Author : zebethcontrol

Goodera makes corporate volunteering events easier, even for remote and hybrid workplaces • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 16, 2022Posted in corporate volunteering, Goodera, social impact, Startups, volunteeringNo Comments

Corporate volunteering is on the rise, as a way to increase a company’s social impact while boosting employee engagement. Managing volunteer programs, however, can get tricky. Goodera wants to make it easier with an end-to-end platform that includes pre-vetted volunteer opportunities and trained hosts. The Utah-based startup announced today it has raised a $10 million Series A led by Elevation Capital, with participation from Zoom Ventures, Xto10X, Nexus Venture Partners and Omidyar Network. Former Xerox CEO Ursula Burns and Flipkart founder Binny Bansal also contributed to the round. Goodera currently has volunteering openings from over 50,000 nonprofits that can be done in an office, remotely or by hybrid workers, with the goal of making them accessible to more employees. Some examples of volunteer opportunities Goodera has hosted include onboarding interns, holiday gift-wrapping, helping Ukrainian war refugees and introducing robotics to kids through automated bot building. The startup was founded by Abhishek Gumbad in 2020, and now has over 400 customers. Goodera’s volunteering programs have been used by companies like IBM, Target, EY, Amazon and 60 Fortune 500 companies. It currently reaches more than 10 million employees in total, and wants to hit 100 million employees by 2025. When Goodera was founded two years ago, socio-political movements like Black Lives Matter were at a peak, said Gumbad, and many employees wanted to participate. But pandemic lockdowns made that difficult. Goodera had already been working on virtual volunteering for remote teams, including a pilot program with a large cloud organization. Now Goodera helps both nonprofits and corporations increase volunteering. For nonprofits, Goodera serves as a partner that helps them find volunteers. Gumbad noted that only a very small number of nonprofits have a dedicated corporate relations program and international nonprofits are hard to screen. Goodera founder and CEO Abhishek Humbad “It’s difficult to find nonprofit partners aligned to your corporate impact goals,” he said. Goodera solves that with a team focused on sourcing and training nonprofits to offer volunteering opportunities on its platform. It currently works with 50,000 nonprofits in more than 100 countries. Gumbad said that it was able to find opportunities for the Ukraine war and Pakistan floods in less than three days after news broke. After partnering with nonprofits, Goodera develops programs, making sure they are engaging for employee volunteers. Its experience team pilots volunteer opportunities through Goodera’s Volunteer Tuesdays program, getting feedback from members of the startup’s team. Once volunteer opportunities are live, it provides a trained host for each one. Goodera now has a network of over 1,000 hosts, who can oversee the organization and logistics of opportunities in 500 cities in more than 20 languages. Volunteer opportunities are also supported by a delivery operations team that creates over a week’s worth of content for each event, including emails, posters, landing pages, videos and nonprofit testimonials. Goodera signed its first customer in August 2020 and now has $7.5 million annual recurring revenue. It monetizes by charging by usage per employee for each placement, which typically costs between $25 and $50 based on if their volunteering opportunity is remote, in-person or at a location. In terms of competition, Gumbad said there are some companies, mostly small corporate event organizers, that partner with nonprofits to host volunteering opportunities, but those engagements are sporadic. He added Goodera differentiates from other volunteer platforms like WeHero and Give to Get by offering volunteer opportunities in a wider geography, and full service including curation, hosting and reporting. Goodera’s funding will be used to scale its operations, with volunteer opportunities catered to diversity, equality and inclusion, environmental, social and corporate governance and employee resource groups. It also plans to explore impact engagement around DEI awareness and training workshops. In a statement, Zoom’s head of corporate development, M&A strategy and Zoom Ventures Sanjay Rao said, “Volunteering has become mainstream across companies of all sizes, sectors and geographies. It is the most meaningful engagement, especially for Gen Z and millennials. Goodera solves a massive need that was underserved and overlooked, especially in the remote and hybrid working environment. We are proud to be a customer and now an investor in their ambition to bring volunteering to every workplace.”

