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May 11, 2020
A pair of lawmakers from both sides of the aisle introduced legislation Monday in the House that would ensure that more venture-capital-backed startups are eligible to receive small-business loans under federal stimulus, following a weekslong lobbying blitz from the VC and startup world.
The bill, co-sponsored by seven other lawmakers, would waive "affiliate" rules for startups that have no majority shareholder, fulfilling the wish of tech trade groups including the National Venture Capital Association. Startups for weeks have complained they are being denied the government's small-business loans, or not applying altogether, because the rules require companies to count investors and their other affiliates under the employee headcount, which is capped at 500.
The rules, meant to ensure that larger firms do not exploit Small Business Administration loan programs like the new Paycheck Protection Program, deem a company an affiliate of another when one controls, or has the power to control, the second. That has left many startups, which are frequently backed by VC firms, unable to receive the loans.
"Startups, like all small businesses in our country, are experiencing a trying time. Unfortunately, many have laid off employees while others have shuttered their businesses completely," said Rep. Anna Eshoo, the Silicon Valley Democrat who co-introduced the bill with Republican Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, who represents a part of Washington state that includes Spokane. "My legislation ensures that startups can access the Paycheck Protection Program to keep employees on payroll or rehire those they've recently laid off."
The Caring for Startup Employees Act of 2020 would bar startups from using money they received under the new waiver to pay their investors.
Since the PPP launched in March, the Department of the Treasury and Small Business Administration have issued a stream of sometimes confusing guidelines for who can seek the money; the loan is forgivable if certain criteria is met. Some of the rules deterred startups from applying for loans — and even prompted a wave of startups to retract applications. A number of startups have asked to change investors' voting and control terms to make them eligible for the grants.
In a report last month, the National Venture Capital Association predicted that startups will continue to do mass layoffs, with up to 80% cutting between 10% and 50% percent of employees over the next few months. The group says roughly 300 U.S. startups have laid off more than 30,000 employees.
"Startups and small businesses are the engines of our economy, but right now, they are being hit hard through no fault of their own," McMorris Rodgers said in a statement. "In order to support American ingenuity, we need to ensure these startups can weather this storm so they can continue to grow, innovate, and enrich our communities."
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has continuously called for a startup-friendly fix to the PPP, is expected to unveil the Democrats' proposal for the next COVID-19 economic stimulus package later this week. Pelosi's office did not immediately respond to an inquiry about whether the package will include a fix to the PPP for startups.
From Your Site Articles
Emily Birnbaum
Emily Birnbaum ( @birnbaum_e) is a tech policy reporter with Protocol. Her coverage focuses on the U.S. government's attempts to regulate one of the most powerful industries in the world, with a focus on antitrust, privacy and politics. Previously, she worked as a tech policy reporter with The Hill after spending several months as a breaking news reporter. She is a Bethesda, Maryland native and proud Kenyon College alumna.
Protocol | Fintech
Jack Dorsey is so money: What Tidal and banking do for Square
Teaming up with Jay-Z's music streaming service may seem like a move done for flash, but it's ultimately all about the money (and Cash).
Jay-Z performs at the Tidal-X concert at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn in 2017.
Photo: Theo Wargo/Getty Images
March 4, 2021
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.
Tomio Geron ( @tomiogeron) is a San Francisco-based reporter covering fintech. He was previously a reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, covering venture capital and startups. Before that, he worked as a staff writer at Forbes, covering social media and venture capital, and also edited the Midas List of top tech investors. He has also worked at newspapers covering crime, courts, health and other topics. He can be reached at tgeron@protocol.com or tgeron@protonmail.com.
Janko Roettgers (@jank0) is a senior reporter at Protocol, reporting on the shifting power dynamics between tech, media, and entertainment, including the impact of new technologies. Previously, Janko was Variety's first-ever technology writer in San Francisco, where he covered big tech and emerging technologies. He has reported for Gigaom, Frankfurter Rundschau, Berliner Zeitung, and ORF, among others. He has written three books on consumer cord-cutting and online music and co-edited an anthology on internet subcultures. He lives with his family in Oakland.
March 4, 2021
It was a big week for Jack Dorsey, who started by turning heads in Wall Street, and then went Hollywood with an unexpected music-streaming deal.
Dorsey's payments company, Square, announced Monday that it now has an actual bank, Square Financial Services, which just got a charter approved. On Thursday, Dorsey announced Square was taking a majority stake in Tidal, the music-streaming service backed by Jay-Z, for $297 million.
