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XSweetgreen CEO Deletes Post Saying ‘No Vaccine Nor Mask Will Save Us’ After Backlash
Harri is dot.LA's senior finance reporter. She previously worked for Gizmodo, Fast Company, VentureBeat and Flipboard. Find her on Twitter and send tips on L.A. startups and venture capital to harrison@dot.la.
In a LinkedIn post, Sweetgreen co-founder and CEO Jonathan Neman wrote this week that "no vaccine nor mask will save us" from the coronavirus, while seemingly suggesting healthier eating as a suitable alternative to widely-recommended preventative measures.
Neman's comments quickly drew backlash on social media, with responses ranging from sarcasm to an invitation for the CEO to eat one Twitter user's size 12 shorts. The controversy comes as the Culver City-based company prepares for an IPO.
The post, which also suggested taxing processed foods, was deleted from Neman's LinkedIn account soon after it was brought to light by Motherboard. But it was up long enough to potentially sour would-be investors and consumers.
Neman's post opened with a statistic from a March CDC study that linked patients who had a higher body mass index (BMI) with an "increased risk for hospitalization and death." The BMI method has faced criticism from experts for being unreliable and racist.
Still, Sweetgreen's CEO said "Our best bet is to learn how to best live with [the virus] and focus on overall health vs preventing infection."
"We have been quick to put in place Mask and Vaccine Mandates but zero conversation on HEALTH MANDATES," he went on. "All the while we have printed unlimited money to soften the blow the shutdowns have caused to our country."
The delta variant has made August one of the darkest months in the pandemic as hospitalization rates across the country reach levels seen last winter. The surge of cases has forced a wave of new restrictions in Los Angeles county even as the state reached a milestone for vaccinations.
The CEO said in LinkedIn's comments section that he wanted to have a dialogue.
"What if we made the food that is making us sick illegal?" he wrote in the post. "What if we taxed processed food and refined sugar to pay for the impact of the pandemic? What if we incentivized health?"
Days later, Neman walked back his statements, saying he did not intend to be "discriminatory or to discount the importance of getting vaccinated and wearing masks to combat COVID-19." He added in a new LinkedIn post:
My goal was to start a conversation around the systemic healthcare issues in the country. Words matter and the words I chose were insensitive and oversimplified a very complex issue that is impacted by larger socioeconomic factors.
The salad chain that appeals to the tech lunch set is known for its $14 salads.
Sweetgreen, which built a reportedly $1.78 billion business selling high-priced salads, did not immediately reply to a request for comment on the controversy.
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Harri is dot.LA's senior finance reporter. She previously worked for Gizmodo, Fast Company, VentureBeat and Flipboard. Find her on Twitter and send tips on L.A. startups and venture capital to harrison@dot.la.
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MaC Venture Capital Raises $203M for Its Second Fund
Decerry Donato is dot.LA's Editorial Fellow. Prior to that, she was an editorial intern at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.
While venture capital funding has taken a hit this year, that hasn’t stopped MaC Venture Capital from raising $203 million for its second fund.
The Los Angeles-based, Black-led VC firm said Monday that it had surpassed its initial $200 million goal for the fund, which dot.LA reported in January, over the span of seven months. MaC said it expects to invest the capital in up to 50 mostly seed-stage startups while remaining “sector-agnostic.”
“We love seed-stage companies because that’s where most of the value is created,” MaC managing general partner Marlon Nichols told dot.LA. While the firm has invested in local ventures like NFT gaming platform Artie, space startup Epsilon3 and autonomous sensor company Spartan Radar, Nichols said MaC—whose portfolio companies span from Seattle to Nairobi—would continue to eye ventures across the rest of the country and world.
“Talent is ubiquitous; access to capital is not,” Nichols noted. “What they’re building needs to matter; we’ve got to believe that this group of founders is the best team building in the space, period.”
Launched in 2019, MaC is led by four founding partners: VC veteran Nichols, former Washington, D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty, and former William Morris Endeavor talent agents Charles D. King and Michael Palank. Nichols described the team’s collective background in government, consulting, media, entertainment and talent management as its “superpower.”
In a venture capital industry where few people of color are decision-makers, MaC Venture Capital has looked to wield its influence to provide opportunities for founders of color. The firm says 69% of its portfolio companies were started by BIPOC founders and 36% are led by women, while MaC has also diversified its own ranks by adding female partners Zhenni Liu and Haley Farnsworth.