Parallel Domain says autonomous driving won’t scale without synthetic data • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 16, 2022Posted in autonomous driving, parallel domain, TransportationNo Comments

Achieving autonomous driving safely requires near endless hours of training software on every situation that could possibly arise before putting a vehicle on the road. Historically, autonomy companies have collected hordes of real-world data with which to train their algorithms, but it’s impossible to train a system how to handle edge cases based on real-world data alone. Not only that, but it’s time consuming to even collect, sort and label all that data in the first place. Most self-driving vehicle companies, like Cruise, Waymo and Waabi, use synthetic data for training and testing perception models with speed and a level of control that’s impossible with data collected from the real world. Parallel Domain, a startup that has built a data generation platform for autonomy companies, says synthetic data is a critical component to scaling the AI that powers vision and perception systems and preparing them for the unpredictability of the physical world. The startup just closed a $30 million Series B led by March Capital, with participation from return investors Costanoa Ventures, Foundry Group, Calibrate Ventures and Ubiquity Ventures. Parallel Domain has been focused on the automotive market, supplying synthetic data to some of the major OEMs that are building advanced driver assistance systems and autonomous driving companies building much more advanced self-driving systems. Now, Parallel Domain is ready to expand into drones and mobile computer vision, according to co-founder and CEO Kevin McNamara. “We’re also really doubling down on generative AI approaches for content generation,” McNamara told ZebethMedia. “How can we use some of the advancements in generative AI to bring a much broader diversity of things and people and behaviors into our worlds? Because again, the hard part here is really, once you have a physically accurate renderer, how do you actually go build the million different scenarios a car is going to need to encounter?” The startup also wants to hire a team to support its growing customer base across North America, Europe and Asia, according to McNamara. Virtual world building A sample of Parallel Domain’s synthetic data. Image Credit: Parallel Domain When Parallel Domain was founded in 2017, the startup was hyper focused on creating virtual worlds based on real-world map data. Over the past five years, Parallel Domain has added to its world generation by filling it with cars, people, different times of day, weather and all the range of behaviors that make those worlds interesting. This enables customers — of which Parallel Domain counts Google, Continental, Woven Planet and Toyota Research Institute — to generate dynamic camera, radar and lidar data that they would need to actually train and test their vision and perception systems, said McNamara. Parallel Domain’s synthetic data platform consists of two modes: training and testing. When training, customers will describe high level parameters — for example, highway driving with 50% rain, 20% at night and an ambulance in every sequence — on which they want to train their model and the system will generate hundreds of thousands of examples to meet those parameters. On the testing side, Parallel Domain offers an API that allows the customer to control the placement of dynamic things in the world, which can then be hooked up to their simulator to test specific scenarios. Waymo, for example, is particularly keen on using synthetic data to test for different weather conditions, the company told ZebethMedia. (Disclaimer: Waymo is not a confirmed Parallel Domain customer.) Waymo sees weather as a new lens it can apply to all the miles it has driven in real world and in simulation, since it would be impossible to recollect all those experiences with arbitrary weather conditions. Whether it’s testing or training, whenever Parallel Domain’s software creates a simulation, it is able to automatically generate labels to correspond with each simulated agent. This helps machine learning teams do supervised learning and testing without having to go through the arduous process of labeling data themselves. Parallel Domain envisions a world in which autonomy companies use synthetic data for most, if not all, of their training and testing needs. Today, the ratio of synthetic to real world data varies from company to company. More established businesses with the historical resources to have collected lots of data are using synthetic data for about 20% to 40% of their needs, whereas companies that are earlier in their product development process are relying 80% on synthetic versus 20% real world, according to McNamara. Julia Klein, partner at March Capital and now one of Parallel Domain’s board members, said she thinks synthetic data will play a critical role in the future of machine learning. “Obtaining the real world data that you need to train computer vision models is oftentimes an obstacle and there’s hold ups in terms of being able to get that data in, to label that data, to get it ready to a position where it can actually be used,” Klein told ZebethMedia. “What we’ve seen with Parallel Domain is that they’re expediting that process considerably, and they’re also addressing things that you may not even get in real world datasets.”

