TechCrunch Disrupt 2022

Why members-only club Chief, with a waitlist of 60K, hates the term ‘girl boss’ • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 19, 2022Posted in chief, Disrupt, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

Chief co-founders Carolyn Childers and Lindsay Kaplan started the company because they had experienced first-hand being women executives without a ton of support. They created a community of female leaders that is now 20,000 strong, with 60,000 sitting on waitlists, but just don’t call these women ‘girl bosses.’ The two women appeared at ZebethMedia Disrupt today in San Francisco. Kaplan asked the audience how many men call themselves “boy bosses.” Nobody raised their hand. “We don’t use the phrase ‘boy boss.’ We only use the phrase ‘girl boss’ because we’ve put women in another category instead of just assuming that a woman can be a leader. And so I don’t like the phrase because of that. I don’t like thinking about women in leadership. It’s just leadership,” Kaplan told the Disrupt audience. She added, “How can we celebrate women, not tear them down, not infantilize what it is to be a woman leader by calling them a ‘girl boss’ and truly make sure that women can lead and do it in their own way.” The three-year-old startup has grown from a 200 person group in NYC to a 20,000 strong organization that has raised $140 million on a $1 billion valuation. Yet they have another 60,000 women who want to join. Kaplan stresses that giving its members a highly curated and valuable experience is more important than growing too fast and losing their value proposition. “The member experience is most important. So when you ask about growth, when we think about how we’ve only scratched the surface of 5 million women [executives] in the US, it is so critical for us to make sure that members are really loving their experience,” she said. It all comes back to the mission, which was born in personal experience, says Childers. “When I started to get in the room where decisions were happening, and I realized that there were differences in the way that conversations were running for different people within the organization, that was just a really eye-opening thing for me,” she said. She decided creating a network of like-minded women could be incredibly helpful. This week the company opened what they call ‘a clubhouse’ in San Francisco, a place for women to meet in person. They have three others in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. In addition, they expanded outside the U.S into the U.K. for the first time.

Cityblock Health CEO Toyin Ajayi on how to scale human-centered care models • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Biotech & Health, Cityblock Health, Disrupt, healthcare, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022, Toyin AjayiNo Comments

