Oracle’s Safra Catz had been co-Chief Executive Officer (CEO) with Mark Hurd since September 2014. On October 18, 2019, Hurd died at the age of 62. He was known as the leading force behind Oracle’s sales, customer and technical support, business development, and marketing team. Oracle’s co-CEO structure allowed Catz to be the dominant force behind finance, M&A, legal, and human resources – traditionally considered the “back end” of a company. Catz is the financial wizard at Oracle and the mastermind behind Oracle’s economic strategy. She has been rightfully called “The Enforcer.”

This division of executive functions allowed the co-CEOs to specialize in their respective strength areas. Hurd would handle the “front end,” often appearing in the limelight for press interviews, speaking on stage, and socializing with customers. While Catz has intensely maintained a private identity for an executive, she would be subject to more public visibility if she took the helm as sole CEO. Between Catz’s experience as a trained lawyer, former investment banker, and as a 20-year Oracle veteran, she may be the ideal leader for Oracle as it makes a big push to take on Amazon, Microsoft, and Google within the cloud.

Larry Ellison, the Chief Technology Officer (CTO), former CEO, and founder of Oracle, oversees engineering and product development, but still maintains a final say with respect to executive decisions. He has noted that he is not interested in being CEO again. Ellison gave Oracle’s board five internal candidates to be considered for the next CEO.

One of the named candidates is Steve Miranda, Executive Vice President of Oracle Applications Product Development at Oracle. Additionally, Don Johnson, Vice President of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and Thomas Kurian, Oracle’s former President of Product Development, now CEO of Google Cloud, are being considered. Two other contenders, Dave Donatelli, Executive Vice President for Worldwide Sales and Marketing Strategy, and Edward Screven, Chief Corporate Architect at Oracle, are also in the mix.

Although one of Ellison’s five named candidates could potentially rise to co-CEO with Catz, it stands to reason that Catz has more experience as a leader. She has been in the CEO role since 2014 and has the business acumen, legal knowledge, and leadership skills to shine as sole CEO. Some even describe her as “brilliant, [and] tough as nails.” Oracle will need to adapt quickly during this critical stage – with the loss of Hurd – and appoint a leader that will keep the company relevant in a fiercely competitive technology landscape.

Oracle’s Secret Weapon: Safra Catz to Potentially Lead as Sole CEO

New York-based digital media company Group Nine Media announced its decision to acquire women’s lifestyle publisher PopSugar earlier this month. The deal is an all-stock transaction and follows Group Nine’s successful round of funding, a $50 million financing led by Discovery Inc. While details of the deal are yet to be disclosed, reports have valued PopSugar at $300 million and Group Nine at $600 million.

PopSugar is now part of the larger portfolio of brands owned by Group Nine, which includes mobile news brand NowThis, animal-story focused The Dodo, tech content publisher Seeker, and digital brand Thrillist, which focuses on travel and entertainment. The women’s lifestyle publisher previously raised $41 million from Sequoia Capital and Institutional Venture Partners (IVP) and claims that it reaches “one in two millennial women in the United States” through its brands.

According to Group Nine CEO Benjamin Lerer, the decision to acquire PopSugar is a strategic decision to expand Group Nine’s outreach to a community that loves the PopSugar brand and will generate an additional 200 million social media followers for the company.  PopSugar’s founder, Brian and Lisa Sugar have said that the transaction will allow PopSugar to create a scalable business model that sets the standard for the next-generation media company. Bringing the entities together is largely aimed at combining the ambition, momentum and leadership of Group Nine with PopSugar’s vast innovative experience in commerce.

According to its spokesperson, a large group of PopSugar’s 500 employees are to be integrated into Group Nine. Additionally, Lisa and Brian Sugar will be taking on executive roles in Group Nine. They will be joined by Sequoia’s Michael Mortiz on Group Nine’s board of directors. Overall, PopSugar’s shareholders look to own a stake of more than 30% in in the surviving entity, which will continue to be called Group Nine Media.

