l
l
blogger better. Powered by Blogger.

Search

Labels

blogger better

Followers

Blog Archive

Total Pageviews

Labels

Download

Blogroll

Featured 1

Curabitur et lectus vitae purus tincidunt laoreet sit amet ac ipsum. Proin tincidunt mattis nisi a scelerisque. Aliquam placerat dapibus eros non ullamcorper. Integer interdum ullamcorper venenatis. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas.

Featured 2

Curabitur et lectus vitae purus tincidunt laoreet sit amet ac ipsum. Proin tincidunt mattis nisi a scelerisque. Aliquam placerat dapibus eros non ullamcorper. Integer interdum ullamcorper venenatis. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas.

Featured 3

Curabitur et lectus vitae purus tincidunt laoreet sit amet ac ipsum. Proin tincidunt mattis nisi a scelerisque. Aliquam placerat dapibus eros non ullamcorper. Integer interdum ullamcorper venenatis. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas.

Featured 4

Curabitur et lectus vitae purus tincidunt laoreet sit amet ac ipsum. Proin tincidunt mattis nisi a scelerisque. Aliquam placerat dapibus eros non ullamcorper. Integer interdum ullamcorper venenatis. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas.

Featured 5

Curabitur et lectus vitae purus tincidunt laoreet sit amet ac ipsum. Proin tincidunt mattis nisi a scelerisque. Aliquam placerat dapibus eros non ullamcorper. Integer interdum ullamcorper venenatis. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas.

Saturday, June 15, 2019

Shyp is preparing for a comeback under new management

Fifteen months after shutting down, Shyp is getting ready to launch again. The startup tweeted today that “We are back! We’re hard at work to rebuild an unparalleled shipping experience. Before we begin operations again, we’d love to hear your feedback in this quick survey. We look forward to working with you and can’t wait to change the future of shipping!”

Most of the survey questions focus on online shopping returns, asking how easy or difficult it was to package the product for return, print the prepaid label, purchase postage or ship the product. The last question offers a hint about what direction the rebooted Shyp might take, asking “When returning a product, how likely would you be to use a service that picked up and shipped the product instead of having to ship it yourself?”

Shyp’s website doesn’t say when it will be back or what services it will offer, but it does mention that Shyp restarted in January 2019 under new management and backed by angel investors “with plans to disrupt the industry with what it does best: cutting-edge technology and a superior customer experience.”

Once one of the hottest on-demand startups, Shyp shut down in March 2018 after missing targets to expand to cities outside of San Francisco. When it first launched in 2014, Shyp initially offered on-demand service for almost anything customers wanted shipped, charging $5 plus postage to pick up, package and bring the item to a shipping company. Eventually it introduced a pricing tier in 2016 as it tried to find new approaches to its business model, before closing down two years later.

If the new Shyp does focus on making online returns easier, it will be bringing back one of its most popular services. The company expanded into online returns in 2015 after noticing that many customers used the app to return products they had purchased online.

TechCrunch has emailed Shyp for more information.



http://bit.ly/2Kl7qNP Shyp is preparing for a comeback under new management https://tcrn.ch/2RrqTgR

Startups Weekly: #CodeCon, the ‘techlash’ and ill-prepared CEOs

Hello and welcome back to Startups Weekly, a newsletter published every Saturday that dives into the week’s noteworthy venture capital deals, funds and trends. Before I dive into this week’s topic, let’s catch up a bit. Last week, I wrote about Peloton’s upcoming initial public offering. Before that, I noted the proliferation of billion-dollar companies. 

Remember, you can send me tips, suggestions and feedback to kate.clark@techcrunch.com or on Twitter @KateClarkTweets. If you don’t subscribe to Startups Weekly yet, you can do that here

Now I know this newsletter is supposed to be about startups, but we’re shifting our focus to Big Tech today. Bear with me.

I spent the better part of the week in Scottsdale, Ariz. where temperatures outside soared past 100 and temperatures inside were icy cold. Both because Recode + Vox cranked the AC to ungodly levels but also because every panel, it seemed, veered into a debate around the “techlash” and antitrust.

If you aren’t familiar, the Financial Times defines the techlash as “the growing public animosity toward large Silicon Valley platform technology companies.” Code Conference has in the past been an event that underscores innovation in tech. This year, amid growing tensions between tech’s business practices and the greater good, things felt a little different.

The conference began with Peter Kafka grilling YouTube’s CEO Susan Wojcicki. Unfortunately for her, CodeCon took place the week after an enormous controversy struck YouTube. You can read about that here. Wojcicki wasn’t up to the task of addressing the scandal, at least not honestly. She apologized to the LGBTQ community for YouTube’s actions but was unable to confront the larger issue at hand: YouTube has failed to take necessary action toward eliminating hate speech on its platform, much like other social media hubs.

From there, The Verge’s Casey Newton asked Instagram head Adam Mosseri and Facebook vice president of consumer hardware Andrew Bosworth point blank if Facebook should be broken up. Unsurprisingly, neither of the two men are fond of the idea.

“Personally, if we split [Facebook and Instagram] it might make my life easier but I think it’s a terrible idea,” Mosseri, who was named CEO of Instagram last fall, said. “If you split us up, it would just make it exponentially more difficult to keep people safe. There are more people working on safety and integrity issues at Facebook than all the people that work at Instagram.”

Bosworth, who manages VR projects at Facebook, had this to say: “You take Instagram and Facebook apart, you have the same attack surfaces. They now aren’t able to share and combine data … So this isn’t circular logic. This is an economy of scale.”

Wojcicki, when asked whether YouTube should separate from Google, had a less nuanced and frankly shockingly ill-prepared response:

There’s more where that came from, but this newsletter isn’t about big tech! It’s about startups! Here’s all the startup news you missed this week.

IPO Corner

CrowdStrike’s IPO went really well: After pricing its IPO at $34 per share Tuesday evening and raising $612 million in the process (a whole lot more than the planned $378 million), the company’s stock popped 90% Wednesday morning with an initial share price of $63.50. A bona fide success, CrowdStrike boasted an initial market cap of $11.4 billion, nearly four times that of its last private valuation, at market close Wednesday. I chatted with CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz on listing day. You can read our full conversation here.

Fiverr climbs: The marketplace had a good first day on the NYSE. The company priced its IPO at $21 per share Wednesday night, raising around $111 million. It then started trading Thursday morning at $26 apiece, with shares climbing for most of the day and closing at $39.90 — up 90% from the IPO price. Again, not bad. Read TechCrunch’s Anthony Ha’s conversation with Fiverr CEO Micha Kaufman here.

Get ready for … Slack’s highly-anticipated direct listing next week (June 20). Catch up on direct listings here and learn more about Slack’s journey to the public markets here.

Bird confirmed its acquisition of Scoot

As is usually the case with these things, parties from both Bird and Scoot declined to tell us any details about the deal, so we went and found the details ourselves! First, The Wall Street Journal’s Katie Roof reported the (mostly stock) deal was valued at roughly $25 million. We confirmed with our sources that it was indeed less than $25 million and came after Scoot struggled to raise additional capital from venture capital investors.

