Since about the 2008 bailouts there’s been criticism, mostly from people on “the left” that “capitalism is broken” or maybe that capitalism isn’t broken but capitalism is the problem, the cause of all our problems.

I think that pointing at problems and saying that it’s “capitalism’s fault” shows a lack of willingness to think hard about commerce and markets, about how the free market system should work. A fair economy, a free economy takes thought, laws, regulation and enforcement. Lina Khan, the Chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) under President Biden, advanced the concept and experience of freedom for everyday Americans by going after corporations that infringed upon American’s freedom1.

In this post we’ll review the FTC’s actions over the past four years. From breaking up monopolies and blocking predatory mergers to protecting our privacy and standing up for workers' rights, Lina Khan and the FTC has been working for the freedom of ordinary Americans.

The FTC Started Enforcing the Law Again

The first and potentially most lasting way Lina Khan and the FTC made the economy more decentralized was by dusting off the antitrust laws Congress passed to reign in corporate power. Some of these laws though died under Reagan through lack of enforcement. This passive approach to antitrust enforcement begun in the 1980s with the rise of the Chicago School of antitrust thought and continued under Clinton, Bush and Obama presidencies, benefiting the wealthiest Americans and facilitated concentration in many economic sectors from hospitals to airlines to tech companies.

The FTC under Biden brought cases strengthening the three main antitrust laws by winning cases and setting precedent. The laws the FTC enforced are the Sherman Act of 1890, the Clayton Act of 1914 and, most controversially, the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936.

The Sherman Act

The Sherman Act is the first and main law against monopolies. It’s a broad law that outlaws unreasonable restraint of trade or harm to competition. Some “per se” violations of the Sherman Act that clearly harm competition are price fixing, agreements to divide markets and bid rigging

The Sherman Act was passed as a response to powerful trusts running the American economy for private benefit like John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, Andrew Carnegie’s Carnegie Steel and J.P. Morgan’s finance empire. These companies concentrated capital in a shocking new way that endangered Americans’ freedom. Congress acted2 to protect the free market system and break the trusts up.

Here are some precedents the FTC set to strengthen the Sherman Act:

• In the FTC v. Meta case the court recognized that when a monopolist buys a nascent competitor, this should be presumed illegal. This will be especially relevant in the case of determining if Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram and Whatsapp were illegal.

• In FTC v. U.S. Anesthesia Partners established that Section 2 of the Sherman Act was a viable means for challenging serial acquisitions. This was for a case where a private equity firm on Park Avenue, New York City bought up all the anesthesiologist practices in Texas so they could overcharge Texans to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

• FTC v. Amazon showed that Section 2 of the Sherman Act can be applied to digital markets via feedback loops and network effects. This helped shape markets in another monopolization case brought by Epic Games v. Google, which Google lost.

• In FTC v. John Deere the FTC sued to give farmers the right to repair their own tractors, advancing Section 2 of the Sherman Act as a viable means of fighting these unjust right to repair restrictions.

The Clayton Act

The Clayton Act was passed to clarify and patch holes in the Sherman Act, especially with mergers and acquisitions. Since the Sherman Act outlawed cartels that restrain trade, companies began to merge like crazy after the act was passed. Congress followed up by passing the Clayton Act to outlaw mergers that lessen competition and create monopolies. The Clayton Act also bans price discrimination, charging different prices to different people for the same good.

Here are ways Khan and the FTC advanced the Clayton Act:

• The FTC successfully blocked big companies from buying their suppliers or distributors, called vertical mergers.

  • Vertical mergers blocked by the FTC in the past four years:

    • Sued to block Microsoft, maker of the Xbox game platform from buying game producer Activision for $69 billion.

    • Blocked semiconductor supplier Nvidia from buying semiconductor designer Arm for $40 billion, resulting in Arm’s IPO — the biggest one of the year.

    • Blocked loan technology provider Intercontinental Exchange from buying Black Knight for $13.1 billion. If these two mortgage technology firms had combined they would have controlled the Loan Origination System (LOS) that processes half of America’s residential mortgages and the dominant downstream Product Pricing and Eligibility (PPE) that controls 40% of residential American mortgages.

    • Blocked Illumina biotech sequencing platform from buying Grail biotechnology firm for $7.1 billion.

    • Blocked Lockheed Martin, the nation’s dominant defense contractor, from buying the last independent U.S. missile propulsion provider for $4.4 billion. This would have resulted in worse quality, more government expense and longer timelines for key defense projects, not to mention a reduced American ability to produce cruise missiles — which would be very important in the event that America decides to defend Taiwan from Chinese invasion.

    • Stopped Tempur Sealy from buying Mattress Firm for $4 billion which would have combined the nation’s largest mattress supplier with the nation’s largest mattress retailer.

• The FTC reinforced a rule that says if a merger would give one company more than 30% of a market, it's probably illegal. This helped stop mergers like Kroger buying Albertsons, which would have created a huge grocery store chain that could raise prices on consumers.

The Robinson-Patman Act

The Robinson-Patman Act stops companies from charging different prices to different customers unfairly.

The last Robinson-Patman case the FTC brought prior to Lina Kahn’s tenure was against McCormick spices in 2000 but they settled. The last litigated Robinson-Patman case the agency fought for was back in 1988. The Department of Justice (DOJ) hasn’t pursued a Robinson-Patman case since the 1970s.

The FTC brought Robinson-Patman back to life by filing a price discrimination case against a wine and spirits distributor named Southern Glazer's, one of the top 10 largest private companies in the United States and Pepsi. These beverage companies charge small businesses much higher prices than they do to big chain stores. So, for example, they charge a mom-and-pop store $10 for something while charging Walmart $5 for the same item.

Other Large Wins by the FTC

Here are some other wins for the FTC and Americans that believe in a decentralized economy.

• Blocked a $24 billion merger between Kroger and Albertsons which would have been the largest supermarket merger in U.S. history, charging that it would raise grocery prices for millions of Americans and result in lower wages and worse conditions for hundreds of thousands of unionized workers.

• Secured a consent order to allow Amgen’s $27 billion acquisition of Horizon go through, prohibiting Amgen from leveraging its portfolio of blockbuster drugs in ways that could raise prices for Horizon’s thyroid eye disease and chronic refractory gout medication

• Blocked an $8.5 billion fashion house merger between Tapestry and Capri that would have combined Coach, Kate Spade, Stuart Weitzman, Michael Kors, Jimmy Choo and Versace into one company.

Other FTC Accomplishments from 2021 to 2025

The FTC, though small for a government agency and outgunned by monopolies with unlimited resources to fight them had significant wins. These actions make the economy more fair and capitalism work for everyday Americans.

PROTECTED CONSUMERS & MADE MARKETS MORE FAIR

• Banned junk fees.

• Sued Meta for a monopoly in personal social networking, focusing on Facebook’s “buy or bury” strategy and its acquisitions of Instagram and Whatsapp.

• Made a “click to cancel” rule so that it has to be as easy to cancel as it is to sign up (looking at you Planet Fitness)

• Reduced price of inhalers from $500 in some cases to $35 by going improper use of patents by mafia-like pharmaceutical companies.

• Sued and won cases against Amazon, Epic Games, GrubHub, H&R Block, Intuit, Adobe, Vonage and Credit Karma for various tricks and deceptive practices that made consumers pay more. Returned hundreds of millions of dollars to American consumers that were victims of these practices.

• Blocked a pharmaceutical company, Sanofi, that monopolized a drug and charged $750k from buying a competitor that was introducing lower cost care.

• Blocked hospital mergers that would have raised prices, reduced competition, squeezed workers and facilitated further consolidation.

DATA PRIVACY AND CONSUMER PROTECTION

• Banned General Motors from sharing drivers' precise location and driving behavior without their consent. This was the first FTC action for regulating connected cars.

• Banned data brokers from selling consumers’ geolocation data for advertising. This was being used to track people’s visits to reproductive health clinics, places of worship and rehab facilities.

• Banned health technology companies like GoodRx, Premom, Flo, Monument, Cerebral and BetterHelp from selling health information

• Won the largest-ever privacy case judgment against Avast for selling users' browsing data, returning $16.5 million to consumers.

• Prohibited companies from storing people’s personal data longer than necessary and punished companies for data breaches. This included actions against Marriot Hotels, home security companies like Verkada and Ring, a public software company worth billions called Blackbaud, alcohol marketplace Drizly, retailer CafePress and web hosting company GoDaddy. This sent a firm message to corporate America that lax security practices with consumer data results in consequences.

• Fined Twitter for $150 million deceptively using account security data to sell targeted ads. This violated a previous FTC order. Laws are not suggestions3.

PROTECTED CHILDREN

• Strengthened a rule to limit companies’ monetizing children’s data, including corporate surveillance in schools.

• Sued TikTok for collection data on children under 13 years old without their parent’s consent, enforcing the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

• Fined Epic Games for $275 million, the largest COPPA penalty ever, for collecting children’s data without parental consent. This is in addition to the $245 million in refunds Epic had to pay out for tricking users into making unwanted purchases.

• Fined Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft for monetizing data about children without parental consent and violating COPPA.

• Prohibited online educational software Edmodo from collecting more personal data from students than necessary after it illegally used kids’ data for advertising and outsourced COPPA compliance to school districts.

WORKERS' RIGHTS

• Banned noncompete clauses from employment contracts. Noncompete clauses were used to harm janitors, fast food workers, hair dressers, security guards, bartenders, doctors, nurses and Americans working across all sectors of the economy. Banning noncompetes freed hundreds of thousands of Americans to pursue better, higher paying jobs — a win for the free market and the labor movement at the same time.

• Ordered Amazon to pay back $61.7 million in tips that they illegally withheld from 140,000 American delivery drivers.

• Sued Care.com for deceiving caregivers about wages and the availability of jobs on it’s site. Care.com had to pay $8.5 million back to their gig workers that take care of the elderly.

• Fined Arise Virtual Solutions for false promises to virtual customer experience workers, winning $7 million for them.

• Ordered companies like Lyft and Grubhub to be honest about driver earnings

• Took action against Handy for luring workers onto its platform with false earnings claims and then charging undisclosed fines and fees, requiring it to pay $2.95 million in refunds to workers.

CREATED MORE FAIRNESS IN THE HOUSING MARKET

• Took action against Invitation Homes, a landlord for 80,000 American homes for charging junk fees, withholding security deposits and employing unfair4 eviction practices. This action returned $48 million to renters that were harmed.

• Sued Greystar (America’s largest rental apartment operator and my former landlord) for hidden fees. We had to move out of our old place because of required fees that weren’t advertised to us, so I can personally attest to this malfeasance by Greystar.

• Fined TransUnion $15 million for inaccurate eviction records that showed up on people’s background checks, making it more difficult for them to obtain housing or jobs.

PROTECTED SMALL BUSINESSES

• Sued Amazon for being a monopoly. The suit alleges that Amazon stopped rivals and sellers from lowering prices, degraded quality for shoppers, overcharged sellers, stifled innovation, and prevented rivals from competing against Amazon.

• Ordered Mastercard to stop illegally blocking merchants from routing debit card payments through its payment network, raising costs for small businesses.

