Priya Haji, CEO of Personal Finance Startup SaveUp, Has Died

SaveUp CEO Priya Haji died on July 14 after suffering what appeared to have been a pulmonary embolism, according to statements from her family and the company.

Haji was a vivacious and creative entrepreneur who launched multiple socially minded projects, including a free health clinic in Texas while in high school and a social service organization in East Palo Alto called Free at Last while in college. Her startup World of Good, which helped woman artisans reach global markets, was acquired by eBay in 2010.

Her most recent company SaveUp rewards users who connect their financial accounts for meeting their savings goals. The company had been working with credit unions as well as advertisers who offered sweepstakes prizes to encourage good personal spending behaviors.

SaveUp, which has $7 million in funding from BlueRun Ventures and True Ventures, won “Best in Show” at the financial tech conference Finovate in May.

Haji, who won the nickname “Firecracker” from her mother after being born on the fourth of July, had just turned 44. She was a single parent of two young children, Zen, 2, and Omi, 11 months. Her family and friends are gathering on a memorial Facebook page.

See Haji in her own words in this series of Makers videos.

Microsoft’s Largest-Ever Layoffs Coming Thursday With Former Nokia Hardest Hit

Asa Mathat

Microsoft is preparing to announce its largest-ever layoffs on Thursday, with cuts coming from across the company, but with the former Nokia business being hardest hit, sources say.

The announcement is expected before the financial markets open on Thursday morning.

Numerically, the layoffs are expected to be the company’s biggest-ever job reduction, surpassing the 5,800 or so workers cut during the 2009 downturn, sources said. However, the layoffs to be announced Thursday are a combination of a strategic shift alluded to in last week’s memo by CEO Satya Nadella as well as delivering on the already promised $600 million in cost savings that the previous management had promised would come from the Nokia acquisition.

A Microsoft representative declined to comment.

By making the Nokia-related cuts and other organizational changes in tandem, Nadella is attempting to demonstrate how quickly and decisively the new regime will act to repair the once leading technology giant. Among his first public events as CEO, Nadella presided over the launch of Office for iPad, a product that had been years in the making but had also been caught up in inter-company squabbles. To date a touch-centric version of the product is not available on Microsoft’s Surface tablet.

Nadella pledged in last week’s memo that a coming organizational shift would focus on streamlining engineering as well as reshaping the company’s culture.

"As a large company, I think it's critical to define the core, but it's important to make smart choices on other businesses in which we can have fundamental impact and success," Nadella wrote. However, he made clear in the memo that he saw the Xbox as strategic and, in follow-up interviews, he added that Bing remains important as well.

One of the key questions will be how well Nadella is able to use the restructuring to achieve the desired shift in mindset for the company. Will mere cost cuts fundamentally change the culture of Microsoft?

"Nothing is off the table in how we think about shifting our culture to deliver on this core strategy," he said. "Organizations will change. Mergers and acquisitions will occur. Job responsibilities will evolve. New partnerships will be formed. Tired traditions will be questioned. Our priorities will be adjusted. New skills will be built. New ideas will be heard. New hires will be made. Processes will be simplified."

With engineering in particular, Nadella has been exploring ways to improve the way products are developed at the company, a process that has already seen shifts in some units, such as Enterprise and Cloud, with more changes likely in other product teams.

Bloomberg reported earlier in the week that the layoffs were looming, with the New York Times saying earlier on Wednesday that the cuts would be announced Thursday.

Who Gets to Catch the Falling Knife at Yahoo, as Shares Drop Five Percent

Even yesterday’s sweetheart deal from the Alibaba Group — allowing Yahoo to sell many fewer lucrative shares of the Chinese Internet juggernaut in its upcoming IPO — could not stop investors from smacking the Silicon Valley Internet giant down today.

Yahoo shares dropped 5.1 percent, largely due to the poor performance of its core display advertising business in the second quarter. Revenue for the area dropped seven percent in the quarter, unusual across the sector, with CEO Marissa Mayer blaming the downturn on a range of things.

Except revenue declines have been happening for many quarters now, and it suddenly occurred to Wall Street that perhaps her turnaround promises are a little harder to deliver on and would take more than frantic buying up of startups and a lot of talk about Yahoo being mobile first.

To be fair, Mayer said Q2 mobile revenues were up strongly, although the company once again did not disclose the size of that business, again, as rivals do. Meaning: Small.

Yahoo tried to sweeten all the sour by unveiling the Alibaba stock news, as well as saying it would return half of the after-tax profits that the company will glean on that public offering.

In other words, the proverbial spoon full of sugar.

But Wall Street analysts, who love to suck up whatever gruel companies dole out, were finally awakened from their diabetic coma.

“YHOO remains a work in progress,” wrote Cowen’s John Blackledge.

“Given that we don’t see any real catalysts for the core business for the balance of the year, we are stepping to the side until monetization improves,” wrote CRT Capital’s Neil Doshi, who downgraded Yahoo stock and dropped his target price to $38 from the $41 he had on it the day before.

