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.

Friday, May 1, 2020

Otonomo raises $46 million to expand its automotive data marketplace

New vehicles today can produce a treasure trove of data. Without the proper tools, that data will sit undisturbed, rendering it worthless.

A number of companies have sprung up to help automakers manage and use data generated from connected cars. Israeli startup Otonomo is one such player that jumped on the scene in 2015 with a cloud-based software platform that captures and anonymizes vehicle data so it can then be used to create apps to provide services such as electric vehicle management, subscription-based fueling, parking, mapping, usage-based insurance and emergency service.

The startup announced this week it has raised $46 million to take its automotive data platform further. The capital was raised in a Series C funding round that included investments from SK Holdings, Avis Budget Group and Alliance Ventures. Existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners also participated. Otonomo has raised $82 million, to date.

The funds will be used to help Otonomo scale its business, improve its products and help it remain competitive, according to the company. Otonomo is also aiming to expand into new markets, particularly South Korea and Japan.

“We now have the expanded resources needed to deliver on our vision of making car data as valuable as possible for the entire transportation ecosystem, while adhering to the strictest privacy and security standards,” Otonomo CEO and founder Ben Volkow said in a statement.

Otonomo’s pitch focuses on creating opportunities to monetize connected car data while keeping it safe from the moment it is captured. Once the data is securely collected, the platform modifies it so companies can use it to develop apps and services for fleets, smart cities and individual customers. The platform also enables GDPR, CCPA and other privacy regulation-compliant solutions using both personal and aggregate data.

Today, Otonomo’s platform takes in 2.6 billion data points a day from more than 20 million vehicles through partnerships with more than automakers, fleets and farm and construction manufacturers. Otonomo has more than 25 partnerships, a list that includes Daimler, BMW, Mitsubishi Motor Company and Avis Budget Group. The company said it’s preparing to bring on seven more customers.

That opportunity for Otonomo is growing based on forecasts, including one from SBD Automotive that predicts connected cars will account for more than 70% of cars sold in North American and European markets in 2020.



https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Otonomo raises $46 million to expand its automotive data marketplace https://ift.tt/2YoxGgA

Introducing the term-sheet grader

When we launched in 2016, we took the unusual approach of saying we’d buy common stock in startups. We believed then, and still do, that alignment with founders was more important than covering our downside in investments that didn’t work as planned. Said differently, we wanted to enhance our upside through alignment, rather than maximizing our downside through terms.

The world has changed a lot since that time. While we are actively making investments, and still buying common stock, we know that many entrepreneurs may be trying to raise money now — and it is very hard.

Fred Destin wrote a great piece about the ugly terms that can creep into term sheets during difficult times. If you have a choice between a good term sheet and a bad one, of course, you’ll take the good one. But what if you have no choice? And how can you compare term sheets in the first place?

To this end, we developed the term-sheet grader, a simple way to compare different term sheets or help characterize whether a term sheet is good or evil.

Let me first point out that none of this has anything to do with the valuation of the round (share price), the amount of capital, the likelihood of reaching a closing, the quality of the firm or the trust you have with the individual leading the investment, all absolutely critical pieces of the puzzle. Here, we are just looking at the terms and conditions, the legal structure of the investment.

We’ve listed nine key terms below — five that have to do with economics and four that relate to control and decision-making:

  • Each key term can earn +1 for being friendly and -1 for being tough.
  • There are a few really friendly terms that have a score of +2 each.
  • Likewise, there are a few really tough ones that earn a -2.
  • The best a term sheet could score is a +11, the worst is a -11.
  • The “Industry Standard” deal scores a 0.

FWIW, the Pillar common stock standard deal earns a +8 (shown below).



https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Introducing the term-sheet grader https://ift.tt/2Wcq5iw

Indian education startup Byju’s is fundraising at a $10B valuation

Byju’s, an education learning startup in India that has seen a surge in its popularity in recent weeks amid the coronavirus outbreak, is in talks to raise as much as $400 million at a $10 billion valuation, said three people familiar with the matter.

The additional capital would be part of the Bangalore-based startup’s ongoing financing round that has already seen Tiger Global and General Atlantic invest between $300 million to $350 million into the nine-year-old startup.

That investment by the two firms, though, was at an $8 billion valuation, said people familiar with the matter. Byju’s was valued at $5.75 billion in July last year, when it raised $150 million from Qatar Investment Authority and Owl Ventures.

If the deal goes through at this proposed term, Byju’s would become the second most valuable startup in India, joining budget lodging startup Oyo, which is also valued at $10 billion, and follow financial services firm Paytm that raised $1 billion at $16 billion valuation late last year.

The talks haven’t finalized yet and terms could change, said one of the aforementioned people. This person, along with the other two, requested anonymity as the matter is private.

A spokesperson of Byju’s and Prosus Ventures, the largest investor in the startup, declined to comment. A spokesperson for Tiger Global did not respond to a request for comment.

Byju’s has seen a sharp surge in both its free users and paying customers in recent weeks as it looks to court students who are stuck at home because of the nationwide lockdown New Delhi ordered in late March.

The startup told TechCrunch last month that traffic on its app and website was up 150% in March and it added six million students to the platform during the month.

Other edtech startups, including Unacademy, which was recently backed by Facebook, and early-stage startups such as Sequoia Capital India-backed Classplus, and Chennai-based SKILL-LYNC, have also seen growth in recent weeks, they told TechCrunch last month.

Through its app, tutors on Byju’s help all school-going children understand complex subjects using real-life objects such as pizza and cake. The app also prepares students who are pursuing undergraduate and graduate-level courses.

