Good morning! The grid needs multiple types of storage to be truly decarbonized and resilient, and a battery based around rust might be just the thing to complement lithium-ion.

Building a long-life grid battery

We’ll need to increase renewable energy use by 430% this decade to get on track to net zero. But the sun sets and the wind stops blowing, so we’ll also need battery storage to keep up with demand — and in fact, we need new kinds of batteries, Protocol’s Lisa Martine Jenkins writes.

What’s wrong with lithium-ion grid storage? Utility-scale versions of those ubiquitous batteries can only discharge energy for up to four hours at a time, meaning that systems can falter when the grid needs to provide widespread power for a long period of time.

• To free the grid from fossil fuels that currently provide a baseload of energy, we need long-duration batteries that provide power for at least several days at a time.
• In reality, of course, we’ll need both: fast-reacting batteries such as lithium-ion, as well as something that can discharge over a longer period.

A potential solution uses alternative chemistry. A company called Form Energy is developing batteries that use an iron-air technology, its CEO, Mateo Jaramillo, told Lisa.

• These batteries work by harnessing the power of rust: They submerge a piece of porous iron in an electrolyte solution, using the metal’s rusting process to charge and discharge energy over the course of several days.
• This technology has been around for decades and was the subject of a 1970s Department of Energy study. But in Jaramillo’s view, it is only now ready for commercialization because the technology is particularly well-suited to the demands of today’s — and tomorrow’s — grid.

The new batteries are now being tested: Form Energy signed a partnership with Georgia Power, its first with an investor-owned utility, earlier this year. The duo will work to deploy up to 15 megawatts of storage capacity. (In 2020, it announced a much smaller 1 megawatt pilot project with the Minnesota cooperative Great River Energy.)

• The company recently closed a $450 million Series E funding round, bringing its total pot of funding to $800 million. It counts high-profile VCs like Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Energy Impact Partners among its investors.

But even if they work, the batteries face obstacles to deployment. Markets need to be redesigned to reflect “where we really are today and where we want to go,” Jaramillo said. “Grid operators and markets were designed with an entirely different and largely combustion-driven grid in mind.”

Read More: Long-duration batteries could free the grid from fossil fuels

The FOMO around generative AI

Generative AI can create more than just text and images: It’s clearly generated a hype cycle around AI companies and rabid investor interest in the space, Protocol’s Biz Carson writes.

Last week was generative AI’s breakout moment, at least if you’re judging by the parties, blog posts, and funding deals that all debuted in the last seven days.

• It kicked off last Monday, when Stability AI — the makers of Stable Diffusion, one of the most popular image-generation models — announced it had raised $101 million and become a unicorn. The next day, AI copywriter Jasper announced its own $125 million round and new billion-dollar valuation.
• Sequoia partner Sonya Huang also released a market map of companies in the space. The fact that two newly minted unicorns were on it (plus investor herd mentality) made it go viral.
• By Friday, the thought leadership around generative AI was in full force with people like Elad Gil, NFX’s James Currier, and several partners at Coatue all publishing their views on the space.

The hype may be high, but it’s “absolutely justified,” said Sequoia’s Huang. While models like GPT-3 and DALL-E have been on the market for a short time, Huang’s map was one of the first to really lay out what the applications of the technology could be and where people are already building on it.

• Image generation, text, and code are the three main areas where there’s a lot of concentrated activity, as the funding rounds of Jasper and Stability AI prove.
• But there were empty boxes in areas like biology that were still “to come” on Huang’s market map, meaning green fields abound for entrepreneurs. “If I was a founder in [Y Combinator] right now, I would 100% be pointing my guns at one of these models and seeing what I can do,” she said.

The end goal isn’t more whimsical images, but giving humans “superpowers” by having a machine work alongside them.

• Huang told Biz that when writing Sequoia’s original blog post on generative AI, she started by using GPT-3 to help describe the differences between classical AI and generative AI, and from there, asked GPT-3 to fill in the blank on potential applications, generating even more ideas. “That human-machine iteration loop I hadn't experienced before,” she told me.
• Learning how to work with these models is going to be a new skill set, one that could make people more creative or more productive. “We have to train how we work with the machines, but I think the result really is we are superpower humans as a result of being able to work with these machines,” Huang told me.

