coronavirus
People

Tech leaders write checks and code to help communities amid coronavirus

From connecting volunteers to buying hospital workers meals to writing $1 million checks, tech leaders like Sheryl Sandberg, Dick Costolo and Paul Graham are stepping up to help out communities during coronavirus.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg

Sheryl Sandberg teamed up with other tech leaders to create a $6 million fund for the Second Harvest of Silicon Valley food bank.

Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

On March 13, Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger got a call from a panicked friend who was going to have to close their San Francisco restaurant as the city wrestled with the spread of coronavirus. Two days later, it had closed its doors. To try to stop other restaurants from meeting the same fate, Krieger and his wife, Kaitlyn, spent the weekend building SaveOurFaves.Org, a website that makes it easy to buy gift cards from local businesses.

"It's a seemingly small gesture, but it means that the business gets income today to stay afloat through the crisis," Krieger wrote in a Medium post about the website's launch. "You'll get repaid in burgers/lattes/negronis (and gratitude) when they're back on their feet."

Get what matters in tech, in your inbox every morning. Sign up for Source Code.

Tech companies are doing their part to make a lot of essential software free, but tech leaders and venture capitalists are also spending their spare time spinning up tech solutions. Startup founder Radu Spineanu created HelpWithCovid.com to connect people with coronavirus-related projects that need volunteers, which investor Sam Altman says was inspired by an idea from Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.

Others are opening up their pocketbooks to help the community. On Friday, shipping startup Flexport announced that Paul Graham, the co-founder of Y Combinator (a Flexport backer), donated $1 million to its nonprofit arm, which is shipping medical supplies to the U.S. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian bought out billboards in Times Square to tell people to stay home. Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg and her fiancé teamed up with other tech leaders like Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, WorkDay co-founder Aneel Bhusri, Intuit's Scott Cook, Nike CEO John Donahoe and Benchmark's Bill Gurley to create a $6 million fund for the Second Harvest of Silicon Valley food bank, she announced Monday. Billionaire investor Chris Sacca said he and his wife are matching $250,000 of donations for teachers in high-need communities who are transitioning their lessons online.

Like Krieger, many tech leaders are focusing their efforts on helping the local small businesses in their community — and restaurants in particular, which are in turmoil. Former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said he is donating $2,000 a night to support 40 family dinners at San Francisco's Che Fico restaurant, which calls him a longtime supporter. Since the announcement on Monday, other people have donated and tripled it to 120 dinners a night, according to an Instagram post by Che Fico's chef and co-owner David Nayfield.

Get in touch with us: Share information securely with Protocol via encrypted Signal or WhatsApp message, at 415-214-4715 or through our anonymous SecureDrop.

On Tuesday, a group of venture capitalists, founders and executives (including Redpoint Venture's Ryan Sarver and Art.com's Frank Barbieri) started a new push to help donate restaurant meals to ER and ICU staff at some San Francisco hospitals. Right now, they're asking people to donate $1,000, which is the cost to sponsor a night's meal for about 50 essential hospital workers. They have also made a plea to the tech community to help them work out fractional donations so people can donate less and still support hospital workers. They raised over $200,000 since going public with their simple Google Form three days ago. On Friday, they open-sourced the project so other cities could follow suit.

"Health care workers are in such a tough spot, but the restaurants are fucked unless they get a bailout," said Sarver, who is also an investor in a restaurant group. "If big companies are interested [in sponsoring], we'd be happy to chat with them, too."

Biz Carson

Biz Carson ( @bizcarson) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol, covering Silicon Valley with a focus on startups and venture capital. Previously, she reported for Forbes and was co-editor of Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startups list. Before that, she worked for Business Insider, Gigaom, and Wired and started her career as a newspaper designer for Gannett.

capital coronavirus philanthropy venture covid-19
gaming
Power

How the creators of Spligate built gaming’s newest unicorn

1047 Games is now valued at $1.5 billion after three rounds of funding since May.

1047 Games' Splitgate amassed 13 million downloads when its beta launched in July.

Image: 1047 Games

The creators of Splitgate had a problem. Their new free-to-play video game, a take on the legendary arena shooter Halo with a teleportation twist borrowed from Valve's Portal, was gaining steam during its open beta period in July. But it was happening too quickly.

Splitgate was growing so fast and unexpectedly that the entire game was starting to break, as the servers supporting the game began to, figuratively speaking, melt down. The game went from fewer than 1,000 people playing it at any given moment in time to suddenly having tens of thousands of concurrent players. Then it grew to hundreds of thousands of players, all trying to log in and play at once across PlayStation, Xbox and PC.