Over the years, Byju’s has invested in tweaking the English accents in its app and adapted to different education systems. It had amassed more than 35 million registered users, about 2.4 million of which are paid customers as of late last year.



https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Indian education startup Byju’s is fundraising at a $10B valuation https://ift.tt/2WwbnDl

As COVID-19 dries up funding, only drought-resistant cannabis startups will survive

The COVID-19 crisis is creating an untold amount of uncertainty through every business sector, but for cannabis startups, it’s exacerbating a critical market that was already in decline.

TechCrunch spoke to Schwazze CEO Justin Dye following his company’s recent rebrand. He joined the company when it was Colorado’s Medicine Man Technologies (MMT) in late 2019 and is revamping the organization, including changing its name to Schwazze and acquiring a handful of companies to create a healthier, vertically integrated cannabis company.

The cannabis market is experiencing a correction after a period of rapid expansion. Shops are feeling the pain, and public valuations are settling under IPO levels — and this was before a pandemic swept the world. Cannabis media outlet Leafly laid off 91 employees in late March, and Eaze, an early mover in on-demand pot delivery, is experiencing major trouble after raising serious cash and recently losing a top partner in Caliva. In several states, efforts are underway to prop up the cannabis market by asking for the federal government to allow these businesses to be eligible for federal financial relief.

According to Dye, there are several things CEOs of cannabis companies of every size should work toward. His advice echoes what TechCrunch has heard in other verticals, as well: During the COVID-19 crisis, cannabis companies must hunker down and lean on strong teams to weather the storm. Once the skies start to clear, capital will be available to the survivors.

One, the cannabis market is looking for financially sustainable companies, Dye said.

“This next reset in the cannabis industry will not only be aspirational, but it’s going to be coupled with a requirement for performance in terms of executing against a plan and driving profits — or driving it to create free cash flow to be reinvested in the business and product experiences.”



https://ift.tt/eA8V8J As COVID-19 dries up funding, only drought-resistant cannabis startups will survive https://ift.tt/35pyEdO

KlearNow raises $16 million to bring customs clearance industry into the digital age

Customs is the sieve of international supply chains. And yet despite its critical role, clearing customs for freight brokers can be a slow and opaque process reliant on manual data entry and prone to errors.

Silicon Valley-based KlearNow has developed a platform that aims to bring customs clearance into the digital age. Now, with $16 million new funding, KlearNow aims to expand its geographic reach and improve its product to cover increasingly complex export-import verticals and time-sensitive shipments.

The company has certification to handle any import into the U.S., no matter what the commodity is. KlearNow is close to getting certified in Canada and the U.K., and plans to expand to Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and Germany. KlearNow has about two dozen customers.

The Series A funding round was led by GreatPoint Ventures, with additional participation from Autotech Ventures, Argean Capital and Monta Vista Capital. Ashok Krishnamurthi, managing partner at GreatPoint Ventures, will join KlearNow’s board. Daniel Hoffer from Autotech Ventures is joining as a board observer.

“This is a significant opportunity to transform an archaic industry that is key to global commerce,” Krishnamurthi said in a statement.

The freight ecosystem is filled with different players from the factories and port authorities to the ship liners and the last-mile delivery companies. Each of them have their own systems.

“There’s no one system that you can transmit the data to,” KlearNow founder and CEO Sam Tyagi said in a recent interview. “So everybody dumps technology down to a PDF or a PNG or some sort of format that everybody can read. The broker gets those documents, and then they print it out — so now they become non-digital.”

If you go to any customs brokers office they look like the old doctor’s office where all those folders are there with nicely arranged, really organized but very manual process,” he added. From here, Tyagi said, a broker will read off from those printed documents and type the information into another system that is communicated to Customs and Border Patrol’s system.

“It is very manual, it’s very small, and they work in a siloed system,” Tyagi said. “There is no visibility for the customer, or the importer, and it’s very costly because of the manual intervention.”

KlearNow developed a digital customs clearance platform that aims to be agnostic. This allows importers, customs brokers and freight forwarders to integrate with local customs authorities and conduct business on a single digital platform remotely and in real time. The platform automates this process to eliminate errors and reduces the time to clear customs. KlearNow says it can slash customs clearance times from hours to minutes.

The startup is also betting that its platform will find new customers in this remote work era that was caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Custom brokers, who might normally travel into central offices and manage physical paperwork, are now faced with completing that task from home.

“Remote work is impossible for these people,” because they often need to access large-format printers, Tyagi said. 

The company said its digital platform can funnel new clients, like these newly remote workers, directly to brokers for global customs clearance.

Tyagi said the company has also added new capabilities in response to COVID-19, such as expediting their FDA module to clear much-needed medical supplies, and is temporarily offering free clearance for nonprofit organizations that are importing masks, hand sanitizers and ventilators.



https://ift.tt/eA8V8J KlearNow raises $16 million to bring customs clearance industry into the digital age https://ift.tt/3d6cHTN

An already struggling smartphone market takes a big hit from COVID-19

{rss:content:encoded} An already struggling smartphone market takes a big hit from COVID-19 https://ift.tt/2WvMPKH https://ift.tt/3bTFFpO May 01, 2020 at 09:56PM

Quarter after quarter, familiar stories have appeared. The smartphone market, once seemingly bulletproof, has suffered. The list of factors is long, and I’ve written about them ad nauseam here, but the CliffsNotes version is: costs are too high, innovation is too incremental and most people already own a device that will be plenty good for the next few years.

But 2020 was going to be different. Smartphone makers were set to finally give consumers a reason to upgrade in the form of 5G. The first handsets appeared in earnest last year, but between a much wider carrier roll out, lower-cost 5G radios from Qualcomm and the arrival of a 5G iPhone, this was going to be the year the next-gen wireless technology helped reverse the smartphone slide.

