Layoffs have struck the startup world swiftly, hurting hospitality and travel startups, as well as recruitment and scooter companies. New data shows that some of those layoffs, brought on by COVID-19, might be disproportionately impacting satellite campuses.

By nature, satellite offices are secondary to a startupheadquarters. Opening smaller offices is a strategic move when a company gets a fresh round of funding or wants to expand to a new market. We&ve seen satellite offices pop up in cities like Portland, Phoenix or Austin, which has satellite offices for Apple, Facebook and Oracle, for example.

While most layoffs are coming from companies whose headquarters are located in the main entrepreneurial hubs of the Bay area and New York, the actual staff members are located in the satellite cities, according to data from Layoffs.fyi, a tracker created by former Y Combinator grad Roger Lee.

EasyPost in San Francisco laid off 75 employees, nearly all in Salt Lake City and Louisville. U.K.-based Challenger bank Monzo laid off 165 customer support employees recently in Las Vegas.

Toast, based in Boston, laid off 1,300 employees, or 50% of its entire staff. Per Layoffs.fyi data, 12% of those layoffs were in Omaha, and another 10% were in Chicago.

KeepTruckin, based in San Francisco and last valued at $1.25 billion, laid off around 350 employees, and 33% of those employees were located in Nashville or Chicago.

These numbers are only a fraction of the total layoffs across the country, as Layoffs.fyidata set only includes publicly disclosed actions and tips. But even if the data is just serving as an anecdotal snapshot, itan important one to note.

What the data means

Once the economy does recover to a new normal, itunclear whether HQ cities or satellite cities will be in a better position to bounce back. We caught up with some investors in Boston, a top startup hub that has recently faced its own flurry of layoffs, to hear their thoughts.

According to Lily Lyman, a partner at Boston-based venture capital firm Underscore, satellite offices are often where a company might locate the sales, customer success and business development staff. Logistically, those roles are the most vulnerable as consumer activity slows. For a lot of businesses, there are no sales and deals to be done right now.

&[These roles are getting] disproportionately affected in [reduction of forces] as companies expect a slowdown on the commercial side,& Lyman said. &While a logical decision to extend the cash runway, it does come with the risk that this withdrawal can damage relationships with customers that may be hard to recover.&

Not everyone sees cuts hitting satellite offices the hardest. Michael Skok, another partner at Underscore, said that &in some cases, we&ve seen that satellite offices are established in emerging markets which come with cost savings, so these offices may actually be more protected in these times.& In other words, if you&re cutting costs, San Francisco employee expenses might be higher than Denver employee expenses by sheer nature of the former having exorbitantly high living costs. Revolution Ventures, which invests in startups in emerging tech scenes, said it has not heard about satellite office layoffs from its portfolio as of recently.

And finally, to put it crassly, layoffs in a non-HQ city might quell some of the negative signaling that founders and venture capitalists are trying so hard to avoid (well, most of them at least). Slimming down operations is becoming a proactive response, not a reactive strategy as the pandemic continues to evolve.

Todaydata reminds us that layoffs are rarely an isolated occurrence, and staff cuts appear to be landing harder on less robust tech ecosystems.

Hi and welcome back to The Station, a weekly newsletter dedicated to the future (and present) of transportation. I&m your host, Kirsten Korosec, senior transportation reporter at TechCrunch.

What you&re reading now is a shorter version of the newsletter, which is emailed every weekend. If you want to subscribe, go here and click The Station.

The transportation industry has seen an influx of &disruptors& in the past 15 years, including car sharing and ride-hailing apps and later shared e-bikes and scooters. Now autonomous vehicle technology developers and flying car startups are working for that title.

COVID-19 could turn out to be the transportation disruptor of this new decade. Yes, yes I know — itstill early days. However, COVID-19 is already changing how we get around. Public transit has taken a hit and shared scooters have been pulled off streets. Meanwhile, e-bike sales are booming and some cities are experimenting with how to provide transportation (and even space) that we need to move around without spreading the disease.

Shall we explore further? Read on. Before we dig in, hereone more friendly reminder to reach out and email me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to share thoughts, opinions or tips, or send a direct message to @kirstenkorosec.

Micromobbin&

Electric bikes are having a moment. While shared micromobility companies have pulled scooters and bikes off streets, there is evidence that private sales are growing. Meanwhile, cities are taking action to make this means of transportation more available.