<p>If there's a theme around the moves, it's control. Having its own bank gives Square more purchase in the financial world. And if Square does something with Tidal, which promised to give artists a bigger cut of the money produced by streaming, it will likely be about giving musicians more control over the revenue streams they create. </p><p>It also suggests Dorsey wants to diversify Square far beyond its original smartphone-swipe business. Already, he talks about Register and Cash App as two distinct businesses within Square. (Caviar was another, until Square sold it to DoorDash.) Now Tidal joins the portfolio.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>"Dorsey is flexing his muscles and expanding his tentacles into banking, crypto, and now the Jay-Z Tidal deal," Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives told Protocol. Ives compared Dorsey to Tesla's Elon Musk in the boldness of his ambitions.</p><p>Some disagreed: There was chatter that the deal was about Dorsey's habit of hobnobbing with celebrities. He was famously photographed with Beyoncé, who is married to Jay-Z, last year. Square plans to name Jay-Z, a.k.a. Shawn Carter, to its board.</p><p>But Square's push into banking is not about "white pillars in front of buildings and marble," as Matt Harris, partner at Bain Capital Ventures, put it. Financial services are becoming a "lifestyle choice" for a new generation of consumers, he said.</p><p>It helps, then, that Cash App is part of the cultural lexicon of <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/dont-venmo-iggy-azalea-cash-app-rules-rap-11565191206" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">hip-hop</a>. "One of the things Square has captured is the consumer business for a long time," Harris said. "Their customer acquisition strategy for a long time has been urban. And Tidal is just a further step. A somewhat radical further step."</p><p>Veteran tech analyst Michael Dortch of DortchOnIT saw the deal as more straightforward: Square can offer valuable services to musicians and artists in what has become a more complex entertainment market, and let them avoid "exploitation and bad treatment" from the major labels, he said.</p><p>Artists often don't get paid for three to six months after a song is streamed, because they have to wait for their label to get paid first. Square has experience, but it's not the only one that could address this problem.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>"Maybe there's an argument that Square will get in the middle of that to simplify payments so creators get paid more quickly," said David Pakman, partner at Venrock. "That's interesting and a bunch of people have tried to do that. But Spotify could do that on their own."</p><p>Square's bet on Tidal is unlikely to shake up the streaming world in the short term. Tidal has not released any subscriber numbers for some time, but data shared by digital music wholesaler CD Baby suggests that the service is little more than an also-ran. CD Baby, which distributed the music of 800,000 independent artists, received 40% of its digital revenue from Spotify, with Apple Music accounting for 18%. Tidal, Deezer, Napster and other third-tier services together made up just 8% of CD Baby's digital revenue.</p><p>Dorsey and Jay-Z both said Thursday that the Tidal link-up went well beyond streaming.</p><p>"Square created ecosystems of tools for sellers and individuals, and we'll do the same for artists," Dorsey wrote in a <a href="https://twitter.com/jack/status/1367460921937817602" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">tweet thread</a>. "We'll work on entirely new listening experiences to bring fans closer together, simple integrations for merch sales, modern collaboration tools, and new complementary revenue streams."</p><p>"I said from the beginning that Tidal was about more than just streaming music … Artists deserve better tools to assist them in their creative journey," Jay-Z <a href="https://twitter.com/sc/status/1367461494821171202" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">tweeted</a>.</p><p>Focusing on services over streams is a smart bet, music industry analyst Mark Mulligan from <a href="https://www.midiaresearch.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">MIDiA Research</a> said. "Streaming is fundamentally a terrible margin business," he said. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p><a href="https://www.patreon.com/m/waterandmusic" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Water & Music</a> author Cherie Hu agreed. "The business of music streaming is not sustainable in and of itself," Hu said, pointing to the fact that Tidal <a href="https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2021/01/13/tidal-2019-earnings-report/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">lost $52 million</a> on subscription revenues of just $166 million in 2019. "Tidal is not a profitable business," she said.</p><p>A bigger focus on creator services could change that. "It is the only big bet at the moment," Mulligan said. And while pundits have focused on Tidal's star power, creator services could actually help Tidal and Square monetize the long tail of music: part-time creators looking to make a few extra bucks, musicians who haven't given up on their day job. "It monetizes hobbies," Mulligan said.</p><p>Square could build out credit or other products or tools for artists. "Even though Tidal has been declining as a streaming service, they have a strong brand and access to artists," said Laura Chau, partner at Canaan. "With Square buying Tidal, they essentially are buying access to those artists and circumventing the creator acquisition challenge that many emerging companies will have."</p><p>The flip side is that there are already a plethora of creator services companies out there, helping bands with everything from playlist sharing to merchandise sales. Those companies include Spotify, which has been looking to offer musicians more tools after acquiring artistry services startups SoundBetter and Soundtrap. "It's super crowded right now," Hu said. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>The one major differentiator for Square could be its financial services business, freshly strengthened with its own chartered bank. "That is one of the growth areas," Mulligan said. The company could offer artists advances, royalty processing and more, effectively taking over some of the roles traditionally held by record labels.</p><p>It's a space that is long overdue for change. In the age of TikTok, artists can see huge streaming spikes practically overnight when one of their songs goes viral. Most of them won't see the resulting royalties for months, Hu said: "The financial innovation has not caught up to general technological innovation." </p><p>If the Tidal bet pays off, Dorsey's reputation as a daring strategic thinker will only grow.</p><p>"He deserves a lot of credit for long-term vision," Eric Sager, Plaid's chief operating officer who was once head of sales at Square, told Protocol in January. "A lot of the things that have made Square the amazing company it is today are things that he was talking about years and years and years ago when it wasn't clear at all that those things would be successful."</p>
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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.
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The future of computing at the edge: an interview with Intel’s Tom Lantzsch
An interview with Tom Lantzsch, SVP and GM, Internet of Things Group at Intel
February 28, 2021
Saul Hudson has a deep knowledge of creating brand voice identity, especially in understanding and targeting messages in cutting-edge technologies. He enjoys commissioning, editing, writing, and business development, in helping companies to build passionate audiences and accelerate their growth. Hudson has reported from more than 30 countries, from war zones to boardrooms to presidential palaces. He has led multinational, multi-lingual teams and managed operations for hundreds of journalists. Hudson is a Managing Partner at Angle42, a strategic communications consultancy.
February 27, 2021
An interview with Tom Lantzsch
Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Internet of Things Group (IoT) at Intel Corporation
Edge computing had been on the rise in the last 18 months – and accelerated amid the need for new applications to solve challenges created by the Covid-19 pandemic. Tom Lantzsch, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Internet of Things Group (IoT) at Intel Corp., thinks there are more innovations to come – and wants technology leaders to think equally about data and the algorithms as critical differentiators.
In his role at Intel, Lantzsch leads the worldwide group of solutions architects across IoT market segments, including retail, banking, hospitality, education, industrial, transportation, smart cities and healthcare. And he's seen first-hand how artificial intelligence run at the edge can have a big impact on customers' success.
Protocol sat down with Lantzsch to talk about the challenges faced by companies seeking to move from the cloud to the edge; some of the surprising ways that Intel has found to help customers and the next big breakthrough in this space.
What are the biggest trends you are seeing with edge computing and IoT?
