Technology

Mary Meeker is leaving Kleiner Perkins to build a new fund and shetaking the firmgrowth team with her.

The news, first reported by Recode and confirmed to TechCrunch, is the latest high-level departure at one of the most prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firms.

Joining Meeker in her new fund are Kleiner Perkins GPs Mood Rowghani and Noah Knauf, as well as Juliet de Baubigny, a partner.According to the firm, this is less of a messy break-up and more of an amicable and intentional decision to spin-off Kleinergrowth-investing unit.

&The environment for venture has evolved — with larger checks being written for seed and A rounds and more support from partners required to build companies — demanding a high degree of specialization and extreme focus to excel,& a spokesperson for Kleiner Perkins said in a statement provided to TechCrunch. &The changes in both areas have led to less overlap between venture and growth and creating two separate firms with different people and operations now makes sense.&

We&ve reached out to Meeker for comment.

A source close to the matter told me the decision was a no-brainer given the success of Kleinergrowth fund under Meekerleadership and her desire tostart her own firm.

Meeker, widely known for her annual Internet Trends Report(don&t worry, itnot going anywhere), joined the firm in 2010 after two decades as a managing director at Morgan Stanley. She was well-established as a tech analyst on Wall Street. In Silicon Valley, she quickly built a reputation as one of the best.

She was one of few women to earn a GP title at Kleiner Perkins in an industry where women have traditionally been shut out from the highest roles in VC. There will be no female GPs at Kleiner in her wake.

A new era at Kleiner Perkins

Founded in 1972, Kleiner has been around to support some of the biggest names in tech. Itbacked Google, Aol and Amazon, and more recently, Slack, Uber and Peloton.

Meeker, Rowghani and Knaufdepartures, as well as several other recent exits, signal a new era at the firm.

Since legendary investor John Doerr stepped down as managing partner in 2016, replaced by Ted Schlein, the firm has been hemorrhaging top talent.

Schlein, however, seems unphased. In an interview with Recode, he said he didn&t think it was a &huge deal.&

The late-stage team at Kleiner &continued to diverge away from what the core part of Kleiner Perkins has done for 46 years, and will continue to do for another 46 years,& he said.

Just last week, longtime Kleiner investor, and the only other female GP, Beth Seidenberg took the wraps off her own fund after announcing in May she would be leaving the firm.

Last year, general partner Mike Abbott left the firm one month after Arielle Zuckerberg, a partner, also exited. The pair waspart of a group of seven to leave Kleiner at the time.

Itbeen over a year since highly classified exploits built by the National Security Agency were stolen and published online.

One of the tools, dubbed EternalBlue, can covertly break into almost any Windows machine around the world. It didn&t take long for hackers to start using the exploits to run ransomware on thousands of computers, grinding hospitals and businesses to a halt. Two separate attacks in as many months used WannaCry and NotPetya ransomware, which spread like wildfire. Once a single computer in a network was infected, the malware would also target other devices on the network. The recovery was slow and cost companies hundreds of millionsin damages.

Yet, more than a year since Microsoft released patches that slammed the backdoor shut,almost a million computers and networks are still unpatched and vulnerable to attack.

Although WannaCry infections have slowed, hackers are still using the publicly accessible NSA exploits to infect computers to mine cryptocurrency.

Nobody knows that better than one major Fortune 500 multinational, which was hit by a massive WannaMine cryptocurrency mining infection just days ago.

&Our customer is a very large corporation with multiple offices around the world,& said Amit Serper, who heads the security research team at Boston-based Cybereason.

&Once their first machine was hit the malware propagated to more than 1,000 machines in a day,& he said, without naming the company.

Cryptomining attacks have been around for a while. Itmore common for hackers to inject cryptocurrency mining code into vulnerable websites, but the payoffs are low. Some news sites are nowinstalling their own mining code as an alternative to running ads.

But WannaMine works differently, Cybereason said in its post-mortem of the infection. By using those leaked NSA exploits to gain a single foothold into a network, the malware tries to infect any computer within. Itpersistent so the malware can survive a reboot. After itimplanted, the malware uses the computerprocessor to mine cryptocurrency. On dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of computers, the malware can mine cryptocurrency far faster and more efficiently. Though ita drain on energy and computer resources, it can often go unnoticed.

After the malware spreads within the network, it modifies the power management settings to prevent the infected computer from going to sleep. Not only that, the malware tries to detect other cryptomining scripts running on the computer and terminates them — likely to squeeze every bit of energy out of the processor, maximizing its mining effort.

At least 300,000 computers or networks are still vulnerable to the NSAEternalBlue hacking tools.

