized, in 2013, that men of color, especially African American men, were similarly underserved when it came to their shaving needs. There were no products in the market that addressed their unique problems—in particular, razor bumps—that were not also old, tired, and segmented out into the “ethnic beauty” aisle, which in fact was nothing more than a dusty, disregarded shelf in most stores.
Tristan’s idea was to create a suite of beautifully designed and packaged products that bundled everything a man of color would need for the ideal shaving experience: a safety razor, a packet of blades, a brush, shaving cream, and pre- and post-shave oils. He called his product line Bevel and figured he needed to raise $2.4 million of professional money to get it o the ground, since this was not something—what with the manufacturing costs for both the hard and soft goods—he could reasonably bootstrap or go to friends and family for help with, without it becoming an unwieldy mess.
Unlike Jenn Hyman, though, Tristan knew what to expect. He knew the VC world intimately, from the inside. He’d spent the previous few years in Silicon Valley, attending the Stanford Graduate School of Business, interning at Twitter, working in business development as one of the first employees at the location check-in app Foursquare, and then leaving to join the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz as an entrepreneur in residence, where his en- tire job was to develop and evaluate new ideas. “This was around the time that a lot of the e-commerce companies started to pop up,” he said. “I was listening to their pitches. I understood the kind of companies that got funded, the types that didn’t. It was just great timing to start something like this.” Tristan even had the blessing and guidance of Ben Horowitz himself, who’d given him two important pieces of advice during his time at the firm: First, Horowitz told him, “what usually look like good ideas are bad ideas, and what look like bad ideas are good ideas, because the problem with good ideas is that everyone tries to do them, and as a result, there’s no value to be created there.” Second, he said, “you need to do the thing that you believe you are the best person in the world to do, where you have a unique proposition, given your story, to solve a problem.” Accordingly, Horowitz encouraged Tristan to abandon a few of his earliest ideas—one to revolutionize freight, another tackling childhood obesity with play—and instead to pursue this thing he was uniquely experienced to execute.
It was under these conditions that Bevel was born and Tristan began his trek up and down Sand Hill Road to raise money. By every metric professional investors use to evaluate opportunities, Tristan’s idea scored highly. “VCs say they want founders who they’ve worked with in the past, who have pedigree and experience, who have a blue ocean opportunity,” Tristan said. “And with this it was check, check, check, check.” He laid out the market for them: “Folks of color spend more money on every single category of health and beauty than anyone else.” He laid out the opportunity: “Folks of color, especially black folks, are the most culturally influential group on the planet.” Then he laid out the vision for how his products would solve this urgent problem that affected 80% of people of color and 30% of the rest of the population. The entire time thinking that Bevel was as sure a thing as one could expect to find in the crowded health and beauty segment. “If you’re a VC who talks about this white space, blue ocean stuff, why wouldn’t you invest in this?” he said.
Tristan met with sixty investors. All but three said no, and it took a long time to find those three. Fifty-seven professional investors turned him down—a Stanford-pedigreed venture capital veteran with experience operating inside two early major tech startups, who knew exactly what kind of rationale these firms used to place their bets. It was the kind of consistent rejection that could have been completely demoralizing. It could have made Tristan question everything he was doing and doubt all of his instincts. But he didn’t, for a few reasons.
“I knew there were 60 more investors right behind those sixty,” he said, “and if they weren’t going to invest in my idea, I knew they weren’t going to fund somebody else’s version of it either.” His point being that the problem wasn’t the idea; the problem was that investors didn’t think there was a problem. “It wasn’t until they started to push back that I realized they just didn’t get it,” he said. “I was trying to explain to these VCs that people are different, and it wasn’t even registering.” Tristan was creating a line of products to address a set of issues they didn’t have or couldn’t see, so therefore they must not be real or at least not big enough to be worth their time and money. Which, paradoxically, was the other reason he never doubted himself. “Silicon Valley, particularly venture capitalists who have never operated before, have this interesting worldview that they’re always right,” he told our bemused audience, “but the job of the venture capital investor is to be wrong 90% of the time. That is literally their job. And I knew this bad idea was good as hell.”
Now, there are probably some things Tristan could have done differently or better when he met with investors to make the process move more smoothly. Maybe his pitch deck could have been better—his first version was in PowerPoint and it did use clip art—or he could have spoken more directly to their self-interests. “I sold the hope and the dream,” he said. But maybe he should have just talked dollars and cents. “My growth chart was up and to the right,” he noted. Maybe he could have talked slower or faster, more or less. Or maybe there was nothing he could have done. Maybe he did everything right. Who knows? I certainly don’t. And like I said, that’s not what this chapter is about. It’s about understanding how to think about venture capital.
The first thing to understand is that raising venture capital is about making a promise. A promise that you have a product or a service that people will pay money for, that you have a plan to reach as many of those people as possible, and that in exchange for lots of money, you will bust your butt to reach them.
The next thing to understand is that good investors know the promise you are making to them is just that—a promise. They know you can’t make any guarantees. You can do everything right, but if the world shifts under your feet, there’s nothing you can do about it. Venture capital is by its nature a gamble—it’s right there in the name—and every gamble comes with the risk of heavy losses. Professional investors know and accept this fact, which is why they also do everything they can to mitigate the risk before writing very large checks.
One of the principal ways they do this, especially if they are unfamiliar with your industry, is to ask lots and lots of questions:
How do you expect to scale this?
Where is the growth going to come from? Who is the customer for this?
Doesn’t something like this already exist? How will you get costs down?
Where will you manufacture?
Where will you be based?
What’s your marketing strategy?
Why does anyone need this?
Why would anyone do this?
Melanie Perkins, the co-founder of the Australian online graphic design platform Canva, encountered countless of these types of questions from the more than 100 investors she pitched over a three-month period in 2012. She traveled from Perth to San Francisco, then to Maui (for a kitesurfing excursion masquerading as a tech conference run by the investor Bill Tai, whom Melanie had met at another conference in Perth), then to any number of places in between. Anywhere there was an event with investors present, Melanie found her way there.
For almost the entire time Melanie was in the United States trying to raise money to build out and launch Canva, her efforts were fruitless, at least as far as getting anyone to write a check was concerned. They were not without merit, though, because with each rejection she learned a little more.
“It was really beneficial because we got so many different questions and comments,” Melanie said, “and it meant that we really had to know what we were doing and really refine our strategy.” Every single day, after she’d pitch an investor who would invariably pass, she’d go back and revise the pitch deck to reflect what she’d learned from the questions that had been asked of her.
“Every time we got a really hard question, that would go right to the front of the pitch deck,” Melanie recalled. “So the hardest questions were answered right at the front.”
Eventually, investors ran out of questions whose answers didn’t already appear in the front of Melanie’s pitch. Before long, those answers were able to allay the doubts and concerns of investors who maybe didn’t fully understand Canva’s business, but who recognized the opportunity that was beginning to emerge with design and publishing tools moving online. By the time Melanie’s tourist visa expired and she had to return to Australia, she’d raised $750,000 and would eventually oversubscribe her $1.5 million seed round. All, I think Melanie would say, because she was able to come up with an answer to every question a skeptical, risk-sensitive investor might have.
As an entrepreneur, you have to expect these questions. You have to know that you are going to face them. Jenn Hyman did. Tristan Walker did, too. And you have to be prepared to manage the fact that when you are faced with what feels like an inquisition with no right answers, it is only natural that the doubt pouring out of investors will begin to creep into your brain and make you start to wonder, “Am I the crazy one here? Maybe this idea really is silly. Maybe there is no way it can work.”
This is a daily fight when you’re raising money. And if your goal is to scale your business, as I talked about at the beginning of this chapter, then you need to fight extra hard to reject each of these nagging, self-doubting thoughts. If, however, you find that you aren’t all that concerned with becoming the biggest you can possibly be, then the resolution of this fight could very well be walking away altogether.
It’s Tristan’s greatest regret in the building of Walker & Company that he took professional money at all. The things he had to endure in the seed stage were tough enough—comparisons to the Chris Rock movie Good Hair, confident assertions that the problem he thought he was solving wasn’t really a problem at all—but when he went back to Sand Hill Road to scale the company a couple years later and really take it big, that’s where the real frustration occurred. He could not, no matter what he said or did, raise more than $30 million. That sounds like a lot, but at a time when VCs were throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at far less worthy companies—as well as at competitors like Harry’s, which started the same year as Walker & Company—$30 million felt like the ultimate vote of no confidence. Without more money, Tristan wouldn’t be able to invest in marketing, product development, research, and, of course, production. He would have to find another way to grow his company.
All Tristan could do was remember that “if there was anyone qualified to do this idea, [it was] me”; that he had the best “bad” idea in the space; that he was uniquely positioned to execute it; and that he knew more about his business and his market than the VCs did. They knew money, but he knew his business. Fortunately, there was one other thing he could do in support of his long-term vision for the company. In December 2018, he sold Walker & Company to Procter & Gamble for much less money than he might have gotten on the open market.
As part of the deal, Tristan moved the company to Atlanta, became the first African American CEO of a Procter & Gamble portfolio company in its 180-year history, and in the process severely limited the return the VC firms that had invested in his Series A got on their money. This was Tristan’s attempt to grow the company on his terms, to take a step back in order to move forward with more confidence down the road, and to show future entrepreneurs—especially those of color—that while VCs might have all the power over the money, that doesn’t mean they are necessarily wiser than you or that they are always right. You can be right, too, whether you choose to take their money or not.