Inspirational Websites Roundup #43 | Codrops

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 16, 2022Posted in inspiration, roundup, website, Websites RoundupsTagged websites inspirationNo Comments

A fresh collection of the most creative and trendy websites for your inspiration. Tagged with: inspiration roundup website

Supernova wants to make it easy to move design elements to code bases • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 16, 2022Posted in design, developer tools, Enterprise, Supernova, wing venture capitalNo Comments

As companies increasingly turn to tools like Figma to design their software, moving the design elements like color schemes from the design tool to your code base can be a time-consuming and manual process. Supernova is an early-stage startup that wants to make it easier by acting as a bridge between your design team and your development team, making it easy to change design pieces in an automated way. Today the Y Combinator graduates announced a $4.8 million seed round. “The idea for Supernova comes from the discrepancy between designers and developers. There is, I think, sort of a communication block between them. Also, the design and developer worlds are quite disconnected from each other, and so any kind of thing that you can do to help designers and developers work better together actually goes a long way, and that’s especially true in larger organizations,” company CEO and co-founder Jiri Trecak told ZebethMedia. The software acts as a bridge of sorts, connecting your different tools and design repositories with your coding tools to facilitate the connection between all of these tools at scale. What’s more, if you have a particularly complex workflow, you can build custom apps or scripts on top of Supernova to extend the tooling even further, Trecak explained. He says an easy way to understand how this works is to imagine you have a brand like Spotify and you need to change the color of your logo from the familiar green to a new color. An undertaking like this would take months to do manually, but with Supernova, you just change your color scheme in your design tooling and run the scripts, and it will cascade across the entire code base, changing the colors automatically. He said it can work across multiple design tools and Supernova will still move the changes regardless. He started the company in the Czech Republic in 2018 and became the first startup from that country to be accepted into Y Combinator in the winter of 2019. Today, Trecak runs the company out of San Francisco, and the company launched the current iteration of the product last year. The engineering team remains in the Czech Republic. They have built up a user base of over 1,000 customers, several dozen of whom are large enterprise users. The company currently has about 30 people, with plans to increase that number with the new funding. As he grows the company, Trecak says that he is very much focused on building a diverse employee base and currently has employees who represent eight or nine different nationalities. “This is something that is very much our focus. We have been trying to be quite diligent about this and we will try to be even more so as we go to the U.S. market,” he said. Today’s funding was led by Wing Venture Capital with participation from EQT Ventures and Kaya VC, along with several prominent industry angels.

NASA’s Space Launch System makes inaugural journey in historic launch • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 16, 2022Posted in Artemis, NASA, SLS, Space, Space Launch SystemNo Comments

After years of preparation and two false starts, NASA’s heavy-lift Space Launch System has finally taken off and entered orbit. It’s a big win for the space agency — even as it assigns tasks once meant for the SLS to SpaceX instead. Some pre-launch jitters threatened to scrub the launch, but a “red crew” went out to the hot pad to tighten something, and a bad Ethernet switch of all things later also needed to be replaced. But everything came together about 40 minutes after the original T-0, and the rocket had a clean (and impressive-looking) ascent with no hiccups to speak of. It reached orbit and as of 13 minutes after launch the various stages, separations, and cut-offs were green across the board. The SLS is a key part of NASA’s Artemis program, intended to bring humanity back to the Moon “to stay,” as they often emphasize. That means bringing a lot of gear up there, stuff that might take years of ferrying with smaller launch vehicles like the SpaceX Falcon 9 and Rocket Lab Electron. The SLS was built with this kind of heavy duty mission in mind, but setbacks and delays have dogged the program, and now there is considerable speculation that commercial heavy-lift vehicles may soon offer more bang for the buck. But it is also clearly important to the U.S. government to have an option they own top to bottom. Now that the enormous “Mega Moon Rocket” has shown it can get to space, NASA can at least plan on putting the model to work, though that will mean building a fresh one every time — unlike some launch vehicles, this one isn’t reusable. You can watch the final countdown and takeoff here: The mission ahead The main goal of the Artemis I mission is to test the Orion spacecraft and its critical components, like the heat shield upon reentry into Earth’s atmosphere and the communications systems, before the capsule eventually carries humans later this decade. The capsule will spend around 10 weeks going from orbit to the Moon and back before splashing back down to Earth in the Pacific Ocean, where it will be recovered by a U.S. Navy ship. NASA of course has a more detailed but easy to understand mission plan, and the diagram below shows it quite succinctly: This was NASA’s third attempt to launch the Space Launch System rocket. The first, which took place in August, was called off due to a hydrogen bleed line issue with one of the rocket’s four core stage engines; the second attempt a few days later was scrubbed for the same reason. It seems third time was the charm after all. This mission will have many more crucial and historic moments, so stay tuned for more as the Orion capsule makes its way moonward.

