本周摘要
第四大公有云
Identity as a service
Web 3.0的Identity
DNA和电脑
人才短缺
Zillow成为了Market Maker
Axie Infinity和feedback loop
其他
第四大公有云
Cloudfare这周很忙。先是推出了email security的产品。
Cloudflare Email Routing makes it possible for individuals or organizations to manage an entire custom email domain, like @coolbusiness.com, from a single consumer email account, such as a personal Gmail address. The tool even lets you consolidate many addresses—boss@coolbusiness.com, help@coolbusiness.com—so they all forward to a single inbox. This way, small businesses in particular can get the benefits of a dedicated, custom email domain without having to manage a whole separate platform.
The second tool, Security DNS Wizard, aims to make two email security features accessible for Cloudflare customers and easy to use. Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) are two tools that are essentially a combination of caller ID and screening schemes for email: They aim to reduce email address spoofing by setting up public records that must match an email's sender information for the message to go through. This significantly reduces how easy it is for attackers to, say, send an email to employees that really looks like it comes from "Cool Business CEO."
接着推出了R2产品,挑战AWS的S3。记得刚上市的时候,CEO称Cloudfare是五大公有云之一。当时没有提Fastly,现在连Akamai也不提了。
Ben Thompson认为这是一个很教科书的low end disruption。具有很强的counter position。链接
This is where zero egress costs could be an even bigger deal strategically than they are economically. S3 was the foundation of AWS’s integrated cloud offering, and remains the linchpin of the company’s lock-in; what if R2, thanks to its explicit rejection of data lock-in, becomes the foundation of an entirely new ecosystem of cloud services that compete with the big three by being modular? If you can always get access to your data for free, it becomes a lot more plausible to connect that data to best-of-breed compute options built by companies focused on doing one thing well, instead of simply waiting for Amazon to offer up their pale imitation that doesn’t require companies to pay out the nose to access.
Moreover, like any true disruption, it will be very difficult for Amazon to respond: sure, R2 may lead Amazon to reduce its egress fees, but given the importance of those fees to both AWS’s margins and its lock-in, it’s hard to see them going away completely. More importantly, AWS itself is locked-in to its integrated approach: the entire service is architected both technically and economically to be an all-encompassing offering; to modularize itself in response to Cloudflare would be suicidal.
如果这个第四大公有云成功了,市值是多少?我猜怎么样也应该2000亿开始算起吧。很多东西一开始看都是贵的,但是后来看都很便宜。貌似这句话反过来也很有道理。
这还不是Cloudflare的唯一故事。作为AWS的对抗者,选择占边到Web 3.0也是很自然的。链接
How does Cloudflare fit in Web3?
Decentralization and privacy are challenges we are tackling at Cloudflare as part of our mission to help build a better Internet.
长期来说,Web2.0和Web3.0应该是共存的,就好比集权和民主的关系一样。
Identity as a service
这周Sterling Check上市了。这不是一家startup,成立于1965年。主要的服务是ID验证,用于招聘领域。有4万个企业客户,一年完成75M次验证。
随着remote working和gig economy的崛起,这个市场正在变大。
同时,在美国有77M人有犯罪记录,所以如何做好审查工作,而不是强行筛选会是一件有价值的事。如果考虑到美国目前劳工短缺的情况。
虽然Sterling Check是这个市场的领导者,但是估值差不多只有初创公司Checkr的一半。Checkr一年审查30M次,估值是46亿美元。所以这是一个很有趣的现象。可以想象Checkr的整个tech stack会比先进一些。至于其他的优势,倒是也想不明白。让我想起来之前投资Blue Prism的情况,市值和UiPath差很多。最后证明VC们是对的,当然投资Blue Prism也可以赚到钱。
除了招人的时候需要验证,新增客户的时候也需要。Alloy就是服务这个领域。
Alloy was founded primarily to fix a “broken” onboarding process that has historically involved manual review when people applied for bank accounts online. Put simply, the startup’s initial mission was to help banks and fintechs make better identity and risk decisions using its single API service and SaaS platform.
Over the last year, Alloy has evolved that platform to not only automate onboarding identity decisions but to also automate transaction monitoring and soon, credit underwriting. Also over the past 12 months, the company has seen its annual recurring revenue (ARR) triple and number of customers double, according to Alloy CFO Kiran Hebbar. Today, the company has more than 200 clients, including Ally Bank, HMBradley, Brex, Marqeta, Gemini, Ramp and Evolve Bank & Trust — up from 90 at this time last year.
Alloy connects its users to data from 120 identity providers, and then uses that data to help financial institutions avoid fraud during initial customer onboarding and when conducting ongoing transactions. Questions it aims to answer for banks and fintechs include: “Is this a real person? Will they defraud us?”
印尼也有类似创业公司。
For many financial institutions in Southeast Asia, verifying new customers takes a week or two, said the founders of Verihubs. The startup cuts that time down to as little as five seconds, using AI-based identity authentication technology and APIs that let companies continue verifying returning customers through SMS, WhatsApp or flash calls.