fortune--2020-09-15--JPMorgan’s WFH model changed worker productivity—especially on two days of the week

To win in November , Trump would need to pull off an even bigger upset in 2020 than he did @ @

A troubling pattern emerged as most of JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s employees worked from home to stem the spread of Covid-19: productivity slipped.
Work output was particularly affected on Mondays and Fridays, according to findings discussed by Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon in a private meeting with Keefe, Bruyette & Woods analysts. That, along with worries that remote work is no substitute for organic interaction, is part of why the biggest U.S. bank is urging more workers to return to offices over the coming weeks.
“The WFH lifestyle seems to have impacted younger employees, and overall productivity and ‘creative combustion’ has taken a hit,” KBW’s Brian Kleinhanzl wrote in a Sept. 13 note to clients, citing an earlier meeting with Dimon.
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The bank has noticed the productivity decline among “employees in general, not just younger employees,” JPMorgan spokesman Michael Fusco clarified in an emailed statement, adding that younger workers “could be disadvantaged by missed learning opportunities” by not being in offices.
JPMorgan’s findings provide a data point in the debate over whether employees perform as well at the kitchen table as they do in the workplace, showing extended remote work may not be all it’s cracked up to be, at least for some job functions. While pre-pandemic studies found remote workers were just as efficient as those in offices, there were questions about how employees would perform under compulsory lockdowns.
JPMorgan last week told its most senior sales and trading employees that they would be required to return to their offices by Sept. 21, the strongest move yet by a U.S. bank to restaff its workplaces. Workers in other functions are also being encouraged to return, up to a maximum building capacity of 50% in New York.
“Overall, Jamie thinks a shift back to the office will be good for the young employees and to foster creative ideas,” Kleinhanzl wrote.


fortune--2020-09-15--What’s Oracle? TikTok users react to proposed Oracle deal

As business software giant Oracle tries to become “a trusted technology provider” for social media phenomenon TikTok, users of the app shared a similar reaction: Oracle who?
Oracle, the enterprise software company, confirmed on Monday that it was part of a high-profile bid for TikTok, which was facing a looming deadline imposed by the U.S. government to sell. The U.S. and China still have to confirm the deal, which stops short of an actual sale, before the it can be completed.
The agreement has some industry analysts scratching their heads. Why would a legacy enterprise software company chase TikTok, a social media app made popular by teens who create viral dance challenges? The answer has some analysts speculating that Oracle wants to serve as TikTok’s cloud data center provider. Meanwhile, half a dozen TikTokers interviewed said they knew little to nothing about Oracle, known for its very unhip database software.
“I heard about Oracle [for the first time] literally yesterday,” said Chelsea Dagrella, a 21-year-old TikToker from Syracuse, NY.
Kara Billington, a 16-year-old TikTok user from Richardson, Tex., said she wasn’t sure what Oracle does, but the name sounded familiar. “It’s a big company,” she said. “I really don’t know too much about it though.”
TikTok’s proposed deal comes just days before the Sept. 20 deadline imposed by President Donald Trump. Citing national security concerns, Trump said TikTok’s owner ByteDance, based in China, needed to sell the app or shutter its U.S. operations. Since then, the app received bids from big companies including Microsoft and Walmart as well as Oracle. However, the final proposal involving Oracle falls short of a sale, and it’s unclear whether it will be enough to appease the White’s House or pass muster with China’s government.
In a statement, Oracle provided few details about the proposed TikTok partnership. It merely said that “Oracle has a 40-year track record providing secure, highly performant technology solutions.”
For TikTok, the proposed deal potentially means the company can continue operating in the U.S. TikTok is also expected to establish a U.S.-based headquarters, where it would employ 20,000 people. For Oracle, the deal adds a big-name company to its roster of “partners”.
But for TikTokers, the deal means next to nothing. Users say they just want to be able to continue creating and watching video clips featuring users lip synching, dancing, and doing short comedy skits.
“If it continues being the same, then it’s fine,” said Diana Terrazas, a 19-year-old TikTok user in Dallas who spends hours every day watching new videos.
Many TikTokers echoed the sentiment. For them, their concern boiled down to the user experience. They want the app’s algorithms to continue to recommend videos based on their interests, to help boost the videos they make, and to steer clear from filling their feeds with ads (or pitches for business software).
Kathryn Baxter, a 16-year-old from Richardson, said TikTok is a service she uses to connect with her peers, knowing that she will be able to relate to others’ videos and not be judged by her responses. She said if Oracle or any new owner changed TikTok, it would be “big” and could potentially change the organic feeling of community that the app has created.
Billington, who attends school with Baxter, said she would continue using TikTok regardless of its owner “as long they don’t change it and turn it into Instagram,” a TikTok rival. And Dagrella said as long as TikTok “is there, I’m there.”
But some of TikTok’s influencers say they know how fickle social media can be. Even though they make money off the service through sponsorships and donations from fans, they make sure not to get too attached. Instead, they use it to amplify other projects that help them make money. They just hope Oracle, whatever it is, and whatever its deal involves, doesn’t get in the way.
For example, Drew Ryn, a 23-year-old singer from Nashville who was once on Fox show The X Factor, said she uses TikTok to help boost her profile as a musician. She has amassed 1.7 million followers on TikTok since joining last year. Unlike some of the others interviewed, she had heard of Oracle before and had a vague idea about what it does.
“I have heard of Oracle, but I’m not an expert,” Ryn said. “I think it will be better for privacy, but what that means for content creation or algorithms or our clout, I don’t know.”
Meanwhile, Cody Orlove said TikTok helped him build a career and that he doesn’t care about Oracle getting involved. The 19-year-old from Los Angeles posts comedy videos, skits, and re-enacts scenes from Netflix shows. At age 14, he realized he could make money on the app and dropped out of high school to dedicate himself to the app and other side ventures. Orlove has 6.5 million followers and said he’s made $2 million in the past three years.
Though he still regularly uses TikTok, he also now sells merchandise and tours with fellow influencers.
“Influencers only have three to four years,” of fame on social media, he said. “So I’ve been trying to make my biggest revenue stream not be social media. It’s very unpredictable.”
Olivia Ghaussy got a taste of how quickly anyone can build a following on social media. The 35-year-old nurse practitioner who lives in Los Angeles, joined in June and already has more than 20,000 followers (one of her videos went viral).
As a result, she knows she’ll always have a way to reach people who want to follow her, even if TikTok becomes unrecognizable because of any Oracle partnership.
“There’s always another app waiting in the wings,” she said.


