Breathing Air: July 1, 2018 Snippets
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This week’s theme: building air quality and environmental intelligence tools with for people and the planet, with Aclima’s Series A fundraising. Plus Intercom keeps the updates coming with new product features, a new book, and more.
Earlier this spring, we announced our commitment at Social Capital to helping cities around the world with the hardest urban challenges of the 21st century. Our partnership with 100 Resilient Cities helps us work with city governments to help create urban resiliency around the planet, and our investment into UrbanFootprint helps those governments, along with planners, developers and other stakeholders, to gain a broad understanding of how to manage their cities’ growth, populace and momentum moving forward into the 21st century. So what’s next? Going after the specific, targeted, very difficult problems that cities and regions are facing, where new technology and new solutions are urgently needed.
One of those very hard challenges is air quality. Cities today are cleaner places than they were in the past, thanks to regulation around air pollution as well as newer, more environmentally friendly technologies for transportation, fuel and industry. But there is still a long way to go: emerging megacities around the world, which which are becoming home to the majority of the world’s population over the coming decades, are seeing air quality progressively degrade as they densify. Even here in the United States, air quality varies significantly block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood, in ways that exacerbate inequality and social injustice. Air quality is not just a health and environmental issue; it is a social and urban development issue as well.
Air pollution follows the Drucker Rule: if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Yet air quality in urban environments, to date, has been essentially an unmeasurable problem. Existing public and private air quality monitoring efforts that take measurements in a handful of fixed locations throughout the city do not provide the neighborhood and street-level, block-by-block detail necessary to take action on specific, fixable problems. Consider the problem of leaking natural gas lines from municipal utilities: many of these leaks go undetected for months or years, costing utilities money while contributing to hyperlocal pollution. It’s not fully for a lack of trying, nor for a lack of public policy: since the passing of SB617 and SB398 in California, there are real mechanisms and tailwinds for local governments to improve their ability to tackle hyper-local pollution. What’s critically needed is sensor and data science technology to deliver ongoing, hyper-local air quality monitoring in a format that cities and their inhabitants can actually use, and that are cheap enough to deploy at massive scale.
At Social Capital, we’ve cared about air quality, pollution and climate change for a long time, and over the last few years we’ve been looking hard for a team to partner with in our effort to solve this difficult problem. In a blog post, Social Capital’s Jay Zaveri writes:
“Over two years ago, we began our foray into studying air quality at Social Capital to determine how we could invest in a platform creating a safe future for the air we breathe. We tested devices from over forty companies on a variety of parameters, such as accuracy, reliability, drift, calibration, equivalence to EPA-level reference equipment. Whether it was for particulates, gaseous pollutants, volatile organic compounds or biological pathogens, we found only one company that consistently stood out — Aclima. Aclima and its incredible team of scientists, engineers and product specialists have designed and engineered a hyperlocal air quality platform that gathers near real-time pollutant data, runs models and machine learning on a large-scale temporospatial basis and makes it available as valuable insight to its customers.”
The environmental intelligence platform for the planet | Jay Zaveri, Social Capital
Enter Aclima: the 21st century environmental intelligence platform for people and the planet. Aclima has built low-cost, high precision sensors that measure nitrogen dioxide, nitric oxide, ozone, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, methane, black carbon, particulate matter (PM 2.5 & PM 10) and volatile organic compounds — all air pollutants that affect human air and climate change. Their sensors have been built and tested in partnership with the EPA, verified by third party panels and independent scientific research, and has been presented at major scientific body conferences as the new state of the art in environmental air quality monitoring. These sensors are mounted on fleets of vehicles, and cover ground throughout the city at a block-by-block and parcel-by-parcel level. In total, Aclima today collects close to a billion data points per day from these sensors as well as comparable indoor air quality sensors.
Air pollution isn’t just an environmental and sustainability issue, it’s a social justice problem as well. As we’ve always known to some degree but Aclima’s recent research proves even further, pollution is hyper-local to a degree most of us don’t appreciate. From 2015 through 2017, Aclima captured billions of data points accumulated across a 100,000 miles of roads and intersections throughout three crucial regions in California: the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and the Central Valley. In each of these areas, block-by-block differences in air quality silently and invisibly reinforce divides between rich and poor neighbourhoods, homes and schools. If we want to effectively manage this problem, then the first step is we need to manage it.
Aclima sucks in $24M to scale its air quality mapping platform | Natasha Lomas, Techcrunch
To help accelerate Aclima’s mission to scale environmental intelligence to the entire planet, Social Capital is thrilled to join as an investor and board member as a part of Aclima’s $24 million Series A round. Along with CEO Davida Herzl and her incredible team, other board members and partners include the Schmidt Family Foundation Kapor Capital, and several other participating investors. Aclima’s mission is a natural fit with Social Capital’s; as Jay puts it, “Of all the hard, global problems that remain unsolved, the sustainability of our planet is the most consequential. Aclima has an unparalleled technology platform for air quality that addresses public health concerns, industrial safety and an improved quality of life for urban citizens. We’re thrilled to support Davida and partner with the Aclima team to take on air pollution worldwide.” We’re looking forward to working with Aclima for many years to come towards our shared ambitious mission, and are lucky to have found such an aligned, purposeful partner in Davida and her team.