This is yet another transaction in digital publishing sector, which recently saw the high-profile acquisition of New York Media by Vox Media. The deal follows Vice Media’s $400 million acquisition of women’s lifestyle publisher Refinery 29, which was also in talks to be acquired by Group Nine, as a way to enhance its advertising business. The growth of tech behemoths like Google and Facebook has made it difficult for digital media businesses dependent on advertising revenue. This acquisition looks to find a solution to the problem. It falls in line with Lerer’s statement last November where he said that the consolidation of the digital media industry is inevitable as it can diversify revenue generation and can largely benefit advertisers, who will gain exposure to larger audiences. Further, the lack of overlap in the entities’ core businesses adds value to the surviving entity, which is a product of a strategic alliance and could undoubtedly prove to be successful in the long run.

Group Nine Media Acquires PopSugar To Access Market Of Millennial Women

With its latest round of software updates, Tesla has even more to offer to its customers.

Tesla vehicles are already considered a breakthrough. But they don’t cease to amaze, nor innovate. The pioneer of driverless car technology recently unleashed its latest update “software version 10.0.” Equipped with multiple features, this software is being hailed by the industry for its innovative inclusion called “smart summon.” This feature can command a Tesla in and out of the parking lot without a driver. The owner simply self-directs his or her car’s Autopilot driver assistance system through the Tesla smartphone’s app to the location of choice. Additionally, the inbuilt car’s sensor helps Tesla to accelerate in a direction and move back and forth. As for safety concerns, the software halts the car if it detects any mobile or immobile object in the vicinity.

To achieve its optimum function while complying with California’s Department of Motor Vehicle safety regulations, Tesla recommends its customers use this technology within a 200 feet range. However, as evidenced by demonstration videos surfaced by owners, the car can technically self-drive down the public street.

To continue meeting its customer’s luxury expectations Tesla has created easy ways to watch Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube in its Model S, Model X, or Model 3. And in upcoming days, the company plans to add more streaming and entertainment services to refine its customer’s experience.

Additionally, new features such as “I’m Feeling Lucky” and “I’m Feeling Hungry” in the car’s navigation system can route Tesla owners to their nearest eateries or point of interest. Plus, the new mobile Tesla app equips its controller to remotely access its car windows, defrost the vehicle’s cabin, and provides options to open and close the garage door.

In expected fashion, Telsa has once again surpassed any features unveiled by other automobile makers.

Tesla’s New Software Update Allows Cars to Park Themselves

Uber recently announced its plan to acquire a majority stake in Cornershop, an on-demand grocery delivery company with a presence in Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Canada. Cornershop plans to continue operations under its current management but will report to a board where Uber has majority control. Absent any delays in regulatory approval, the parties expect to complete the transaction in early 2020.

The Cornershop acquisition reflects Uber’s ongoing strategy to expand beyond its core ride service business. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi highlighted that this transaction helps Uber achieve its goal of being “the operating system for your everyday life.” Uber’s focus on diversifying its business comes after a turbulent ride since its IPO in May 2019. Uber believes that building ancillary services, such as grocery delivery, for its already captive audience of 100 million users will allow it to further monetize those users and make progress towards its goal of becoming profitable.

Cornershop is not Uber’s first venture within food logistics. The company originally tested a variety of delivery services for goods and other items through its Uber Everything initiative, which launched in 2016. Though Uber’s ambitions were large, the company quickly realized that Uber Eats was the most promising line of business, and it is where the company has invested significant capital to date. Partnering with Cornershop will enable Uber to expand upon the logistics already in place from both companies and make quick headway into the grocery delivery space.

Though the food and grocery delivery markets present significant opportunities for growth, they are also highly competitive. Uber Eats already faces strong competition from vendors like GrubHub in the U.S. and Just Eat internationally. Uber can expect similarly formidable competition within the grocery delivery space from U.S. heavy hitters such as Instacart and AmazonFresh. Instacart alone has raised over $1.9 billion and, unlike Uber, is dedicated solely to servicing this market. To what extent Uber will be able to replicate Cornershop’s international success in the U.S. remains to be proven.

