Sci-Tech
Inside Amira Yahyaoui’s Claims about Mos, a Student Aid Start-Up
As a Tunisian human rights activist in the 2000s, Amira Yahyaoui staged protests and blogged about government corruption. In interviews, she described being beaten by police. When she was 18, she said, she was kidnapped from the street, dropped off at the Algerian border and placed in exile for several years.
Ms. Yahyaoui’s compelling background helped her stand out among entrepreneurs when she moved in 2018 to San Francisco, where she founded a student aid start-up called Mos. The app hit the top of Apple’s App Store and Ms. Yahyaoui raised $56 million from high-profile investors, including Sequoia Capital, John Doerr and Steph Curry, according to PitchBook, which tracks start-ups. Mos was valued at $400 million.
In podcasts, TV interviews and other media, Ms. Yahyaoui, 39, frequently discussed Mos’s success.
Among other things, she said the start-up had helped 400,000 students get financial aid. But internal company data viewed by The New York Times showed that as of early last year, only about 30,000 customers had paid for Mos’s student aid services. The rest of the 400,000 users included anyone who had signed up for a free account and may have gotten an email about applying for student aid, two people familiar with the situation said.
After Mos expanded into online banking in September 2021, Ms. Yahyaoui told publications such as TechCrunch that the company had more than 100,000 bank accounts. But those accounts had very small amounts of money in them, according to the internal data. Less than 10 percent of Mos’s roughly 153,000 bank users had put their own money into their accounts, the data showed.
Some employees tried to speak up about Ms. Yahyaoui’s claims, said Emi Tabb, who worked at Mos in operations and had roles such as head of financial aid before resigning in late 2022. But Ms. Yahyaoui dismissed and sometimes disparaged employees who tried pushing back against her public comments, five people who witnessed the incidents said.
“She created a culture of fear,” Mx. Tabb said.
Mos is among a class of tech start-ups that rose during the fast money era of the late 2010s and early in the pandemic, when young companies landed millions of dollars in funding with little more than promises. Now as the money has dried up and many tech start-ups grapple with a downturn, investors are pickier, customers are warier of bold claims and employees are more suspicious of founder pronouncements.
Last year, Mos laid off approximately half its staff of around 50 and shut down its banking service. The company reverted to its original business of helping students find financial aid and began emphasizing its use of artificial intelligence.
Ms. Yahyaoui referred questions to a Mos spokeswoman, who declined to comment. When Ms. Yahyaoui was asked last year about Mos’s number of users, she posted on social media that female founders were often presumed guilty while male founders were presumed innocent.
“Maybe today we should start applying presumption of innocence to also female founders,” she wrote.
This account of Mos was based on interviews with eight current and former employees, as well as internal communications, presentations and analytics. The internal documents go up to 2023.
Ms. Yahyaoui grew up in Tunisia and then lived in exile in France. After moving to San Francisco, she raised money for Mos from investors including Expa, the investment firm started by Garrett Camp, a founder of Uber. Mos provided a service to help students find sources of financial aid, charging $149 for each school year.
Deena Shakir, an investor at Lux Capital, which backed Mos in 2020, said she and the firm’s partners “deeply respect” Ms. Yahyaoui.
“We take pride in supporting companies and founders like Amira whose commitment to enabling access for students gives us hope for the future of higher education,” Ms. Shakir said.
Mos had a slow start, three people with knowledge of the company said. Some students who signed up learned about aid they already knew about, like a Cal Grant for California residents, they said.
An investor presentation viewed by The Times showed that Mos had monthly revenue of $340,000 in December 2019. The start-up allowed users to pay $1 upfront and the remaining $148 when they got their financial aid.
Mos ultimately did not collect most of that money. Seventy percent of users defaulted on their payments after the pandemic hit in 2020, Jess Lee, an investor at Sequoia who sits on Mos’s board, later said in an article about the company published on Sequoia’s website.
As of late 2022, roughly 6,500 of Mos’s paying customers, or 22 percent, got refunds for its financial aid service, according to internal data. The company had told customers that if they didn’t get five times the cost of Mos’s services in financial aid, they could get a refund.
Mos said it could help students access $160 billion in scholarships, but that amount included loans, three people familiar with the situation said. The company’s pitch was to help students avoid debt.
