Spacetech growth, the future of micromobility, and how to solve the hell of open offices

Is space truly within reach for startups and VC?

With the 50th anniversary of the moon landing taking place this past week, Darrell Etherington takes a temperature check of the current state of spacetech, chatting with startups like Wyvern and NSLComm. What he finds is actually a fairly positive picture — not only are there a huge number of original ideas and serious dollars flowing into the … space (couldn’t resist), but there are also clear trajectories to real products in the short-to-medium term. Writing about satellites:

Now, driven largely by miniaturization and manufacturing efficiency gains resulting from the ubiquity of home computing and smartphones, those components are a lot more affordable and a lot more available. High-quality optics can be had off the shelf for a relative song; antennas, solar cells, batteries and more have all dropped off a cliff in terms of manufacturing cost. Consumer hardware startups benefited from this trend as well, but it’s paying dividends to companies with higher-altitude ambitions, too.

[…]

Thanks to improvements in materials science, NSLComm was able to develop a proprietary technology to quickly deploy long communications antennas in orbit from relatively small craft, letting them offer high-bandwidth ground and air connectivity at a fraction of the cost needed by large satellite operators, while still maintaining favorable margins.

How top VCs view the new future of micromobility

Transportation into the cold vacuum of space isn’t the only hot zone for VC investment. Transportation itself is still getting a lot of love, but the investment theses are changing as more data comes in from the first wave of micromobility startups. At our Sessions: Mobility event, we had our VC reporter Kate Clark interview Sarah Smith of Bain Capital Ventures, Michael Granoff of Maniv Mobility, and Ted Serbinski of TechStars Detroit to discuss the future of this market, and we’ve now posted an exclusive edited transcript for Extra Crunch members.

Smith: The thing that’s interesting about comparing Uber and Lyft to Lime, Bird or other scooter companies are that they are vastly different businesses. You’re running a very operationally intense company with a physical fleet, which is super different than trying to recruit and pay for drivers, which is quite expensive from an acquisition standpoint, and balance that type of market.

So there’s just a lot of things that are very different in the way the unit economics work about these businesses. And frankly that’s why I believe, ultimately, Uber and Lyft will think that they want to be more of a transportation destination, rather than owning every single part of your transportation journey.

And I think they’ll find that partnering with these companies globally is probably going to be their better path towards retaining market share, than trying to go head to head with all of these different partners.

Africa’s ride-hail markets are hot spots for startups and VC

Meanwhile, we had a bit of a worldwide tour of startup ecosystems this week. First up, Jake Bright investigated the current state of the ride-hail market in Africa, which is burgeoning with dozens of new startups along with the rise of the continent’s economy. New, more localized startups are taking market share, while established players like Uber attempt to maintain and grow their position.

Africa’s ride-hail markets offer unique challenges and capabilities that make the continent a new testing ground for the transformation of global mobility. There’s strong potential for startups adapting to local needs to produce technology and product models that could have global application.

Uber Africa has experimented with image-based direction apps — where drivers can locate passengers in areas without formal street grids through photos sent via SMS.

Uber Africa has also added skateboards and roller-blades as delivery mediums for its UberEats drivers in Nairobi. Uber and Bolt have moved into the three-wheeled tuk tuk taxis Africa. And Uber and MAX will add on-demand boat taxi services soon in cities like Lagos, which have an abundance of waterways.

Lessons from the hardware capital of the world

Switching to China now, our hardware editor Brian Heater was in Shenzhen this past week getting an up-to-date glimpse of what’s happening in the hardware supply chain world, particularly as the US/China tariff battle continues and companies attempt to protect the resiliency of their manufacturing.

The topic of trade is very much on everyone’s mind — though not everyone is eager to discuss it.

Large companies are reeling from ever-escalating trade tensions between the U.S. and China. Tariffs were enough of a concern for Apple to lead Tim Cook to take a meeting with Trump in order to plead his case. Clearly, those meetings weren’t enough, as Trump levied a very public threat against the company on Friday.

Ultimately, that instability appears to be as much of a concern as the actions themselves. But as much of a concern as those fees are for the Apples of the world, they could prove to have a profound effect on startups with much less wiggle room when it comes to product pricing. Startups and those in the industry I spoke with told me that pricing and supply decisions are far more day-to-day in the face of an all-out trade war between superpowers.

