Alexia Tsotsis

Just a nerd in the world.

[alexiatsotsis]

The Unbearable Softness Of Softbank

Japanese telecom company Softbank has been making headlines recently for the mountain of capital it has raised and is now deploying in the tech sector. Fortune’s Polina Marinova gives some insight into Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son’s strategy beyond making it rain billions on struggling unicorns, by analyzing a Softbank “Next 30 Years Vision” deck from 2010. 

On a conceptual level, the deck posits an eventual “information revolution” catalyzed by sensors and data, and argues that computing power (which is defined as ‘cell’ versus ‘transistor’ count) will surpass human brain power in 2018. As far as I can tell, that prediction will not pan out.

On a deeper level, it would seem like the person who designed this deck was a closet Existentialist, painstakingly questioning the very meaning of life through liberal use of the PowerPoint Clip Art library. 

As the dystopian future the deck predicts seems ever more plausible in 2017, the poignancy of the deck’s image and text juxtapositions make the heart ache with ontological angst. “Why are we here?” “Are we in control of our lives?” “Why is Donald Trump president?” “Why is it called Softbank if it’s not a bank?”

Because the universe is absurd, and we make our own meanings in life, here are the most wistful slides in the Softbank deck, paired with a quote from some of the greatest Existentialist thinkers of our time. Philosophical wax on, philosophical wax off. 

1. “What is life but an unpleasant interruption to a peaceful nonexistence?” John Paul Sartre

2. “The worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself; you lie in wait for yourself in caverns and forests.” Friedrich Nietzche 

3. “Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman--a rope over an abyss.” Frederich Nietzche

4. “If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance.” Albert Camus

5. “After awhile you could get used to anything.” Albert Camus

6. “Hell is other people.” Jean Paul Sartre

7. “The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.” Carl Sagan

8. “People run from rain but sit in bathtubs full of water.” Charles Bukowski

9. “Did she love you?” “Only as an extension of herself.” “What else can love be?” Charles Bukowski

10. “There is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock.” Charles Bukowski

11. “Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?” Martin Heidegger

[alexiatsotsis]

A picture is worth 1000 cells.

[alexiatsotsis]

Snapchat Bought The Next Snapchat

Last week someone casually asked me what I thought the next Snapchat would be. As there is a lot of volatility among social apps (note the current migration from Twitter to Snapchat in the +30 age group), the real answer is that the next Snapchat will probably look nothing like Snapchat, just like Snapchat looked nothing like Facebook.  

If I had to guess, I would guess that the next Snapchat will actually look something Bitmoji, the ‘make your own avatar’ product launched last year by Bitstrips. Bitstrips, a custom comic strip startup, was founded in 2007, while Evan Spiegel was still in high school.

[[More]]

Lighthearted and quirky, the relatively simple Bitmoji avatars are taking over the world: There has been a proliferation of Bitmojis in my messaging apps and texts this quarter, especially around holidays and birthdays, which have up until now been Facebook’s bread and butter.  

I have little insight into Bitmoji’s actual traction -- SensorTower estimates it at 750k downloads in March 2016, which seems low to me. But I have watched its usage increase in frequency among my peers in the first three months of the year, as it climbs the ranks of the iOS app store. As a Bitmoji would say, it’s “trending up!”

The Bitmoji product itself, much like Snapchat’s ridiculous filters, is delightful -- on any given day, you can be a character from Zoolander or the singer Sia or a human burrito who hates Mondays. You can dress your Bitmoji in DVF. You can use it ironically with friends, all of you in on the joke (that cartoon of you holding a bleeding heart is so creepy!). Or you can drill deep with verisimilitude and meaning in your messages -- one of my friends, who happens to be a fighter pilot, uses a ‘Happy Birthday!’ Bitmoji with a plane skywriting the ‘Happy Birthday’ part. 

Bitmoji plays so well into one of the key user stickiness factors of social apps: Vanity. We keep marveling when our Bitmojis look like us and our friends -- even though that’s what they’re supposed to do exactly. 

Products that galvanize communication and social interaction through humor and playfulness will continue to spread, by definition, no matter how rudimentary they are. 

