Remittances from workers in the U.S. to their families and friends in Latin America amounted to $155 billion in 2023. With such a huge opportunity, banks, money transfer companies, retailers, and fintechs are all trying make transfers more convenient on both sides of the transaction.
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Expressable is a platform that offers one-on-one virtual sessions with speech language pathologists.
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Groww, an Indian investment app, has become one of the first startups from the country to shift its domicile back home.
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A vulnerability in a smart access control system used in thousands of U.S. rental homes allows anyone to remotely control any lock in an affected home. But Chirp Systems, the company that makes the system, has ignored requests to fix the flaw.
U.S. cybersecurity agency CISA went public with a security advisory last week saying that the phone apps developed by Chirp, which residents use in place of a key to access their homes, “improperly stores” hardcoded credentials that can be used to remotely control any Chirp-compatible smart lock.
Apps that rely on passwords stored in its source code, known as hardcoding credentials, are a security risk because anyone can extract and use those credentials to perform actions that impersonate the app. In this case, the credentials allowed anyone to remotely lock or unlock a Chirp-connected door lock over the internet.
In its advisory, CISA said that successful exploitation of the flaw “could allow an attacker to take control and gain unrestricted physical access” to smart locks connected to a Chirp smart home system. The cybersecurity agency gave the vulnerability severity score of 9.1 out of a maximum of 10 for its “low attack complexity” and for its ability to be remotely exploited.
The cybersecurity agency said Chirp Systems has not responded to either CISA or the researcher who found the vulnerability.
Security researcher Matt Brown told veteran security journalist Brian Krebs that he notified Chirp of the security issue in March 2021 but that the vulnerability remains unfixed.
Chirp Systems is one of a growing number of companies in the property tech space that provide keyless access controls that integrate with smart home technologies to rental giants. Rental companies are increasingly forcing renters to allow the installation of smart home equipment as dictated by their leases, but it’s murky at best who takes responsibility or ownership when security problems arise.
Real estate and rental giant Camden Property Trust signed a deal in 2020 to roll out Chirp-connected smart locks to more than 50,000 units across over a hundred properties. It’s unclear if affected properties like Camden are aware of the vulnerability or have taken action. Kim Callahan, a spokesperson for Camden, did not respond to a request for comment.
Chirp was bought by property management software giant RealPage in 2020, and RealPage was acquired by private equity giant Thoma Bravo later that year in a $10.2 billion deal. RealPage is facing several legal challenges over allegations its rent-setting software uses secret and proprietary algorithms to help landlords raise the highest possible rents on tenants.
Neither RealPage nor Thoma Bravo have yet to acknowledge the vulnerabilities in the software it acquired, nor say if they plan on notifying affected residents of the security risk.
Jennifer Bowcock, a spokesperson for RealPage, did not respond to requests for comment from TechCrunch. Megan Frank, a spokesperson for Thoma Bravo, also did not respond to requests for comment.
When I started working from home in the late 1980s as a freelance technical writer, I was clearly an outlier. Even contractors mostly went into the office in those days. Over time, though, that slowly changed, and the pandemic — along with generationally shifting views on work-life balance — accelerated worker sentiment away from going into a formal office every day, even if some CEOs wish it weren’t so.
Today, 14% of U.S. workers work at home full time (including me), and that number is expected to increase to 20% by next year, according to data published by USA Today. In total, 58% of white-collar employees want flexibility in their work schedules to work at home a few days a week, per that same USA Today data. Yet, we are continually getting post-pandemic mixed messages about returning to the office.
Some companies like IBM and Amazon have been pushing hard to get people back to the office, with Amazon CEO Andy Jassy reportedly telling employees if they wanted to stay remote, it probably wouldn’t work out well for them. Wayfair, the Boston-based online furniture company, concentrated on remote workers over in-office folks in a layoff earlier this year, according to a WSJ report.
Big tech CEOs like Jassy and Elon Musk have been pushing back hard against remote work; Musk called it “morally wrong” for some people to work at home while service workers had to show up. Meanwhile, Michael Bloomberg suggested remote workers weren’t actually working, but playing golf (which honestly sounds like projecting to me). Even Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, whose company pushed the notion of a digital HQ during the pandemic, began preaching about a return to the office, blaming working from home for lack of productivity, especially among new employees.