Fortnite throws a Houseparty 

While we’re on the subject of M&A, Epic Games, the creator of Fortnite, acquired Houseparty, a video chatting mobile app, this week. The deal comes shortly after Epic Games raised a whopping $1.25 billion. Founded in 2015, Houseparty is a social network that delivers video chat across a number of different platforms, including iOS, Android and macOS. Like Fortnite, the offering tends to skew younger. Specifically, the app caters toward teen users, providing a more private and safer space than other, broader platforms.

Startup Capital

Symphony, a messaging app, gets $165M at a $1.4B valuation
BetterUp raises $103M to fast-track employee development
Neurobehavioral health company BlackThorn pulls in $76M from GV
Against Gravity, maker of the VR hit ‘Rec Room,’ nabs $24M
Simpo secures $4.5M seed round to help drive software adoption

~Extra Crunch~

If you’ve been unsure whether to sign up for TechCrunch’s awesome new subscription service, now is the time. Through next Friday, it’s only $2 a month for two months. Seems like a no-brainer. Sign up here. Here are some of my personal favorite EC pieces of the week:

Silicon Valley’s founder fetish infantilizes public companies

If you enjoy this newsletter, be sure to check out TechCrunch’s venture-focused podcast, Equity. In this week’s episode, available here, Crunchbase News editor-in-chief Alex Wilhelm and I debate dual-class stock, discuss my takeaways from #CodeCon and review the biggest rounds of the week. You can subscribe to Equity here or wherever else you listen to podcasts.



https://tcrn.ch/2BYQuGw Startups Weekly: #CodeCon, the ‘techlash’ and ill-prepared CEOs https://tcrn.ch/2FbtlTE

Friday, June 14, 2019

Amazon Spark, the retailer’s two-year-old Instagram competitor, has shut down

Amazon’s two-year-old Instagram competitor, Amazon Spark, is no more.

Hoping to capitalize on the social shopping trend and tap into the power of online influencers, Amazon in 2017 launched its own take on Instagram with a shoppable feed of stories and photos aimed at Prime members. The experiment known as Amazon Spark has now come to an end. However, the learnings from Spark and Amazon’s discovery tool Interesting Finds are being blended into a new social-inspired product, #FindItOnAmazon.

Amazon Spark had been a fairly bland service, if truth be told. Unlike on Instagram, where people follow their friend, interests, brands like they like, and people they find engaging or inspiring, Spark was focused on the shopping and the sale. While it tried to mock the Instagram aesthetic at times with fashion inspiration images or highly posed travel photos, it lacked Instagram’s broader appeal. Your friends weren’t there and there weren’t any Instagram Stories, for example. Everything felt too transactional.

Amazon declined to comment on the apparent shutdown of Spark, but the service is gone from the website and app.

The URL amazon.com/spark, meanwhile, redirects to the new #FoundItOnAmazon site — a site which also greatly resembles another Amazon product discovery tool, Interesting Finds.

Interesting Finds has been around since 2016, offering consumers a way to browse an almost Pinterest-like board of products across a number of categories. It features curated “shops” focused on niche themes, like a “Daily Carry” shop for toteable items, a “Mid Century” shop filled with furniture and décor, a shop for “Star Wars” fans, one for someone who loves the color pink, and so on. Interesting Finds later added a layer of personalization with the introduction of a My Mix shop filled with recommendations tailored to your interactions and likes.

The Interesting Finds site had a modern, clean look-and-feel that made it a more pleasurable way to browse Amazon’s products. Products photos appeared on white backgrounds while the clutter of a traditional product detail page was removed.

We understand from people familiar with the products that Interesting Finds is not shutting down as Spark has. But the new #FoundItOnAmazon site will take inspiration from what worked with Interesting Finds and Spark to turn it into a new shopping discovery tool.

Interesting Finds covers a wide range of categories, but #FoundItOnAmazon will focus more directly on fashion and home décor. Similar to Interesting Finds, you can heart to favorites items and revisit them later.

The #FoundItOnAmazon site is very new and isn’t currently appearing for all Amazon customers at this time. If you have it, the amazon.com/spark URL will take you there.

Though Amazon won’t talk about why its Instagram experiment is ending, it’s not too hard to make some guesses. Beyond its lack of originality and transactional nature, Instagram itself has grown into a far more formidable competitor since Spark first launched.

Last fall, Instagram fully embraced its shoppable nature with the introduction of shopping features across its app that let people more easily discover products from Instagram photos. It also added a new shopping channel and in March, Instagram launched its own in-app checkout option to turn product inspiration into actual conversions.

It was certainly a big move into Amazon territory. And while that led to headlines about Instagram as the future of shopping, it’s not going to upset Amazon’s overall dominance any time soon.

That said, Instagram’s changes may have prompted Amazon to give up trying to build its own Instagram clone, so it could instead focus on building out better and more differentiated tools for product discovery, like the new site.



from Social – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2KRZ4gm Amazon Spark, the retailer’s two-year-old Instagram competitor, has shut down Sarah Perez https://tcrn.ch/2WGmCa7
via IFTTT

Amazon Spark, the retailer’s two-year-old Instagram competitor, has shut down

{rss:content:encoded} Amazon Spark, the retailer’s two-year-old Instagram competitor, has shut down https://tcrn.ch/2WGmCa7 https://tcrn.ch/2KRZ4gm June 15, 2019 at 02:18AM

Amazon’s two-year-old Instagram competitor, Amazon Spark, is no more.

Hoping to capitalize on the social shopping trend and tap into the power of online influencers, Amazon in 2017 launched its own take on Instagram with a shoppable feed of stories and photos aimed at Prime members. The experiment known as Amazon Spark has now come to an end. However, the learnings from Spark and Amazon’s discovery tool Interesting Finds are being blended into a new social-inspired product, #FindItOnAmazon.

Amazon Spark had been a fairly bland service, if truth be told. Unlike on Instagram, where people follow their friend, interests, brands like they like, and people they find engaging or inspiring, Spark was focused on the shopping and the sale. While it tried to mock the Instagram aesthetic at times with fashion inspiration images or highly posed travel photos, it lacked Instagram’s broader appeal. Your friends weren’t there and there weren’t any Instagram Stories, for example. Everything felt too transactional.

Amazon declined to comment on the apparent shutdown of Spark, but the service is gone from the website and app.

The URL amazon.com/spark, meanwhile, redirects to the new #FoundItOnAmazon site — a site which also greatly resembles another Amazon product discovery tool, Interesting Finds.

Interesting Finds has been around since 2016, offering consumers a way to browse an almost Pinterest-like board of products across a number of categories. It features curated “shops” focused on niche themes, like a “Daily Carry” shop for toteable items, a “Mid Century” shop filled with furniture and décor, a shop for “Star Wars” fans, one for someone who loves the color pink, and so on. Interesting Finds later added a layer of personalization with the introduction of a My Mix shop filled with recommendations tailored to your interactions and likes.

