The New York Times - USA (2020-10-26)

MONDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2020 B1

N

TECH ECONOMY MEDIA FINANCE

2 TECHNOLOGY

Phone companies are

flooding us with 5G ads. But

what’s out there isn’t much of

an advancement. On Tech.

3 COMPANIES

Dunkin’ Brands is in talks to

sell itself to Inspire Brands,

owner of Sonic, Buffalo Wild

Wings and other restaurants.

6 MEDIA

In a ‘propaganda feedback

loop,’ voter fraud stories are

circulating on conservative

news sites.

SAN FRANCISCO — It is the folksiest

of Silicon Valley origin stories:

Tech start-up makes it big after a

wide-eyed entrepreneur builds a

prototype in his garage. But Colin

Wessells could never have imag-

ined that a pandemic would force

him back into the garage just to

keep his company going.

Dr. Wessells, 34, is one of the

founders and the chief executive

of Natron Energy, a start-up build-

ing a new kind of battery. In

March, when social distancing or-

ders shuttered his company’s of-

fices in Santa Clara, Calif., he and

his engineers could no longer use

the lab where they tested the bat-

teries. So he packed as much of

the equipment as he could into a

sport utility vehicle, drove it home

and recreated part of the lab in his

garage.

“It was only a fraction of the test

equipment,” Dr. Wessells said.

“But we could at least run some

new experiments.”

Designing and creating new

technology — never easy tasks —

have become far more difficult in

the pandemic. This is particularly

true for companies building bat-

teries, computer chips, robots,

self-driving cars and any other

technology that involves more

than software code. While many

American workers can get by with

a laptop and an internet connec-

tion, start-up engineers piecing

together new kinds of hardware

also need circuit boards, car parts,

soldering irons, microscopes and,

at the end of it all, an assembly

line.

But Silicon Valley is not the

home of ingenuity for nothing.

When the pandemic hit, many

start-up engineers in the area, like

Dr. Wessells, moved their gear

The pandemic has forced Silicon Valley hardware makers, who need more

than a laptop and internet connection to work remotely, to get creative.

Aaron Loar, an

engineer at Natron

Energy, working

from home. The

start-up is building a

new kind of battery,

which requires a lot

of equipment.

CAYCE CLIFFORD FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

When Tech Start-Ups

Go Back to the Garage

By CADE METZ

CONTINUED ON PAGE B2

WASHINGTON — At a virtual con-
ference in September, Adam
Boehler, chief executive of the U.S.
International Development Fi-
nance Corporation, described his
nascent agency as a bulwark
against China’s “economic co-
lonialism” — with $60 billion in an-
nual lending authority to counter
Beijing’s strategy of spreading its
global influence with low-interest
infrastructure loans.
But in recent months, Mr.
Boehler, a former health care ex-
ecutive, has repurposed the inter-
national agency into something
far from its intended role: a fi-
nancing arm for projects inside
the United States.

Kodak Debacle

Puts an Agency

In the Hot Seat

This article is by Alan Rappeport,
Ana Swansonand Glenn Thrush.

CONTINUED ON PAGE B5

By early October, even people

inside the White House believed

President Trump’s re-election

campaign needed a desperate

rescue mission. So three men

allied with the president gath-

ered at a house in McLean, Va.,

to launch one.

The host was Arthur Schwartz,

a New York public relations man

close to President Trump’s eldest

son, Donald Jr. The guests were

a White House lawyer, Eric Her-

schmann, and a former deputy

White House counsel, Stefan

Passantino, according to two

people familiar with the meeting.

Mr. Herschmann knew the

subject matter they were there to

discuss. He had represented Mr.

Trump during the impeachment

Inside Trump Allies’ Plan to Alter Race

CONTINUED ON PAGE B6

Ben Smith

THE MEDIA EQUATION

JOHN WISNIEWSKI

Journalists at The Wall Street Journal were skeptical about a story pitch.

The first requests that upended

Seesaw, a popular classroom app,

came in January from teachers

and education officials abroad.

Their schools were shutting down

because of the coronavirus, and

they urgently wanted the app ad-

justed for remote learning. The

company figured it could do that

with a single short hackathon

project.

“We were so naïve,” said Emily

Voigtlander Seliger, a Seesaw

product manager.

Weeks later, reality hit: The vi-

rus spread to the United States,

where more of the app’s users are.

Seesaw had been designed for stu-

dents in a classroom to submit an

audio comment or a digital draw-

ing after a lesson. But thousands

of teachers suddenly wanted it to

work as a full-featured home

learning tool. Rather than using

Seesaw for a couple of assign-

ments a week, they were using it

for hours each day.

It seemed like every start-up’s

dream: racing to keep up with de-

mand from people desperate for

your app.

And in many ways, that has

worked out well for Seesaw, a San

Francisco company. The number

of student posts on its app in-

creased tenfold from February to

May, Seesaw says, and the paid

customer base has tripled from

Upended by the Pandemic,

Classroom App Takes Flight

75%+

The percentage of American

schools using Classroom.

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

CONTINUED ON PAGE B5

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