Author : zebethcontrol

Netflix launches a new interactive trivia experience, ‘Triviaverse’ • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 8, 2022Posted in games, Gaming, Media & Entertainment, Netflix, streaming service, triviaNo Comments

Today, Netflix is launching a new interactive game called “Triviaverse” that allows subscribers to test their knowledge and compete against an all-knowing “Trivia master” using their TV remote. In the game, players are challenged to answer questions as quickly as they can before time runs out and beat high scores to earn badges. “Triviaverse” is today launching globally on the streaming service and is available in nine languages, including English, Spanish (LatAm), Spanish (Spain), Portuguese (Brazil), French, German, Italian, Korean and Japanese. The gameplay itself is fairly simple. Players must correctly answer as many questions as possible within a limited time frame by pressing the arrow keys on their remote. Questions will span various categories like history, science and pop culture. They’ll increase in difficulty as you make it through the rounds. When players reach certain milestones, they earn badges, beginning with “Bird Brain,” then “Preschool Graduate,” “Lucky Guesser,” “Shockingly Average,” “Mere Mortal,” “PhD Dropout,” “Super Nerd,” “Potential Genius,” “Certified Genius” and “Triviaverse God” — the last and most epic-sounding title that players can receive. There are two ways to play “Triviaverse” — one-player mode, which has three rounds of trivia; or two-player mode, which is divided into two rounds per person. “Whether it’s challenging a personal best to beat 4,000 points or dueling your friends to reach 10,000 points, we hope you learn something new and have fun!” Netflix Director of Product Management, Rick Sanchez, wrote in an announcement posted on the company’s blog. Image Credits: Netflix While Netflix has experimented with interactive storytelling before, not all of those past efforts have been designed to be played like a game. In 2017, the company debuted interactive stories for subscribers to enjoy, like “Cat Burglar” and “Black Mirror: Bandersnatch,” among others. It also offered a “Triviaverse” precursor with its interactive game “Trivia Quest,” which had a different format involving daily episodes during the month of April 2022. The new game, however, has a more stripped-down format, as if Netflix wants to test whether or not subscribers would be interested in just using its service as a game-playing platform, instead of for interactive features that also tell stories. The new trivia game comes one year after Netflix began investing in gaming, which the company has said would eventually expand beyond mobile games. For instance, following Netflix’s promising Q3 earnings results, VP of Gaming Mike Verdu revealed at ZebethMedia Disrupt that the company is exploring cloud gaming and was opening a new gaming studio in Southern California. Netflix recently acquired the gaming studio, Spry Fox, which joined Netflix’s five in-house games studios.

Southeast Asia health tech platform Speedoc raises $28M • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 8, 2022Posted in Asia, Biotech & Health, health care, Health tech, healthcare, malaysia, Singapore, Southeast Asia, Speedoc, Startups, telemedicineNo Comments

Speedoc, a health tech platform that brings hospital care to homes, has raised $28 million in pre-Series B funding. The round included Bertelsmann Investments, Shinhan Venture Investment and Mars Growth. Returning investor Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia and India, which led Speedoc’s $5 million Series A in 2020, also participated. Based in Singapore, Speedoc was founded in 2017 by Dr. Shravan Verma and Serene Cai. Its services include telemedicine consultations, on-site doctor and nurse visits, virtual hospital wards and ambulance hailing. Speedoc is available in a total of nine cities, including eight in Malaysia. Dr. Verma told ZebethMedia that he became interested in creating an app for on-demand medical services while he was a doctor in an emergency department, and saw how many patients had to wait hours for minor conditions. Cai, meanwhile, wanted to create an easier way for people to get medical help, especially in underserved communities, while her family was caring for her grandmother, who had severe dementia. Speedoc is currently participating in the Ministry of Health Office for Healthcare Transformation’s Mobile Inpatient Care@Home initiative, and its hospital partners include National University Health System (NUHS), the Singapore General Hospital (SGH) and Khoo Teck Puat Hospital. As part of the program, Speedoc plans to expand its virtual hospital program, which includes a 24/7 patient care team. H-Ward is one of the main ways Speedoc differentiates from other telemedicine platforms, Dr. Verma said, because it standardizes services like telemedicine, remote monitoring and home-based doctors and nurses for continuous care. Patients are able to receive frequent medical reviews, 24/7 nursing, intravenous therapies, blood tests and in-person visits. “Research and survey findings have shown that given the same medical care and treatment, patients could recover faster at home,” Dr. Sherma said. “We have also been encouraged by our patients advocating for home-based care, and preferences to be admitted at home. Most importantly, on the impact on the healthcare landscape, the thrust towards virtual hospitals will ensure more optimal utilization rates, and more capacity for medical personnel to attend to life-threatening conditions.” Speedoc will use its new funding to expand in Southeast Asia, especially in cities where there is a shortage of healthcare professionals. In a statement about the funding, Shinhan Venture Investment (Global Investment) director Jinsoo Lee said, “Healthcare provision and delivery in Southeast Asia is poised for tremendous change in the next decade. We believe the healthcare model Speedoc champions will see greater adoption in meeting the healthcare gap in the region.”