Cityblock Health is focused on providing affordable, human-centered healthcare in lower-income and marginalized communities, while also building sustainable business models. Founder and CEO Toyin Ajayi talked at Disrupt today about the challenges of tackling the healthcare system’s inequalities, while serving patients with personalized medical care, behavioral health care and social services. “Do I believe that healthcare is a right, that should be available to all people, irrespective of their ability to pay and then it should be distributed equitably? Yes. 100%. And there are a lot of ways of achieving that,” Ajayi said. “It’s unacceptable in 2022, that we’re looking at exactly the same data that we were looking at 15 years ago about health care disparities, health care outcomes, all exacerbated by COVID,” she added about the current health care system. “Everyone’s like, oh my god, black and brown people are dying more from COVID. Oh my god, poor people are dying more from COVID. Oh my god, essential workers who don’t have health insurance. We knew this stuff. Give me a break. So, yes, I would have designed it differently and I’m also not content to bitch and moan about it. We’ve got to do something.” Based in Brooklyn, New York and now live in seven markets, including Indiana and Ohio, Cityblock works with many people who lack access to basics like food, safe places to sleep and social support, which creates more risk factors for worsening chronic conditions. As a result, many rely on emergency rooms for crises, like running out of insulin or acute psychiatric care, because they didn’t received the kind of care that would have kept them at home. “I come to this work as a physician, I’m deeply passionate about caring for underserved communities. I come to this work from a place of real heart. This is my life’s work and my mission,” Ajayi said. “I’m also a deep pragmatist and I recognize that there are real economic forces that drive most of the decisions that people make in our healthcare system, certainly in the for profit space, but even as we learn and read more about it, even in the not-for-profit space.” Addressing systemic issues like health disparities is important on a moral level, but for payers there is also an opportunity to figure out how to create a more viable business by caring for people differently. When launching in a new market, like Indiana or Ohio, Cityblock looks for places where there are socioeconomic disparities and then looks for partners, payers and health insurers who they launch into markets with. “Pre-launch we spend the time figuring out where exactly in the neighborhood should we be,” Ajayi said. “Can we be near public transportation, near grocery stores, making sure that we’re really mapping the ecosystem and showing up in places that are accessible to our members and also positioning ourselves so we can go to the home and see people from there.” Part of this means working with community-based organizations, include shelters, housing agencies and food pantries. “We think of ourselves as part of the glue within an ecosystem that knits together existing providers, the specialty providers, the hospitals, the communities, organizations and creates a seamless experience for the people we serve,” Ajayi said. She noted that many of these organizations run on tenuous and vulnerable business models. For example, during the pandemic, many community-based organizations couldn’t get enough workers to continue coming in. Many run on tiny margins and are grant-funded. This means Cityblock has to be prepared to support community organizations in its ecosystem, including tasks like packaging and bring over groceries. Tech and data science can also support more individualized care. For example, data science can help Cityblock figure out who it needs to engage with first in patient populations that are often very diverse in terms of age and needs. “I have to engage all of them. Who do I go after first. Who do I call first? Who’s going to go to the emergency room tomorrow unless they get a phone call from us? Who’s not home today because they’re likely not working, or who’s likely to be engageable on the weekend,” Ajayi said. “Those are types of things we can use our data and our data products to help us better refine.” Better data science means people also have to repeat their story less as they seek care. “When we interview our members about what they dislike about the traditional health care system, it’s ‘I gotta tell my whole story over and over again.’ And then you add on layers of discrimination and stigma that many people face. More than half of our members are people of color, because that’s the best representation of Medicaid and dually-eligible populations.” “Telling your story over and over again seems benign, but the healthcare system makes people tell their story over and over again, it subjects them to friction, abrasion and sometimes even trauma, that is entirely counterproductive to a therapeutic relationship that’s going to result in better health outcomes. Even alleviating that is such a meaningful lever for us.”

Netflix to expand into cloud gaming, opens new studio in Southern California • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Disrupt, Gaming, Media & Entertainment, Netflix, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

At ZebethMedia Disrupt, Netflix VP of Gaming Mike Verdu dropped two bits of news about the streaming giant’s foray into games. Verdu said that Netflix is “seriously exploring a cloud gaming offering.” The company will also open a new gaming studio in Southern California. “It’s a value add. We’re not asking you to subscribe as a console replacement,” Verdu said on stage. “It’s a completely different business model. The hope is over time that it just becomes this very natural way to play games where wherever you are.” Google’s Stadia and Amazon’s Luna have made the same play, attempting to peddle video games that people can play even if they don’t have an expensive gaming computer or coveted console. But these services have struggled to attain mainstream user adoption. Google recently said that it will shut down Stadia in January. “While Stadia’s approach to streaming games for consumers was built on a strong technology foundation, it hasn’t gained the traction with users that we expected so we’ve made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service,” Stadia VP and GM Phil Harrison wrote in a blog post. Verdu thinks these products struggled due to their business models, not the technology itself. Mike Verdu, VP of Games at Netflix speaks about “whether game streaming can go mainstream” at ZebethMedia Disrupt in San Francisco on October 18, 2022. Image Credit: Haje Kamps / ZebethMedia “Stadia was a technical success. It was fun to play games on Stadia,” Verdu said. “It had some issues with the business model, sure.” Both Stadia and Luna have dedicated controllers — but Verdu was reticent to say whether or not we can expect a Netflix gaming controller in the future. He did reveal, though, that Netflix is stepping up its game development by opening an internal studio in Southern California. This is the company’s fifth studio — just last month, Netflix set up shop in Helsinki, Finland, with a former Zynga GM at the helm. Others include Boss Fight Entertainment, Night School Studio and Finland’s Next Games, which are each designed to develop games catering to different tastes. The new California studio will be led by Chako Sonny, the former executive producer on “Overwatch.” At Blizzard Entertainment, “Overwatch” was a massive success, netting billions of dollars. Sonny announced his departure from Blizzard last year in the wake of an SEC probe regarding sexual harassment and discrimination at the dominant gaming company. “He could have done anything, but he chose to come here,” said Verdu. “You don’t get people like that coming to your organization to build the next big thing in gaming unless there’s a sense that we’re really in it for the long haul and in it for the right reasons.” Since it announced its foray into gaming, Netflix has developed 14 games in its own studios and has 35 games on the service now. In total, Verdu said it has 55 games “in flight” at present. These games include experiences based on original IP like “Stranger Things,” as well as licensed IP like “Spongebob Squarepants.” Netflix is also developing original games. “We hope over time that the balance is like, 50% Netflix IP,” Verdu said. The company still considers itself in the very early stages of its gaming initiative but hasn’t ruled out expansions beyond mobile — though we understand it won’t be heading to the console or VR at this point. The news of the gaming studio launch and cloud gaming plans arrives as Netflix is announcing its Q3 earnings, which sees the streamer beating expectations with the addition of 2.41 million subscribers, bringing the total to 223.09 million. Netflix had forecast a net gain of only 1 million subs in the third quarter. The company also reported earning $7.93 in revenue in Q3 2022, whereas analysts predicted $7.85 billion.