That’s a lot of executive energy being directed against working from home and toward working in the office. Some have suggested that it’s because these companies have invested heavily in office buildings and need people to fill them. Maybe it’s just a need to have the employees in front of managers for control purposes, or they genuinely believe that workers are more productive in the office. Whatever the reason, they seem quite committed to getting back to the office.
Do they have a point? Will workers be more productive under the watchful eye of their managers sitting in cubicles instead of the comfort of their homes? Perhaps more importantly to results-driven CEOs, will their companies make more money? Research from the University of Pittsburgh Katz School of Business published earlier this year suggests not necessarily.
“Our findings are consistent with employees’ concerns that managers use RTO (return to office mandates) for power grabbing and blaming employees for poor performance. We provide evidence that RTO mandates hurt employee satisfaction but do not improve firm performance,” the report found.
Karen Mangia, president and chief strategy officer at the Engineered Innovation Group, who has studied and written extensively about remote work, says she was surprised to find that workers tended to value flexibility over place; it wasn’t so much where you needed to be, so much as your ability to control when you worked, to maintain a proper work-life balance.
“All of the research I’ve been looking at shows the same thing: that employees who have some degree of flexibility over where and when they work are reporting higher levels of employee engagement. That is the group of people that is demonstrating to be more engaged and more productive,” she said.
What’s more, Mangia has found that those companies forcing employees to go back to the office are unsurprisingly having to deal with more employee burnout. “The argument so many times behind this return to office mandate is that employees will be more productive because we can collaborate in person and, and things get done. Well, being burnt out and sustaining a burnout level is the opposite of being more productive,” she said.
There are also good reasons to encourage hiring more remote employees, including access to a much broader and diverse employee base than you could get from one geographical location.
“I’ve had a big Midwestern consumer packaged goods company say ‘we’re finding all sorts of talent. Whereas before we insisted all employees must be local or must be in the city, now we’ve opened it up more broadly, and we got way better candidates. We don’t ever want to go back and we’re going to open that up permanently,’” said Dion Hinchcliffe, an analyst at Constellation Research who has been watching this trend for a long time.
The next debate is how much, if any, time should employees be required to spend in the office and for what reasons. There are many tech companies that are leaving it up to their employees to decide where they want to work, and it seems to work quite well.
GitLab is a prime example of a company that has been fully remote from the day it was founded a decade ago. Other tech companies with a flexible approach include Dropbox, Atlassian and Okta, none of which require a specific number of days in the office.
As for startups, anecdotally the vast majority of founders I speak to are remote-first. Hinchcliffe says this is part of a shift to a decentralized workplace where startups in particular avoid the regular overhead of having an office. Instead they often rent space in the WeWork model to get together with customers, press and analysts, or each other, as needed.
Mangia says that the one worker demographic that does tend to struggle in all-virtual environments is new hires out of college, who benefit from being in an office. “When you have new-hire employees, especially early in their career, they do ramp up faster and report a better experience with a lower degree of burnout when they can come into a place where there are other people to help them,” she said, giving some credence to what Benioff was saying.
Even the most ardent work-from-home advocates understand there will be times when there is value in getting together for team building, to meet customers or to collaborate and brainstorm in person, but in spite of the cries from big CEOs, employees have tasted this flexibility, and it’s going to be hard to get the genie back in the bottle. For now, it continues to be a debate between labor and management about where and how work gets done.
Home From College, a career platform for young professionals and college students looking for their first job or internship, announced Wednesday that it raised $5.4 million in a seed round led by GV (formerly Google Ventures).
The new capital will go toward building out the platform’s main offering, “Gig,” a marketplace for companies to list jobs, ranging from part-time and internship opportunities to one-time projects and more long-term roles. Home From College features job listings from hundreds of top brands such as Poppi, Aquaphor, Burt’s Bees, Nivea, Urban Decay, Thrive Market, Peacock, and Steve Madden, among others.