Doola nurses new capital for its ‘business in a box’ tool targeting global founders • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 8, 2022Posted in Arjun Mahadevan, doola, LLC, Nexus Venture Partners, VentureNo Comments

Doola, a company helping global founders start a limited liability company in the United States, even without a Social Security number, raised an $8 million round of funding. The new investment comes less than one year after the company secured $3 million in seed funding. This gives the company just under $12 million in total funding since the company was founded by Arjun Mahadevan and JP Pincheira in 2020. Mahadevan did not disclose the company’s new valuation but did say this round increased it. When we previously wrote about doola in 2021, the New York-based company had just built its MVP and was working with its first paying customer and hundreds of companies had formed LLCs using its software that provides things like an EIN (employee identification number), a U.S. address and bank account, access to U.S. payments, a free tax consultation, U.S. tax support and a phone number. Today, now thousands of companies from over 130 countries have launched with doola, which has helped the company increase its revenue growth by seven times since 2020, Mahadevan told ZebethMedia. Doola is building what he said customers call “business in a box,” which has turned into a one-stop solution for compliantly forming a company, including more education on how to start a company, a new banking offering and a soon-to-come credit product. Much of that is to help the U.S. Census’ project of over 5 million new business applications made in 2021, Mahadevan said. “If we can help people go from zero to point one and get their business off the ground, we think we can increase entrepreneurship globally and make it more likely that people with businesses can succeed and reach product-market fit and scale,” he added. Nexus Venture Partners again led the investment into doola and was joined by investors, including Y Combinator, Hustle Fund, Chris Adelsbach, Sahil Bloom, Alex Cohen, Bart Macdonald and Vibe Capital. They join a group of existing investors that includes Jacqueline Reses, former head of Square Capital; Dharmesh Shah, founder and CTO at HubSpot; Ankur Nagpal, founder at Teachable and of Vibe Capital; Rohini Pandhi, product manager at Square and partner at Transparent Collective; Arjun Sethi, co-founder and investor at Tribe Capital; Prasanna Sankar, co-founder of Rippling; Translink and Psion Capital. Mahadevan intends to use the new funding to grow doola’s team, particularly in the areas of product, engineering and R&D. It has an office in New York and Germany and will be scaling those and opening up new offices. It will also focus on marketing. Meanwhile, in the past year, the company launched its own banking service, which enables customers to have a U.S.-based account and remotely bank from anywhere in the world using physical and virtual credit and debit cards and international wires. “The ultimate end goal is to accept payments,” Mahadevan said. “We’re also sitting on this treasure trove of data with visibility into companies and how they perform. We’re going to be able to think for customers and provide financial services that never had before.”