Read more: Sequoia’s Sonya Huang says the generative AI hype is “absolutely justified”

​The tech war's next front?

U.S. efforts to freeze China’s technological progress in key areas may turn out to be about more than just advanced chips, Protocol’s Enterprise team writes.

• Bloomberg reported that technologies that could be used in quantum computing, along with “artificial intelligence software,” might be the Biden administration’s next targets for export controls.
• The Bloomberg report indicates, however, that the Biden administration’s planning is at an early stage.

Quantum computing is being taken very seriously. The U.S. government has clearly been considering the threat of quantum-based attacks, while China has openly placed a high priority on acquiring quantum computers. That’s all despite the fact that quantum computing and the associated threat to encryption are years, possibly even decades, away from commercialization.

• The recent U.S. blockade on exports of advanced chip technology to China essentially already prevents the country from getting the chip technologies it needs for quantum computing from U.S. suppliers, according to Aidan Madigan-Curtis, a supply chain expert who formerly worked for Apple.
• Any restrictions on quantum-related technologies, then, might focus on the software and material sciences that would be needed as other underpinnings for the technologies.
• The Bloomberg report had a notable lack of specifics regarding "AI software," an extremely broad category that can mean different things depending on the context.

A broader tech freeze on China could be crippling for the nation in the long term. It could not only stifle China economically, but also prevent the Chinese government, down the road, from potentially leveraging quantum computers for encryption-breaking cyberattacks.

• The White House published a list of critical and emerging technologies in February that could be used to inform national security-related activities such as new export controls or investment screening. The list included network sensing, quantum information technologies, and AI.

Read more: A version of this article first appeared in our Enterprise newsletter. Subscribe here.

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People are talking

Elon Musk said the global economic decline could last until the spring of 2024:

• “It sure would be nice to have one year without a horrible global event.”

Emmett Shear, CEO of Twitch, said there needs to be a “third way” in employment law to classify content creators:

• “It’s not quite a W-2 job and it’s not quite a contracting job. I think we could really use legislation that created a third option that was appropriate for the gig economy and the creator economy.”

Coming this week

TikTok, Boom premieres Monday on ITVS. The film is about the complexity of tech and social media.

Apple is releasing macOS Ventura and iPadOS 16 on Monday.

The SMPTE Media Technology Summit starts Monday and runs until Thursday in Hollywood.

Meta’s Quest Pro headset goes on sale on Tuesday, starting at $1,500.

Several companies report earnings this week. Alphabet, Microsoft and Spotify report on Tuesday; ServiceNow reports on Wednesday; and Apple, Shopify and Pinterest report on Thursday.

The one-year anniversary of Meta’s rebrand from Facebook is Friday. Going well so far, eh?

The deadline for the Elon Musk vs. Twitter trial is Friday.

In other news

The SEC finally agreed to release documents that Ripple says could shed light on the agency’s thinking on crypto as it pursues a lawsuit against the crypto company.

The White House is in talks with Elon Musk about setting up Starlink in Iran to provide internet service to the country.

Evans Hankey, Apple’s VP of industrial design, is leaving three years after taking over from Jony Ive.

Phillips is to cut 4,000 jobs, or about 5% of its workforce, in order to reduce operating expenses.

Facebook is prepared to block sharing of new articles in Canada, over legislation that would force tech companies to compensate domestic media outlets in the country.

There may be a big problem for carbon removal: Capturing 1 billion tons of carbon could essentially require all of the carbon-free energy that’s available today, including nuclear.

Amazon hired Hawaiian Airlines to fly the first Airbus cargo planes in its air network, which will replace its older fleet.

Neuralink delayed its latest demo by a month, surprising essentially nobody.

Taylor Swift’s metaverse?

Lots of companies think they have a clear picture of what the metaverse will look like, but the unifying theme is creating a place for people to gather — and, more to the point, a place where people actually want to gather. Strangely enough, Taylor Swift has cultivated the underpinnings of killer metaverse over the past 15 years, dropping hints and messages throughout album liner notes, music videos, and social-media posts for her network of fans to listen to and discuss all across the internet. And they do it in droves. OK, so Taylor’s metaverse may be missing the digital infrastructure and VR headset. But she’s nailed the part that the likes of Meta are still struggling with.