Here are three examples:

• New Yorktentative budget agreement reached April 1 includes a provision that would legalize throttle-based bikes and scooters.
• Lectric eBikes, an Arizona-based startup that launched in May 2019, told TechCrunch it has seen a spike in sales since mid-March. The company was selling an average of 25 bikes a day before COVID-19. By mid-March sales jumped to about 48 bikes a day. The following week, the company averaged daily sales of 55 e-bikes. Lectric sold 175 bikes the week of March 7th. A month later, weekly sales hit 440.
• Portland is trying to make its shared bike system, known as Biketown, more accessible and a helluva a lot cheaper. The city has reduced pay-as-you-go plans to a $0.10 one-time sign up fee and then $0.01 a minute. Yes, 1 cent a minute.

Autonomous delivery

COVID-19 has put a new focus on autonomous vehicle delivery. There aren&t fleets of delivery bots at the ready, but progress is being made.

Starship Technologies launched this month a robot food delivery service in Tempe, Ariz., as part of its expansion plans following a $40 million funding round announced last August.

Starship Technologies, which was launched in 2014 by Skype co-founders Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis, has been ramping up commercial services in the past year, including a plan to expand to 100 universities by late summer 2021. Now, with the COVID-19 pandemic forcing traditional restaurants to close and placing more pressure on gig economy workers, Starship Technologies has an opportunity to accelerate that growth. The company recently launched in Washington, D.C and Irvine, Calif., and says it plans to roll out to more cities in the coming weeks.

Nuronext milestone

Meanwhile, Nuro has been granted permission to begin driverless testing on Californiapublic roads. Nurolow-speed R2 vehicle isn&t designed for people, only packages.

And itwell-positioned to actually scale commercially in California. Under state law, AV companies can get a separate permit that allows them to operate a ride-hailing service. But they can&t charge a fee.

Nuro can&t charge a delivery fee either. However, it can generate revenue by working with local retailers to launch a commercial delivery business using the autonomous vehicles.

Other autonomous vehicle news

AutoX has opened an 80,000-square-foot Shanghai Robotaxi Operations Center, following a 2019 agreement with municipal authorities to deploy 100 autonomous vehicles in the Jiading District. The vehicles in the fleet were assembled at a factory about 93 miles outside of Shanghai.

AutoX, which is developing a full self-driving stack, has operations in California and China. It has been particularly active in China. The company has beenoperating a fleet of robotaxis in Shenzhen through a pilot program launched in 2019 with BYD. Earlier this year, it partnered with Fiat Chrysler to roll out a fleet of robotaxis for China and other countries in Asia.

The Shanghai operations center marks an escalation of AutoXambitions. The company plans to unveil a ride-hailing app that will let users in Shanghai request rides from one of the vehicles at the new operations center.

Trend Watch

Trend Watch is meant to be a bookmark that we can look back on in a few weeks, months or even years and see if it actually caught on.

I&ll mention two this week.

Nauto is an automotive tech startup that combines cameras, motion sensors, GPS and AI algorithms to understand and improve driver behavior. The companyplatform is used in commercial fleets and some fresh data shows an uptick in last-mile driving and more distracted driving.

Nautodistribution and last-mile fleets averaged 41 miles driven every active driving hour in March, a 46% increase from the same month last year.

Meanwhile, distracted driving incidents increased. Nauto said that its distribution and last-mile fleets averaged 1.54 distraction events every active driving hour in March compared to 0.98 events per hour in the same month last year.

Now onto cities. Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf launched Saturday the Oakland Slow Streets initiative to help folks maintain physical distancing. The city has shut down down 74 miles of streets to through traffic to give people space to recreate.

Streets are open to local traffic only and residents are able to drive home. Fire, police, deliveries and other essential services won&t be impacted by street closures either.

Other cities are experimenting with similar efforts. While streets will likely open back up after the pandemic passes, this could change how people, including planners, business owners and city officials view how we should use streets.

From you

Over the past few weeks, I&ve shared comments from readers about how COVID-19 has affected their business or how they use transportation. This week, I thought I&d share some advice from Laurie Yoler, a new partner at Playground Global, board member of Zoox and adviser to multiple companies. She was an early adviser and former board member at Tesla .

Herewhat she shared:

This is a time of deep reflection. Instead of viewing ‘social distancing& as a prison, we can focus on the people we care about and reflect on our work and what gives us joy. Look at this time as an opportunity to be compassionate with yourself and the people around you, and pursue your curiosity. That doesn&t mean forcing yourself to complete a list of tasks with urgency and focus, but rather using this time for gentle creative exploration.