And then COVID-19 disrupted everything. For many of us, life is on hold — and will likely continue to be for months. I’m writing this from my home in Queens, N.Y., the hardest-hit county in the hardest-hit country in the world. It still feels strange to type that, even though it’s been a reality for a month and half now.

Purchasing a smartphone is most likely the last thing on anyone’s mind during what is shaping up to be the worst global pandemic since the 1918 flu pandemic. With a number of key manufacturers reporting quarterly earnings this week, the numbers are starting to bear out this disconnect. Earlier this week, both Samsung and LG reported weak mobile numbers. Yesterday, Apple reported revenue of $28.96 billion, down from $31.1 billion the same time last year.

More troubling, all three companies appeared to be united in suggesting that the worst might be yet to come. Samsung suggested that both mobile and TV demand would “decline significantly” in the following quarter. LG used virtually the same exact wording, stating that, “market demand is expected to decline significantly YoY due to COVID-19 pandemic.” For its part, Apple simply didn’t issue guidance for the next quarter, a surefire indication of uncertainty in these uncertain times — to borrow a phrase from every commercial airing currently.

Guilded raises $7 million for its competitive gaming-focused chat app

Gaming platforms have earned serious clout with investors in recent years. Add in the VC excitement surrounding collaboration tools and it’s no surprised there’s interest in backing another gaming chat app.

Guilded is creating a chat platform designed for competitive gaming and esports that focuses heavily on keeping gamers organized and connected with their teams.

The startup’s sell is that Discord (currently valued at $2 billion) has moved too broadly in recent years and that their feature set isn’t actually focused on what competitive gamers are looking for, forcing them to turn to spreadsheets and form submissions when they’re looking to get serious about organization.

“Discord is really great for a lot of communities, but we’re building chat specifically for gamers,” Guilded CEO Eli Brown told TechCrunch.

Guilded just announced that they’ve raised $7 million in Series A funding led by Matrix Partners. Initialized Capital, Susa Ventures and Sterling.VC also participated in the deal. Guilded was in Y Combinator’s S17 class.

Guilded is a bit more tightly organized than Discord, with the focus more dialed in on teams and server-based structures. The deep integration of scheduling and calendars is perhaps the biggest differentiation of the platform.

In addition to text chat, users can create inline events, upload documents and post screen captures as well. You can fire up the app while you’re actually playing a game and use voice chat to communicate with your server. Guilded currently supports more than 400 titles.

As with any new communications tool, Guilded’s challenge will be chipping away at competing products, namely Discord, and achieving a critical mass of users and servers that can self-sustain moving forward.

Looking ahead, the platform is looking to get deeper into facilitating gameplay. Users can already browse through public servers to immediately join or apply to be accepted to a private server and these servers can be further broken down into individual groups or channels. Guilded is building out a tournaments feature to match servers with similar skill levels to each other, a feature that’s launching in the coming months.



https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Guilded raises $7 million for its competitive gaming-focused chat app https://ift.tt/3fajJc3

As lockdowns stretch on, is edtech passing or failing?

Back in January, Georgia Tech professor David Joyner got a cryptic email from a student based in Wuhan, China.

“I’m under quarantine, but my internet access is okay so I have more time to spend on classwork, I wanted to let you know,” the message read. Unsure why Wuhan would be under quarantine, Joyner did a quick Google search and saw the beginnings of the coronavirus pandemic.

“I thought, there’s something going on in Wuhan so maybe we’ll have some students affected by it,” Joyner said. Fast-forward two months and the coronavirus is a household term. All of Joyner’s students, regardless of geography, have been impacted by the pandemic.

It has been a little over a month since colleges and schools across the country started shutting down due to COVID-19. Edtech startups had a surge in usage and a demand for more resources than ever. Now that the adoption scramble has slowed, the same startups are reckoning with unprecedented use cases.

Everyone knows how they’re expected to behave in a physical classroom, but can you stop a student from cheating when taking a test in their bedroom at home? How should teachers offer 1:1 time and take questions during a lesson?

Piazza founder Pooja Sankar says teachers face more open questions: “What does it mean to record myself? What does it mean to have a camera on my face? How do I know I can hold a class with reliable internet connection?”



https://ift.tt/eA8V8J As lockdowns stretch on, is edtech passing or failing? https://ift.tt/2SqjW0V

Mark Cuban: ‘Raising money isn’t an accomplishment, it’s an obligation’

Mark Cuban isn’t impressed that you’ve raised money.

“If you think the accomplishment is raising money first, we’re probably not gonna get along,” said Cuban in an Extra Crunch Live interview. “If your orientation is ‘I got to raise the money first,’ you don’t really have a company yet, and you really haven’t accomplished anything yet. […] Sweat equity is the best equity.”

We also got his take on today’s economy, the nation’s direction and his notes on what startups should do to survive in the new world. Happily, as we had an hour to chat, we managed to cover a lot of ground. The full conversation (YouTube) is after the jump, and we’ve excerpted a number of quotes for your perusal.

But up top we wanted to share Cuban’s notes regarding which companies should accept Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) funds from the Small Business Administration. The matter became a hot-button issue in and around Silicon Valley, where initial debate centered around which startups could access the money. After it became clear the first installment of PPP funds wasn’t going to last, whether startups should access to the capital at all became a question. Some venture-backed companies even decided to return their PPP check.

According to Cuban, when PPP was first put together, the market’s “perspective was that there’d be plenty of money for everybody. You know, people didn’t really want to do the math.” Cuban said that if there was $350 billion in the pot and one million small businesses, the fund would have worked out to $350,000 apiece. “Well guess what,” he said, “there are 30 million companies, [and] like 20 of them are independent contractors.”

