Technology

Hello and welcome back toEquity, TechCrunchventure capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This weekKateandAlex were back at TechCrunchSan Francisco HQ to huddle over the weeks& biggest news story: WeWorkinfamous CEO exiting his role. Adam Neumann is now merely the non-executive chairman of The We Company, a firm that he helped found and led the public story for over the last half-decade.

His exit comes after a number of revelations made his tenure at the highly-valued WeWork appear chaotic and self-dealing. After WeWorkvaluation tumbled as it raced towards a financially-critical IPO, something had to give. The firm tried to ameliorate investors with changes (read: improvements) to its corporate governance butthat wasn&t enough. Snakes don&t rot from the tail, and WeWork needed new leadership, which it got the form of co-CEOs.

WeWork is now led by SebastianGunningham and Artie Minson, seasoned executives with stints at Amazon and Time Warner Cable, respectively. They&ve been charged with leading the company into an era of maturity, cost-cutting and maybe even profitability! But probably not. Anyway, we think there are a whole lot of parallels to draw between Uber and WeWork, as we&ve made clear in the past.

Kate and Alex also touched on corporate governance, especially regarding super-voting stock. The TL;DR: private company boards look and operate much differently than public company boards. More often than not, startup boards are made up of venture capitalists focused on protecting their equity and future returns. Ita dog-eat-dog world, folks.

Wapping, it seems likely that WeWork will look to secure new cash in the short-term as it buttons up its business, divests or kills off non-performing assets (remember this?), and looks to temper both its growth-rate and losses. If that will be enough to allow the company to float in 2020 (2019 seems unlikely) isn&t clear.

Icarus.

We&re back Friday morning with our regular episode and a guest. Stay tuned!

At the end of its hardware event today, Amazon announced a new program for testing and selling its own experimental, limited-volume hardware: Day 1 Editions.

The first of these new products is Echo Frames. These are Alexa-enabled glasses, though unlike Google Glass, thereno camera and no display, just microphones and a speaker.

The second is the Echo Loop, a rather large Alexa-enabled ring with two built-in microphones and, of course, a tiny speaker. Both of these will be available on an invite-only basis and in limited volumes later this year.

The frames will retail for $179.99 and the Loop will cost $129.99 for the introduction period.

The glasses, which will sell without any prescription lenses (though you can add those if you want), weigh in at 31 grams. They aren&t especially stylish, though they look pretty acceptable.

The ring is maybe the oddest product Amazon demoed at its event today. Itpretty large and I can&t quite see people talking into their rings and then listening to what Alexa has to say in response, but I could be wrong. Maybe itthe next big thing.

&Paired with your phone, this ring lets you access information throughout the day,& Amazon writes. &Itsuper easy to connect with Alexa without breaking stride or digging out your phone, for those simple things like turning on the lights or calculating the tip on your lunch bill. Simply press a button, talk softly to Alexa, and then the answer comes discretely through a small speaker built into the ring.&

To be fair, though, these are very much experimental products that are meant to allow Amazon to get feedback from real customers. But thatwhat Amazon said about its Alexa-enabled microwave, too, and now itthe best-selling microwave on the site.

Two years ago, Oculus announced a radical departure in how they were funding virtual reality developers. Instead of partnering with a ton of upstart teams looking to explore the medium and help fund their low-budget pursuits, the company would be pursuing fewer, more expensive projects with established studios. Their crown jewel would be a made-for-VR first-person-shooter coming in 2019 done in partnership with Titanfall developer Respawn Entertainment.

After two years with no further details, today, at its Oculus Connect 6 developer conference, it was announced that Respawn will be releasing a World War II shooter titled &Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond& on the Rift platform next year. That release is pushed back from the original 2019 timeline, Respawn wouldn&t nail down the release date any further than &2020.&

The game disappointingly will not be launching on Quest, the companyall-in-one headset, but with the newly-announced Oculus Link software feature launching November, it seems you&ll be able to play the title still, albeit in tethered mode.

Itnot at all clear how much Oculus invested in this title, thought it was clear from the press event that the scope of the titledevelopment was extensive and expensive. Oculus has pumped hundreds of million getting developers to bring their products exclusively to their VR platform, though at this point exclusivity is less of a concern as the companyVR competitors have largely either folded, shifted to higher-end price points, or moved to the enterprise market.

Onto the game itself, I had a chance to demo several levels of &Above and Beyond,& and itclear that the title will be a hit among Rift and Rift S users. It very much seems to be a full-game with around a dozen hours of campaign in single-player as well as a robust multi-player mode which I was not able to demo.

The mechanics are crafted for VR — every time you empty a clip you have to eject it from the gun you&re holding and insert a new magazine into the gun then cock your weapon all with the Touch controllers.

So many of the games made for VR haven&t had direct comparisons to console titles, but diving through bunkers shooting up nazis kind of showcased where Oculus pushes boundaries and where it falters. Interaction mechanisms are rich, immersive and where the Rift and Quest shine, but Oculus keeping the recommended PC system specs largely the same since launch hasn&t aged well. The Rift just can&t push pixels with outdated PCs and &Above and Beyond& showcases the max capabilities of the recommended spec systems but it seems like this generation is fully smashed against the glass wall which was the risk Oculus took when it launched the Rift S rather than a fully upgraded class of hardware.

The game is tons of fun, and was clearly thought out to extreme lengths, but one wonders whether Oculus would have invested so much energy into a PC-first title again had they known that two years later they would be pushing standalone experiences with Quest publicly with such fervor.