A few years ago, there was a notion that the edge was going to be a simplistic model, where we were going to have everything connected up into the cloud and all the compute was going to happen in the cloud. At Intel, we had a bit of a contrarian view. We thought much of the interesting compute was going to happen closer to where data was created. And we believed, at that time, that camera technology was going to be the driving force – that just the sheer amount of content that was created would be overwhelming to ship to the cloud – so we'd have to do compute at the edge. A few years later – that hypothesis is in action and we're seeing edge compute happen in a big way.
<p>The last 18 months have been a wild time to be in technology. We've seen edge compute come to life to help businesses adapt during the pandemic. At the same time, we are also seeing how 5G is going to drive up interest, especially from a networking perspective, rather than a use-case perspective. We also see lot of people that are focused on their data, but the <em>algorithms</em> that companies train with the data are going to be their critical assets. It doesn't matter what company or what industry; <em>this</em> will really become the differentiator for many companies.</p><p>And particularly amid the backdrop of the pandemic, we've seen how companies are using technology to either bring workers back in safely or <a href="https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/corporate-responsibility/covid-19-response-sensormatic-article.html" target="_blank">serve their customers in new ways</a>, <a href="https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/customer-spotlight/stories/brentwood-academy-customer-spotlight.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">educate children in new ways</a> -- all things that have accelerated the digital transformation that had been underway. I recently read a <a href="https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/how-covid-19-has-pushed-companies-over-the-technology-tipping-point-and-transformed-business-forever" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">McKinsey survey</a> that reported on the "speedup in creating digital or digitally enhanced offerings. Across regions, the results suggest a seven-year increase, on average, in the rate at which companies are developing these products and services."</p><p>And based on what we're seeing at Intel, those are lifesaving and industry saving investments happening today – completely re-designing the way that <a href="https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/corporate-responsibility/covid-19-response-mic-article.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">patients are treated</a>, and businesses operate.</p><h4>What are you particularly expecting to see this year?</h4><p>What I find most interesting is the work that combines IoT with networking capabilities – and I think this is going to be a year of expansive exploration and working with our customers to put these two things together to solve real business challenges.</p><p>When we first started the integration of networking technology and operational technology capabilities and layered that across the industry verticals, we could count the amount of interested customers and opportunities on one hand. Last year, it was five times that many and this year we see that number increasing significantly already. So, we're excited to see the industry continue to build excitement to scale those types of deployments.</p><h4>What role does AI play at the edge and in what way is Intel involved?</h4><p>An AI use case recently grabbed my attention: employees in a restaurant being screened by a device that checks temperature while the employees are washing their hands – and provides a determination on whether they'd done it adequately before they report to work. I have seen other applications using similar technology in the <a href="https://marketplace.intel.com/s/offering/a5b3b000000TiMSAA0/using-ai-to-make-construction-site-safer?language=en_US" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">construction industry</a>, where an AI algorithm scans to see if employees have their helmet, goggles, vest and other safety equipment on properly to determine if they are ready to work. And the best part is – that the employer can see aggregate data on these interactions to determine if more training on handwashing or helmet wearing is needed.</p><p>At Intel, in addition to providing the fundamental base technology to enable these applications, we work with a lot of third-party developers to create these applications. And we help the developers scale them across multiple industries with our salesforce. So, we may not make the scan technology that determines if you have the right gear on, but we orchestrate that coordination across our ecosystem with all of our partners to effectively put it into a <a href="https://marketplace.intel.com/s/?language=en_US" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">catalog</a> so that if customers are interested in that sort of application, we can provide them with different parties to make that happen.</p><h4>Is there a problem with fragmentation in the market and how can that be solved?</h4><p>It's very fragmented. I gave just two examples of totally different workers coming to work in different industries and I can give you five more that are different again. Although the base technology that Intel creates to enable this type of innovation is very horizontal in nature, the reality is that bringing those to life must be very "vertically-centered" and very "use-case centered" – and must take into account, geography. The two employee use cases I cited look very different if you are talking about employees in North America, India or Germany. So, all in all, this is a holistic ecosystem challenge – and an ecosystem solution.</p><p>At Intel, we're in a unique situation to orchestrate these solutions. </p><p><cite class="pull-quote">People tend to think of Intel as providing the technical footprint that enables edge computing – but we also have the developer reach – and we can use our ecosystem and scale to help our end customers get access to the best solutions.</cite></p><h4>What sort of challenges do customers face when they're attempting to adopt edge computing?</h4><p>There are two common challenges. One is the technical question of 'Who can I work with?' A customer may have a chip focus but actually, it's a more complex question than a chip. We like that complexity, because we can be an adviser to them and <a href="https://marketplace.intel.com/s/partners-by-industry?language=en_US" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">bring to the table partners</a> that they can work with to solve that complexity leveraging our technical knowledge and ecosystem network. </p><p>The second thing that companies struggle with is the challenge of how to fund getting into this space – even if the business case warrants the investment. The world has changed. Companies don't want to write a big capital check for these types of investments – they want a pay-as-you-go model, like you see with the cloud. We've been working with customers to find a way to make that happen – and I think that is going to be a bigger part of the conversation moving forward.