fortune--2020-09-17--Once a COVID-19 vaccine is discovered, the hard part begins

Why Accenture thinks the ‘ Henry Ford moment of the digital era ’ is coming

In the global sprint to find a COVID-19 vaccine, we’ve seen the world embrace approaches that would have previously been considered unthinkable, from spending billions on untested technologies to compressing clinical trials from years to months.
These bold steps may be exactly what the world needs to find a vaccine even one day sooner. But unless we bring the same kind of urgency, inventiveness, and investment to vaccine distribution as we have to vaccine development, our attempts to end the COVID-19 pandemic will fail.
Why does delivering the one thing everyone in the world needs merit such an audacious approach? Because vaccines are delicate things; they require near-perfection in our ability to deliver them.
The COVID-19 vaccine, like most vaccines, will need to be kept cold, fixed within a precise temperature range from the moment it leaves the manufacturer to the moment it’s administered.
This is hard even in rich countries with strong supply chains. In countries with underdeveloped infrastructure, a vaccine’s journey can be perilous. If there’s any break in the cold chain as a vaccine moves across thousands of miles and changes dozens of hands on its way to a hospital in Dakar, Senegal, a rural health facility in Bihar, India, or a remote clinic in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, it’s all for naught; the vaccine will lose its potency.
Where you’re born shouldn’t determine whether you get a vaccine, but if we stay on our current course, it may determine whether it works.
Breaks in the cold chain aren’t a new problem, but they’ve mostly been ignored. Over the past two decades, wealthy governments and pharmaceutical companies have laudably partnered to make vaccines available at lower prices for developing countries. But once these precious commodities reach the port of entry, attention to them often fades. There’s a cynical term of art for this approach: ship and pray.
“In God we trust,” the saying goes, “all others must bring data.” That’s exactly what companies like Parsyl are beginning to do. For the past two years, we’ve partnered with Gavi, the global vaccine alliance, to ship vaccines with sensors that can detect breaks in the cold chain before they lead to irreversible damage.
What those sensors have taught us is remarkable.
You might assume that the biggest threat to vaccines in the cold chain is heat. In fact, the opposite is true; our data show that freezing temperatures from ice-cooled vaccine carriers and faulty refrigerators pose a far greater risk. In one country, vaccines had a nearly one-in-four chance of spoiling due to freezing temperatures.
But dig deeper into this data and some good news emerges: Most of that freeze damage comes from just 5% of fridges. In this case, fixing just the worst fridges would cut vaccine damage in half and save lives for pennies on the dollar.
By including sensors in all vaccine shipments, companies like Parsyl will benefit. But we can also enable targeted interventions—like identifying and replacing the tens of thousands of old fridges destroying vaccines right now—that are only possible with more precise data. Gavi has already created an initiative to replace cold chain equipment around the world; better data will help it target these urgently needed upgrades and improvements more effectively.
Shipment-level data also allows for innovative ways to manage and transfer risk. Under the ship-and-pray model, insuring vaccine stockpiles in developing countries is prohibitively expensive because underwriters are flying blind. But with a sensor that can monitor and beam temperature information to the cloud, health workers on the ground will have the insights they need to prevent losses from occurring, and underwriters can accurately model risk. This is the idea behind the Global Health Risk Facility we announced last week with Lloyd’s of London, which will insure COVID-19 vaccine delivery to developing countries.
But perhaps the biggest surprise in our data was what could happen if we could simply deliver vaccines faster. If we’re able to cut the time vaccines spend in the cold chain, especially in the so-called last mile, we could reduce spoilage by nearly 40%.
One effective but underutilized way to speed up the supply chain is to enlist local logistics firms to deliver the goods. When vaccine distribution in three Ugandan districts serving over 3 million people was handed over to an East African logistics company, Freight in Time (which uses Parsyl’s sensors), stockouts ended and the lead time needed for new vaccine shipments was cut from one month to five days. As a result, Freight in Time increased monthly vaccine distribution by 100,000 doses while cutting the number of wasted vials.
Embracing these bold approaches—better data, targeted interventions, smarter risk management, more trust in local partners—can mean the difference between billions of people receiving potent vaccines or a COVID-19 crisis that lives on long after a vaccine is discovered. Unless we care as much about the delivery as we do about the cure, we will never be free of COVID-19.
Ben Hubbard is cofounder and CEO of Parsyl, an insurance technology company and Lloyd’s Lab alumni.


fortune--2020-09-17--Eli Lilly is teaching an old drug technology new tricks against COVID—and has promising early result

Eli Lilly is teaching an old drug technology new tricks against COVID—and has promising early results

Good afternoon, readers.
Antibodies are interesting entities. These Y-shaped proteins occur naturally in the human body to fight off various ailments. But they can also be man-made, as is the case for “monoclonal antibodies,” by inducing immune responses in either animals or patients.
Those little things (also known as mAbs for short) have been around for more than 30 years and are currently used for treating cancer and as immunosuppresive therapy for transplant patients. The world’s best-selling drug, AbbVie’s Humira, is itself a monoclonal antibody.
The fight against COVID has forced the drug industry to get creative with repurposing treatments, or existing pharmaceutical technologies spanning the gamut from older infectious disease drugs to cheap steroids, to see if they can make a dent on the coronavirus. Monoclonal antibodies are also a part of that pharmaceutical equation. And there’s now preliminary evidence that it’s a process which may work.
Indianapolis-based drug giant Eli Lilly announced this week that its own experimental monoclonal antibody, created by reproducing the antibodies of people who have recovered from COVID, significantly slashed diagnosed patients’ need for hospitalization.
Now, the company’s statement doesn’t come with significant data beyond the topline, so it will still have to go through the scientific peer review process. But Lilly claims that about 6 percent of diagnosed coronavirus patients who received placebo had to be hospitalized, whereas just 1.7 percent of those receiving the real drug had to. If the numbers hold, that’s a success that other companies testing their own mAbs haven’t seen to date.
It all goes to show that in the pharmaceutical business, treatments can work in mysterious ways.
Read on for the day’s news, and see you again next week.
Sy Mukherjee
sayak.mukherjee@fortune.com
@the_sy_guy
DIGITAL HEALTH
Telehealth provider American Well surges in public debut. Telemedicine giant American Well went public in a big way. In its first day of trading, Amwell stock spiked as much as 28% (before taking a bit of a dip at the end of the day). The IPO, and the company itself, was fueled by some prominent powerhouses, including underwriters such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, and financial backers like Google parent Alphabet, which is ponying up $100 million in investments to lure the company to moving some of its virtual medical visit tech over to the Google Cloud platform. (Barron's)
INDICATIONS
Moderna says COVID vaccine efficacy data could come by November. Moderna, the "mRNA" platform company that's among the hopefuls for a COVID vaccine, says that it expects to have significant data on its experimental treatment by November. CEO Stéphane Bancel told CNBC than October data reading (a timeline that Pfizer and Germany's BioNTech, which are collaborating on a coronavirus vaccine, say they will likely meet) may not be in the cards. However, the "worst-case scenario" would be a data readout by December, according to Bancel. (FiercePharma)
THE BIG PICTURE
The COVID dilemma even the most cautious colleges face. I spoke with college students, administrators, and public health officials across the country to figure out just how effective universities' plans for returning to students to campus while maintaining health safety might be. The short answer is: It's going to depend on your specific school's efforts, and passing the buck to students with the mantra of "personal responsibility" isn't going to be enough without institutional accountability. (Fortune)
Climate change is a health care issue. My colleague Erika Fry writes on the pressing matter of climate change as it relates to health care. At a virtual event with experts hosted by Fortune on Wednesday, Surili Patel, a director of the Center for Climate, Health, and Equity at the American Public Health Association, had this to say: “Equity is at the center of every climate or health discussion.”
“We’re talking not just about the distribution of power, but we’re talking about making sure every community has the ability to bounce back from a climate event.” (Fortune)
REQUIRED READING
Wildfire smoke and COVID are a one-two punch for air quality in the U.S., by David Z. Morris
Mastercard pledges $500 million to promote financial inclusion for Black communities, by Rey Masheyekhi
3 ways tech stocks resemble the 2000 bubble and one way they don't, by Anne Sraders


fortune--2020-09-17--By this measure, Snowflake’s IPO wasn’t such a a success after all