Alaffia Health taps AI to detect errors in hospital bills • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Alaffia Health, Battlefield 200, Biotech & Health, Disrupt, Robotics & AI, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

The multi-decade rise in healthcare costs isn’t expected to reverse course any time soon. In search of a fix, Adun Akanni and TJ Ademiluyi co-founded Alaffia Health in 2020, one of the startups participating in the ZebethMedia Disrupt Battlefield 200. The healthtech company uses machine learning to try to identify fraud, waste and abuse in healthcare claims. “We leveraged key insights from our family’s medical billing company in founding Alaffia,” Ademiluyi told ZebethMedia in an interview. “We determined that the majority of the waste in the system results from natural human error, lack of transparency in claims processing, and misaligned incentives between healthcare providers and payers. We founded Alaffia to tackle these issues using nascent machine learning and AI, built on top of deep healthcare domain expertise.” Alaffia sells services primarily to health insurance payers and enterprises that provide their employees health coverage. Using AI to extract and standardize data from hospital bills, including various medical billing procedure codes and dates of service, the platform aims to reduce payers’ spending by finding errors and overcharges within the bills sent by healthcare providers. The causes of medical billing errors are myriad, but often arise from double billing, missing the payer submission deadline and a failure to capture patient information. Non-specific diagnostic codes are another common issue, leading to instances of upcoding and undercoding. Upcoding is when a coder reports a higher-level service than patients received or never had performed, while undercoding is when billing codes don’t capture the full scope of work performed by a physician. Medical expenses are expected to grow by an average of 5.1% from 2021 to 2030, reaching $6.8 trillion, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — and a significant portion of those expenditures are derived from errors in health insurance claims. It’s estimated that about 80% of claims in the U.S. contain at least one medical billing error, and that as much as $300 billion is lost to provider fraud, waste and abuse each year. Image Credits: Alaffia Health “This is a quite challenging technical problem due to the lack of data standardization in the healthcare system, so we’ve rigorously trained machine learning models using training data generated by our in-house annotation team,” Ademiluyi said. Alaffia reviews facility bills for errors such as “unbundling” — i.e., using multiple codes for individual parts of a procedure — while checking the accuracy of more complex claims like implants and surgeries. The company says it taps registered nurses, certified coders and certified billers to cross-reference the AI’s findings, as well as a clinical review team that examines each claim and corresponding medical record. When asked about competitors, Ademiluyi says he sees “legacy industry participants” who manually process and review claims as Alaffia’s principal rivals. But Alaffia isn’t the only startup attempting to tackle the medical billing error problem with AI. Anomaly, which works with insurance companies and providers, offers an AI-driven platform designed to detect irregularities in medical bills. There’s also Nym, whose technology converts medical charts and electronic medical records from physician consultations into auditable billing codes automatically. Alaffia has managed to gain traction in the space, however — and funding. Ademiluyi claims the company’s services currently cover over 300,000 health plan members in aggregate. And to date, Alaffia has raised $6.6 million in venture capital from backers including Anthemis, 1984 Ventures, Aperture Venture Capital, Tau Ventures, Twine Ventures, Plug and Play Ventures and ERA’s Remarkable Ventures Fund. Ademiluyi says that 2022 revenue is on pace to more than double year-over-year. The near-term plan is to expand Alaffia’s commercial footprint and product offerings, he added, starting with hospital bill review services direct to patients. The company currently employs “just over” 20 people and expects to hire five more by the end of the year. “Fortunately, we operate in an industry resistant to recession. Regardless of pandemics, macro trends, or the outlook for interest rates, people will still visit the doctor to receive care,” Ademiluyi said. “When patients receive care, it leads to further healthcare spending, which benefits our business as we review generated hospital bills for errors. As we move into a slowdown in the market, large enterprises — both health insurance institutions and employers whom we support are actually looking at ways to lower their expenses, which we directly support by reducing healthcare spending. As such, we believe the pandemic and current slowdown in the economy to be a net positive for the business.”

