Technology

We here at TechCrunch are watching the novel coronavirus situation closely, as most of you likely are.

In addition to our editorial coverage of the effects of the novel coronavirus on the business of entrepreneurship — and the ways that technology can help — we have a number of events planned for 2020, including TC Early Stage in April in San Francisco and our TechCrunch Sessions: Mobility event in May in San Jose.

As of now we have not cancelled any of our events for the year, but we continue to monitor the situation very closely on a daily basis.

Our primary goal is to make sure we proceed in a conscientious and careful manner that takes into account local, state and federal guidance as well as our own personal care for all of our event attendees.

Just as it is with all of the members of our editorial and business staff, you&re the TechCrunch family and we will make sure that any decisions we make have you at heart, no matter what.

Much like the companies we cover, TechCrunch has always tried to stay nimble and adopt new ways of serving our readers. We&re in the process now of thinking hard about how to deliver on the promise of our events in a COVID-19 world. Stay tuned, we&ll have some interesting announcements ahead.

Over the years we&ve experimented with many virtual events like our huge Disrupt SF Virtual Hackathon and hosted hybrid virtual interviews on our stages, like the memorable chat at Disrupt in 2014 with Clayton Christensen and Bill Hambrecht — not to mention our coverage of and experimentation with just about every virtual telepresence platform ever invented. Whatever happens, you can depend on us to find interesting and innovative ways to bring together tech entrepreneurs, students, academics, investors and anyone passionate about building to talk, inspire and innovate like hell.

If you want to keep track of current updates to our plans for TechCrunch events throughout the year, please use this page as your resource of record.

As always, we&ll keep you posted. Thank you.

Cadillac has cancelled the upcoming debut of the Lyriq, an all-electric mid-sized SUV designed to be an entry point into luxury brandnew EV lineup, over concerns about the COVID-19 outbreak.

GMluxury brand had planned to reveal the Lyriq on April 2 at an event in Los Angeles.

COVID-19, a disease caused by a new virus that is a member of the coronavirus family and a close cousin to the SARS and MERS viruses that have caused outbreaks in the past, has caused governments and companies to cancel tech, business and automotive events around the world. The Geneva International Motor Show was cancelled, as well as MWC in Barcelona and the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas.

The GM brand said in a statement that the event was being cancelled &out of an abundance of caution.&

Herethe statement from Cadillac:

As you are aware, the situation in relation to the COVID-19 (novel coronavirus) outbreak in the U.S. continues to develop.Now, several states have declared a State of Emergency and the number of cases continues to climb.

Out of an abundance of caution, we have made the difficult decision to cancel the Cadillac LYRIQ reveal in Los Angeles, California on April 2^nd. We are currently evaluating future plans and will be touch soon with an update. Our top priority is the safety of our media guests and employees. We have been working with GM Medical and Security to monitor the situation closely and have been following recommendations for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization.

The Lyriq is just one in a roster of electric vehicles that GM plans to bring to market in the next two years. The automaker revealed March 4 a sweeping plan to produce and sell EVs that hinges on a new electric architecture that will support a wide range of products across all of its brands, including Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet and GMC. The EV portfolio will include everything from compact cars and work trucks to large premium SUVs and performance vehicles.

This modular architecture, called &Ultium,& will be capable of 19 different battery and drive unit configurations, 400-volt and 800-volt packs with storage ranging from 50 kWh to 200 kWh, and front-, rear- and all-wheel drive configurations.

The Cruise Origin, a self-driving, electric shared vehicle that was shown in January, was the first product under this new EV strategy to be revealed to the public. The reveal of Cadillac Lyriq SUV was supposed to come next, followed by the GMC Hummer EV on May 20.The Hummer event has not been cancelled.

When Zapier was founded in 2011, it was a side project for three friends from Missouri who wanted to make it easier to connect any one web app to another. Nine years, millions of users and around 300 employees later, itone of the most highly valued companies to ever go through Y Combinator — and they did it all with a team that is entirely remote.

I chatted with Zapier co-founder and CEO Wade Foster to find out why they decided to go remote from the start, and how the company addresses the challenges of scaling up a distributed team. Hereour chat, lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

TechCrunch: Why remote?

Wade Foster: I&ll give you a little of the origin story.

We started as a side project… and side projects can&t afford offices. So we&re kind of working via coffee shops, our apartments, wherever we could get the job done.

We moved out to the Bay Area from Columbia, Missouri for [Y Combinator] . That summer, we were all three in the same apartment — the only time in the companylife cycle where the whole company was together. At the tail end of that, Mike, one of my co-founders, moved back to Missouri to be with his then-girlfriend/now-wife as she was wrapping law school. So we were remote by necessity there.

Today was an awful day for the stock market, with global and domestic equities falling sharply as the world digested a collapse in oil prices, and yet another weekend of the spread of COVID-19. All major U.S. indices were down, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq falling the least of the three, slipping a comparatively modest 7.29%, to 7,950.68 on the day.

However, while the tech index didn&t fare as poorly as other American indices, a critical portion of the technology market actually fell further than the Dow Jones Industrial Average or the S-P 500: SaaS and cloud stocks, as measured by the Bessemer-Nasdaq index.