Ms. Yahyaoui also said students who used Mos “saved” an average of $16,000. That was the amount that the start-up determined they qualified for and not what the students received in aid, three people with knowledge of the company said.
Mos’s website includes a moving ticker of happy customers (“Jasmine got $12,237 for Cal Poly,” for example). Ms. Yahyaoui asked employees to use stock photos and to make up names, three people with knowledge of the company said.
By 2021, financial technology was hot with investors. Ms. Yahyaoui pushed Mos to become a bank, making its financial aid product free. That September, the start-up announced its move into banking with a promotion that gave people $5 to sign up and another $5 for every referral.
Sign-ups poured in. Mos turned off the $5 promotion on its first day. Two months later, it turned it back on for three days and signed up more than 100,000 accounts, spending around $1 million in the promotion and sending Mos to the top of the App Store.
The sign-ups piqued investor interest, including from the investment firm Tiger Global. Sequoia’s Ms. Lee wanted to see how many of the accounts that signed up during the promotion remained active before investing more, two people familiar with the situation said. Sequoia encouraged Ms. Yahyaoui to hire an outside firm to assess whether the accounts belonged to real people, the people said.
Some employees also had concerns that many accounts did not belong to real people, three people familiar with the situation said. As sign-ups continued, Mos analyzed the accounts for potentially fraudulent behavior in an internal working document. In November, Ms. Yahyaoui restricted Ms. Lee’s access to that document, two of the people said.
Soon after, in February 2022, Tiger Global announced it led a $40 million funding for Mos. Sequoia joined the deal. It is not clear what impact access to the document would have had on Sequoia’s decision to invest more in Mos. Two people familiar with the situation said Ms. Lee retained access to a broader data source regarding the accounts.
In a statement, Ms. Lee said, “The most successful founders are the ones who have grit and are willing to test new hypotheses and adapt. Amira is the embodiment of these qualities.”
Tiger Global declined to comment.
Alongside the funding announcement, Sequoia published an article on its website detailing Ms. Yahyaoui’s dramatic past and entrepreneurial vision. It said fewer than 1 percent of Mos’s bank accounts had been closed, “an unheard-of statistic for a money-based sign-up promotion.”
Few people used the bank accounts, according to internal data viewed by The Times. Of roughly 153,000 open accounts, 95 percent had less than $5 in them and a third had a balance of zero through 2022, the data showed. Just 9.5 percent of account holders deposited money into their accounts during that time.
Mos told its board that 74 percent of bank account holders were students, according to a presentation viewed by The Times. But only around 20 percent were 22 or younger, according to internal data, with about 45 percent over the age of 30. Mos’s revenue from transaction fees, which made up the vast majority of the company’s total income after it became a bank, was less than $70,000 for the first nine months of 2022, two people familiar with the finances said.
Ms. Yahyaoui sometimes berated her top managers and threatened to fire them if their performance didn’t improve, according to five people who witnessed such events.
Using expletives, she wrote in a January 2022 message to employees that the company’s mission was meaningless “because of how bad we are at getting” stuff done.
“I need people I can count on to beat my dreams not to lower them,” she wrote.
Ms. Yahyaoui’s treatment of employees — including workers hired in Tunisia and Algeria — ran counter to her image as an activist, Mx. Tabb said.
At an employee gathering in September 2022, a Mos employee asked Sequoia’s Ms. Lee about her biggest concern for the start-up, three people who attended said. Ms. Lee initially said she was surprised by how good morale was given the circumstances, then added that it wasn’t clear what Mos’s product would be.
The start-up was at more of a “seed stage,” or very early in its development, Ms. Lee said.
Akara EttehEarly on a Saturday morning in April, Akara Etteh was checking his phone as he came out of Holborn tube station, in central London.
A moment later, it was in the hand of a thief on the back of an electric bike – Akara gave chase, but they got away.
He is just one victim of an estimated 78,000 “snatch thefts” in England and Wales in the year to March, a big increase on the previous 12 months.
The prosecution rate for this offence is very low – the police say they are targeting the criminals responsible but cannot “arrest their way out of the problem”. They also say manufacturers and tech firms have a bigger role to play.
Victims of the crime have been telling the BBC of the impact it has had on them – ranging from losing irreplaceable photos to having tens of thousands of pounds stolen.