Tiger Global-backed Algorithmiq to collaborate with IBM over drug discovery using Quantum • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 16, 2022Posted in StartupsNo Comments

Algorithmiq, a Helsinki-based quantum computing startup, has pulled in a deal with IBM to super-charge its exploration of quantum algorithms applied to the life sciences. The collaboration will attempt to dramatically cut the time and cost of drug discovery and development. The widely accepted maxim is that it takes around a decade and $1 billion for a new drug to get to market. The move plans to also contribute to Qiskit, an open-source SDK for quantum computers. Algorithmiq will therefore become part of the IBM Quantum Network. In February this year, Algorithmiq announced a $4m seed round backed by investment from Tiger Global, K5 Global and various angel investors. Headed by Co-Founder, and Professor, Sabrina Maniscalco, Algorithmiq also won the honour of being the “Hottest DeepTech Startup In Europe” award at the long-standing Europas Awards, held this year in in Lisbon, which has been running for 14 years and is judged solely by investors, founders, and journalists.

Valar Ventures leads $20M round in online brokerage platform baraka • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 16, 2022Posted in Dubai, Fintech, valar venturesNo Comments

Stock-trading apps have multiplied over the past couple of years, targeting varying demographics and audiences that they feel need to partake in investment activities to live healthier financial lives. In the latest development, baraka, a two-year-old commission-free investment platform based in the Middle East, is announcing that it has closed a $20 million Series A round led by Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures with participation from global investment firm Knollwood to expand across the region and reach more users. CEO Feras Jalbout‘s years of investment experience working with Barclays, Standard Chartered and a Dubai-based family office led him to launch baraka in 2020. His upbringing also played a part. In an interview with ZebethMedia, Jalbout told how he learned about investments such as stocks and government-assisted retirement funds while growing up in Canada, where investing was institutionalized. However, in the Middle East, it was a different ballgame. For years, people in the region have invested via traditional savings options such as bank deposits and real estate, according to Jalbout; hence, baraka brings much-needed variety. “When I moved to the region, it was surprising to see that people didn’t invest in digital assets much as there were little to no provisions for that,” said the founder and chief executive. “Many people in the region earn tax-free income and don’t invest. It’s a big part of why I launched baraka because very few fintechs offered investment options. I wanted to make an app I would’ve loved to use based on my experience as a professional investor.” Prior to getting its license to launch its trading app, baraka was a content platform using newsletters and a podcast to educate retail investors in the Middle East, particularly in the UAE, about stock investing and financial knowledge. It launched its app a year ago armed with Y Combinator’s backing and a $4 million seed round. This arsenal has propelled baraka to offer its “thousands” of investors access to more than 5,000 U.S. stocks and 1,000 Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). Investors can start investing with as little as $1 (~3.79 dirhams) on the platform. Jalbout added that the platform has users in the “tens of thousands” who actively trade and consume in English and Arabic. Of this user base, 56% are younger than 30, a sign of the young regional population seeking digital investment solutions. More than 50% are first-time investors, indicative of high interest in learning about equity markets through baraka’s content and starting their investment journey on the platform. Also, 83% have traded three times or more in at least one month throughout their lifetime on the baraka app. Image Credits: baraka Since baraka is a zero-commission platform, it doesn’t make revenue off commissions, trades or spreads. Instead, it’s from a subscription service, about $10 (~37.99 dirhams) per month, that retail investors can use to access more financial data about companies and stock reports from baraka’s partner Refinitiv. Baraka is exploring other revenue streams, one of which is to launch commission- or asset management-based products that will generate an annuity over time. With this new investment, the Robinhood-esque platform will double down on its presence across the GCC and Egypt, its new market (where it’ll face competition from Thndr), and drive customer acquisition. The company said it would add new services over the next 12 months, including access to features like dividend reinvestment plans and extended-hours trading. Offering local stock trading is also on the cards. Taduwal, the Middle East’s most prominent stock exchange, raised $4.7 billion through 27 new listings in the first half of 2022, contributing to a nearly 300% increase in IPOs across the region’s exchanges this year. As such, baraka is committing a large portion of this investment to work with local stock exchanges such as Tadawul and regulators to secure licensing in order to democratize access to local stocks. “Our ambition is to offer local equities as well by partnering with Taduwal, which is the Saudi stock exchange, the Dubai financial market (DFM), and the Abu Dhabi exchange (ADX),” said Jalbout of baraka’s plans of offering retail investors local stocks. Baraka has raised $25 million in total venture capital funding from investors such as Class 5 Global, Global Founders Capital and Venture Souq. Its new investor Valar Ventures has also backed similar digital brokerage startups such as Bitpanda and Shares (also backed by Global Founders Capital). General partner at Valar Ventures, Andrew McCormack, said this is his firm’s first investment in the Middle East’s emerging fintech ecosystem filled with potential. “We’re encouraged by the early signs of traction that baraka has been able to showcase. We’re really looking forward to working closely with the company as they enter this exciting new phase of growth across the region,” he added.