No recent event better exemplifies the tech frenzy than the jaw-dropping Snowflake IPO. Following its debut on Sept. 16, many in the media marveled at how its $70 billion valuation made the software unicorn––its annual sales running at just $500 million—the priciest newly listed player ever. What went mainly unnoticed is that Snowflake captured another distinction as the second-most underpriced IPO in history, as measured by dollars “left on the table,” and the record holder, by a wide margin, for a newcomer of its slender size. “We’ve seen an unusually high number of IPOs this year that rank near the top in forgone proceeds,” says Jay Ritter, a professor at the University of Florida and the nation’s leading IPO expert. “But Snowflake dwarfs them all.”
Prior to the offering, Snowflake’s team of two dozen underwriters, led by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, sold 28 million newly issued shares to their institutional clients at a price of $120. That part of the sale raised $3.36 billion, less commissions of $106 million, netting $3.254 billion for Snowflake’s treasury. But it also garnered additional cash by selling an extra 2.083 million shares each to Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and cloud-startup investor Salesforce Ventures at the same price. Technically, the 4.17 million share deals qualified as a separate secondary offering following the IPO.
The bankers also reserved the right to boost the allocation for their customers by 4.2 million shares, via an “overallotment” provision known as the “greenshoe.” As it turned out, demand was so strong that the underwriters found eager buyers among their clients for the greenshoe shares as well. That brought the full number sold to around 36.4 million. After fees, the three transactions brought Snowflake $4.364 billion in cash.
As often happens with glamour IPOs, investors willing to pay a lot more than $120 a share either couldn’t get any shares or obtained only a fraction of what they wanted. When Snowflake debuted, they arrived en masse, pushing the price up 112% to $253.93 by the opening day close. Had Snowflake sold those 36.4 million shares via a direct listing, or an auction process that captured the shares’ full value, it would have amassed, even after the same $106 million in fees, $9.24 billion. So the eight-year-old phenom in effect sacrificed $4.88 billion. In other words, it “paid” $1.12 in forgone funds for every dollar it raised.
Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman defended the pricing in an interview with Fortune on Wednesday. The company wanted to sell IPO shares to large and steady institutional shareholders who wouldn’t pay the highest price, he said, while deriding the later trading action as the “frothy, opportunistic retail side.”
That $4.88 billion is by far the largest forgone amount in a dozen years, and ranks second to Visa’s underpricing of $5.85 billion at its entrance in 2008. This year has featured many of the biggest first-day bounces ever for IPOs. No fewer than 13 of the 60 biggest amounts ever left on the sidelines came in the first eight-and-a-half months of 2020. Yet all the other spikes pale beside the Snowflake pop. Snowflake’s first-day shortfall was three times as large as that logged by No. 2, Corvis, and an amount equal to the count for the next four combined, Royalty Pharma, ZoomInfo, Vroom, and nCino.
Of course, forgoing $4.88 billion may not seem too much of a loss when the investors reckon your company is worth 15 times that number or, as we’ll see, even more. Still, Snowflake is a young, fast-sprinting player that’s now burning over $200 million a year in cash, and will need increasing amounts of capital to keep racing. Having an extra almost-$5 billion in its coffers would provide plenty of additional fuel for future expansion. Piling all that extra cash on its balance sheet would also have raised its book value, and hence its valuation, by a not inconsiderable near 7%.
In reality, investors on opening day were valuing Snowflake at a lot more than $70 billion. That’s because its total shares outstanding will grow substantially in the years ahead as employees cash in their generous equity grants. Its prospectus discloses that Snowflake has awarded 72.2 million options and another 7.7 million shares of restricted stock, or roughly 80 million in shares poised to swell the float. The average exercise price on the options is a paltry $6.70, and the company has met the targets required for the restricted stock to vest. In fact, the prospectus discloses that 24 million of the options have already vested.
“In most cases, since options vest over several years and employees often leave before the options and restricted shares vest, many of the shares expire and aren’t added to the float,” says Ritter. “But in the case of Snowflake, the options are so far in the money that it’s the ultimate in golden handcuffs. Who would want to leave and sacrifice shares now selling at 40 times the strike price?”
Right now, it looks like almost all of those 80 million shares-in-waiting will add to Snowflake’s current float of around 280 million, lifting the total by 29% to 360 million. So that looming dilution means Snowflake is sporting—at the Sept. 16 price of around $250—what we’ll call a shadow valuation of more like $90 billion.
That’s the number that counts. The $90 billion bogey will dictate what Snowflake must earn going forward to provide the big returns investors are expecting. In these heady times, forgoing almost $5 billion may seem a small price to pay for notching an IPO that both succeeded in raising billions and brought a rousing vote of confidence by bestowing one of the richest valuations in tech history. But if times turn stormy, Snowflake’s leaders could rue letting all that rainy-day money get away.


fortune--2020-09-17--‘Cheer’ star Jerry Harris arrested on child pornography charges

Jerry Harris, the star of the Netflix documentary series “Cheer,” was arrested Thursday on felony charges of production of child pornography, three days after twin boys filed a lawsuit alleging he sent them sexually explicit photos of himself and cornered one of them in a bathroom and begged for oral sex.
According to the complaint, Harris admitted during an interview after FBI agents raided his home Monday that he had asking one of the teens to send him photographs and videos of his penis and buttocks on Snapchat. He also admitted that he repeatedly asked the teen, identified only as Minor 1, between December 2018 and March of this year for such photographs and videos.
Further, according to the complaint, Harris admitted to requesting and receiving on Snapchat child pornography from “at least between 10 to 15 other individuals he knew were minors.”
FBI agents were photographed Monday coming out a home in the Chicago suburb of Naperville that USA Today, which first reported the suit, reported was Harris’ home.
The boy’s mother told the newspaper that both of her sons had spoken to the FBI, and the lawsuit alleges that she also reported the allegations to Fort Worth police, the FBI and others. The complaint contends that the mother contacted authorities after she saw messages from Harris on one of her son’s cellphones.
Harris, 21, was the breakout star of the show that followed the cheerleading team from Navarro College in Corsicana, Texas, as it sought a national title.
Harris did not respond for comment from USA Today, and attempts by The Associated Press to find a phone number for Harris have not been successful.
In interviews with USA Today at their Texas home, the boys — who are now 14 years old — described a pattern of harassment both online and at cheer competitions, which began when they were 13 and Harris was 19. They said it continued for over a year.
Besides accusing Harris of sexual misconduct, the lawsuit alleges that cheer organizations failed to protect the boys. The organizations named in the lawsuit are U.S. All Star Federation, which governs competitive cheerleading; Varsity Spirit, which puts on competitions; and the Cheer Athletics, a chain of gyms.
A Varsity official in Aug. 1 letters to police in Florida and Texas said the organization had learned of “inappropriate sexual conduct” allegations against Harris, USA TODAY reported.
Cheer Athletics owner Angela Rogers told the newspaper that Harris hasn’t been affiliated with the gym since March 1. Rogers told the newspaper that she learned of the allegations against him in mid-May and reported them to police.
“Cheer” was an instant success when it was released in January, and Harris drew fans for his upbeat attitude and his encouraging “mat talk.” Earlier this year, he interviewed celebrities on the red carpet at the Academy Awards for “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.”


fortune--2020-09-17--iPhone’s new ‘orange dot’ feature warns you when an app is listening

Many iPhone owners are seeing a strange orange dot appearing from time to time in the top right corner of their screen. The dot is part of Apple’s latest iOS software update, and is part of Apple’s ongoing campaign to provide better privacy services.
If you see the dot, it means an app is accessing your iPhone’s phone or camera. In many cases, this will come as no surprise—we use many apps precisely because they can take pictures or record a sound.
In some cases, though, app developers may seek to deploy the phone or camera without permission in order to obtain data. These include a controversial category of apps known as “spyware” or “stalkerware,” which governments or controlling partners install on victims’ phones to track them in secret.
Apple’s new orange dot feature may now help warn users that such activity is taking place. It looks like this:
The orange dot feature won’t appear automatically. Instead, it will only work for those who install the new software package, iOS 14, on their phones. Apple has provided test versions of iOS 14—which contains a wealth of other new features including tools to organize your screen or even start your car—to some users since the summer, but is now rolling out the feature to all iPhone owners. You can see a full rundown of all the features on Apple’s website.
The orange dot is part of a broader attempt by Apple to burnish its reputation as a privacy-conscious company, and to differentiate the iPhone from Android devices, where privacy controls are more loose.
Those concerned about apps spying on them can monitor their activity by viewing individual apps under the iPhone’s “Settings” icon. Users can also see which apps have access to their camera and microphones by tapping on the “Privacy” menu, which is also under settings.
More must-read finance coverage from Fortune:


fortune--2020-09-17--Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider does not approve of anti-maskers using ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’