A MESSAGE FROM CAPITAL ONE SOFTWARE

The flexibility of the cloud helps companies like Capital One unlock access to their data with performance that can scale instantly. But this flexibility and scale can also create a unique challenge for organizations and users who are not proficient in cloud optimization.

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Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to sourcecode@protocol.com, or our tips line, tips@protocol.com. Enjoy your day, see you tomorrow.

Battery storage has emerged as a key technology to reach net zero.

So far, lithium-ion batteries have largely been used by utilities to store renewable energy when the sun sets or the wind stops blowing. However, existing utility-scale storage can only discharge energy for up to four hours at a time, meaning that systems can falter when the grid needs to provide widespread power for a long period of time, such as during a heat wave or major storm. To free the grid from fossil fuels that currently provide that baseload, we need long-duration batteries that provide power for at least several days at a time.

Form Energy is developing batteries that use an iron-air technology and could be poised to fill that gap. Investors certainly seem to think so. The 5-year-old company raised a whopping $450 million in its series E funding round, bringing its total investment to around $800 million. It counts high-profile VCs like Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Energy Impact Partners among its investors, as well as the steel company ArcelorMittal. The latter is also among the industrial firms that Form Energy has partnered with to acquire iron for its batteries and deploy them to provide power for notoriously hard-to-decarbonize sectors. (The head of ArcelorMittal’s investment fund said its investment leaves it “well-placed to directly benefit as the technology matures to industrial scale.”)

Form Energy signed a partnership with Georgia Power, its first with an investor-owned utility, earlier this year. The duo will work to deploy up to 15 megawatts of storage capacity. In 2020, it announced a much smaller 1 megawatt pilot project with the Minnesota cooperative Great River Energy. CEO and co-founder Mateo Jaramillo told Protocol that Form Energy will announce more contracts in the near future, and that the company is targeting late 2024 for commercial production of its batteries.

The technology sounds deceptively simple. Form Energy submerges a porous piece of iron (the anode, reminiscent of a flat and thin brick) in an electrolyte solution, and then harnesses the metal’s natural rusting process to charge and discharge energy over the course of several days. Every battery has both a cathode and an anode, which pull electrons from a circuit and push them out, respectively. But in Form Energy’s case, Jaramillo said, “the cathode is a bit of a false term.”

“The active material is not inside the battery,” he said. “It’s the oxygen in the air.”

Form Energy submerges a porous piece of iron in an electrolyte solution then harnesses the rusting process.Image: Form Energy

The oxygen is highly controlled, entering the washer-and-dryer-sized batteries through a specialized membrane that keeps it from going out again. Once it makes contact with the electrolyte solution, a series of chemical reactions causes the iron to rust.

“Before we zeroed in on iron-air batteries, we considered what is fundamentally able to scale and what is fundamentally safe, and what is fundamentally available to us to work with,” Jaramillo said. “Iron ticks all of those boxes.”

This technology has been around for decades and was the subject of a 1970s Department of Energy study in the wake of the oil embargo and accompanying energy crisis. But in Jaramillo’s view, it is only now being commercialized because the technology is particularly well-suited to the demands of today’s grid. He spoke with Protocol about how the iron-air technology works and the importance of long-duration storage.

This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

Can you explain exactly how an iron-air battery charges and discharges energy?

We can drive the chemical reaction that causes rusting in both directions. When you return the iron to its metallic state, you're essentially charging it and preparing it to be discharged, because iron wants to rust. But we know how to keep that from happening automatically by controlling its conditions. In its charged state, a metallic iron anode doesn't have oxygen working on it. And then in the discharged state, we're adding the oxygen to it, and in that process, it gives up the electrons.

How do iron-air batteries fit with the energy storage system?

Today, the lowest marginal cost source of electricity is renewable. There is very low-cost wind and solar, but those resources only show up when the weather permits. And when we have a weather-driven power-generation system, we need to be able to solve for the intermittency. The easy pattern to solve for is the daily cycle — the sun going down and coming back up every morning — but we also have patterns around storms and seasonality. To solve that problem, you want really low-cost batteries so you can provide storage for days at a time, and there are trade-offs to get there.