California passes a new and very tough online privacy law:
Assembly Bill no. 375: The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018
California unanimously passes historic privacy bill | Issie Lapowski, Wired
California just passed the country’s toughest online privacy law | Sean Captain, Fast Company
The World Cup is awesome, as always:
A most beautiful game: the World Cup gets advertising right | M.G. Siegler
The Beautiful vs Commercial Game | Tanay Jaipuria
Value outliers, and outlier valuations:
On knowing the value of everything and the price of nothing | Horace Dediu, Asymco
Crypto Commons | Mike Maples, Jr
Podcast episodes for your listening enjoyment:
Todd Harrison discusses biopharmaceutical investments | Masters in Business with Barry Ritholtz
Legacy Leverage: Ben & James talk about Microsoft’s acquisition of Github and more | Exponent.fm
Interesting learnings in cell biology:
Cells talk and help one another via tiny tube networks | Vivianne Callier, Quanta
Other reading from around the Internet:
Apple is rebuilding Maps from the ground up | Matthew Panzarino, TechCrunch
Publishing content vs delivering it | Tim Raybould
The geography of talent shows a gaining rust belt and sun belt | Richard Florida, CityLab
Worried about Amazon taking over your industry? Here’s what to do | Laura Behrens Wu
VW invests $100M in QuantumScape, a battery-building unicorn | Eric Wesoff, GTM
In this week’s news and notes from the Social Capital family, one company that keeps shipping product after product with no end in sight is Intercom. Ever since the launch of their new Business Messenger Platform two months ago, which introduced a brand new slate for businesses to create their own customer-centric workflows and applications right inside the messenger environment, the product team at Intercom has been hard at work making this new opportunity a reality for their own customers. This week, they’ve launched another piece of that ecosystem: “Outbound Apps”, which can seamlessly embed customer-facing applications right into the conversation:
Outbound Apps by Intercom | Product Hunt
Accompanying the launch, the team has partnered with three friends — Typeform, AskNicely and Wootric — to build three different data-collection and customer-satisfaction outbound apps for users to get started with immediately. Customers can try use cases like sending NPS surveys and gather other kinds of feedback from inside Intercom’s messenger. Over time, we can expect the Intercom ecosystem to flourish with all kinds of new applications in its App Store: common use cases built by the Intercom team themselves, third party applications built by developers looking to help, and internal applications that are custom-built by teams who have unique, specific needs, all flourishing together to help bring a delightful customer service experience to anyone using Intercom, anywhere.
The other big thing that Intercom shipped this week wasn’t a product feature; it was a book. Specifically, a book about growth: where it comes from, how to prime it, how to sustain it, and how to measure and master it.
Announcing our latest book: The Growth Handbook | Adam Risman & Geoffrey Keating, Intercom
Featuring advice and playbooks from seasoned entrepreneurs who have grown all kinds of different products and businesses (both inside and outside Intercom), The Growth Handbook systemically goes through Intercom’s six major focus areas in scaling businesses and sustainably adding customers: acquisition, activation, retention, monetization, testing & optimization, and metrics & management. It also features several key A-ha moments for growth practitioners that come less obviously but are crucially important to finding the growth sweet spot, which include:
- How to pinpoint your product’s magic moment — and ensure users experience it as quickly as possible,
- Why retention is the most powerful growth lever your business can pull,
- The do’s and don’ts of growth experiments and the metrics you’ll need to measure their success, and
- Actionable advice for driving word of mouth from your most influential users.
Like all of Intercom’s books, you can get it in PDF, Kindle, or epub format. Speaking of all of Intercom’s books, did you know they have a whole library of collected advice, for startups at all different stages of their journey tackling all kinds of different problems?
Once you’ve downloaded a copy of Growth, make sure you also check out the other books in their series for startups. It includes Product Management, Customer Support, Customer Engagement, Jobs-to-be-Done, Starting Up, Marketing, Onboarding, and more.
As you may have guessed, Intercom is hiring (they’re always hiring), and would love for you or anyone you know who’s thinking of making a career move to check them out. They’re hiring all around the world, too: Dublin, Ireland; London, UK; Sydney, Australia, Chicago Illinois, and here in San Francisco. So please forward along to anyone who’s looking, and help the world forever fix the “talk-to-actual-humans” problem with some incredible teammates at Intercom HQ.
Have a great week and happy July 4th,
Alex & the team at Social Capital