The Interesting Finds site had a modern, clean look-and-feel that made it a more pleasurable way to browse Amazon’s products. Products photos appeared on white backgrounds while the clutter of a traditional product detail page was removed.

We understand from people familiar with the products that Interesting Finds is not shutting down as Spark has. But the new #FoundItOnAmazon site will take inspiration from what worked with Interesting Finds and Spark to turn it into a new shopping discovery tool.

Interesting Finds covers a wide range of categories, but #FoundItOnAmazon will focus more directly on fashion and home décor. Similar to Interesting Finds, you can heart to favorites items and revisit them later.

The #FoundItOnAmazon site is very new and isn’t currently appearing for all Amazon customers at this time. If you have it, the amazon.com/spark URL will take you there.

Though Amazon won’t talk about why its Instagram experiment is ending, it’s not too hard to make some guesses. Beyond its lack of originality and transactional nature, Instagram itself has grown into a far more formidable competitor since Spark first launched.

Last fall, Instagram fully embraced its shoppable nature with the introduction of shopping features across its app that let people more easily discover products from Instagram photos. It also added a new shopping channel and in March, Instagram launched its own in-app checkout option to turn product inspiration into actual conversions.

It was certainly a big move into Amazon territory. And while that led to headlines about Instagram as the future of shopping, it’s not going to upset Amazon’s overall dominance any time soon.

That said, Instagram’s changes may have prompted Amazon to give up trying to build its own Instagram clone, so it could instead focus on building out better and more differentiated tools for product discovery, like the new site.

How to make remote work work

Every time I see a “the future of work is remote” article, I think to myself: “How backwards! How retro! How quaint!” That future is now, for many of us. I’ve been a fully remote developer-turned-CTO for a full decade. So I’m always baffled by people still wrestling with whether remote work is viable for their company. That jury rendered its verdict a long time ago.

One reason companies still struggle with it is that remote work amplifies the negative effects of bad practices. If everyone’s in one place, you can dither, handwave, vacillate, micromanage, and turn your workplace into an endless wasteland of unclear uncertainty, punctuated by ad-hoc last-second crisis meetings — and your employees will probably still conspire against your counterproduction to get something done, albeit much less than what they’re capable of.

If they’re remote, though, progress via conspiracy and adhocracy is no longer an option. If they’re remote, you need decisive confidence, clear direction, iterative targets, independent responsibilities, asynchronous communications, and cheerful chatter. Let me go over each of those:

Decisive confidence. Suppose Vivek in Delhi, Diego in Rio, and Miles in Berlin are all on a project. (An example I’m drawing from my real life.) It’s late your time. You have to make a decision about the direction of their work. If you sleep on it, you’re writing off multiple developer-days of productivity.

Sometimes they have enough responsibilities to have other things to work on. (More on that below.) Sometimes you don’t have to make the decision because they have enough responsibility to do so themselves. (More on that below.) But sometimes you have to make the business-level decision based on scant information. In cases like this, remember the military maxim: “Any decision is better than no decision.”



https://ift.tt/eA8V8J How to make remote work work https://tcrn.ch/2KkiTxs

How to negotiate term sheets with strategic investors

Apply to the TechCrunch Hackathon at Disrupt SF 2019

The TechCrunch Hackathon is shaping up to be a huge battle royale, but we still have room for a few more creative coders, hackers and outright webmonsters to join us at Disrupt San Francisco 2019 on October 2-4 for a chance to win $10,000.

It won’t cost you a thing to come and play in the hackathon sandbox. If you have the vision, the chops and the stamina to face off against some of the world’s best devs, then stop what you’re doing and apply to compete right here.

Here’s what you need to know about the Disrupt SF 2019 Hackathon. Teams can consist of a maximum of 6 people. Don’t have a team? No problem, you can find a team member on our Devpost host site prior to the event.

Besides the $10,000 grand prize, sponsors will also offer prizes (including cold, hard cash, people) to the teams that build a great product using their platform. It won’t be easy. You’ll have roughly 24 high-pressure hours to deliver the goods using their APIs, data sets and other tools.

We’ll announce this year’s sponsors and challenges over the next few weeks, but the sponsored contests, prizes and winners from last year’s hackathon can give you an idea of what to expect.

When the dev clock runs out, it’s pencils down and time to submit your work. On the afternoon of day two, judges review all completed projects — kind of like a flashback to your science fair days. They’ll pick 10 finalists to deliver a two-minute project pitch on the Extra Crunch Stage.

The sponsors will announce their winners, and then TechCrunch will announce one grand prize winner for the best overall hack — and that team will take home a cool, $10,000 cash prize. Check out all the details and the agenda on the Hackathon website.

We’ll keep you fed, watered and highly caffeinated throughout the event — at no cost to you. Plus, you receive free Expo Only passes for the first two days of Disrupt. And if you have any energy left, you can enjoy your free Innovator pass to catch all of the content during day three of Disrupt SF. Sweet!

The entire experience is exhausting and exhilarating, grueling and gratifying. You’ll flex your mighty skills in front of influential people and build something awesome that can make a difference in this world.

The TC Hackathon takes place at Disrupt San Francisco 2019 on October 2-4. Join the battle royale and show us what you can do. Apply to the Hackathon right here.

Is your company interested in sponsoring the Hackathon at Disrupt San Francisco 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.



https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Apply to the TechCrunch Hackathon at Disrupt SF 2019 https://tcrn.ch/2MYiNOa

Last day to save $100 on tickets to TC Sessions: Mobility 2019

This is it. The final call for all the mobility and transportation startuppers who want to save a solid Benjamin on their ticket to the TC Sessions: Mobility 2019 conference in San Jose, Calif. on July 10. The early-bird ticket price disappears tonight, June 14 at 11:59 p.m. (PT). Beat that deadline and buy a ticket — or pay full freight.

Get ready to experience a full day devoted to the revolution that’s taking place within the mobility and transportation industries. More than 1,000 people — the greatest minds, biggest names and influential thinkers, makers and investors — will attend a day packed with interviews, panel discussions, fireside chats, demos and workshops.

Along with TechCrunch editors, speakers will question assumptions and examine complex technological and regulatory issues. They’ll discuss capital investment concerns and look at the ethics and human factors in a future of autonomous cars, delivery robots and flying taxis.

Here’s a small sample of the programming that’s on tap. The event agenda can help you plan your day, although you may have to clone yourself to catch it all.

Building Business and Autonomy: Co-founder and CTO Jesse Levinson will be on hand to talk about Zoox, an independent autonomous vehicle company. Its cars can navigate tricky San Francisco streets — including the notoriously iconic Lombard Street. We’ll hear how Zoox plans to navigate the challenging road to business success.

The Future of Freight: The trucking industry is in serious trouble, and startups and OEMs are scrambling to come up with a solution. Volvo’s Jenny Elfsberg and Stefan Seltz-Axmacher of Starsky Robotics will join us to debate whether autonomous trucks are the fix we need or if another near-term technology can pave the way to a more efficient and profitable industry.

Will Venture Capital Drive the Future of Mobility? Michael Granoff of Maniv Mobility, Ted Serbinski of Techstars and Bain Capital’s Sarah Smith will debate the uncertain future of mobility tech and whether VC dollars are enough to push the industry forward.