Once you did the calculations again with that many companies eligible for PPP funds, you could tell that the money wasn’t going to last. So Cuban told firms that he’s invested in where he has sway to “either not apply or just pay it back immediately.” Why? “For the betterment of the country and the economy,” he said, adding that “if you do have access to capital” or “your business isn’t dramatically impacted [then] let’s leave [the PPP money] for the people who need it the most.”

As noted, the full video is below (you can join Extra Crunch here!), along with Cuban’s notes on startup advice during the pandemic, American 2.0 (and Marc Andreessen’s essay), AI, pre-seed companies, his future in politics and how to pitch him.

Mark Cuban on the record

How he’s advising portfolio companies during the pandemic:

So first and foremost, communicate. Second is be honest. Third is be transparent. And fourth is be authentic. Because everybody is nervous. Everybody is terrified at a certain level. So you just have to recognize that. People are going to need that honesty from you and people are going to want communications from you. That’s been the primary thing around what these companies should do.

Regarding cutting costs: Every business is different. On the smallest ones, they’re already grinding, and it’s typically dependent on the founder. I’ve really tried to encourage people to keep all their employees on if at all possible. That there’s gonna be a lot of change and that’s going to create a lot of opportunity. So, if you can hold on to your employees and push forward in any way, shape, or form, you may have an opportunity.



https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Mark Cuban: ‘Raising money isn’t an accomplishment, it’s an obligation’ https://ift.tt/35xQmMF

Daily Crunch: iPhone sales decline in Q1

{rss:content:encoded} Daily Crunch: iPhone sales decline in Q1 https://ift.tt/35li0fq https://ift.tt/2CoAoqu May 01, 2020 at 06:10PM

Apple’s earnings show the impact of COVID-19, NVIDIA’s top scientist shares an open source ventilator design and Amazon anticipates big spending in the coming months.

Here’s your Daily Crunch for May 1, 2020.

1. iPhone sales are down, ahead of uncertain times for the industry

Apple device sales have taken a hit, but the company’s services are doing swell, according to its latest earnings report. The iPhone, the longtime cornerstone of the company’s hardware portfolio, hit $28.96 billion in revenue for Q2, down from $31.1 billion from this time last year. The iPad and Mac lines saw drops for the quarter, as well.

In fact, a new Canalys report suggests that smartphone sales are down 13% globally.

2. NVIDIA’s top scientist develops open-source ventilator that can be built with $400 in readily-available parts

The mechanical ventilator design developed by NVIDIA’s Bill Daily can be assembled quickly, using off-the-shelf parts with a total cost of around $400 – making it an accessible and affordable alternative to traditional, dedicated ventilators which can cost $20,000 or more.

3. Amazon Q1 beats on net sales of $75.5B but posts net income of $2.5B, down $1B on a year ago

The company’s net sales were up 26% year-year-over. Of those sales, $41 billion was attributable to product sales and $33 billion to services (which includes AWS, but also streaming and other non-physical goods). CEO Jeff Bezos acknowledged the challenges the company is facing, but he also reiterated that it plans to double down on spending in Q2.

4. Walmart is piloting a pricier 2-hour ‘Express’ grocery delivery service

Walmart now hopes to capitalize on the increased demand for speedier delivery with the introduction of a new service that allows consumers to pay to get to the front of the line. The retailer confirmed today it’s launching a new Walmart Grocery service called “Express,” which promises orders in two hours or less for an upcharge of $10 on top of the usual delivery fee.

5. 5 tips for starting a business with a stranger

Co-founder and CEO Sam Pillar argues that his startup Jobber is proof that starting a company with a stranger isn’t just doable, it can even be an advantage. That’s because it allowed them to arrive at big decisions and have productive debate without the baggage and bias of a pre-existing relationship, establishing Jobber’s feedback-oriented culture. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. Cliqz pulls the plug on a European anti-tracking alternative to Google search

Cliqz, a Munich-based anti-tracking browser with private search baked in that has sought to offer a local alternative to Google powered by its own search index, is shutting down — claiming this arm of its business has been blindsided by the coronavirus crisis. However, the company is not closing down entirely, and a spokesman confirmed that Ghostery will continue.

7. JetBrains Academy for learning code launches for free during COVID-19 pandemic

Most online coding courses, either free or paid, essentially suggest you download a project or copy-paste code from their snippets going through their courses. Unlike JetBrains, they tend not to include Integrated Development Environments, which are more helpful in the learning process.

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.

IPOs, crypto funds and other things I missed this week

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

What a week it’s been. I’m exhausted. Not only are we another cycle deeper into the COVID-19 quarantine, but there seems to be more news than ever to sift through. I’ve fallen behind. So, today, this little column is taking look back at things that it missed but wanted to cover. (There may come a day when we run out of stuff to talk about, but it’s not coming any time soon.)

So let’s about a16z’s new crypto fund, recent economic data, the Ebang F-1, Lime’s layoffs, Procore’s IPO delay and fresh valuation, stocks, Luckin, and, if we have time, Twitter’s changing jobs data. Let’s get this all out of our heads and into the world.

Odds, ends

To annoy my editors, we’re using bullet points this morning. Bullet points are great way to convey a bloc of information in a neat format. Let the haters hate, we have a lot of ground to cover:



  • https://ift.tt/eA8V8J IPOs, crypto funds and other things I missed this week https://ift.tt/3aQwFk9

Monzo recruits former Amex exec Sujata Bhatia as its new COO

More personnel changes are afoot at Monzo, as the U.K. challenger bank continues to bolster its leadership team.

Specifically, TechCrunch has learned that Sujata Bhatia, a former American Express executive in Europe, has been recruited as Monzo’s new Chief Operating Officer, replacing previous COO Tom Foster-Carter (who left the bank rather suddenly in November to found a startup of his own). Monzo confirmed Bhatia’s appointment, which is still subject to regulator approval, and I understand she is due to start the COO role in late June.