Uber has already begun celebrating the potential Cornershop can bring to the Uber platform. However, there are several regulatory approvals still pending – primarily since Cornershop operates in several international markets. In September 2018, Walmart announced it would purchase Cornershop for $225 million, but the transaction was rejected just four months ago by Mexico’s Federal Economic Competition Commission due to antitrust concerns. That said, Uber will likely not face the same level of regulatory scrutiny the Walmart-Cornershop partnership received since Uber is not a retailer and cannot similarly corner the market.

Competition and regulatory hurdles aside, the heightened pressure of being a publicly-traded company will likely force investors to pay close attention to Uber’s strategy and narrative around the acquisition. Uber will need to continue educating its shareholders on the value Cornershop can bring to its platform and the potential it could mean for future growth and profitability.

Uber Goes Shopping – Cornershop Acquisition

For the last decade, startup companies in technology were supported by excessive venture capital funding and encouraged to prioritize fast growth over everything else. However, as investors in the stock market became more skeptical about the financial performance of fast-growing tech companies, entrepreneurs have started to rethink their priorities and have considered becoming more financially responsible. For example, Travis VanderZanden, the chief executive of startup company Bird Rides, declared at a tech conference in San Francisco last week that his company was switching its focus to profitability.

The stumbles of some high-profile startups after reaching the public market have motivated this change of strategy. WeWork, the office rental startup company, withdrew its initial public offering in September as investors became increasingly wary of its huge losses and corporate governance problems. S&P Global Ratings dropped WeWork’s credit rating to “B-” and its outlook to “negative” due to concerns about the company’s ability to raise additional capital. As the market questioned WeWork’s financial performance, the company’s valuation went down from $47 billion to $10 billion recently.

Similarly, the stock price of ride-sharing application leaders, Uber and Lyft, have plummeted in value for months after they went public in 2019. Investors in the stock market are less willing to buy shares when they see huge losses on the financial statements and no prospect of making profits in the near future. Uber’s market cap went down to around $49 billion from a pre-IPO valuation of $76 billion. Lyft’s valuation also went down from $15 billion to $11.6 billion.

The concern over profitability in the public market has made some venture capitalists rethink their evaluation strategies. Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist at Union Square Ventures, wrote in his blog how companies trade in the public market should give venture capitalists an insight into how they should finance and value businesses in the private market. Financial transactions in the private market are initiated by the issuers, so private investors tend to make more irrational decisions when they finally have an opportunity to invest and hopefully gain advantages from onboarding early. In contrast, investors in the public market can choose to buy or sell shares at any time they want, so valuation of companies in the public market are more rational, especially when the company has been trading in the market for a material amount of time. Therefore, as the public market becomes more cautious when it comes to growth companies, venture capitalists probably should rethink about their valuation strategies and start to pay attention to financial performance as well.

Although more investors and entrepreneurs started to focus on the financial performance of startup companies, the widespread tradition is to spend a huge amount of money and invest everything in the business for growth at early stages. The rationale behind this strategy is that investing heavily in growth would help the business become more competitive in the market, and the huge losses sitting on the financial statements now would be turned into more enormous profits in the long run. Therefore, venture capitalists are willing to pour in huge amount of money without focusing on the financial performances of a startup. In fact, funds raised from venture capital companies is still at record high in the past three quarters of 2019 despite the fact that investors are expecting a possible correction after several years of sharp rise in valuations.

However, the life of a startup is full of unpredictability. It is a wise decision to shore up cash flow, an essential aspect for any business, in order to survive at hard times. It is interesting to see how new companies will adjust their strategies to deal with the increasing concerns over their financial strength in the market.

Silicon Valley Startups – Profitability or Growth?

It’s been a busy week at Juul’s San Francisco headquarters amidst a CEO turnover, a slashed valuation, and a pending federal criminal investigation. But despite the negative news, the company’s investors are positive e-cigarettes are here to stay.