And for Akara, like many other people who have their phone taken, there was another frustration: he was able to track where his device went, but was powerless to get it back.
Phone pings around London
He put his iPhone 13 into lost mode when he got home an hour or so later – meaning the thieves couldn’t access its contents – and turned on the Find My iPhone feature using his laptop.
This allowed Akara to track his phone’s rough location and almost immediately he received a notification to say it was in Islington. Eight days later, the phone was pinging in different locations around north London again.
In a move says he “wouldn’t recommend” with hindsight, he went to two of the locations his phone had been in to “look around”.
“It was pretty risky,” he said. “I was fuelled by adrenaline and anger.”
He didn’t speak to anyone, but he felt he was being watched and went home.
“I am really angry,” he said. “The phone is expensive. We work hard to earn that money, to be able to buy the handset, and someone else says ‘screw that’.”
Then, in May, just over a month after the theft, Akara checked Find My iPhone again – his prized possession was now on the other side of the world – in Shenzhen, China.
Akara gave up.
It is not uncommon for stolen phones to end up in Shenzhen – where if devices can’t be unlocked and used again, they are disassembled for parts.
The city is home to 17.6 million people and is a big tech hub, sometimes referred to as China’s Silicon Valley.
Police could not help
In the moments after Akara’s phone was stolen, he saw police officers on the street and he told them what had happened. Officers, he said, were aware of thieves doing a “loop of the area” to steal phones, and he was encouraged to report the offence online, which he did.
A few days later, he was told by the Metropolitan Police via email the case was closed as “it is unlikely that we will be able to identify those responsible”.
Akara subsequently submitted the pictures and information he had gathered from the locations where his stolen phone had been. The police acknowledged receipt but took no further action.
The Metropolitan Police had no comment to make on Akara’s specific case, but said it was “targeting resources to hotspot areas, such as Westminster, Lambeth and Newham, with increased patrols and plain clothes officers which deter criminals and make officers more visibly available to members of the community”.
Lost photos of mum
Many other people have contacted the BBC with their experiences of having their phones taken. One, James O’Sullivan, 44, from Surrey, says he lost more than £25,000 when thieves used his stolen device’s Apple Pay service.
Meanwhile, Katie Ashworth, from Newcastle, explained her phone was snatched in a park along with her watch, and a debit card in the phone case.
“The saddest thing was that the phone contained the last photos I had of my mum on a walk before she got too unwell to really do anything – I would do anything to get those photos back,” the 36-year-old says.
Again, she says, there was a lack of action from the police.
“The police never even followed it up with me, despite my bank transactions showing exactly where the thieves went,” she said.
“The police just told me to check Facebook Marketplace and local second-hand shops like Cex.”
‘Battle against the clock’ for police
So why are the police seemingly unable to combat this offence – or recover stolen devices?
PC Mat Evans, who has led a team working on this kind of crime for over a decade within West Midlands Police, admitted that only “quite a low number” of phones that are stolen actually get recovered.
He says the problem is the speed with which criminals move.
“Phones will be offloaded to known fences within a couple of hours,” he said.
“It’s always a battle against the clock immediately following any of these crimes, but people should always report these things to the police, because if we don’t know that these crimes are taking place, we can’t investigate them.”
And sometimes just one arrest can make a difference.
“When we do catch these criminals, either in the act or after the fact, our crime rates tank,” he said.
“Quite often that individual has been responsible for a huge swathe of crime.”
But the problem is not just about policing.
In a statement, Commander Richard Smith from the National Police Chiefs’ Council, which brings together senior officers to help develop policing strategy, said it would “continue to target” the most prolific criminals.
“We know that we cannot arrest our way out of this problem,” he said.
“Manufacturers and the tech industry have an important role in reducing opportunities for criminals to benefit from the resale of stolen handsets.”
Tracking and disabling
PC Mat EvansStolen phones can already be tracked and have their data erased through services such as “Find My iPhone” and “Find My Device”, from Android.
But policing minister Dame Diana Johnson said this week the government wanted manufacturers to ensure that any stolen phone could be permanently disabled to prevent it being sold second-hand.
Police chiefs will also be tasked with gathering more intelligence on who is stealing phones and where stolen devices end up.
A growing demand for second-hand phones, both in the UK and abroad, is believed to be a major driver behind the recent rise in thefts, the government said.