Genesis teases its EV future with the Genesis X convertible • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 16, 2022Posted in EV, genesis, TransportationNo Comments

Hyundai luxury arm Genesis unveiled Tuesday evening the Genesis X convertible, the third and final electric vehicle concept of the brand’s EV future. The reveal, held at a splashy event ahead of the 2022 Los Angeles Auto Show, follows the X Concept and the X Speedium Coupe — all of which fall under the Inspired by X lineup. These are all just concepts and few if any details were shared at the event. But the Genesis X convertible, and its concept siblings, aren’t just design exercises. The intent is for the vehicles, and specifically the front fascia of the Genesis X convertible, to showcase the brand’s new EV portfolio. When asked about whether the X Convertible or something like it might soon be in customers’ garages, Luc Donckerwolke, chief creative officer of the Hyundai Motor Group and the Genesis automotive brand, demurred. “Let’s put it this way. I’m putting a huge amount of energy, of my energy, to make it possible,” he told ZebethMedia. Image Credits: Abigail Bassett The X Convertible has a hardtop roof with transparent moonroofs to keep the cabin open and spacious feeling for four passengers when the top is closed. The front of the vehicle gets Genesis’ new EV face, which is an abstract of the Genesis Crest Grille. Expect this new “face” to show up on future EVs. The white paint on the concept is called Crane White and incorporates pearl particles according to the release. The interior is Giwa blue with Dancheong Orange stitching and a driver oriented cockpit. Image Credits: Abigail Bassett Genesis calls the X Convertible, “a beacon for the brand.” And based on the reaction, perhaps it has that chance. When the vehicle was unveiled to select media and guests at a multimillion dollar beach home in Malibu, California, the audience audibly gasped a response that’s uncommon at these kinds of events. “We have to utilize this opportunity to inject more adrenaline in the brand,” Donckerwolke said. “If somebody believes that electric vehicles cannot be sexy, Genesis will demonstrate the exact opposite.” The X convertible shares its architecture and electric powertrain with the X Concept announced in 2021 and X Speedium Coupe concept announced in 2022. Donckerwolke wouldn’t confirm the underpinnings of these concepts. He did tell ZebethMedia: “We are working with the right partners to get the right amount of of performance, which will be in my opinion adequate performance to fit this segment.” He continued to say that the X Convertible will “open up a new, uh, let’s say base of platform, a new platform and modular system.” Donckerwolke declined to elaborate. Genesis continues to push the design forward, as Donckerwolke mentioned, “Normally you go to you create something and you have to limit your design to the most common denominator,” he said. “We don’t have this, we, we talk to our internal suppliers and we say, we need those seats. We need those lights. And this is, this is basically allowing us to push the boundaries a lot. And that’s basically what’s allowing us to create cars like this.” Genesis said its aim is to “deliver products for customers to enjoy,” and given the response of the gathered attendees, the Convertible X Concept moves the brand in that direction.

Thailand’s Beam simplifies checkout for social commerce • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 16, 2022Posted in beam, Sequoia Capital India, social commerce, StartupsNo Comments