Grab Financial leader Reuben Lai to step down • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 8, 2022Posted in Fintech, grab, Grab Financial, GXS, Reuben Lai, Southeast AsiaNo Comments

Reuben Lai, senior managing director of Grab Financial Group, is leaving the position at the end of this year. The news was first reported by Tech In Asia. Lai oversees Grab Financial Group and is also executive director and head of regional strategy at GXS Bank, the digital bank joint venture between Grab Holdings and telecom Singtel. In a statement to ZebethMedia, GXS Bank said, “GXS Bank (GXS)’s executive director and Head of Regional Strategy, Mr Reuben Lai, has decided to leave the Bank at the end of 2022. Along with his resignation as an executive director, Reuben will be stepping down from his appointment as a director in GXS’ board in Singapore. He remains a director on the Board of the digital bank in Malaysia.” Launched by Grab in 2018, Grab Financial Group has been instrumental in Grab’s journey from a ride-hailing service to super app. Its digital wallet, GrabPay, is now the top digital wallet in Southeast Asia. During his tenure at Grab Financial Group and GXS Bank, Lai focused on financial inclusion, telling Bloomberg in 2021 that “we know that because of many of our drivers, our merchants come to us and tell us that they want to open a bank account, but they’re not able to. They want to access a working capital loan, but they’re not able to. What we want to do at Grab Financial Group is to make financial services more accessible and more convenient in a very simple and intuitive way to as many consumers as possible.” GXS Bank launched in August after Grab and Singtel were granted a digital full bank license from the Monetary Authority of Singapore. It also holds a banking license in Malaysia.

Amazon quietly opens its logistics network to third-party merchants in India • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 8, 2022Posted in Amazon, Amazon India, Commerce, Flipkart, WalmartNo Comments

Amazon is quietly beginning to offer its transportation and logistics network as a service to third-party merchants, businesses and direct-to-consumer brands in India, tapping its large delivery chain to drive revenue in the key overseas market as the e-commerce group attempts to replicate a model it has been testing in the U.S. for several months. The service, called Amazon Shipping, offers “extensive reach and the highest reliability – all at the lowest logistics cost,” the company describes on its website. Amazon Shipping “will pick up your parcels 7 days a week, and deliver them to your customers,” the company adds. The retailer, which has poured over $6.5 billion in India over the past seven years, says it’s offerings its shipping at “competitive rates,” and includes a dedicated support channel. There’s no additional fee for deliveries on weekends and customers are not tied to any contract for a consignment, allowing them to cancel the service at any time. It has partnered with local firms Shiprocket, Unicommerce, Easyecom, Clickpost and Vinculum for order and delivery management systems, it says on the site. The company has been testing the service for at least a few months in India, according to an analysis of the archived pages. As Amazon expands the Shipping service, it may become a headache to local firms including Delhivery, Ecom Express, and even legacy logistics giants including Blue Dart and India Post. Flipkart, the Walmart-backed rival of Amazon in India, also began to open its logistics network to third-party firms earlier this year. Indian newspaper Economic Times first reported about Amazon Shipping, and added that Amazon Shipping covers all types of products other than dangerous and hazardous goods. On a policy page, Amazon says Shipping currently offers the ground mode of deliveries and resricts the number of shipments items to 99 per order. Amazon opened its logistics network to third-party merchants in the U.S. earlier this year with a service called Buy with Prime. Analysts say that Amazon can pose a greater challenge to rivals like Shopify with the move because it has built a nearly “impregnable moat in logistics.” “Today Amazon’s logistics is massive and fully integrated from the fulfillment center to the doorstep, even though it only serves Amazon; the obvious next step is opening it up to non-Amazon retailers, and that is exactly what is happening,” Stratechery’s Ben Thompson wrote earlier this year.