Altria Group showed it understood the upcoming generations push for tech when it made a big bet on Juul. While Altria had a 54% market share of the tobacco industry, it faced with a steadily decreasing percentage of the US population that smoked traditional cigarettes. So, in December 2018, Altria invested $12.8 billion in a 35% stake in Juul, an e-cigarette company with 75% market share in the US –resulting in a  $38 billion valuation. However, this number has recently been slashed to $24B by investor Darsana Capital Partners.

But more bad news for Juul was yet to come. Although its e-cigarettes do not contain tobacco, the FDA’s Deeming Rule extended the definition of a tobacco product to include e-cigarettes three years ago. Despite this label, Juul’s popularly soared. However, last month Juul received a warning from the FDA not to market its products as safer than cigarettes without scientific evidence. States and major retail chains have banned vaping products, flavored pods (80% of domestic sales), and online sales. And in response, Juul had to suspended all product advertising and federal lobbying.

To try and turn the tide, Juul hired K.C. Crosthwaite, who has spent his entire career in the tobacco industry, to be its newly minted CEO. It also hired Jerry Masoudi in 2018 to be its Chief Legal Officer – previously the chief counsel of the FDA.

However, the trendiness of vaping has seemingly conquered all boundaries. 25% of high school students partake, and they haven’t seemed to slow in the face of a few deaths caused by street-market pods. And while the increased regulation may diminish Juul’s market share, it has also given Juul a 3-year head start on any potential copycats.

Meanwhile, Altria has launched IQOS, a similarly sleek, lower-toxin, FDA-approved device that heats, versus burns, a tobacco “heatstick.” This proves that whatever else happens to the industry, alternative cigarettes are not going away.

The Juul Kids’ Club- Here to Stay

At its most recent event, Amazon introduced a range of potential new Alexa-enabled products that aim to further ingrain the company’s voice assistant into the everyday lives of its consumers.

Much of the proposed hardware comes in the form of wearable gear that will allow Alexa to go where users go, moving toward an even more constant stream of connection between consumer and AI tech.

The introduction of “Echo Buds” marks Amazon’s entrance into the wireless headphone market, allowing Alexa to stay in your ears all day, and for Amazon to compete with Apple’s AirPods. A pair of normal-looking eyeglasses, “Echo Frames,” are equipped with microphones that give you the ability to conversationally engage with and task Alexa without ever having to open your phone. The last of the accessory-like category of products, “Echo Loop,” is a ring that keeps Alexa on your finger—the company’s take on smart jewelry (think, Apple watch, but, no screen)—and accessible via whisper. The event also announced the launch of several updates to existing Echo product lines, an interactive Alexa doorbell, celebrity voices as Alexa, and a venture into the culinary world with an updated Alexa Smart Oven. While the eyeglasses and ring are part of the “beta” group of products, meaning they are still being tested and only available by invitation, the advances that these products embody in the mobility and integration of AI into all facets of human life have significant implications for data privacy.

While Amazon has retained a significant advantage in the market for home AI integration through Alexa, Google and Apple, however, have dominated the mobile AI market because their versions of Alexa are seamlessly built into their respective smartphone models—a product that Amazon lacks. As Amazon takes steps to become a larger player in an on-the-go AI world, it marks a transition toward a more intimate relationship between consumer and device, and between the entities that control the information consumers feed to those devices. The volume of information received by the voice assistants of the modern world is rapidly increasing and, so too, the privacy concerns about what happens to customer data, when data is being collected, and how it is protected.

Amazon began to address some of the questions about privacy and their products. The company is aware of the various concerning privacy matters that have arisen regarding Alexa devices, including that the devices are sometimes indirectly triggered and listen to conversations that they were not meant to. For starters, customers have had the option since May to command Alexa to delete anything she heard that day, but David Limp, the senior VP of Amazon, acquiesces that this is an area where they want to improve.

It seems that, especially in light of these new products on the cusp of formal roll-out, the most crucial area for refinement of voice assistants is when and how they listen, and how much control customers have over when their data is at risk.

Amazon’s Newest Product Announcements and Implications for Privacy

In March of 2018, former Twitch user Tyler “Ninja” Blevins was streaming live when other industry leaders Drake, Travis Scott, and Juju Smith Schuster joined to play Fortnite. Ninja usually had an audience of 70,000 viewers, but this night was different. When the rapper, pop superstar, and up and coming NFL wide receiver came together to stream, more than 600,000 viewers took notice. Ninja is no longer with Twitch and has since left to work for Microsoft. Twitch chief executive Emmett Shear says the competition is “healthy, and hasn’t yet affected the company’s long term goals of being the streaming platform for all interests.”

25,000 attendees gathered each day at TwitchCon, and many brands that are outside of the gaming industry were also present. Gaming enthusiasts continue to comprise the main audience for Twitch, but the company is focused on other areas as well in order to relate to their core users’ interests. MAC, a cosmetics manufacturer, is taking notice of the power Twitch has in reaching audiences from around the world on its streaming platform. Cary Neer, MAC’s executive director of global integrated communications and content, noticed the similarities between MAC’s motto and Twitch’s vision by saying, “Our motto is all ages, all races, all genders. And then you see the sign that greets you when you walk into Twitchcon, ‘You’re already one of us.’ ” With current makeup streamers and Instagram users making tutorials and other home videos daily, Twitch allows users to get a live view of their favorite artists and connect with them in a personal way on a daily basis.

Twitch currently has over 27,000 partners and more than 150,000 affiliates, and the number continues to grow each day. Other companies have taken notice of these growing numbers. The non-gaming industry companies that participated at TwitchCon were Honda, TikTok, Hershey’s and Kraken Rum. Live streaming will soon be able to expand to industries outside of gaming and have a noticeable impact on viewers’ accessibility to their favorite brands across the world.

State Farm Insurance also made their first appearance at the gaming convention, with sponsored esport athlete, Ben “DrLupo” Lupo. While raising thousands of dollars for St. Jude’s Research Hospital, Lupo shared his thoughts on the growing live streaming industry and noted that having a sense of community and talking live by the second is great for engaging with fans. Twitch chief executive Emmitt Shear also gave a lot of credit to gamers like Lupo by saying, “Gamers are always the early adopters. Gamers are always the ones to show up first to technology.” While gamers continue to pave the way for other industries to join live streaming industry leaders like Twitch, we will see a greater connection between audiences and stars who are using the platform to build a sense of community.

Gamers paved the road for a streaming future. Twitch wants to add more lanes.

News of Volkswagen Group’s diesel emissions scandal first broke in September 2015. Yet after four years, and more than $30 billion in fines and settlement, legal repercussions stemming from the scandal continue today. Within the last week, German prosecutors brought stock market manipulation charges against three current and former executives. Additionally, the Federation of German Consumer Organizations (VZBV) initiated suit on behalf of 470,000 consumers. In response to these new charges, the company’s share price dropped 2.4%.

The indictment against VW executives alleges that they were aware of the rigged emissions tests months before U.S. authorities brought the practice to light. Under the European Union’s Market Abuse Regulation (MAR), publicly traded companies are subject to a continuous disclosure regime and must release known information “as soon as possible” to provide for “timely assessment” by the public and market. If German prosecutors are successful in proving the VW executives violated MAR by deliberately withholding information, they could face up to five years in prison.

Meanwhile, the suit brought on behalf of German consumers seemingly piggybacks on the buyback offers and compensation that was part of the company’s settlement with consumers in the U.S. To date, VW has only paid out U.S. consumers for the scandal. The VZBV aims to show German car owners should be compensated as well because the company’s emissions monitoring software similarly harmed them. However, VW vehemently asserts that German consumers lack a legal basis for their claims and refused the German court’s initial request to consider settling.

Since the scandal, Volkswagen has undertaken a rebranding of the company, somewhat ironically, by shifting its focus to affordable emission-free cars. Just last month, the company debuted a prototype of the ID.3, its new battery-powered vehicle. But despite its best efforts, the company’s renewed legal battles may distract from its push to reestablish footing with consumers and reinvent the VW brand. It may take several more years before VW can earn the trust of their consumers and shareholders, and ultimately put this scandal behind them.

Volkswagen’s Continued Emissions Fallout