The Leaderboard

Justin Kan launched a new company, with a fresh $65M round led by Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, and YC's Continuity Fund.

This isn't Kan's first startup: he launched and sold live-streaming and gaming startup Twitch to Amazon for a cool billion dollars in 2014. Kan's been building for years as part of the first class of famed startup accelerator Y Combinator with Reddit's Alexis Ohanian, late internet-activist Aaron Swartz, and current YC President Sam Altman.

Kan's new startup, Atrium, wants to automate lawyers using machine learning. Since going through YC last winter and raising $10M last year, they've acquired 220+ customers, including bird-themed companies, MessageBird, SendBird, and Bird. 🐦

Many law firms are notoriously inefficient, charging clients by the hour to complete tasks that could easily be automated. In addition, most firms pay out any annual profits to shareholders, leaving nothing behind to invest in software or internal tools. "For example, one of its apps automatically turns startup funding documents into Excel cap tables," from a recent TechCrunch article.

Atrium isn't alone. DoNotPay, founded by then-19-year-old Joshua Browder, automates common legal needs using their chatbot. The bot was initially built to help people fight traffic tickets and has since expanded to handle 1,000+ legal problems. They've already beaten 375,000 traffic tickets worldwide.

Most legaltech startups are focused on selling software to existing law firms: Klarity just launched out of YC to help lawyers analyze contracts using AI, and Ravel lets lawyers compare firms, quickly search millions of case files and decisions, and even predict how judges will rule. 😳

Atrium isn't selling software. They're launching a completely new law firm. Only time will tell if they'll be able to beat the big firms at their own game.

A #1 top paid app in the Mac App Store has been stealing your data. 😳

Adware Doctor, which promised to "prevent malware and malicious files from infecting your Mac" actually created a locked history of your personal data, including Chrome, Firefox, Safari browser history... then uploaded it to a server in China. Not good.

The developers avoided Apple's detection for months by pausing their data collection when the app was run for the first time. The app has since been pulled from the Mac Store. 🤔

Now is also a good to chance to protect yourself from future hacks:

😱 Have I Been Pwned? will inform you if one of your accounts was compromised. They've cataloged over 5.3 Billion hacked accounts.

🦊 Mozilla's Facebook Container just launched to block Facebook from tracking you around the internet. Don't tell Zuck. 😳

🔍 Alphabet's Outline is an open-sourced VPN builder for anybody. Instead of trusting some shady company with all of your traffic, build your own private network to protect all your data.

🔐 1Password is better than storing your passwords on a post-it note on your desk, integrated into literally every browser.

💳 Privacy.com is the Snapchat of credit cards, generating a new (potentially ephemeral) credit card for every transaction online.

What's missing? Share your favorites and explore 20+ other tools that might save your butt. 😅

Sonos is taking on Amazon, Apple, and Google... all at once.

The Santa Barbara-based hardware startup known for their premium speaker systems just launched a powerful developer kit for their millions of devices.

Within the past few years, millions of homes have adopted Amazon Echos and Google Homes. Even babies are learning how to use the voice assistants to play music, ask about the weather, and explore the internet. 👶

Last year, Sonos launched the Sonos One – a self-contained, Alexa-connected speaker to compete with the Amazon Echo. Previously, all of the Sonos systems required an Echo Dot or Google Home to let people control their speaker with their voice. Apple also launched their own Siri-powered HomePod in February.

This is Sonos's first large foray into opening their hardware to developers. Before, they've relied on Amazon and Google's massive suites of Alexa/Google Home skills to expand how users can speak to their Sonos devices.

This isn't a trivial battle – the ultimate winner(s) of the battle to own your voice assistant will heavily influence where your voice purchases are routed, which streaming service plays your music, and your newborn's first words. 😂

Coincidentally, Twitter just launched Periscope Audio, a new feature to broadcast just audio. Think of it like a live podcast for your Twitter followers. We're hoping the next update will let you jump into a friend's live Periscope audio broadcast from a separate phone. Anchor, the popular podcasting tool, already supports this feature for non-live broadcasts.