</p><p>You can see it across almost every aspect of technology now. We rent compute more than we buy compute. Evidenced by the success of AWS, companies can rent compute from Amazon instead of building their own data center – and there are many benefits to that approach. In the old world, even for this video conference that we're having today we would have installed capital to do this. Now it's just a service. And I think that edge as a service is right around the corner.</p><h4>Do you have an example of that?</h4><p>A customer in Mexico wanted to deploy outdoor WiFi and add security features into it. So, it was an edge-based computing issue that was part connectivity. But there was actually way more to it than just installing it. We not only helped to solved the technological challenge creatively and coordinated the <a href="https://marketplace.intel.com/s/partners-by-industry?language=en_US" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">ecosystem of providers</a> to solve this, but we also found a way so that the customer could get into this market with a service-based model without needing to outlay a lot of capital.</p><p>Other semiconductor companies would have a difficult time partnering on both sides of that challenge, but Intel can do it because we have the scale.</p><h4>How do businesses identify which functions they do want to perform at the edge versus in the cloud?</h4><p>It really comes down to a question of what you're trying to do and how you do it at the lowest cost, highest quality and standard in computability.</p><p>If you have an application and it can perform what you need it to do in the cloud, you'll probably run it there. The cloud is a great thing - there's infinite compute and lots of choice in a well-understood developer environment.</p><p>But there are many things you can't or shouldn't do in the cloud for certain reasons. Take the camera example from earlier. Say you have eight high-density cameras, and you want an action on them immediately. You may not be able to afford the latency that comes with going up into the cloud. Or it may be a financial challenge – that its actually more expensive to send that data to the cloud over and over again, and it makes sense to invest in compute at the edge. There are nuances in the decision-making. It really comes down to what you want the application to do, how quickly and how much it should cost.</p><h4>How does Intel help developers to learn, to build and then test their solutions at the edge?</h4><p>To enable what we know to be interesting and challenging use cases at the edge, required us to change our focus on who these developers are and what they care about. We learned that they <em>really</em> don't care about what hardware they're running on. The modern developers are fairly well extracted from the hardware – they just assume the compute is going to be available for them to do their work.</p><p>To make sure we can deliver on that, we typically target developers by specific capability. The most advanced case that we've been studying on the edge recently is focused video and specifically, video inferencing and AI inferencing. We created a tool called <a href="https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/tools/openvino-toolkit.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">OpenVINO</a>, which was developed in a way that developers didn't have to care about the hardware it runs on. It's a model optimization technology that enables them to easily scale out to different hardware platforms. That's proven to be an interesting value proposition to these developers.</p><p>Our goal with <a href="https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/tools/openvino-toolkit.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">OpenVINO</a> is democratize AI activity and inference at the edge. We want to make it simple -- to put these tools in the hands of non-data scientists and make it work. As a part of that process, we're also creating an environment where they can develop anyplace, anytime, anywhere they want to be. We're so proud of our <a href="https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/tools/openvino-toolkit.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">OpenVINO</a> community and are constantly working to grow the community and release new features and capabilities to edge developers.</p><h4>What's the possible next breakthrough that you see for Intel in edge computing and the IoT space?</h4><p>I'm looking forward to the big breakthrough when we show integrated 5G, Virtual Private Network and the edge workloads all in one unit. More to come.</p>
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Saul Hudson has a deep knowledge of creating brand voice identity, especially in understanding and targeting messages in cutting-edge technologies. He enjoys commissioning, editing, writing, and business development, in helping companies to build passionate audiences and accelerate their growth. Hudson has reported from more than 30 countries, from war zones to boardrooms to presidential palaces. He has led multinational, multi-lingual teams and managed operations for hundreds of journalists. Hudson is a Managing Partner at Angle42, a strategic communications consultancy.
People
Citizen’s plan to keep people safe (and beat COVID-19) with an app
Citizen CEO Andrew Frame talks privacy, safety, coronavirus and the future of the neighborhood watch.
Citizen added COVID-19 tracking to its app over the summer — but its bigger plans got derailed.
Photo: Citizen
February 24, 2021
David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editor at large. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.
February 24, 2021
Citizen is an app built on the idea that transparency is a good thing. It's the place users — more than 7 million of them, in 28 cities with many more to come soon — can find out when there's a crime, a protest or an incident of any kind nearby. (Just yesterday, it alerted me, along with 17,900 residents of Washington, D.C., that it was about to get very windy. It did indeed get windy.) Users can stream or upload video of what's going on, locals can chat about the latest incidents and everyone's a little safer at the end of the day knowing what's happening in their city.
At least, that's how CEO Andrew Frame sees it. Critics of Citizen say the app is creating hordes of voyeurs, incentivizing people to run into dangerous situations just to grab a video, and encouraging racial profiling and other problematic behaviors all under the guise of whatever "safety" means. They say the app promotes paranoia, alerting users to things that they don't actually need to know about. (That the app was originally called "Vigilante" doesn't help its case.)