Vitag launches NFC-powered ‘sticky notes’ for visual instructions • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Apps, Battlefield 200, Disrupt, Hardware, NFC, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022, VitagNo Comments

While QR codes emerged as something of a technology poster-child during the pandemic, garnering a new lease of life in everything from restaurant menus to contactless payments, there remains a certain inelegance to the matrix barcode system. Usability remains a sticking point, both in terms of the effort it takes to create content and align it with a QR code, and also from the end-user’s standpoint who has to open their camera app to scan the QR code — something that might not even work in low-light situations. Throw into the mix aesthetics (who’s ever seen an attractive QR code?), and there’s a strong case to be made for an alternative that brings the QR code spirt to a more user friendly format. This is a problem that Vitag is setting out to address, with an NFC product designed for video instructions. Or, “video sticky notes,” as the company calls them. Founded in Dallas in March this year, Vitag is officially announcing its private beta today at TC Disrupt, where the company was selected as one of ZebethMedia’s Battlefield 200 startup cohorts. We caught up with cofounders Sean Jackson (CEO) and CTO Daniel Reiling to get a sneak peek into what exactly it’s looking to achieve. Vitag cofounders: Daniel Reiling (CTO) and Sean Jackson (CEO) Image Credits: ZebethMedia Videos on tap Vitag’s product consists of two core “things”: a mobile app for people to record instructional videos or upload existing material from their device, and a physical NFC-enabled tag that they can program the video to. All the end-user then has to do is tap their phone on the tag, and the video pops up on their screen, demonstrating to an AirBnb guest how to use the A/C system or where the recycling goes. Vitag in action Image Credits: Vitag Of course, it’s easy enough to achieve all this through QR codes — there are many online services for generating QR codes which someone can then tether to a YouTube video that they created. What Vitag does, though, is provide the tools for creating the video, managing tags, and hosting the actual video itself — it has built its own hosting service on top of Google Cloud, with the content viewable only to those with access to a unique URL, which is activated when users tap their phone to a tag. “We created our own service where you can capture a video on your phone, it goes to our servers, and it’s hosted there,” Reiling said. It may seem more intuitive to have just used an existing white-label video hosting service from a company like Vimeo, but the founders explained its reasoning for building its own hosting service: it’s about scalability, controllability, and customizability. While Vimeo might be great for a company to host its own videos, when it comes to potentially hundreds or thousands of Vitag’s own customers who need their own individual accounts for creating and storing hundreds or thousands of videos, this requires full control of the experience from creation through to hosting. The entire back-end and front-end packaged in a single platform. “Our goal is to remove complexity from the process of sharing instructions,” Jackson said. “We believe people are tired of cobbling together different technologies to complete a task — from QR code generators, to different hosting platforms, to desktop publishing tools, to printers, to adhesives — and everything else required.” However, it’s not purely about video. A customer can configure their tag so that it links to a static text page, a photo, URL, or whatever they want. The company offers $2 pre-printed tags specific to a certain type of business, for example restaurants or retail, while creators can also order personalized tags with their own individual text and a choice of different backgrounds. It’s also worth noting that companies can elect to have QR codes printed on the NFC tags for those who prefer to use QR codes, Vitag: Customization interface Image Credits: ZebethMedia Furthermore, Vitag also supports NFC tags from third-party providers, with an in-app function for users to format the tags to work with Vitag. The company said that it’s also planning additional tools in the future, including a desktop app with additional features for small businesses and enterprise customers. NFC surge NFC, or near-field communication as it’s more formally known, is hardly a new technology, but it has taken its time to properly hit the mainstream consciousness, where it still pretty much resides in the payments domain. But its recent growth has been aided somewhat by recent adoption from big tech companies such as Apple, which started to fully embrace NFC with iOS 13 back in 2019 — instead of only allowing iPhone apps to read NFC tags, Apple started to allow apps to write directly to blank tags, and interact through native protocols. The company also recently launched a new “tap to pay” feature that allows iPhones to accept contactless payments over NFC. Elsewhere, NFC is also being used as a replacement for business cards, allowing people to exchange information just by tapping phones. So while QR codes have seen a major resurgence in recent years and are unlikely to being going away any time soon, NFC is on something of an upwards trajectory too, which is where Vitag wants to make its mark. “We believe that consumers are becoming more comfortable with ‘tap to’ events, with payments being the most used today,” Jackson said. “And as more people become exposed to digital business cards the market adoption of ‘tap to’ will only increase.” For now, Vitag is looking to serve the short-term rental property market in the U.S., which Jackson identified as a particularly powerful use-case for video instructions. But plans are afoot to target all manner of verticals, from restaurants and retail stores to gyms. “As we shared our vision of what this technology could do, we found use-case after use-case from almost everyone we encountered,” Jackson explained. “People that stayed in rentals wanted to use them

