In early March, almost two years after Google purchased the data-analytics platform Looker for $2.6 billion, the company laid off most of Looker’s US-based support team—a group one Google Cloud exec called the platform’s “secret sauce.”

• The decision, which affected dozens of members of Looker’s US-based support team, had been planned “a few months in advance,” one Google Cloud exec said in an internal town hall after the layoffs, a recording of which was shared with Emerging Tech Brew.
• But until the day before, some Looker managers had no idea; Looker’s head of engineering did not find out until after the fact.

Zoom in: Looker’s support team, known as the Department of Customer Love (DCL), plans to rely primarily on outsourced labor through contractors from Infosys, an IT staffing firm headquartered in India. For three months before the layoffs, Google Cloud executives tasked DCL employees with designing training programs for the new contractors, not knowing that their own roles were on the chopping block.

• “We always asked, ‘What’s the goal of this? Why are we bringing on these [contractor] teams? Are our jobs at stake?’” The employee, who requested anonymity, told us.
• “They would always be like, ‘No, no, no, of course not, we just want to bring on the [contractors] so that you guys can get more time off [customer] chat to work on other projects that we have.’...The timeline felt really aggressive.”

Non-US DCL employees—like the full-time EMEA and APAC teams—were kept on. But the cuts didn’t stop with Looker: US-based support roles have been slashed across multiple Google Cloud products.

• Google declined to confirm the total number of affected workers, but the Alphabet Workers Union says it has confirmed at least 100 so far.

“As Google Cloud grows, we frequently evaluate the right approach to providing the best service and support structure to serve our customers,” Ted Ladd, Google Cloud’s director of go-to-market communications, told us in an emailed statement. “The changes will ensure we have the right people, partners, and systems in place to meet our customers now and into the future.”

Big picture: Just weeks before the layoffs, Google Cloud announced total losses of $3.1 billion for 2021, even as revenue grew nearly 50% year over year to $19.2 billion. In 2020, the division lost $5.6 billion.

The division, which had 37,000 employees as of last July, is spending heavily to compete with the likes of AWS and Azure, and in its bid for profitability, moving support operations to contractors could help cut costs.

Click here to read the full story on Google Cloud’s recent round of layoffs.—HF

As EV adoption accelerates and countries across the globe make plans to rapidly install charging infrastructure, many charger manufacturers are seeing intense growth as well.

On Wednesday, Spanish charging company Wallbox reported its first earnings since it went public via SPAC in October. The financials are a peek into how one EV charging company is trying to evolve quickly to meet rising demand.

By the numbers…

Last year, Wallbox’s revenue increased to $86.5 million, a 266% increase over 2020.

• For context, global EV adoption hit an inflection point last year, with automakers more than doubling 2020 volumes to sell a record 6.6 million plug-in vehicles, according to the International Energy Agency.

Wallbox more than doubled the size of its workforce to around 900 employees over the course of 2021 and sold ~129,000 chargers, more than triple the number it sold in 2020, according to the company’s earnings report.

But, but, but...As it ramps up production, grows its headcount, and expands its product offerings, Wallbox—like many other charging companies—is still spending more money than it’s making. The company reported a loss of $69.2 million in 2021, up from $13.3 million in 2020.

Big picture: While the company has mostly been focused on at-home charging equipment for European customers since its founding in 2015, Wallbox is now scaling its production of public DC fast chargers, bringing its smart charging software in-house, and establishing its presence in new markets.

Check out the full breakdown of Wallbox’s first earnings report.—GD

Coworking is a weekly segment where we spotlight Emerging Tech Brew readers who work with emerging technologies. Click here if you’d like a chance to be featured.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in tech?

I work on the chargers and motors for electric vehicles.

What’s your favorite emerging tech project you’ve worked on?

A commercial space application for Blue Origin’s New Shepard.

What emerging tech are you least optimistic about?

More social media platforms. It’s a market that incentivizes users to be the products, from information collection to addiction algorithms.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile?

I am an avid backpacker.

What do you think about when you’re not thinking about tech?

Philosophy, politics, and travel.

Stat: Venture funding for climate tech hit $23.2 billion in 2021, per Pitchbook data cited by the Wall Street Journal—more than double the 2020 total.

Quote: “One of the decisions I made in 2022 is to try to be more risk-taking and less neutral. I would rather Ethereum offend some people than turn into something that stands for nothing.”—Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, to Time

Read: Inside the push to create a more inclusive human genome project.

If we hear “be a team player” one more time … A recent Slack survey revealed that most remote and hybrid workers would rather communicate informally and ditch stale, overused workplace jargon. Peep the full survey and see why Slack is a more pleasant way to work.*

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For fans of cinema and climate tech: A thread of “heat pumps that look like George Clooney.”

For AI-assisted writing: Looking for a way to improve your writing skills? Check out YouWrite—the perfect place to get feedback and advice from professionals!

• ^^^ This was written by the YouWrite AI, based on the prompt “Convince people to check out YouWrite,” and using the…”witty”…tone. This is a pretty fun text-generating tool to mess around with, though it’s far from its self-description of “perfect.”

For the third time ever, the Federal Trade Commission ordered a company to destroy an algorithm it created. In a March 4 complaint, the FTC ordered WW (formerly known as Weight Watchers) to delete the algorithms or AI models it created based on personal information collected from children via its healthy eating app, Kurbo.

The practice, known as algorithmic disgorgement, requires companies to delete algorithms built on illicit data-collection practices.

• The penalty was first used in 2019 on Cambridge Analytica, and then in 2021 on Everalbum, a photo-sharing company that allegedly did not allow users to opt out of facial recognition in its app.
• In practice, such orders could quickly get messy.

Big picture: These algorithmic disgorgements have been triggered by violations of the FTC Act—a broad consumer-protection law—and, in the case of WW, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). A reminder that the US does not have comprehensive federal privacy laws, and who knows if it ever will.

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• California’s vehicle-to-grid experiments offer a glimpse of the future
• Training an AI system is time consuming, but this startup says it has a solution
• Seatrec’s self-replenishing batteries could make ocean research cheaper