Former Tink employees launch Atlar, a payment automation startup • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 8, 2022Posted in api, Atlar, bank payment, Fintech, StartupsNo Comments

Stockholm-based startup Atlar raised a $5 million (€5 million) seed round led by Index Ventures. The company has been working on an application programming interface (API) that facilitates bank-to-bank payments for European businesses. In addtion to Index Ventures, La Famiglia VC, Cocoa and various business angels also participated in the round, such as Revolut CFO Mikko Salovaara, former EVP of global sales at Adyen Thijn Lamers and N26 CFO Jan Kemper. While European consumers are already quite familiar with open banking and payment initiation, a lot of B2B transfers are still processed manually. Business banking hasn’t experienced the same level of innovation when it comes to payments. And yet, corporate banks already offer ways to initiate payments without having to connect to a web portal and upload a spreadsheet. But banks don’t necessarily run modern REST APIs. They expect a text file formatted in a very specific way on an SFTP server. If you have a development team, they could build a custom integration. But many companies simply don’t have the resources to maintain these connections. They would rather pay a partner to handle all the technical details. Atlar provides a modern API that hides all the complexities involved with bank connections. Once a company uses Atlar, it can trigger transfers, reconcile transactions and process direct debits through Atlar’s API directly. In particular, Atlar can be used for payouts, insurance premiums, deposits and loan payouts. Companies that operate across multiple European countries likely have multiple bank accounts. That’s why automating payments could be a nice upgrade for those businesses. “Accepting payments as a business is pretty painless now, but initiating them with your bank is still agonisingly slow and manual,” Atlar co-founder and CEO Joel Nordström said in a statement. “This is why Atlar is on a journey to becoming the operating system for bank-based payments. By creating a new category, we hope to unleash a wave of innovation for our clients which will ultimately benefit European consumers and businesses.” In addition to Joel Nordström, Joel Wägmark and Johannes Elgh are the two other co-founders. They were all working at Tink, the open banking company that was acquired by Visa for $2.2 billion. Atlar competes with Numeral, a French startup that I covered earlier this year. So far, Atlar focuses on the Nordics, Germany, Austria and Switzerland. And today’s funding round will be helpful when it comes to European expansion.

Nvidia touts a slower chip for China to avoid US ban • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 8, 2022Posted in alibaba, China, chip, Government & Policy, Hardware, Huawei, nvidia, semiconductor, TSMCNo Comments

Two months after the U.S. choke off China’s access to two of Nvidia’s high-end microchips, the American semiconductor design giant unveiled a substitute with a reduced processing speed for its second-largest market. The Nvidia A800 graphic processing unit is “another alternative product to the Nvidia A100 GPU for customers in China,” a spokesperson for Nvidia said in a statement to ZebethMedia. “The A800 meets the U.S. government’s clear test for reduced export control and cannot be programmed to exceed it.” The new chip was first reported by Reuters on Monday. The A100 processor is known for powering supercomputers, artificial intelligence, and high-performing data centers for industries ranging from biotech and finance to manufacturing. Alibaba’s cloud computing business has been one of its customers. A100, along with Nvidia’s enterprise AI chip H100, were placed under a U.S. export control list to “address the risk that the covered products may be used in, or diverted to, a ‘military end use’ or ‘military end user’ in China and Russia.” Nvidia previously reported that the U.S. ban could affect as much as $400 million in potential sales to China in the third quarter, so the new chip seems to be an attempt to remedy the financial loss. The A800 GPU went into production in Q3, according to Nvidia’s spokesperson. Indeed, chip distributors in China, such as Omnisky, are already marketing A800 in their product catalogs. The chip looks to be designed to circumvent U.S. export rules while still carrying out other core computing capabilities. Most of the key specs of A100 and A800 are identical except for their interconnect speeds: A800 runs at 400 gigabytes per second while A100 functions at 600 gigabytes per second, which is the performance threshold set by the U.S. ban. According to an analysis from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a bipartisan think tank, “By only targeting chips with very high interconnect speeds, the White House is attempting to limit the controls to chips that are designed to be networked together in the data centers or supercomputing facilities that train and run large AI models.” Nvidia isn’t the only one slowing down its chips in order to evade U.S. sanctions. Alibaba and Chinese chip design startup Biren, which have been pouring resources into making rivals of Nvidia processors, are modifying the performance of their latest semiconductors, according to the Financial Times. That’s because Alibaba and Biren, like other fabless semiconductor firms, contract Taiwan’s TSMC to make their products. And because U.S. export controls cover chip sales by companies using American technologies, sales from TSMC fabs to China could be curtailed.