The Home Office is to host a summit at which tech companies and phone manufacturers will be asked to consider innovations that could help stop phones being traded illegally.
PC Evans said there was “no magic bullet”, but he said there was one thing manufacturers could do which would be “enormously helpful” to the police – more accurate tracking.
“At this moment in time, phone tracking is okay,” he said.
“But it’s not that scene in Total Recall yet, where you’re able to run around with a tracking device in your hand, sprinting down the road after a little bleeping dot.
“I appreciate it’s a big ask from the phone companies to make that a thing, but that would be enormously helpful from a policing perspective.”
Apple and Android did not provide the BBC with a statement, but Samsung said it was “working closely with key stakeholders and authorities on the issue of mobile phone theft and related crimes”.
Additional reporting by Tom Singleton
Google uses anti-competitive practices to dominate the market for online advertising technology, a UK watchdog has provisionally found.
The potentially unlawful behaviour could be harming thousands of UK publishers and advertisers, an investigation by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has warned.
It accuses Google of preventing rivals from “competing on a level playing field” with its own tech for the billions of pounds spent by UK businesses on online advertising.
Google said the watchdog’s findings were “flawed” and said it would respond.
According to the CMA, the vast majority of businesses use Google’s services when placing digital ads on websites.
Google maintains it has a strong business incentive to help UK firms thrive, and argues that advertisers choose to use Google because its products work well and help their businesses grow.
The watchdog will now consider representations from Google before deciding what action to take.
If Google is found to have broken competition law, the watchdog could impose a financial penalty of up to 10% of annual worldwide group turnover and issue legally binding directions to the firm.
“We’ve provisionally found that Google is using its market power to hinder competition when it comes to the ads people see on websites,” Juliette Enser, the CMA’s interim executive director of enforcement, said in a statement.
She pointed out that many businesses were able to keep their digital content free by using revenue from digital adverts, which reach millions of people across the UK.
“That’s why it’s so important that publishers and advertisers – who enable this free content – can benefit from effective competition and get a fair deal when buying or selling digital advertising space,” she wrote.
But Google’s vice president of global ads, Dan Taylor argued the search giant’s advertising technology helped websites and apps fund their content, and effectively reach new customers.
“The core of this case rests on flawed interpretations of the ad tech sector. We disagree with the CMA’s view and we will respond accordingly,” he wrote.
Google’s activities in ad tech are also subject to continuing probes by the US Department of Justice and the European Commission.
Competition economist Dr Cristina Caffarra, told the BBC that while the CMA’s statement of objections certainly presented “another headache” for Google, the regulator was merely “joining the club” of those who have already taken action.
“The UK is by no means some sort of pathfinder here,” she said.
The Department of Justice, state of Texas – which along with nine other states sued Google over alleged abuse of its ad tech dominance in 2020 – and the EU are all far ahead, Dr Caffarra added.
In 2023, EU competition regulators told Google it might need to sell part of its ad-tech business to address their concerns.
But the tech-giant has argued this would be a “disproportionate” step.
Separately, Google is seeking to appeal a UK court decision in June to allow a £13.6bn collective-action lawsuit against it to proceed.
The case alleges the search giant behaved in an anti-competitive way which caused online publishers in the UK to lose money.
Google has vowed to oppose the claim “vigorously and on the facts”.
Additional reporting by Liv McMahon
SonyIt’s just a few hours before reviews of one of the year’s biggest PlayStation 5 releases arrive, and its director is talking about food.
Buffets, to be precise.
You might get a lot for your money, but how do you feel afterwards?
“Bloated, you’ve eaten too much and you just want to go and sleep,” says Nicolas Doucet, head of Sony-owned studio Team Asobi.
Gamers are fond of food metaphors. Developers don’t just make games, they “cook”. If you’re spoilt for choice with high quality new releases, you’re “eatin’ good”.
But Nicolas is referring to the sense that blockbuster publishers have tended to have an all-you-can-eat approach when it comes to making games.
For a while now, the industry’s biggest players have been focused on producing open-world titles offering dozens of hours of gameplay, or on attempts to muscle into the lucrative online market.
Both genres have produced some huge hits, but Nicolas wonders if there is an appetite for something more like “that two-course meal that is going to be just the right amount”.
Astro Bot could be just the recipe Sony has been looking for.