Based on up-to-date statistics from Shodan, a search engine for open ports and databases, at least 919,000 servers are still vulnerable to EternalBlue, with some 300,000 machines in the US alone. And thatjust the tip of the iceberg — that figure can represent either individual vulnerable computers or a vulnerable network server capable of infecting hundreds or thousands more machines.

Cybereason said companies are still severely impacted because their systems aren&t protected.

&Thereno reason why these exploits should remain unpatched,& the blog post said. &Organizations need to install security patches and update machines.&

If not ransomware yesterday, itcryptomining malware today. Given how versatile the EternalBlue exploit is, tomorrow it could be something far worse — like data theft or destruction.

In other words: if you haven&t patched already, what are you waiting for

Elvie, a London-based startup known best for its connected Kegel trainer, is jumping into the breast pump business with a new $480 hands-free system you can slip into your bra.

Even with all the innovation in baby gear, breast pumps have mostly sucked (pun intended) for new moms for the past half a century. My first experience with a pump required me to stay near a wall socket and hunch over for a good 20 to 30minutes for fear the milk collected might spill all over the place (which it did anyway, frequently). It was awful!

Next I tried the Willow Pump, an egg-shaped, connected pump meant to liberate women everywhere with its small and mobile design. It received glowing reviews, though my experience with it was less than stellar.

The proprietary bags were hard to fit in the device, filled up with air, cost 50 cents each (on top of the $500 pump that insurance did not cover), wasted many a golden drop of precious milk in the transfer and I had to reconfigure placement several times before it would start working. So I&ve been tentatively excited about the announcement of Elvie new cordless (and silent) double breast pump.

Displayed: a single Elvie pump with accompanying app

Elvie tells TechCrunch its aim all along has been to make health tech for women and that it has been working on this pump for the past three years.

The Elvie Pump is a cordless, hands-free, closed-system, rechargeable electric pump designed by former Dyson engineers.It can hold up to 5 oz. from each breast in a single use.

Itmost obvious and direct competition is the Willow pump, another &wearable& pump moms can put right in their bra and walk around in, hands-free. However, unlike the Willow, Elviepump does not need proprietary bags. You just pump right into the device and the pumpsmartphone app will tell you when each side is full.

Italso half the size and weight of a Willow and saves every precious drop it can by pumping right into the attached bottle so you just pump and feed (no more donut-shaped bags you have to cut open and awkwardly pour into a bottle).

On top of that, Elvie claims this pump is silent. No more loud suction noise off and on while trying to pump in a quiet room in the office or elsewhere. Itsmall, easy to carry around and you can wear it under your clothes without it making a peep! While the Willow pump claims to be quiet — and it is, compared to other systems — you can still very much hear it while you are pumping.

Elvieconnected breast pump app

All of these features sound fantastic to this new (and currently pumping) mom. I remember in the early days of my babylife wanting to go places but feeling stuck. I was chained to not just all the baby gear, hormonal shifts and worries about my newborn but to the pump and feed schedule itself, which made it next to impossible to leave the house for the first few months.

My baby was one of those &gourmet eaters& who just nursed and nursed all day. There were days I couldn&t leave the bed! Having a silent, no mess, hands-free device that fit right in my bra would have made a world of difference.

However, I mentioned the word &tentatively& above, as I have not had a chance to do a hands-on review of Elviepump. The Willow pump also seemed to hold a lot of promise early on, yet left me disappointed.

To be fair, the companycustomer service team was top-notch and did try to address my concerns. I even went through two &coaching& sessions, but in the end it seemed the blame was put on me for not getting their device to work correctly. Thata bad user experience if you are blaming others for your design flaws, especially new and struggling moms.

Both companies are founded by women and make products for women — and itabout time. But it seems as if Elvie has taken note of the good and bad in their competitors and had time to improve upon it — and thatwhat has me excited.

As my fellow TechCrunch writer Natasha put it in her initial review of Elvie as a company, &Itnot hyperbole to say Elvie is a new breed of connected device. Itindicative of the lack of smart technology specifically — and intelligently — addressingwomen.&

So why the pump &We recognized the opportunity [in the market] was smarter tech for women,& founder and CEO Tania Boler told TechCrunch on her companymove into the breast pump space. &Our aim is to transform the way women think and feel about themselves by providing the tools to address the issues that matter most to them, and Elvie Pump does just that.&

The Elvie Pump comes in three sizes and shapes to fit the majority of breasts and, in case you want to check your latch or pump volume, also has transparent nipple shields with markings to help guide the nipple to the right spot.

The app connects to each device via Bluetooth and tracks your production, detects let down, will pause when full and is equipped to pump in seven different modes.

The pump retails for $480 and is currently available in the U.K. However, those in the U.S. will have to wait until closer to the end of the year to get their hands on one. According to the company, it will be available on Elvie.com and Amazon.com, as well in select physical retail stores nationally later this year, pending FDA approval.