We can't wait to see what makers build on Sonos. Share your thoughts – the Sonos team will be around all day answering your questions. 🔈

Jack Dorsey and Sheryl Sandberg testified in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday, almost a year after they divulged that Russia had used fake accounts to influence the 2016 election.

Google declined to send anyone. Some lawmakers are threatening to subpoena the founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. 😳

Questions yesterday ranged from data privacy to fake videos that have spread on the platforms, especially as machine-learning tools like Lyrebird and Facehub let anybody impersonate's voice and likeness with less than a minute of audio.

Coincidentally, Vanish launched yesterday to help you delete all of your social accounts, including Facebook, Twitter, Telegram, Instagram, Reddit, Pinterest, Gmail, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and more. Warning: click delete, and all of your data and dog pictures will be gone forever.

Vanish isn't the only pro-deletion app: Phototrash lets you quickly delete old photos by swiping left and right (just like on Tinder!), and this Message Deleter for Slack will clear through your old work messages. Please ask your boss before you run the app. 🙏

A new Google Chrome has arrived.

The browser loved by 55%+ of the world has a completely new design, focused on productivity and security:

• Tabs have been completely redesigned to let you quickly scroll through your open windows. Tab hoarders everywhere rejoice.
• The in-browser password, address, and credit card number manager is rebuilt to make it easier to spend all your money while surfing the internet.
• Answers now appear directly in your omnibox (where you'd typically enter a URL). Instead of having to Google a question, Chrome will pull the answer up automatically without loading a full web page.

Up next on Google's to-do list? Killing the URL. 😬

"They’re hard to read, it’s hard to know which part of them is supposed to be trusted, and in general I don’t think URLs are working as a good way to convey site identity. We want to challenge how URLs should be displayed." – Adrienne Porter Felt, Chrome's engineering manager

They've tried this before: in 2014, the team tested the "origin chip", a feature that only displayed the main domain on your current tab. It was quickly deprecated and never launched publicly. We'll have to wait and see what their next iteration looks like. AOL Keywords were farrrr ahead of their time. 😂

The new Google Chrome is live for Mac, PC, Android, and iOS today. Do you like the new design? Share your thoughts with the community.

Fearless founders are here to save the day.

Some of the most successful startups from the last decade seemed crazy when they launched. Uber asked customers to get in a stranger's car. Coinbase lets anybody buy and sell magic internet money. Lil Miquela, with her 1.4M Instagram followers, isn't a real person.

There's no shortage of fearless founders:

🚁 Zipline uses autonomous drones to deliver urgent blood, vaccines, and medicine to remote hospitals across Africa. Their drones fly at 80MPH and can deliver supplies up to 100 miles away. "I used to see the drones fly and think ‘they must be mad’, until the same drone brought me blood and saved my life."

🎙️ Lyrebird lets you impersonate anybody's voice. Ghost-written and recorded podcasts could be coming soon... or #fakenews powered by falsified audio recordings of public officials. Facehub will even let you face-swap in realtime directly on your iPhone.

🛴 Scootbee is building self-driving, decentralized shared scooters. Push a button, and a scooter will drive to you. Hop on and ride to your destination – the scooter will drive away in search of a new rider. They're launching on the heels of Bird and Lime each raising hundreds of millions shortly before Uber and Lyft announced their scooter strategies. Big competition.

💅 Wanna Nails lets you try on nail polish in Augmented Reality. Simliar to INKHUNTER (tattoos), Sephora's Virtual Artist (makeup), and Fabby Hair (hair colors)... all in AR. Next step: full outfits in VR?

☠️ Die With Me is a chat app for people with less than 5% of battery life. We promise we're not draining our battery on purpose to use on the app.

Over the long weekend, we were introduced to a new font, designed entirely using tech company logos. Brand New Roman looks like a ransom note written by a tech founder.

It's not the only font-focused product to take off recently:

🏆 Font Shaming ranks fonts used by of the most-upvoted 700+ startups on Product Hunt. Sad spoiler alert: Comic Sans is not the winner.

✍️ Turn your handwriting into a font with Calligraphr. Just fill out a template by hand, upload your writing, and their services will send you a ready-to-use font.