The Los Angeles–based startup was founded in 2021 by Julia Haber, who founded WAYV, a marketing company that created “branded experiences” like pop-up shops on college campuses; and Kaj Zandvliet, a former banker at PineBridge Investments and financial analyst at Sony Music Entertainment.
Home From College had its genesis during WAYV-hosted events, where students would express their “fear of being unemployed when they graduated” and “not having their [college] major aligning with what they actually wanted to do in life,” Haber told TechCrunch. Other pain points include students being unable to find an enjoyable way to earn extra income during their time at college, or not qualifying for jobs due to an empty résumé.
Home From College aims to disrupt the traditional job search for Gen Z, who are gravitating toward more flexible opportunities outside of the 9 to 5. Some call Gen Z the “freelance generation,” with 67% of Gen Zers embracing freelance work and 71% prioritizing jobs with flexible working hours, per Fiverr. Gen Z is also exploring more creative roles, with many looking to build their careers in social media, entertainment, marketing, beauty, and fashion.
Haber wants Home From College to be a place for students to find gigs that fit within their busy lifestyles and provide valuable experience related to their career path and goals. So rather than applying for unpaid internships, they can take on side hustles like a social media ambassador or logo designer.
“I work full time, so I’ve been using [Home From College] as a way to get side gigs,” Sierra Estevez, a recent graduate from SUNY Oneonta, told us. “I’m able to filter through the different gigs that are available to find opportunities that suit my timeframe or my schedule.”
When reviewing the marketplace, the majority of the listings are one-time gigs mainly focused on content creation or product testing, which many brands offer to get feedback from a younger demographic. The compensation varies widely. For instance, Nivea is currently offering $500 to create two TikTok videos. Smaller businesses offer much lower compensation, with one company offering just $15 to try a product and leave a review.
“All gigs on Home From College are paid … [it] helps weed out the [jobs] that feel maybe disingenuous to students or feel manipulative of their time because we know Gen Z cares a lot about that too… We always want to make sure that the opportunities for someone who is a career starter are always compensated realistically in terms of what the value exchange is,” Haber said. She added that the team reviews all the listings before they go live.
Another way that Home From College caters to Gen Z and stands apart from other career sites is its interview feature where students answer questions from real companies, which they can post to their profiles. For instance, “If you had to describe your personal brand in one sentence, what would it be?” or “What role do you play in a group setting?”
In addition, the platform lets students show off their personality with fun cover designs for their profiles and colorful about pages that explain their background, experience, and what they’re looking for.
Students can also see the number of times companies have viewed their résumés and the total profile views they get on a weekly and monthly basis. Companies see a similar dashboard that tracks how many applicants are being reviewed and the number of contracts that have been signed.
Students can also receive messages from companies, giving them an opportunity to form connections with future employers.
“I actually get to talk to different people from these brands, whereas, with other platforms that I have tried, it’s a message that I put out or an application I’ve sent into an abyss that I never really hear back from,” Estevez added.
Home From College is also competing with design tools like Canva with its newest feature, “Resume Studio.” Although the templates offered on Home From College are arguably less advanced than Canva templates, they serve as a starting point for students who may have never made a professional résumé before. The résumé builder is still in beta, so the selection will likely improve over time.
Home From College is free for students and has three subscription tiers for companies: Starter ($99 per month), Growth Mode ($199 per month) and Enterprise (price varies). Students are paid directly through Home From College’s platform and companies are charged a 20% service fee on top of each invoice price.
The platform has over 100,000 users. Home From College has helped facilitate “thousands and thousands” of hires, said Haber.
Home From College mainly caters to people just starting out in their careers, but the company wants to expand its product offerings to people who have been in the workforce for ten years or less.
The company previously raised $1.5 million from PEAK6 and angel investors.
Welcome to Startups Weekly — your weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday.
In the corporate tug-of-war over remote work, CEOs like Andy Jassy and Elon Musk are the old-school gym teachers insisting everyone get back on the field, despite the bleachers being perfectly fine. They argue that remote work is akin to slacking off, yet studies and employee sentiments suggest otherwise, highlighting that flexibility might just be the secret sauce to productivity and satisfaction.