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</div></p><p>Above all, Citizen raises questions: When does safety trump privacy? What are people willing to give up or risk in order to keep themselves and their loved ones safe? What does "safety" even mean in an increasingly digital world?</p><p>Frame joined the <a href="https://www.podpage.com/sourcecode/" target="_blank">Source Code podcast</a> to discuss all that and more. He talked about the app's history, what it means to promote safety above all else, how his company tried — and failed — to fight COVID-19 long before other tech companies got involved and what it means to be a good Citizen citizen.</p><div class="rm-embed embed-media"><iframe frameborder="no" height="200px" scrolling="no" seamless="" src="https://player.simplecast.com/1cb18adc-4514-4097-b9a5-3c9a5c2e5408?dark=true" width="100%"></iframe></div><p><em>The following excerpts from our conversation have been lightly edited for length and clarity.</em><br></p><p><strong>Citizen has had sort of a windy history, so maybe go all the way back to the beginning of the product and the company. What was the thing you were trying to build when you started out building it?</strong></p><p>I wanted to build something that was consumer [facing], because that's where my passion lies. And I feel like that's the only thing I'm sort of good at. It had to be mobile first, network-effect driven, with a very noble mission so that once the network effect activates, hopefully, it becomes the gift that keeps on giving. </p><p>As soon as I identified wanting to build a safety product, the question was, how do you get to market with a product that keeps people safe? There was a moment where I was sitting outside, and I was just thinking about, what is the Trojan horse to build a safety system? And it just dawned on me: I think all of us remember playing with police scanners, and listening to police. It's this incredible data stream that is filled with people in need of help. And it was just this closed system that had open access for listening. When a fire hits a building, nobody knows except the fire department. Why don't the 1,000 people inside of the building know that their building is on fire? The information is right there, transmitted right through the walls of that building. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>And so it just instantly hit me: Let's open this system, create a trusted shared safety system where police and civilians and everybody has access to the same information. There are so many great byproducts of creating this open, shared system, one of which is you get the people out of the burning building. You get the kidnapped kid back because you got the whole neighborhood engaged. You eliminate police brutality, because now you've built what I call "conditional transparency." It's not a radical transparency. It's a conditional transparency, meaning the transparency hits once a kid is missing. It doesn't mean there's overhead planes surveilling, there's no surveillance state in this. It's simply transparency when it is urgently needed. And that was kind of the genesis of this thing.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p><strong>I'm getting ahead of myself here, but you kind of already got into what over the years has been complicated in how people think about Citizen. The reason to not tell the people in the building that there's a fire is that you don't want to cause a panic, right? And the reason to not tell people in the neighborhood is that you don't want them running toward the fire, because some people will run toward a fire.</strong> </p><p><strong>All the pushback I've ever seen about Citizen has basically been about that fundamental question. Is it productive to have all of this information given to everyone all the time? At some point, do you just have to decide that, on balance, you believe it is?</strong></p><p>You know, there would be no innovation if people were just fixated on worst-case scenarios. On any product, we can think about worst-case scenarios. And of course, there are valid reasons. But it's not going to stop you from building something great. </p><p>Just take Uber, right? I was taught not to hitchhike, that'd be a very dangerous thing. And if we were all in a room thinking about what happens when you just allow people to hitchhike with their neighbors, and build it as a global platform? People would say, "Oh, my gosh, that's the worst idea of all time."</p><p><strong>A lot of people did say that about Uber!</strong> </p><p>Yeah. So you know, it's just so easy to just fixate on the worst-case scenario. This is no longer an idea. This is something that is prevalent across 28 cities, we have ZIP codes, where 60[%], 70[%], 80% of the entire ZIP code are active Citizen users. We don't have those stories. Believe me, I was also terrified of this. At the beginning, it gave me and the team a huge amount of anxiety, because we also thought about the worst-case scenario. But we also thought about the best-case scenario, which is why we built this and why we're scaling. And it far exceeds the unfounded fear of some of these worst-case scenarios.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p><strong>I feel like COVID has become kind of a bigger part of Citizen than I would have expected. Rewinding to the early days of the pandemic, was it obvious to you that Citizen needed to be part of this, needed to help be the solution here?</strong></p><p>At first, everybody in the company wanted to pitch COVID ideas. It wasn't until we realized just the architectural model of contact tracing — a very simple idea of just enabling Bluetooth and allowing everybody's Bluetooth radio to say hello to each other as you come in close physical contact — that it was like, OK, wait a sec, we already have distribution. We had 30% of New York City on the app back in March. </p><p>We just went, "Oh, my goodness, we have the safety platform, all we have to do is ask these 30% of New Yorkers to turn on Bluetooth." Suddenly, we have the largest and most dense contact-tracing system in any big city in the world, in ground zero, which was New York at the time. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>Unfortunately, we never got the approval to launch it. </p><p><strong>What happened?</strong> </p><p>It's a complicated story. Apple and Google had their own plans. We came forward with this architecture, and we needed help. We needed allies. We needed Apple, we needed Google, we needed the government. </p><p>We created a product that integrated at-home testing and contact tracing. Because we knew those were the two tactics on how to manage this here in the U.S. Our ask was basically, a) obviously we need to get it in the App Store; b) we wanted the government to pay for all that at-home testing for the U.S. Labcorp was working on their at-home test kit. And basically, you could just ship a test kit to anybody that asks for it within 24 hours, saliva sample, they send it back, and the result is delivered in the app. So it'll say, "You're negative for COVID." </p><p>Keep in mind, this is back in March that we had this. We built prototypes and everything inside the company, we were taking tests and getting the results in the app. Now, if you are positive, it would automatically inform all of the people that your Bluetooth recently saw that "you have had a potential exposure to COVID." Those people would then be offered a free test that would show up the next day. You can imagine if we partnered with Amazon on the logistics side, where Amazon is trucking these. It's like OK, tech, come together and let's go, like, what can we do about COVID? There was zero government support. None whatsoever. We needed them to pay for the tests. It'd be great if Amazon did the logistics. But we called it the "testing-tracing flywheel." And this is, again, back in March, people had never even heard of contact tracing.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
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</div></p><p>We didn't get the support. We didn't get the alliances, we were on our own on this one. And the government, there was a Contact Tracing Task Force, we were selected as the app to provide contact tracing to America, before [the task force] was suddenly just disbanded and dissolved and just went away one day.</p><p><strong>My question was going to be, wouldn't this be a useful time to do things like partner with local governments, but you're saying you did, and then it fell apart?</strong></p><p>Well, there was no official partnership. But we were told that this was by far the best system for America. And there were just a bunch of meetings that didn't really go anywhere. And then suddenly, you know, they put a bunch of great technology entrepreneurs on the task force, who we knew! We knew all these people, and it was great. Sometimes government needs entrepreneurs to step up and solve problems. And in this case, it seemed like something was going to happen, but then it was just instantly disbanded with no plan. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="7">