Twisted Sister singer Dee Snider took to social media to condemn anti-maskers who went into a Florida Target store blaring the group’s hit “We’re Not Gonna Take It” while ripping off their masks.
In a tweet Wednesday, Snider called the stunt “moronic,” and shared a video that was recorded by an upset customer inside the Target at Coral Ridge Mall in Fort Lauderdale. The video had more than 30 million views.
Snider said the group doesn’t have his “permission or blessing to use my song for their moronic cause.”
The stunt drew quick action from Broward County officials. Target was fined for not enforcing the county’s mask law and citations were mailed to the protesters, the South Florida Sun Sentinel reported.
Fort Lauderdale resident Chris Nelson told the newspaper that his group, ReOpen South Florida, organized the “flash mob.” He also posted a YouTube video of it from their vantage point on Tuesday.
“In celebration of Burn Your Mask Day we decided to spread some freedom dust over the shoppers and employees of Target!” the YouTube caption said.
The small group of anti-maskers approached customers inside the store.
“We’re Americans, breathe,” a woman yelled. “It’s all a lie!”
Another woman screamed that a customer should take the mask off. “You don’t need it,” she said.
If a guest complied, the group cheered.
Federal health officials have said masks could effectively halt the spread of COVID-19 and have begged the public to embrace them. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told a committee of U.S. senators on Wednesday that a simple face covering could be more effective than a vaccine in protecting people from the virus.
Nelson has been involved with previous protests related to the coronavirus pandemic. He staged a protest against beach closures on the Fourth of July. He shouted about restrictions being intrusions on citizens’ Fourth Amendment rights during a Broward County news conference. Police asked him to leave, saying he was causing a disturbance. He initially resisted but complied after an officer ordered him to place his hands behind his back.
Three people were identified on video and the county mailed them $100 citations for failing to wear facial coverings in public spaces to help curb the spread of COVID-19, Broward County spokeswoman Margaret Stapleton told the newspaper.
“Any additional participants from the video that are able to be identified will also receive $100 citations in the mail,” she said.
Interim Assistant Police Chief Frank Sousa said the group was gone when officers arrived. But he told the newspaper the protesters had entered the store with their masks on.
Danielle Schumann, a Target corporate spokeswoman, said Target requires shoppers to wear masks inside stores. The protesters were asked to leave “after they removed their masks and became disruptive and rude to other shoppers,” she said.
Nelson told the Sun Sentinel he will continue to use the Twisted Sister song, despite Snider’s criticism.
“It’s sad,” Nelson said. “It’s a great anthem about freedom and overcoming oppression.”


fortune--2020-09-17--Even the most cautious schools are seeing outbreaks

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The best laid plans of colleges and universities are no assurance during a public health crisis.
University administrators tell Fortune they’re doing everything they can to ensure public safety. But at schools like the University of Alabama system, which resumed in-person classes in August, cases have risen considerably. That school system has seen nearly 2,600 COVID cases across campuses as of Sept. 10.
The first week of college is supposed to be a time of celebration and the launch of the next chapter in your life, but students across America are facing a truly bizarre entry into the world of higher education as universities grapple with the coronavirus pandemic.
Logistical problems—and downstream social consequences for students themselves—abound. And depending on which school one attends, the processes for dealing with COVID can be wildly divergent, as evidenced by students and school administrators across the country who spoke with Fortune.
“I left the Harvard Global Health Institute after 16 years to become a dean at Brown’s public health school recently,” Ashish Jha, a physician and health policy researcher who previously served as director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, tells Fortune.
This gives Jha a unique perspective. He’s a public health expert and doctor by training—but also an expert in epidemics and critic of America’s response to the COVID crisis. And in his new role as a college dean, he can speak to what does and doesn’t work in this bizarre timeline.
“I think every college and university will see some cases and some outbreaks. The question will be: Will they be small and manageable and they can go on, or will you have to shut down and go online indefinitely?” Jha tells Fortune.
Here’s the issue: A university can’t exactly rely on personal responsibility—something that politicians and college administrators alike have played up in the midst of the pandemic—to be the single course to safety.
“The problem is that a lot of universities are acting like the only thing you can rely on on is behavior change on the part of students without calling out the responsibility of the universities themselves,” says Jha.
With COVID cases spiking in communities surrounding colleges, such as Johnson County, Iowa, the area around Washington State University, and the Alabama county containing Auburn University, individual schools’ approach to and enforcement of public health measures could spell the difference between new local outbreaks and a safe, if strange, new form of learning.
Divergent testing strategies
Nick didn’t even get to visit the University of Colorado at Boulder campus before showing up there a few weeks ago; a planned trip to campus got scuttled during the outbreak’s heyday in his hometown of New York City. The 18-year-old freshman, who asked to use only his first name for privacy, had to have a lot of his belongings mailed over to campus from across the country.
Before he left for college, Nick received a coronavirus test—one of the ones requiring a nasal swab—at a CityMD location in New York. He informed them that he was a student and received results back pretty quickly, within two days, before getting on the plane.
He was tested again on campus on Aug. 31 using the University of Colorado’s own proprietary COVID test developed at a campus lab. With this test, called RT-LAMP, you can simply spit into a tube and get results within 45 minutes, an easy way to identify asymptomatic individuals. Family members or guests helping students move in face a separate set of restrictions, such as allowing only one guest to enter a hall and requiring them to vacate after a set time.
Students moving into dorms also take a so-called PCR test, which takes longer to process but is more accurate in identifying an active infection. If the rapid response test comes back positive and the PCR test result hasn’t been returned yet, the student would be put into an isolation facility, according to a university spokesperson. Those who live off campus but may need to come to campus are encouraged to go to a health clinic for free testing if they show any symptoms.
The spokesperson points to the university’s live COVID dashboard as a means of controlling coronavirus spread and keeping the student body informed.
The university is also using another novel technology to monitor cases: wastewater testing—the literal testing of waste, which can detect coronavirus prevalence on a community level.
And that has shown how difficult it can be to control COVID outbreaks even with stringent testing and safety requirements. Testing information released on Sept. 2 revealed potential outbreaks at four University of Colorado at Boulder dorms, bringing the number of confirmed on-campus cases up to nearly 40.
“The next few days will be critical to our ability to maintain our current operating status,” the university’s associate vice chancellor Dan Jones wrote in a letter to students on Sept. 2, warning that cases could spike in the coming weeks. “It is imperative that we all continue to follow public health orders, avoid large gatherings, wear masks, and practice physical distancing.”
The situation has grown more dire since then. On Sept. 15, Jeffrey Zayach, executive director of Boulder County Public Health, urged all University of Colorado at Boulder students to self-quarantine for two weeks despite the school’s innovative measures.
“Boulder County Public Health has been closely monitoring the case counts and outbreaks among students, faculty, and staff associated with the University of Colorado at Boulder campus,” he wrote. “In the past two weeks 663 Boulder County residents have tested positive for COVID-19; 502 of these residents were associated with CU students (76% of all cases). The majority of CU Boulder cases come from off-campus students.”
Other schools depend more on students to conduct tests for themselves. At Chapman University in Southern California, students are given a self-administered nasal swab test that is then sent to a commercial laboratory in a partnership with diagnostics giant LabCorp.
“We sent out the procedure at the beginning of August. Everybody—staff, faculty, and students have to take a training module that we provide online: an explanation of precautions and what you have to do. And no one is allowed back on campus until we’ve certified that they’ve taken this module,” Chapman president Daniele Struppa tells Fortune.
The school has been working with Pixel, an arm of LabCorp that specializes in mailing at-home diagnostics, and says the coronavirus tests are free of charge to students. “You have to log in. They send you this test. There’s a prepaid FedEx package that you send,” Struppa says.
Those who live off campus and don’t plan on coming back to visit campus to, say, hang out with their friends don’t have to get tested. And despite Struppa’s emphasis that the school has been in clear and early communication about expectations, Chapman senior Emma Brown says there’s still some confusion.
“I’m a little unclear on all of it. Throughout summer they were sending us e-mails suggesting there would be some sort of hybrid model where some classes are virtual, some are in person. There would have to be temperature checks and social distancing at campus buildings,” says the 21-year-old.
Classes are currently all online, though Brown suspects there may come a time when the idea of a hybrid model is possible.
There’s also the ever-present matter of how long it takes a test such as the LabCorp one to come back. The company says it currently takes, on average, 24 hours to 48 hours.
Samantha Hager at Wesleyan University in Connecticut faced some confusion of her own: “Prior to coming, they were pretty confused about what they were going to do. They gave us all the option to defer for the whole semester. We could go to classes remotely from our homes or from our dorm rooms.”
Wesleyan also looked into whether or not students were moving onto campus from areas with high rates of COVID; those students were required to arrive two weeks before classes started in order to self-isolate. Students from lower-risk areas were required to arrive one week before classes began.
Hager received one test before heading to school from Brooklyn and then was required to take another one as soon as she arrived on campus: “I immediately went to a testing tent, and that was required of me before they gave me the key to my dorm.” Both of the tests she took were of the nasal swab variety, although the one she took on campus was self-administered. Since she’s not from a high-risk area, she only had to quarantine until Sept. 7.
A significant shift in college culture—for some
College students have a reputation for hanging out in groups and attending the occasional party. Meeting people in person in classes is its own form of socializing.
“I can hear people outside yelling and stuff. It’s a party school, and I’m not partying right now,” says Nick, the University of Colorado student. He can only have people from his own dorm building over to his room.
Of his six classes, five are completely virtual. The sixth has optional in-person attendance with required distancing. That comes with its own dilemma—what if a professor’s Wi-Fi goes out? Students may not be compelled to wait to deal with technical difficulties.
“I’m happy I’m not a freshman right now because I think that my dorm experience is something I never would have wanted to give up. But now I live in an apartment with my girlfriend,” says Brown, the Chapman senior. “But it’s still pretty isolating to be in my apartment 24/7. It’s pretty hard to make new friends.”
Hager says that things are relatively calm, without major parties, as far as she’s seen at Wesleyan. “There have been, like, two or three from what I’ve heard, but I haven’t seen it. But, I mean, I’m part of a Facebook group for my class, and a lot of Wesleyan upperclassmen have been complaining about kids, like freshmen, going around asking for parties.”
This semester has only just begun for America’s nearly 20 million college students. How these schools respond to a situation that’s still very much in flux, even at the most cautious campuses, could determine whether or not we see another massive nationwide spike in the coronavirus outbreak in the next weeks and months.
Correction: This post has been updated to reflect the University of Colorado at Boulder’s policies for parents and guests assisting students during move-in.


