Day 2: Everything you need to know about TC Disrupt 2016

A bullet-point roundup with a personal touch

If you haven’t seen it already, check out the notes from Day 1 here. Also, Steph Curry is at the bottom of this post.

• The morning kicked off with Sebastian Thrun, CEO of Udacity, singing happy birthday to the TechCrunch moderator.
• “Udacity teaches what universities cannot.” For example: classes on self-driving cars.
• Thrun said the greatest in-demand jobs of the future will be self-driving car engineers.
• Transportation-as-a-service will reduce the number of cars on the road by 1/3, change insurance companies, and reduce the need for parking lots.

• Marc Benioff, CEO of Saleforce said, “The business of business is to help the world.” One of the ways his company is doing that is the 1–1–1 model: where startups set aside 1% of stock on day one with the intention to set up a charity. Salesforce.org plans to give away $40m next year.
• The mental math when tweeting as CEO of a $3.5 billion company: Four things go through Benioff’s mind — “Does this build trust? Does this yield growth? Does this further innovation? Does this promote equality?”
• Salesforce is hiring for a new CEO: a “Chief Equality Officer”.
• Benioff on Apple’s new headphones: “I will buy anything.”

• Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn and Josh Elman, both principals in Greylock Partners, said, “Life-changing companies begin as simple interfaces and simple concepts, i.e., Facebook began as a platform to share messages with friends, same with LinkedIn.”
• Hoffman: “In 2002–3, social networks were new (MySpace, etc.). Today, there are a set of existing networks that fulfill all of our basic needs. Now, if you want to create a network, it must have a unique edge. We all want to be tribal. It’s about how to communicate what you’re missing out on. There’re still so many tribes that we all want to be apart of. General networks have been established.”

• Followed by a round pet robot as she walked on the stage, Melanee Wise, CEO of Fetch Robotics, said, “We don’t need to be afraid of robots because they will be taking the dull, dirty, and dangerous jobs — the ones nobody wants to do.”

• Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, in an admirable display of humility, said, “We need silicon valley.”
• “We’re not as agile, particularly in the matter of dispensing money, as the tech community wants, but we’re learning.”
• What the government is looking for in new tech startups: automation, strong encryption, bio-engineering. Contact director of DIUX Raj Shah — get in touch and it might get funded.
• Confirmed what Megan Smith and MacGillivray said yesterday that the US government is looking for strong data security and encryption engineers.

• Marc Andreessen is literally a tech giant. He is really tall. And he talks really fast.
• He said, “Twitter and the Internet haven’t changed anything. They’ve only pulled back the curtains of what has always been there.”
• Humans vs. algorithms in editorial curation: It’s going to intensify in the next 10–20 years.”
• Be very specific and strict on goals, but very flexible on tactics.
• The popular phrase “fail fast” is about tactics. “Fail fast” applied to strategy is catastrophic.

• Danny Lange, Director of Machine Learning at Uber, and Rana el Kaliouby, CEO of Affectiva, discussed machine learning and artificial intelligence.
• Uber will soon be offering machine learning-as-a-service.
• The most visible impact of machine learning will be better ETAs.
• When it comes to AI, “It’s not human vs. machine, it’s augmented human.”
• Affectiva, an innovator in emotional AI, announced they’re releasing their SDKs for free to companies making under $1m/year.
• Also, Affectiva announced partnering with Giphy to search for GIFs by making facial expressions. Example: making a duck face brings up GIFs of Kim Kardashian.

• Janica Alvarez, Naya Health, Deborah Anderson-Bialis (Fertility IQ), and Ida Tin (Clue) discussed “femtech” — technology startups dedicated to improving female health.

• Neal Stephenson, author and futurist, announced the launch of his new book Seveneves.
• As a futurist, Stephenson said, “It’s going to be weird when we look back and see people viewing televisions. In the future, we we all be wearing VR headsets.”
• Advice for writing a book — “There’s a dismissal of the middle man these days. It’s easy to not see the value what an agent, publicist, and editor do.”