There were a plethora of similar sentiments, which — luckily for Mayer — got drowned out today with the noisier effort by 21st Century Fox’s head fox Rupert Murdoch to grab Time Warner.

Still, Mayer was cheery and a little defiant on the conference call after the results yesterday, pointing out how much better her Yahoo changes across its business, such as a series of flashy content efforts, were compared to other leaders.

Not in the financials, though, which is why she acknowledged the very obvious in her statement with yesterday’s press release.

“Our top priority is revenue growth, and by that measure, we are not satisfied with our Q2 results,” she said. “While several areas showed strength, their growth was offset by declines.”

Let’s be clear: This is not a secular decline either — it is a Yahoo one. The company used to be the top seller of display advertising in the U.S. But a new report by eMarketer said Yahoo’s share is projected to drop to six percent from 7.1 percent last year. That’s despite the total display ad market growing nearly 24 percent this year. Facebook’s display business is bigger, Google is bigger and, now, even Microsoft is bigger.

That’s why sources inside the company said that Americas head and sales chief Ned Brody is under a lot more pressure from Mayer of late. She already tossed out COO Henrique De Castro, whom she hired from Google and touted endlessly as the ad savior until she did not. Rumors about the eventual fate of Brody, who was poached cloddishly from AOL by Mayer, and the search for a new sales leader to replace him have rocketed around the company and the larger advertising community recently.

Also someone that has to be feeling the heat is ad tech head Scott Burke. Mayer blamed the revenue decline in the quarter partially on company’s borking of the transition to its new Yahoo Ad Manager Plus, as well as marketers preferring to buy cheaper ads.

Burke and Mayer had given the big sell to the new self-serve ad platform in a rah-rah debut at the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas in January. At the time, Burke said the new offering would provide “next generation of tools” to “simplify a highly complex and fragmented market.”

Not so much yet, Scott.

Shervin Pishevar And Scott Stanford’s SherpaVentures Closes $150 Million For Its First Fund

 SherpaVentures, the venture firm founded by former Menlo Ventures partner Shervin Pishevar and former Goldman Sachs banker Scott Stanford, is finally ready to be less vague about what it’s doing. After a year of raising money and simultaneously making investments, the firm is announcing that it has closed $150 million in financing from limited partners. Read More

Yahoo Exec Accused Of Sexual Harassment Files Defamation Counter-Suit

 Prominent Yahoo executive Maria Zhang filed a defamation complaint Wednesday against a former female employee who sued her for sexual harassment and subsequent wrongful termination. In her filing, Zhang called Nan Shi’s allegations — that she forced Shi to have oral and digital sex — “outrageously false” and based on attempts to extort Yahoo. Read More

Snapchat Files Trademarks To Handle Payments

 Snappay? Snapchat may try to monetize by processing peer-to-peer payments, money transfers, or online payments, according to two trademarks it filed earlier this week. Owned by Snapchat and filed on July 11th by an attorney at Cooley, which is known to be Snapchat’s law firm, the trademarks could keep anyone else from entering the same space under the Snapchat name. After being tipped… Read More

Tech Entrepreneur Priya Haji, Founder And CEO Of SaveUp, Has Passed Away At 44

 Priya Haji, a Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur known for her focus on socially-minded ventures in both the for-profit and non-profit spaces, most recently as CEO and co-founder of personal financial savings app SaveUp, passed away unexpectedly of natural causes on July 14th at the age of 44. SaveUp co-founder and CFO Sammy Shreibati confirmed the news to TechCrunch today. The cause of death… Read More

Xbox One Sales “More Than Double” In June, But Microsoft Doesn’t Disclose Absolute Figures

 Today Microsoft announced that in June, sales of its Xbox One console “more than doubled.” It did not release a concrete sales figure for the time period, disappointingly. Microsoft last indicated a hard sales number for the Xbox One in April. It sold 115,000 consoles that month. It isn’t clear if its sales declined in the ensuing period thus making the doubling less… Read More

Xbox One Sales More Than Doubled in June

Microsoft announced today that, following a $100 price cut, it sold more than twice as many Xbox Ones in the U.S. in June as it did in May. The announcement did not say exactly how many units that was, but it came almost exactly 24 hours before the expected release of the NPD Group’s June retail gaming sales numbers. Other than December, the Xbox One has lagged behind its chief rival, Sony’s PlayStation 4, in sales every month.

What’s Your Brain’s Dew Point? (Comic)

Speedy 4G LTE Wireless Networks to Reach One Billion Users by 2017

Can you hear me now? A new report from Juniper Research forecasts blistering global adoption of 4G LTE mobile technology over the next five years, with the number of active connections crossing the one billion mark in 2017. China, Japan and India will help spur the rollout, pushing the number of users to 1.8 billion by 2019. That would amount to one in five active mobile connections.