If your business needs to rethink its plans or is facing a substantial slowdown, as so many are, remember you can only be effective by focusing on one thing at a time. I have five &F&s& I run through with entrepreneurs I advise. Friends and family first, then physical facilities, in order to ensure business continuity. After that, you can move to finances, cutting costs and creatively thinking about your business model in order to give your company the best chance of survival. Next, itabout planning for the future. Scenario planning is essential for all critical areas of your business. Ask yourself, &can I use this crisis to make the company stronger?& Lastly, we turn to faith in the worldscientists and innovators to see us through this difficult time.

Remember, even amid the devastation around us, there is still space for optimism. This could be a catalyst for the sweeping innovation in healthcare and education that we so desperately need. Use this time of stillness to restore yourself. Watch inspirational TED talks, exercise, meditate, and check in with friends and colleagues often.&

— Laurie Yoler

Marty Pichinson gets called a lot of things: Silicon Valleyundertaker, its terminator, a grave digger. These aren&t meant as slights; Pichinson is the founder of Sherwood Partners, a restructuring firm that Bay Area venture firms frequently turn to when they need someone to help sell off the assets of startups they have funded. The idea is to return at least some money to the companycreditors and, if anything is left, to the VCs, too.

We last checked in with Pichinson almost exactly three years ago when the startup world was humming along. Even then, because of the sheer number of companies that get funded — and thus the number of startups that invariably don&t make it — Sherwood Partners was helping to wind down two to four companies a week.

Now, as he told us in conversation last week, itwinding down two to three companies every day.

So who is shutting down, how does it all work and what can VCs expect to get in terms of a return in the age of the coronavirus?

Right now, Pichinson says the shutdowns are across verticals and across stages. &We&re in companies that raised $10 million to $25 million, to companies that raised up to $1.5 billion. It doesn&t matter what size they are; when they come to us, they&re all broke. If we&re closing it down to clean up and monetize what we can, they are basically in the same position, whether they raised $20 million or they were once a billion-dollar business.&

The fact that so many people are stuck at home makes for strange opportunities. Italyconfined populace has taken to singing from the balconies — and now researchers are asking them to use those same balconies to help accomplish a bit of citizen science.

The project, created by the Italian National Research Council, aims to take widespread samples of light pollution in the country. The question of &light trespass,& or how much light from outside our homes reaches inside them, isn&t a particularly easy one to test without access to those homes. So they&re asking people to collect that information themselves.

Using their phone and a special app, some 7,000 Italians participated in an initial run of the experiment two weeks ago. All they needed to do was turn off all the lights in their place, go to their window or balcony, and point their phone at the brightest light source they could see.

The resulting data showed that the average light trespass in Italian cities is nearly twice that of homes in the country — not exactly surprising, but itimportant for even supposedly obvious conclusions to be quantified and supported with evidence. Sure, itbrighter in the city — but how much brighter? What type of light is it? More data means better understanding of even the most basic questions.

&With this experiment, we wanted to bring citizens closer to measurement techniques, to let them see the often complex process and allow them to participate in the scientific method,& Alessandro Farini, one of the organizers of the experiment, told Nature. (I contacted the researchers for more information but have not heard back.)

The experiment was so successful that #scienzasulbalcone, or &science on the balcony,& is having an encore — new measurements taken last week and a final one tomorrow night. The team issued revised instructions to its participants in order to better characterize the data they bring in.

Anyone interested in helping is asked to find a light bulb they can easily check the wattage on, then calibrate their phone by leaving only that light on and using their phoneambient light sensor to measure its output. This will help calibrate the system, since some phones are more sensitive to light than others. Once they&re done, they can make another measurement out their window or off the balcony, and submit that.

If you&re interested in taking part, you can find the instructions in Italian here; English instructions are here, but I don&t think it is intended to be a global effort just yet.

Emerging from the smoldering wreckage of Echo Fox and Vision Venture Partners, the investor Stratton Sclavos is rising again to launch a new esports-related venture — a gaming-focused digital network also backed by the WME talent agency and Daylight Holdings.

Tapping Daylight and WME roster of talent, Sclavos has createdPlayers Ntwrk, a new gaming-focused production company that will look to compete with other upstarts angling to tap into esports and competitive gamingnewly dominant place in the entertainment firmament.

Players Ntwrk will feature original programming, unscripted series, celebrity gameplay and live events tapping talent from music, traditional pro-sports and the esports gaming world.