Lithium-ion batteries are very good at cycling many thousands of times. If I charge my phone a few times a day, I’m getting maybe 1,000 cycles per year out of my battery. But let’s say we have a battery that discharges for a week and then charges for a week. That means that the theoretical maximum number of cycles I could get out of my battery is 26 per year. So if I want it to have a 20-year life, we’re talking about roughly 500 cycles. If I want to keep the battery low-cost, I don’t need to prioritize thousands of cycles like I would for a lithium-ion battery.

Form Energy CEO Mateo JaramilloPhoto: Form Energy

The trick is to make the right trade-offs in pursuit of the attributes that you really care about. On the grid today, we have great daily cycling batteries like lithium-ion, but what we don’t have are these very low-cost batteries that allow you to smooth out multiple days of intermittency associated with the power generation driven by weather. And that's what Form Energy is.

Do you have any supply chain challenges?

We certainly didn’t anticipate the supply chain problems for battery materials caused by the pandemic, but we did anticipate the scale of what we’re trying to do. And if you are competing with the automotive industry for the same materials, it's just going to be very difficult.

How have recent policy developments, such as the bipartisan infrastructure law or the Inflation Reduction Act, informed your work?

There are benefits in both of those pieces of legislation. There are specific programs in the bipartisan infrastructure act for long-duration storage, including for demonstrations. And in the IRA, the benefit to Form is direct and indirect. The biggest benefit is probably indirect, in that it is setting up a path for the energy transition broadly. If you use renewable power, you're going to want this kind of solution. But there are also direct benefits for storage in there, in particular the investment tax credit. That’s the same vehicle that's been used for solar for a very long time and has helped bring down costs, but it is calling out storage for the first time as a qualifying technology. The owner of the asset qualifies for the ITC, which would make it cheaper for both companies to develop storage technology.

What other kinds of policies would ease Form Energy’s path?

Probably most important for us at this point is that the market designs are updated to reflect where we really are today and where we want to go. Grid operators and markets were designed with an entirely different and largely combustion-driven grid in mind. There's a big push in general to acknowledge that and figure out what the right market designs are to get the system to value things like reliability and decarbonization.

For example, last year MISO came out with a report about what they called the “reliability imperative,” in which they started to articulate how the market design needs to incorporate reliability as an explicit thing that gets compensated. That is something that will have to get defined in how wholesale markets are designed so that the value that we bring as an asset is properly compensated.

Good morning! Employees are drowning in a sea of apps. But bailing them out is a trickier challenge than it might seem.

Fighting software bloat

1,200. That’s how many times, on average, an office worker switches between applications in one work day. Equally startling, the number of apps that the average business runs has grown to 187, a big jump from 77 in 2015. And some have many, many more. But despite the growth in IT over the past seven years, worker productivity has slowed to a sluggish pace, per federal data, prompting the question: What’s the benefit of all this tech?

It’s no surprise companies are clogged with many potentially unnecessary applications. For decades, IT vendors have convinced businesses that whatever inefficiencies they might have could be solved by adopting yet another new program.

• The rise of software-as-a-service only exacerbated that problem, as it made it much easier for companies to deploy new products, increasingly without going through IT gatekeepers.
• Add in the fact that most large corporations have acquired a passel of smaller companies, all with their own unique IT stacks, as well as the pivot to remote work, which seems to require a whole new set of apps, and it’s easy to see how quickly the portfolio is getting out of hand.

Industry experts remark, behind the scenes, that most tech portfolios within enterprises are duct-taped together. Not every piece of software is snake oil. But many are unable to achieve success in isolation. Instead, real value comes when various apps work together. That’s why companies like Oracle have long touted the potential cost savings that arise as a result of consolidating on their suites.

• That’s more promise than reality, even for products purchased through the same vendor. That forces companies to solicit expensive help from consultants and yet more software vendors to help stitch those disparate systems together.

Those efforts clearly haven’t succeeded. Users are still forced to toggle through tons of different systems to do their jobs. Basic tasks still require ample human intervention. And businesses still can’t get immediate answers to basic questions like “How many employees do I have?”