Meanwhile, the rest of us are watching this unfold like a tennis match, wondering if these executives will ever match their strategies with the reality of modern work preferences. Ron has been working from home as a writer for almost as long as I’ve been alive. No wonder we call him Daddy Ron (we don’t, honestly, although that would be hilarious). In any case, Ron argues that working from home ain’t going away, and I can’t say that I disagree in any way — even as I’m writing this from my local pizza parlor. Working from home. Working from pizza parlor. Whatever, as long as it ain’t the office, amirite?
Very checkr. Much security. Image Credits: Checkr
Mahbod Moghadam, whose roller-coaster career ranged from legal eagle to rap lyric annotator to blockchain enthusiast, died in March at the age of 41. He leaves behind a legacy as colorful and controversial as a graffiti-splashed back alley. Known for his edgy antics and brainchild projects like Genius and Wikipedia-but-on-blockchain Everipedia, Moghadam was a maverick who tried to shake up the digital content payment scene with ventures like HellaDoge, and even in his final acts, remained a thorn in the side of the establishment he helped create. As tributes roll in, the tech community reflects on a figure who was as much a provocateur as he was a pioneer, proving that in the startup world, being unforgettable is sometimes more impactful than being unimpeachable.
Image Credits: Faraday Future
Look, I’m trying my best to have a balance of everything here on Startups Weekly. It ain’t my fault that the transportation team keeps punching way above its weight. Just read all of their stuff, okay, it’s all good.
In a twist that’s less surprising and more “Muskian,” Elon Musk refuted claims about Tesla ditching a budget EV for a robotaxi, only to turn around and hype an upcoming robotaxi reveal (even as Tesla throws in the towel for its entry-level-price car). Critics replied that he’s been promising that since 2016, but Full Self-Driving (FSD) continues to be a thorn in Tesla’s side.
Here’s some highlights from the past week:
Clicky clicky. Image Credits: Frederic Lardinois/TechCrunch
Every week, there’s always a few stories I want to share with you that somehow don’t fit into the categories above. It’d be a shame if you missed ’em, so here’s a random grab bag of goodies for ya:
For every tech success story, there are countless projects that slam headlong into the brick wall of reality. Apple’s electric vehicle ambitions are one of the most recent — and, frankly, best — examples of a project failing in spite of seeming to have everything going for it.
The jury is still out on the ultimate fate of the Vision Pro, but at the very least, Apple’s mixed reality headset demonstrates that the company isn’t afraid to keep trying where pretty much everyone else has failed. With the Apple Car firmly in the rearview, the company is reportedly exploring yet another notoriously difficult path: home robots.
The category is both unique and uniquely difficult for a number of reasons. One thing that sets it apart from other categories is the fact that there’s been precisely one success story: the robot vacuum. It’s been 22 years since the first Roomba was introduced, and for the past two decades, an entire industry (including iRobot itself) has been chasing that success.
iRobot’s inability to strike gold a second time is not for lack of trying. In the nearly quarter-century since it introduced Roomba, it’s given us gutter clearers, pool cleaners, lawn mowers and even a Roomba specifically designed to remove screws and other hardware detritus off garage floors. In spite of those efforts, however, the company has fared best when it focused its resources back into its robot vacuum.
Image Credits: iRobot
The robot vacuum succeeded for the same reason any robot has ever succeeded: It was a product built to perform a single in-demand task repetitively to the best of its ability. To this day, vacuums are the battlefield on which the home robot wars are fought. Take the well-funded Bay Area startup Matic. The former Google/Nest engineers who founded the company believe the next breakthrough in the home will be built on the foundation of robot vacuums. Their case, in part, is that iRobot effectively painted itself into a corner with its puck-like form factor.
Those early Roombas weren’t built with today’s sensing and mapping capabilities in mind. Matic believes that by simply making the robot taller, you dramatically improve its vantage point. This was also the driver behind the most interesting innovation found on Amazon’s Astro home robot: the periscope camera.
Image Credits: Amazon
The fact is that home robot functionality is severely hampered by form factor. The hockey puck design that’s prevalent across robot vacuums isn’t ideal for anything beyond the core functionality it’s built for. To effectively perform more of the sorts of tasks people might desire in a home robot, the hardware needs to get more complex. Mobile manipulators are a great moving target. That is to say, if you want a helping hand, a hand is a good place to start.