fortune--2020-09-17--Oracle, Bytedance, and U.S. Treasury tentatively agree on terms for TikTok bid

The Treasury Department, TikTok owner Bytedance Ltd. and Oracle Corp. have tentatively agreed to terms for Oracle’s bid for the U.S. operations of the social-media service, according to people familiar with the matter.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin sent Bytedance a revised terms sheet late Wednesday and the company and Oracle accepted it, the people said. They described the changes as addressing national security concerns about the transaction and asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter.
Bytedance is trying to win U.S. approval for a transaction with Oracle that would leave the Chinese-headquartered parent company with majority ownership of TikTok. President Donald Trump demanded the sale of the service in August, declaring in executive orders that the popular video-sharing app is a national security threat.
Any deal needs to be approved by both Trump — who could still reject the transaction — and the Chinese government, where officials have accused the U.S. of “economic bullying.”
White House senior adviser Jared Kushner is aware of the revised terms but hasn’t reviewed the latest details in depth and hasn’t weighed in on whether Trump should sign off on the deal, one person familiar with the matter said.
The White House and Treasury declined to comment. The Chinese embassy in Washington didn’t respond to requests for comment.
White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said early Thursday that he’s concerned that Oracle’s bid for TikTok may be a “repackaging” that won’t meet the president’s goals.
“We’re still looking at the potential details of the deal, and whether it meets the national-security thresholds, the American-interest thresholds,” Meadows said. “My big concern is if all we’re doing is repackaging it and still keeping it as a predominantly Chinese-government run company, that would not sit well with the original goal the president outlined.”
Under the plan, Oracle would acquire a minority stake in a newly formed TikTok that would be headquartered in the U.S. with an independent board approved by the U.S. government.
The new terms, which are designed to protect the data of U.S. citizens from falling into Chinese hands, include 20 pages of detailed provisions over data and national security, the people said. Under those terms, the board of directors would have to consist entirely of U.S. citizens and would include a national security committee.
That body would be chaired by an American data-security expert who would be the primary contact with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., which would oversee any issues of concern to the U.S. government. The previous terms hadn’t included language on the formation of that committee.
Terms of the proposed deal would give Oracle full access to TikTok’s source code and updates to make sure there are no back doors used by the company’s Chinese parent to access data on the video-sharing app’s 100 million American users, Bloomberg reported.
At least three shareholders in TikTok’s Chinese parent company — General Atlantic, Sequoia Capital and Coatue Management — would take stakes in the new business, Bloomberg has reported.
Walmart Inc., which had previously partnered with Microsoft Corp. to make an outright bid for TikTok’s U.S. business, remains interested in investing as well, and could also end up with a seat on the board, according to one of the people. With Oracle, Walmart and the continued involvement of existing U.S. investors, the new company, TikTok Global, would have a strong contingent of American investors, some of the people said.(Updates with details on Kushner and deal terms from fifth paragraph)
–With assistance from Ben Brody.


fortune--2020-09-17--‘Antebellum’ tackles the past head on in an effort to ‘move forward’

A successful writer finds herself trapped as a 19th-century slave. Without getting into the ensuing twists and turns too much, that’s the general premise of Antebellum, a new psychological horror film and the feature debut of writer-director duo Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz.
“It’s like The Color Purple meets Hitchcock,” Bush tells Fortune.
The filmmakers acknowledge that some of the imagery on screen is difficult and uncomfortable to watch, but they felt it was important for the story they were trying to tell. “As much as we would like to look away because we don’t want to confront it, it’s necessary,” Bush says.
Antebellum, the film, has its roots in a short story the duo wrote in October 2017. It was then adapted into a script by the following February before it was eventually filmed. Bush and Renz have been working together for about a dozen years, producing social justice–driven advertising, short films, and music videos, which means they were very used to collaborating by the time they made the movie.
“We’re able to, within the writing process, work through all of the issues with the story and know exactly how we want to tell the story and become crystal clear on our vision before we even get on set,” Renz says. “So that by the time we’re on set, we know exactly what we want.”
“There was an absolute unified voice on set,” Bush adds.
Janelle Monáe stars in psychological horror film “Antebellum,” out via video-on-demand Sept. 18. Matt Kennedy—Lionsgate
That said, the two writer-directors would sometimes split up when having to discuss particular aspects of filming with their cast.
“We’re two men. We don’t want to come on set and crowd an actress who’s just had a really difficult scene. That isn’t appropriate,” Bush says. “The two of us caucus, and then we figure, ‘Who would be the best to go in and have this particular conversation at this moment?’ But we’re always within seven feet of each other.”
The filmmakers credit casting director Laray Mayfield (known for her work with David Fincher) for getting the ensemble together. Additional cast members include Jena Malone, Jack Huston, Kiersey Clemons, and Gabourey Sidibe; each brought something distinct to the production.
“She’s one of the most intense listeners. She’s always present,” says Bush of Malone. “Gabourey is bottled sunshine. She’s just a person who brings a warmth to every room she enters. She also happens to be one of the more intelligent people I’ve ever met.”
Bush describes the film’s star, Janelle Monáe—the Grammy-nominated singer whose film credits include Moonlight and Hidden Figures—as a polymath: “We think that going from supporting roles to taking on a movie of such weight where she has to be the spine and heart of the film, I think she’s going to surprise a lot of people.”
Antebellum is coming out at a time when the U.S. is grappling with its history of racism and inequality. The past year alone has seen a wave of titles dealing with such issues, from HBO’s Watchmen series to Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods. On some level, it’s an indication that “art is reflecting the times,” Renz says.
Writer-directors Christopher Renz (left) and Gerard Bush on the set of “Antebellum.” Kyle B Kaplan—Lionsgate
“Our focus has been on social justice storytelling for a decade, and for our part, we really think that the movie has a very specific thing that we are saying,” says Bush. “I think that America is finally waking up to the idea that for a large swath of the population, there is a horror prism in which that would probably be the most effective way to gain an understanding of some aspects of the Black experience.”
Current events and how they connect to the film’s themes and plot points are part of what Bush and Renz hope audiences can take away from watching the film.
“We need to move forward. And to move forward means we have to confront the past and all of its ugliness, so that we can correct this behavior now,” Bush says.
“There is great hope in America’s future if we’re courageous enough to confront the past,” he adds.
The film, which was supposed to be in theaters earlier this year, is coming out via video-on-demand on Friday as the coronavirus pandemic continues to upend theatrical release schedules. It wasn’t what Bush and Renz originally envisioned for the film, but they opted not to push for a theatrical release later in 2021, because they believe it’s important for the film to be a “part of the conversation now.”
“We hope people turn the lights down and the volume up and turn their phones off and try to experience it the best way possible,” Renz says.
Antebellum is available to watch on VOD starting Sept. 18.
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fortune--2020-09-17--What’s your biological age? A new app promises to reveal it—and help you slow the aging process