• Banned false "Made in USA" labels that were hurting American small businesses. This included a $3.7 million fine against Williams-Sonoma for falsely saying certain products were made in America.

• Won $20.3 million judgment against a predatory merchant cash advance operation that cheated small businesses and threatened them with violence.

• Banned fake reviews.

• Reinvigorated enforcement of the Robinson-Patman Act, which prohibits price discrimination that squeezes independent retailers, by suing Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits, the largest U.S. distributor of wine and spirits.

• Sued Pepsi for violating the Robinson-Patman Act by favoring larger retailers when providing promotions and services, leading to increased prices on Pepsi products for customers and rivals

ENFORCED RIGHT TO REPAIR

• Took action against Weber grills, Harley-Davidson motorcycles, and Westinghouse for restricting people’s ability to repair the products they bought from them.

• Allowed McDonalds to fix their own McFlurry machines 🍦

• Sued John Deere for not allowing farmers to fix their own equipment.

REGULATED ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)

• Banned Rite Aid from using discriminatory AI facial recognition technologies that wrongly accused innocent people, including children, of shoplifting.

• Banned AI-enabled impersonation of government agencies and businesses and AI-generated fake reviews, and extended consumer telemarketing protections to AI-generated calls.

• Launched an inquiry and published a report into how partnerships and investments between dominant technology firms and emerging AI providers may risk distorting innovation and undermining competition. The report focused on cloud service providers Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft’s relationships with Artificial Intelligence developers Anthropic and OpenAI.

• Filed briefs with DOJ making clear that hotels and residential landlords engaging in algorithmic collusion5 are breaking the law, and that price fixing by algorithm is still illegal price fixing.

• Cracked down on companies offering an AI tool to create fake customer reviews, a company claiming to sell “AI lawyer” services, and companies making deceptive earnings claims to customers that AI could help them earn money.

• Conducted a public Voice Cloning Challenge to solicit multi-disciplinary solutions to rooting out AI-driven voice cloning that can turbocharge fraud.

• Blocked NVIDIA’s acquisition of Arm, which would have been the largest chip merger in history, protecting innovation in the critical semiconductor industry and leading to Arm’s successful IPO — the largest IPO in two years.

Today the primary way people move between San Francisco and the East Bay is by driving, the BART tube, Uber or Lyft — maybe soon self driving cars, a market Google owned Waymo is poised to conquer.

You can take ferries from Alameda, Richmond and Oakland into San Francisco. Hell you could even take a catamaran ferry from Vallejo which is pretty fast and puts up a big wake.

Routes to and from the East Bay are run by San Francisco Bay Area Water Emergency Transportation Authority (WETA). Which is a very rude name; it implies any time anyone would take a ferry was in an emergency 😂

There are separate, privately owned ferries that will take you to Sausalito, Larkspur, Tiburon, Richmond. All told, the ferries around the Bay, pre pandemic moved 16,000 people on a typical weekday1.

Back in 1913 though 60,000 people rode the ferries on a typical weekday!2 San Francisco’s ferry building makes way more sense. Instead of stepping out onto a busy street there would be a rotunda with cable cars to take you down Market Street. Thank God the freeway overpass that used to go by the ferry building is gone. That was before my time.

Bottom line:

Now, times have changed. With the pandemic less people than ever are going into tech offices at all. There are all sorts of stories about San Francisco empty office buildings. For some reason though, renting an office in San Francisco is still f*cking expensive though. Maybe it’s a horrible time to expand ferry transportation systems.

After all, a few things they did not have in 1913 really help the whole “moving people around” situation. They’re called Bridges and there are some good ones. The two going into San Francisco are the Golden Gate Bridge3 completed in 1937 and the Bay Bridge, completed in 1936. The bridges were funded by bond measures during the Great Depression. Maybe people hated the ferries idk.

Either way, I don’t know what it would take to have four times the ferries going around the Bay. It would be cool though to more easily be able to travel around it. It could unlock new urban centers around ferry stations. It might make going into the office more fun and revitalize downtowns. It could relieve housing pressure because people could live in the East Bay and commute to work by ferry with a bar on it instead of through a tube in the ground or sitting in traffic.

Bottom line ferries are cool. Let’s expand on and improve the systems that run them ⛴️

All hail the Chocolate Oligopoly

An oligopoly is like a monopoly except it’s a sector of the economy ruled by a few corporations instead of one. America has lots of oligopolies, we’re full of them!

If you need insulin there are only three companies to go through — Eli Lilly, Sanofi, and Novo-Nordisk.

If you want to run an internet search it’ll probably be through Google or Microsoft.

If you want to buy something online it’ll probably be from Amazon, Target or Walmart.

If you have a prescription to pickup it’ll be from CVS or Walgreens.

If you go to the grocery store it’ll probably be one owned by Kroger-Albertsons. Though this merger might actually be challenged by the court..

If you have a headache from all this and want to have a beer it’ll probably be made by Anheuser-Busch InBev, which is a Belgian company and it’s basically a rollup of rollups the owns most of the beer brands you see.

There are lots of monopolies and oligopolies in America but today we’re going to talk about one: the chocolate monopolies… and, weirdly, pet food too.

Chocolate in the United States is ruled by an oligopoly of two companies:. Hershey's and Mars. There’s a few other producers like a Swiss company that owns Lindt and Ghirardelli, plus there’s Nestle, which owns Kit Kat, and globally Cadbury is a big player but for the most part if you’re buying chocolate in America, no matter where you live in the country, you’ll be buying from Mars or Hershey’s.

Now if you’re a fancy lawyer at a big law firm that represents Hershey’s or Mars you’re probably going to say there’s lots of competition out there and that two companies controlling half the market isn’t that big of a deal and certainly isn’t illegal. They’ll argue people just want to punish their success. Besides they’ll say, anyone can start their own chocolate company and compete, that’s what makes America great.

Let’s dig into those claims, first we can look at starting our own chocolate company from an unlikely source: Mr. Beast.

Can’t anybody just start your own chocolate company?

Mr. Beast has 166 million subscribers on YouTube and recently started his own chocolate company called Feastables for his rabid fans. On the surface this seems to be how the American economy is supposed to work. If there are dominant, complacent companies ruling an industry new, innovative companies can build their own products and out compete. Producers are free to produce and the consumers benefit from corporate competition. After-all, there are tons of resources on the internet about starting a new business and I’m sure there are tons of videos about how to make chocolate. Mr. Beast started a new chocolate company to attack entrenched players, end of story. I can already hear the Libertarians: let the free market do its thing, get the government out of the way!

In a recent interview he acknowledged the dominance of Hershey’s and Mars and two ways they exercise their power: through buying upstart competitors and exclusive contracts for them to control shelf space.

Hershey’s and Mars control distribution so even if someone raises plenty of capital and makes a better product they won’t be able to get it in front of consumers. I’m sure part of this has to do with the dominance of firms like Target and Wal-Mart and the deals they strike with Hershey’s and Mars. Even getting into these big stores can be a challenge. They demand massive scale and have systems like Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) for managing inventory where you have to buy or build expensive software. For context, this is what a request for chocolate might look like coming from Target to your chocolate business:

If you don’t deliver on that request you could be ruined. Or perhaps even if you do deliver the terms could be so unfavorable that if your chocolate doesn’t sell you’d be ruined anyways. One coffee company was grifted by a multi-billion dollar distributor landing themselves in $200,000 in debt while the nation-wide retailer walked away risk free.

If anything lawyers or advocates for Hershey’s and Mars might claim that their power is necessary to counterbalance the power of big retailers like Target and Wal-Mart! The solution to big, powerful, dominant corporations though is not more big powerful dominant corporations.

Next let’s look at how powerful these chocolate companies really are..

Mars, Incorporated

Mars, Incorporated is, somewhat surprisingly a private company. It’s one of the largest private companies in America and the Mars family, worth $94 billion, is the country's third-wealthiest family after the Waltons and the Kochs. There are clear problems for democracy and society with this kind of wealth concentration. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis summarized it best in 1941:

This wealth inequality is bad for society and un-democratic in the sense that people with this much money can pressure, co-opt and bribe democratically elected politicians. It’s also just plain not decent, but let’s table all that for a minute and look at how Mars, Incorporates operates.

The current incarnation of Mars, Incorporated was started by Franklin Clarence Mars in 1920 in Minneapolis after a failed attempt to launch in Tacoma, Washington in 1911. They launched Milky Way in 1923. They moved the headquarters to Chicago and launched Snickers in 1930 and in 1932 launched the 3 Musketeers bar. Up until about the 1960s chocolate production in the United States was largely regional. As current chairwoman of the FTC Lina Khan explains in her 2013 article Why So Little Candy Variety? Blame the Chocolate Oligopoly:

Candy was a sprawling and diverse industry at that time, run by confectionery tinkerers who tirelessly stirred and tweaked to dish up new sweets. To distinguish their creations, producers pegged treats to national sports stars, disgraced politicians, or even the local preacher. There was the Winning Lindy bar for Charles Lindbergh, the Dr. IQ bar for a ’30s radio quiz show, and the Oh Henry! bar named after the guy who moved barrels of corn syrup at one manufacturer’s candy plant.

Within the past 25 years though Mars, Incorporated has gotten bigger, more powerful and bought up rivals. Independent candy producers like the Idaho Candy Company are a dying breed. Their dominance goes well beyond candy too.

Pet food brands Mars, Incorporated owns

Mars’ dominance in candy has enabled them to dominate pet food as well. The industry is controlled by them and Nestle.

Mars owns popular pet food brands like Pedigree, which it started, and Iams which it bought from Proctor and Gamble in 2014 for $2.9 billion in cash. Mars bought Doane Petcare Company, a leading dog food supplier for Wal-Mart for hundreds of millions of dollars back in 2006 and in 2002 Mars bought Royal Canin a French dogfood company for 1.5 billion Euros. Mars has spent billions buying up competitors and consolidating the industry. Their dominance comes largely from this financial engineering instead of out competing with quality products.

In addition to dominating pet food Mars has expanded into other pet adjacent industries like veterinary care as well.

Veterinary and pet diagnostic services Mars, Incorporated owns

Mars is a dominant player in the veterinary space, forcing out and co-opting smaller practices in that industry.

In 2007 Mars bought Banfield Pet Hospital that runs over 1,000 clinics within PetSmart stores.

In 2015 Mars bought BluePearl Veterinary Partners making Mars, according to their own press release, “the largest pet nutrition and veterinary care provider in the world”.

In 2017 Mars expanded further buying VCA Animal Hospitals paid $9.1 Billion to acquire .

Mars acquired Wrigley for $23 billion in 2008. The resulting division of Mars is Mars Wrigley. Here are the candy brands Mars Wrigley owns:

In November 2020, Mars acquired full ownership of snack food company Kind North America which made Kind bars for $5 billion.^[38]

In December 2022, it was announced Mars had acquired the West Valley City-headquartered whole-fruit snacking brand, Trü Frü.

Mars acquired a lot of pet care companies. Mars owns several pet-food brands, including Iams, Pedigree and Royal Canin

Mars owns over 800 petcare hospitals and makes 20% of its revenue from pet-related business lines. Half of Mars' 140,000 employees work for its veterinary business. It makes more revenue than Cocoa Cola.