Earlier this week the Japanese company announced it was pulling Concord – one of its other recent big games – from sale after a tepid response from critics and players.
The online shooter is the latest high-profile bid to corner the so-called “live service” market dominated by the likes of Fortnite and Apex Legends that’s failed to attract a large audience.
But in a quiet year for first-party PlayStation releases, Astro Bot has received some of the highest review scores of 2024 and some critics say it’s one of Sony’s best in ages.
At its heart it’s an old-school 3D platformer that’s crammed full of references to PlayStation’s 30-year history.
The game’s main objective is to rescue 300 Astro Bots hidden around various themed levels, with about half of those decked out in cosplay to resemble characters from the console’s past.
But as much as it’s a nostalgic reminder of Sony’s great successes, could it also be a lesson for the company’s future?
Team AsobiIf you’re one of the world’s 60 million PlayStation 5 owners, you’re almost certainly familiar with Astro Bot.
The cute mascot character appeared in 2020’s Astro’s Playroom, a short, three-hour adventure pre-installed on every machine.
It was designed to act as a tech demo for the hardware and its advanced controller, but people loved it.
“And it did highlight perhaps the fact that people are craving for these kind of games,” says Nicolas.
Releasing a 3D platformer in 2024 is, on paper, a daunting prospect. Nicolas admits the genre – a staple of the PlayStation 2 era – isn’t very common these days.
And, he says: “The ones that do exist are very, very high quality from people who’ve been making them for years and years.”
It’s also a genre Sony has moved away from recently, and its biggest releases have been more adult, cinematic titles such as God of War and The Last of Us.
Nicolas thinks this is a sign of audiences, and the developers making games for them, maturing.
But he admits that left a gap which Team Asobi – a relatively young studio – was eager to fill.
“I think there needs to be more games that are there just to relax, have a little bit of fun, that are not dramatic, that are not necessarily heavily story driven, where you can just mess around with a game and it’s fun,” says Nicolas.
“But, of course, it needs to be executed well.”
Astro Bot’s been widely praised for its polish, attention to detail and the way it plays, drawing comparisons with Mario – for many, the undisputed king of 3D platformers.
Nicolas considers descriptions of Astro Bot as “old school” a compliment and that going “back to basics” helped with the game’s development.
As concerns grow over spiralling budgets, Astro Bot was made in three-and-a-half years by a team of about 65 people – a relatively short time and small staff by modern standards.
Nicolas says the game’s bite-sized nature – it’s divided across 50 short, playable stages – helped to simplify development and made it easier to “swap things around”.
“Whereas when you’re tied to something that is one storyline, one timeline that is set, it’s very difficult,” he says.
“You have less flexibility.”
Team AsobiSony will now be hoping that Astro Bot’s glowing reception translates into big sales, but comparisons with Concord’s swift fall have already begun.
It’s also shone a light on characters Sony could revive, and prompted some people to question whether the company will shift its recent focus on the live-service market.
Under previous PlayStation boss Jim Ryan, the company announced plans to launch 12 online-focused games. It’s since scaled that back to six.
As for single-player titles, some of Sony’s biggest in-house studios haven’t yet revealed PS5 projects.
Hermen Hulst, one of two new CEOs in charge of Sony’s gaming division, told the BBC in a statement it was “very important we offer a wide variety of titles to our community” and that “Astro Bot fills an important part of our portfolio”.
He praised Team Asobi for creating “something special that is light-hearted and delightful” with “incredibly fun gameplay”.
Astro Bot is also “a great opportunity for families to game together”, he said.
Nicolas opts not to comment on the Concord situation or bigger, strategic moves, but he does agree with his boss that Astro Bot has given PS5 a game that can “bridge generations”.
Many reviewers have remarked on how cameos from the past have reminded them of growing up with Crash Bandicoot, Jak and Daxter or the cast of Ape Escape – characters that set them on the path to becoming gamers.
Nicolas says he often gets messages from parents who’ve played Astro’s Playroom with their children talking about their experiences, and he hopes that the new game will create more shared moments.
“I’m really happy that, besides the game itself, there’s a greater good, if you like, that we’re able to tell stories like that,” he says.
“And I really hope that we can brighten some people’s homes thanks to that experience.”
Additional reporting by Tom Gerken.
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