Category: tax

Tracy Chou’s Block Party is fighting online trolls—and the startup ecosystem itself

Posted onAuthoradmin

In January 2021, prominent software engineer Tracy Chou opened up registrations for her company’s first product. The service—like the company, called Block Party—is designed to help people who experience harassment online, starting on Twitter but with the ambition to expand to other platforms. By giving users more control over what they see on Twitter, Chou is hoping to solve one of the biggest and most intractable problems with social media. The problem is also deeply personal. “I have some dedicated harassers who are proud to have been harassing me for six or seven years,” says Chou, who grew up in Silicon Valley as the child of Taiwanese immigrants. “Platforms are really bad at detecting this and don’t really care.” Chou’s experiences with online abuse began when she was in high school, she recalls, but slowly escalated when she became an early employee at Quora and then Pinterest. While at Pinterest, she published a blog post encouraging tech companies to reveal how many female engineers they employed, sparking a movement toward publishing diversity metrics. In 2016, she cofounded Project Include, solidifying her position as an outspoken advocate for equity and inclusion in the tech industry. But as her profile has risen—she now has more than 100,000 Twitter followers —the more she has been forced to deal with trolls, stalkers, and serial harassers sending her abusive, horrifying messages everywhere she goes online. “My whole life is oriented around how I can be safe, psychologically, mentally, and physically,” she says. Now, as Block Party’s founder and CEO, Chou is confronting a new challenge: a well-capitalized competitor offering a free alternative to Block Party. Just a few weeks after Chou opened Block Party to the public, another startup called Sentropy announced a similar product. Like Block Party, Sentropy Protect is designed to help Twitter users manage online harassment by filtering out abusive messages. While Chou ultimately plans to sell subscriptions to Block Party, Sentropy, whose core business is enterprise software, says it will always offer Protect to individual users for free. My whole life is oriented around how I can be safe, psychologically, mentally, and physically.” Tracy Chou, Block Party The financial disparity between the two companies is stark. Though both launched their consumer products in early 2021 and were founded around the same time in 2018, Sentropy has raised a total of $13 million in funding. Block Party has raised less than $1.5 million, from Precursor Ventures and a handful of angel investors including Project Include CEO Ellen Pao, former Facebook executive Alex Stamos, and former TechCrunch editor Alexia Bonatsos. When we spoke in early March, Chou was her company’s only full-time employee and she’d built most of the product on her own. Sentropy, meanwhile, has a team of 26. For some in Silicon Valley, news that Sentropy would be competing with Block Party touched a raw nerve Read More …

Want to make healthcare cheaper? Bring the hospital to you

Posted onAuthoradmin

At first blush, the idea of moving most healthcare from hospitals and medical offices to people’s living rooms seems impossible. Of course, once upon a time, so did getting your groceries without leaving your couch. Or voting. Or attending college. Or talking to your doctor. Or virtually any of the activities in our daily lives that used to require going somewhere and doing something. There’s not many silver linings to COVID-19, but the emergence and acceptance of virtual healthcare is certainly one of them. Patients and doctors are now far more comfortable interacting over video or text, discussing intimate healthcare issues, prescribing treatment and conducting the follow up, all without anyone having to go anywhere. No one with a fever prefers climbing into a car or squeezing onto a crowded subway to sit in a germ-infested waiting room only to eventually have a doctor ask the same standardized questions that could have fit into a text Read More …

PayPal now lets you spend cryptocurrency at millions of U.S. merchants

Posted onAuthoradmin

PayPal now allows payment for goods and services with cryptocurrency, with a twist: Merchants receive cold, hard, American cash, less PayPal’s standard merchant fee. Starting with U.S. customers and merchants, the global payment-processing firm’s new “Checkout with Crypto” provides the most mainstream conduit to convert value in bitcoins and three other digital currencies into government-backed dollars to complete purchases. “What I love about this for the consumer is that their crypto holdings are just like any other funding instrument inside the PayPal wallet, whether it be your credit card, your debit card, your balance that you may have. . . . You just select whatever funding source you want,” says PayPal CEO Dan Schulman Read More …

5 things people are getting wrong about NFTs

Posted onAuthoradmin

NFTs (nonfungible tokens) are having a moment right now. Tons of digital collectibles have been traded, including Dapper Labs’ NBA Top Shot , which raked in $1.05 million for just one recent pack of basketball videos, and Everydays: The First 5000 Days , a digital image by artist Mike Winkelmann (aka Beeple), which sold for $69.3 million at high-end auction house Christie’s. NFT transactions tripled in 2020, reaching more than $250 million, according to the Non-Fungible Tokens 2020 Yearly Report from NonFungible and L’Atelier. And they show no sign of slowing in 2021. But the big money currently being thrown around for single pieces leads to overall misconceptions about the cost and value of NFTs and their place in the market. Read More …

Robinhood makes Wall Street feel like a game to win—not a place where you can lose your savings

Posted onAuthoradmin

Wall Street has long been likened to a casino . Robinhood, an investment app that just filed plans for an initial public offering , makes the comparison more apt than ever . That’s because the power of the casino is the way it makes people feel like gambling their money away is a game. Casinos are full of mood lighting , fun noises, and other sensory details that reward gamblers when they place coins in slots. Similarly, Robinhood’s slick and easy-to-use app resembles a thrill-inducing video game rather than a sober investment tool. The color palette of red and green is associated with mood, with green having a calming effect and red increasing arousal, anger, and negative emotions . Picking stocks can seem like a fun lottery of scratching off the winning ticket; celebratory confetti drops from the top of the screen for the new users’ first three investments. But just as people can lose a lot of money gambling at the casino, the same thing can happen when you trade stocks and bonds—sometimes with disastrous consequences, such as last year when a Robinhood user died by suicide after mistakenly believing that he’d lost $750,000. I study how people behave inside game worlds and design classroom games . Using gamelike features to influence real-life actions can be beneficial, such as when a health app uses rewards and rankings to encourage people to move more or eat healthier food. But there’s a dark side too, and so-called gamification can lead people to forget the real-world consequences of their decisions. Games explained Generally speaking, games—whether played on a board, among children or with a computer— are voluntary activities that are structured by rules and involve players competing to overcome challenges that carry no risk outside of their virtual world. Read More …