Musk’s $56 billion Tesla pay deal goes to trial amid Twitter overhaul • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 8, 2022Posted in Elon Musk, elon musk buys twitter, Tesla, Transportation, TwitterNo Comments

As if Elon Musk didn’t have enough on his plate, the world’s richest man is headed to court next week to defend his $56 billion Tesla pay package. Richard Tornetta, a Tesla shareholder who filed suit in 2019 to rescind Musk’s 2018 pay deal, claims the package — “the largest compensation grant in human history” — is unjustly paid to Musk without demanding he focus entirely on the carmaker. The trial begins November 14, yet another drama Musk will have to juggle as he works to overhaul Twitter. Musk’s deal to buy the social media company went through at the end of October, and since then Musk has set to work laying off swathes of employees, getting sued for said layoffs, and generally scheming out loud on the platform about charging users $8 per month to get a blue tick next to their names. The Twitter buy didn’t exactly help Musk’s case in the lawsuit over his pay package. Aside from Tesla, Musk already serves as CEO of SpaceX, the Boring Company, OpenAI and Neuralink. With Twitter, Musk will only lend credence to Tornetta’s claims that Musk is a “part-time executive” at Tesla. Tornetta also claims the board set low bars on performance targets for Musk and that the grant was “demanded for the avowed purpose of colonizing Mars (the planet).” Tesla has said Musk’s pay package delivered a 10-fold increase in value to shareholders. The trial will be decided by Kathaleen McCormick on Delaware’s Court of Chancery. McCormick oversaw Twitter’s suit against Musk that ended in him agreeing to close his $44 billion deal, an acquisition which he financed in large part by selling his Tesla stock. The grant ‘defied its goal of focusing Musk on Tesla’ Tornetta’s lawyers argue the 2018 package did not achieve its stated purpose of getting Musk to focus on Tesla, and no wonder — there were no provisions requiring Musk to devote time or attention to Tesla, nor were there provisions limiting Musk’s allocation of time or attention to non-Tesla endeavors. “Indeed, Musk testified that since the Grant’s approval, he has spent a little more than half his time on Tesla matters and has dedicated substantial time and attention to various other endeavors,” the lawsuit reads. Musk’s lawyers responded that his ambition is what makes him unique as a CEO, and that he does not punch a clock to determine time spent at the company. The disputed pay package allows Musk to buy 1% of Tesla stock at a discount each time performance and financial targets are met. If they aren’t met, Musk gets nothing. Tesla hit 11 out of 12 targets, according to court papers. “In any event, under the proposed plan, Musk would not earn any compensation at Tesla unless he drove tremendous growth, which could not be accomplished without significant time and attention from the CEO,” said Musk’s lawyers. The suit against Musk also claims the package was not entirely fair because Musk controls the board. “None of the committee members were independent of Musk,” wrote Tornetta’s lawyers. For example, Kimbal Musk, Musk’s brother, sits on Tesla’s board — a pretty clear conflict of interest. Tornetta’s filing also points to former board member Antonio Gracias who the plaintiff describes as a close friend of Musk’s. Gracias, personally and through his private equity firm, has collectively invested over half a billion dollars in “essentially all of Musk’s entities,” according to the filing, including PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity, The Boring Company and Neuralink. In addition, the filing calls out Ira Ehrenpreis and James Murdoch, who are both still on Tesla’s board, as being personal friends of Musk and investors in Musk’s entities. Gracias, Murdoch and Ehrenpreis are also listed among the defendants on the case.

the market is changing; YC’s terms are not • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 8, 2022Posted in Startups, VentureNo Comments