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</div></p><p><strong>Looking back now with almost a year of hindsight, was there anything else you could have done? Should you have just pushed through and said, "We'll figure something else out, screw all the rest of you?"</strong></p><p>No, we couldn't, we didn't have approval from the app stores. Right now, innovation is no longer open. You have to go through the app stores, and they will decide if your innovation can reach the world. This is not how it was, pre-mobile. With the internet, you can build anything you want. And you have an open, uncensored, unfiltered internet. And with app stores, you don't. You must get through the process.</p><p><strong>This is actually sort of a perfect example of the kind of tension we were talking about earlier. You have an obvious societal good. No one is going to argue that curbing the spread of COVID-19 is not a good thing. We're all on the same page about that. But then, and this is what I think we spent maybe six months too long debating, you have all of the privacy implications of that. What does it mean that there's now a system that knows that not only do I have COVID, but who gave it to me and where they got it from? Were those the kinds of debates that you were having, even back in March? Was that the holdup?</strong></p><p>That actually annoyed me, because I just don't think that COVID was this mass privacy thing. All of the data was protected, nobody would know. But most likely, just through the social interaction, like people, every person that has COVID has told me. It's not like, "Oh, my gosh, this person has COVID. Nobody can know." </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="8">
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</div></p><p>And we didn't expose the name. We did expose the location. There was a big fight even with the app stores, because we thought that the location was super relevant. Why? Because it protects more people. If you went to a superspreader dinner, it should say, here's the time and place you got COVID. We can say Friday night, 8 p.m., here's the location. We're not going to tell you who, but you're like, "Oh, that was the birthday party." What's the next step? Tell everybody at the birthday party that there was an exposure there, because not everybody has the contact tracer. </p><p>This was about beating COVID. I just think that there was this red herring around privacy that stopped everything. Privacy became the fundamental discussion, when it's like, OK, we won on the privacy side, but how are we doing as a nation now? Printing trillions of dollars, small businesses all going out of business. What mattered more: this privacy thing that seems to be extremely unfounded and a red herring, or beating COVID?</p><p><strong>That's the big existential question around all of this, right? And it goes back to what you were saying before about best- and worst-case scenarios. There's just always going to be a tension between privacy and safety, right? Even as we talk about things like encryption, there's always going to be that tension. And at some point, all you can do is pick a side and be clear about which side you've picked.</strong></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="9">
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</div></p><p>Yeah. I mean, you've got to use judgment. And this is really where mission comes in. What is this privacy preservation that we're even talking about? I mean, the amount of tracking going on by Big Tech is thousands of times more privacy-invading than the COVID thing we were talking about. </p><p>The fact that we just got so sucked up talking about privacy preservation being the only issue, when in the meantime, COVID is spreading rapidly and just destroying families and small businesses and American restaurants that'll never come back. I think that the focus was on the wrong area.</p>
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David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editor at large. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.
Transforming 2021
Blockchain, QR codes and your phone: the race to build vaccine passports
Digital verification systems could give people the freedom to work and travel. Here's how they could actually happen.
One day, you might not need to carry that physical passport around, either.
Photo: CommonPass
February 23, 2021
Mike Murphy ( @mcwm) is the director of special projects at Protocol, focusing on the industries being rapidly upended by technology and the companies disrupting incumbents. Previously, Mike was the technology editor at Quartz, where he frequently wrote on robotics, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics.
February 23, 2021
There will come a time, hopefully in the near future, when you'll feel comfortable getting on a plane again. You might even stop at the lounge at the airport, head to the regional office when you land and maybe even see a concert that evening. This seemingly distant reality will depend upon vaccine rollouts continuing on schedule, an open-sourced digital verification system and, amazingly, the blockchain.
Several countries around the world have begun to prepare for what comes after vaccinations. Swaths of the population will be vaccinated before others, but that hasn't stopped industries decimated by the pandemic from pioneering ways to get some people back to work and play. One of the most promising efforts is the idea of a "vaccine passport," which would allow individuals to show proof that they've been vaccinated against COVID-19 in a way that could be verified by businesses to allow them to travel, work or relax in public without a great fear of spreading the virus.
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</div></p><p>But building a system that everyone agrees with — and can access — is no small task. There are several companies working on competing projects to verify vaccinations. But beyond that, there are more than a few hurdles that could prevent vaccine passports from succeeding, from antiquated medical records systems to interoperability issues and privacy concerns. Here's how they could actually succeed. </p><h3>Competing projects, similar standards</h3><p>Pretty much since the first blockchain white paper, people have been looking for perfect examples of where a distributed, immutable ledger could be valuable. There's obviously the push to use it for currencies, and companies have tried to use it for things like tracking <a href="https://www.protocol.com/ibm-blockchain-supply-produce-coffee" target="_self">food production</a> and <a href="https://www.govtech.com/products/Blockchain-Voting-Debate-Heats-Up-After-Historic-Election.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">voting</a>, but there are few use cases that have truly taken off, at least so far. "We've been working on this since 2014; we never thought that health care would be the kind of the use case that we take this mainstream," Jamie Smith, the senior director of business development at Evernym, a company focused on using the blockchain as a basis for verifying identities, told Protocol. </p><p>Smith said Evernym had been discussing its concepts with automakers, retailers, telcos, governments, loyalty companies and banks prior to the pandemic. One of those companies was IAG, the airline group that owns British Airways, which had been interested in the idea of contactless travel based on a single identity credential that follows you from the airport check-in to your gate. With the pandemic, that morphed into thinking about ways to verify that passengers have had negative COVID tests, and eventually, that they've received a vaccine. "From our perspective, it was a really easy lift to see," Smith said. "We're doing contactless travel, and we just added verifiable credentials for test results."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>It's a similar genesis for IBM's Digital Health Pass initiative, which leader Eric Piscini said started about two years ago as a way to store people's entire health records in a safe, accessible platform. It also relies on the blockchain for its immutable record of proof, and both Evernym and IBM are part of an open-standards group called the Good Health Pass Collaborative, which aims to bring private credentialed vaccine records to business and people around the world. Companies are working on their own implementations of the standards, but Evernym's Smith said the data is meant to be portable from one passport to another. </p><p>Most of the companies working on passports say their systems are private by design, especially given that they're mainly working off the same open standards. In most cases, the health information only ever remains on a user's phone, but where it asks to verify that the user's information meets a system's standards — such as whether this person has had two COVID vaccines and should be allowed into an office — that information is recorded on a blockchain. "You can, using blockchain technologies, verify that someone has been tested recently, without having access to the underlying data," Piscini said. "I don't know any other technology where you can do that."