Technology

Facebook continues to expand its VR ambitions in the Pacific Northwest. The company has been quietly growing its footprint 16 miles East of Seattle, in Microsoftbackyard.

A new analysis by real estate resource BuildZoom sheds additional light on the Menlo Park-based companyefforts to build a satellite virtual reality HQ in and around Seattle. Over the last three years, Facebook has spent $106 million on construction and development permits for Oculus offices in Redmond.

In 2018 alone, Facebook spent $88.3 million on Oculus -related permits for as many as eight new offices in the area. BuildZoomanalysis identifies five properties in particular, all on Willow Road in Redmond, that span more than 90,000 square feet of lab and office space. Those locations are10545 Willows Rd.,10785 Willows Rd.,9805 Willows Rd.,9845 Willows Rd. and 9461 Willow Road.

Last November, Seattle-based news site GeekWire reported that Facebook was on the hunt for 200,000 square feet worth of R-D space in Redmond, to expand its existing Oculus research efforts there. At the time, Oculus listed more than 60 job positions in Redmond in additional to a smaller amount of hiring for its Oculus operations in Seattle proper.Oculus is currently hiring for 121 positions in Redmond, with 42 of them in research.

9805 Willows Rd, via Google Maps

TechCrunch reached out to Facebook about its plans for the new Oculus offices but the company declined to comment. Late last year, an Oculus spokesperson told TechCrunch that the company is growing its Seattle team to achieve its goal to &get 1 billion people into VR.&This May, Oculus announced that its Oculus Research division would be rebranded as Facebook Reality Labs.

The growing Oculus offices join nearby Valve, MicrosoftHoloLens and other VR operations nearby to cement Seattle as one of techmajor VR hubs beyond Silicon Valley.

One year after receiving a whopping $75 million commitment to invest in early stage companies applying artificial intelligence to various industries, Glasswing Ventures has closed its debut fund with $112 million.

Ita significant milestone for a firm that purports to be the largest early stage investor focused on machine learning on the East Coast, and one of the largest early stage funds to be led by women.

Founded by Rudina Seseri alongside her longtime investing partner Rick Grinnell and bolstered by the addition of former portfolio executive Sarah Fay, Glasswing so far has invested in three startups: BotChain (a company spun up from Glasswingearly investment in the AI management company, Talla); Allure Security, a threat detection company; and Terbium Labs, whose service alerts companies when sensitive or stolen information of theirs appears on the Internet.

For Seseri and Glasswing, the close is actually just the beginning. As she said in a statement:

&Raising an AI-focused fund on the East Coast is just the beginning for Glasswing Ventures. As we embark onajourney to shape the future, we are laser-focused on investing in exceptional founders who leverage AI to build disruptive companies and transform markets. Beyond providing smart capital, we are firmly committed to supporting our entrepreneurs with all facets of building and scaling their businesses.&

The story, for Seseri and her co-founder Grinnell actually begins nearly a decade ago at the venture firm Fairhaven Capital, the rebranded investment arm of the TD Bank Group.

At the time of the firmlaunch in 2016, Glasswing was targeting $150 million for its first fund, with a 2.5% management fee and 20% carried interest (pretty standard terms for a venture fund), according to reporting by Dan Primack back when he was at Fortune.

In a pitchdeck seen by Primack the firm was touting 4.25x return multiple on its investments including 6x realized and 1.8x unrealized in deals like Grinnellexit from EqualLogic (which was sold to Dell for $1.46 billion) and Seseriinvestments in Jibo (which is now basically worthless) and SocialFlow (which isn&t).

Fay, who worked at a portfolio investment of Fairhaven&s, was brought on soon after the two partners launched their new venture.

Glasswing definitely benefits from the firmproximity to Bostonstellar universities. And Seseri, a Harvard University graduate maintains close ties with the research community at both Harvard and MIT — tapping luminaries like Tim Berners-Lee to sit on the firmadvisory council for networking.

Chase Martin, Marketing and Events Manager, Emma Marty, Operations and Support Coordinator, Rick Grinnell, Founder and Managing Partner, Rudina Seseri, Founder and Managing Partner, Sarah Fay, Managing Director, and Andre Rocha, Investment Associate

Facebook has released its fifth diversity report, and itfine. Unless companies fire everyone and start over, we&re not going to see drastic improvements anytime soon.

&A critical lesson we&ve learned is that recruiting, retaining and developing a diverse, inclusive workforce should be a priority from day one,& Facebook Chief Diversity Officer Maxine Williams wrote in a blog post. &The later you start taking deliberate action to increase diversity, the harder it becomes.&

Anyway, worldwide, Facebook is 36 percent female, up from 31 percent in 2014. In the U.S., Facebook is 3.5 percent black, compared to just 2 percent in 2014, and 4.9 percent Latinx compared to 4 percent in 2014. White people, unsurprisingly, still makes up the single largest population of employees (46.4 percent today versus 57 percent in 2014). The upside to this is that white people no longer make up the majority at Facebook.

At the leadership and technical levels, change has not occurred for black employees. Black employees still make up just two percent of people in leadership roles and one percent of employees in technical roles. For Latinx people, employees make up three percent of the technical team and three percent of the leadership team, down from four percent in 2014.

In her blog post, Williams noted that &diversity is critical to our success as a company.&

Ittrue and the data is there to back it up.Companies in the top quartile for ethnic diversity at the executive level are 33 percent more likely to have above-average profitability than companies in the bottom quartile, according to McKinseyreport, &Delivering through Diversity.&

When the Cambridge Analytica scandal went down, some pointed to Facebookoverall lack of diversity as part of the problem. Thatbecause homogenous cultures lead to limited perspectives and potential lack of awareness of things that may be more obvious to diverse groups of people. Perhaps if Facebook had been more diverse, that all fiasco could&ve been prevented.

You can check out Facebookfull report here.