Prior to Monzo, Bhatia spent almost 16 years at American Express. Her most recent position at Amex was Senior Vice President for Global Merchant Services Europe. Before that she was Senior Vice President of Global Strategy and Capabilities, where, according to her LinkedIn profile, she lead a team of 400 people across 23 global markets.

Bhatia’s appointment follows the recruitment of Mike Hudack, the former CTO of Deliveroo and most recently a founding partner at London venture capital firm Blossom Capital. He joined Monzo in March as the challenger bank’s new Chief Product Officer. Going the opposite way was Meri Williams, Monzo’s Chief Technical Officer, who parted ways with the bank a few weeks later citing her wish to voluntarily help with “cost-cutting measures”.

Meanwhile, Bhatia joins Monzo at a somewhat turbulent time for the challenger bank, as it, along with many other fintech companies, attempts to insulate itself from the coronavirus crisis and resulting economic downturn, meaning that the new COO will likely need to hit the ground running.

Last month, I reported that Monzo was shuttering its customer support office in Las Vegas, seeing 165 customer support staff in the U.S. lose their jobs. And just a few weeks earlier, we reported that the bank was furloughing up to 295 staff under the U.K.’s Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme. In addition, the senior management team and the board has volunteered to take a 25% cut in salary, and co-founder and CEO Tom Blomfield has decided not to take a salary for the next twelve months.

Like other banks and fintechs, the coronavirus crisis has resulted in Monzo seeing customer card spend reduce at home and (of course) abroad, meaning it is generating significantly less revenue from interchange fees. The bank has also postponed the launch of premium paid-for consumer accounts, one of only a handful of known planned revenue streams, alongside lending, of course.

With that said, Monzo recently launched business accounts, many of which are revenue generating, with both free and paid tiers. I understand from sources that the number of business accounts opened to date already stands at approaching 20,000.

Related to this, having originally missed out on state aid via the capability and innovation fund designed to introduce more competition in SME banking, Monzo now has a second potential bite of the apple after previous grant winners Metro and Nationwide are returning the money.

As always, watch this space.



https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Monzo recruits former Amex exec Sujata Bhatia as its new COO https://ift.tt/2xoCesl

Streaming service Hooq shuts down, ends partnership with Disney’s Hotstar, Grab and others

{rss:content:encoded} Streaming service Hooq shuts down, ends partnership with Disney’s Hotstar, Grab and others https://ift.tt/3f1AYfA https://ift.tt/2WeMsnB May 01, 2020 at 10:51AM

Hooq, a five-year-old on-demand video streaming service that aimed to become “Netflix for Southeast Asia,” has shut down weeks after filing for liquidation and terminated its partnerships with Disney’s Hotstar, ride-hailing giant Grab, and Indonesia’s VideoMax.

Hooq Digital, a joint venture among Singapore telecom group Singtel (majority owner), Sony Pictures, and Warner Bros Entertainment, discontinued the service on Thursday. It had amassed over 80 million subscribers in nearly half of the dozen markets in Asia.

“For the past 5 years, we gave you unbelievable thrills, heartrending drama, roaring laughs, awesome action, and more. Our goal was to bring you the best entertainment from here to Hollywood. Our hearts are full of gratitude for all of you who shared the journey with us,” it says on its website.

Hooq publicly disclosed that it had raised about $95 million, but the sum was likely higher. News outlet The Ken analyzed the regulatory filings last month to report that Hooq had raised $127.2 million, and its losses in the financial year 2019 had ballooned to $220, suggesting that it had received more capital.

The streaming service said last month that it could not receive new funds from new or existing investors.

Homepage of Hooq

The service counted India, where it entered into a partnership with Disney’s Hotstar in 2018 and telecom operators Airtel and Vodafone, as its biggest market. The company also maintained a partnership with ride-hailing giant Grab to supply content in its cab, and VideoMAX in Indonesia.

Hooq brought dozens of D.C. universe titles including “Arrow,” “The Flash,” “Wonder Woman” and other popular TV series such as “The Big Bang Theory” to its partners. In India, users began noticing last week that those titles were disappearing from Hotstar.

A spokesperson of Hooq told TechCrunch today that its tie-ups with all its partners including Hotstar have closed. A Hotstar spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Mobile operator Singtel first unveiled Hooq’s liquidation in an exchange filing last month. The Ken reported that the filing left hundreds of employees at Hooq stunned who thought the firm was doing fine financially. Nearly every employee at Hooq has been let go, with select few offered a job at Singtel, according to The Ken.

In an interview with Slator earlier this year, Yvan Hennecart, Head of Localization at HOOQ, said that the company was working to expand its catalog with local content and add 100 original titles in 2020.

“Our focus is mostly on localization of entertainment content; whether it is subtitling or dubbing, we are constantly looking to bring more content to our viewers faster. My role also expands to localization of our platform and any type of collateral information that helps create a unique experience for our users,” he told the outlet.

Thursday, April 30, 2020

Smartphone shipments dropped 13% globally, and COVID-19 is to blame

{rss:content:encoded} Smartphone shipments dropped 13% globally, and COVID-19 is to blame https://ift.tt/3c4tG9f https://ift.tt/3f0596S April 30, 2020 at 11:40PM

We knew it was going to be bad — but not necessarily “lowest level since 2013” bad. As Apple was busy reporting its earnings, Canalys just dropped some of its own figures — and they’re not pretty. After two quarters of much-needed growing, the global smartphone market just took a big hit. And you no doubt already know who the culprit is.