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>Similarly, the nonprofit Commons Project's CommonPass, backed by the likes of Oracle, Microsoft and Salesforce, started out as a project to bring an analog to Apple Health for Android. JP Pollak, a senior researcher at Cornell and founder of the Commons Project, first launched CommonHealth to bring the sort of data and insights that Apple Health offers to iPhone owners to Android users. Last summer, the group started building an app that could take health data and privately share it with others — in that case, it was to help truckers stuck at the borders in <a href="https://www.newtimes.co.rw/opinions/digital-technology-re-opening-africa" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">East African countries</a> who couldn't easily prove they'd taken COVID tests. This morphed into vaccine credentialing, with the group now working to pull together the various data streams needed to get a project like this off the ground. </p><p>"Health care institutions, EMR vendors, retail pharmacies, state vaccine registries, all issuing people a digital verifiable credential of their vaccination record that they could then use in the app of their choice, to be able to get access to various kinds of services," Pollak said. CommonPass is also working with the Mayo Clinic, as well as Epic Systems and Cerner, two of the largest EMR vendors. </p><h3>Something for everyone </h3><p>With so many competing efforts to become the world's digital vaccine passport, it might seem that the country is heading for some sort of VHS versus Betamax format war for proving everyone has had COVID vaccines. But given that so many of the efforts are using the same standards, and in many cases, looking to embed their tech in someone else's app rather than their own, the race might be less about the best tech winning, and more about various approaches working in different situations. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>"The intent is not to be the only company; we don't want to be the proprietary platform that everybody has to use because they have no choice," IBM's Piscini said. "That's not who we are right now: That's the IBM from 30 years ago, not the IBM of today."</p><p>For IBM, though, the selling point is that the company already works with so many other massive companies. Why look elsewhere for a vaccine passport solution if your airline booking system is already powered by IBM? "We believe our network is going to be more valuable than any other because of our scale and our ability to integrate the platform with CRM systems, building systems or stadium systems — we can do that every day," Piscini said.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTY2NTc3NS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYyMTM1MjYyM30._ykxxCyx3_wDbZrYgCcmK0QT2Ue1tZFdP5pf60kOmPU/img.jpg?width=980" id="c81c9" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="3967636652192acfdaad341861263bc8" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image">
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">IATA's digital passport app.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Photo: IATA</small></p><p>For other companies, it's about securing new partnerships with major players in the hopes of finding that scale. Evernym, for example, is working with International Air Transport Association, the airline industry's trade association, on an air travel-specific app called Travel Pass. IATA is working with airlines and local governments to ensure it has the latest requirements to feed the app's rules engine. "It will say, 'Hey, you're flying JFK to Heathrow, you need a PCR test 48 hours in advance before you can land,'" Evernym's Smith said. "And of course, those policy changes are changing every day." Qatar, Emirates and Etihad Airways are all <a href="https://simpleflying.com/qatar-iata-travel-pass-launch/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">expected</a> to start trialing the app in the next few weeks.<br></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>In other instances, the technology will live inside other companies' existing apps; why make someone download yet another app and add another hurdle to compliance? Instead, the experience will be rather like adding a loyalty account or TSA PreCheck number when booking a flight. Airlines and other venues restricting access will require uploading negative test results or vaccine records using one of these services. "You're going to be using the United or the Delta app, and they'll be using our solution or somebody else's, but you will do it via their app," IATA's Travel Pass lead, Alan Murray Hayden, told Protocol.</p><p>The World Health Organization is also working on its own offering, and recently convened the <a href="https://www.who.int/groups/smart-vaccination-certificate-working-group" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Smart Vaccination Certificate Working Group</a>. It's built upon the WHO's nearly century-old notion of the "yellow card" vaccination record, which first was used to document that travelers had been inoculated against diseases such as cholera and yellow fever. Evernym Chief Trust Officer Drummond Reed is part of the working group; he said there should be more to share in the coming months. </p><h3>What could go wrong?</h3><p>It's entirely possible that as more people start to get vaccinated, vaccine passports start to become the norm. You walk to work — still masked, of course — scan a QR code reader in the lobby, and are let in. You go out for lunch, and your loyalty card app has a discount for in-store shoppers verifying they're vaccinated. Your concert ticket is also tied to health pass information that you shared earlier in the day with Ticketmaster. But there are more than a few hurdles ahead of the companies rushing to turn these concepts into realities. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
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</div></p><p>First off, there's the … reality … of the real world that any digital system has to contend with. For anyone without access to the internet, digital vaccine credentials will prove difficult to acquire, though all the companies Protocol spoke with said they would offer a paper-based QR code for people who don't have smartphones. But there's also the issue of having to corral so many different stakeholders into one system, especially when some health care providers are still reliant on antiquated database systems or <a href="https://www.protocol.com/manuals/health-care-revolution/electronic-health-records-after-coronavirus" target="_self">even paper records</a>. "The amount of inefficiency in the system is tremendous," IBM's Piscini said. </p><p>But in the U.S. at least, all vaccinators are required to report COVID-19 vaccines to their state. Piscini said that even for people who just received a paper copy of their vaccine records, systems like IBM's can likely link up to the state's immunization registry and allow people to import records to a vaccine passport.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTY2NTc4My9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYzNzg3MTM2M30.RZtqR7F_FuXK1S24V6jVaqUZ0xOSG-gCwj00xU3fxcM/img.png?width=980" id="b0bd3" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="11d8002d92c0cd6ef39b12fc7b8dccf8" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image">
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">How CommonPass's app shows your records. </small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Image: CommonPass</small></p><p>And states are willing to help out, Pollak said, adding that CommonPass has started working with Hawaii to roll out its offering for would-be tourists. "We're seeing a lot of state governments stepping up and doing a really good job with this," Pollak said. "It would be surprising if there wasn't a coordinated federal effort very soon." That being said, while <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/iceland-covid-passports-canada-1.5904828" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">many countries around</a> the world are committing to working on vaccine passports, getting a straight answer out of the U.S. government on what it's doing has proven difficult. The State Department, which maintains America's traditional, analogue passports, referred me to Homeland Security, which referred me to the White House. The acting director and chief of staff of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, Kei Koizumi, told Protocol that "OSTP can't discuss projects we are working on before they are publicly announced."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="7">
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</div></p><p>But even with systems in place at a federal level, there's still a fair amount of education that needs to happen before people will trust systems like these. "There's a substantial gap in understanding and knowledge of how these systems work, and people's views, in terms of who should get access to which data," Pollak said. </p><p>"We assume there's a Facebook Borg in the sky, monitoring every interaction," Smith said. "The emergence of verifiable credentials breaks down that mental model, where actually it becomes more like decentralized bits of paper that I can carry around, and no one's to know that I've been sharing this information."</p><p>"Our belief is that if you do the right thing, from a platform point of view, protecting your privacy, and giving you control and access to the platform to everybody who wants to use it," Piscini said. "I think those are very basic things that allow the core of the platform that we build to generate adoption by the individuals."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="8">
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</div></p><p>Even with a system that works, there may still be holdouts to this potential new normal. "Some people are saying, 'I will never get vaccinated,'" Piscini said, "and I don't know if the airlines are going to say, 'Well, maybe you will never fly again.'"</p>
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Mike Murphy ( @mcwm) is the director of special projects at Protocol, focusing on the industries being rapidly upended by technology and the companies disrupting incumbents. Previously, Mike was the technology editor at Quartz, where he frequently wrote on robotics, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics.