📝 You can build your own font in Photoshop and Illustrator too, with a little-known app called Fontself. Loved by teams at Google, Apple, and Ogilvy.

🏘️ Airbnb launched their own font earlier this year: Airbnb Cereal, after the Obama and McCain cereal boxes that co-founders Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia sold in order to bootstrap Airbnb.

The new iPhone has been LEAKED.

9to5Mac leaked an unreleased photo of the two new iPhone XS models, set to replace the iPhone X this fall. The leak is timely: Apple announced their their annual keynote yesterday morning, slated for September 12th.

The iPhone XS will come in two sizes: a 5.8in model identical to the current iPhone X, and a larger 6.5in model like the 7 and 7+ from 2016.

Our biggest question: how is the "iPhone XS" pronounced? Is it the "iPhone 10 S," "iPhone Excess," or the "iPhone Extra Small"? Is the larger model called the "iPhone Extra Small Plus"? We're here to ask the most important questions.

To keep yourself distracted until September 12th, here's a list of our favorite productivity-killing apps:

👾 The Internet Arcade (900+ classic arcade games, no quarters required)
🐍 Snake on a Chrome: The classic game, now in your browser
🖥 Giphy Tab: Ridiculous GIFs in every new Chrome tab
😎 Netflix Super Browse: Let's you pick Netflix's secret genres
😡 Annoisli: Listen to screaming babies and sirens at work

We apologize in advance for all the time that will be lost. For more, check out the Anti-Productivity collection on Product Hunt. 😜

Subject: Back to school? You'll thank me later
To: Your now back-in-school son, daughter, niece, nephew, etc.
From: You and Product Hunt
---------

Hi {{Student's Name}}!

I know you're headed back to school and dreading the idea of taking notes after a summer of playing Fortnite and other Gen Z things.

The Product Hunt community has a list of the 75 Must-Have Apps for Students to make your first day back juuuuust a little bit easier.

My favorite? {{Pick one of the following 5}}

⌨️ Grammarly fixes all of your typos in your most import papers for professors and emails to recruiter. Game-changer.

🎈 Helium floats a small browser (for Netflix) above your other windows, so you can watch shows on mute while taking notes in class.

🐘 Evernote is the best note-taker and organizer out there. Public/private notebooks, to-do lists, tables, web clippings, attachments – it's everything you need to crush that frustratingly boring required class.

📝 Paperspade lets you type your math homework. Your professor and the environment will thank you.

🚀 Rocket adds Slack-style emojis to every program on computer. This isn't necessarily the most productive app, but it's one of my favorites.

Enjoy classes. They'll be over in less than a year.

-{{Your Name}} {{Your Favorite Emoji}}
---------

All of the young people are headed back to class.

Help your favorite son, daugher, or friend crush their classes and impress their friends with the 75 Must-Have Apps for Students.

Trust us, they'll thank you later.

Product Hunt Radio is back. Listen and subscribe right here.

Shortly after Product Hunt started, we were inspired to start a podcast. We named it Product Hunt Radio, which felt delightfully nostalgic.

Over the following years, we recorded 100+ episodes with notable founders like Tim Ferris, Alexis Ohansian, and Brit Morin, reporters like Sarah Buh and Ann Friedman, investors like Sarah Tavel and Chriss Sacca, and ocassionaly entertainers like G-Eazy and Amanda Palmer.

We loved recording the pod, but were decided to retire it in 2016 to focus on growing the community.

Today, we're excited to re-introduce Product Hunt Radio with a new superstar cast. Each episode features your favorites, like Alexia Bonatsos, Andrew Chen, Erik Torenberg, Allison Esposito, Garry Tan, Brian Norgard, Jeff Morris Jr., Patrick Collison, and Sophia Amoruso.


Each week we’ll host a different prompt. Call (707) 785–6152 to chime in and we might include it on the show. It’ll be fun. 😊

The first episode will drop soon so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, and wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Big thanks to our partners, Airtable, GE Ventures, Intercom and Stripe for their support. You’ll hear more about them on the show. 🙌