Managed by Q, the office management platform based out of New York, has today been acquired by The We Company, formerly known as WeWork.

Financial terms were not disclosed. The WSJ reports that it was a cash and stock deal. Managed by Q, which has 500 employees, will remain as a wholly owned separate entity and CEO Dan Teran will remain following the acquisition to join WeWork leadership.

Upon its latest financing in January, Managed by Q was valued at $249 million, according to PitchBook.

Here’s what Teran had to say in a prepared statement:

We are excited for this incredible opportunity to deepen our commitment to realizing our ambitious vision of building an operating system for the built world. WeWork is uniquely positioned to invest in workplace technology and services, and I look forward to partnering with their team to build more robust products for our clients and create a global platform to help companies push the bounds on our collective potential.

Managed by Q was founded in 2014 with a plan to change the way that offices run. The platform allowed office managers and other decision-makers to handle supply stocking, cleaning, IT support and other non-work related tasks in the office by simply using the Managed by Q dashboard. Managed by Q serves the demand through a combination of in-house operators and third-party vendors and service providers.

Notably, Managed by Q took a different tack than most other logistics companies, employing their operators as W2 workers instead of 1099 contractors. Moreover, Managed by Q offered a stock option plan to operators that gives 5 percent of the company back to those employees.

The company has raised a total of $128.25 million since launch from investors such as GV, RRE and Kapor Capital. Managed by Q currently serves the markets of New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston and Silicon Valley, with plans to aggressively expand following the acquisition, according to the WSJ.

Not only has Managed by Q swiftly matured into a big player in the NY tech scene and Future of Work space, but it has also fostered interesting competition and consolidation within the space. Managed by Q has itself made several acquisitions, including the purchase of NVS (an office space planning and project management service) and Hivy (an internal comms tool to let employees tell office managers what they need).

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | WeWork acquires Managed by Q

Hometalk, a DIY community site with just under 10 million monthly users and more than 21 million monthly visits, today announced that it has raised a $15 million growth round led by NFX, with participation from WeWork founder and CEO Adam Neumann and Altair Capital.

If you’re not familiar with Hometalk, you can think of the site as kind of a DIY-centric Houzz, with a focus on visuals and step-by-step guides for doing projects inside your home. Those user-written guides cover everything from fixing clogged sink drains to repairing drywall, as well as more complex home improvement projects, and can feature text, images and video.

It’s very much a community-driven site and its 17 million registered users have now created more than 140,000 tutorials. In total, these have been viewed more than 2.5 billion times in the last year, the company says.

Until now, the site’s revenue mostly came from advertising. Going forward, though, the company plans to expand its offerings and introduce new revenue streams. Unsurprisingly, that’s what a lot of the new funding will go toward, too. Those new revenue streams include a marketplace, subscription service and branded content — all of which are logical additions for a site that already focuses on helping people improve their homes and who will likely need the right tools to do so.

“We always believed there is a massive, unmet need in the market for people to create the home they love by unlocking their creativity and giving them tools to empower this,” Hometalk founder and CEO Yaron Ben Shaul said. “The growth we have experienced demonstrates not only the product-market fit for Hometalk, but also the large opportunity we have ahead. We are most proud to have such an active, engaged community that trusts and relies on Hometalk as its go-to place for creativity.”

The company was founded in 2011 and currently has 60 employees in offices in New York City and Jerusalem.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Hometalk raises M to grow its DIY community

What happens when you’re working behind the scene with French President Emmanuel Macron and you suddenly become a minister? This is what’s happening to Cédric O this week, who was appointed Minister for the Digital Economy on Sunday. I was the first journalist to interview him after his appointment.

While Cédric O has been talking with the French tech ecosystem for years, he usually stays away from cameras and microphones. At the Elysée, he was in charge of France’s stakes in companies and tech in general. I wrote about many of the things he’s been working on.

He invited 50 tech CEOs to meet with Emmanuel Macron and talk about “tech for good.” He invited dozens of venture capitalists and limited partners to Paris to convince them to invest more in the French tech ecosystem. He convinced Facebook to let French regulators investigate on moderation processes. And yet, you can’t find his name anywhere.

Now that he’s under the spotlight, the public figure of all things technology, it’s important to understand his views. Tech regulation is going to be a cornerstone of the economy and the fabric of society — and he has strong feelings about it.

Regulating big tech

For some reason, most of our conversation ended up being about regulating tech companies. On this topic, Cédric O has a subtle stance that involves cooperation between European countries, a clear regulatory framework and a new type of regulator. He doesn’t necessarily want to break them up.

“Platforms have to implement regulation in one way or another. And I completely agree with Mark Zuckerberg’s op-ed,” Cédric O told me. “Platforms shouldn’t write laws about what’s legal or not. However, they are responsible when it comes to implementing regulation and getting results.”

According to him, Zuckerberg shouldn’t write laws and French regulators shouldn’t focus on content. It should all be about moderating processes.

“It’s just like banking regulators. They check that banks have implemented systems that are efficient, and they audit those systems. I think that’s how we should think about it.”

And he also says that it isn’t (just) about deleting content. Social networks should also make sure that they don’t delete content that isn’t supposed to be deleted.

In a perfect world, Cédric O thinks there should be a central repository so that social networks can query the status of a specific post.

“For instance, when Marine Le Pen publishes a video of an ISIS slaughter, there should be a repository that isn’t necessarily managed by a public administration. Platforms could query that repository and get a status very quickly,” Cédric O said.

You could imagine a neutral repository built by multiple platforms. Of course, that wouldn’t solve all the issues we have seen with the Christchurch terrorist attack. Many people re-uploaded the live stream with slight edits so that it wouldn’t be detected as a duplicate.

When it comes to French regulators, Cédric O says that nothing is set in stone yet. The CSA could gain some new responsibilities, or the ARCEP, or maybe multiple regulators could work together. And it’s unclear where the HADOPI would fit in all of this. Eventually the French government wants to improve regulation at a European level.

In all cases, Cédric O doesn’t want to rush things. Before implementing a new regulatory framework, the government needs to understand how social networks moderate content. French regulators have worked with Facebook to understand how Facebook’s processes work. The final report is coming soon.

Reaching new highs

Over the past few weeks, a handful of French startups have raised mega–rounds of funding, sometimes reaching unicorn status. This shouldn’t come as a surprise if you’ve been following the French tech ecosystem over the years. But Cédric O thinks he needs to improve the image of the tech industry in France because it has a bad reputation.

“The first question I received [at the parliament] was about digital inclusion. They were blaming the French tech with something I hear a lot: ‘Startups are nice but it’s not real life,’ ” Cédric O said in a speech at La French Tech in Paris.

“There’s one thing we need to change and it’s going to be my message for the coming days — the French tech ecosystem is important. If we want our children, our grandchildren to get jobs, we can’t do it without startups.”

Depending on the study, France and the U.K. are battling to be the first European country when it comes to the number of VC deals and the total amount of money raised. France also has some of the best engineering schools in the world. Evidence of this lies in all the French data scientists and AI experts who work in some of the biggest tech companies in Silicon Valley.

But if you look at French public companies, the majority of them have been created way before the internet and personal computers.

“[At the Elysée], I was a lot more worried for France’s stakes in big companies than startups,” Cédric O said. Over the morning, he kept repeating the same number. “Nearly 50 percent of net job creations in the U.S. are related to the tech industry.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | How France’s new digital minister plans to regulate tech