• CEOs and tech leaders have few options. Once software is deployed throughout the enterprise, it’s tough to junk an app due to, among other factors, employee pushback. Even though those monthly bills add up, the ROI rarely justifies the cost. It’s easier to let things ride.
• And that’s why firms like Oracle and IBM continue to rake in the dough from aging software. That is slowly changing as new options emerge. But even as those companies pivot to modern tech, many of those legacy systems still run in the background.
• Part of the problem is also the dynamics of working in a corporation. If a department is given a budget for tech, it’s going to spend it.

There is a shift happening in the world of business software that promises a fix. Instead of building software targeted at a specific function, providers are increasingly trying to build tools to manage entire processes. Instead of just procurement, for example, picture software that handles everything from procurement to logistics to payment.

• It’s why marketing materials from the likes of Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Microsoft are now hyperfocused on the concept of “workflows,” which means integrating widely used systems under one user interface to try to prevent the dreaded tab switching. It’s basically a Band-Aid for the underlying issue of app bloat that came from those same vendors overselling customers on things they probably didn’t need.
• There’s also ample investment in programs that can analyze information stored in multiple core systems across a business, a trend that promises to let companies finally use the decades of data they’ve gathered for competitive advantage.
• And new vendors are building their core systems so that external sources can be plugged in more easily. The combination of Asana and Slack, for example, can make it easier for managers to track employee work without that maddening app switch.

Software is an industry that was built on over-promising and under-delivering. But despite some horror stories, it’s clear that businesses that invest in the right tech early can very quickly outpace rivals.

• As IT permeates deeper throughout the enterprise, it’s imperative that leaders become smarter purchasers, a difficult task as vendors constantly push new payment models and “categories” of must-have tech.
• A smart company is no longer one that simply burns a bunch of money getting tons of shiny new applications. Increasingly, as the programs get more advanced, it takes a very strategic approach to be successful — and with it, dedicated talent to support integrations. Alongside developers, for example, IT might consider hiring user experience experts to streamline work.

Tech leaders love to say we’re still in the early innings of a long digital modernization journey. If that’s the case, buckle up, because the road ahead is bumpy. And given the software industry’s track record, sometimes customers might have to pave pieces of it themselves.

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The best of Protocol

• Jensen Huang and his wife, Lori Huang, are donating $50 million to Oregon State University for a new innovation complex that will include a Nvidia supercomputer. The investment, Huang said, is to help people simulate the future, using AI to “predict the impact of climate science and the magnitude of impact in different regions around the world.”

Confessions of a metaverse unicorn — Janko Roettgers

• Horizon Worlds is relatively barren, with only around 200,000 users in total. Protocol’s own Janko Roettgers is one of those 200,000, falling in love with the game Arena Clash, described by the company as “a team-based laser tag game” earlier this year. Even with its glitches and moderation challenges, Arena Clash is proof that Horizon Worlds can actually be fun.

AWS has a clear advantage among cloud enterprise marketplaces: It has the most customers — Donna Goodison

• Since its launch in 2012, AWS Marketplace has made a name for itself as the most mature cloud-apps marketplace among the Big Three providers — and many software vendors see it as a crucial part of their go-to-market strategy. Its secret is its “private offers,” which allow SaaS companies to negotiate custom licensing agreements, pricing, and payment schedules with customers without leaving Amazon’s marketplace.

Connecting crypto wallets is scary. Plaid wants to change that. — Tomio Geron

• Plaid’s latest product, which helps developers connect consumers’ crypto wallets to their apps, aims to make crypto more secure. But it also feeds into an ongoing debate over just how decentralized crypto can be while addressing consumers’ needs for secure, easy-to-use apps.

Maryland’s digital ad tax shows how hard ‘easy’ policy can be — Ben Brody

• A Maryland court struck down the state’s first-in-the-nation tax on Big Tech’s digital ads. The ruling may force several states eyeing similar laws to go back to the drawing board, and shows how tricky regulating Big Tech can be, even with something as seemingly simple as a tax.

Salesforce SVP: The definition of ‘team’ is changing — Allison Levitsky

• The next stage of work isn’t just rethinking what it means to be in an office, but rethinking what it means to be on a team, Kat Holmes, SVP of UX and product design at Salesforce, told Protocol. For some companies, being on a team doesn’t mean working on the same product, but rather being in the same space and finding “connection that can be built through that local community.”