FTC action

Regulatory Muzzle: Mars' pet business might be even bigger if it weren't for scrutiny from the US Federal Trade Commission. Mars agreed to divest 12 veterinary clinics to three different rival pet services companies after the FTC said its VCA acquisition was an antitrust threat. Earlier this month, the FTC also required veterinary chain JAB Consumer Partners to divest clinics in order to complete an acquisition. When it comes to petcare, the FTC apparently is more territorial than a rottweiler.

Hershey Co

The largest shareholders in Hershey’s are Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street. Mars is one of the largest privately held companies in the world with $45 billion in annual sales; that’s even more than the Coco-Cola company’s $38 billion in annual sales.

Recently I’ve pulled some new data about US-based startups into Employbl and would like to share some insights with you.

Series A, B and C funding

First let’s look at Series A, Series B and Series C funding for US based companies over the past 12 months.

• According to our data 1,323 unique companies raised a Series A, Series B or Series C round over the past 12 months. In the previous period 1,718 unique companies raised one of those rounds, so a 23% decrease in the number of companies funded. However, it’s difficult to get “real time” up to date data on who has been funded over the past three to six months because companies sometimes hold off on announcing funding rounds and it takes time for our web scrapers to catch up, so take this with a grain of salt.

• For our data there were:

  • 827 unique Series A funding rounds for a total of $14.84 billion raised.

  • 426 unique Series B funding rounds for a total of $18.3 billion raised.

  • 182 unique Series C funding rounds for a total of $13 billion raised.

• This highlights that over the past year only about one fifth of companies that raised a Series A went on to raise a Series C. The dollar amount going to Series A companies as later stage Series C companies was similar though.

• San Francisco far and away took the lions share of fundraising, followed by New York, Boston and Los Angeles.

California makes a strong showing in this graphic. It’s possible that since I’m based in California and know lots of Bay Area companies that CA companies are over represented in the Employbl database. If you’d like to add or promote your US-based tech company on Employbl you can do so here.

Even if we extend the data back to 2020 though the order of the cities does not change. Austin makes a very strong showing, as does Palo Alto, especially given their much smaller population sizes. Seattle actually had fewer early stage startup dollars invested in than San Diego. That’s a surprising result I may need to investigate more. It could be that Seattle is home to bigger, established tech companies and not so much startups. Or maybe I’m not pulling in enough data about Seattle tech companies.

San Francisco startups

Since I live in San Francisco, and many of you are in the Bay Area let’s dive into some of the notable San Francisco companies that raised Series A, B and C rounds within the past 12 months.

Note if you’d like to explore these through the Employbl UI you can do so through the “Company Directory” page: https://www.employbl.com/companies?raise_rounds=Series+A&page=1&hq_location=San+Francisco%2C+CA

Without further ado here are SF startups that have raised money in the past year. If I missed any please reply and let me know!

That’s all for now! I’ve had fun playing with this Datawrapper tool and hope to use it more in the future. If there’s any data you’re curious about shoot me a reply!

From punchcards to computers

In the 1950s IBM, known colloquially as “Big Blue” owned, rented and produced the tabular punchcard business machines that were the state of the art of the American computer industry. IBM was the most important name in technology and had cornered the lucrative punchcard market. During World War II breaking the German code that required two million punchcards per week. By the 1950s data processing was indispensable to the military and most sizable American corporations. Punchcards were big business and IBM didn’t have much motivation to shake up this lucrative market.

However, scientists and engineers funded by the United States Army built the world’s first programmable electric computer in 1945, called ENIAC, that would soon make IBM’s whole manual tabular punchcard business obsolete. IBM by that point was already a bully on the scene, pushing out competitors, bundling products and squeezing suppliers. They also played both sides in World War II, selling punchcard software to the Nazis and the American military2. IBM wielded enormous political power through decades of lobbying connections, military contracts and bribes.

In the face of the technological shift that was electronic computing and the monopoly power of IBM the federal government stepped in and filed a lawsuit to break up the company in 1952. They won the case by 1956. At the time of the suit Graham Morison, head of the Truman Antitrust Division said:

Back then, as they do today, government officials saw that new technologies can bring new opportunities for enterprising, free individuals or the new technologies can further cement the dominance of entrenched players, growing the power of financial engineers and monopolists.

The lawsuits of the 1950s forced IBM to license some of its patents and share its knowledge, opening up the electronics field and forcing IBM begrudgingly away from the punchcard industry and full on into electronic computers.

The unbundling of software from hardware

IBM used it’s resources to build a thriving electronics hardware business through the 1960s. Technological advancements in electronics hardware advanced a lot faster and was more expensive than the software that ran on those computers. IBM bundled its catalog of software products for free or far below cost with the purchase of IBM hardware. This made it nearly impossible for new or more sophisticated firms to compete because they had to compete with one of the largest companies on earth in both hardware and software. It wasn’t possible. No corporate buyer ever got fired for buying from IBM.

In 1969 the federal government stepped in again, alleging that IBM violated Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act by monopolizing the general-purpose electronic digital computer system market, specifically monopolizing business computing.

The government filed an antitrust suit against the company in January 1969. In anticipation of and as a direct result of the government’s lawsuit IBM announced in June 1969 that soon they would be unbundling computer hardware from computer software. By the next month in 1969 they announced when the unbundling would take effect:

The Beginning of the Unix Epoch

If you’re not a computer programmer January 1, 1970 probably has no meaning to you. If you write code for a living though it probably looks familiar — it’s the unix epoch. If you head right now into the developer console of the web browser you’re reading this article on and paste in Date.now() you’ll get a seemingly random number that is the amount of milliseconds between you and January 1st, 1970.

The unix epoch was cobbled together and decided on by a bunch of hackers in the 70s, but as Josh Davis in convincingly argues this date was the beginning of the American software industry:

“While historically the Unix epoch is an arbitrary date, it just so happens to coincide with a momentous date for the computing industry. It’s an incredible coincidence given the importance the date had on the software industry. It's especially meaningful for software engineers everywhere because it was the date that the market and industry were legitimized.”

With unbundling, instead of IBM giving away computer software for free with the computer machine they put a price on the software. Software became a standalone product. A price created a market for software. People could build businesses selling software after the unbundling. Those businesses wouldn’t have been viable before the unbundling because software was free anytime you bought an IBM machine.

Unbundling of software from hardware was a crucial development for the American technology space, spurred on by government antitrust action3. The government’s lawsuit against IBM set the stage for the personal computer revolution of the 80s and 90s, releasing pent up innovation and ultimately driving crucial innovation in both computer hardware and computer software.

The Personal Computer Revolution

One of the most fascinating chapters for me while reading Malcom Gladwell’s book Outliers was the chapter on the dawn of the personal computer age. Gladwell asserts that the personal computer revolution began in January 1975 when Popular Electronics announced the Altair 8800: the first home minicomputer that rivaled commercial models was brought to market.

Gladwell asserts that those best positioned to take advantage of this technological advancement were people in a certain age range. If you were smart with computers but out of college you probably had a job at IBM building multimillion dollar mainframes. If you were in high school you’d be too young to be taken seriously and to take advantage of the market shift. You’d have to be about 21 or 22 on 1975, so born around 1954 or 1955. Gladwell then goes on to list when the titans of the personal computer industry were born:

• Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, born 1955

• Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, born 1953

• Steve Ballmer, early Microsoft employee and later CEO, born 1956

• Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, born 1955

• Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, born 1954

• Scott McNealy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, born 1954

• Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and founder of Khosla Ventures, born 1954

• Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, born 1955

• Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the internet, born 1955

• Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, born 1955

The point here from Gladwell is that instead of looking too closely at the successful people themselves we should look at the world that surrounds successful people.

In the case of people who were successful with the personal computer revolution they were the perfect age to benefit from the unbundling of software from hardware and the development of the personal computer.

Microsoft’s Monopoly in the 80s and 90s

Microsoft was founded in 19754 and Gate’s Mom was on the national board for United Way with IBM’s CEO at the time5. Microsoft won the contract with IBM to build their software, DOS. This was something IBM could not do themselves because of the antitrust lawsuit they were currently fighting. IBM partnered with Microsoft, allowing them in to the market. The shift from advances in hardware to advances in software and ruthless business practices propelled Microsoft forward. They were ruled a monopoly in their own right by 2001 though the decision and breakup was neutered by the Bush administration’s Justice department.

Microsoft owned the dominant operating system, Windows, and the dominant browser, Internet Explorer, but because of antitrust scrutiny they had to forfeit the search bar to companies like Yahoo! and Google. Despite Bill Gates’ warnings about charging a vig for every transaction on the internet they forfeited that to Amazon.

Government action especially at technological inflection points drives innovation

Government action and intervention has defined and developed the American technology industry. Without the government’s case against IBM hardware and software would never have been unbundled. The government’s intervention created a new software industry, new competition, new companies and new freedoms for the rest of us. When the software industry became consolidated under Microsoft the government took action again, attempting to break up the company. That antitrust suit lead to the ascent of today’s internet companies Google and Amazon. Internet companies themselves have consolidated the market as we stare into a new AI revolution. The government is again taking action to create new markets and release innovation through their antitrust cases against Google for monopolizing search and Amazon for unfair business practices.

I hope this has been some helpful history about antitrust and the American computer industry! Don’t forget to like and subscribe ;)

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AT&T was the sole provider of telephone services in the United States until the government required that AT&T be broken up into “baby bell” systems. If you live in San Francisco you may remember the Giants stadium being called “Pac Bell” park, short for Pacific Bell company one of the baby bells for California and Nevada. Via financial engineering and government regulators being asleep at the wheel all the baby bells were able to be gobbled back up again into the AT&T conglomerate. Hence the renaming of PacBell Park to AT&T Park which is now Oracle Park. If you’re really interested in the telephone systems you can read about the more recent fiasco of the T-Mobile and Sprint merger in the below article:

BIG by Matt Stoller

How Trump Increased Your Cell Phone Bill

Welcome to BIG, a newsletter on the politics of monopoly power. If you’d like to sign up to receive issues over email, you can do so here. Today I’m writing about how the Trump administration, in allowing a merger between T-Mobile and Sprint, ended up causing inflation in cell phone prices. Fortunately, because of some savvy class action lawyers and usef…

Read more

4 years ago · 65 likes · 10 comments · Matt Stoller

The biggest story happening right now in the effort to decentralize the American economy is the antitrust trial against Google: United States v. Google LLC. If you’re not familiar with Google it’s a multibillion dollar company that has monopolized the internet search and advertising markets through buying competitors, rigging online and mobile advertising markets and bribing other players like Apple and Facebook. The core of the government’s complaint, brought via the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) under the wise leadership of Commissioner Lina Khan, is that Google’s conduct to win their monopoly has been anticompetitive to the point of violating Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act — a landmark piece of legislation from 1890 that outlaws monopolistic business practices.

There are a few reasons why this case is important…

Concentrated industries are undemocratic

Google and its parent company Alphabet conservatively spent $13 million on lobbying the government last year.

When industries are concentrated in the hands of a few players, it’s easier for firms to collude and influence government in undemocratic ways. When markets are decentralized it’s harder for a small group of businesses to hijack democratic governance. We can see this through a hypothetical:

Let’s say one hundred firms shared control of an industry. Those firms have to compete with each other for market share (a word banned internally at Google). If they wanted to influence government through lobbying they’d have to get ninety nine other firms onboard to pool resources, coordinate and act. It’s too much for one firm with 1/100th of the market to influence the federal government so they’d need to act together. Coordinating one hundred companies for a common lobbying vision is next to impossible. Firms that didn’t spend time and money on lobbying the government could focus on making better products and take market share from the companies trying to influence elected officials.

The same dynamic does not play out in concentrated industries like web search where there are two or three companies controlling the industry. Coordinating between a few companies is trivially easy. Additionally since competition in the industry is not as fierce these players with massive monopoly-style profits can pour money into lobbying, hiring ex-government officials to influence current government officials. Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft coordinate their influence on government through the Internet Association, common law firms they hire and corporate lobbyists they use.

There’s also the issue how concentrated industries breed fascist relations between business and the state. Economic power through monopolized control of industry breeds profits and political power. If that power gets to be too great the state and corporations merge. Either the government can control the company as in disastrous socialism or the corporation can control the government as in authoritarian fascism. The beauty of the American system is the middle way where economic power and industry is decentralized, breeding greater freedom and democratic governance. Antitrust is the ultimate check on corporate power and should be taken seriously in regards to our democratic system of governance!

Google’s abuses

The Sherman Antitrust Act distinguishes between fair and unfair competition. The FTC lays out a few ways in which Google’s conduct has been anticompetitive:

• Acquiring competitors: I’ve written before about how companies shouldn’t be able to buy their competitors. The FTC complaint is a searing inditement of Google’s business model, in it they state:

  Google’s plan has been simple but effective: (1) neutralize or eliminate ad tech competitors, actual or potential, through a series of acquisitions; and (2) wield its dominance across digital advertising markets to force more publishers and advertisers to use its products while disrupting their ability to use competing products effectively.

Specifically the acquisition of competitors like AdMeld, DoubleClick and AdMob come under heavy scrutiny in the FTC complaint.

• Distorting Auction Competition: Google rigged ad markets in its favor through an initiative called Project Bernanke, where it manipulated the advertising auction win rates in its own favor since 2013.

• Auction Manipulation: Google insulated itself from competition through a quid pro quo arrangement with Facebook called Jedi Blue that halted the development of new technologies and ad auction houses.

• Forcing adoption of Google’s tools: I haven’t read the full complaint yet but essentially the issue is locking in publishers to using Google products.

The trial is ongoing. I’ll be sharing updates as they emerge, I also highly recommend Matt Stoller’s newsletter as they’re going to be reporting directly from the courtroom.

Google has near infinite money and political clout to spend on this case that could result in them being broken up into separate companies. It’s still early days but this trial has the potential to decentralize the American technology economy and set precedent for future breakups of Amazon and Apple. 🚀

New & Updated Pages on Employbl

In addition to working, raising kids and nerding out about about the Alphabet antitrust case I’ve been researching and writing a bit about AI companies.

To start I published a massive list of companies with .ai domain names and putting together some other resources to be shared in a future newsletter.

Also, launching soon will be the new employer onboarding experience on Employbl. If you’re interested in promoting your tech company or startup through the site reply to this email or fill out this form.

That’s all for now! Stay classy out there.

P.S.

I recently bought a ticket to this conference for software developers in San Francisco in November. If you’re going too holler at me!

Decentralized Economy News

These are links of things happening in the American economy to decentralize economic power.

• The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) which is in charge or reviewing and challenging mega-mergers is updating it’s requirements so that companies have to provide basic info when they file to acquire another business. The basic info includes things like why they’re trying to acquire the company, what other companies they’ve acquired and current business relationships. The FTC is an understaffed agency that has to review thousands of mergers each year as financiers buy up and consolidate our economy. This change has Wall Street investment bankers that make their money on mergers & acquisitions (M&A) freaking out and that’s a good thing. Read more

• The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is cracking down on Private Equity (PE) middlemen. Private Equity companies take money from insurance companies, institutional funds, wealthy people and pensions to invest in buying things outside of the stock market… i.e. equities that are private. Private. Equity. Get it? (That hadn’t clicked for me for a long time..) There are a lot of stories about PE firms buying up private companies like hospitals or cybersecurity companies like SolarWinds then firing everyone or degrading the quality. Also when a PE fund buys a company the company assumes the debt, not the PE firm, which I’ve never understood. Anyway the economic model is a large part of why we can’t have nice things like an American manufacturing sector or Toy R’ Us. The SEC is putting new rules on the investment side, mandating the PE firms disclose their fees and provide independent valuations of their portfolio companies to investors. The rules are aimed at increasing transparency and driving down fees. Read more.

• Meta is trying to say that because they paid $5 billion for breaking the law in 2020 they don’t have to follow the law in the future or respect the FTC administrative order to stop monetizing the personal data of minors. Monopolies use their excess profits to buy lobbyists, lawyers and politicians. I’m glad Lina Khan at the FTC is standing up to them. Read more.

• There’s a West Coast 🦀 crab 🦀 monopoly run by Pacific Seafood but small fisherman are fighting back to decentralize economic power. Read more

• It’s hard to make a living in font design since one company Monotype, which acquired MyFonts controls most of the market. They take a whopping 50% of whatever independent font designers can sell their fonts for. These winner-take-all marketplaces that buy up competitors need to be regulated. If every font looks the same to you this is one reason why. Read more.

• The T-Mobile CEO told Congress that if they bought Sprint it would add thousands of jobs. Instead they’re firing tens of thousands — from 81,000 employees down to 66,000 employees. When executives talk to politicians they promise the moon then turn around and do whatever they want. There should be penalties. Read more.

• Amazon might be buying ESPN from Disney. Big companies collude. We should break them up. Read more.

• Google and Nvidia are pumping money into AI startups like Hugging Face that will be big customers for them. There’s precedent of people going to prison for fooling Wall St analysts with inflated revenue numbers. At a $4.5 billion valuation there could be something fishy going on here. 🤖 Read more.

Recent Funding rounds

These are recent private market funding rounds of newish startups in the American tech scene.

• Thunderbirds.me out of Orlando, Florida raised a $4 million dollar seed round for Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), Generative AI, NLP, LLM framework. They get the prize for the most buzzwords. Gotta work in blockchain and Web3 somehow 😜

• Rootly out of San Francisco raised a $12 million Series A for the developer tool incident management platform.

• Treehouse AI electric vehicle charging startup out of Detroit, Michigan raised a $10 million Series A.

• Daybreak Health raised $13 million Series B from Union Square Ventures, Y Combinator and Lightspeed Venture Partners to help teens connect with therapists. I think some Venture Capitalists are definitely going to be sending their kids to therapy with this app. Won’t be long before school districts are buying in.

• Axena Health out of Massachusetts raised $26 million to help women with pelvic floor disorders.

And many more.. I’m working on building more functionality for you to explore the data yourself. For now head over to the funding rounds page on Employbl.

Startup Job Openings

Lots of startups hiring now! If you’re looking for a new job head on over to the Jobs page to view active, open roles. Please reply with what type of job you’re looking for and I’ll do my best to help.

New & Updated Pages on Employbl

These are some updates & improvements we've made to the Employbl website.

• Added a new page featuring Venture Capital Firms. You can click on the name of each VC to learn more about the firm and see the portfolio companies. I’d like to display recent investments the firm has made on those pages too 📈

• Discover companies that use various tech stacks like AWS, Python, Next.js or Laravel. Very excited about this as it’s important for job seekers to be able to target companies that use the same tools as they do.

• Working on building a new employer onboarding flow. If you’d like to feature your tech company or startup with a badass, premium profile on Employbl let me know! We’re working on the signup process now :)

I’ve recently updated the Employbl company database to include the latest funding rounds for many technology companies. There’s too much info to share in a single post but I put together some highlights grouped by industry.

☀️ Renewable energy companies that have raised money recently

• Silicon Ranch - Nashville, TN - raised $375 million from Private Equity investors to build solar farms.

• Palmetto - Charleston, SC - solar company that raised $150 million from Private Equity recently, they were backed early on by Social Capital and Greycroft.

• Form Energy - Somerville, MA - energy storage company, raised $105 million Grant funding round last month.

• Our Next Energy - Novi, MI - energy storage company… that also uses AI, $300 million Series B funding round raised at the beginning of 2023.

• BlocPower - New York, NY - smart energy efficient buildings. Raised $24 million Series B from Kapor Capital. a16z got in at the pre seed stage. Salesforce is also an investor. The founder is black and the company name kind of sound like black power which is kind of cool ✊🏾

• Pristine Sun - San Francisco, CA - solar energy equipment supplier. They raised $250 million from Private Equity in February 2023.

• Hecate Energy - Chicago, IL - develops solar and wind energy projects. They raised $550 million in debt this year.

• Industrial Sun - Austin, TX - solar and renewable energy company founded in 2021. They raised a $90 million Series A this year.

🔐 Security companies that have raised money recently

• Netskope - Santa Clara, CA - raised $400 million convertible note to build their software computer security platform. Company was founded in 2012 and has raised over $1.4 billion to date.

• Snyk - Boston, MA - builds security software. They raised $25 million from ServiceNow at the beginning of the year and have raised over $1 billion to date.

• Vannevar Labs - Palo Alto, CA - software security for the defense industry. They raised a $75 million Series B round this year.

🧪 BioTech companies that have raised money recently

• Asimov - Boston, MA - “An integrated suite of cells, genes, and software to power advanced genetic design.” They raised $175 million Series B Andreessen Horowitz and others.

• Colossal Biosciences - Dallas, TX - bioscience and genetic engineering. They raised $150 million Series B funding round.

💻 SaaS companies that have raised money recently

• Chronosphere - New York, NY - cloud monitoring platform. Raised $115 million Series C funding round from Founders Fund + Greylock and more.

• Craft.co - San Francisco, CA - competitior to Employbl. They share company data too and have raised a $32 million Series B this year.

• Jump - Los Angeles, CA - technology platform for sports fans and sports teams. They raised a $30 million Series A.

💸 Investment companies that have raised money recently

These are companies that invest in other companies that have raised money to invest in companies.

• Generate Capital - San Francisco, CA - very into sustainability. Their homepage says “let’s rebuild the world together”. They raised $923 million from Private Equity at the beginning of this year.

• Accial Capital - Cambridge, MA - impact focused investor that raised $35 million from U.S. International Development Finance and others.

And many more…

• Capella Space

• Flowcarbon

• Angle Health

• Paytient

• Pattern Bioscience

• Precision Neuroscience

• Freeform

• Oxygen

• Datacubed Health

• Masttro

• Firsthand

• Spartan Radar

• Atomic AI

• OXOS Medical

• True Anomaly

• Chord

• GrainChain

• Fortem Technologies

• Gradient

• EarthOptics

• Cognosos

• Revelstoke

• Strata Identity

• Liteboxer

• Doorstead

• Solarcycle

• StayTuned

• Living Carbon

• Capacity Bio

• Slingshot Biosciences

• Spine BioPharma

• Mantra Bio

• Butlr

• ZeroCater

• Numerai

• Tilia

• Plai Labs

If any of these look interesting feel free to check them out on the Employbl company search page: https://www.employbl.com/companies

If you found this post informative or helpful let me know and I’ll share more coverage like this.

Recently I read through America’s Future is at Sea inThe Atlantic written by a retired Navy Captain. The gist of the article is that the American economy we know and love is wholly dependent on America’s command and control of the world’s oceans. Chain stores like WalMart, Target and predatory Dollar stores wouldn’t be able to run their businesses without discounted imports from around the globe that require maritime commerce secured by the U.S. Navy. The author draws on history and modern experience to argue America is a sea power state and always has been.

A different article came out in the New York Times stating the war in Ukraine has showed a “worrisome lack of production capacity in the United States” where the U.S. will run out of crucial supplies like long-range anti-ship missiles within about a week if a large scale war breaks out with China.

As if to respond Xi Jinping announced he’s preparing China for war with the United States. In this newsletter I’d like to look at how prepared America is for a two front war with China and Russia and what some of the current bottlenecks are.

Some issues are:

• Economic concentration of foreign owned global shippers that the American economy relies on.

• America’s lack of productive capacity, especially in shipbuilding.

• Concentration within the defense industry.

A lot of people think a war with China will never happen because of how intertwined our economies are. That’s definitely a possibility but I invite you to consider that a non-nuclear war with China is also possible. A Chinese invasion of Taiwan could start a global war. With America’s globalized economy dependent on Asia and strong alliances with Japan, South Korea and Australia isolationism, never much of an American strong suit would be difficult to maintain. As one of the Joint Chiefs of Staff recently said though, war with China and Russia is not inevitable.

The General argues, the United States must remain the most powerful nation on Earth if peace is to continue between the U.S., China and Russia. Elbridge Colby elaborates on this point and the strategy of deterrence more on his Twitter account and in his book Strategy of Denial. The gist of the argument is that there’s a moral imperative to be strong in order to avoid war.

Without further ado let’s get into it..

Concentration in global container shipping

The existing economic order has warped in recent decades to rely on more and more on the U.S. Navy’s protection of a few major shipping companies. Shipping firms have merged into larger and larger conglomerates to the point where nine non-American container shipping companies control 82% of global container shipping. These ships are protected directly and indirectly by the U.S. Navy; the only American shipping company that makes the list of top thirty is Matson, coming in with 29 ships and 0.3% of global market share. Further concentrating the market is that the largest nine container shipping companies work together in massive “alliances”, removing the benefits from competition. The three major shipping alliances rely on large, slow ships that can only unload at specific ports equipped with deep water and equipment to handle the size. This concentration has led to diseconomies of scale, ships too big to fit through canals and shocks to the supply chain.

Below is the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index, a commonly accepted measure of market concentration for the container shipping industry over a twenty year period.

Though we as Americans depend on free seas our sea-based supply chains are concentrated in the hands of a few foreign conglomerates that operate large, slow ships that can only dock in certain ports leading to backup and a brittle supply chains. Large ships can lead to some efficiencies at the cost of resiliency. As ships have gotten bigger and bigger with the shipping industry getting more concentrated diseconomies of scale have kicked in.

America isn’t as capable of building as it used to be

When I was a kid I remember going to the Bay Model in Sausalito and seeing a video of how the Liberty Ships were built in Sausalito. As one ship was launching a keel for the new ship would be swinging in. New ships were built in 46 days and thousands were launched. This maritime industrial base stands in stark contrast to the tourist traps and fancy restaurants that make up Sausalito’s economic base today.

Even by the late 1970’s American shipbuilders produced more than 1 million gross tons of merchant ships. By 2005, that number had fallen to 300,000 and today it’s restricted to some government ships that travel between U.S. ports.

The size of the American Navy has been shrinking. In the 1960s America had about 1,000 active warships and then began to decline. By 1980 it dropped to about 520 ships until President Reagan went on a building spree, enlarging the Navy up to 590 ships to control global waters. Today the Navy only has 251 active ships.

Meanwhile the secretary of the Navy remarked recently that China has a larger Navy, greater ship building capacity and “consistently attempts to violate the maritime sovereignty and economic well-being of other nations”. Russia has modernized it’s nuclear submarine fleet in recent years and is able to patrol the Pacific and Atlantic with the dangerous Yasen class submarine. China and Russia are both extending their territorial claims into international waters. A Chinese invasion of Taiwan would accelerate this trend, block major shipping channels to Japan and Korea plus give unfettered access to deep waters off Taiwan’s east coast.

Concentration within the defense industrial base

Throughout the American military there’s been a concentration of firms bidding on military projects. This graph from 2003 shows the scale of the concentration that’s happened. Lockheed, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics are hardly even companies they’re mergers of mergers of mergers.

This merger boom was a deliberate choice under the Clinton administration, as Captain Jerry Hendrix notes in The Atlantic article:

In 1993, Deputy Secretary of Defense William Perry invited the executives of leading defense contractors to a dinner in Washington—a meal that would enter national-security lore as the “Last Supper.” Perry spelled out projected cuts in defense spending. His message was clear: If the American defense industrial base was going to survive, then mergers would be required. Soon after, the Northrop Corporation acquired the Grumman Corporation to form Northrop Grumman. The Lockheed Corporation and Martin Marietta became Lockheed Martin. A few years later, Boeing combined with McDonnell Douglas, itself the product of a previous merger. Among the shipbuilders, General Dynamics, which manufactures submarines through its Electric Boat subsidiary, bought Bath Iron Works, a naval shipyard, and the National Steel and Shipbuilding Company.

These mergers reduced American industrial capacity and made the American defense system less resilient to shocks. When there are only five suppliers to the military if one or more of those companies are hacked or compromised the whole system is at risk.

Fortunately, some politicians recognize the problems with too much concentration in the American military supply chain. Here’s Senator Elizabeth Warren calling for a return to a more decentralized procurement process:

Clearly there’s a political element here to fix the military’s procurement process and political will to build a military capable of defending our country from authoritarian regimes. There are lots of private defense contractors and defense companies working everyday to keep the military equipped and Americans safe. You can browse lists of these companies for free by clicking the links below.

List of American defense tech companies

At Employbl my co-founder and I are building a huge open dataset of tech companies and startups. We’ve compiled a list here of Defense Tech Companies that are building tech solutions for the Department of Defense and American military.

List of top 30 American defense tech companies

List of American military contractors

For a more extensive list we’ve also been creating a company collection of American military contractors. This builds off preexisting public lists of the largest U.S. defense contractors from Wikipedia, Bloomberg and Defense & Security Monitor. There are hundreds more military contractors that we may add as time goes on but the top ones are there.

List of top 32 American military contractors

List of American defense companies

Putting it all together is the combined list of defense tech companies and military contractors. Full list of American defense companies:

List of 62 top American defense companies

In early August 2007, the American firm Countrywide Financial suffered a bank run as a consequence of the subprime mortgage crisis.

I hadn’t heard of or completely forgot about Countrywide Financial. But about six months after Countrywide fell big banks — Bear Stearns, IndyMac, Washington Mutual and Wachovia — all suffered bank runs as part of the 2008 financial crisis portrayed in the movie The Big Short.

The co-founder of Countrywide Financial, Angelo Mozilo made $470 million from the business between 2001 and 2006. In the twelve months leading up to the crash of his firm he sold $129 million worth of stock. Despite being responsible for the financial crisis and being charged with insider trading and securities fraud by the SEC he settled, paid a fine and bafflingly didn’t have to admit any wrongdoing. The government completely dropped it’s criminal investigation and the only punishment was a $20 million fine. Countrywide was sold to Bank of America for $4 billion in all stock. The true cost was quite a bit more though for Bank of America because they had to pay $17 billion to settle claims against it from Countrywide’s sale of toxic mortgage-linked securities. The rich got richer and the government stepped in to bail everybody else out. No one went to jail.

The 2008 crisis drove further consolidation in the American banking sector. Bank of America gobbled up Countrywide, Wells Fargo acquired Wachovia and JPMorgan Chase scooped up Washington Mutual. The result was fewer, more powerful banks and less competition. One positive outcome was that legislators passed the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act to make sure our financial system was secure from gambling financiers and the crooks that drove Countrywide to massive profits followed by swift destruction.

Enforce financial regulations — don’t weaken them

Fast forward to 2018. Jerome Powell, Chair of the Federal Reserve, the agency that’s supposed to be regulating these banks supported loosening restrictions in law: S.2155 - Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act. Silicon Valley Bank lobbied for this legislation but they never could have got it passed without the support of the Federal Reserve itself. Powell testified in support of the bill that undid parts of Dodd-Frank and ultimately led to SVB’s risky behavior that led to its collapse. Right after the bill passed SVB announced a $500 million stock buyback program. Executives took generous pay bumps as they took on larger and larger uninsured deposits, enforcing provisions that customers had to put 100% of their money into SVB. Greg Becker, CEO of SVB took out $2.27 million in personal profits weeks before the entire bank collapsed. Now he’s under investigation by the SEC. Weakening financial regulations leads to behavior that’s highly profitable for financiers in the short term and destructive for the rest of us in the long term. Strong laws and strong civil and criminal enforcement is necessary to keep financiers from engaging in reckless behavior.

Regulate the banks — don’t let them regulate themselves

Jerome Powell is trying to act like the Fed did nothing wrong but that’s clearly not the case. Regulators completely failed to keep SVB’s risk-taking in check and they should be held accountable. We need financial regulatory enforcers that will actually enforce regulations on the books, not campaign to weaken them. It’s telling that every member of the Federal Reserve is a multi-millionaire. Greg Becker, CEO of Silicon Valley Bank was on the board of the San Francisco Federal Reserve, the same body that was supposed to be regulating him. The fox guarding the hen house doesn’t work. Financial regulators need to do their jobs and the regulated clearly shouldn’t be doing regulating.

Listen to Elizabeth Warren — not Yellen or Powell

Elizabeth Warren was the only member out of twenty three on the Senate Banking Committee to vote against confirming Jerome Powell in 2017. She recently wrote a letter cataloging the astonishing list of regulatory failures that led to the collapse of SVB and has already written legislation to undo the 2018 S.2155 law called the Warren-Porter bank bill. Warren has been a champion of decentralizing power for a long time and as the only member of the Senate Banking Committee to vote against confirming Powell has clear authority to not only say “I told you so” but to lead towards what’s next.

In contrast we see Janet Yellen testifying before Congress. Republican James Lankford from Oklahoma ask her if small community banks in Oklahoma will now be fully insured. She responds that they won’t be to which he asks what’s to stop large depositors from moving out of community banks into big banks. She has no good response. Instead it’s clear those banks will have to pay increased “assessment fees” to make Venture Capitalists, startups and even foreign members of the Chinese Communist Party whole.

The full exchange is worth a watch:

From Powell and Yellen’s behavior it’s clear they don’t care about small banks. They’re multimillionaires that come from and live in the world of big bankers. We need politicians and regulators to keep the bankers inline not technocrats that deliberately work to centralize financial power in America.

• We launched verified company profiles for tech companies and startups to promote their business, make edits to their Employbl profiles and share job listings for free. Verified companies show at the top of company search and job search results.

  We have eight verified companies so far!

• In conjunction with this we launched a new employer dashboard where companies can edit how their company appears on Employbl and manage their job postings, including syncing with Greenhouse ATS in one click.

• We’re actively working on a mobile app for candidates to find jobs and companies near them and a Lever ATS integration for employers to sync their job listings.

I hope that this work on Employbl helps people discover new startups and all of the amazing opportunity that is out there! I definitely view this project as a small way of decentralizing economic power in our society.

If you’d like to make your company profile verified with a sweet sweet orange checkmark and appear at the top of the results simply reply to this email or fill out this form.

Cheers,

Connor

With the Employbl project my cofounders and I, with the assistance of Diffbot — one of the world’s largest knowledge graphs, have built a database of startups and tech startup funding rounds. Earlier this fall I added a ton of web3 companies to our database so I was curious about what startups FTX had backed.

We’ve added a tag now to Employbl so you can search to see companies that FTX, FTX Ventures or Alameda Research has invested in. We focus mainly on companies in the United States so we ignored the companies like Sky Mavis that’s based in Singapore or the collapsed offshore exchange Liquid Global that FTX owned. With those caveat we’ve built pages where you can see the companies that SBF invested in:

• Alameda Research portfolio companies

• FTX Ventures portfolio companies

• FTX portfolio companies

Taking money from FTX doesn’t automatically make the company a scam but it is a 🚩 in my book, especially since crypto is having a hard time and the market is down. If a company raised money from a fraudster it might be hard to raise again in the future. The list is by no means comprehensive but should be treated as a guide to some of the most prominent companies SBF invested in. This is like a $32 billion fraud; the money got spread a lot of places.

The founder of Flexport plans on returning the charitable investment FTX donated to them:

What’s especially interesting is that FTX also invested as an LP in some of the same Venture Capital firms that backed FTX. What a mess.

What’s next for crypto and Web3?

Now that the scam is exposed I hope that SBF is prosecuted to the full extent of the law. I don’t really think crypto provides value to people beyond the speculation and buying drugs online so I hope that it’s outlawed or treated like a security or we actually enforce our financial laws and fund the agencies in charge of enforcing those laws. For more on the political angle I highly suggest reading Matt Stoller’s piece on the issue:

BIG by Matt Stoller

Why Didn't the Government Stop the Crypto Scam?

Welcome to BIG, a newsletter on the politics of monopoly power. If you’re already signed up, great! If you’d like to sign up and receive issues over email, you can do so here…

Read more

3 years ago · 117 likes · 35 comments · Matt Stoller

Whatever happens in terms of the law and the economy, one fact that needs to be reckoned with is these crypto and web3 companies have raised a lot of money. Looking at the FTX/Alameda investments we see some of the largest crypto companies out there. For example:

• Circle has raised over $1.1 billion from financiers. They were founded in 2013 so have at least been around a while. Their latest round was $400 million from Private Equity firms last April.

• Near is a “scalable blockchain” on a mission to “change the world with Web3”. The company was founded in 2017, has raised over $1 billion from investors like FTX Ventures and Andreesen Horowitz. They’re a for profit company with the audacity to host their website on a .org domain. They also raised $350 million from private equity firms last April.

• Mysten Labs has raised $336 million from investors like FTX, a16z crypto and Binance Labs and Coinbase Ventures. The company is only one year old and claiming to be “bringing digital asset ownership to billions of people”.

These companies have tons of capital to continue their operations on, even if the whole thing is a Ponzi scheme.

In addition to the above companies, a16z has backed many fraudsters, chronicled in this tweet thread:

According to Employbl records the companies that FTX has invested in have raised a cumulative $9,059,598,728 — that’s $9 billion from financiers. If we take all the three hundred and fifty companies on our Web3 list and add up their total financing it’s over $25 billion raised from financiers. This is no doubt conservative since we don’t have every web3 company in our database. That’s a lot of money that has been poured into crypto and web3 businesses. Even if all of them are 100% fraudulent it’s going to be a long time before the majority of web3 companies go bankrupt, based solely on how much they’ve raised. Hopefully this runway can be used to invent something practical before the house of cards comes crashing down.

On a more positive note, at Employbl we’re actively working on Greenhouse and Lever integrations, have rebuilt and launched new and improved job search and company search, complete with a map of companies. We hope that these tools will help candidates find the best opportunities and allow legit companies to build their employer brand and hire great people.

If you’re interested in hiring through Employbl or featuring your company prominently on our site shoot me an email: connor at employbl dot com.

Thanks for reading!

Cotopaxi leaves SF

In the news this week is the founder of Cotopaxi, an outdoorsy retail brand took to LinkedIn to announce they are shutting down their San Francisco store due to rampant, coordinated looting campaigns. The founder did an interview with The Atlantic that’s really quite shocking. The store was looted dozens of times, multiple times a week and it went on for over a year. Each time looters would pour in and steal as many hundred, $200, $300 dollar backpacks and jackets that they could carry. The whole episode reflects really poorly on the San Francisco Police Department and city government. I hope that the crime stops and these criminals face justice for their property crimes, but in the shower the story got me thinking.

Cotopaxi is a Series C company headquartered out of Salt Lake City. It was founded in 2014 and has raised over $77 million from Venture Capital firms like Greycroft and institutional investors like Bain Capital out of Boston. Cotopaxi markets themselves as a brand to help alleviate poverty, which is pretty rich for any VC backed startup, as those companies are primarily looking to deliver outsized returns to their investors. I’m sure they’d claim they’re “doing well by doing good”. In The Atlantic interview the founder repeatedly states that what he cares about isn’t policing strategies or politics but instead the safety of his employees and “changing capitalism—using capitalism to do good in the world”.

Never mind that capitalism is a political and economic system and changing it is inherently political and involves policy. This founder man has raised millions from investors and built a business to sell backpacks to people while convincing them that they’re doing something to help poor people. Fine. I’m sure they’d point me to their donations to the Cotopaxi Foundation which then launders the money to other global nonprofits as proof that they’re changing poor people’s lives. “What are you doing?” they’d say. “Builders build”, Marc Andreesen would chime in and everyone would go their merry way buying boats with their venture capital money. With the money from chic Cotopaxi backpacks the good people at the International Rescue Committee can employ college grads and career non-profit workers to do savior missions for the global poor in a way that’s eerily similar to how San Francisco treats its homeless today. There’s definitely a lot to this mission of “changing capitalism” and why Cotopaxi and San Francisco are such a good cultural match but that’s not even what I wanted to write about today..

What struck me from The Atlantic interview was how fucking much money Cotopaxi lost from thieves before the founder decided to close his store. He states in the interview..

Smith: I don’t know the exact number off the top of my head. I can tell you that the theft has happened dozens and dozens and dozens of times. We’ve been open for a year, and, I mean, this is, like, multiple times a week.

Nyce: Is that all mass-grabbing of merchandise?

Smith: Yeah, it’s not shoplifting. Shoplifting would be different.

Nyce: It’s happening dozens of times?

Smith: Oh, yeah. We’ve lost track, but it’s multiple times a week for a year. You just do the math and it’s like, I don’t know, 50 times, 100 times.

He said their store was set up where there were racks of $250 down jackets and looters could grab 20 of them “really easily”.

There’s a lot to unpack there. I’m not trying to victim blame here and I’ll reiterate that all these criminals should be brought to justice. People should be able to engage in commerce in peace, it’s pretty much the most basic job of a functioning government but let’s look at the property crime against Cotopaxi more closely.

The founder doesn’t say how much money the company lost but back of the napkin if each looter stole 5 grand worth of merchandise and they need like at least five looters to make a successful run that’s $25,000 in merchandise on each looting. The founder says this happened multiple times a week for a year. Hundreds of times this happened to one store. That’s like… over $7 million dollars. Cotopaxi’s latest funding round was last year for $45 million so that’s like 15% of their funding round going to theft from this one store.

There’s definitely an irony about a company claiming to change capitalism by giving back 1% of its revenues to entrenched non-profit interests being robbed for 15% of its venture capital financing round. It would be stupid to call this theft direct giving to the poor but it kinda is if you look at it through Robin Hood’s lens, the age old enemy of capitalism.

But how is Cotopaxi changing capitalism? First, as explained in the brilliant book Shoe Dog retail businesses didn’t used to be backed by Venture Capital. Instead retail companies would make products in America and grow slowly. The rise of Nike led to the Nikefication of many American retailers where firms outsource apparel designs to contract manufacturers, mostly in Asia. Cotopaxi outsources its manufacturing to Latin America and has raised millions in venture capital, allowing them to put many very extremely expensive products on their shelves very quickly, and restock them too despite massive losses. Cotopaxi lost tens of thousands of dollars worth of merchandise every week from one store without shutting it down. If this was a locally owned firm where employees knew the people making the backpacks instead of a firm backed by New York Venture Capital money concocted by a Utah founder things might have turned out differently. If it was a smaller business without the luxury of venture capital a present founder might have bought a gun to confront this outrageous threat to his livelihood. Instead employees were instructed to stay out of the thieves way, leave it to the absent cops.

The reality is that yes the police and the city of San Francisco need to do better but we also need to look at the warped incentives and burdens Venture Capital backed businesses put on our communities. I do hope that Cotopaxi stays because they make cool looking swag and working at a Cotopaxi store seems like a good job. The founder of Cotopaxi has the ear of City Hall now where he can make his VC backed interests heard. Public tax dollars can be used to better defend the salaries of Cotopaxi employees and the bottom line of Venture Capitalists. People should be able to do business in San Francisco but we should also scrutinize the type of businesses and capitalists this city attracts.

SF board approves a $1.7 million toilet

I really enjoyed this thread from Mountain View based startup 1build on how ridiculous SF’s $1.7 million toilet project is.

Kroger-Albertsons insane acquisition deal

Private equity is why we can’t have nice things.

• Before this deal actually happens Albertsons is going to pay all of its working capital, $4 billion to its private equity overlords, making things more difficult for regulators. If the merger doesn’t happen Albertsons will be totally fucked and then they’ll say look we’re a failing business we have to be bought.

• The standard justification for the merger by Kroger and Albertsons lawyers and economists on their payroll is that they have to merge to compete with Wal-Mart. The thing is is that centralization and bigness are the problem. Fewer companies is the problem not the solution.

Adobe acquires Figma further centralizing the power of Big Tech

I wrote up a whole thing on why the Adobe - Figma is a bad idea, but it doesn’t seem like a battle we can win. If you’re interested in more details I suggest reading Matt Stoller’s breakdown: Should the Government Block the Adobe-Figma Merger?

Apple versus Google. Microsoft versus Google. Google versus Facebook. Apple versus Facebook. Microsoft versus Apple. Amazon versus Microsoft. There are many popular narratives of tech companies competing with each other. When people call for antitrust regulation many are quick to point out that these companies don’t need more competitors, they compete with each other!

In many realms that’s true. We see Apple implementing ad restrictions to destroy Facebook’s advertising business while they scheme to launch their own Apple Ads service. Google and Apple famously compete with each other in the smartphone market. Microsoft and Google are trying to catch up to Amazon in terms of cloud services offerings. YouTube and Prime Video go head to head. There are many ways you can slice and dice how Big Tech companies compete for each other.

One thing that’s often overlooked though is how Big Tech competes cooperate, collude, finance and support each other. A common shallow critique of antitrust is saying well if there’s one competitor it isn’t a monopoly. What we have most resembles an oligopoly running the American tech economy.