Sclavos and the multifaceted talent manager and president of Daylight Holdings, Ben Curtis, dreamed up Players Ntwrk as a way to tie together disparate groups of athletes and entertainers around their shared love of gaming and entertainment. The network will initially leverage relationships with WME and Klutch Sports Group, the agency founded by LeBron James& longtime manager, Rich Paul, to find talent for programming.

The network will launch on Tuesday at 5:00 pm Pacific for two hours of gameplay featuring the New Orleans Pelicans Guard/Forward Josh Hart and Sacramento Kings point guard De&Aaron Fox on the Players Ntwrk Twitch channel. Additional live streams will be broadcast Friday and Saturday, the company said.

Over the next 12 weeks the network will add live programming featuring all of its &First Squad& talent and experimenting with different gaming and unscripted formats. Ultimately, the network will produce between 12 and 15 hours of original programming per week by the end of the second quarter and will ramp up to 20 to 24 hours of programming per-week by the end of the year.

Initial programming is going to be devoted to charity fundraising, with proceeds going to designated charities based on direct audience donations, the company said.

Players NtwrkFirst Squad talent roster includes:

• Professional athletes: De&Aaron Fox (Sacramento Kings), Josh Hart (New Orleans Pelicans), Jarvis Landry (Cleveland Browns) and Alvin Kamara (New Orleans Saints)
• Music and Entertainment: PARTYNEXTDOOR, Murda Beatz, producer Boi-1da, actor/former athlete Donovan Carter (Ballers)
• Creators/Streamers: KatGunn, Sodapoppin, Cash, Jesser, Jericho, Octane, Sigils, Sonii and DenkOps

Players Ntwrk joins companies like Venn, which are angling to gain a slice of the roughly 37.5 million monthly viewers that are expected to watch live streams on Twitch by the end of 2020,according to research done by eMarketer.

&The number of viewers and subscribers consuming gaming entertainment across YouTube and Twitch tops other entertainment services such as Netflix, HBO, Spotify and ESPN combined,& said Sclavos, in a statement. &Entertainment spectacle is trumping hardcore gaming competition. That kind of engagement makes it clear; gaming entertainment is the next pop culture phenomena. PLAYERS NTWRK is the only platform embracing and executing this new reality by creating original content with the most influential people who also happen to be fans themselves.&

Ita mark of 2020 that the image of throngs of Americans flocking to polling places to exercise their right to vote, once a heartening symbol of democracy in action, is now a nightmare scenario that could visit widespread death on unsuspecting communities nationwide.

In the midst of a viral outbreak thatinfected more than half a million people and swiftly claimed more than 20,000 lives in the U.S. alone, the country is grappling with the question of how Americans will safely cast their votes in Novemberelection — and time is running out.

A number of state officials have pushed back their primaries to protect residents, but last weekWisconsin primary, with its long lines, uneven protective measures and shuttered polling places, demonstrated a worst-case scenario for what Novembergeneral presidential election could look like if states don&t quickly implement a Plan B.

But a handful of lawmakers pushing for a more equitable voting system don&t believe we need a full-on Plan B to rescue the election, just a scaled-up version of systems in place that millions already use to cast their ballots each election cycle. Early voting, absentee voting and mail-in voting have all ticked upward in the last 20 years. Five states now use vote-by-mail as their primary way of voting: Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Utah and Hawaii. The military also relies on mail-in absentee voting for those deployed overseas. In 2018, one in four Americans who cast a ballot did so through the mail.

With the economy still frozen in place, Congress is working on another big coronavirus relief package, though efforts are at a political standstill for the moment. Proposing their own bill, Democratic Senators Amy Klobuchar and Ron Wyden are striving to get vote-by-mail provisions into the next relief package. &Americans shouldn&t have to choose between their health and casting a ballot,& Klobuchar said in a bipartisan call on vote-by-mail efforts. &And it is wrong to shortchange our election officials as we provide relief to address the effects of this global pandemic.&

The bill, called the Natural Disaster and Emergency Ballot Act (NDEBA), seeks to provide 20 days of early voting for all states, a guarantee that all voters can request to vote with a no-excuse absentee ballot, accommodations for voters who don&t receive an absentee ballot in time and additional funding for the Election Assistance Commission to make the changes.

&We are gonna fight like hell to get our bill in the next COVID-19 package,& Wyden told TechCrunch in an interview.