Carbon removal has a funding gap. This climate nonprofit is attempting to fill it. — Michelle Ma

• Major tech companies like Microsoft, Alphabet, and Salesforce are all-in on carbon dioxide removal. Terraset, a nonprofit that came out of stealth mode this week, is jumping in to help channel private philanthropy into the nascent field to bridge its funding gap.

Why security teams are losing trust in the term ‘zero trust’ — Kyle Alspach

• The cybersecurity term “zero trust” is cryptic, overused, and often misconstrued. When used correctly, experts agree it’s the best way to stop cyberattacks in their tracks. But vendors giving the “zero trust” title to every cybersecurity product they offer is muddying the waters for security teams.

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Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to our tips line, tips@protocol.com. Enjoy your day, see you tomorrow.

Hello, and welcome to Pipeline. I’m Biz Carson, and after spending 17 days on the road in the Midwest and New England, I’d argue that the Midwest’s fall is underrated and has some pretty great leaf-peeping too. Thanks to Tomio for filling in last week in my absence. Also happy birthday, Dad!

This week in the startup world: the weird place people listen to Clubhouse, why managing out is the new layoffs, and generative AI’s breakout moment.

The FOMO around generative AI

Generative AI can create more than just text and images: It’s clearly generated a hype cycle around AI companies and rabid investor interest in the space.

This week was generative AI’s breakout moment, at least if you’re judging by the parties, blog posts, funding deals, and new use cases that all debuted this week.

• It kicked off Monday with Stability AI’s funding round and kick-off party at San Francisco’s Exploratorium. Sergey Brin, Naval Ravikant, and Ron Conway all attended what The New York Times described as “a coming-out party for generative A.I.” The makers of Stable Diffusion, one of the most popular image-generation models, had raised $101 million and become a unicorn.
• The next day, AI copywriter Jasper announced its own $125 million round and new billion-dollar valuation as well. Sequoia partner Sonya Huang also released a market map of companies in the space, which included Jasper. The fact that two newly minted unicorns were on it (plus investor herd mentality) made it go viral.
• On Thursday, fashion maker Cala announced that it was using DALL-E to generate new ideas for clothes and accessories. I’m guessing “powered by DALL-E” is going to be a tagline you’ll see on company's pitches even more often.
• By Friday, the thought leadership around generative AI was in full force with people like Elad Gil, NFX’s James Currier, and several partners at Coatue all publishing their views on the space.

The hype may be high, but it’s “absolutely justified,” said Sequoia’s Huang. While models like GPT-3 and DALL-E have been on the market for a short time, Huang’s map was one of the first to really lay out what the applications of the technology could be and where people are already building on it.

• Image generation, text, and code are the three main areas where there’s a lot of concentrated activity, as the funding rounds of Jasper and Stability AI prove. “People are moving on beyond one-shot image generation to a few different branches, whether it's ‘Let's make this really good for the process of interior design or product design’ or ‘Let's make it a really, really good image generator that you can continue innovating with the machine on,’” Huang said.
• But there were empty boxes in areas like biology that were still “to come” on Huang’s market map, meaning green fields abound for entrepreneurs. “If I was a founder in [Y Combinator] right now, I would 100% be pointing my guns at one of these models and seeing what I can do,” she said.

The end goal isn’t more whimsical images, but giving humans “superpowers” by having a machine work alongside them.

• When Huang started thinking about which areas could find applications, she turned to GPT-3 to help her brainstorm. She told me that when writing Sequoia’s original blog post on the subject, she started by using GPT-3 to help describe the differences between classical AI and generative AI, and from there, asked GPT-3 to fill in the blank on potential applications, generating even more ideas. “That human-machine iteration loop I hadn't experienced before,” she told me.
• Learning how to work with these models is going to be a new skill set, one that could make people more creative or more productive. “We have to train how we work with the machines, but I think the result really is we are superpower humans as a result of being able to work with these machines,” Huang told me.

It will be a while before generative AI can generate its own market map, but given its ability to manufacture buzz, the future maybe isn’t too far away. Huang’s already working on an update to a landscape that’s changing fast. Let the FOMO begin.

For more on generative AI, read my Q&A with Sequoia’s Sonya Huang.

