Three years, multiple delays, and a rebranding later, the Matter standard is finally here, promising a new era of compatibility for smart-home tech.

Matter is a connectivity standard that enables different smart-home products and systems—from smart lights to speakers to fridges—to all work with one another, regardless of their brand. 

• “As much as we love having everybody using the Google Assistant, the reality is people have iPhones and Android phones in their homes,” Michele Turner, senior director of Google Smart Home Ecosystem, told the Verge in May.
• “Some of them want to use HomeKit. We just don’t have that kind of compatibility today for users. And I think that’s hard. Being able to have multi-admin really work well between these ecosystems is going to be a big benefit for users,” she added.

Big picture: The push to bring Matter to the forefront of the smart home was led by the Connectivity Standards Alliance, an industry group that includes influential names in the smart-home space like Apple, Google, Samsung, and Amazon.

But the big names aren’t the only companies that have signed on: There are over 272 total members of the group, all of which played a part in developing, marketing, and testing the standard before its release.

We talked with two members to learn about why and how they joined the standard. Read what they had to say here.—JM

Everyone might be talking about Web3, but Sarah Guo is thinking about what she calls “software 3.0.”

A former general partner at Greylock Partners, Guo set off on her own this June, and in early October, debuted Conviction Partners, a new firm with $100 million in funding.

• The fund will invest in seed-stage software and hardware companies at the forefront of software innovation, opening the door for what she called “AI-native” companies.

Zoom in: We caught up with Guo earlier this month to talk about her investment vision and what she sees as the next step in software and AI.

Check out the conversation here.—EH

Stat: More than 500 workers have left Twitter in the last three months—60% more than in the quarter before, per Punks & Pinstripes data cited by Insider. And almost 30% of those Twitter expats went to Google or Meta.

Quote: “Developments in the biometrics and emotion AI market are immature. They may not work yet, or indeed ever.”—Stephen Bonner, deputy commissioner of the ICO, the UK’s privacy watchdog, in a release this week

Read: The future of the US economy could rest on a tricky task—making engineering cool.

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Three of the following news stories are true, and one...we made up. Can you spot the odd one out?

• Researchers designed a sweater that can defeat object-detecting AI.
• Bumble open-sourced its nudity-detection algorithm.
• Meta warned investors that it would lose even more money on AR/VR projects next year.
• As part of a new expansion, MrBeast announced an AI-focused R&D group.

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

• Fleet electrification is opening up a new market for payments companies
• Who is responsible for a broken EV charger? This company wants to help the industry figure it out
• Why Chipotle created a $50 million venture fund this year