Feel young for your age? Think you have the mind of a 25-year-old, even though you’re pushing 45? Are you in better shape now than when you were in grad school? A new app promises to use cutting-edge science and technology to tell you if you’re right.
Young.ai, an iPhone app created by Hong Kong–based technology company Deep Longevity, will use a variety of “biological clock” algorithms to compute a user’s biological age based on everything from blood samples and data collected from wearable fitness trackers to a simple photograph of the user’s face.
A person’s biological age is a way of assessing how rapidly a person is aging based on a number of indicators. It can differ from a person’s chronological age owing to health and lifestyle factors, as well as genetics. For instance, a 50-year-old ultramarathoner might have a younger biological age than a 35-year-old couch potato.
The Young.ai app, which is expected to debut on Apple’s App Store on Sept. 29, promises to not only tell a user her current biological age, but make predictions about the rate at which she is aging and then recommend personalized interventions—from exercise to diet—that could slow, or even possibly reverse, some of the effects of aging.
“We want to help everyone on the planet live longer and better regardless of their nationality, race, gender, or social status,” says Alex Zhavoronkov, who bills himself as the CLO—or “chief longevity officer”—of Deep Longevity, a company he also founded and runs as chief executive officer. The company was spun out of Insilico Medicine, which Zhavoronkov also founded.
He said the company wanted to provide advice on medical or lifestyle interventions that would “bring you a little back, closer to the age of your optimal performance, which for humans is usually between ages 20 to 40. After that we have, unfortunately, this declining path.”
The app will include a checklist of personalized steps that each user can take to help slow or reverse the aging process.
Longevity goes high-tech
“Longevity tech,” such as Young.ai is increasingly attracting interest from both consumers and investors. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, owns Calico, a startup researching ways to extend human life spans. Craig Venter, the entrepreneur who founded Celera Genomics and helped map the human genome, has cofounded Human Longevity, a California startup pursuing similar ideas. (Deep Longevity has a partnership with Human Longevity on some biological clock methods.) Deep Longevity itself was recently purchased by Regent Pacific, a publicly traded Hong Kong company founded by British billionaire James Mellon, who has funded a number of ventures dedicated to reversing human aging.
The Young.ai app will assess a user’s biological age across up to 20 different metrics as well as providing an overall prediction of a person’s biological age, a score that Deep Longevity calls the “AgeMetric.”
“We believe in using multiple aging clocks,” Zhavoronkov said. “We believe there is no universal clock, but we can work with data from completely different modalities and combine those.”
The simplest of the biological clocks offered by Young.ai is an age-prediction feature based on a photograph of the user’s face taken with their mobile phone camera. Others include an assessment of a user’s heart rate, which can be obtained from a fitness tracker. The app is designed to integrate with both the Apple Watch and Fitbit fitness trackers. And some of the metrics are based on users answering simple questions in the app about their mental health and their own feeling about their age and aging process.
But other metrics that the app supports, such as analysis of a user’s transcriptome, a molecule essential to cell function, or assessment of a person’s microbiome, the microbes that live on and in our bodies, require sophisticated lab tests.
Zhavoronkov said Deep Longevity hoped the Young.ai app would help encourage discussions between users and their doctors about aging and longevity. There will also be a desktop version of the service available with an even richer set of features for users and their doctors to explore.
He said that in the future, Young.ai users might be able to order or book these more sophisticated tests directly through the app. The app might also eventually enable users to find and contact dietitians, personal trainers, and specialist health professionals who would be able help them take the steps the app recommends for slowing, or in a few cases reversing, the effects of aging.
What it costs
The app will operate on a freemium model, with some of the simpler biological clocks and combined age score available for free, but some of the more sophisticated clocks will require payment to unlock. Zhavoronkov said that Deep Longevity hoped to eventually launch an Android version of the Young.ai app, but that it would be some time before it was ready to do so.
He said that Deep Longevity is in discussions with several insurance companies, which he declined to name, about future partnerships. He said the interests of insurance companies and the interests of their customers were aligned when it came to the goal of helping people live longer, healthier lives.
But the powerful predictive analytics underpinning Young.ai could also potentially be used by insurance companies to charge patients with more advanced biological ages or who seemed to be aging faster higher premiums for health or life insurance, or perhaps to deny them coverage altogether.
Users will give Deep Longevity the right to conduct anonymized research using their data as part of the app’s terms and conditions, Zhavoronkov said. He said the company would comply with any laws that required additional consent from individuals to use their data in specific research projects.
“We are well aware of the regulatory environment, and we will ensure no one’s data is used for research in an unconsented way,” he said.
The algorithms used to compute a biological age for each of the different data types—as well as the AgeMetric scoring mechanism—are either patented or patent-pending, Zhavoronkov said. The company has published some of the research underpinning these different “biological clock” algorithms, many of which use artificial intelligence to make predictions based on the data, in peer-reviewed scientific journals.