What lower Netflix pricing tells us about competing in India

Finally, from India, our local reporter Manish Singh discusses the current state of the content market there, where Netflix recently (and for the first time) lowered prices for Indian consumers as it faces keen competition from a number of well-funded competitors. India is the last great growth market for media given that China is almost hermetically sealed from non-mainland media companies, but profits in India are still elusive.

But just adapting to local conditions in India is not going to be enough for Netflix — or anyone else. Over the past year, it has become increasingly apparent that for now, India is not going to contribute much to the bottom line of any company — despite their reach in the country.

Hotstar is not profitable, people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. Neither is Gaana, a music streaming service with more than 100 million users that charges less than $6 a year for its premium offering.

In an interview with TechCrunch in May, Satyan Gajwani, Vice Chairman of Times Internet, a conglomerate in India that claims to reach more than 450 million internet users in the country, admitted that ads alone are no longer enough to break even.

Ethics in the age of autonomous vehicles

We had one final piece from Sessions: Mobility that we thought deserved deeper attention. One of the biggest questions around autonomous cars has to do with ethics — how will cars handle seemingly irreconcilable decisions like whether to swerve and hit a pedestrian to protect their own human driver? Our transportation writer Megan Rose Dickey sat down with Voyage CEO and co-founder Oliver Cameron and Uber’s prediction team lead Clark Haynes on the ethical considerations for autonomous vehicles.

Cameron: I’d say that Silicon Valley has a history of sucking when it comes to generating data sets that are diverse. If you go and you try and build a self-driving car for Palo Alto, your data set that you generate from driving in Palo Alto probably is not going to be diverse, right?

So it’s imperative that if you’re trying to build a safe, awesome self-driving car that you can collect data from a whole abundance of different locations around the country in which to feed into your data set to make your models more generalizable.

That’s the first thing. The second thing is that I very much believe, in a similar way to the airline industry, you need to have redundancy across everything that you do. You cannot assume that any piece of software is absolutely bulletproof to all of the time capture every and any object in and around you.

So we have what we call led perception, which effectively has at the very top layer, a really awesome deep learning model that’s able to detect objects, using cameras, radars, lidars. It has, unfortunately, one flaw. That flaw as Clark mentioned is that if your data set doesn’t have an object, then it can’t detect the feature.

So if an elephant runs across the road, we’re not going to detect that because we don’t have elephants in our data set. So for us, we assume that that primary lab will have some issue. And then we have numerous other perception layers using fundamentally different approaches, which aren’t as reliant on data sets to be able to capture any and all objects in and around us.

How startups can make the open office work, for employers and employees

Everyone hates open offices (okay, some people like open offices, but then those tend to be the people that ruin open offices for everyone else). And yet, open offices are an important way to quite literally remove barriers to communication among team members and accelerate a startup’s success.

Alejandra Albarrán, ROOM’s Director of Design and Innovation, discusses how to optimize an open office for both communication and for deep work.

I like to think of the office floor plan as an opportunity to divide a set space into areas of human interactions, drawing heat maps over a floor plan ranging from “hot” to “cold.” Each color defines and encourages a different type of social behavior at work.

The warmer an area, the more lively and collaborative it is meant to be. Cold is quiet, with a focus on individual work. With this in mind, I believe there are five foundational environments that live on this spectrum, key for the success of any open plan office.

David and Goliath: Approaching the ‘deal’

Finally this week, Adam Zegaris of Moonshot Legal (who also happens to be one of our Verified Experts), wrote in to Extra Crunch this week with a framework on how to think through negotiating a contract with key customers — a skill every founder eventually has to learn.

Deals are not cookie-cutter, and neither are the contracts on which they are built. That said, a basic framework can help provide startups with some grounding to better think about negotiations with large enterprises. The idea is to avoid over-lawyering, and instead approach the discussion with a legally prudent yet deal-centric mindset.

ICYMI: Earlier this week:

Thanks

To every member of Extra Crunch: thank you. You allow us to get off the ad-laden media churn conveyor belt and spend quality time on amazing ideas, people, and companies. If I can ever be of assistance, hit reply, or send an email to danny@techcrunch.com.