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A pandemic has a way of making urgent topics less urgent. That in turn gives cover to entrepreneurs to work stealthily and somewhat less frantically on their products.
Autonomous driving an example. The field has gone in recent years from tomorrow to right around the corner to some time in the future to maybe one day.
I spoke last week to Dan Ammann, the former General Motors president who now runs Cruise, the majority-GM-owned self-driving car company in San Francisco. Ammann Zoomed from his home, sporting a black Chevrolet cap and a black Izod shirt. His company has grown from 40 people in 2016 to 1,800 today. It has raised $7 billion from Honda, SoftBank, T. Rowe Price, and others and is busy testing its technology on the complicated and hilly streets of San Francisco.
Every robotic car company has its own unique goals. Cruise’s goal is to operate is own ride-hailing service and to sell vehicles to other transportation companies. (It is already running a service for employees only.) Ammann sees a future where Cruise’s service puts a dent in the $4 trillion worth of cars in the U.S. that occupy $4 trillion worth of parking places. Isn’t that future pretty bad for majority shareholder GM? Says Ammann: “You might as well be part of making it happen.” (It, being the future.) He also notes that GM’s profit drivers today, at least pre-pandemic, were in pickup trucks for rural customers; Cruise aims to make its money in cities.
Cruise is betting its technology will improve dramatically over time, making it safer and more commercially attractive than the competition. There is plenty of it.
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I visited the premium sneaker reseller Stadium Goods’ office just after a New York snowstorm in 2017. I interviewed its CEO as part of a story I was writing about Alibaba. One of the joys of being a business journalist is learning about companies you otherwise would know nothing about. Stadium Goods has done really well since then, according to this fun piece over the weekend in WSJ Magazine.
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I’ve been trading movie recommendations with friends who have middle schoolers. The goal: not too juvenile but also not too mature/disturbing/violent/adult. I’d love to hear your suggestions. My family’s last three, legal-themed films, in this order: On the Basis of Sex, Legally Blonde (it held up really well), and RBG. Two thoughts: Stay healthy, Justice Ginsburg, and The Future Is Female.
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(Correction, May 7, 2020: An earlier version of this story misstated the origins of Cruise’s ride hailing app. It was developed internally.)
Adam Lashinsky
This edition of Data Sheet was curated by Aaron Pressman.
NEWSWORTHY
I guess you're just what I needed. My finger had been hovering over the "buy" button for weeks, and I finally got to press it on Monday (for one of our involuntary at-home students). Apple debuted an update to its 13-inch MacBook Pro laptop that does away with the horrendous butterfly switch keyboard. In a telling detail about Intel's struggles, some of the new Apple models still have three-year-old CPUs. Intel's newest CPUs aren't much faster on most tasks except graphics, turns out.
I don't mind you comin' here and wastin' all my time. Speaking of involuntary at-home students, when colleges and universities shut down due to the pandemic, most said they'd still offer classes, just online. Now students from at least 25 schools, including Cornell, Purdue, and the University of Colorado, are suing, alleging that the online options fall short and they should get partial refunds of tuition and housing costs.
I needed someone to feed. The weak economy is likely driving some consolidation in the startup scene. Nvidia bought network software specialist Cumulus Networks. And Intel is paying almost $900 million for transit and mobility app developer Moovit. Meanwhile, Uber is looking to invest more in Lime, at 20% the valuation of Lime's 2018 fundraising, and get an option to buy the scooter rental company outright.
It doesn't matter where you've been. While they perfect a contact-tracing system of sorts, Apple and Google have decided the phone-based plan will not allow GPS tracking, the better to protect user privacy. But that's thwarting the desire of some public health experts who want tracing apps to collect such data to help identify disease hotspots.
I don't mind you hangin' out. Fortune's own Ellen McGirt, who writes our raceAhead newsletter, will be a guest today at 1 p.m. ET/ 10 a.m. PT on Salesforce’s Leading Through Change online series, discussing the impact of COVID-19 and race in America. Other guests will be CNN’s Van Jones and epidemiologist Dr. Camara Jones. The livestream will air on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and on Salesforce's website.
(Headline reference video explainer, with thanks to The Cars and the late, great Ric Ocasek.)
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Today's food for thought goes pretty deep. In a timely essay for our pandemic times, tech thinker Jennifer Schaffer writing in The Baffler pulls back the curtain on the service app economy to consider what she sees as the exploitive and sexist underpinnings of the system.
What concerns me as much as these developments is the broader picture of which they form only a part: a world in which the exact forms of labor women have fought to have recognized and remunerated—chief among them caretaking labor, tedious household labor, buoying-the-male-ego labor, service-with-a-smile labor—are being co-opted, monetized, and sold back to us as shiny, premium, cutting-edge tech, the intermediary step of individual households outsourcing such tasks to workers primarily from the Global South having been insufficiently profitable for the Silicon Valley brain trust. As automation rises, technology will increasingly undercut the wages of these workers; the human workers who depend on these precarious gigs are viewed by the tech industry and the broader economy as a temporary inefficiency.
ON THE MOVE
Upset with how Amazon has treated critical workers and failed to protect the health of warehouse workers, vice president and well-known programmer Tim Bray said he was quitting on Monday. Citing a "vein of a vein of toxicity running through the company culture," Bray writes on his blog: "I choose neither to serve nor drink that poison"...The former CTO of Pandora, Chris Martin, is joining Lyft as VP of data science and machine learning...Quest Software hired Patrick Nichols, former CEO of Corel Corp., as its new top boss...Cynthia Hogan, Apple’s VP for public policy and government affairs, is helping Joe Biden's campaign vet vice presidential possibilities...Maggie Zhang, former EVP of video research and insights at Dentsu Aegis Network, is jumping to Amazon to work on advertising and audience measurement for Prime Video.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
How A.I. may help solve science’s ‘reproducibility’ crisis By Jonathan Vanian
How Marc Benioff is helping out during the coronavirus pandemic By Rachel Schallom
Robinhood raises $280 million in push for global expansion By Jeff John Roberts
Disney earnings preview: A sprawling media empire in the deep end By Aric Jenkins
How to play live pro sports in a pandemic? Taiwan, South Korea offer lessons By Grady Mcgregor
(Some of these stories require a subscription to access. There is a 50% discount for our loyal readers if you use this link to sign up. Thank you for supporting our journalism.)
BEFORE YOU GO
Try and keep a dry eye while you admire the mad skills, creativity, and pure joie de vivre of this video made by a bunch of Juilliard students, staff, and alumnae (hat tip to Jason Kottke for the link). Best watched on a screen somewhat larger than your phone.
Aaron Pressman