‘Investors got scared off by Amazon’s attack’ • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Commerce, Disrupt, Marc Lore, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

Way back in 2010, Marc Lore struck a more than half-a-billion dollar deal to sell Quidsi — the company behind Diapers.com and Soap.com — to Amazon. The blow-out acquisition helped turn Amazon into “the everything store,” but twelve years later, Lore described the sale as “upsetting.” “We sold out,” said Lore — who co-founded both Quidsi.com and Jet.com — at Disrupt 2022. “With Walmart, we were happy to sell; we saw that as a way to accelerate our vision,” said the billionaire of the 2016 sale of Jet.com to Walmart. The “Amazon situation was different. It was a forced situation. We did not want to sell,” Lore said on stage in conversation with ZebethMedia’s Ingrid Lunden. To stick it to the competition, Amazon “cut the price of diapers by 30%, right? Which is unheard of,” recalled Lore. But in the face of ratcheting pressure, the former Quidsi executive claimed his now-defunct business was “still growing nicely.” Lore claimed this was among the reasons why Amazon ultimately decided snapped up the brand. But before that point, Lore believed that Quidsi needed to raise at least $100 million more to adequately challenge Amazon— an especially hefty sum at the time. Only, he couldn’t secure it. (In all, Quidsi raised around $79 million in equity and debt from investors, including Accel, Bessemer Venture Partners and Pinnacle Ventures.) “That’s what it would have taken to feel like we had enough capital to really do it,” said Lore. “And yeah, the investors got scared off by Amazon’s attack.” In a side note, Lore claimed that Quidsi also “had an offer from another company” for “like $100 million more,” yet the co-founder enigmatically declined to share additional details. A day after the Amazon-Quidsi transaction closed, Lore said that he and others from the company went to a bar, “drinking our tears away” over “how upsetting it was, because we sold out.” “We were building something really special,” Lore added, citing Wag.com and other sites under the now-extinct Quidsi umbrella. In the eyes of the co-founder, Quidsi’s customer experience back then “was a lot better than you’d find on Amazon or anywhere else.” But $100 million “was a lot of money” back then, and Lore concluded: “People were just scared of Amazon.”