Today’s the last day you can save $100 on your pass to the TC Sessions: Mobility 2019 conference in San Jose, Calif. on July 10. Buy your ticket by 11:59 p.m. (PT) tonight, June 14 or kiss that early bird — and $100 — goodbye.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Mobility? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.



https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Last day to save $100 on tickets to TC Sessions: Mobility 2019 https://tcrn.ch/2WJSrDS

Get 2 months of Extra Crunch for $2

We’re excited to announce a special promotion for Extra Crunch. Starting today, new users signing up for Extra Crunch will get a trial rate of $2 for the first 2 months. After the trial period ends, you’ll be moved over to our monthly plan for $15 per month. This offer ends on June 21, so be sure to take advantage of it before it expires.

Claim this offer by heading here.

Extra Crunch is our membership program that launched back in February. It features original research and reporting, including unicorn deep dives, startup resources and recommendations, and more. As a subscriber, we’ll remove all banner ads and video pre rolls from the site for you. If you’re interested in attending our events like Disrupt SF, you can also save 20% on tickets by being an Extra Crunch subscriber. Membership also gets you access to our weekly conference calls with TechCrunch writers.

Here are a few articles our subscribers have loved so far:

We’ve already received tremendous feedback and positive reactions from our loyal readers, and we’d love to see you join, too. It’s a great way to support the journalism you love while also getting a deeper dive into the topics you already enjoy on TechCrunch. Sign up here or click the banner below.



https://tcrn.ch/2KSmC4z Get 2 months of Extra Crunch for $2 https://tcrn.ch/2MRe6W4

Thursday, June 13, 2019

Pioneering private space explorer Anousheh Ansari welcomes ISS commercialization

XPRIZE CEO and Prodea founder Anousheh Ansari dreamt of being an astronaut as a child growing up in Iran, but understandably most people around her were skeptical about her ambitions. Yet in 2006, she made that dream come true when she became the first woman to visit the International Space Station as a privately funded citizen (as well as the first Iranian citizen and the first Muslim woman), traveling aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket as a trained and paying guest of the Russian Space Agency.

At the time, NASA wasn’t thrilled about the idea and definitely did not want Ansari to pay a visit. 13 years later, the U.S. space agency announced earlier this week that the ISS is officially “open for business,” and revealed that pricing for a night’s stay will be around $35,000 per person (that’s just lodging – you still have to figure out your own transportation). At a Creative Destruction Lab event in Toronto this week, I spoke to Ansari about what this milestone announcement means for commercial spaceinterests, and her perspective on the field and opportunity for space-focused startups in general.

“Actually, I wish I had my laptop to I could show a slide from probably six, seven years ago, maybe even longer, which I used that said ‘ISS for rent. It’s coming true! I’m telling you, I can predict the future,” Ansari joked. “But I think it makes so much sense.”

There are a number of reasons the situation has changed regarding how NASA views commercial and private interest in visiting and using the space station. Not least of which is that the station has now aged beyond its original mission parameters, and is definitely nearing its true functional end of life.

The space station is […] already on extended life right now,” Ansari said. “So now they can generate revenue from, make good use of the space station [beyond its intended mission] so they can invest in the next generation.”

Even if its original, official mission is technically ended, there’s a lot of advantage that private companies can still derive from the facility in the interim.

“There’s so much interest in doing research and experimentation on board the space station, I think the cost is incredibly low,” she added, referring to the pricing quoted in NASA’s guidelines for private astronauts. “I mean, there’s still the cost of access, which will mean it’s not affordable for everyone. But the renting space station for $35,000 a night and doing experiments. It’s incredible.”

“I think there will be a lot of companies, a lot of, you know, pharma, medical and health companies will definitely take advantage of that and do experiments,” Ansari continued. “And, and I’m excited. I’m glad it’s happening.”

PLAYA VISTA, CALIFORNIA – MAY 15: (L-R) Anousheh Ansari, CEO, XPRIZE, Peter Diamandis, Founder & Executive Chairman, XPRIZE and Emily Church, Executive Director of the Global Learning, XPRIZE attend the Global Learning XPRIZE Foundation Grand-prize Awards at Google Playa Vista Office on May 15, 2019 in Playa Vista, California. (Photo by Jesse Grant/Getty Images for Global Learning XPRIZE)

For Ansari, the growth in the commercial space sector has its origins in XPRIZE, the organization she leads as CEO as of last October. The Ansari X Prize, a $10 million prize so-named thanks to a multimillion dollar contribution provided by Ansari and her brother-in-law Amir Ansari, was awarded in 2004, and paved the way for the kind of business SpaceX operates today.

“The first prize was a $10 million prize, to go to space twice within two weeks, because we wanted to show that it can be repeated, which means that it is commercially viable – it’s not a science fiction project, and it can be done at a reasonable cost” Ansari recalled. “We had a requirement, I think it had to be 95%, reusable, outside of the mass of the fuel. We didn’t want someone to build two spaceships, fly this one, and then fly this other one. So it was all designed because we wanted to make sure it can really be a business.”

The key ingredient here was to show, for the first time, that this could be a commercially viable interest at investment levels that were not out of reach for private companies to pursue. And another key ingredient was that the project involved making sure participants actually could launch, and were cleared by relevant agencies to do so.

“We had to work with regulators and the FAA to figure out how people could even launch, because FAA didn’t know how to deal with this,” Ansari said. “They’d never had a private company wanting to launch something to space. So because of our work, and and the work we did with NASA and the regulators, they opened up, they created this division – now it’s called the FAA Office of Commercial Space Transportation.”

SpaceX’s CRS-11 launch from 2017. SpaceX’s ability to launch privately is due in part to the work XPRIZE did to help establish guidelines for commercial launch operations.

While her work to date has broken a lot of ground and opened up avenues for startups, Ansari had specific requests about new areas of opportunity and consideration for entrepreneurs in attendance at the Creative Destruction Lab event during a keynote talk she gave to kickoff the first day. She noted that there exists plenty of potential for “cloud systems that exist above the clouds,” since data warehouse facilities operating in space would have immediate benefits in terms of energy collection and thermal management.

She also called for startups to focus on making sure they consider knock-on effects of the things they build. Space debris, as one example in the specific – and more generally, a reminder that exponential change naturally engenders a reaction of fear.

“It’s a difficult thing, because as engineers we just like to play with toys and play with technology,” she said. “But it’s up to us in this room to help make sense of this.”



https://tcrn.ch/2IJ60ti Pioneering private space explorer Anousheh Ansari welcomes ISS commercialization https://tcrn.ch/2RbkRR4

Daily Crunch: Telegram faces new attack in China

{rss:content:encoded} Daily Crunch: Telegram faces new attack in China https://tcrn.ch/2MPDXh6 https://tcrn.ch/2x1pDaR June 13, 2019 at 08:43PM

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. Telegram faces DDoS attack in China… again

The popular encrypted messaging service Telegram is once again being hit with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack in Asia as protestors in Hong Kong take to the streets.