Keep Reading Show less
Nick Statt
Nick Statt is Protocol's video game reporter. Prior to joining Protocol, he was news editor at The Verge covering the gaming industry, mobile apps and antitrust out of San Francisco, in addition to managing coverage of Silicon Valley tech giants and startups. He now resides in Rochester, New York, home of the garbage plate and, completely coincidentally, the World Video Game Hall of Fame. He can be reached at nstatt@protocol.com.
startups protocol gaming funding venture capital gaming
sponsored
Sponsored Content

Putting the ‘human’ into payments

While it's easy to get lost in the operational and technical side of a transaction, it's important to remember the third component of a payment. That is, the human behind the screen.

Over the last two years, many retailers have seen the benefit of investing in new, flexible payments. Ones that reflect the changing lifestyles of younger spenders, who are increasingly holding onto their cash — despite reports to the contrary. This means it's more important than ever for merchants to take note of the latest payment innovations so they can tap into the savings of the COVID-19 generation.

Keep Reading Show less
Antoine Nougue,Checkout.com

Antoine Nougue is Head of Europe at Checkout.com. He works with ambitious enterprise businesses to help them scale and grow their operations through payment processing services. He is responsible for leading the European sales, customer success, engineering & implementation teams and is based out of London, U.K.

sponsored sponsored content
Protocol | Policy

Why Twitch’s 'hate raid' lawsuit isn’t just about Twitch

When is it OK for tech companies to unmask their anonymous users? And when should a violation of terms of service get someone sued?

The case Twitch is bringing against two hate raiders is hardly black and white.

Photo: Caspar Camille Rubin/Unsplash

It isn't hard to figure out who the bad guys are in Twitch's latest lawsuit against two of its users. On one side are two anonymous "hate raiders" who have been allegedly bombarding the gaming platform with abhorrent attacks on Black and LGBTQ+ users, using armies of bots to do it. On the other side is Twitch, a company that, for all the lumps it's taken for ignoring harassment on its platform, is finally standing up to protect its users against persistent violators whom it's been unable to stop any other way.

But the case Twitch is bringing against these hate raiders is hardly black and white. For starters, the plaintiff here isn't an aggrieved user suing another user for defamation on the platform. The plaintiff is the platform itself. Complicating matters more is the fact that, according to a spokesperson, at least part of Twitch's goal in the case is to "shed light on the identity of the individuals behind these attacks," raising complicated questions about when tech companies should be able to use the courts to unmask their own anonymous users and, just as critically, when they should be able to actually sue them for violating their speech policies.

Keep Reading Show less
Issie Lapowsky

Issie Lapowsky ( @issielapowsky) is Protocol's chief correspondent, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. She also oversees Protocol's fellowship program. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University's Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing.

content moderation twitch
Protocol | Workplace

Remote work is here to stay. Here are the cybersecurity risks.

Phishing and ransomware are on the rise. Is your remote workforce prepared?

Before your company institutes work-from-home-forever plans, you need to ensure that your workforce is prepared to face the cybersecurity implications of long-term remote work.

Photo: Stefan Wermuth/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The delta variant continues to dash or delay return-to-work plans, but before your company institutes work-from-home-forever plans, you need to ensure that your workforce is prepared to face the cybersecurity implications of long-term remote work.

So far in 2021, CrowdStrike has already observed over 1,400 "big game hunting" ransomware incidents and $180 million in ransom demands averaging over $5 million each. That's due in part to the "expanded attack surface that work-from-home creates," according to CTO Michael Sentonas.

Keep Reading Show less
Michelle Ma
Michelle Ma (@himichellema) is a reporter at Protocol, where she writes about management, leadership and workplace issues in tech. Previously, she was a news editor of live journalism and special coverage for The Wall Street Journal. Prior to that, she worked as a staff writer at Wirecutter. She can be reached at mma@protocol.com.
cybersecurity remote
insurance
Protocol | Fintech

When COVID rocked the insurance market, this startup saw opportunity

Ethos has outraised and outmarketed the competition in selling life insurance directly online — but there's still an $887 billion industry to transform.

Life insurance has been slow to change.

Image: courtneyk/Getty Images

Peter Colis cited a striking statistic that he said led him to launch a life insurance startup: One in twenty children will lose a parent before they turn 15.

"No one ever thinks that will happen to them, but that's the statistics," the co-CEO and co-founder of Ethos told Protocol. "If it's a breadwinning parent, the majority of those families will go bankrupt immediately, within three months. Life insurance elegantly solves this problem."

Keep Reading Show less
Benjamin Pimentel

Benjamin Pimentel ( @benpimentel) covers fintech from San Francisco. He has reported on many of the biggest tech stories over the past 20 years for the San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones MarketWatch and Business Insider, from the dot-com crash, the rise of cloud computing, social networking and AI to the impact of the Great Recession and the COVID crisis on Silicon Valley and beyond. He can be reached at bpimentel@protocol.com or via Signal at (510)731-8429.

life insurance ethos insurance
Latest Stories