The mobile industry joins countless others that have taken a massive hit due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with shipments dropping 13% from this time last year. Here’s a graph for those of you who are visual learners:

Analyst Ben Stanton used the word “crushed” to describe the novel coronavirus’s impact on the mobile market. “In February, when the coronavirus was centered on China, vendors were mainly concerned about how to build enough smartphones to meet global demand,” he writes. “But in March, the situation flipped on its head. Smartphone manufacturing has now recovered, but as half the world entered lockdown, sales plummeted.”

First it was impact on the global supply chain, which is centered in Asia, along with a drop in demand among consumers in China. As Europe, the U.S. and other locations continue to live under shelter in place order, demand in those markets has taken a significant hit. People are stuck inside and many have lost jobs — it’s not really the ideal time to consider shelling out $1,000+ for what still seems a luxury for many.

Samsung regained the top spot, while still losing significant numbers. Both it and the number two company, Huawei, were down 17% for the quarter. Apple, at number three, dropped 8%. Chinese manufacturers Xiaomi and Vivo saw some gains, at 9- and 3%, respectively.

There are bound to be rough times ahead as well. Per Stanton, “Most smartphone companies expect Q2 to represent the peak of the coronavirus’ impact.” Apple noted the uncertainty of its own earnings by opting not to issue guidance for next quarter.

How this startup built and exited to Twitter in 1,219 days

By the summer of 2016, Marie Outtier had spent eight years as a consultant advising media agencies and martech companies on marketing growth strategy.

Pierre-Jean “PJ” Camillieri started as a music software engineer before joining one of Apple’s consumer electronics divisions. Inspired by Siri, he left to start Timista, a smart lifestyle assistant.

When the two joined forces to co-found Aiden.ai, the combination was potent — one was a consummate marketer, the other, a specialist in machine learning. Their goal: create an AI-driven marketing analyst that offered actionable advice in real time.

Humans who manage ad campaigns must analyze vast amounts of numbers, but Outtier and Camillieri envisioned a tool that could make optimization recommendations in real time. Analytics are vast and unwieldy, so theirs was a no-brainer proposition with a market crying out for solutions.

The company’s first office was at Bloom Space in Gower Street, London. It was just a handful of hot desks and a nearby sofa shared with four other startups. That summer, they began in earnest to build the company. A few months later, they had a huge opportunity when the still 100% bootstrapped company was selected for Techcrunch Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield competition.

Interviewed by TechCrunch, they explained their proposition: Marketers wanted to know where a digital marketing campaign was getting the most traction: Twitter or Facebook. You might need to check several dashboards across multiple accounts, plus Google analytics to compile the data — and even if you conclude that one platform is outperforming the other, that might change next week as users shift attention to Instagram, potentially wasting 60% of ad spend.

Aiden was intended to feel like just another co-worker, relying on natural language processing to make the exchange feel chatty and comfortable. It queried data from multiple dashboards and quickly compiled it into flash charts, making it easy to find and digest.

Eventually, instead of managing 10 clients, marketing analysts would be able to manage 50 using dynamic predictions as well as visualizations. Aiden incorporated Outtier’s expertise into its algorithms so it could suggest how to tweak a Facebook campaign and anticipate what was going to happen.

Was appearing at Disrupt a significant moment? “It was a big deal for us,” says Outtier. “The exposure gave us ammunition to raise our first round. And being part of the Disrupt Battlefield alumni gave us many meaningful networking and PR opportunities.”

A few weeks later the company had raised a seed round of $750,000. But not without difficulty. By this time Outtier was in the latter stages of pregnancy. Raising money under these circumstances was difficult, but, she says, “it can be done. It’s tougher than ‘normal circumstances.’ It’s a bit like running a marathon, but with a fridge on your back.”



from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/eA8V8J How this startup built and exited to Twitter in 1,219 days Mike Butcher https://ift.tt/2WcivEG
via IFTTT

How this startup built and exited to Twitter in 1,219 days

By the summer of 2016, Marie Outtier had spent eight years as a consultant advising media agencies and martech companies on marketing growth strategy.

Pierre-Jean “PJ” Camillieri started as a music software engineer before joining one of Apple’s consumer electronics divisions. Inspired by Siri, he left to start Timista, a smart lifestyle assistant.

When the two joined forces to co-found Aiden.ai, the combination was potent — one was a consummate marketer, the other, a specialist in machine learning. Their goal: create an AI-driven marketing analyst that offered actionable advice in real time.

Humans who manage ad campaigns must analyze vast amounts of numbers, but Outtier and Camillieri envisioned a tool that could make optimization recommendations in real time. Analytics are vast and unwieldy, so theirs was a no-brainer proposition with a market crying out for solutions.

The company’s first office was at Bloom Space in Gower Street, London. It was just a handful of hot desks and a nearby sofa shared with four other startups. That summer, they began in earnest to build the company. A few months later, they had a huge opportunity when the still 100% bootstrapped company was selected for Techcrunch Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield competition.

Interviewed by TechCrunch, they explained their proposition: Marketers wanted to know where a digital marketing campaign was getting the most traction: Twitter or Facebook. You might need to check several dashboards across multiple accounts, plus Google analytics to compile the data — and even if you conclude that one platform is outperforming the other, that might change next week as users shift attention to Instagram, potentially wasting 60% of ad spend.

Aiden was intended to feel like just another co-worker, relying on natural language processing to make the exchange feel chatty and comfortable. It queried data from multiple dashboards and quickly compiled it into flash charts, making it easy to find and digest.

Eventually, instead of managing 10 clients, marketing analysts would be able to manage 50 using dynamic predictions as well as visualizations. Aiden incorporated Outtier’s expertise into its algorithms so it could suggest how to tweak a Facebook campaign and anticipate what was going to happen.