• John Hanke, CEO of Niantic Labs, the Google spin-off that created Pokemon Go, said there were 500 million app downloads in two months.
• Expect to see the next releases of Pokemon Go pertain to events. And battling “are on the roadmap.”

• George Hotz, CEO of comma.ai, gave an impassioned oration around how he is single-handedly taking on Tesla to invent self-driving cars. He built a camera device that hangs from your rearview mirror that can self-drive Toyotas and Hondas from Mountain View to San Francisco. It’s shipping at the end of this year for $999.

• David Sacks, CEO of Zenefits, discussed the lawsuit and investigation. He said the software essentially circumvented regulations and he was brought on board to fix the problems. He was happy to report that after revamping the company, the debacle is behind them.
• Z2 is launching in the next few days.

• Diane Green, SVP at Google, announced Google is partnering with Evernote. Evernote was running its own servers. Now they are migrating their 200 million users to the Google cloud platform (the #1 competitor to AWS).
• There was a lot of discussion around what machine learning and AI exactly mean. Green had a helpful insight, “The cloud is what powers machine learning. The more data you have the better the machine learning is.”

Startup Battlefield

Nine startups went head-to-head pitching their company to a panel of judges and the audience and giving live demos of their software.

Here is the list of startups and what they do:

Eren Bali, Head of Design, Carbon Health

• Carbon — a sleek mobile app that puts a digital hospital on your phone. Users can view medical history, message with a physician, schedule an appointment. Users can follow a treatment plan, fill prescriptions, have them delivered, and set daily reminders for taking pills. https://carbonhealth.com/

• Slides — web platform that redesigns presentations for the modern web. Solves the problem of teams needing to use 4–5 applications (Dropbox, Microsoft Powerpoint, Adobe PDF, and Google Drive) to put a presentation together. My favorite feature (and how it’s different from everything else) is the ability to stack slides vertically for deep dives). https://slides.com/

• Sqreen — a protection and monitoring platform for web applications. First company to protect applications between development and deployment stages. https://www.sqreen.io/

• Amaryllis Nucleics —a lab technology providing breakthrough approach to RNA sequencing. Significant for cancer diagnostics, pharmaceutical development, and food security.

• Spincle — a visual mobile app to take 360-degree photos, videos, and VR. Spin around with your phone to take the image and pause to embed the video in the 360 image. “Watch” the image as VR with Google Cardboard. http://www.spincle.io/

• Giftbit — a software service that gives small businesses the ability to make custom currency (“in-store credit). Big corps such as Amazon and Lyft have their own custom credit but it takes money and talent to build the complex system. Giftbit charges a monthly price for your brand to have its own “e-money” for your customers to spend. https://www.giftbit.com/

• Sensay — an machine learning Smartbot that pairs you with a human to solve a problem such as hiring, traveling, or parenting. It applies machine learning to conversations within Slack, Facebook Messenger, Kik, SMS, WhatsApp, WeChat, and Skype. Typical responses within 90 seconds and users rate helpfulness of the conversation. Sensay logs the data. Allows users to tip Sensays (90% tip average). https://sensay.it/

• MyKi — a password security management platform for companies with employee accounts. https://www.myki.co/

• mFluidx — a point-of-care diagnostic kit that doesn’t require external power and interfaces with mobile devices. Gives low-resourced clinics the ability to detect disease affordably. http://mfluidx.com/

• WeConnect — a mobile platform that gives users the ability to beat addiction through connection. Monitor progress, maintain accountability, follow a schedule, send message to support network in emergencies. http://www.palalinq.com/

Steph Curry

To finish the day off, Steph Curry came out and had a casual conversation with emcee Jordan Crook.

Watch the live video of Steph Curry answering questions about Trump vs. Hillary, Uber vs. Lift, Larry Bird vs. Magic Johnson, and more: https://youtu.be/6Ca0UEoM1Cg.

View Day 3 or go back to Day 1.