I can only imagine what Bitmoji’s independent trajectory as a fleshed-out (pun intended) platform would look like, had it not been acquired by Snapchat in March -- AR? VR? I’d settle for the ability to include multiple people in avatars, a solid viral hook. We’ll never know. 

Which brings us to another 🔑 lesson: If you’re looking for the next Snapchat, so is Snapchat. 

Top image via: Pla Siriviriyakul

[alexiatsotsis]

Smashing The Award Show Glass Ceiling

Every awards show is a bit of bullshit and a bit of a mess. At their messiest, you get Seth MacFarlane at the Oscars, and on an average night you may get an interruption by Kanye, a streaker, or this “Face Off” between me and my fellow Women 2.0 Award winner, Ina Fried.

The 2014 Crunchies were definitely on messiest end of the spectrum. This is the eighth time we’ve hosted the annual awards ceremony, and we’re having growing pains.

Though I wasn’t offended by much of host T.J. Miller’s Dadaist humor, attendees like Twitter VP of Global Media Katie Stanton are right in balking at the “bitch” and “rape” comments and a general off-putting atmosphere. This year’s ceremony should have been clearly defined as being “18 and over." We did not do that and that’s our failure, in addition to some other touch points. 

In the US, gender, sexuality and race are legally protected categories. They are topics worth treating with care, so we, both TechCrunch editorial and TechCrunch events, flagged T.J. after the first shaky interaction with an audience member. He had never done a big awards show, and acted like he was at a comedy club, dealing with hecklers.

But I do not think it was T.J.’s intent nor TechCrunch’s intent to offend an entire gender or race by producing the Crunchies. We are a team led by women, including myself, Susan Hobbs and Leslie Hitchcock, who want more than anything else to see more women in tech, including onstage at our events. I’m sorry that did not happen here.

We should have demonstrated much more awareness of our community and responsibility as we planned our run of the show. As the tech sector charges forward and billions of dollars are up for grabs, fed-up white women as well as women and men of color continue to be left out.

If not having enough diversity onstage, in the audience, and in tech in general is the real problem, then let’s address it. You could say VCs don’t fund women, but VCs say they simply don’t meet enough women and/or minority founders. Everyone shifts the blame to someone else.

We asked many women, including Katie Stanton, to present awards this time, and they said no. This is reflective of an industry-wide question: How do we get more of us to show up onstage? To VC meetings? To partner interviews? Successful women like Katie and Sheryl Sandberg and Susan Wojcicki are oversubscribed.

And while her overall point that women should be treated with respect, at tech events and beyond, is something I’m passionate about, I did not agree with Katie’s conflating of Jordan Crook’s “hooha” comment as hostile. It was an improvised, non-scripted exchange on the controversial Airbnb logo. And Jordan, who is gay, was neither pejorative or anti-woman with her “I like hooha too” quip.

Are we never supposed to talk about our bodies or sex in this brave new equal world?

The environment at last night’s Women 2.0 Awards was the opposite of the Crunchies. One-fifth the size of the Crunchies, that event, held at the Kabuki Theatre with a small audience of mostly women, was mostly positive and supportive, and no one got called a bitch (though it too had its detractors).

The difference between the two shows is best expressed in the comparison of the two awards: ours, a gnarly bro-monkey wearing no pants, and theirs, an elegant glass sculpture of an arrowhead. Something you could display in your house.

So how do we make our show look more like theirs?

Perhaps we do the math beforehand: Should we say, “We need 50% women presenters, at least 50% women nominees on stage”? (At the Women 2.0 Awards, 85% of the winners were women, and the earth did not crack open and swallow us all.) This would be one way to fight the self-fulfilling prophecy of stereotype threat.

Sure these proportions do not reflect the fact that women are 10% of Venture Series A investment, 6% of partners in VC. But if that’s not “fair,” neither is current state of affairs: Lots of noise on Twitter, while we continue to not get our companies funded. It’s easier to favorite a tweet than to hire a female General Partner.

Like Megan Smith, America’s new CTO, who accepted the “Unstoppable” award yesterday, I believe one solution is to keep as visible as possible as members of underrepresented groups, to “debug unconscious bias" in Smith's words.