Was appearing at Disrupt a significant moment? “It was a big deal for us,” says Outtier. “The exposure gave us ammunition to raise our first round. And being part of the Disrupt Battlefield alumni gave us many meaningful networking and PR opportunities.”

A few weeks later the company had raised a seed round of $750,000. But not without difficulty. By this time Outtier was in the latter stages of pregnancy. Raising money under these circumstances was difficult, but, she says, “it can be done. It’s tougher than ‘normal circumstances.’ It’s a bit like running a marathon, but with a fridge on your back.”



https://ift.tt/eA8V8J How this startup built and exited to Twitter in 1,219 days https://ift.tt/2WcivEG

Smart home startup Josh.ai raises $11 million to offer a home assistant alternative to Alexa

Directly taking on Google and Amazon generally seems to be an ill-advised strategy for a young startup. It’s even more complicated when you’re competing on the home assistants front, a technically complex, capital-intensive future platform into which both tech giants have dumped substantial sums.

Over the past few years, the small smart home startup Josh.ai has attempted to do just that, capitalizing on public distrust of the big voice platforms to sell an intelligent assistant to users weary of sticking a Google or Amazon-owned microphone in their homes. The company has built its business catering to customers seeking professionally installed pricey outfits in their home, costing upwards of $10,000 on the high end.

The company just secured its largest funding round to date, an $11 million Series A round, which brings the startup’s total funding to $22 million. A spokesperson for Josh.ai said their investors have asked not to be named, though he confirmed the round was led by corporate investors.

For people with an Echo Dot or Google Mini in their home, Josh.ai’s approach feels familiar. The platform boasts a number of third-party integrations, so you can use the platform to switch off lights, turn on devices, play music and answer some simple commands. Basically, the bulk of home-centric commands popular on Google Assistant and Alexa.

The startup recently introduced Josh Micro, its own take on the Echo Dot. It has a futuristic vibe and, because it’s installed by professionals, users are privy to a sleek look with wires neatly tucked away inside walls. CEO Alex Capecelatro says their competitors in the professionally installed space have been pushing wall-mounted screens with UIs that often aren’t updated and don’t age well. He hopes their more low-key display-free devices can keep less focus on the hardware and more attention on their software.

“Our philosophy is that you shouldn’t be talking to a puck, it should feel fully immersive,” he says.

Capecelatro had originally seen the best path to existing alongside Google and Amazon as working with them and leveraging their platforms, but he soon found that not working with them proved to be the startup’s biggest asset.

“In terms of direction, what became really clear in the past three years was the importance of privacy,” Capecelatro told TechCrunch. “A lot of our clients are just people who care about their privacy; it’s part of every conversation.”

On the tech side, Capecelatro says the startup’s platform is designed around its own natural language processing stack, so most voice requests can be processed locally, though the startup does leverage tech built by Google and Microsoft to handle speech-to-text processes. While the company uses anonymized data to improve its services, the startup has also introduced specific software features to keep privacy-focused users satisfied including their own take on a smart home incognito mode.

There are few silver bullets in smart home tech, and robust third-party support often leaves room for uncertainty, which in Josh’s case can mean the difference between lights turning on or staying off. Capecelatro says ensuring smooth compatibility with supported devices has been a pretty big focus for their engineering team.

“The more things we work with, the more things we have to QA and the more things that could be impacted,” he says.

While Capecelatro says that around 80-85% of their business goes to single-family homes, he says the startup is starting to find business in commercial sectors, outfitting hotels and condo buildings.

“The reality is we’ve found that the professional installed space is a really big market that the consumer companies don’t really think about,” Capecelatro says. “I think for us the likely future is that we’ll focus on areas where you have a professional installer in a non-residential arena.”

The company says the pandemic has actually given their business a bump, with April being their best month of sales to date as homeowners stuck in their houses look to finally act on long-considered home improvement projects.



https://ift.tt/2VPZDfs Smart home startup Josh.ai raises $11 million to offer a home assistant alternative to Alexa https://ift.tt/2VRp4h1

Plantible raises $4.6 million seed round for an egg white replacement that isn’t aquafaba

When California announced a statewide lockdown, Tony Martens and Maurits van de Ven decided to stay put instead of heading home to Amsterdam.

So, the co-founders of Plantible bought two trailers and started living at their HQ: a two-acre duckweed farm in San Diego.

Plantible uses duckweed, a tiny aquatic leaf, to extract a plant-based protein ingredient that will eventually allow food companies to make animal-based products into plant-based products. The offering would be attractive to companies that make baked goods or protein powder, and thus use lots of egg whites as part of their creation process.

The startup is selling a whey or dairy protein replacement, and is still working on FDA approval.

“We are firm believers that whatever is in nature should be sufficient to provide humanity the ingredients they need,” said Martens from the office trailer.

The startup recently did a series of trials with companies, and Martens says that Plantible validated it can be a replacement with baking ingredient companies and plant-based meat sellers. But the startup is not limited to current use cases.

“If the sector we had our eyes on is taking a while, but sports nutrition is taking off really fast, we’ll go there,” said Martens. “We need to prove the feasibility of our company.”

The trailers where Plantible co-founders have sheltered in place amid COVID-19 lockdowns.

Plantible is entering a crowded space. Recently, aquafaba, the liquid made from a can of chickpeas, has regained popularity amid other quarantine cooking hacks. Martens says that aquafaba might recreate foaminess, but it doesn’t recreate gelation (or the sizzle and fry look that comes when you pour a real egg white into a hot pan). Plantible claims to offer an egg-white replacement with no compromises on texture or nutrition.

