Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, February 28

• Uber’s SVP of engineering is out after he did not disclose he left Google in a dispute over a sexual harassment allegation: Amit Singhal has left his job at Uber as its SVP of engineering because he did not disclose to the car-hailing company that he left Google a year earlier after top executives there informed him of an allegation of sexual harassment from an employee that an internal investigation had found “credible.” Singhal was asked to resign by Uber CEO Travis Kalanick this morning. Uber execs found out about the situation after Recode informed them of the chain of events between Singhal and the search giant this week. Indeed. According to multiple sources and internal notes read to me, after discussing the claims of an alleged encounter between Singhal and a female employee first with former Google HR head Laszlo Bock and also Google CEO Sundar Pichai in late 2015, he denied those claims at the time. He also apparently stated a number of times that there were two sides to every story. But, after the Christmas holidays, he then decided to resign himself after a 15-year career there. Sources said that Google was prepared to fire Singhal over the allegations after looking into the incident, but that it did not have to do so after he resigned.

• Tesla plunges another 5 percent on fears of Model 3 delays: Shares of Tesla dropped on Monday after a downgrade by Goldman Sachs, bringing the electric carmaker's decline to 11 percent since its quarterly report last week stoked worries about how much cash it is using to launch its Model 3 sedan. Concerns that Tesla's Model 3 production this year might be delayed, as well as expectations the company will sell stock to raise $1.7 billion, led Goldman Sachs analyst David Tamberrino to downgrade Tesla to "sell" from "neutral". That helped push the stock down 4.83 percent to $244.52 in morning trade on Monday. If it closes at that level, it will have been the worst three-day performance for the shares since June last year. Even with the recent drop, Tesla has surged more than 30 percent since early December and is up 14 percent in 2017. Tesla investors and short sellers disagree about whether the company will become a carbon-free energy and transportation heavyweight or be overtaken first by older, deep-pocketed manufacturers such as General Motors.

• SpaceX Plans to Send 2 Tourists Around Moon in 2018: SpaceX, the ambitious rocket company headed by Elon Musk, wants to send a couple of tourists around the moon and back before the end of next year. If they manage that feat, they would be the first humans to venture that far into space in more than 40 years. Mr. Musk made the announcement on Monday in a telephone news conference. He said two private individuals approached the company to see if SpaceX would be willing to send them on a weeklong cruise, which would fly past the surface of the moon — but not land — and continue outward before Earth’s gravity turned the spacecraft around and brought it back for a landing. “This would do a long loop around the moon,” Mr. Musk said. The company is aiming to launch this moon mission in late 2018, he said. The two people would spend about a week inside one of SpaceX’s Dragon 2 capsules, launched on SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket. The spacecraft would be automated, but the travelers would undergo training for emergencies, Mr. Musk said. He did not say how much the travelers would pay for the ride, but the Falcon Heavy itself has a list price of $90 million. He said the two would-be private space travelers wished to remain anonymous for now, and he declined to describe them except to say that they knew each other. In response to a reporter’s question, Mr. Musk did say the two were not Hollywood people.

• PebblePost raises $15M to combine online data and old-school mail: PebblePost is betting that there’s a big marketing opportunity in printed postcards and catalogs. The startup is announcing that it has raised $15 million in Series B funding. The round was led by RRE Ventures, with participation from Greycroft Partners and Tribeca Ventures. RRE’s Jim Robinson is joining the PebblePost board of directors. PebblePost describes its offering as “programmatic direct mail.” The idea is to send customized follow-ups to potential customers based on their online activity — so if you’re browsing a retailer’s website, you could get a postcard a few days later highlighting some of their products and maybe offering some discounts. CEO Lewis Gersh was previously a founder at seed investment firm Metamorphic Ventures (now known as Compound), where he said he built “probably the largest portfolio of retargeters of any fund in the country” — namely, companies that use your online behavior to target you for ads. (The ad companies he backed include iSocket, Mass Relevance and Movable Ink.) However, he said digital advertising has become “the new junk mail,” where marketers have to get more and more aggressive in the hopes of getting eyeballs and clicks. One of the problems, Gersh said, is that ads are often shown when someone is “100 percent not disposed to action — and worse.” In contrast, he said that when someone gets physical mail, they usually stick all the relevant stuff into a pile to deal with when they have more time. That means that when they actually go through their mail, they’re more likely to be receptive to a brand’s message — and maybe even ready to do some shopping. To be clear, you’re not necessarily going to get a postcard talking about the exact product you were looking at — Gersh acknowledged that would be “annoying” and “spooky.” Instead, you might see other products that are in the same category, serving as a “gentle, relevant reminder.” The approach seems to be working, with an average of 7 to 10 percent of PebblePost mail resulting in a purchase.