Technology

Last night, SpaceX launched its first generation Dragon capsule on its twentieth — and final — resupply run to the International Space Station.

The launch marks the Dragonlast mission as the capsule makes way for SpaceX updated and improved Dragon 2 capsule, which will begin making resupply runs to the space station in October.

Alongside cargo to resupply the ISS, the Dragon will be bringing along payloads for experimental research aboard the space station. Including an Adidas experiment to see how it can manufacture midsoles in space; a project from the faucet maker, Delta, to see how water droplets form in zero gravity; and Emulate is sending up an organ-on-a-chip to examine how microgravity affects intestinal immune cells and how heart tissue can be cultured in space.

As of this writing, COVID-19 has killed more than 3,400 people around the globe and the coronavirus has infected tens of thousands more. But its impact has gone much further, causing major disruptions in public markets and leading corporations to pull out of conferences and delay travel. Big tech companies are asking workers to stay home and investors are now urging startups to prepare accordingly.

Sequoia Capital sent a letter to its founders on Thursday warning that the coronavirus was a &black swan& event and startups should &brace themselves for turbulence& by considering if they have enough cash and preparing to face supply chain disruptions. The letter also warned they could have a harder time fundraising, similar to the market downturns of 2001 and 2009.

The coronavirus effect is rippling throughout the tech world. Seattle, which has seen a cluster of cases, seems almost a ghost town in some parts, according to entrepreneur and former Madrona Capital partner Shauna Causey. She told TechCrunch that many of the coffee shops and co-working spaces popular among VCs have gone empty in the last week and all of her fundraising meetings are conducted via Zoom.

And already theresome chatter that funding might be drying up for early-stage startups, though Bloomberg BetaRoy Bahat tells TechCrunch that startups should always be fundraising as soon as they can to protect themselves from this type of calamity.

Silicon Valley companies had already been going remote-first when the coronavirus became a global pandemic. This means there are lots of great software tools already on the market, that are seeing a huge amount of new usage now. And not just Zoom. Alex Wilhelm checked in withHiveIO, Friday,FreeConferenceCall,Brandlive,Kentik,Bluescape,LogMeIn, and other remote-oriented SaaS startups large and small to get the freshest data for Extra Crunch. Herewhat FreeConferenceCall reported back, for example:

• United States and United Kingdom: +6%
• India: around +10%
• France and South Korea: +20%
• Italy: +170%
• China: +524%
• Hong Kong: +1576%
• Vietnam: +3836%

Next, check out Ron Millerlook at what experts recommend right now (EC) if you&re trying to make the transition for your team or company.

We&ll have more analysis of great remote-first companies and investment areas coming up soon, as the working world goes through this abrupt transition to an already inevitable future. In the meantime, be sure to check out our existing coverage:

How to work during a pandemic (TC)

How we scaled Seeq by being remote first (EC)

How to make remote work work (EC)

Essential tools for todaydigital nomad (EC)

Remote workers and nomads represent the next tech hub (EC)

One final note: wondering why thereno vaccine yet? Connie Loizos caught up with long-time healthcare investor Camille Samuels for TechCrunch. &The reason you hear about cancer and orphan diseases so much is that you can price high in those areas,& the Venrock partner explains. &In therapeutic areas where you can&t price high because there are already a bunch of generics on the market — pain, depression, other huge unmet needs — you don&t see as much innovation. Ita matter of [businesses] following the incentives. With infectious disease, you&ve got this problem that maybe someone even a year ago predicted might become a problem, but when ita potential and not an actual problem, ithard to get investors to fund something like that.&

Three cofounders is the magic team number for pre-seed investors

What are the main characteristics of successful pre-seed fundings these days? Docsend, the document management company that thousands of founders use to share decks with investors, has a new report out that surveys recent pre-seed fundings to determine what success is looking like these days. Resident former VC Danny Crichton dug into the data — based on an anonymized survey of founder-users — and highlighted some surprising trends on TechCrunch. Hereone: companies with larger founding teams were able to raise with fewer meetings, but the companies that averaged the largest raises per number of meetings have three cofounders.