Indeed, the BVP Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index was off 8.28% today, closing at 1,134.51. Thatthe lowest level that the index has traded at since last October. Putting the basketswings into context, the index is just 7% above its 52-week lows, but 21% off its recent highs (52-week range data via the excellent Financial Times).

That means that SaaS and cloud stocks are off the requisite 20% needed to classify as in a bear market. A correction is defined as a 10% decline from recent highs. A bear market is 20%. Other major indices arenear the bear market mark, but are still above it. They could easily reach the threshold tomorrow, but SaaS got there first.

What the hell?

It was just three days ago that SaaS stocks approached the correction threshold. Covering that marker earned me some flak on Twitter, as some folks invested in the success of SaaS read the news item as a dis of the category itself. To the contrary, really, SaaS companies are still richly valued — far above historical norms — and it seems unlikely that investors are about to price them more cheaply than other types of companies.

However, what does seem clear is that there is less short-term optimism about SaaS than there was just a few weeks ago, when, in mid-February, companies in the sector set all-time record highs on the public markets. (We&ve been covering the SaaS run for some time now.)

The carnage today was widespread, but not that bad when we take into account resulting revenue multiples. For example:

• Atlassian was off 7.87% today, but still had a price/sales multiple of over 23, per YCharts data.
• Slack was off 6.13% today, but had a price/sales multiple at the end of day of 21.24, again according to YCharts.

This doesn&t undercut the pain that public SaaS companies felt today, or the gut-drop that SaaS startups felt as they watched their leading lights get pummeled on the stock market. But SaaS highfliers are still just that, and the whole category is still expensive. So, pour one out, but just one. Another day or two like today, however, and worry becomes a bit more understandable.

On Monday, Facebook announced the addition of two new names to its board of directors, Nancy Killefer and Tracey T. Travis.

Killefer brings potentially valuable government insight to Facebook, as she served in the U.S. Department of the Treasury during the Obama administration. With last yeardeparture of former Clinton administration chief of staff Erskine Bowles, Facebookboard lost one of its voices with deep government experience.

In addition to her time in the treasury, Killefer held various leadership roles at global consulting firm McKinsey - Company over 30 years and currently serves on the board of Cardinal Health. She previously held a board seat with Avon.

&I&m excited to join the board of Facebook, a company that is at the center of the biggest debates about technology and society,& Killefer said in the investor press release. &The next few years are likely to shape the internet for generations to come and I hope to contribute to Facebookefforts to be a responsible force for good in the world.&

Travis, Facebookother board pick, joins from Estée Lauder, where she currently serves as EVP and CFO for the cosmetics company. While Killefer brings public sector experience, Travis offers a &strong finance and corporate leadership background,& per Zuckerberg, and plenty of consumer and retail finance experience from roles with Ralph Lauren, Limited Brands, Inc., Pepsi and General Motors. In a press release, Travis expressed optimism about Facebook and the &power of technology and innovation to change our world for the better.&

Facebook lost three board members last year, first Bowles and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, known to clash openly with Zuckerberg, and later Dr. Susan Desmond-Hellmann, former CEO of the Bill - Melinda Gates Foundation. Last month, Facebook added Mark Zuckerbergclose personal friend, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to its board. This monthadditions fill in the remaining gaps.

Facebookboard now consists of Zuckerberg, PayPalPeggy Alford, Marc L. Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz, General CatalystKenneth I. Chenault, DropboxHouston, Founders FundPeter Thiel, Cranamere GroupJeff Zients, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and the two new names. With the addition of Killefer and Travis, the board is at its most gender-balanced yet, with four women and six men filling the seats.

In recent years, Facebook has faced multiple outside proposals from shareholders to remove Zuckerberg from his chairman position, but his board has historically held fast. Itunlikely that the company has brought anyone on particularly willing to rock the boat, but we&ll be following the new dynamics as the companylatest board members settle in.

At least itover.

The markets endured their worst day of trading of this young year as the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 2,000 points to close at 23,850.79— a 7.79% decline. The Nasdaq Composite Index fell 624.94, to close at 7,950.68, and losses to the S-P 500 triggered a temporary halt on trading in the early morning hours. The S-P itself closed down 225.81 at 2,746.56, a 7.6% loss on the day.

Stocks were set up for a fall on Monday as every major financial indicator turned south.

Oil was down over a scuttled OPEC deal which will now mean that Russia and Saudi Arabia will flood the global oil market with cheap crude. The price war pushed the price of crude down to roughly $30 per barrel.

Meanwhile, markets are still trying to absorb all of the latest news around the spread of COVID-19, the disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2. The disease continues to spread in the U.S., with 607 total confirmed cases so far, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. Schools are closing, businesses are encouraging their employees to work remotely if they can and nearly everyone is canceling non-essential business travel.

Hits to oil and gas companies and airplane manufacturers were always going to weigh heavily on the Dow. And now therean open discussion in the halls of the U.S. government about the possibility for industry bailouts.

That kind of talk doesn&t bode well for the overall health of the U.S. economy, nor do fears over large hits to the nationservices sector.

And the Federal Reserve has basically flipped all of the switches it possibly can to keep the U.S. economy humming, driving interest rates down to near zero in an effort to encourage investment in the stock market.

None of this seems to be helping, yet. And startups have as much to fear from a market contraction as the rest of the world. Less money flowing in financial markets reflects fewer dollars getting spent in the real world — and more cautious decision-making around how to spend the money a company has.