Google finances Apple

$15 billion a year is what Google pays to be the default search provider on Safari. This was previously secret information that’s now public thanks to discovery in the federal government’s antitrust case against Google. Apple is getting a cash payout from keeping Google dominant but Facebook doesn’t pay them the same vig, hence the warfare and rise of Apple Ads to combat Facebook. This also gives 15 billion reasons why Apple has never bothered to build their own search engine despite how lucrative that could be for them. Much smaller teams than Apple have built quality internet search engines.

Facebook and Google rig ad markets

The Texas state attorney general filed a complaint against Google where they revealed that Google and Facebook had a secret project to collude on price fixing for online ad markets called Jedi Blue. Cool name, I’ll give them that but not cool about the whole monopolization thing; doesn’t make for a freer more decentralized economy.

Half the internet is built on AWS

This definitely isn’t a crime but I think it’s worth mentioning that so much of the internet is built on Amazon Web Services and a lot of the money came from tax payers. Amazon, along with other tech giants have received billions in subsidies for building things like data centers. Amazon especially has used revenue from cloud computing their AWS division to finance other parts of the business. This practice allows them to price below cost and drive out competition from smaller players and was once called predatory pricing. Many tech companies may compete with Amazon in one area like One Medical versus Amazon Care but still rely and be dependent on Amazon in another realm like cloud computing with AWS. In this way even to compete with Amazon you’ll likely need to be their customer. For example, AWS has a case study with Netflix which is ironic because the money Netflix pays to Amazon can be directly used to subsidize massive productions of Lord of the Rings or Prime membership which directly deteriorate Netflix’s customer base. Once a competitor is destroyed as in the case with Diapers.com prices go up.

On the data front

Switching gears to what we’re building with Employbl..

• We pulled in a lot of new startup funding information into the Employbl Funding Rounds dashboard. It’s free to use. Doing a search on there for companies that recently raised money in San Francisco we see:

  • CERE Network a crypto and blockchain CRM raised $50 million to invest in other web3 companies.

  • Anyscale raised a $99 million Series C round.

  • Microverse raised a $4 million Series A round.

  • Phyllo raised a $15 million Series A round.

  • AtoB raised a $75 million Series B round.

  • Northbeam raised a $15 million Series A round.

  • Overall we’ve collected data about seventy five funding rounds since August 1st..

• We fixed a bug this week where we were missing jobs data about hundred of tech companies. In the latest count we’ve pulled in over forty eight thousand jobs that have been updated by employers in the past forty days. We’re currently featuring tech jobs from over 1,000 companies.

• I’m currently working on a post featuring online education startups that are headquartered in America.

That’s all for now! If you are hiring in the tech realm I’d love to chat about the tools you use and your current process for finding great candidates and getting your job listings out there.

In the past few weeks we’ve seen some pretty big developments in the tech market. Amazon bought One Medical and then immediately after the acquisition killed off their own offering that was called Amazon Care. It hard to build a business and compete in the market; it’s much easier to buy a company that’s done the hard work of hiring people and acquiring and retaining customers. As Christina Farr, health-tech investor at Omers Ventures said:

Physician recruitment is really hard, building insurance contracts is really hard, building employer relationships is really hard. All of those things take a long time and One Medical was available to purchase.

One Medical has contracts with other big tech firms like Google, offering them healthcare and telemedicine for employees. Amazon was able to acquire the One Medical network instead of building their own through Amazon Care. If Amazon Care and One Medical existed as separate companies they would have to compete with each other to hire doctors, to hire employees and to acquire and retain customers. Competition between firms is fundamental to capitalism and free market economics. Competition is what makes the system work to spur innovation, improve service and lower prices. When big tech firms acquire their competitors the rest of us lose.

Big Tech firms have been buying their competitors for decades. Some other examples of Big Tech firms acquiring their competitors or emerging competitive threats include:

• Amazon buying MGM Studios (2021) to not compete with Prime Video or MGM launching their own streaming service.

• Facebook buying Oculus VR (2014) to not have to build their own virtual reality headset business. Facebook acquired their way into the Metaverse.

• Google buying Waze (2013) eliminated a competitor of their Maps product and resulted in higher prices for developers.

• Facebook buying Instagram (2012) eliminated an existential threat to their business in mobile social networking.

• Amazon buying Diapers.com (2010) after ruining them with predatory pricing allowed them to become the primary player in online shopping for diapers and baby care items.

• Google acquiring DoubleClick (2008) rolled up the internet display advertising space.

• Google buying YouTube (2006) allowed them to sunset Google Video and rolled up the video search market.

These instances are all cases where big existing tech firms were able to enter or dominate a new market or fortify their existing dominance. The list goes on: to date Google has acquired 250 companies, Amazon has acquired 113 companies and Facebook has acquired 95 companies. Historically, mergers have been challenged or blocked by the government but in this generation the Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump administrations have done very little to block any mergers. In fact since the Reagan Administration rewrote the merger review guidelines in 1982 we’ve been on a merger wave that continues to this day.

What’s wrong with companies buying their competitors?

Today we get low prices from Amazon, free internet searches from Google, tantalizing networking and entertainment products from Facebook and a plethora of other services from tech giants. It’s easy to see the argument that consumers have never been better off. The government hasn’t been blocking these mergers and things are great so why start now? In some cases the companies didn’t even have a business model, like when Google bought Android and those acquired businesses could become viable with subsidies from other parts of the business. This can be great for consumers but for American society to function well and democracy to flourish there’s more at stake than consumer welfare.

These are some of the problems with dominant firms buying their competitiors:

Reduced innovation — big companies are hard to manage

The heart of the FTC’s lawsuit against Facebook is that they don’t innovate but instead illegally “buy or bury” their competition. In the social media space new competition comes from other countries like TikTok from China or BeReal from France. TikTok is basically the same as Vine which Facebook killed through bait and switch tactics involving their API over a decade ago. When big companies can simply buy up innovative new ones it reduces the incentive for big companies to innovate themselves.

Additionally, as companies grow bigger they become harder to manage. Senior Facebook engineers recently admitted to Congress that they have no idea where they keep user’s personal data. In the words of The Intercept report:

The hearing amounted to two high-ranking engineers at one of the most powerful and resource-flush engineering outfits in history describing their product as an unknowable machine.

In the course of acquiring and merging together hundreds of companies these firms have become so bloated and complicated that their inner workings are unknowable to any individual. This complexity combined with reduced incentive to innovate leads to stagnation.

Predatory pricing and cross subsidizing businesses

Once a company wins in one sector, even a niche sector like online book sales, they can use those profits to win in another sector like Cloud Computing or Healthcare. Buying competitors makes this process even easier. In the case of Amazon they can enter new markets through acquisition and then loose money for years if not decades, decimating competitors until they are the only one left.

Government corruption and collusion

If an industry has 100 firms that all compete with each other and there’s legislation coming to regulate that industry it’s going to take a lot for everyone to chip in and coordinate to buy lobbyists and influence the legislation. If a firm spends too much on lobbying other competitors that don’t spend on lobbying could eat their lunch. There’s a coordination problem too getting one hundred different firms to all agree on what they should be lobbying for and how to achieve their ends.

If there are two or three firms that dominate an industry, like Google, Facebook and Amazon for the digital advertising space, then those firms can easily coordinate and spend millions on targeted lobbying to influence the American government. Additionally, it’s much easier for firms to collude and price fix, which is exactly what Facebook and Google did in the digital ads market under the code name “Jedi Blue”. Additionally, firms can collude to keep worker wages down, which is what Big Tech companies like Apple, Google, Adobe, Intel and Intuit did to suppress tech salaries.

What’s being done to stop it?

The good news is that America has faced this problem before where firms got too big and bought all competitors or politicians that threatened them. Laws like the Sherman Act (1890), Clayton Act (1914) and the Robinson–Patman Act (1936) are all on the books and have never been repealed by Congress. Since the 1980s though the executive branch simply hasn’t enforced laws that distribute economic power, instead favoring an economy comprised of powerful firms. These antitrust laws need to be enforced even though turning the government around takes time.

• Last year the Biden administration issued an Executive Order to promote competition within the American economy.

• Lina Khan, chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is doing lots of good things including updating merger guidelines to be more restrictive of vertical mergers.

• There’s a growing populist movement to revise the antitrust laws and throw out the consumer welfare standard that’s dominated antitrust legal thinking for decades.

Anyway, this is the tip of the iceberg on this topic but I’m planning on exploring more about how we can build a more decentralized economy in future issues.

On the data front

• We added 19 more companies to our list of over three hundred web3 companies that are in the Employbl database. The data is available in CSV format here.

• We’ve been working on a new jobs search dashboard using Next.js. You can see a sneak peek at employbl dot com slash jobs. If you’re hiring or looking for a job let me know I’d love to chat!

• We’ve pulled the latest data from the public web for over 9,000 tech companies and startups. You can see the latest funding rounds on the Employbl dashboard, like Pinata — a web3 company out of Nebraska that raised an $18 million Series A round.

That’s all for now! If you are hiring or looking for a job let me know by replying to this email or sending directly to connor at employbl dot com.

I’ve relaunched the Employbl newsletter to use Substack instead of ConvertKit. I was originally drawn to ConvertKit because of its “indiehacker” roots, that it was a bootstrapped company and most importantly they featured Courtland Allen, founder of Indiehackers whose podcast I’m into. Substack on the other hand is backed by venture capital has built a platform kind of like Medium. Though most email platforms these days allow you to export your list and leave I still felt like with Substack I’d be writing for their platform and building up the substack dot com domain and pigeon holed as a “substack writer”, whatever that means.

Fast forward six months later I’d written one, two, three newsletters the last one sent in March. I reflected and realized there were a couple things holding me back.

The first is that with Employbl me and the two other guys I work on it with are looking to grow web traffic, primarily through Search Engine Optimization, commonly known as SEO. ConvertKit does offer a landing page where people can read past emails but it’s pretty much an afterthought with no customization. Substack in contrast is built like a blog for people to search through and read past issues. The landing page is much friendlier and I’ve got a hunch Google ranks Substack websites a lot better than ConvertKit ones. It helps that Substack launched a new one time payment feature where you can host your Substack on your own subdomain like newsletter.employbl.com instead of substack dot com slash your newsletter.

The second thing I realized was that holding me back from publishing newsletters was that it didn’t feel easy for me to write. The ConvertKit editor is fine and people build massive lists on their platform but to me it felt clunky and out of touch with the rest of the work I was doing. Combined with the fact that I didn’t think my newsletters with ConvertKit would rank on Google I routinely favored writing on the Employbl blog instead where we have a pretty slick editor set up with Statamic. Making something easy and pleasurable to do is important to building a routine so it’s something I prioritized, even though it kind of sounds silly.

The final thing I realized that was holding me back from publishing a regular newsletter was that I didn’t really have a theme. What was the newsletter about? I’d mostly used it to share product updates, but I had to wonder did anyone really care? Sure we shipped a new feature or I wrote a new blog post but why did I need to let people know about that? I constantly delete those tone deaf emails from my inbox so a newsletter about product updates only made me cringe. There were definitely things that I wanted to keep like startup news and reports on recent funding rounds in addition to the powers that Employbl gives people for free but I wasn’t sure what tied the whole thing together. Without a thread reporting on “startup news” as a general topic is a recipe for making your head spin.