a16z GP on investing billions in Adam Neumann • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in adam neumann, Andreessen Horowitz, Chris Dixon, Disrupt, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022, VentureNo Comments

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) general partner Chris Dixon shed some light on the firm’s recent investments in controversial WeWork founder Adam Neumann on stage at ZebethMedia Disrupt 2022. Neumann raised $350 billion from the venture firm back in August in a deal that reportedly valued his new real estate venture, Flow, at $1 billion before it had even launched. That investment, which marked the largest check a16z had ever written for a single company and its second bet on a Neumann startup in 2022, drew criticism from VCs and founders. Many noted Neumann’s less-than-ideal track record at WeWork, which under his tenure tanked in value from ~$47 billion to ~$8 billion and gained a reputation for mismanagement and poor treatment of employees. Marc Andreessen, the venture firm’s founder who led the Flow deal, saw Neumann’s track record differently, Dixon told interviewer Lucas Matney. “He’s one of the few founders — I mean, he’s one of the only people in the world who has built a real estate brand name,” Dixon said. The funding news in August also came on the heels of the release of WeCrashed, an Apple TV+ show that depicted Neumann’s rise, fall and exit from WeWork with actor Jared Leto playing the founder. The show, which portrayed Neumann as a narcissistic, chaotic leader, was inspired by actual events but did not purport to be a documentary. “I know there’s a lot of stuff written about [Neumann] and things we did, but we do our own research. We just don’t rely on books and movies for our diligence. We do our own research, and we just came to a different conclusion on a lot of what happened,” Dixon said.

a16z’s Chris Dixon announces new accelerator program for crypto founders in LA • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Andreessen Horowitz, Chris Dixon, Crypto, crypto accelerator program, Disrupt, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) is one of the most influential players in the web3, funding entrepreneurs in the space amid “crypto winter.” Founded and helmed by general partner Chris Dixon, the venture firm’s crypto arm raised a massive $4.5 billion fund in May for its fourth dedicated sector fund to continue backing early-stage founders just as the crypto downturn had begun to take root. Now, it’s doubling down on its programming for crypto founders, Dixon, an early Coinbase backer who has been investing at a16z since 2012, revealed on stage at Disrupt 2022 in San Francisco on Tuesday in an interview with ZebethMedia’s Lucas Matney. On stage, Dixon announced a16z’s plans to expand its educational “Crypto Startup School” initiative to include a new accelerator program for entrepreneurs. The inaugural accelerator program will take place in-person in March in Los Angeles, Dixon said, adding that he has noticed particular excitement in the city around the creator economy and its potential intersections with crypto. Participants in the 12-week program will each get $500k in seed funding and access to mentors and advisors as well as the opportunity to participate in a Demo Day at the end of the course, according to the website. Applications for the accelerator are now open, Dixon said, though he did not share details on the expected cohort size. “This one will be different than the last one in that we will also provide capital and take equity, similar to an accelerator and Startup School combined,” Dixon said of the new program, contrasting it with the current version of “Crypto Startup School.” “Crypto Startup School” first launched in 2020 as a seven-week course meant to educate people on how to build a crypto company. The in-person cohort had 40 founders participating, including those behind companies such as Phantom and Notional Finance, and raised a collective $300 million+ in venture funding, according to a16z. a16z Crypto also released video segments of its lectures for the public to view, which it says have been watched by over 1 million people. Instructors for the first program included Dixon, Stanford computer science professor Dan Boneh, Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong and other well-known industry leaders. Dixon noted that the new program will remain crypto-focused and that a16z is “not trying to build some sort of new startup accelerator,” saying the new offering is instead intended to be an educational program with funding that is tied to the “very specific” sector. When asked about what makes the firm’s offering unique from accelerators such as Y Combinator, Dixon said there isn’t a “grand master plan” for this launch and that it was built as a response to feedback he had been hearing from founders. “We literally just meet entrepreneurs all the time, who say, hey, I wish that conversation we had was available online … so we’re just listening [to them],” Dixon said.