If Katie Stanton and the Katie Stantons of the world stay away from the Crunchies next year, there will be one less woman on stage, one less woman accepting an award, one less woman to look up to. That’s moving backwards, and I might be willing to give up an edgy “hooha” joke to avoid it.

[alexiatsotsis]

Caught red-eyelidded!

Via.

[alexiatsotsis]

Naming your kids after computers. 

[alexiatsotsis]

A Note On Tinder

Yesterday an investigative piece on the Tinder lawsuit was published on TechCrunch. The piece took quite a bit of reporting, and in the process of researching, our writer, Jordan Crook, spoke to more than 15 people involved in the case.

While there is always room for tighter edits, the story went through multiple editors at TechCrunch and multiple passes from our legal team. However, this work was called into question by an Events post that went up an hour later, unbeknownst to me and my co-editor Matthew Panzarino.

That post announced that Tinder CEO Sean Rad would be speaking at Disrupt SF, which was a decision made a month ago. Unfortunately, the timing of that post made it look like this event was tied into the just-published story.

Since those two posts went out, we have had to deal with unfair accusations that we traded TechCrunch coverage for a Disrupt spot for Rad. I cannot be more clear: That is not what happened.

What did happen? Some incredibly bad blog timing coupled with an issue as incendiary as gender in tech. I apologize for the mistake, and the mistaken perception of our editorial mission and team.

[alexiatsotsis]

William Jefferson Clinton meets John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The past is a foreign county. 

[rapshirtsforwhitepeople]

Via

[alexiatsotsis]

Rich kids of Cafepress. 

[parislemon]

Oh, AT&T. You’re incorrigible. 

[alexiatsotsis]

Innovation. 

[alexiatsotsis]

Dr.Dre needs a Crunchbase profile. 

[alexiatsotsis]

What really freaks me out is when he's at a giant stadium and performs it and there's 60,000 people screaming your name. I want to crawl under a rock because I'm actually very, very, very shy and no one ever believes this! I really am very shy.

Tom Ford on the eponymous Jay Z song. 

[alexiatsotsis]

The Media Eats Its Children

Users of social communication networks yesterday (whether they be television or Facebook or a barstool) could not avoid the tragic news of "socialite" Peaches Geldof's death.

My experience with Geldof is thus, once, in my 20s, I clicked on a link to a posting of nude photos of her on Gawker and came to the conclusion that a) the folks at Gawker had nothing better to do with their time b) there was someone famous whose body looked like mine.

The latter fact was awesome until I glanced at the Gawker comments section. This was the first time I’d seen a woman profiled like this who had a normal body, and she was being torn down because of it.

Just Google “Peaches Geldof fat” and prepare to be disgusted. Peaches was barely an adult, and we the media tossed her in the air and served her up to readers on a platter -- as an abstract thing to attack for not living up to some ideal. In the darkest interpretation of her story, the media might ultimately be responsible for her death. It wouldn't be the first time. 

The simple truth in our business, because of its economics, is that if you're a celebrity you’re damned if you fit in to a media absolute and you’re damned if you don’t. Frances Bean Cobain gets coverage for not doing anything tabloid-worthy -- her mom, the opposite. 

Geldof, despite being a devoted mother, led a life that I would not wish on my worst enemy -- because of its sheer level of media scrutiny. 

This weekend I deleted Secret, because of a thread that referenced me and TechCrunch which eventually devolved into something terrible.

I just want whoever posted that thread to know that, despite having a job in media at the moment, I am a real person. That post hurt me as much as it would have hurt anyone you knew personally, if you had said those things to them in person. 

Pro tip: If you don’t know someone in real life, and comment about them online, it affects them (if they see it) as much as it would if you knew them and told them to their face. R.I.P. Peaches. 

[timeshaiku]

Guess The New York Times is writing haikus now.

[alexiatsotsis]

"I only got 10 Likes in the past five minutes, do you think I should take it down?"

Welcome to the 21st Century. 

[sexpigeon]

How did he do it? How did he convince them?

[alexiatsotsis]

The Qooq wins the award for most French product ever, because who else would market a tablet with a shot of a gravity-defying egg, red pepper, whisk and whatever that brown dust is. Incroyable.