LA gets a big SAAS exit as Fastly nabs the Culver City-based Signal Sciences for $775M

Los Angeles was always more than a one industry town, even when it comes to technology startups, but media and entertainment (and social networking) were always the big draws in tinseltown.

Now the city’s enterprise tech scene can claim a really big winner with Signal Sciences, the security monitoring and management company that is getting bought by Fastly, a provider of content delivery networking services, for $775 million.

“Our team couldn’t be more excited about the opportunity to join Fastly to continue to drive forward security protections that empower developers. But we also believe this is a great moment to showcase the diversity of the LA technology scene,” wrote Signal Sciences chief executive, Andrew Peterson, in a direct message. “Being the largest enterprise tech outcome ever here, we’re just one of so many great deep technology companies who are paving the way for the next generation of SoCal based start ups. We’re thrilled to help lead the way for the broader tech community in Los Angeles.”

Content delivery and security go hand-in-hand and some of the biggest companies online use businesses like Fastly and its competitor, Cloudflare, to ensure that their online presence doesn’t go offline — and that browsers can quickly download and deliver websites.

Fastly said that the acquisition of Signal Sciences’ business will boost its ability to provide better security for applications and APIs — the connective fabric between different services that knit different technologies together behind the scenes.

With the acquisition, Fastly is planting a flag as a new competitor in the cybersecurity market, even as companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google offer a wider array of services under their Internet as a service business lines.

Application security is a higher value piece of the services stack and it takes advantage of the natural position that a company like Fastly has as a content distribution network.

“Fastly was founded to meet developers’ need for greater visibility and control. Now, as the digital transformation movement continues to accelerate, DevOps teams are struggling with inadequate and inflexible security tools,” said Joshua Bixby, Chief Executive Officer of Fastly, in a statement. “Together with Signal Sciences, we will give developers modern security tools designed for the way they work.”

Los Angeles, California, USA – March 23, 2016: Aerial view of the Hollywood sign at dusk in Los Angeles. The image has been taken from an helicopter flying over LA. Image Credit: Getty Images/franckreporter

Under the terms of the agreement Fastly is buying Signal Sciences for $200 million in cash and approximately $575 million worth of stock, subject to customary adjustments for transactions, according to a statement.

Fastly is also setting up a $50 million retention pool of restricted stock units to give out to Signal Sciences employees.

Signal Sciences employees aren’t the only winners in the deal. The company raised $63 million in venture financing from investors including CRV, Harrison Metal, Index Ventures, Oreilly Alphatech Ventures, Lead Edge Capital, and individual investors including former Facebook security officer Alex Stamos, and Etsy chief executive Chad Dickerson.

The company’s last round was a $35 million investment raised about two years ago, and one investor with knowledge of the company’s cap table called it a “pretty efficient exit” for its backers.

Signal Sciences secures $35 million investment to protect web apps

Morgan Stanley & Co. and Union Square Advisors are acting as financial advisors to Fastly, and Cooley LLP is acting as its legal advisor with regard to the transaction, according to a statement. Qatalyst Partners is acting as financial advisor to Signal Sciences, while Goodwin Procter was the company’s lawyer.

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Amazon debuts Halo smart health subscription service and Halo Band wearable activity tracker

Amazon has introduced an entirely new membership program called Halo today that aims to provide comprehensive personal health and wellness monitoring and advice. The Halo service, which is opening to early access by special request today, includes both the service and a new Amazon Halo Band wristworn activity tracker for $64.99 for a six-month membership. Amazon says that the standard public price of the same will be $99.99 once it’s more generally available.

Halo looks to offer more than your standard health tracking gadget/app combo, by taking a comprehensive look at various measures of health, including body fat percentage, as measured at home with just your smartphone’s own camera and the Amazon Halo app. The company says that it was able to make this possible using its own advances in computer vision and machine learning. Amazon employes deep neural network-based processing of your uploaded photos to separate your body from its surroundings, analyze so-called body fat “hot spots” where it’s easier to measure body fat percentage, and then generates a 3D model of your body. You can then use a slider to adjust your body fat percentage up or down to see what kind of impact gaining or losing body fat would actually have on your physique.

Image Credits: Amazon

Amazon claims that its technology is able to provide accuracy up to the standards of what a doctor would be able to determine in a clinical setting – and as much as twice as accurate as is currently possible using other at-home methods, including smart scales.

