Daily Crunch - Goldman Sachs calls for diverse boards

Happy Friday

Goldman Sachs takes a stance on the board diversity of startups going public, the London police move forward with facial recognition and Sonos tweaks its approach to old speakers. Here’s your Daily Crunch for January 24, 2020.

Goldman Sachs says it won’t take startups public without at least one ‘diverse’ director; it should go further

CEO David Solomon told CNBC that beginning this year, Goldman will no longer take companies public if they don’t have at least one “diverse” member on its board of directors.

Some will, perhaps rightly, see the announcement as little more than marketing. After all, it’s already widely viewed as unacceptable for a company to go public without at least one female board member and preferably far more diversity than that.

Read more

Seeking Startups Building Frontier Technologies

Sponsored by Newlab

Newlab and NYCEDC are seeking startups building frontier tech to help make NYC more sustainable and energy efficient. Apply for the opportunity to pilot your tech, receive grant funding and work with government, community and academic partners.

Read more

London’s Met Police switches on live facial recognition, flying in face of human rights concerns

The deployment comes after a multi-year period of trials by the Met and police in South Wales. The Met says its use of the controversial technology will be targeted to “specific locations … where intelligence suggests we are most likely to locate serious offenders.”

Read more

Sonos clarifies how unsupported devices will be treated

If you use a Zone Player, Connect, first-generation Play:5, CR200, Bridge or pre-2015 Connect:Amp, Sonos is still going to drop support for those devices. But at least the company is backing away from its initial decision that your entire ecosystem of Sonos devices would stop receiving updates, as well.

Read more

Meet the B2B videoconferencing startup that’s gone crazy for online dating

Eyeson’s website touts “no downloads, no lag, no hassle” video calls. But when TechCrunch came across founder Andreas Kröpfl last December, pitching hard in Startup Alley at Disrupt Berlin, he was most keen to talk about something else entirely: video dating.

Read more

Layoffs hit Q&A startup Quora

Quora, the 10-year-old question-and-answer company based in Mountain View, is laying off staff in its Bay Area and New York offices. CEO Adam D’Angelo did not disclose the scale of the layoffs.

Read more

As SaaS stocks set new records, Atlassian’s earnings show there’s still room to grow

Atlassian reported earnings after-hours yesterday and the market quickly pushed its shares up by more than 10%. Alex Wilhelm explores why. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

Read more

Wikipedia now has more than 6 million articles in English

The feat, which comes roughly 19 years after the website was founded, is a testament of “what humans can do together,” said Ryan Merkley, chief of staff at Wikimedia, the nonprofit organization that operates the online encyclopedia.

Read more

See more jobs on CrunchBoard

Post your tech jobs and reach millions of TechCrunch readers for only $200 per month.