Identity as a service的普及说明生活数字化的速度在加快。新加坡的政府有一个数字ID用户登陆很多网站。澳洲也有这样的系统,而且最近审批通过了私人公司提供类似系统。
Web 3.0的Identity
当然不能叫ID,叫DID比较好。可以解决的问题,包括投票的公平性
Right now crypto mainly revolves around monetary use cases. Exemplifying these are decentralized apps (dApps), which favors capital over membership or contributions made to ecosystems. Plutocratic (one-token-one-vote) systems reinforce an unfortunate cycle that makes most dApps speculative and only beneficial for those with capital.
A more desirable and egalitarian model would be to create an ecosystem that offers one-human-one-vote use cases. DID can play a role in this, by seeking to provide humans active within the crypto ecosystem with the ability to verify their identity and use their on-chain reputation to create more accessible, secure, and rewarding experiences.
DeFi的credit score
When it comes to DeFi, DID can help fix some of the issues associated with airdrops. If projects only airdropped to users verified using DID protocols, they would ensure the fair distribution of tokens across participant pools. Members would have to be authenticated, reducing the potential for bots to drain airdrop contracts, which is a pressing issue for some in the DeFi space.
DID protocols allow for credit evaluation systems to verify users scores and background based on data stored on blockchain. This means that users can access credit-based lending, whilst still maintaining control of their identity. Through DID, all parties are able to access decentralized financial systems, not just whales.
Reputation systems that measure on-chain behavior can help to split out responsible borrowers from degens, essentially making the whole system more robust and reliable. DID can facilitate giving users a self-sovereign credit score that they can use to access credit, borrow, and invest.
NFT的交易验证
There are exponential benefits wrought from implementing DID solutions in the realm of NFTs. NFTs, which have experienced an unparalleled surge of interest in recent months have many potential use cases, but have been mainly popularized by their usage in digital art. By deploying DID solutions with NFTs, buyers and sellers will be able to verify the creator or any given digital artwork, as well as the collector.
This ensures that representative value will be transferred to the creator or seller. DID could also be implemented to help keep NFTs in the hands of the communities that support them, instead of scalpers who mint tokens for speculation, raising the price of tokens, making it near impossible for those without capital to access them.
有一个公司Mask Network想通过browser plugin来实现wallet和social network的链接。不过,看了一下Twitter的演示,感觉体验明显更好。这对于推广NFT肯定是一个好事。
除了展现NFT收藏,如果Twitter和现有的wallet在深度集成(不要忘了Square),tipping,投票等crypto里面的UI问题都可以在一个地方完成。这也许就是crypto迈向普及的关键一步。
就在Facebook和Snap在广告领域大胜Twitter和追求Metaverse的时候,Twitter有可能可以弯道超车。想一想这个赌注还是很划算的,目前来说大公司的CEO里面真正相信和在crypto里面做事的也就只有Jack Dorsey。而这本身就是稀缺资源了。
DNA和电脑
Gartner预测用DNA做数据存储是一个趋势。
Gartner predicted in a recent report that by 2024, 30% of digital businesses will mandate DNA storage trials –addressing the exponential growth of data poised to overwhelm existing storage technology. “Technologies are being stretched to their limits,” Gartner VP analyst Daryl Plummer, the lead author of the research, said during a recent presentation at the virtual Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2020. “Nontraditional approaches will enable the next rebound of innovation and efficiency … All of human knowledge could be stored in a small amount of synthetic DNA.”
Catalog是这个领域的创业公司。
Catalog, a Boston, Massachusetts-based company developing what it claims is the world’s first DNA computer, today announced that it raised $35 million in a series B funding round led by Hanwha Impact Partners. The company says that it plans to use the capital to launch its chemical-based computing platform by next year, where data management and computation occur through the manipulation of synthetic DNA.
让我想起来了Twist Bioscience这家公司,在几年前就和微软合作类似的项目。去年的更新
SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Twist Bioscience Corporation (NASDAQ: TWST), Illumina, Inc. (NASDAQ: ILMN) and Western Digital(NASDAQ: WDC) today announced the formation of an alliance with Microsoft to advance the field of DNA data storage. These founding companies, alongside member organizations, will work together to create a comprehensive industry roadmap that will help the industry achieve interoperability between solutions and help establish the foundations for a cost-effective commercial archival storage ecosystem for the explosive growth of digital data.
恰好这周Alex Danco也写到了这家公司,认为它可以成为Biotech里面的AWS。链接
Twist may help shift biotech's "founding" paradigm. Traditional tech businesses are often forged by a singular founder, responsible for defining and driving the vision. Biotech businesses have typically followed a different model with a "scientist" de-risking the tech while a "manager" handles commercialization. This structure can limit the types of companies created. Twist's infrastructure and tooling may allow for more founder-led experimentation.