Meanwhile, the Amazon Halo Band is a small, sleek wristworn device that can capture other measures of health, including activity, skin temperature, sleep states (including REM, light and deep sleep). It has an accelerometer, a heart rate monitor, two microphones, and it’s water resistant. The built-in battery can last up to a fully week on a 90 minute charge, and it’s compatible with a range of different band accessories for switching style.

Another unique vector that Amazon is measuring on top of activity, sleep and body fat percentage is wha tit’s calling “Tone” – that’s why there are microphones on board the Halo Band. That monitors your voice, and applies machine learning to determine factors including “energy and positivity.” Amazon says this will allow them to provide unique insights like whether “a difficult work call leads to less positivity in communication with a customer’s family,” for instance.

Image Credits: Amazon

The blatant, obvious concern here is that Amazon Halo seeks unprecedented access to a person’s personal data in order to derive its insights. Amazon is looking to collect information about the time, lengthy and quality of your sleep; biometric data including your heart rate and body temperature; information about when you exercise and where; and even highly accurate and detailed info about your body’s physical makeup – not to mention how your voice sounds and what that might indicate about your mental state.

Amazon says in a release about Halo that both Halo and Body were built with “privacy in mind,” and that body scans are automatically deleted from any servers where they’re stored after they’re processed. They’re then stored only locally on your phone, and Amazon says this means “no one but you ever sees them” unless you opt to share them. Further, it says all health data “is encrypted in transit and in the cloud,” with customers able to delete their data at any time. As for voice and speech data, Amazon says that these are analyzed locally on the phone itself and then immediately deleted after processing, so that no one ever hears them – including them customer themselves.

Image Credits: Amazon

Even so, this is handing a lot of trust and information to Amazon, and while the raw data may be protected, the insights gathered, even if anonymized, obviously stand to offer Amazon a lot more value in terms of its ability to tune its overall product offerings and create additional opportunities for things like its bourgeoning healthcare business. That said, Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant and ecosystem hasn’t seemed to deter customers, so it’ll be interesting to see how many are open to sharing even more info with Amazon in exchange for guided health and wellness advice.

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Amazon opens its first Amazon Fresh physical grocery store, in LA

The shift to online shopping has accelerated in the COVID-19 pandemic, but today Amazon made a bold move that underscores its belief that physical stores will remain a key component of how consumers shop. In the Los Angeles neighborhood of Woodland Hills, the e-commerce giant today opened its first Amazon Fresh supermarket, the first of seven Amazon Fresh that it plans to set up in California and Illinois in the coming weeks and months.

A blog post from James Helbling, the head of Amazon Fresh, notes that the store will open initially invitation-only, based emails it will be sending out to locals, from 7:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. PT. It will update more on opening hours and capacity over time here.

You might be thinking to yourself, but Amazon already has Whole Foods and smaller Amazon Go stores? The idea here will be to build a new grocery store experience from the ground up targeting a different customer. Indeed, this is par for the course with all consumer packaged goods plays: own a wide variety of brands targeting all demographics, and you will own the space.

It’s also an essential part of the playbook for Amazon in its wider bid to compete more squarely against the likes of Walmart, which dominates the world of physical (and therefore, all) shopping in the US. Walmart was estimated to have about a 26% market share of grocery sales in the US, in what is still quite a fragmented market, according to this graphic from Statista. The data puts Amazon’s Whole Foods share at just 1.6%, although Amazon itself estimates that it is closer to about 4%, including its other channels, including online. Still pretty small, nevertheless.

While Whole Foods focuses mainly on organic and health foods (and has rightly earned the nickname “Whole Paycheck” because of how expensive a shopping trip can be there), and Go is smaller and about catering to early adopters with its no-human, all-automation, AI and camera approach, Amazon Fresh will bring in a bunch of recognised, mainstream big brands alongside Amazon’s own burgeoning own-label lines, along with a lot of pre-prepared items.

That’s not to say it won’t also be very tech-heavy. The store will have a new feature called the Amazon Dash Cart so that people can build lists of items before going into the store, and then use that to select and pay for things to cut waiting time to ring up and pay with a human cashier. And there will be Echo Show devices set up around the store to give people advice on where to find products. (But I don’t think they will be fully operational devices: ie no ability to change the music playing in the store through these… not yet at least.)