States take the lead

Republicans in Congress have yet to show any support for expanded mail-in voting, but a swath of Republican state officials close to the election process have turned to mail voting systems to keep residents safe, including the secretaries of state in Kentucky, West Virginia and Georgia.

On the bipartisan call led by Sen. Klobuchar with secretaries of state last week, West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner was skittish about the idea of a permanent, expanded vote-by-mail system, but agreed voters should be allowed to cast their votes safely through the mail during the COVID-19 crisis. He previously announced that all West Virginia voters would be sent application postcards for voting through the mail.

&The governor, attorney general, county clerks and I have zealously worked together within state law to balance health concerns with the ease of voting,& Warner said. &We have determined that the absentee voting process is the safest method… Your ballot box is as close as your mailbox.&

Washington Secretary of State Kim Wyman, also a Republican, touted her stateown system in the bipartisan call.

&Washington statevote-by-mail system is accessible, secure, fair and instills confidence in our voters,& Wyman said, encouraging officials &across the political spectrum& to unify around keeping voters safe and stressing that expanded absentee voting and vote-by-mail &must be options on the table& for 2020.

On the call, secretaries of state around the U.S. emphasized the need to act quickly to scale up absentee voting systems, stressing that funding, organizing and putting new systems into practice will be a scramble over the next seven months.

President Trump has attacked vote-by-mail systems in recent White House coronavirus briefings and tweets, but there is no evidence that voting through the mail is &fraudulent in many cases,& as he has claimed. Trump himself uses mail-in voting to cast his absentee ballot in Florida.

The presidentattacks on expanded vote-by-mail also contradict the CDCown guidance for safe elections during the pandemic, which encourage expanded mail-in voting to &minimize direct contact with other people and reduce crowd size at polling stations.&

Out of the billions of absentee votes cast through the mail in the U.S. over a 12-year period, an examination of all known instances of voter fraud found only 491 cases involving absentee voting. With those numbers, Americans are less likely to commit voter fraud than they are to be struck by lightning. In states with vote-by-mail, safeguards built into the system can catch or deter anyone who might tamper with a ballot. In Oregon, which uses forensic signature matching to secure its vote, a poll worker was sentenced to 90 days in jail and ordered to pay a $13,000 fine for tampering with two ballots.

Politics aside

Republicans today mostly believe that Democrats would benefit from any effort that might broadly boost voter turnout, a perspective that the president echoed in a recent Fox News interview discussing the early coronavirus relief bill. &The things they had in there were crazy,& Trump said. &They had things — levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you&d never have a Republican elected in this country again.&

That package included $400 million to safeguard Novemberelection — an amount Democrats argue is insufficient — and no requirements that states implement vote-by-mail. But the conversation around vote-by-mail hasn&t always broken down along todaypolitical lines and the political reality of a broad mail-in voting system is likely nuanced, though untested on a national scale.

An early and vocal proponent of vote-by-mail, Wyden explains that those lines have been redrawn over the years as attitudes toward implementing vote-by-mail have shifted.

&You have to put this in context of where we are,& Wyden said, noting that the debate around vote-by-mail was an &academic thing& two decades ago, with political scientists hashing out which party stood to benefit. In Oregon, other Democrats initially opposed vote-by-mail efforts, believing that because their voters skewed older, Republicans would benefit.

&After all this bickering back and forth on who would benefit, Oregonians put it on the ballot.& In 1998, 69% of voters supported the ballot measure, which passed easily.

In the U.S., implementing any voting changes across the country is politically challenging due to the fact that states oversee and administer their own elections. Even the oversight process varies widely from state to state. Differences aside, many states have expanded absentee voting in recent years.

&Back then when I was introducing those first bills, you didn&t have the number of people voting absentee that you have today,& Wyden said. While voting absentee once required a justification, a &big chunk& of those excuse requirements have given way since then, allowing more people to vote by mail.

&Absentee voting is enormously popular,& Wyden said. &Basically what I tell people… is what we&re really doing with our legislature is kind of upscaling what is already going on — not reinventing the wheel.&

Wyden warns that we&ve already seen the worst-case scenario play out in Wisconsin. &You have older voters waiting in line to talk to older poll workers… some had masks, some didn&t.&

&[In] Wisconsin… the legislature said ‘we&re going to put the lives of our people at risk.& I thought that was very troubling,& Wyden said.

&All I can think of was at this point in the middle of a pandemic, I don&t think this is a partisan issue.&