Like so many other things in this world, however, mobile manipulators are deceptively difficult. In fact, industrial robotics haven’t cracked it yet. Big, bolted-down arms are common in manufacturing, and wheeled autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) like Locus and Kiva are common in warehouses, but the middle ground between the two hasn’t been firmly established. This is a big part of the reason the human element remains important in that world. It’s a problem that will be solved soon enough, but it seems likely it will happen with these more expensive industrial machines well before it makes its way into more affordable home robots (as a rule, corporations generally have deeper pockets than people).
This is also a big part of the reason many are championing the humanoid form factor in the workplace (human beings, after all, offer a kind of mobile manipulation). But that’s a longwinded think piece for another day.
Image Credits: Hello Robotics
Mobile manipulation isn’t entirely out of reach for home robots. Hello Robot’s Stretch is probably the most compelling example at the moment. Rather than a humanoid form factor, the robot looks like a Roomba with a pole mounted in its center. This houses both an imaging system and an arm that moves up and down to clasp objects (dishes, laundry) at different heights. Of course, some tasks are more easily accomplished with two arms — and suddenly you start to see why so many robotics firms have effectively backward-engineered humanoids.
In its current form, Stretch is prohibitively expensive at $24,950. That’s likely a big part of the reason the company is selling it as a development platform. Interestingly, Matic sees its own robot as a kind of development platform — using vacuuming as a gateway into additional home chores.
Another issue with Stretch is that it’s teleoperated (the company sent us a note after this published stating that some developers have created autonomous functions). There’s nothing wrong with teleop in many scenarios, but it seems unlikely that people are going to flock to a home robot that’s being controlled by a human somewhere far away.
Navigation is another key barrier to the home. Compared to warehouses and factories, homes are relatively unstructured environments. They differ greatly from one to another, lighting tends to be all over the place and humans are constantly moving stuff around and dropping things on the floor.
Matic’s vacuum uses an array of cameras to map spaces — and understand where it is in them. Image Credits: Matic
The world of self-driving has faced its own obstacles on this front. But the key difference between an autonomous robot on the highway and another in the home is that the worst the latter is probably going to do is knock something off a shelf. That’s bad, but very rarely does it result in death. With self-driving cars, on the other hand, any accident represents a significant step back for the industry. The technology is — perhaps understandably — being held to a higher standard than its human counterpart.
While adoption of self-driving technologies is well behind the curve that many anticipated, largely for the above safety reason, many of the technologies developed for the category have helped quietly kickstart their own robotics revolution, as autonomous vehicles take over farms and sidewalks.
This is likely a big part of the reason it might view home robots as “the next big thing” (to quote Bloomberg quoting its sources). Apple has no doubt pumped a tremendous amount of resources into driving technologies. If those could be repurposed for a different project, maybe it won’t all be for naught.
While the reports note that Apple “hasn’t committed” to either the robotic smart screen or mobile robot that are said to exist somewhere inside the company’s skunkworks, it has already put Apple Home execs Matt Costello and Brian Lynch on the hardware side of things, while SVP of Machine Learning and AI Strategy John Giannandrea is said to be involved on the AI side of things.
Image Credits: Brian Heater
Given the proximity to its home efforts, one can imagine the company working on its own version of Amazon’s Astro — though that project currently exists as more of a cautionary tale for the time being. The project has been hamstrung by high cost and a lack of useful features to justify it. The system also effectively served as a mobile Alexa portal, and home assistants have largely fallen out of fashion of late.
Apple does have some robotics expertise — though nothing approaching what Amazon has on its industrial side. The company has been involved in the production of robot arms like Daisy, which salvages key metals from discarded iPhones. That’s still a pretty large leap to a home robot.
Perhaps the company could take a more Vision Pro-like approach to the category, which has a heavy focus on developer contributions. Doing so, however, would require an extremely versatile hardware platform, which would almost certainly be cost-prohibitive for most consumers, making the Vision Pro’s $3,500 price tag look like small potatoes.
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