The social commerce market is already worth more than $13 billion in Southeast Asia, but the checkout process is filled with friction. Many sellers don’t have online storefronts and instead use social media and messaging apps, which means payment is made by switching to banking apps or wallets. This means low conversion rates, say the founders of Beam. The Thailand-based startup created a one-click payment solution for social commerce sellers and has raised $2.5 million in seed funding led by Sequoia Capital India and Southeast Asia’s Surge, with participation from Partech Partners. Beam was founded in 2019 by Nattapat Chaimanowong, Mike Chinakrit Piamchon and Win Vareekasem. The trio were frustrated by the process of filling out information repeatedly for things like memberships, credit cards and visas and began working on a business idea to streamline form filling, which turned into Beam. Beam founders Nattapat Chaimanowong, Mike Chinakrit Piamchon and Win Vareekasem Vareekasem told ZebethMedia that after building multiple MVPs, the team found that one of the largest groups dealing with the problem were retailers. “Form filling alone could not solve sales conversions, so payments had to be integrated too, ultimately realizing a much larger, burning problem we are going after.” Many social commerce sellers ask for peer-to-peer mobile banking apps, which means they accept payment by sharing account numbers. This can result in poor conversions because of limited payment options and a lot of work to manage payments. Beam says its checkout process takes just 20 seconds. It accepts all major payment service providers in each market, like BNPL leaders Atome and Pace, and claims sellers using their payment solution have increased checkout success by up to 30%. Sellers also save money by paying lower transaction fees, since they don’t have to pay the subscription and platform fees charged by e-commerce marketplaces. Beam monetizes by charging a flat percentage for each transaction based on the payment method. For example, it charges 2.95% for credit card transactions. Its typical client are medium-sized businesses that process a few hundred orders daily, and sell in the fashion, beauty, home and living and electronics sectors. Beam is currently focused on Thailand, with plans to expand into Southeast Asia. While there are other startups focused on removing friction from social commerce, like Opaper, Vareekasem said Beam differentiates by focusing on end-to-end user checkout experiences for both shoppers and merchants, making sure that the former can checkout in just one click when they shop online.

High-precision induction stove startup Impulse powers up with $20M Series A • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in Daily Crunch, Startups, Venture, venture capitalNo Comments

To get a roundup of ZebethMedia’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Greetings on this fine Tuesday. There was a lot of news today, so I’m not going to waste time and instead will get right to what you came here for. — Christine. The ZebethMedia Top 3 Taking telehealth’s temperature: Amazon is getting back into telehealth with Amazon Clinic, a marketplace for third-party virtual consultants that will initially launch in 32 states, Ingrid reports. Yes, we know it’s been a few short months since the delivery giant shut down its Amazon Care telehealth service, but as Ingrid writes, this is the company’s chance to provide care that may be a bit more complex for the corner drugstore, but not as necessary for what could be an expensive doctor’s visit. Heating things up: Impulse isn’t able to light a physical fire under consumers to get them to try out its stovetop, but now with its $20 million cash injection, it can heat up the competition with its induction technology. Haje has more. UPI XOXO: This is the moment that India has been waiting for — Google Play finally adds United Payments Interface subscriptions, Jagmeet writes. Startups and VC Most of us live and die by our calendar, but Vimcal thinks we shouldn’t have to spend that much time creating the actual event. Ivan writes that this “nifty calendar app” will have you entering a new event and even providing scheduling options in just a few steps. Oh, and it also has a desktop version. Pucker up, robot enthusiasts! Pickle brought in $26 million in new funding to continue developing its truck unloading robots, which Brian writes is one of the “links in the chain that remains one of the least addressed.” And we have five more for you: 5 sustainable best practices for bootstrapped startups Image Credits: Getty Images / Ratchapoom Anupongpan / EyeEm For founders interested in building on their own, maintaining control and staying off the fundraising treadmill for as long as possible, investor/entrepreneur Marjorie Radlo-Zandi sets out five basic principles for bootstrapped founders in her latest TC+ article. “Don’t be tempted to hop on a plane at a moment’s notice to meet potential customers in glamorous locations or for meetings in far-flung locations,” she writes. “Your bootstrapped business likely will not survive such big, optional financial outlays.” Bootstrapped founders face longer odds, but if they can drive growth and reach product-market fit, “fundraising will be that much easier.” Three more from the TC+ team: ZebethMedia+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription! Big Tech Inc. Alibaba’s logistics arm, Cainiao, is stretching out its arms to hug Latin America, which it hopes will fill some of the gap left by a Chinese commerce slowdown, Rita reports. The e-commerce giant started delivering goods in Brazil earlier this year and has plans to boost its presence in the country over the next three years. Netflix wants to help you get someone off of your account, no matter who it is and if they know your password. The streaming company has a new feature that lets subscribers kick devices off their accounts, meaning it will forcibly log a device out of that account, Lauren writes. And we have four more for you: