Things are going well for Krablr, the crab pricing messaging app for millennials. Yet now that the app has managed to attract millions of crab lovers the..
Things are going well for Krablr , the crab pricing messaging app for millennials. Now that the app has managed to attract millions of crab lovers the company faces more scrutiny. That’s why Krablr CEO Paul Paulson Black III just released the company’s first ever diversity report detailing the demographics of its employees.
“We fully recognize that our millions of daily active users expect us to set a positive example. They don’t just want to stuff their face with fresh crab,” he told us.
The startup has a predominantly white and male workforce, according to the report, with 37.1 percent female employees — of whom only 16.4 percent are in a tech role.
“Hey, at least we did better than Uber,” Paulson Black III told TechCrunch. And it’s true that Krablr beats Uber’s gender breakdown by one percentage point.
When it comes to race, 55.7 percent of Krablr is white, 28.6 percent Asian, 7.2 percent black, 5.6 percent Latinx and 2.9 percent two or more races.
Frankly, this is yet another dismal performance by a technology startup. And one that fails to be reflective of the diverse population of crab consumers around the world. Krablr advisor John Blarggs was in the room during our interview and couldn’t stop rolling his eyes. We share his sentiment entirely.
When we made these points, Paulson Black III shifted uneasily in his designer office chair, and said the leadership has recently hired an external consultancy to look into whether or not it should relocate its Friday beer-pong team-bonding sessions at ‘The Saucy Mermaid’s Tail’ to somewhere less douchey.
“We’re open to looking less like a bunch of stupidly successful dudebros,” he added.
The CEO became much more animated discussing the company’s ambitious plans to build an in-house artificial intelligence engineering division this year.
“We think we’ll have what it takes to dominate the competition while it’s still in diapers playing with those learn to code pre-school toys that people are giving their kids nowadays,” said Paulson Black III. “Successful crabbing is one part art, one part blind luck. But with all the machine learning experts we’re sucking up from Uber’s driverless car division we’re very confident we’ll be able to predict crab migration patterns with up to 86.7 percent accuracy in future.
“Truly, we think we’ll have what it takes to crack this market right open.”
And it’s true that Krablr has an innovative approach. The AI team uses machine learning on existing machine learning algorithms to select the best machine learning algorithm — in real time. They call this patent-pending technique the “double pincer machine learning inception” — or, colloquially, the ‘Krablr club sandwich’.
In order to feed the model, Krablr had to amass a ton of data about crab migration patterns. The EFF has since published a statement warning that crabs should encrypt their migration patterns to protect their privacy (and their lives, really).
In other news, Krablr just dropped support for its chatbot. It turns out users would rather share Snapchat-like stories than enter command lines into a chat interface.
“We want to think entirely outside the text box,” said Paulson Black III. “I personally believe the future will be 110 percent video, 0 percent sound. People want to experience the crabs they’re thinking of purchasing in immersive 360 video before they commit. We tried VR but it just made people sick. No one wants to eat crab if they’re feeling sicker than a dog.”
Another new focus for the team is crab kits. They’re planning to launch a home crab kit delivery service called Red Apron — penciling in a launch for three apartments in a street in Greenwich Village, New York in summer 2019.
Customers will be sent a box containing all the crab parts needed to reconstitute a crab at home. “Just add salted water!” enthused Paulson Black III. He said the company intends to work with drone companies to airfreight crab kits to customers in minutes. (Though he cautioned drone delivery might not be universally available.)
“Obviously Red Apron will only be available to a minuscule fraction of our most elite and discerning urban consumers. But we think not everyone needs to eat crab so quickly,” he added.
Asked about his long term vision for Krablr’s future, Paulson Black III returned immediately to the topic of diversity — saying he is committed to changing the direction of the company eventually. Ideally before he hands the CEO’s chair to his son, Paul ‘Paulie’ Paulson Black Jr.
“I recognize we might not be coming up with all the best ideas. Frankly, there’s only so many crab-based products a bunch of dudebros can think of. Can you give me the number of a good HR manager?”
Krablr has been funded by $5 million from investors including Scranton Angels. It’s not expecting to be profitable before the next century. Paulson Black III said it’s looking to raise a ton more cash, and very soon.

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Tour and activities marketplace Zozi fired its CEO earlier this year, but employees were only just informed of this fact last week, when the ousted CEO – who..
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Now the CEO, T. J. Sassani, has filed suit against the board and investors who have taken control of the company, alleging wrongful termination, among a number of other outrageous claims, including also breach of fiduciary duty, embezzlement on the part of a former exec, fraud, discrimination, harassment and a host of other violations.
Last Thursday, tour and activities marketplace and software maker Zozi confirmed to TechCrunch it had laid off a portion of its staff.
The layoffs, which we noted last week , had affected jobs across the board, including sales, marketing, operations and engineering.
The company at the time claimed 30 percent of staff were affected, but the real number is actually higher – closer to 40 percent, we’ve since learned, and confirmed with Zozi.
The company actually had around 106 employees ahead of the layoffs, which included a team of 35 engineers in Vancouver.
A spreadsheet with over 40 names was being passed around among the affected employees, as a means of helping each other find new jobs.
But the layoffs are only one facet of this company’s current struggles. Sassani is no longer with the company and really hasn’t been around for months. Many told us a member of the executive team, Steven Weidman, was acting CEO after the COO’s departure.
But when we contacted Zozi, we were told that Elon Boms, a long-time investor and board member, has been working with Weidman, to lead the company internally. The company now says Boms is acting CEO. Boms is also named in Sassani’s lawsuit.
Boms is a representative of KLP, the fund owned by Karen Pritzker and Michael Vlock, of the billionaire Pritzker family, which is a majority shareholder in Zozi.
Boms tells us that last week’s layoffs were about refocusing Zozi on the part that’s growing – not the consumer marketplace, but the software-as-a-service product for businesses, Zozi Advance.
He confirmed Sassani’s departure and a new round of funding in a statement to TechCrunch ahead of the lawsuit’s filing:
Following the filing, Zozi issued another statement:
Sassani, we heard from many people, hadn’t been around the office in recent months. Some staff was led to believe he was out fundraising – and Sassani’s lawsuit indicates this, as well.
Employees were not told in January when the board fired him, and only learned of it last week.
But many employees were already concerned that something odd was happening at Zozi. The CEO hadn’t shown up at the holiday party in December, for example, though he lived only blocks away. He didn’t even come after people called him to ask where he was.
“I knew that was a terrible sign that the CEO hadn’t been in the office in months and the COO apparently left the company unannounced,” noted one person who had recently been laid off. “There’s been no transparency about this situation,” they said.
“We were told that he was out fundraising. He met up with a group of employees that were affected by the layoff and was shocked that we weren’t informed that he was fired in December, shortly after raising $15 million, for not agreeing to a merger with our rival Peek,” they added.
Sassani had made those claims to a group he met with at a local bar, following Thursday’s layoffs. He also alluded to various health concerns – including serious illnesses – as being partly to blame for his absence at the company as well as the holiday party. Sassani also told the group he planned to fight back.
After the layoffs were announced Thursday at a Town Hall, a second Town Hall was called on Friday to address the situation with Sassani, and clear the air about the nature of his exit.
Weidman called the Friday meeting, where, along with Zozi co-founder Daniel Gruneberg, the execs prepared to finally tell the staff about the leadership changes, including Sassani’s firing – as the founder had yet to address the situation himself.
But before the meeting started, Sassani entered the room. Some Zozi hires were so new, they had never even seen him in the office. Those who did know him were fairly shocked.
Weidman tried to call off the meeting at that point, but Sassani said he was there to observe, and to please continue. Weidman and Gruneberg refused, so Sassani spoke to the group instead, to explain his firing. He brought up his health issues. He then asked Weidman to proceed with the scheduled meeting, but Weidman dismissed the group instead.
Staff in attendance described it as a very “awkward” situation.
When trying to reach Sassani for comment on all this (initially via his girlfriend), we were directed to call his lawyer, Harmeet Dhillon. We were later provided Sassani’s cell, but he has not returned our calls.
Dhillon’s firm, DLG, Inc ., has now filed a lawsuit on Sassani’s behalf. The firm confirmed their involvement but did not issue a statement.
The suit makes a number of astounding claims.
In a lengthy document, Sassani claims a litany of abuses. He says he raised $60 million for his company over the course of his tenure from over 150 investors, including funds from KLP. He claims to suffer from ulcerative colitis, a chronic condition that can lead to cancer and is exacerbated by stress.
Sassani, in the filing, says the board refused him medical leave on multiple occasions, and instead pressured him to work longer hours, worsening his condition. He claims he was diagnosed with early-stage colon cancer in 2013 and had polyps removed, but was never offered the opportunity to take formal leave, even as the conditioned flared and subsided over the years. He says he was instructed to raise funding from new investors in 2014, instead of resting, for example.
In 2016, when Zozi needed more cash, KLP offered $5.7 million in a personal loan to Sassani, of which $5 million was invested in Zozi via convertible note, with other portions used for Sassani’s personal debts. The collateral for the loan was Sassani’s preferred shares and common stock (meaning his voting rights.)
In August 2016, Sassani says he was instructed to fundraise again, but KLP was putting no new capital in – something that would make it difficult to bring in new investors, he said, as KLP was the largest investor. Sassani says by December 2016, his medical conditions were so bad he had to work from home, but formal leave was still not offered. He was also supposed to be out raising equity capital.
Sassani says, during this time, Boms was secretly working on a merger and recapitalization strategy with the then-COO. (We’ve heard this is Peek.) Sassani says other investors were not being made aware of this.
Sassani claims that the COO had been a consultant to Zozi before being COO, but was not owed his fees until the next equity round closed. But the COO had approved a transfer of $58,600 without Sassani’s approval after submitting his hours to the company comptroller. In the lawsuit complaint, Sassani calls this embezzlement and says he fired him. (The board promptly reinstated the COO, however. The COO is not named as defendant in the lawsuit.)
Sassani says that he was threatened with bankruptcy if he didn’t resign, and that Boms used a number of high-pressure tactics to seize control.
He says Boms threatened to force a lender to call a loan on Zozi and sink the company if he didn’t comply. He says Boms followed through on this, as KLP sent a Notice of Default on a personal loan Sassani took from KLP to invest in Zozi.
Sassani says he was also sent a letter that said KLP would sell off all common and preferred stock and other assets valued at $25 million (Zozi’s most recent valuation), to cover the $5.7 million loan. This would allow KLP to seize control of the company and deprive Sassani of his voting power. KLP did not seize the preferred stock Sassani recently purchased, he also says – which is why they would be able to believably claim they were not trying to bankrupt him, the filing states.
Sassani’s claims are only one side of this complicated saga. Reading between the lines, it appears like this is a founder doing everything in his power to hold onto his company. But many questions can be raised here.
For example, if Sassani were as sick as he claims – necessitating him permanently working from home – why didn’t he voluntarily step down as CEO long ago? Wouldn’t that have been what’s best for his company – to have a leader who could run it day-to-day?
Why did KLP issue a personal loan to Sassani to allow him to pay off personal debts, in addition to infusing the business with more capital? What were these debts?
Why would a company deny someone with cancer, or at least a serious medical condition, medical leave?
Why would a board member representing KLP threaten to “sink” a company they had invested in?
How could paying someone for their hours worked be called embezzlement, when the board immediately rehires the exec in question after ousting the CEO?
According to multiple sources on the exec team, the reality of the situation is not one that Sassani describes in this suit.
Instead, they paint a picture of extreme dereliction of duty by the founder – where he was gone from the office for months at a time – something other non-exec Zozi employees have also confirmed. Various sources said he was essentially unfit to lead and lacked the strategic decision-making skills that would allow the company to remain operational.
We also heard that Sassani had just stopped showing up at work, was not participating in leadership meetings, and stopped having one-on-ones with direct reports as far back as the second quarter of 2016. By the third quarter, he was really gone.
“ T. J. attended meetings less and less and by Q4 of 2016 he was rarely seen in the office,” said a member of the executive team.
The last executive meeting Sassani attended was late summer 2016, where he became excessively agitated when the team didn’t stay on script per his agenda and were in disagreement with how he wanted to spend funds. We heard from sources that the startup’s cash burn was high.
We heard Sassani had hired a number of account executives ahead of his fundraising; and many account execs ended up getting laid off last week.
We also understand Sassani was pursuing a number of expensive initiatives that execs didn’t agree with, including those with outside contractors.
“Working with T. J. was easily the most horrible experience of my professional career,” said one vendor that had been contracted to work for Zozi. “Zozi owes us almost a million in debt and cash. Despite repeated assurances that we would be paid, we’re months overdue on payment,” they said.
Overall, multiple sources at Zozi painted a picture of a CEO refusing to back down, no matter the damage done to Zozi in the process.
While it’s not unusual for a board to take control of a company where the CEO is ineffective, Zozi’s situation is fairly chaotic and dramatic, largely because of Sassani’s behavior, and now, this lawsuit.
In addition to the suit, Sassani has filed a temporary restraining order to prohibit KLP from “selling, deposing, conveying, purchasing, or transferring” any of his assets or equity securities.

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On Valentine’s Day at Soft Robotics a staff member places heart-shaped marshmallow Peeps on a conveyor belt. A mechanical arm snatches them up, one by one,..
On Valentine’s Day at Soft Robotics in Cambridge, Mass. a staff member places heart-shaped marshmallow Peeps on a conveyor belt. A mechanical arm snatches them up, one by one, setting them gently in a nearby box. It isn’t much of a romantic celebration, really. But it is a triumph of sorts.
Soft Robotics’ RL7 and other grippers can reliably perform some of the physical tasks we do countless times a day but have learned to take for granted. They can pick up a pliable object and put it where it needs to go, all without having to identify the object with computer vision systems, or any kind of pre-programming.
Besides the pink Peeps, the startup’s lab is littered with a bizarre array of objects. There are bags of peanuts and various types of produce on one side, a knockoff Furby and plastic Frozen toys across the room. The lab has the makings of a terrible dollar store, each object chosen for its inconsistency of shape, Soft Robotics CEO Carl Vause acknowledges. But the inventory represents a good cross-section of real-world products, he explained.
Founded in 2013, Soft Robotics’ grippers are already being used by manufacturers and retailers to pick and pack everything from chocolates to injection-molded parts to uncooked pizza dough. The grippers don’t look like a human hand. Instead, they are comprised of a cartoonish quartet of rubbery, bright blue fingers that snap onto their target like an octopus clutching its prey.
The name of the company is a nod to both the soft material used to make its grippers and a sub-category in the larger field of robotics. Vause traces his inspiration for the company back to a 2011 paper co-authored by George Whitesides , now a board member at Soft Robotics.
In it, the Harvard professor details a four-legged, X-shaped quadrupedal robot that looked destined to latch onto the face of an unsuspecting passenger in an Alien sequel. “We are interested in a unique class of robots,” the paper explains. “That is, soft robots fabricated in materials […] that do not use a rigid skeleton to provide mechanical strength. The objective of this work is to demonstrate a soft robot that requires only simple design and control to generate mobility.”
In order to design a soft robot that could both walk and stretch itself through a centimeter gap under a door, Whitesides looked outside the human tribe for biological inspiration. And like other roboticists before them, Whitesides’ team found that inspiration in the ocean.
The final product made the rounds on the internet, courtesy of its impressive ability to walk by undulating individual limbs through inflation and its admittedly creepy visage. That same year, Whitesides’ team applied the design to its first flexible robotic gripper, this time shaped like a starfish.
Suspended by fishing wire and a tube for delivering compressed air, the team demonstrated that the grip was capable of picking up an uncooked egg without crushing it. The team did the same with a live mouse, demonstrating how, with the correct polymer material and air pressure, the hand was capable of securely gripping an object without harming it — an act that would have required a far more complex array of computer vision and sensors in a more rigid gripper.
“We saw that as a breakthrough technology that could bring human-like dexterity in a simple compliant form factor to robotics,” says Vause. “[A traditional robotic gripper] has to know exact location of the object. It has to calculate its path, so there’s a lot of numerical calculation called path planning and then there’s sensors on the fingers, so it has to grasp them just enough, but not too much. So it can be very slow and very tedious to solve this.”
By 2014, Soft Robotics had its first public prototype. In late 2015, the company made its gripper commercially available, attaching these to the end of third-party industrial robotic arms from companies like ABB.
Since launch, Soft Robotics’ grippers have proven most successful in food shipping, an industry where the product rarely adheres to strict consistency in size and shape. It also helps in the food business when your equipment can simply be hosed down at the end of the day.
“When we started, we thought we would look at food in about three years’ time,” Vause said, “but the ability to have cleanable robot systems that can directly handle food was a huge unmet need. So, about 80 percent of our business right now is in food, everything from bakery to produce.”
Soft Robotics wasn’t the first company to bring the technology it’s named after to manufacturing and fulfillment. Founded in 2012, Empire Robotics hit the scene with the Versaball, a gripper based on similar principle, taken to a minimalist extreme. The gripper consisted of a balloon-like ball filled with sand-like granular material. Air is pumped in and out of the object to adjust grip strength. It wasn’t made to pick up food so much as small metal parts that you’d need to get sorted and out to assembly points in a factory.