As they look to evade surveillance measures by government officials, Telegram is one of the tools that organizers have turned to. Four years ago, a similar attack struck the company’s service, just as China was initiating a crackdown on human rights lawyers in the country.

2. Bird confirms acquisition of Scoot

This acquisition means Bird may finally get to operate shared electric scooters in San Francisco.

3. LaLiga fined $280K for soccer app’s privacy-violating spy mode

Users of the LaLiga app were outraged to discover the smartphone software does rather more than show minute-by-minute commentary of football matches: It can use the microphone and GPS of fans’ phones to record their surroundings in a bid to identify bars that are unofficially streaming games.

4. Google leaks its own phone

Details of the Pixel 4 have been swirling around this week, so Google decided to just leak the design of its next phone via its official Twitter account, revealing the backplate and new camera module on the smartphone.

5. NFC gets a lot more powerful in iOS 13

This opens up a range of new application possibilities, Apple said, including the ability to create apps that read passports and contactless smart cards and interact with NFC-enabled hardware.

6. Facebook collected device data on 187,000 users using banned snooping app

The social media giant said in a letter to Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s office — which TechCrunch obtained — that it collected data on 31,000 users in the U.S., including 4,300 teenagers. The rest of the collected data came from users in India.

7. Uber’s annual flying taxi summit reveals Uber Air has a ways to go

We talked to Uber Director of Engineering for Energy Storage Systems Celina Mikolajczak at the company’s third annual Elevate Summit in Washington, D.C. this week. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

Why is Andreessen Horowitz (and everyone else) investing in Latin America now?

Investments by U.S. venture capital firms into Latin America are skyrocketing and one of the firms leading the charge into deals is none other than Silicon Valley’s Andreessen Horowitz.

The firm that shook up Silicon Valley with potentially over-generous term sheets and valuations and an overarching thesis that “software is eating the world” has been reluctant to test its core belief… well… pretty much anywhere outside of the United States.

That was true until a few years ago when Andreessen began making investments in Latin America. It’s the only geography outside of the U.S. where the firm has committed significant capital and the pace of its investments is increasing.

Andreessen isn’t the only firm that’s making big bets in companies south of the American border. SoftBank has its $2 billion dollar investment fund, which launched earlier this year, to invest in Latin American deals as well. (Although the most recent SoftBank Innovation Fund investment in GymPass is likely an indicator that the fund, much like SoftBank’s “Vision” fund, has a pretty generous interpretation of what is and is not a Latin American deal.)

“We previously didn’t invest internationally, [because] we weren’t as well set up to help these companies,” says Angela Strange, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “Part of the reason for why LatAm is proximity.”



https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Why is Andreessen Horowitz (and everyone else) investing in Latin America now? https://tcrn.ch/2wTv8rX

Neurobehavioral health company Blackthorn pulls in $76 million from GV to treat mental disorders

There are numerous challenges to finding effective treatments for mental disorders. However, Blackthorn Therapeutics, a neurobehavioral health company using machine learning to create personalized medicine for mental health, is betting its technological approach to finding drugs that work will put it ahead of the competition. Lucky for them, GV and other biotech investors have shown they agree by adding another $76 million in Series B financing to the coffers.

Today, Blackthorn announced the close of its $76 million series B round from GV, Scripps Research, Johnson & Johnson Innovation and a bevy of other biotech investment firms, including Polaris Partners, Premier Partners, Vertex Ventures HC, Alexandria Venture Investments, Altitude Life Science Ventures, ARCH Venture Partners, and Biomatics Capita.

Blackthorn has been heads down the last couple of years on a clinical trial for a drug that could potentially treat mood disorders. In April, the company announced positive results from its phase I trial for the drug.

The company plans to use the funding to advance its clinical-stage programs for mood disorders as well as for potential treatment of autism spectrum disorder, advancing towards clinical investigation in 2020.

Brian Chee, a managing partner at Polaris Partners, Lori Hu, a managing director at Vertex Ventures HC, and Julie Sunderland, a managing director at Biomatics Capital have joined Blackthorn’s board as directors in conjunction with the funding.

Blackthorn also recently added two people to its executive team. Jane Tiller has joined as chief medical officer and Laura Hansen as vice president, corporate affairs.

“BlackThorn was founded to bring new therapies to patients by applying advances in computational sciences to address patient heterogeneity, one of the biggest historical challenges in the field of neuropsychiatric drug development,” said Blackthorn’s president and COO Bill Martin, Ph.D. “Three years later, insights from our data-driven approaches are yielding patient enrichment strategies that could increase probability of clinical trial success and improve patient outcomes. We are grateful for our investors’ support to continue advancing our platform and therapeutic pipeline as we build out a world-class team at the intersection of technology and clinical neuroscience.”



https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Neurobehavioral health company Blackthorn pulls in $76 million from GV to treat mental disorders https://tcrn.ch/31qIn1n

Verified Expert Growth Marketing Agency: Right Side Up

Right Side Up is not your typical growth marketing agency. As a former entrepreneur and in-house growth marketer for startups like Eventbrite, founder Tyler Elliston says he created RSU as a way to help his former self. RSU recruits a collective of expert growth marketers and partners them with various companies, but unlike a traditional agency, RSU actively encourages growth teams to hire their top talent.

It may seem counterintuitive, but two and a half years later, with more than 250 marketers in their “growth collective”, and having helped 120+ companies, Tyler seems to be fulfilling his vision. Learn more about RSU’s unique approach to growth marketing for startups.

On what makes Right Side Up unique

“They can support individual channel marketing needs across all levels of seniority and sophistication, as well as a full-fledged interim VP of Marketing needs.” Micah Moreau, SF, VP, Growth Marketing, DoorDash

“There are a number of lessons that I learned as an in-house marketer and a founder, that have become the underpinning for how we operate the business. Great performance comes from great marketers, not from companies or brands. It’s really about the person doing the work. So, our goal is to find the best marketers as they are today, instead of training junior talent, which is a common agency practice.”

Advice to startup founders

“A lot of what we consider growth marketing is simply scaling a one to one conversation with a prospective customer. So, if you can get a prospect in front of you and you can persuade them, how do you do that? How do you talk about it? That’s your positioning. What are you offering them?

That’s your value prop. I would recommend doing one on one conversations at a small scale before you try scaling it. Be in touch with your customer and then think about growth as automating what’s happening on a very small scale.”

 

Below, you’ll find the rest of the founder reviews, the full interview, and more details like pricing and fee structures. This profile is part of our ongoing series covering startup growth marketing agencies with whom founders love to work, based on this survey and our own research. The survey is open indefinitely, so please fill it out if you haven’t already.


Interview with Right Side Up founder Tyler Elliston

Yvonne Leow: Tell me a little bit about how you got into growth and why you decided to start Right Side Up.

Tyler Elliston: I came to the Bay Area in 2006 because I wanted to help build tech companies. I went to Berkeley to get my MBA and basically gave myself two years to figure out how to best plug into the startup community.