It will also offer free delivery to people who shop at the store, which essentially will also become a depot of sorts for the wider Amazon Fresh operation — which had been entirely online until now (and which had started to offer free delivery some time back to sharpen competition with the wide plethora of other grocery delivery options out in the market now).

By building the whole store from the ground up, it will give Amazon to integrate more tech into the experience more easily, too.

The arrival, spread, and persistent existence of the novel coronavirus has played out in a tricky way when it comes to physical stores. Depending on where you live, you will have different sets of regulations to comply with when shopping, which might range from requiring face masks or limiting entry or movement within stores, through to stores operating with other limitations and in some extreme cases not being opened at all.

Amazon said it plans to take its own set of guidelines into how the stores will be run, basing it on how Whole Foods has been working. Employees will have temperature checks daily; both workers and customers will have to wear face masks; it will offer free disposable masks to people who need one; and stores will be limited to a maximum capacity of 50%.

The opening of this store in LA should not come as a huge surprise to those who have been following the company’s moves: it has been slowly picking up large retail locations to develop them into Fresh depots for a while now, including sites in LA, but a number of other signals including hiring patterns have led many to guess that the bigger plan was to build them into retail operations.

The company has reportedly also been looking to develop physical grocery stores in other markets outside of the US as well. There have been rumors swirling for years now in the UK — which like the US has a pretty fragmented and somewhat tumultuous grocery industry, dominated in its case by Tesco — that Amazon has been eyeing up retail locations that have come up for sale as big retail chains have found themselves in financial dire straights.

That predicament, ironically, has been partly the result of the shift to people shopping online, on sites like (you guessed it) Amazon.

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Partly Cloudy today!

With a high of F and a low of 61F. Currently, it's 74F and Fair outside.

Current wind speeds: 11 from the West

Pollen: 6

Sunrise: August 26, 2020 at 06:15PM

Sunset: August 27, 2020 at 07:30AM

UV index: 0

Humidity: 39%

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August 27, 2020 at 10:01AM

A Bit on CI/CD

I’d say “website” fits better than “mobile app” but I like this framing from Max Lynch:

Every production mobile app ultimately has a set of recurring tasks around integration, testing, deployment, and long term maintenance. These tasks often must be automated across a team of many developers and app projects. Building a process for these tasks can be incredibly time consuming and require specialized infrastructure experience, but is critical for the success of any serious app project.

They are talking about “Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment,” or CI/CD.

Everybody is trying to get you on their CI/CD tooling, and it’s obvious why: it’s a form of lock-in. This stuff is hard, so if they can help make it easier, that’s great, but they tend to do it in their own special way, which means you can’t just up and leave without causing a bunch of work for yourself. I ain’t throwing shade, it’s just how it is.

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So much CI/CD stuff crosses my attention:

• Max was writing about AppFlow, which is a new CI/CD thing from Ionic. I haven’t used it, but hey, it looks nice. I also have not used Semaphore but it also looks nice.
• I use Buddy on CSS-Tricks.
• At CodePen, we used to Capistrano, then moved to CodeShip, then moved to GitLab (DevOps), and are now on GitHub (Actions) configured with Pulumi. That was after checking out Azure DevOps and AWS CodeBuild. Some of it involves using tools like Serverless to help get code to AWS.
• Netlify runs my builds on anything Jamstack-y I do, which is highly configurable and deployment is assumed.
• We talked with Brian Leroux on ShopTalk who is building Begin, which is serverless CI/CD.
• It feels like the big classics are Jenkins, Circle CI, and Travis CI.
• Heroku deserves a high five for teaching developers long ago that CI/CD should be Git-based and as simple as git push heroku master.

I’m probably missing at least 20 companies here. Like I say, everybody wants you on their system. They want you storing your secrets there. They want you configuring your permissions there.

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Standard Model Changes

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Why you should hire a front-end developer

Matt Hobbs says you should hire a front-end developer because…

• “A front-end developer is the best person to champion accessibility best practices in product teams.”
• “80-90% of the end-user response time is spent on the front end.”
• “A front-end developer takes pressure off interaction designers.”
• “If you do not have a front-end developer there is a high risk that the good work the rest of the team does will not be presented to users in the best way.”

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