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Saturday, April 20, 2019

From lab-grown meat to fermented fungus, here’s what corporate food VCs are serving up

Joanna Glasner Contributor More posts by this contributor A record $2.5B went to US insurance startup deals last year, and big insurers are in all the way Space tech rockets higher In a foodie’s ideal world, we’d all eat healthy, minimally processed cuisine sourced from artisanal farmers, bakers and chefs. In the real world, however, most of us derive the lion’s share of calories from edibles supplied by a handful of giant food conglomerates. As such, the ingredients and processing techniques they favor have an outsized impact on our daily...

Acquisitions, more than IPOs, will create Africa’s early startup successes

Africa has made its global IPO debut. Pan-African e-commerce company Jumia—a $1 billion-valued company—began trading live on the NYSE last week. The stock offering made Jumia the first upstart operating in Africa to list on a major global exchange. This raises expectations for unicorns and IPOs to create the continent’s first wave of startup moguls. But unlike other markets, big public listings and nine-figure valuations could remain rare in Africa. The rise of venture arms and startup acquisitions will factor more prominently than IPOs in creating...

3 fixes for Netflix’s “What to watch?” problem

Wasting time every night debating with yourself or your partner about what to watch on Netflix is a drag. It burns people’s time and good will, robs great creators of attention, and leaves Netflix vulnerable to competitors who can solve discovery. Netflix itself says the average user spends 18 minutes per day deciding. To date, Netflix’s solution has been its state-of-the-art artificial intelligence that offers personalized recommendations. But that algorithm is ignorant of how we’re feeling in the moment, what we’ve already seen elsewhere, and...

Startups Weekly: Zoom CEO says its stock price is ‘too high’

When Zoom hit the public markets Thursday, its IPO pop, a whopping 81 percent, floored everyone, including its own chief executive officer, Eric Yuan. Yuan became a billionaire this week when his video conferencing business went public. He told Bloomberg that he actually wished his stock hadn’t soared quite so high. I’m guessing his modesty and laser focus attracted Wall Street to his stock; well, that, and the fact that his business is actually profitable. He is, this week proved, not your average tech CEO. I chatted with him briefly on listing...

Friday, April 19, 2019

Notes from the Samsung Galaxy Fold: day four

{rss:content:encoded} Notes from the Samsung Galaxy Fold: day four https://tcrn.ch/2vjfWTX http://bit.ly/2Ium7NV April 20, 2019 at 03:31AM Apologies for skipping day three. This kept me extremely busy yesterday. Though the Galaxy Fold remained a constant companion. Before you ask (or after you ask on Twitter without having read beyond the headline), no it’s hasn’t broken yet. It’s actually been fairly robust, all things considered. But here’s the official line from Samsung on that, A limited number of early Galaxy Fold samples were provided to...

Fastly, the content delivery network, files for an IPO

Fastly, the content delivery network that’s raised $219 million in financing from investors (according to Crunchbase), is ready for its close up in the public markets. The eight-year-old company is one of several businesses that improve the download time and delivery of different websites to internet browsers and it has just filed for an IPO. Media companies like The New York Times use Fastly to cache their homepages, media and articles on Fastly’s servers so that when somebody wants to browse the Times online, Fastly’s servers can send it directly...

How do you hire a great growth marketer?

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Verified Expert Brand Designer: Ramotion

Ramotion is a remote branding and product design agency that has worked with Bay Area tech startups since 2014. While they typically do branding for funded, fast-growing startups, Ramotion has helped companies ranging from Bitmoji’s early brand identity to Mozilla’s rebrand. We spoke to Ramotion’s CEO Denis Pakhaliuk about their iterative approach, his favorite branding projects, and more.   Ramotion’s branding philosophy: “We are a big fan of starting small: designing a small package, releasing it, and then iterating on top of that. So,...

How do you hire a great growth marketer?

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Uber’s self-driving car unit raises $1B from Toyota, Denso and Vision Fund ahead of spin-out

Uber has confirmed it will spin out its self-driving car business after the unit closed $1 billion in funding from Toyota, auto-parts maker Denso and SoftBank’s Vision Fund. The development has been speculated for some time — as far back as October — and it serves to both remove a deeply-unprofitable unit from the main Uber business: helping Uber scale back some of its losses, while giving Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group (known as Uber ATG) more freedom to focus on the tough challenge of bringing autonomous vehicles to market. The deal values...

ProcessOut improves payment data visualization

ProcessOut has grown quite a lot since I first covered the startup. The company now has a ton of small and big clients, from Glovo to Vente-Privée and Dashlane. The company has become an expert on payment providers and payment analytics. The core of the product remains the same. Clients sign up to get an overview on the performance of their payment systems. After setting up ProcessOut Telescope, you can monitor payments with expensive fees, failed payments and disappointing payment service providers. And this product is quite successful. Back in...