fortune--2020-09-17--Funding pours into the at-home fitness trend

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At-home fitness startups are muscling up as gyms file for bankruptcy.
Adding to the flurry of deals in the space: Tonal, a startup with a strength-training system, raised $110 million in funding from investors including L Catterton (an existing investor), as well as Delta-v Capital, the Amazon Alexa Fund, Steph Curry of the Golden State Warriors, and golfer Michelle Wie.
That comes after weight-training startup Tempo raised some $60 million in July and Lululemon acquired Mirror for $500 million in late June—not to mention Apple’s foray into the space, announcing earlier this week a subscription service that offers workout classes online.
While Apple’s name may strike the fear of… well, Apple, in the hearts of some investors (Peloton’s shares did some funny somersaults mirroring that of investors’ stomachs upon Apple’s announcement), the obsessive community Peloton has built is still among the most formidable—after all, it was will to pay $2,000-plus, even when gyms were open, for a stationary bike and the hype that comes with being a part of Peloton nation. But hey…famous last words.
Also worth noting is a returning investor in Tonal’s round: L Catterton has invested quite a bit across not only companies in the physical gym space, but also in the at-home fitness trend—and in a potential competitor to Tonal. Earlier this year, L Catterton invested in Hydrow, a younger rowing startup that recently raised $25 million. Before that, the firm made bets on the likes of ClassPass and Equinox.
STRIPE’S PLAN FOR EMPLOYEES WHO LEAVE MAJOR CITIES: As the pandemic pushes employees to move to more suburban sprawls than urban haunts, fintech darling Stripe is addressing the shifting dynamic in its compensation. The company, which employs about 2,800 people, plans to make a one-time payment of $20,000 to those who decide to leave San Francisco, New York, or Seattle, according to Bloomberg—though it also plans to cut their base salaries by as much as 10%. Read more.
Lucinda Shen
Twitter: @shenlucinda
Email: lucinda.shen@fortune.com
VENTURE DEALS
- Infarm, a Berlin-based urban farming network, raised $170 million in its first Series C funding close. LGT Lightstone led the round and was joined by investors including Hanaco, Bonnier, Haniel, and Latitude.
- Olive, a Columbus, Oh.-based automation platform for hospitals, raised $106 million in financing. General Catalyst and Drive Capital led the round and were joined by Ascension Ventures, Oak HC/FT and SVB Capital.
- Boosted Commerce, a Los Angeles-based company acquiring businesses that list goods on Amazon, raised $87 million and acquired six Amazon fulfillment centers. Investors include Torch Capital and CrossCut Ventures.
- AppDirect, a San Francisco-based subscription commerce platform, raised $185 million in funding. Investors include Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec.
- Synthekine, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based biotech company engineering cytokine therapeutics for cancer and autoimmune diseases, raised $82 million in Series A funding. Canaan, The Column Group and Samsara led the round.
- Ready, a New Orleans-based on-demand healthcare service, raised $54 million in funding. The company’s investors include GV, Deerfield Management Company, City Light Capital, Town Hall Ventures, and Frist Cressey Ventures.
- GoExpedi, a Houston-based supply chain and analytics company for industrials and energy companies, raised $25 million in Series C funding. Top Tier Capital Partners led the round and was joined by investors including Crosslink Capital, San Jose Pension Fund, CSL Ventures, Bowery Capital, and Hack VC.
- Joint Academy, a Sweden-based digital treatment for chronic joint pain, raised $23 million Series B funding. Kinnevik led the round Karl-Johan Persson (chairman of H&M) and Alfvén & Didrikson led the round.
- Aidoc, a New York-based AI solution for radiologists, raised $20 million in extended Series B funding. Investors include Square Peg Capital.
- Humatics, a Waltham, Mass.-based maker of micro-location technology, raised $30 million in Series B funding. Blackhorn Ventures led the funding round and was joined by investors including Tenfore Holdings, Fontinalis Partners, Airbus Ventures, Lockheed Martin Ventures, and Presidio Ventures.
- Bunch, a New York-based party app for multiplayer games, raised $20 million in Series A funding. General Catalyst led the round.
- JupiterOne, a Morrisville, N.C.-based cybersecurity company, raised $19 million in Series A funding. Bain Capital Ventures led the round and was joined by investors including Rain Capital and LifeOmic.
- Quanto, a Brazil-based open banking company, raised $15 million in Series A funding. Bradesco and Itaú Unibanco led the round and was joined by investors including Kaszek Ventures and Coatue.
- Air, a Brooklyn, New York-based cloud collaboration tool for visual work, raised $12 million in Series A funding. Tiger Global led the round and was joined by investors including Lerer Hippeau, WndrCo, Slack Ventures, Red Sea Ventures, and Advancit Capital.
- eFileCabinet, a Lehi, Ut.-based document management company, raised $11.5 million in Series C funding. Allegis Capital and Signal Peak Ventures led the round and were joined by investors including Camden Partners, Allegis Nippon Life and Oquirrh Ventures.
- GoTab, an Arlington, Va.-based contactless ordering and payment platform for hospitality companies, raised $6 million. Investors included Anthony Bruce (former CEO at APT) and Greg Cohen (former president of iPayment and Paya).
- ManiMe, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based maker of custom-fit stick-on gel nails, raised $6 million in Series A funding. Canaan Partners and Trinity Ventures led the round. Read more.
- First AML, a New Zealand-based anti-money laundering startup, raised $5.4 million in Series A funding. Bedrock Capital led the round and was joined by investors including Pushpay founder Chris Heaslip and Icehouse Ventures.
- HappySignals, a Helsinki-based platform measuring the experiences of IT employees, raised €4.7 million ($5.5 million) in Series A funding. Nauta Capital led the round and was joined by investors including Vendep Capital.
- Zuper, a Seattle-based provider of a workforce and customer management platform, raised $1.1 million in seed funding. Prime Venture Partners led the round and was joined by investors including Gunderson Dettemer and Gemba Capital.
PRIVATE EQUITY
- Investors including Oxford Properties Group, BentallGreenOak, and D1 Capital Partners invested $1.6 billion in Lineage Logistics, a cold-storage focused REIT. The deal values Lineage at $15.5 billion. Read more.
- The Carlyle Group plans to acquire a majority stake in Victory Innovations, a Minneapolis-based maker of electrostatic sprayers used to disinfect offices, airplanes, schools and other businesses. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- Spectrum Equity and Blue Venture Fund invested in PWNHealth, a New York-based healthcare diagnostic testing company. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- San Francisco Equity Partners invested $20 million in BrüMate, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based maker of insulated drinkware for adult beverages. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- RelaDyne, backed by Audax Private Equity, acquired Nick Barbieri Trucking, a Ukiah, Calif.-based lubricant, gasoline and diesel fuel distributor. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- SSI Acquisition, formed by TCW Asset Management Company, Cerberus Capital Management, and Lantern Capital Partners, acquired School Specialty, a Greenville, Wis.-based provider of educational products to pre-K through to the 12th grades. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- An affiliate of Peak Rock Capital acquired Halo Foods, a Newport, Wales-based maker of healthy bars and snacks. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
OTHERS
- Sennder agreed to acquire Uber Technologies’ European freight business in an all-stock transaction valuing the unit at less than €900 million euros ($1.1 billion). Read more.
- Kobalt Music Group, a New York-based music-publishing company, is considering a sale that could value it at over $1 billion. Read more.
- EQT Corp. (NYSE:EQT) bid $750 million on Chevron Corp's (NYSE:CVX) Appalachia gas properties and a pipeline stake. Read more.
- Embracer agreed to acquire Vertigo Games, a Netherlands-based virtual reality games maker for €50 million ($59.3 million) upfront and a possible additional payment of up to €65 million ($76.5 million) based on performance. Read more.
- Delivery Hero (DE:DHER) agreed to acquire the Latin American operations of Glovo, a Spanish on-demand delivery service, for up to €230 million ($272 million).
EXITS
- Illumina (Nasdaq:ILMN) is in talks to acquire Grail, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based cancer detection startup, in a deal that could value the latter at $6 billion. Its investors include Hillhouse Capital, Bill Gates, and Bezos Expeditions.
- MacAndrews & Forbes is weighing a sale of RetailMeNot, an Austin-based coupons website, that could value the unit at $500 million to $600 million, per Bloomberg. Read more.
- Pure Storage (NYSE: PSTG) agreed to acquire Portworx, a Los Altos, Calif.-based data management company based on Kubernetes, for about $370 million in cash. Portworx investors have included Sapphire Ventures and Mayfield Fund.
- Kahoot! acquired Actimo, a Copenhagen-based maker of an employee engagement platform, for $33 million. Actimo investors included Lehrmann Ventures.
- Clearlake Capital Group agreed to acquire Zywave, a provider of office insurance solutions, from Aurora Capital Partners. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
- SEMrush acquired Prowly.com, a Polish public relations software maker. Prowly’s investors included IQ Partners and Internet Ventures.
IPOs
- The Hut Group, the UK-based ecommerce company, raised £1.88 billion ($2.4 billion) in the U.K. Investors including BlackRock participated.
- Flipkart, the Indian e-commerce company, is preparing for an IPO abroad in 2021, per Reuters. The IPO could value it at over $50 billion. Read more.
- American Well, a Boston-based telehealth company, raised $742 million in an offering of 41.2 million shares priced at $18. Allianz Strategic Investments and Teva Pharmaceuticals back the firm. Google also invested $100 million. It plans to list on the NYSE as “AMWL.” Read more.
- Pactiv Evergreen, a Lake Forest, Ill.-based maker of fresh food and beverage packaging, raised $574 million in an offering of 41 million shares priced at $14. Read more.
- Sumo Logic, a provider of cloud log management solutions, raised $326 million in an offering of 14.8 million shares priced at $22. Backers include Greylock, Sapphire Ventures, and Accel. Read more.
- Taysha Gene Therapies, a Dallas-based biotech developing treatments for central nervous system disorders, plans to raise $125 million by offering 6.6 million shares priced between $18 to $20. Read more.
SPAC
- Apollo Strategic Growth Capital, a blank check company formed by Apollo, filed to raise $750 million. Read more.
- Harvester Holdings, a SPAC formed by the founders of investment firms Mariposa and Viking, plans to raise $750 million in an IPO on the London Stock Exchange. Read more.
- VG Acquisition Corp, a blank-check company founded by billionaire Richard Branson, filed to raise $400 million. Read more.
- ChargePoint Inc, a California-based electric vehicle charging networks, is nearing a deal to go public via merger with Switchback Energy Acquisition Corp, a SPAC, per Reuters. Read more.
F+FS
- KKR & Co. has raised over $11 billion so far for its fourth Asia-focused fund. Read more.
- Questa Capital Management raised $348 million for Questa Capital Partners II.
- Atlassian Ventures plans to deploy $50 million in investments over the next three years