People
Why the CEO of GoFundMe is calling out Congress on coronavirus
GoFundMe has seen millions of Americans asking for help to put food on the table and pay the bills. Tim Cadogan thinks Congress should help fix that.
"They need help with rent. They need help to get food. They need help with basic bills," GoFundMe CEO Tim Cadogan said. "That's what people need help with to get through this period."
Photo: John Lamparski/Getty Images
February 12, 2021
Anna Kramer is a reporter at Protocol (@ anna_c_kramer), where she helps write and produce Source Code, Protocol's daily newsletter. Prior to joining the team, she covered tech and small business for the San Francisco Chronicle and privacy for Bloomberg Law. She is a recent graduate of Brown University, where she studied International Relations and Arabic and wrote her senior thesis about surveillance tools and technological development in the Middle East.
February 11, 2021
Tim Cadogan started his first day as CEO of GoFundMe about two weeks before the pandemic wrecked the world. He knew he was joining a company that tried to help people make extra money. He didn't know his company would become a lifeline for millions of Americans who couldn't pay their bills or put food on the table.
And so after a year in which millions of people have asked for help from strangers on GoFundMe, and at least $600 million has been raised (that number could be as much as $1 billion or more now, but GoFundMe didn't provide fundraising data past August) just for coronavirus-related financial crises, Cadogan has had enough. On Thursday, he wrote an open letter to Congress calling for a massive federal aid package aimed at addressing people's fundamental needs. In an unusual call for federal action from a tech CEO, Cadogan wrote that GoFundMe should not and can never replace generous Congressional aid for people who are truly struggling.
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</div></p><p>"I don't look at it actually as political. We've got facts, we should share them," Cadogan told Protocol. Given the ongoing negotiations over a new federal aid package, Cadogan said he felt it was his duty to speak out. "There are many millions of people who urgently need help." </p><p>In mid-March, the <a href="https://www.protocol.com/coronavirus-gofundme-tim-cadogan-interview" target="_self">first wave of pleas on GoFundMe</a> focused on help for struggling small businesses, a pattern the site had never witnessed before. Campaigns for PPE came next, and then for everyday financial needs. The wave fell a bit in early fall (perhaps coinciding with the gradual reopening of businesses), and then the scariest trends sharpened as winter rolled in and the pandemic worsened. </p><p>People couldn't pay their bills, and they couldn't put food on the table. Their relatives were dying, and health care costs were escalating. When it became clear the need was overwhelming, acute and not going away anytime soon, the company launched a new fundraising category in October called "Rent, Food, Monthly Bills." In December, even after Congress passed another relief bill, <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2021/02/11/gofundme-ceo-congress-pass-covid-relief-desperate-americans-column/4440425001/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">the number of people asking for help</a> was higher than in May, the peak of the pandemic's first wave.</p><p>"They need help with rent. They need help to get food. They need help with basic bills," Cadogan explained. "It's nothing fancy. It's the basics. That's what people need help with to get through this period." It seems obvious that Congress should help fix that, he said.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>Reckoning with what's technically a pandemic success story for GoFundMe has been at times emotionally overwhelming for Cadogan and his team. GoFundMe has never had more demand, and it's for all the wrong reasons. The product was never meant for this kind of world, according to Cadogan; it was built to help people fund the better times in life, like study abroad trips and vacations. </p><p>"There are the folks on our trust and safety team and happiness team helping these customers directly, and it's a lot to take on," he said. And so they've focused relentlessly on improving their product and hiring new people to meet the demand. Their jobs are not nearly as hard as the lives of the people they are helping, and Cadogan focuses on that context to get himself and his team through each day.</p><p>"Our platform was never meant to be a source of support for basic needs, and it can never be a replacement for robust federal COVID-19 relief that is generous and targeted to help the millions of Americans who are struggling," Cadogan wrote in the open letter.</p>
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Anna Kramer is a reporter at Protocol (@ anna_c_kramer), where she helps write and produce Source Code, Protocol's daily newsletter. Prior to joining the team, she covered tech and small business for the San Francisco Chronicle and privacy for Bloomberg Law. She is a recent graduate of Brown University, where she studied International Relations and Arabic and wrote her senior thesis about surveillance tools and technological development in the Middle East.
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