CEO and TechCrunch/Extra Crunch columnist Russ Huddleston also said that the quality bar for products appear to have gone up. &We used to say you could get funding with an MVPP (minimum viable PowerPoint),& he said, &but VCs are spending a significant amount of time looking at the product pages of successful decks, and really expect a level of product readiness that we didn&t see five years ago.&

A16z general partner Connie Chan talks the future of consumer tech (including remote-first bets)

With a recent investment in virtual conferencing startup Run the World, Connie Chan is at the forefront of consumer investing trends as we know them today. She sat down with Connie (Loizos) for a wide-ranging interview on Extra Crunch, here are a few highlights:

• On D2C: &Itless specific almost about what the product is, but the market they&re going after, and what kind of margins you have to play with from a marketing standpoint.&
• On remote-first trends in China right now: &People are spending more time at home, so whether itgames or streaming or whatever they&re doing at home is doing well. Lots of my counterparts in China are also taking all their pitches via video conference. They&re still doing work, but they&re all just working from home.&
• On the potential for a ‘super app& like WeChat: &WeChat started as a communications platform, so naturally you would think communication is a great place. But the other big ingredient of a super app is the payments layer, or some kind of connection to either your credit card credentials or your bank account. So in that sense, anything else that powers transactions also has a really good shot of doing it right. Like, if I&m using DoorDash to order food, why not also use it to order X and Y and Z that also requires a credit card checkout or also requires some kind of logistical delivery. If you look at GoJek or Grab in Southeast Asia, thatexactly what they&ve done. They started in transportation, but they also do grocery, they do food, they do loans, they do fintech. They do everything in one place.&

TechCrunch Senior Editor Alex Wilhelm

Who is Alex Wilhelm?

Alex is a long-time writer, editor and analyst who fully rejoined TechCrunch recently to write prolifically on topics including but definitely not limited to a daily finance column for Extra Crunch about the $100m ARR club, unicorn IPOs, business models, investing trends and other topics that are most dear to our startup audience. He is also the host of the popular Equity podcast, a real mensch, and like me, from Corvallis, Oregon. Given how popular he is with our core readers, we decided to get him talking about himself a little more in this Q-A on TechCrunch.

Across the week

TechCrunch

New AngelList data set sheds light on the signaling risks of seed-stage investments

SXSW cancels its 400K-person conference due to coronavirus

SF poised to pass Prop E, which could significantly reduce new supply of startup office space

Startup Battlefield applications for TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2020 are now open

Why you can&t overlook the small details in the pursuit of innovation

Extra Crunch

Oyo layoffs, Airbnbdelayed IPO and the long-term quandary of investing in travel startups

Understanding 2020early-stage fundraising market

Break-even ads can generate free brand awareness

Inside the effort to turn startups into zebras, not unicorns

Lerer HippeauBen Lerer shares his priorities for scouring seed deals

Dear Sophie: I live in India and run a startup

#EquityPod

Herewhatin the latest episode, via Alex:

• Kleiner has more money, again. About a year after raising a $600 million vehicle, Kleiner Perkinsraised a new, larger fund. Now flush with $700 million, the longstanding venture group has more money to play with than it has in recent memory. For early-stage deals, that is.
• Atriumshut downafter raising $75 million. Investors got some of their money back, but the company had to lay off its 100 employees. The lesson here is that famous backers and tenured founders can&t will something into existence that doesn&t work.
• OYO is laying people off.Again.The major SoftBank Vision Fund-backed Indian hotel brand was supposed to be a massive hit. Now, with novel coronavirus and other challenges, it andglobal tourism are hitting snags.
• We also poked at theRobinhood downtimethat came during a period of sharp trading swings. The company has a lot of work to do to recover user trust, and continue to grow into its valuation. (More on that here.)
• Zoom was the daygood news, posting strong earnings (here), possibly indicating that remote-work companies are seeing demand for their products.

And don&t miss the Equity Shot from this Tuesday, which Alex and Danny put together about activist fund Elliott Management. It has just bought a large stake in Twitter and is trying to remove founder and CEO Jack Dorsey(!).

Want Startups Weekly or any of the other great newsletters from TechCrunch in your inbox? Subscribe here.

Welcome back to This Week inApps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all.

The app industry is as hot as ever, with arecord 204 billion downloads in 2019and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019, according to App Annierecently released &State of Mobile& annual report. People are now spending 3 hours and 40 minutes per day using apps, rivaling TV. Apps aren&t just a way to pass idle hours — they&re a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus.

In this Extra Crunch series, we help you keep up with the latest news from the world of apps, delivered on a weekly basis.

This week, we&re looking at the further impact of the coronavirus on the app industry, which is now leading to more major event cancellations — including, as of this week, Google I/O and SXSW. That begs the question, will WWDC be next? And what will that mean for developers who rely on the annual event to make those invaluable face-to-face connections? We&re also looking at the revised App Store review guidelines and what that means for developers, as well as Walmartplan to dramatically change its app strategy, Robinhoodbad week, the launch of a new Spotify competitor from the makers of the worldmost viral app, TikTok and much more.

Headlines

Apple changes the rules

Apple this weekalerteddevelopers to a new set ofApp Store review guidelinesthat detail which apps will be accepted or rejected, and what apps are allowed to do. The changes to the guidelines impact reviews, push notifications, Sign in with Apple, data collection and storage, mobile device management and more, thecompany says. Some ofthe more high-profile changes include the ability for apps to now use notifications for ads, stricter rules for dating and fortune-telling apps and a new rule that allows Apple to reject apps that help users evade law enforcement, among other things.

General Motors& EV day didn&t just mark the launch of a new flexible battery architecture and an ambitious plan to deploy this underlying foundation across all of the automakerbrands, including Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet and GMC.

It was a resurrection, albeit with a modern twist.

The companyannouncement this week gave new life to its brand ladder — a portfolio that ranges from the heights of luxury to the most basic utility — and tipped its hand about how it will bring EVs &across the chasm.&

This game plan isn&t new. GM is bringing back a strategy that once defined its success and reshaped Americaautomotive landscape. This strategy worked for GM until complacency crept in and the brand ladder collapsed. This time, GM is aiming to avoid these snares.

History lesson

Henry Fordmoving assembly line birthed the early auto industry, but as American prosperity grew in the 1910s-20s, it was General Motors that laid the foundations of the modern car market. Under then-chairman Alfred Sloan, the amalgamation of once-independent automakers united under a strategy that would, in his words, create &a car for every purse and purpose.& From a value Chevrolet to a sporty Pontiac, from a discreetly plush Buick to a majestic Cadillac, and with countless brands in between, what became known as Sloanism birthed the idea that there should be a car to reflect every Americanself-image and social status.

Following on the heels of several major cancellations of events the past few days, including the SXSW conferencein Austin and the tech conference SaaStr, Stanford University, which is located in the heart of Silicon Valley in Palo Alto, California, announced late Friday that the school would cancel in-person classes for the final two weeks of the universitywinter quarter in response to the expanding outbreak of novel coronavirus, or COVID-19.

In a statement posted by the university, Stanfordprovost Persis Drell announced that the university would cancel two weeks of classes leading up to the universitywinter quarter exams, and &to the extent feasible& migrate classes to online formats.

In addition, professors are being encouraged by the administration to find ways of delivering functionally equivalent course material through online formats, and all exams for winter quarter are expected to be delivered remotely. The policy takes effect immediately starting with classes this coming Monday, March 9.

Furthermore, the university is canceling its annual Admit Weekend, where newly-admitted prospective freshman visit the palm-lined campus and learn more about the school before making a final decision on where to head for their undergraduate degrees. Tours of the campus have also been canceled.

The university in a separate notetoday acknowledged that two students are in self-isolation after &possible exposure& to the novel coronavirus. The university emphasized that neither student has affirmatively tested positive for the infection at this time.

The San Francisco Bay Area has seen increasing numbers of potential exposures to the novel coronavirus. Stanford itself has been on the vanguard of responding to the global pandemic, announcing thedevelopment of its own test earlier this week to detect the infection.