Enter Decentralized Economy.

I’ve listed this phrase from Tim Wu’s book The Curse of Bigness where he writes:

As Louis Brandeis, the great prophet of decentralized economy, put it, the antitrust laws answered a question: “Shall the industrial policy of America be that of competition or that of monopoly?”

This combined with Matt Stoller’s books and newsletter struck a cord with me that there’s something fundamentally wrong with the American economic system and it’s not “capitalism” which seems to be the common lazy critique from the left. America’s issue is economic concentration and monopolies. Power is centralized and in a democracy it should be decentralized. This makes sense from a political perspective: one person gets one vote. But from an economic perspective things start to break down. How should our society work when a corporation has bought all its competitors, raised prices and squeezed workers and suppliers? What about when oligarchs or monopolists buy politicians, propose propositions, intimidate competitors and flood the media with their lines of thinking? 100 years ago Louis Brandeis recognized that economic concentration breeds political concentration. For democracy and free markets to work power needs to be decentralized but today’s startups, citizens and even financiers need to act.

The Web3 movement proposes that government is too bloated and incapable of fixing society’s problems. Instead we need to build and rebuild technological solutions that eliminate gatekeepers and concentrated middlemen. I think there’s some truth to that but it’s clearly not the only way.

With this newsletter and the Employbl project I hope to showcase and propose some of the way’s today’s tech companies are decentralizing power and what we can do to build a decentralized economy instead of a concentrated one.

On the data front:

One important aspects of free markets is open access to data. That’s something we’re building into Employbl but we’re not the only ones. These are some data sources we’re looking at and that you’re free to check out too.

• Growjo released a new “top 1,000” companies list that’s free to export as a CSV.

• BuiltIn has a list of web3 companies I referenced when writing our web3 companies report. Additionally, TrueUp has built a solid list of web3 and crypto companies.

• CB Insights published a free comprehensive list of unicorn companies that lists each company’s country and more info.

Featured tech companies and startups

In this section I’d like to showcase some startups and tech companies that are decentralizing power away from big tech and/or providing awesome functionality for the community.

• Cloudflare

  • Cloudflare provides CDN and security services for tech companies. We use them at Employbl to block bots and serve our web pages faster, which helps us rank better on search engines.

  • They’re launching a direct competitor to Amazon Web Services’ S3 offering called R2 for object storage.

• Ahrefs

  • Ahrefs is headquartered out of Singapore but they provide amazing functionality for seeing exactly how web search traffic is behaving. They’ve indexed the internet and provide an incredible tool for doing keyword research and seeing how your pages are ranking.

  • They recently launched their own consumer search engine called Yep that is free and doesn’t have ads right now as a direct competitor to Google. They plan on giving 90% of ad revenue to content creators.

• Diffbot

  • Diffbot is headquartered out of Menlo Park, CA and is one of the only companies besides Google and Microsoft to build a Knowledge Graph of the entire internet.

  • We use Diffbot at Employbl as our secret sauce to pull in information about companies, funding rounds, founders and investors. They’ve recently launched functionality to see each company’s competitors and customers with one API call!

This newsletter was originally sent on March 25, 2022.

Hey there,

We've still been working on Employbl and shipped some pretty rad updates. Some of which include:

• We have a map! (again) The Employbl project started out with less than 500 startups and a Google Map where you could filter by company categories. Now we're at over 11,000 companies in the database, tons of filters and a Mapbox map of ~4,000 companies in the Bay Area. I'd really like to get this to looks like an AirBnB / Zillow style map with filters but turns out plotting 11,000+ points from a database all over the United States with filters is technically complex. Go figure 🤷🏼 🗺

  • If you'd like to see the original map and what we have today check this tweet.

• Job Board is updated To be honest there are a million job boards but this is nice to be able to query like "show me all Software Engineering jobs at companies backed by either Sequoia or First Round Capital". You can also do more refined searches like show jobs based on industry or custom company collection but ya still a lot to do here and job search software is a pretty competitive space with a lot of noise. One future improvement we can make here is to group the job listings results by company and display more about the company. I really like how Breakout List shows their records, just a shame you can't click on the founders or the investors to learn more about them. We'd have to remedy that!

• Homepage copy updates and...

🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁

🥁🥁🥁 Employbl is now officially free to use! 🥁🥁🥁

🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁

We had a paywall up but the people who did sign up all churned quickly after signing. Being free allows us to share company data more freely and makes the tool accessible to more people, which is an ultimate goal of the project. Perhaps if lots of people sign up and we get a thriving community going there will be potential to earn revenue from companies. For now though the product is free to use and we don't even have advertisements :)

Startup News

We recently fetched the freshest fundraising rounds. Here are some buzzworthy funding events that have happened in the past month:

• ​AngelList raised a $100 million Series B round. This is their second Series B, the first was all the way back in 2015.

• One year old Xata.io raised a $30 million Series A out of Ohio. They build serverless database services for developers.

• ​Health Gorilla raised a $50 million Series C. Seems like they build APIs for healthcare patient data.

• ​Apollo (sales solution) raised a $110 million Series C. They're based in San Francisco.

• ​Reforge education and professional training service raised a $60 million Series B. This one I'm excited to keep an eye on. They run training programs specifically built to help people advance their careers in the tech industry. I wish them well. It means more competition for Galvanize and Lambda School, hopefully leading to better options for workers.

• ​Veev pulled down a whopping $400 million Series D to buy up a lot of American real estate and build smart homes.

• New company Inworld AI entered the Metaverse with a $10 million Seed round. They're one year old.

• ​Roofstock has more capital to play with after closing a $240 million Series E round this month. They're based in Oakland, CA 🙌🏼

It seems like the big money is flowing into Real Estate so I'd expect we're going to see some corporate consolidation there.

​

What info would you like to see in future newsletter? Have you tried logging into Employbl yet? What should we build next?

Hey there,

Hope you're all doing well and not reading too many news headlines :) 🇺🇦

We've been pretty heads down on Employbl feature development. I'd like to share some info in this note about recent startup funding rounds and new capabilities of the Employbl dashboard.

First, one list I've been keeping an eye on is companies that have recently raised Series A rounds, have headquarters in San Francisco and are backed by "top tier" Venture Capital firms (more on that later).

It seems to me that right after a Series A is a pretty good time to join a startup.

Companies at that stage are not super mature, they still believe in their people, the mission and the corporate culture. They pay pretty well. It's risky but it's not like joining a Seed stage company. By virtue of raising a Series A round the founders have convinced the monied classes that there's merit to the idea. As an employee there will be opportunities for advancement and interesting challenges to solve.

Anyway, you may disagree with me about the best time to join a startup, but information for job seekers about startup financing stages is woefully inadequate.

LinkedIn has a deal with Crunchbase so they show financing information right on LI company profiles, but you can't search or filter for that information. To do that you need to buy a Crunchbase subscription.

Crunchbase as a product is primarily geared toward financiers and salespeople not developers looking to level up their careers.

AngelList has a way to filter for companies based on their largest investment round, but not every startup is on AngelList.

TechCrunch reports on funding rounds all the time, the data is public, but who wants to read TechCrunch all the time? The filters are crap.

This month we re-launched the Employbl "Funding Rounds" dashboard where we can filter for funding rounds based on corporate information.

For instance using these filters in the dashboard..

We can see that within the past six months the following SF based companies have raised Series A rounds and are backed by either Sequoia Capital, First Round Capital, Accel or went through the YC program (links go to public facing Employbl company profiles):

• ​Career Karma​

• ​Abacum​

• ​Lendtable​

• ​UserGems​

• ​Sprinter Health​

• ​Matter​

• ​Mutiny​

• ​StreamNative​

• ​Callin​

• ​Joy​

• ​Sora​

• ​Aalto​

• ​Verifiable​

This approach of relying on public web data instead of companies beholden to advertisers and corporate sponsors yields better results, more actionable data and empowers workers to take charge of their careers instead of relying on recruiters or adverts.

How do you specify "top tier" VCs?

I've taken a stab at a public list of "top tier" VC firms in this blog post but it's based on my own subjective experience in the tech industry. Would it be helpful to have a quick filter like "is backed by top tier" VC firm?

What's Next?

We launched some improvements to the job listings page this month too but honestly I feel like searching the internet for jobs by title and keyword is pretty well covered.

That said we have over 70,000 active job listings in the Employbl database and could commit ourselves to fetching more if it's what the people want :)

Our next focuses as a product are..

• Maps: who doesn't love a good map? I've been waiting for like an Airbnb or Zillow but for startups for a long time. Gunna try launching something in that space.

• Tech Stacks: what technologies do companies use? And no BuiltWith, I'm not talking about oh this company uses Google Analytics, Hubspot, Wordpress and Javascript. I'm talking let me find companies backed by a16z that use Ruby On Rails ✨

• People: a corporation isn't much without the humans that make it run. Pretty soon I'd like to pull in information about founders and current employees so we can see in the Employbl dashboard the people that work at various companies and what their backgrounds are.

What would you like to see? What could a knowledge tool like Employbl do for your career? Are we barking up the right tree?

This newsletter was originally sent on January 24, 2022.

Hey y'all,

First off I want to say thank you for subscribing to the Employbl newsletter.

This is the first newsletter I've sent since relaunching the site a year ago.

I'd like it be an open forum, you tell me what you'd like to know about the tech industry and I'll do my best to answer it.

My goal with the Employbl project is give candidates better access to publicly available market information, and to do it in a way where we're not beholden to corporations.

Most job sites scrape data about people and sell the data to companies and third party recruiters who then go on to "hunt" for talent.

Job boards post jobs for the companies that pay them.

Even LinkedIn, which sells premium subscriptions to candidates, makes most of its money by selling to recruiters, corporate business (a.k.a. sales) people and advertisers.

There's more information than ever about the tech labor market but it's not available in an unbiased, digestible way for those looking to break in or get their next job in tech.

We could definitely be wrong. There's so much free information out there maybe people will continue to be fine being the product.

But it seems to me there's a shift. We all need our careers to be successful, why not invest in the tools to know the market you're selling your services in?

Anyway, we've harvested and synthesized information from the public internet about over 11,000 companies, 27,000 funding rounds and 63,000 job listings from a thousand different job boards.

It's honestly the tip of the iceberg.

We could harvest way more about founders, tech stack and even more corporations and job listings. Before we eat up all that storage in a server farm we want to validate that we're on to something.

Lmk if you're up for a call and I'll happily demo the product. Otherwise if you have any questions about hiring process, the tech industry or job listings shoot them my way!

In the meantime we're going to be doing some research to see what resonates with people :)

These are some of the blog posts we've put out recently for the public, would love to know your thoughts.

• ​177 companies that are hiring Software Engineers right now​

• ​List of 100+ SaaS companies with offices in San Francisco​

• ​List of 100+ early stage startups in "Silicon Valley" (defined geographically)

That's all for now. It's my intention to send a newsletter about once a month, but I'll be posting on LinkedIn more regularly and you can book time with me directly on my Calendly page.

Cheers