I eventually started a company and raised venture capital, but I really struggled to crack customer acquisition, and of all the hats I wore as an entrepreneur, growth marketing felt particularly fun and challenging. So, I went on this quest to find the answers to customer acquisition, and it was difficult to find people who could help me unlock growth channels. I often heard, “Oh, I did this for my company,” but it wouldn’t work for us.



https://tcrn.ch/2IgXuTD Verified Expert Growth Marketing Agency: Right Side Up https://tcrn.ch/2wQTLoW

Calendar influencers? Event social network IRL raises $8M

Why is there no app where you can follow party animals, concert snobs, or conference butterflies for their curated suggestions of events? That’s the next phase of social calendar app IRL that’s launching today on iOS to help you make and discuss plans with friends or discover nearby happenings to fill out your schedule.

The calendar, a historically dorky utility, seems like a strange way to start the next big social network. Many people, especially teens, either don’t use apps like Google Calendar, keep them professional, or merely input plans made elsewhere. But by baking in an Explore tab of event recommendations and the option to follow curators, headliners, and venues, IRL could make calendars communal like Instagram did to cameras.

“There’s Twitter for ‘follow my updates’, there’s Soundcloud for ‘follow my music’, but there’s no ‘follow my events'” IRL CEO Abe Shafi tells me of his plan to turbocharge his calendar app. “They’re arguably the best product that’s been built for organizing what you’re doing but no one has Superhuman’d or Slack’d the calendar. Let’s build a super f*cking dope calendar!” he says with unbridled excitement. He’ll need that passion to persevere as IRL tries to steal a major use case from SMS, messaging apps, and Facebook.

Finding a new opportunity for a social network has attracted a new $8 million Series A funding round for IRL led by Goodwater Capital and joined by Founders Fund and Kleiner Perkins. That builds on its $3 million seed from Founders Fund and Floodgate, whose partner Mike Maples is joining IRL’s board. The startup has also pulled in some entertainment and event CEOs as strategic investors including Warner Bros president Greg Silverman, Lionsgate films president Joe Drake, and Classpass CEO Fritz Lanman to help it recruit calendar influencers users can follow.

Filling Your Social Calendar

In Shafi, investors found a consumate extrovert who can empathize with event-goers. He dropped out of Berkeley to build out his recruitment software startup getTalent before selling it to HR platform Dice where he became VP of product. He started to become disillusioned by tech’s impact on society and almost left the industry before some time at Burning Man rekinkled his fever for events.

IRL CEO Abe Shafi

Shafi teamed up with PayPal’s first board member Scott Banister and early social network founder Greg Tseng. Shafi’s first attempted Gather pissed off a ton of people with spammy invites in 2017. By 2018, he’d restarted as IRL with a focus on building a minimalist calendar where it was easy to create events and invite friends. Evite and Facebook Events were too heavy for making less formal get-togethers with close friends. He wisely chose to geofence his app and launch state by state to maximize density so people would have more pals to plan with.

IRL is now in 14 states with a modest 1.3 million monthly active users and 175,000 dailies, plus 3 million people on the waitlist. “50% of all teens in Texas have downloaded IRL. I wanted to focus on the central states, not Silicon Valley” Shafi explains. Users log in with a phone number or Google, two-way sync their Google Calendar if they have one, and can then manage their existing schedule and create mini-events. The stickiest feature is the ability to group chat with everyone invited so you can hammer out plans. Even users without the app can chime in via text or email. And unlike Facebook where your mom or boss are liable to see your RSVPs, your calendar and what you’re doing on IRL is always private unless you explicitly share it.

The problem is that most of this could be handled with SMS and a more popular calendar. That’s why IRL is doubling-down on event discovery through influencers, which you can’t do anywhere else at scale. With the new version of the app launching today, you’ll be recommended performers, locations, and curators to follow. You’ll see their suggestions in the Explore tab that also includes sub-tabs of Nearby and Trending happenings. There’s also a college-specific feed for users that auth in with their school email address. Curators and event companies like TechCrunch can get their own IRL.com/… URL people can follow more easily than some janky list of events of gallery of flyers on their website. Since pretty much every promoter wants more attendees, IRL’s had little resistance to it indexing all the events from Meetup.com and whatever it can find.

IRL is concentrating on growth for now, but Shafi believes all the intent data about what people want to do could be valuable for directing people to certain restaurants, bars, theaters, or festivals, though he vows that “we’re never going to sell your data to advertisers.” For now IRL is earning money from affiliate fees when people buy tickets or make reservations. Event affiliate margins are infamously slim, but Shafi says IRL can bargain for higher fees as it gains sway over more people’s calendars.

Unfortunately without reams of personal data and leading artificial intelligence that Facebook owns, IRL’s in-house suggestions via the Explore tab can feel pretty haphazard. I saw lots of mediocre happy hours, crafting nights, and community talks that weren’t quite the hip nightlife recommendations I was hoping for, and for now there’s no sorting by category. That’s where Shafi hopes influencers will fill in. And he’s confident that Facebook’s business model discourages it moving deeper into events. “Facebook’s revenue driver is time spent on the app. While meaningful to society, events as a feature is not a primary revenue driver so they don’t get the resources that other features on Facebook get.”

Yet the biggest challenge will be rearranging how people organize their lives. A lot of us are too scatterbrained, lazy, or instinctive to make all our plans days or weeks ahead of time and put them on a calendar. The beauty of mobile is that we can communicate on the fly to meet up. “Solving for spontaneity isn’t our focus so far” Shafi admits. But that’s how so much of our social lives come together.

My biggest problem isn’t finding events to fill my calendar, but knowing which friends are free now to hang out and attend one with me. There are plenty of calendar, event discovery, and offline hangout apps. IRL will have to prove they deserve to be united. At least Shafi says it’s problem worth trying to solve. “I know for a fact that the product of a calendar will outlive me.” He just wants to make it more social first.



from Social – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/31xzVNV Calendar influencers? Event social network IRL raises $8M Josh Constine https://tcrn.ch/2XKeOW4
via IFTTT

Calendar influencers? Event social network IRL raises $8M

{rss:content:encoded} Calendar influencers? Event social network IRL raises $8M https://tcrn.ch/2XKeOW4 https://tcrn.ch/31xzVNV June 13, 2019 at 05:20PM

Why is there no app where you can follow party animals, concert snobs, or conference butterflies for their curated suggestions of events? That’s the next phase of social calendar app IRL that’s launching today on iOS to help you make and discuss plans with friends or discover nearby happenings to fill out your schedule.

The calendar, a historically dorky utility, seems like a strange way to start the next big social network. Many people, especially teens, either don’t use apps like Google Calendar, keep them professional, or merely input plans made elsewhere. But by baking in an Explore tab of event recommendations and the option to follow curators, headliners, and venues, IRL could make calendars communal like Instagram did to cameras.

