Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, December 28

• Apple Pay Seeks Growth in Asia, Europe After Slow U.S. Adoption:  After a sluggish start in the U.S. since its debut more than a year ago, Apple Pay is ramping up in markets where people are more comfortable with so- called contactless payments. The service, which lets consumers pay in an app or by tapping their iPhone on store terminals, will be introduced next year in China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Spain. Apple is counting on its brand recognition as it enters markets that are further along than the U.S. in all things mobile payments, particularly in advanced technologies needed to accept them in retail outlets. Still, it won’t be easy. The iPhone maker will compete with local banks and Internet companies that already offer the service -- not to mention Samsung Electronics Co., the world’s leader in smartphones. The mobile-payment service, which only works with Apple devices, is a way for the company to make products more appealing and spur customer loyalty. After Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook called 2015 the “year of Apple Pay” in January, the service has been slow to take off domestically, partly because of a lack of promotion and a limited number of store terminals able to accept it. China: Apple said its service will be rolled out as soon as early 2016.   Last week, Apple teamed up with Chinese bank-card association UnionPay, which will make Apple’s market entry “a lot easier,” said James Wester, an analyst at researcher IDC. Still, Apple Pay will compete with services like Tencent’s WeChat and Alibaba’s Alipay that control more than 75 percent of the mobile-payments market. And Apple should be prepared to race with Samsung, which also announced a partnership with UnionPay and plans to bring Samsung Pay to China as soon as early 2016.

• Jet.com’s Strategy: Low Prices, Fast Delivery, Happy Workers: You can’t accuse Jet.com of timidity. Jet has had some bumps and turns since last summer, when it began selling products as varied as cans of chili, exercise bikes and WowWee personal robots. It changed its business model, dropping a membership fee. It is burning through cash as it continues to scale up, now with more than 900 employees. When it went out to raise more money in the fall, it encountered skepticism. A week before Christmas, it told some customers they would not get their orders in time. Jet said only about 500 shipments out of a million were affected, but such admissions never look good. Yet Marc Lore, Jet’s founder and chief executive, says he is not worried. What will separate Jet from Fab and every other failed company, he says, is happiness. In particular, employee happiness. “I’m constantly asking people at Jet if they’re happy,” he said. “It’s really important for me to know that they love working here and think this is the best place they’ve ever worked.” Jet supplies its employees with typical start-up perks like free food (weekly lunches, plus Red Bull in the refrigerator and protein powder in the kitchen cabinet), four months of paid parental leave, unlimited vacation and an ownership stake that could one day be worth a lot. But it also has some decidedly less common policies, like standardized, no-negotiation pay packages and worker-friendly employment agreements. Employees can see, every day, how the business is doing. “Transparency” is a big word with Mr. Lore. So is “fairness.” Make people feel good, he says, and they will do their best. Trust them and they will reward you. As the holiday shopping season was beginning in late November, Mr. Lore convened his top executives in Jet’s Hoboken, N.J., headquarters for their regular weekly meeting. Here are some of the things that were not on the agenda: warehouse logistics, customer concerns, fine-tuning prices, potential shipping bottlenecks, supplier issues or any of a dozen other topics that could have bedeviled Jet’s first December. Instead, the executives discussed the mood and well-being of Jet’s employees. The preliminary results of Jet’s first “Happiness Pulse” were in. More than 500 employees responded to the survey, which means basically everyone who had been at Jet for at least a month. Two-thirds of them said they viewed Jet favorably. Only 4 percent had a negative opinion. “So only 25 people are basically unhappy,” Mr. Lore said. In an interview a few weeks after Jet’s official debut in July, Mr. Lore pulled out his phone and opened an app. It showed that Jet sold $667,200 in gross merchandise value in one day, up 89 percent in a month. Jet had 6,100 first-time buyers the previous day, and 7,800 orders. The company had $153 million in cash. The app is bulging with data, and it is available to investors and the salaried — but not the hourly — employees. Some information is available even to casual visitors. Dominating one wall in the reception area in Hoboken is a board posting constant updates of the day’s sales by number and dollar volume. For technology companies, this is radical openness. Also radical is a practice to keep salaries the same for jobs grouped together, a process called “leveling.” This is meant to rule out the common ploy “I got a job offer, can you match it?” Extroverts who promote themselves and introverts who keep their heads down are paid the same for jobs of the same value to the company.

• Common Stock Ownership Spreads Among Start-Up Investors: When institutional investors put money into companies backed by venture capital, they typically end up owning a type of stock called preferred shares. Now, institutional investors are also becoming owners of a different class of start-up stock: common shares. The competition among investors to get into hot start-ups has been so fierce that many hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds and others have been unable to participate when the up-and-coming companies sold preferred shares, a kind of stock that generally comes with many protections. So to make sure they got a stake in private companies like Palantir Technologies, Dropbox and One Kings Lane, the institutional investors instead began buying common stock — generally owned by employees of start-ups — often from workers directly or from platforms that sell employee shares. In doing so, the investors chose to forgo the protections that come with preferred shares. Common stock usually comes with no guarantees and is paid out only after the preferred shareholders get their money. The spreading of common stock may have some unintended consequences, especially as the air begins to come out of the Silicon Valley boom and some companies get sold for modest amounts of money. For one, institutional investors who own common stock could take home much less than other investors in the same company who have preferred shares. That gap, in turn, could lead to more litigation between investors.