In spite of the Versaball’s positive press, including a late-night beer pong match against Jimmy Fallon , Empire fizzled. The balloon-like gripper it designed couldn’t endure high-repetition industrial use. The company went quiet in 2016.
Soft Robotics’ cephalopod-inspired robot seems to be gaining traction, however, thanks in no small part to its versatility and minimal set up. Vause said that depending on the products the robot will be handling in a given setting, installers need to choose which type of rubbery fingers to attach and adjust the air pressure used to actuate those grippers. Otherwise, the robot is plug-and-play.
The company has managed to overcome the hurdle of bringing a breakthrough technology from the lab to a commercial application in an industrial environment.
“One of the biggest challenges is, if you think about academic work, you want to get something that runs a couple of times,” explains Vause. “You get your data, you publish the paper, you get on the cover of Nature or one of the great journals. In industry and especially robots, these machines are required to run 24/7, so, millions of cycles a month. Taking a technology that can stand up to that industrial wear and tear was really the biggest challenge.”

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When I first met Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly in 2015 at the Intel Capital Summit, we were about to go on stage for a fireside chat to discuss among other things..
When I first met Cloudera CEO Tom Reilly in 2015 at the Intel Capital Summit, we were about to go on stage for a fireside chat to discuss among other things Intel’s massive investment in his company.
While on stage, the conversation inevitably turned to when the company might go public. As you might expect, he gave me the standard startup CEO answer. While Cloudera was certainly of sufficient size to IPO, they had just raised over a billion dollars and had plenty of cash. He was willing to wait until, in his words, “when we feel it’s the right time.”
Apparently it was yesterday when the company filed its S-1 paperwork with the SEC indicating its plans to go public. The announcement had been rumored for some time , and made sense, especially given the number of enterprise tech companies that have gone public (or announced their intentions to do so) recently.
As we’ve seen, in the first quarter of this year, enterprise tech IPOs are suddenly a hot commodity with Alteryx and MuleSoft already having gone out, and Cloudera joining Yext and Okta as the next ones up in the queue.
In spite of the name, Cloudera isn’t really a cloud company, at least in the pure sense. It’s a commercial product built on top of the open source Hadoop project , the one with the cute elephant for a mascot. In spite of the cuteness, Hadoop is very serious technology used to process massive amounts of data, which should come in increasingly handy in a world with increasing amounts data to deal with — often referred to in industry parlance as “big data”.
The problem is that while Hadoop may be a powerful way to process that data, and it may be available as open source, it is not simple to use. That’s where companies like Cloudera and Hortonworks, which went public in 2014 come in. These companies, and others like MapR, are attempting to package Hadoop in a way that makes it more consumable for large organizations.
While Hortonworks came strong out of the gate after its IPO, it has not fared all as well since. After a high of over $27 in July, 2015, it was under $10 a share as of the close on Friday.
But just because two or more companies share the same market doesn’t mean they each share the same fate or are even completely comparable beyond both being Hadoop vendors.
Carl Olofson, an analyst at IDC, says there are some fundamental differences between the two companies. He describes Hortonworks as a “pure open source company,” one that packages, coordinates and manages that open source as a product for a subscription fee, and also sells support. He says the company’s products are aimed mostly at “big data technologists.”
Cloudera is a bit different, he says. “[It] offers packages that are mostly open source, but with tooling that is proprietary, and that are aimed at various classes of business problems. They sell to business managers. So their approach is different, and as a result, they have a higher percentage of their income derived from software than does Hortonworks,” Olofson told TechCrunch.
One of Cloudera’s chief investors was none other than Intel, which sank $740 million into the company in a single investment in March, 2014, obviously seeing some serious potential to take such a substantial stake. And as you would expect, the S-1 revealed Intel and Cloudera have a special relationship and a deep partnership, and that too could give it additional investor credibility as it heads into the public markets.
Certainly Reilly thought so in our interview saying, “While everyone focused on the dollars behind the investment that Intel made, what was so important to us was the partnership, and the value that Intel brings us as a partner goes way beyond the dollars they gave us.” The S-1included multiple examples of the two companies working together including developing a way to speed up encryption at the chip level and launching an open source cybersecurity project called Apache Spot , a platform for advanced threat detection using artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Cloudera’s has been around since 2008, and the market should appreciate that longevity says Olofson. “Compared to others, Cloudera could be seen as a relatively mature player, with steady growth, a good market position and significant momentum,” he said. While markets can be fickle, it could be that this is finally Cloudera’s moment.

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