Last week at Web Summit, we were asked to interview outgoing Y Combinator President Geoff Ralston about the past, present, and future of the popular accelerator program. We covered a lot of ground during our 20-minute-long chat, including why Ralston — long a partner at YC — decided to leave after assuming the role of president just three years ago (Garry Tan assumes the role in January). We also discussed where YC’s investing capital comes from and whether, given the market slowdown, YC will be changing its terms to reflect that slowdown. Here is much of that conversation, edited lightly for length and clarity. You can watch the longer conversation here, or just listen in. TC: Let’s start with the news [that] you are leaving Y Combinator. You were there for three years. It was a little bit of a surprise [that you are stepping away]. Why now? GR: I actually count my tenure at YC from just after 2006, when I left Yahoo [and] started hanging out with Paul [Graham] and company, so really, almost 16 years. And I’ve been an employee at YC since 2011. So it’s been over a decade. And, you know, I felt inside me an urgency that it was time for a change. And I think you have to do that justice, when you feel that, even though I love YC. I love what I do. I think it’s important work. I think it matters. We’re very mission driven. We think entrepreneurship is important and makes a real positive difference in the world. And I love working with founders. It’s weird. I love it. But it was just time to do something different. So I’m moving on. TC: YC went from cohorts of 12 or 18 to roughly 400 founders last winter, before downsizing a bit. Tell me about this idea that launching startups is infinitely scalable. GR: I’ve made what some people consider outlandish claims for how many companies we could possibly fund. It’s never been infinite. It scales a lot. There is extraordinary opportunity for entrepreneurship and for founders to find success across the United States and across the world, in every demographic. In the beginning, we were just scratching the surface. One of the things that I think YC did that was really special was to democratize the idea of entrepreneurship, to open it up to different folks. Originally, the idea was to open it up to technologists, to hackers. That was really an opening of entrepreneurship to folks who really didn’t quite have the access. And we’ve continued that to this day. For that reason our batches have continued to grow. It’s supply and demand. There’s a demand for entrepreneurship. TC: Sam Altman, your predecessor as president, once said there are five ways that YC really innovated, including letting anybody in the world apply to the program, whereas with VCs, you had to get a warm introduction. GR: Yeah, totally, and to be fair, PG, Paul Graham, the founder of YC, started opening up the ideas behind entrepreneurship with his essays, which I’m sure a number of people in the audience have read. They were really a turning point for how people thought about entrepreneurship I honestly don’t know at this point how YC is really structured. You have the Continuity Fund [for later-stage investments]. Where is the money [for these new cohorts] coming from? Is YC a holding company where investors have stakes in a holding company? Or does it raise funds very, very quietly? We raise funds, and we do it rather quietly. It’s sort of our internal sausage making, and it’s not so relevant to talk. We’ve evolved over time. Originally, YC was funded exclusively by Paul and company. And later on, we took on, from a funding perspective, the nature of most VCs, where we have limited partners from whom we raise money on a relatively regular basis. And we have a number of funds in which those LPs place their money. We look like a standard VC from that perspective. Are these evergreen funds? They’re not. I’m guessing that a lot of alums are also welcome to invest? Virtuous cycle and all? Yeah. I would like to point out that one of the innovations that Sam probably talked about when you talked about these five innovations was that we think of the folks who go through Y Combinator as our alumni and we’ve created this community of founders. If that tight community can actually reinvest the success they found back into YC, it ties us all more tightly together. With regard to that community, I’ve always wondered if there is a breaking point. I know a founder will roll out a product and a lot of YC alums will happily test it out or buy it, for example. But when you’re dealing with thousands of teams as you are at this point, I wonder how you keep your alums from getting overwhelmed. The best answer to that is we have really good software. We actually consider ourselves, more than anything else, a software platform. We’ve all been software engineers. Paul has a PhD in computer science. Sam was a software engineer. I’m a software engineer. My successor, Garry Tan, is a software engineer. So we take a software attitude toward scaling and toward creating tools that bring our companies and our founders together. In fact, Garry built the community software originally that we still use at YC. You did pare back your class size more recently. It’s a new world, right? It changed in two fundamental ways, which caused us to retrench a little bit on our batch size. One is that the pandemic sort of is coming to an end, and we’re much more in person, and it’s harder to scale in person than purely virtual, which we were from March 2020 until the winter of 2022. The second thing is the economy is doing somewhat different things than in 2021, so it’s