“There’s Twitter for ‘follow my updates’, there’s Soundcloud for ‘follow my music’, but there’s no ‘follow my events'” IRL CEO Abe Shafi tells me of his plan to turbocharge his calendar app. “They’re arguably the best product that’s been built for organizing what you’re doing but no one has Superhuman’d or Slack’d the calendar. Let’s build a super f*cking dope calendar!” he says with unbridled excitement. He’ll need that passion to persevere as IRL tries to steal a major use case from SMS, messaging apps, and Facebook.

Finding a new opportunity for a social network has attracted a new $8 million Series A funding round for IRL led by Goodwater Capital and joined by Founders Fund and Kleiner Perkins. That builds on its $3 million seed from Founders Fund and Floodgate, whose partner Mike Maples is joining IRL’s board. The startup has also pulled in some entertainment and event CEOs as strategic investors including Warner Bros president Greg Silverman, Lionsgate films president Joe Drake, and Classpass CEO Fritz Lanman to help it recruit calendar influencers users can follow.

Filling Your Social Calendar

In Shafi, investors found a consumate extrovert who can empathize with event-goers. He dropped out of Berkeley to build out his recruitment software startup getTalent before selling it to HR platform Dice where he became VP of product. He started to become disillusioned by tech’s impact on society and almost left the industry before some time at Burning Man rekinkled his fever for events.

IRL CEO Abe Shafi

Shafi teamed up with PayPal’s first board member Scott Banister and early social network founder Greg Tseng. Shafi’s first attempted Gather pissed off a ton of people with spammy invites in 2017. By 2018, he’d restarted as IRL with a focus on building a minimalist calendar where it was easy to create events and invite friends. Evite and Facebook Events were too heavy for making less formal get-togethers with close friends. He wisely chose to geofence his app and launch state by state to maximize density so people would have more pals to plan with.

IRL is now in 14 states with a modest 1.3 million monthly active users and 175,000 dailies, plus 3 million people on the waitlist. “50% of all teens in Texas have downloaded IRL. I wanted to focus on the central states, not Silicon Valley” Shafi explains. Users log in with a phone number or Google, two-way sync their Google Calendar if they have one, and can then manage their existing schedule and create mini-events. The stickiest feature is the ability to group chat with everyone invited so you can hammer out plans. Even users without the app can chime in via text or email. And unlike Facebook where your mom or boss are liable to see your RSVPs, your calendar and what you’re doing on IRL is always private unless you explicitly share it.

The problem is that most of this could be handled with SMS and a more popular calendar. That’s why IRL is doubling-down on event discovery through influencers, which you can’t do anywhere else at scale. With the new version of the app launching today, you’ll be recommended performers, locations, and curators to follow. You’ll see their suggestions in the Explore tab that also includes sub-tabs of Nearby and Trending happenings. There’s also a college-specific feed for users that auth in with their school email address. Curators and event companies like TechCrunch can get their own IRL.com/… URL people can follow more easily than some janky list of events of gallery of flyers on their website. Since pretty much every promoter wants more attendees, IRL’s had little resistance to it indexing all the events from Meetup.com and whatever it can find.

IRL is concentrating on growth for now, but Shafi believes all the intent data about what people want to do could be valuable for directing people to certain restaurants, bars, theaters, or festivals, though he vows that “we’re never going to sell your data to advertisers.” For now IRL is earning money from affiliate fees when people buy tickets or make reservations. Event affiliate margins are infamously slim, but Shafi says IRL can bargain for higher fees as it gains sway over more people’s calendars.

Unfortunately without reams of personal data and leading artificial intelligence that Facebook owns, IRL’s in-house suggestions via the Explore tab can feel pretty haphazard. I saw lots of mediocre happy hours, crafting nights, and community talks that weren’t quite the hip nightlife recommendations I was hoping for, and for now there’s no sorting by category. That’s where Shafi hopes influencers will fill in. And he’s confident that Facebook’s business model discourages it moving deeper into events. “Facebook’s revenue driver is time spent on the app. While meaningful to society, events as a feature is not a primary revenue driver so they don’t get the resources that other features on Facebook get.”

Yet the biggest challenge will be rearranging how people organize their lives. A lot of us are too scatterbrained, lazy, or instinctive to make all our plans days or weeks ahead of time and put them on a calendar. The beauty of mobile is that we can communicate on the fly to meet up. “Solving for spontaneity isn’t our focus so far” Shafi admits. But that’s how so much of our social lives come together.

My biggest problem isn’t finding events to fill my calendar, but knowing which friends are free now to hang out and attend one with me. There are plenty of calendar, event discovery, and offline hangout apps. IRL will have to prove they deserve to be united. At least Shafi says it’s problem worth trying to solve. “I know for a fact that the product of a calendar will outlive me.” He just wants to make it more social first.

Chewy founder Ryan Cohen on its fast-approaching IPO: ‘It’s like seeing my baby graduate’

Ask any venture capitalist about the most important ingredient to success in startups, and they’ll tell you it’s founders who can persuade not only investors to part with their capital but, more important, who can convince people to leave what are often more stable jobs in order to help build their companies.

Ryan Cohen certainly fits the description. It goes a long way in explaining why Chewy, the online retailer of pet supplies that he cofounded in 2011, sold to PetSmart for a reported $3.35 billion in 2017 — and why it’s also expected to stage a successful IPO this Friday, when PetSmart spins it off (though PetSmart will continue to hold a majority stake in the company). Just today, the expected IPO price range, originally planned at between $17 and $19 per share, was raised to $19 to $21 per share, with the IPO advisory firm IPO Boutique saying the guidance it has received is that the deal is “multiple times oversubscribed.”

Cohen stepped away from Chewy last year, nearly a year after its all-cash sale. Naturally, he’s still excited to stand on the balcony of the NYSE as the company’s shares begin trading publicly on Friday. We talked with him earlier today about his path, beginning as a baby-faced founder without a college degree or any kind of network — and what, at age 33, he’s planning to do next.

TC: Your company was acquired in one of the biggest e-commerce sales in history, yet most people still don’t know who you are. Who are you?

RC: [Laughs.] I’ve been an entrepreneur since as far back a I can remember. My father was a glassware importer — so a businessperson — and I saw what it was like to be accountable and responsible and to have your own employees and from an early age, I just knew that I wasn’t cut out for a traditional job, that entrepreneurship was the right path for me.

TC: Were you coding away in your bedroom like 90 percent of the founders we talk with?

RC: I was building websites at [age] 13, 14, then I moved on to affiliate marketing . . . My cofounder, Michael Day [who became Chewy’s CTO] and I met each other in an internet chat room, back when they were pure and bad things weren’t happening [online]. It was [centered around] website design computer programming, and we just hit it off.

TC: You get together, and then you settle on creating a retail pets business? Why? 

RC: We were doing affiliate marketing and we wanted to own the entire customer experience and were looking for big categories that were underpenetrated. In fact, we thought the jewelry space was ripe for disruption, so we started going to trade shows and building the site and the back end.

We even spent a few hundred thousand dollars on jewelry and we were a few weeks away from launching the company, but I have a poodle, Tylee, who’s now 12 years old, and I would go every couple of weeks to buy products from this store owner who knew me and who I really trusted and who was a pet lover like me. And I had this epiphany; I realized I’m so much more passionate about this category. So we sold the jewelry, luckily getting back most of our money, and started Chewy.