Overheard

Can you tell what’s AI or not? This week, YouTuber Ali Abdaal’s Twitter thread on productivity hacks went viral with over 1 million impressions. A day later, Abdaal revealed it was an experiment that was almost entirely written by GPT-3. The AI’s answers were good (and actually useful), which could threaten the creator economy that normally churns out these kinds of threads. “I was a bit scared initially, but this experiment makes me even more bullish on the idea of personality and personal brands, where an AI can’t (yet) replicate the vibe we feel with other humans (especially through video),” Abdaal tweeted.

“This is a giant office park. It is indistinguishable from Huntsville. How are you people not embarrassed? You’re supposed to be builders.” An hour visiting the heart of the tech industry left one person deeply disappointed by the low-slung, low-key office buildings of Silicon Valley. Just don’t tell them how it used to be beautiful orchards before it was turned into office buildings.

Quiet quitting is out. “Quiet layoffs” are in. That’s the new moniker for the term when companies just try to quietly manage out a bunch of people by giving bad performance reviews. For example, Stripe managers were reportedly told to start giving lower ratings to chunks of the workforce and were asked during performance evaluations whether they’d hire that employee again.

This week’s weirdest stat: 24% of Clubhouse users use the app in the shower.

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It's becoming increasingly appreciated among the broader business and NGO community that the planet and people elements of sustainability are mutually dependent, and as such a focus on one at the exclusion of the other will be fruitless. But balancing profit and sustainability progress remains a more thorny debate.

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Inside track

How low can we go? The public market continues to compress, writes Redpoint’s Tomasz Tunguz. Revenue multiples are now below 2016 levels.

It feels early for 2023 predictions, but it’s time to break out the crystal ball. Contrary’s Eric Tarczynski predicts a bifurcation in the market where the best companies will find as good of terms as any and everyone else will remain in the depressed market of this past year.

Consumer social is saturated already, but innovation is still happening, and apps like Gas are still having their breakout moments. Index’s Rex Woodbury breaks down why consumer social isn’t totally dead yet and where there are still areas (like photo sharing) for startups to tackle.

Need to know

Venture deals declined in Q3 quite dramatically. “The magnitude of the decline from 3Q21 -> 3Q22 is the largest such decline ever observed in a 12-month period on AngelList,” the company wrote about the sharp pullback seen last quarter.

SF is getting its own tech week. This week already kind of felt like tech week between TechCrunch Disrupt and the Masters of Scale event in the Presidio, but not to be upstaged by Miami and LA, VCs are banding together to create an SF Tech Week in early November. Seems like a bit of an oxymoron if you ask me.

Instacart’s IPO is back on ice. The real surprise is that anyone ever thought an IPO this year was possible.

Ye acquired Parler, but perhaps the most important part is what he isn’t buying.

It’s time to build (more crypto companies). Andreessen Horowitz is going toe-to-toe with Y Combinator with the launch of its new accelerator, Crypto Startup School, as more firms build their own YC alternatives. Meanwhile, a16z partners have been heavily involved in political donations to crypto-friendly candidates, and a Forbes deep dive into their spending argues its paying off for the firm.

Moves: In more niche climate tech VC news, HubSpot co-founder Brian Halligan has a new $100 million fund focused on ocean-related climate tech and Chris Sacca has a new $250 million fusion-focused fund. Marc Lore and Alex Rodriguez (yes, A-Rod) are teaming up on a new sports ticketing startup that would resell seats when people leave midway through a game. Kanjun Qiu is starting an AI research company, Generally Intelligent, to create actually intelligent AI agents.

From Protocol: Peter Thiel's gamble against the “somewhat fake California thing,” and how the fate of the Republican party (and his role in it) hinges on the Senate races in Ohio and Arizona.

Also from Protocol: How Big Tech critic Meredith Whittaker decided to leave the FTC to run Signal.

Also, also from Protocol: Clubhouse and its clones continue to try, but audio will never capture the hearts of social media users.

Your weekend reading: He’s already a big name in tech, but now Craft Ventures’ David Sacks is making a name for himself in politics too. The New Republic took a look at the “quiet political rise of David Sacks, Silicon Valley’s prophet of urban doom” and how Sacks is following in the footsteps of buddies Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.