我记得以前看过一次Twist,增速太慢,还有官司。现在官司是没有了。不过founder的股权很少。有意思的是这家公司基本是中国资本撑起来的。
除了DNA,Intel也在利用生物知识来建立芯片设计。
Intel today announced a major update to its neuromorphic computing program, including a second-generation chip called Loihi 2 and Lava, an open source framework for developing “neuro-inspired” applications. The company is now offering two Loihi 2-based neuromorphic systems — Oheo Gulch and Kapoho Point. They will be available through a cloud service to members of the Intel Neuromorphic Research Community (INRC) and Lava via GitHub for free.
号称很快
Early tests show a 60 times reduction in operations per inference on Loihi 2 compared to standard AI models running on Loihi — without a loss in accuracy — according to Intel neuromorphic computing director Mike Davies. “Loihi 2 … harvest[s] insights from several years of collaborative research using Loihi,” Davies added in a statement. “Our second-generation chip greatly improves the speed, programmability, and capacity of neuromorphic processing, broadening its usages in power- and latency-constrained intelligent computing applications.”
人才短缺
日本到2030年会缺乏27万个工程师。
Already behind other countries in nurturing the IT professionals indispensable to a digital transformation, Japan in 2030 is expected to have 270,000 artificial intelligence and Internet of Things jobs that it will be unable to fill. With few graduates holding STEM degrees -- those in science, technology, engineering and mathematics -- Japan sees gloom in its future and the need to invest more in human resources. Japan has a considerable number of IT workers. The information and communication industry had 1.22 million engineers in 2020, according to a survey by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. That is the fourth-most in the world. Information collectors like the International Labor Organization put the number of these workers in the U.S. at 4.09 million, those in India at 2.32 million and those in China at 2.27 million. But specific IT skills are what matters. Conventional IT workers, those who develop websites and apps, in 2018 accounted for 90% of all IT workers in Japan. Cutting-edge IT workers, those who specialize in artificial intelligence and the smart devices that connect to what is known as the Internet of Things, made up 10%, according to the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.
Andela帮助连接非洲的软件工程师和美国的企业,估值15亿美元。
Andela, a fully remote company that helps tech companies build remote engineering teams (initially from Africa but now a global market), is currently valued at $1.5 billion following a $200 million Series E round led by SoftBank’s Softbank Vision Fund 2, the $30 billion venture fund of SoftBank Group
这家公司之前一直落后于竞争对手TopTal,直到学习TopTal把自己也变成一家remote的公司,才大幅扩大了招聘范围。同时也被TopTal起诉盗窃商业机密。
可惜Fiverr目前的市值一般,这些都是不错的收购目标。如果今年早些时候高位的融资成功就好了。
Zillow成了Market Maker
这是一个很好玩的事情。下面是Matt Levine的原文
Anyway is Zillow front-running your house search? Is Zillow painting the tape to push up the price of houses? Is Zillow using retail home-buying data to get an informational advantage and trade homes ahead of retail home-buying patterns? I don’t know, probably a little bit, why not?
In the hypothetical he lays out in the video, the company uses its cash to amass an inventory of 30 homes in a given neighborhood, all for one price: $300,000. Then the company buys an additional home for $340,000 in a bid to drive up the value of the first 30 homes.
This is a devious and possibly brilliant idea, but probably not what Zillow is up to.
A much more likely explanation is that Zillow sometimes overpays for homes, because the market has been really hot, and at times prices in certain markets have been moving so fast that it’s hard to know what a property is worth.
Zillow said in a statement that it pays market value for every home it buys.
Zillow的投资thesis主要在于流量。幸好这个流量不在SEC的管辖范围内。
Axie Infinity和feedback loop
Axie Infinity这个游戏的内置游戏币SLP的价格下降了很多
作为一个play-to-earn的游戏,SLP的价格越高,玩家越有动力来玩。是一个正向反馈。但一旦反过来,就是危险的反向反馈。
Indeed, the game’s current mechanics may be to blame for the depressed SLP price — players continue to earn the token through battles, but the only way SLP is decreased is when people use the token to breed Axie NFTs (SLP is actually removed from circulation upon breeding, called burning).
With the SLP rewards dipping, there’s less incentive to battle. This reduces demand for Axie NFTs , so there’s less incentive to breed. This in turn dampens the only deflationary force on SLP. So people continue to inflate the token’s supply by playing the game with existing Axie NFTs, without adequate demand to support SLP’s value.
Crypto项目里面很多都是基于这样的反馈机制。比如Bitcoin值多少钱和Liquidity Mining。作为一个bootsrap的方法,这确实很好。但是最终一个项目是否成功还是要回到产品的价值。
其他
Music Streaming里面的power law
SEC也缺人
Neobank的用户规模
Warby Parker的竞争对手
Web 3.0
备注我持有的股票包括FVRR,NET,DOCU,PTON,SPOT,TDOC,TWLO,SQ,DUOL,SHOP,TWTR,TKWY,ZG,FB.