TC: Obviously, you’d heard of the terrible fate of dot.com high-flier Pets.com. Why didn’t that dissuade you?

RC: The world was full of business models back then didn’t make sense. People weren’t online. They were using dial-up. They weren’t comfortable putting their credit cards online. But over time, so much changed, including that the pets market had moved up into high-margin, higher-retail price points. You could also suddenly ship 30-pound boxes from most of the country overnight, thanks to shipping density.

TC: You were living in Dania Beach, Florida — not exactly a tech hub at the time. Did you think about moving?

RC: I had family here, growing up. I also knew it would be really expensive to build out customer service in a big city.  So it ended up working out really well. But you’re right, from a financing standpoint, south Florida is not a popular tech hub. We also had the fact that we were going head-to-head with Amazon, that I have no college eduction, and the demise of Pets.com, and so when we talked with VCs, it was like, ‘We’ll pass.’

TC: Without outside help, how did you get started?

RC: We contacted a local distributor who worked with a [third-party logistics] company that was next to him, and we started buying product the same day.  Then we started marketing to cities and states near fulfillment centers, using all direct response marketing that we were able to optimize on the fly. We’d buy the inventory as we sold it and we were doing almost everything ourselves, so if an order came in and we didn’t have inventory, I’d go buy the product and ship it out from a local Kinkos.

For the first couple of years, it was three guys and a call center.

TC: When did that change?

RC: We hit an inflection point where three [third party logistics companies] we were working with [were getting overwhelmed]. We’d give them weekly or monthly projections so they could plan ahead and have warehouse space, but they didn’t fully believe our growth and by the end of 2013, we had these 3PLs that couldn’t scale any more, so we had to bring fulfillment in house.

We didn’t know anything about this, so we hired a bunch of people who were experts in fulfillment and we flew to Mechanicsburg, Pa. to lease a 4,000-square-foot space, and within nine months or so, we became expert at doing fulfillment. It was risky. It was totally outside of our areas of competence. But by August of 2014, after breaking everything first, that center was humming along, and then we launched another in Reno. At that point, we went national.

TC: How would you describe your hiring process?

RC: A lot of it was intuitive. I believe in the Warren Buffett model of treating people with respect and being honest and transparent with them. A lot of these people would come from Amazon and Wayfair.  I went home at night and reached out to them after finding them on LinkedIn. We’d jump on a call and we’d talk about this vision to build the largest pet retailer in the world, while focusing on delighting customers and being category experts. And all of my management team, they came from amazing companies and stable jobs, and they pulled their kids out of school to come to south Florida because they believed in me.

I was grateful they took that leap of faith, but it was also a huge responsibility, so I was going to fight even harder; I wasn’t going to let them down.

TC: You say VCs weren’t interested. What happened exactly?

RC: Almost from the beginning we reached out to investors, but I knew nothing about raising capital. I have no network. I come from a middle-class family. I don’t have a rich uncle. We just started cold-calling VCs and I learned the hard way that’s not how it works. I got turned down basically every single time, until Larry [Cheng of Volition Capital] invested, and it was not a competitive process.

TC: What convinced Larry to write you that first check?

RC: We’d reached out to Volition six to nine months earlier and spoke to an associate who took down our information, and they followed up with us in late 2012. We’d given them our projections and we were crushing our numbers. Larry was going to Disneyland anyway with his family, so he decided to make a pit stop to meet with us. I remember he was like, ‘Who is going to take this company to $100 million in sales?’ and I was like, ‘Me! Who do you think?’

I looked very young at the time so I think I was easy to underestimate. I’ve been slightly aged now from Chewy. But he gave us that needed credibility. Then Greenspring Associates — they’re investors in Volition — came in to lead our Series B.

TC: Did you want to take the company public, or were you hugely relieved when PetSmart came knocking?

RC: We were building a big company that inevitably was going to go public. Especially in those later years, we’d become ‘public company ready.’ We built up our finance and accounting team; we had audited financials. We’d raised a lot of capital — $350 million — but we had a lot of discipline. We also had a lot of revenue. We went from $200 million in sales in 2014 to $3.5 billion in sales by 2018. We burned through $130 million, but that cash burn was going to new customer acquisition and future fulfillment centers.

TC: So when you got that call from PetSmart . . .

RC: It was very fast. From the time I had a conversation with Raymond [Svider, the executive chairman of PetSmart] to the time he gave us a term sheet — and I was looking for an all-cash deal — the entire thing happened in 30 days, on our terms. We weren’t going to go and open up the kimono unless we got comfortable, and we were comfortable with the entire transaction.

TC: You stayed on for bit. Were you locked up?

RC: I wasn’t locked up at all. I could have left the day after the deal. I stayed but I felt like the teams were built and the systems and strategy were in place, and it felt like a fine-oiled machine. The business was at a significant scale. I just felt like my job was done. I’d been at it for more than seven years, going 24/7. I gave my life to this thing. But I have a two-year-old today, and just being with my family and being able to return to civilian life was [irresistible after a point].

TC: I’m a Chewy customer but I’m not even sure why, except that it’s easy for me to re-order. Why do you think I’m a Chewy customer?

RC: Because Chewy is the best in the business. It has the best selection, competitive pricing, fast shipping, excellent customer service and we know the product better than our competitors. If you need a weight loss product for your dog, we’ll tell you which to buy.  All Chewy does is sell pet products, and that’s a big differentiator.

E-commerce can feel like a series of faceless transactions; we wanted to recreate that feeling I use to enjoy at the pet store, shopping with a pet parent who I trusted. And we did that at scale, which is hard but we stayed focused.

TC: How are you feeling about the IPO?

RC: It feels like my baby is graduating from the college that I never went to.

TC: There are concerns over the fact that Chewy remains unprofitable. Do you worry that, as a publicly traded company, Chewy might have to change — that it may need to charge for shipping, for example?

RC: It’s not profitable because it’s continuing to execute on scale and market leadership. If you reduce your marketing and decide you don’t want to grow as much, the company could have been profitable years ago. The underlying company is profitable.

TC: What about the fact that Amazon and Walmart are expanding their own pet product offerings?

RC: Amazon made us fight really hard. Obviously, they’re a fierce competitor. But I don’t think it was the category that made us successful. I think it was delighting our customers. You focus on that and you’re going to do just fine.

TC: You’re a young guy. Are you retiring?

RC: Retirement is overrated.

I’m lucky. I’m talking to a lot of different entrepreneurs and business and looking at corporate board opportunities. I’m going through that exploratory process.

TC: Would you partner again with Michael on a different e-commerce business or maybe a venture outfit?

RC: We’re really close. It needs to be the right opportunity obviously, and we need to be picky. But I have no plans to sit in retirement, that’s for sure. I’m 33 and I’m competitive and I like consumer businesses and I like to win.



https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Chewy founder Ryan Cohen on its fast-approaching IPO: ‘It’s like seeing my baby graduate’ https://tcrn.ch/2WFW9yk

blogger better Headline Animator