Thursday, April 18, 2019

Index Ventures, Stripe back bookkeeping service Pilot with $40M

Five years after Dropbox acquired their startup Zulip, Waseem Daher, Jeff Arnold and Jessica McKellar have gained traction for their third business together: Pilot. Pilot helps startups and small businesses manage their back office. Chief executive officer Daher admits it may seem a little boring, but the market opportunity is undeniably huge. To tackle the market, Pilot is today announcing a $40 million Series B led by Index Ventures with participation from Stripe, the online payment processing system. The round values Pilot, which has raised...

Instagram hides Like counts in leaked design prototype

“We want your followers to focus on what you share, not how many likes your posts get. During this test, only the person who share a post will see the total number of likes it gets.” That’s how Instagram describes a seemingly small design change test with massive potential impact on users’ well-being. Hiding Like counts could reduce herd mentality, where people just Like what’s already got tons of Likes. It could reduce the sense of competition on Instagram, since users won’t compare their own counts with those of more popular friends or superstar...

Instagram hides Like counts in leaked design prototype

{rss:content:encoded} Instagram hides Like counts in leaked design prototype https://tcrn.ch/2UqN1aL https://tcrn.ch/2VUvyci April 18, 2019 at 10:57PM “We want your followers to focus on what you share, not how many likes your posts get. During this test, only the person who share a post will see the total number of likes it gets.” That’s how Instagram describes a seemingly small design change test with massive potential impact on users’ well-being. Hiding Like counts could reduce herd mentality, where people just Like what’s already got tons of...

Facebook now says its password leak affected ‘millions’ of Instagram users

Facebook has confirmed its password-related security incident last month now affects “millions” of Instagram users, not “tens of thousands” as first thought. The social media giant confirmed the new information in its updated blog post, first published on March 21. “We discovered additional logs of Instagram passwords being stored in a readable format,” the company said. “We now estimate that this issue impacted millions of Instagram users. We will be notifying these users as we did the others.” “Our investigation has determined that these stored...

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel will reappear at Disrupt SF

He invented modern social media, then had it stolen from him. So how does Evan Spiegel feel about it, and how will he turn Snapchat’s product leadership into a profitable business? We’ll bring you the answers at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, where Snap CEO Evan Spiegel will join us. Come learn how Spiegel analyzes behavior to create new features, evolves from failure and keeps his brand cool. The talk comes at a pivotal time for Snap, just as it hopes to hit profitability. After 2.5 years of being ruthlessly copied while trying to maintain the moral high...

Working backwards to uncover key success factors

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Uber, Lyft implement new safety measures

Uber and Lyft instituted new safety features and policies this week. The move follows the death of Samantha Josephson, a student at the University of South Carolina, who was kidnapped and murdered in late March. She was found dead after getting into a vehicle that she believed to be her Uber ride. The murder, which has garnered nationwide media attention, seems to have spurred action by the ride sharing behemoths. In response, Uber is launching the Campus Safety Initiative, which includes new features in the app. Currently, the features are in...

Y Combinator grad Fuzzbuzz lands $2.7M seed round to deliver fuzzing as service

Fuzzbuzz, a graduate of the most recent Y Combinator class, got the kind of news every early-stage startup wants to hear when it landed a $2.7 million seed round to help deliver a special class of automated software testing known as fuzzing in the form of a cloud service. Fuel Capital led the round. Homebrew and Susa Ventures also participated, along with various angel investors, including Docker co-founder Solomon Hykes, Mesosphere co-founder Florian Leibert and Looker co-founder Ben Porterfield. What Fuzzbuzz does specifically is automate fuzzing...

Marketing platform startup Adverity raises $12.4M in round led by Felix Capital

Marketers get a lot of incoming from the data they have to deal with, bound up in hundreds of spreadsheets and reports, making it time consuming and tricky to get value out of. Tech companies like Datorama and Funnel.io have appeared to try and lighten this load. Adverity is a data intelligence platform also playing in this space by applying AI to produce actionable insights in real-time. Founded in 2015, it’s a cloud agnostic SaaS platform compatible with Amazon, Google and Microsoft which provides data to destinations such as SQL databases, Snowflake,...

The different playbooks of D2C brands

Ashwin Ramasamy Contributor Ashwin Ramasamy is the cofounder of PipeCandy that provides algorithm-generated insights and predictions about eCommerce and D2C companies. His company helps investors, banks, tech firms and governments understand the global eCommerce landscape. @Ashwinizer More posts by this contributor Waiting for the right professional network It’s the end of “euphoric times” for custom app developers Over the past half a decade, the tidal wave of niche brands delivering new kinds of products to consumers and doing so online...

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