Lyft takes $135.7 million hit on Argo AI shutdown • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 8, 2022Posted in Argo AI, autonomous vehicles, Lyft, ridehailing, TransportationNo Comments

Ride-hailing company Lyft lost $135.7 million in the third quarter due to the shutdown of autonomous vehicle company Argo AI, in which Lyft had a small stake. Late last month, Argo AI closed its doors as its main backers, Ford and Volkswagen, pulled their investments in order to focus on more near-term goals like advanced driver assistance systems in passenger vehicles. Lyft and Argo were working together to test autonomous ride-hailing using Argo’s tech on the Lyft platform. The two companies had launched public robotaxi services in Austin, Texas in September and Miami, Florida in December of last year. Both of those services have now been discontinued, a Lyft spokesperson told ZebethMedia. Lyft did not say how it will adjust its AV strategy in the future, but the company has also partnered with Motional, another AV tech company, to launch robotaxis in Las Vegas in August. Lyft’s losses incurred by the Argo shutdown only account for about a third of the company’s total losses for the quarter. In Q2, Lyft lost $422.2 million, which is a larger cost than the $99.7 million in the same period of 2021 and a net loss of $377.2 million in the second quarter of this year. A bigger portion of Lyft’s losses are attributable to $224.1 million in stock-based compensation and related payroll expenses, an increase from $179.1 million in the second quarter. The uptick is related to the top-up that Lyft issued to employees when its stock price declined earlier in the year, according to a Lyft spokesperson. Lyft said the increase isn’t yet related to the rounds of layoffs from the company, the first of which occurred in July and the second just last week as Lyft tries to cut down on operating expenses. In regards to that reduction in workforce, Lyft expects to “incur a charge of between $27 million and $32 million” in Q4, as well as “a stock-based compensation charge and corresponding payroll tax expense related to affected team members, as well as restructuring charges related to a decision to exit and sublease, or cease use, of certain facilities,” said Elaine Paul, Lyft’s chief financial officer, during Monday’s earnings call. “However, we aren’t able to estimate these charges at this time because they depend in part on our future stock price.” Paul also said Lyft has been working to reduce stock-based compensation next quarter by ceasing new hires in the U.S. and shifting the nexus of hiring away from the U.S. and toward international markets like Canada and Eastern Europe where “there’s a different compensation model with low or no equity.” Lyft misses Q3 estimates For the third quarter, Lyft reported revenue of $1.05 billion, which is slightly less than Wall Street expectations of $1.06 billion. The company’s earnings per share hit -$1.18 versus the $0.09 that was expected. Even active riders, which saw an improvement quarter over quarter, only topped 20.3 million, and the Street had hoped for 21.1 million. That said, Lyft’s revenue per active rider beat expectations of $49.94 at $51.88. Lyft’s stock, which had started to climb after Uber reported strong earnings last week, fell 14.36% Monday in after-hours trading. The company’s shares have slid 69.29% since the start of the year. Lyft closed the quarter with $143.7 million in cash. Looking forward, Lyft expects revenue to be between $1.145 billion and $1.165 billion in the fourth quarter, with revenue growth reaching between 9% and 11% quarter over quarter and 18% to 20% year over year. Part of that growth will come from increased revenue per rider, which is backed by Lyft’s recent decision to increase service fees for riders. Paul said Lyft intends to cut its operating expenses by roughly $20 million in Q4 versus Q3, which is in part due to the reduction in force. John Zimmer, Lyft’s president, said he was confident that Lyft would be able to achieve its Q4 goals regardless of the macro environment. “We’ve been using internally two main cases. One is the growth case, which assumes market bookings grow in the low to mid 20% year over year, and that the labor market stays as tight as it currently is,” said Zimmer during the Q3 earnings call. “And then, internally what we call a recession case where the market growth slows and we see operating leverage through lower driver engagement and acquisition costs if unemployment rises. So in both cases, we have a very confident path to the billion dollars, and in both cases, we’ll continue to focus our R&D spend on marketplace innovation that helps improve the cost basis of the business.”