Marc Lore shares exclusive details on Jump Platforms, his stealth sports ticketing startup • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Commerce, Disrupt, dynamic pricing, Marc Lore, Sports, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

Today at ZebethMedia Disrupt, serial entrepreneur Marc Lore disclosed exclusive details about a new dynamic ticketing startup, still in stealth, that he founded with former New York Yankee all-star Alex Rodriguez. Called Jump Platforms, the company will sell access to seats that free up when people leave midway through a game. Fans already at the game are alerted when better seats become available. Pricing starts high and drops depending on demand in a reverse auction format. Lore, who co-owns the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves with A-Rod, has applied for a patent that is still pending. He said he started looking into dynamic ticketing years ago when he was attending various sporting events. “I just felt like wow, why are all the seats empty close to the field or close to the arena? And why, when people leave, like when they leave the baseball game in the eighth inning, and all these incredible seats — why do they have people that don’t let anyone go down?” he said, referring to event security staff. “Nobody’s sitting there.” “So I thought, why couldn’t you — this was the patent — dynamically in real time make these seats available so that people could could jump to any new seat so they would always be filled in. Everybody from the top would naturally come down because there would be a reverse auction,” Lore said. “I call it dynamic real-time ticketing. There’s lots of other things you can do with that technology.” Lore assigned the patent to the company and is an investor in the startup. Jump is still in stealth mode, according to CEO Jordy Leiser’s LinkedIn profile. According to incorporation papers filed in Delaware, the company was founded in August 2021.

‘She Matters’ is the name and mission of a BIPOC-focused postpartum care startup • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Battlefield 200, Biotech & Health, Disrupt, postpartum care, She Matters, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

After Jade Kearney suffered postpartum depression and anxiety but was dismissed by care providers, she hoped to create a platform where Black women like her can access culturally competent care. Her experience led her to found and lead She Matters, a digital health platform focused on supporting Black women experiencing postpartum comorbidities, and providing cultural competency training for care providers. The company is part of the Battlefield 200 at ZebethMedia Disrupt 2022. “It’s not only up to black women to understand terminology around postpartum care, and understand maternal health and submerge ourselves in all things birthing,” Kearney said. “It’s up to the health care system and health care professionals to meet us halfway and be culturally competent and help us.” Training requires providers to attend courses but also interact with Black women in the community. Kearney told ZebethMedia they require those interactions so doctors can better understand the communities’ concerns and needs. At a given time the company can train upwards of 500 care professionals per contract across all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and 3 U.S. territories. Image Credits: She Matters In addition to providing physicians training, She Matters allows individuals to access what they call “The Pink Book”, making a reference to The Green Book used by Black motorists in the Jim Crow era. The book is an interactive map that users can use to find what they believe are “the safest hospitals across 14 states with the largest African-American populations in the United States.” Individuals can also request to be part of the She Matters community to access events and information from qualified physicians. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, infant mortality rates are highest among BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) communities, especially among Black birthing people. For every 1,000 live births close to 11 infants pass away. Additionally, Black women are four times more likely to die during childbirth and 80% more likely to be admitted to an emergency room during postpartum than their white peers. The hope for companies like She Matters is that by increasing cultural competency, the rates above will lessen. “The only way a doctor can truly help you is if you feel comfortable being honest with what you’re experiencing, and there are a lot of barriers to honesty for black women,” Kearney said. “There’s so much negative history between black women in the healthcare system, that it makes it hard to get to the root of a lot of postpartum maternal illnesses in general because we’re afraid of doctors, we feel like we won’t be heard. And if you look at the health care system in America, it needs to be improved because it is steeped in systemic racism.” Although the company’s main focus is on Black birthing people, the company will be releasing We Matter as an additional product line in 2023 to better serve other historically marginalized communities. We Matter will include Ella Importa (Latinx/a community focus); Native Her (Indigenous community focus); and They Matter (LGBTQIA+ community focus).