MaC’s second investment fund nearly doubled the size of the firm’s $110 million first fund, which it closed in March 2021. The new fund’s repeat institutional investors include Goldman Sachs, ICG Advisors, StepStone, the University of Michigan, the George Kaiser Family Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation, while the likes of Illumen Capital and the Teachers’ Retirement System of the State of Illinois also pitched in as new investors.
“It’s a great combination of having affirmation from people who have been with us from the beginning and new people coming in that want to be a part of it,” Fenty told dot.LA.
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Decerry Donato is dot.LA's Editorial Fellow. Prior to that, she was an editorial intern at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.
California Debates Data Privacy as SCOTUS Allows Abortion Bans
Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.
The United States Supreme Court called a Mississippi law banning abortion after 15 weeks constitutional on Friday, overturning the country’s founding abortion rights decision Roe v. Wade. The Supreme Court also upheld that there cannot be any restriction on how far into a pregnancy abortion can be banned.
When Politico first broke the news months before SCOTUS’s final ruling, a slew of bills entered Congress to protect data privacy and prevent the sale of data, which can be triangulated to see if a person has had an abortion or if they are seeking an abortion and have historically been used by antiabortion individuals who would collect this information during their free time.
Democratic lawmakers led by Congresswoman Anna Eshoo called on Google to stop collecting location data. The chair of the Federal Trade Commission has long voiced plans for the agency to prevent data collection. A week after the news, California Assembly passed A.B. 2091, a law that would prevent insurance companies and medical providers from sharing information in abortion-related cases (the state Senate is scheduled to deliberate on it in five days).
These scattered bills attempt to do what health privacy laws do not. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, was established in 1996 when the Internet was still young and most people carried flip phones. The act declared health institutions were not allowed to share or disclose patients’ health information. Google, Apple and a slew of fertility and health apps are not covered under HIPAA, and fertility app data can be subpoenaed by law enforcement.
California’s Confidentiality of Medical Information Act (or CMIA), goes further than HIPAA by encompassing apps that store medical information under the broader umbrella of health institutions that include insurance companies and medical providers. And several how-tos on protecting data privacy during Roe v. Wade have been published in the hours of the announcement.
But reproductive rights organizations say data privacy alone cannot fix the problem. According to reproductive health policy think tank Guttmacher Institute, the closest state with abortion access to 1.3 million out-of-state women of reproductive age is California. One report from the UCLA Center on Reproductive Health, Law and Policy estimates as many as 9,400 people will travel to Los Angeles County every year to get abortions, and that number will grow as more states criminalize abortions.
Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.
LA Tech ‘Moves’: Adtech Firm OpenX Lures New SVP, Getlabs and DISQO Tap New VPs
Decerry Donato is dot.LA's Editorial Fellow. Prior to that, she was an editorial intern at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.
“Moves,” our roundup of job changes in L.A. tech, is presented by Interchange.LA, dot.LA's recruiting and career platform connecting Southern California's most exciting companies with top tech talent. Create a free Interchange.LA profile here—and if you're looking for ways to supercharge your recruiting efforts, find out more about Interchange.LA's white-glove recruiting service by emailing Sharmineh O’Farrill Lewis (sharmineh@dot.la). Please send job changes and personnel moves to moves@dot.la.
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Advertising technology company OpenX Technologies appointed Geoff Wolinetz as senior vice president of demand platforms. Wolinetz was most recently senior vice president of growth at Chalice Custom Algorithms.
Remote health care infrastructure provider Getlabs hired Jaime LaFontaine as its vice president of business development. L.A.-based LaFontaine was previously director of business development for Alto Pharmacy.
Customer experience platform DISQO tapped Andrew Duke as its vice president of product, consumer applications. Duke previously served as Oracle’s senior director of strategy and product.
Media company Wheelhouse DNA named Michael Senzer as senior manager of Additive Creative, its newly launched digital talent management division. Senzer was previously vice president of business development at TalentX Entertainment.
Fintech lending platform Camino Financial hired Dana Rainford as vice president of people and talent. Rainford previously served as head of human resources at Westwood Financial.
Kourtney Day returned to entertainment company Jim Henson’s Creature Shop as senior director of business development. Day mostly recently served as business development manager for themed entertainment at Solomon Group.
Decerry Donato is dot.LA's Editorial Fellow. Prior to that, she was an editorial intern at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.