A MESSAGE FROM GOALS HOUSE

Currently, much of the ‘E’ in ESG is focussed on climate only, and it is essential that companies also focus on biodiversity, recognizing nature-climate linkages in order to optimize mitigation and build resilience. ESG will prepare us for the necessary paradigm shift, driven by increasing external pressures forced upon us as a result of short-term profits.

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Alan W. McLachlan, an engineer who helped create the PDF, died at home in San Francisco on Oct. 6. He was 58.

His husband Paul McLachlan, who works as senior engineering manager at Rivian, described him as incredibly humble, talented, and loving. His co-workers described him as vastly knowledgeable and technically gifted. Throughout his career he focused on firmware, essential software that allows a device’s specific hardware to function. It’s not “the sexy part of tech, because everybody wants to write the app,” Paul said. Yet Alan’s code, Paul said, is likely running on the computer of everyone who reads this article.

“His legacy is to celebrate the people who want to help, who are working in the background on the stuff that you don’t see but you use everyday,” Paul said.

Alan was born in Auckland, New Zealand. In 1979, he immigrated to the United States, where he enrolled in Orange County’s Westminster High School. Paul said one of Alan’s early experiences with computers took place in high school, when a teacher sat him down in front of Commodore 64 and made him learn it.

After high school, he attended California State University, Long Beach where he studied radio, film, and television. He graduated in 1985. He was a part of the film crew for the sitcom “Family Ties” during his studies, Paul said, and “he has a bunch of photographs with people like Michael J. Fox and others.”

Alan taught himself to code; he never studied computer science or engineering formally. He pivoted from film to technology soon after graduation, according to his LinkedIn. One of his early jobs was as a senior programmer with the Conographic Corporation. In 1993, he started working at Adobe as a systems programmer. He was a member of the core team that invented the PDF, and built the printer drivers (software that converts data into a printable format) that enabled languages like Arabic, Farsi, and Urdu.

“He was really fortunate to join tech before it was a capital T,” Paul said. “It was a weird industry full of weird people who were not working like other people.”

Alan with Michael J. Fox; Alan with his dog Ayr.Photos: Courtesy of Paul McLachlan

Alan later worked at Microsoft on the Xbox engineering team. The majority of his career, though, was spent at BigFix, which was acquired by IBM in 2013 and subsequently HCL Technologies in 2019. Brian Shorey, his manager at BigFix, said Alan was known as a company encyclopedia. He knew the product inside-out, and was adept at handling complicated customer problems.

“Everyone knew they could just ping Alan and he could answer their questions,” Shorey said. “It was quicker than doing a Google search or looking it up internally.”

Shorey said Alan was one of the smartest people he’d ever met, describing him as a “super guy.” Fellow BigFix architect Rosario Gangemi echoed Shorey’s descriptions, also noting Alan’s care and thoughtfulness. “He’s somebody that speaks only with reason and when he has something to say,” Gangemi said. BigFix promoted Alan’s position to fellow posthumously. He’s the first fellow within HCL Software.

Paul and Alan met on match.com in 2009. In a lucky coincidence, Paul’s VPN accidentally set his location to San Francisco instead of New York, where he was living at the time. Paul recalled being stuck on his BlackBerry in those early times, texting with Alan even on a Christmas vacation sailing in the Caribbean. After a harrowing, near-death experience when his sailboat flipped over, Paul texted Alan, who booked him a helicopter flight off the island. Paul flew to meet him in San Francisco, and never left.

“He was so gentle, and so handsome,” Paul said. “He was so fascinating, too.”

Outside of work, Alan and Paul cared for rescue dogs together. In fact, the couple planned to open a shelter for older and disabled dogs. One of their adopted dogs is an epileptic and diabetic dog named Ayr. Every morning and evening at 7:30 exactly, Alan would measure out Ayr’s food and take his blood pressure, logging the data points in a journal. He was part Maori, the group indigenous to New Zealand, and would walk the dog past the native pōhutukawa tree to retain the New Zealand connection.

More than work, Alan cared about people. Paul said he was never the type to discuss accolades or technical achievements.

“I don't think he had a grand narrative like, ‘Wow, look at all of these accomplishments,’” Paul said. “It was always about the people.”