The startup also has some increasingly well-funded alternative protein competitors. Plantible’s closest venture-backed competitors are Clara Foods and FUMI Ingredients, as both try to create egg-white replacements. Clara Foods uses yeast, instead of chickens, to make egg whites, and similarly sells to businesses that use egg whites in large quantities for items like macaroons, angel food cake and protein powders. It has the backing of Ingredion, a global ingredients solution company.

Plantible needs to have a faster, cheaper and more scalable operation to beat its competitors. From a supply perspective, Plantible is in a good place. Duckweed doubles in mass every 48 hours and grows year-round. Plus, it is more digestible than pea, soy or algae, the company claims.

The real expense comes from the extraction process.

Right now, Martens admits, Plantible is “lab scale, and lab scale is really expensive.”

To bring costs down, the company just raised a $4.6 million seed round, co-led by Vectr Ventures and Lerer Hippeau. Other participants include eighteen94 Capital (Kellogg Company’s venture capital fund) and FTW Ventures.

Plantible co-founders Maurits van de Ven and Tony Martens (from left to right).

Through the new capital, Plantible claims it will be cost-competitive with egg whites. Currently, two pounds of liquid egg whites cost $8 to $10 dollars to make and sell for $15 to $20 dollars.

“In the end it is about developing a scalable and cost-competitive supply chain that produces a desired ingredient. Since it is very hard to compete with nature, we have decided to embrace it as much as possible by identifying a highly functional and nutritional enzyme,” he said.

“The more you can leverage nature, the more scalable you become,” he said.

As with any seed-stage alternative-protein company, the proof that Plantible has legs to succeed will be in sales and capacity to produce. And it’s not quite there yet.



https://ift.tt/2KMc065 Plantible raises $4.6 million seed round for an egg white replacement that isn’t aquafaba https://ift.tt/2KP0PcY

Figma raises $50 million Series D led by Andreessen Horowitz

Figma, the design platform that lets folks work collaboratively and in the cloud, has today announced the close of a $50 million Series D financing. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with partner Peter Levine and cofounding partner Marc Andreessen managing the deal for the firm. New angel investors, including Henry Ellenbogen from Durable Capital, also participated in the round alongside existing investors Index, Greylock, KPCB, Sequoia and Founders Fund.

Forbes reports that the latest funding round values Figma at $2 billion.

Figma launched in 2015 after nearly six years of development in stealth. The premise was to create a collaborative, cloud-based design tool that would be the Google Docs of design.

Since, Figma has built out the platform to expand access and usability for individual designers, small firms and giant enterprise companies alike. For example, the company launched plug-ins in 2019, allowing developers to build in their own tools to the app, such as a plug-in for designers to automatically rename and organize their layers as they work (Rename.it) and one that gives users the ability to add placeholder text that they can automatically find and replace later (Content Buddy).

The company also launched an educational platform called Community, which gives designers the ability to share their work and let other users ‘remix’ that design, or simply check out how it was built, layer by layer.

A spokesperson told TechCrunch that this deal was “opportunistic,” and that the company was in a strong cash position pre-financing. The new funding expands Figma’s runway during these uncertain times, with coronavirus halting a lot of enterprise purchasing and ultimately slowing growth of some rising enterprise players.

Figma says that one interesting change they’ve seen in the COVID era is a significant jump in user engagement from teams to collaborate more in Figma. The firm has also seen an uptick in whiteboarding, note taking, slide deck creation and diagramming, as companies start using Figma as a collaborative tool across an entire organization rather than just within a team of designers.



https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Figma raises $50 million Series D led by Andreessen Horowitz https://ift.tt/35nOMwv

5 tips for starting a business with a stranger

When I first thought of the idea for what would become Jobber, I never could have imagined that I would one day be the CEO of a tech company with nearly 100,000 active customers in more than 45 countries. And that I would do this alongside a complete stranger who I met during a chance encounter at a coffee shop.

When you’re first thinking about starting a company, most people would either go at it alone or partner with someone they know, like a friend, family member, or former colleague. Few would consider pursuing their entrepreneurial dream with a stranger. Without proper due diligence, co-founding a company with a stranger can feel like putting a down payment on a new house without opening the front door. While this might not be the right path for everyone, it was absolutely the best move for me.

Jobber is proof that starting a company with a stranger isn’t just doable, it can even be an advantage.

Pursuing a business partnership without a prior relationship has allowed my co-founder Forrest Zeisler and I to be more honest and forthcoming with each other as we worked toward a clear, common objective from the start. The ability to arrive at big decisions and have productive debate without the baggage and bias of a preexisting relationship helped to establish Jobber’s feedback-oriented culture, which is ingrained in the DNA of the company. I attribute our company’s early success to our focus on building a strong and honest business partnership first.

For aspiring entrepreneurs looking to launch a company, I’ve identified five tips that really helped me build trust, camaraderie and mutual understanding with my co-founding partner — a partnership that can withstand intense competition and the test of time.

Start small and aim big

I didn’t know that Forrest would become my co-founder when we first met. As a self-taught developer, I was looking for more sophisticated development help on the project I was working on. During the early stages of our relationship, I would present a problem, such as technical aspects with code, and he would help me with it. Through these initial interactions, it became clear how Forrest’s mind works, and we learned that we worked really well together. At the time, I wasn’t thinking of these tasks as “tests” on compatibility, but in retrospect, they were. If you can’t overcome the small hurdles amicably and efficiently, then how do you expect to take on the big stuff? It’s not a good sign for a long-term business relationship.



https://ift.tt/eA8V8J 5 tips for starting a business with a stranger https://ift.tt/2VPtLaO

Dribbble, a bootstrapped ‘LinkedIn’ for designers, acquires Creative Market, grows to 12M users

Traditionally dominated by big players like Adobe and Autodesk, the world of design has been flush with a newer wave of startups that are creating collaboration spaces and new cloud-based tools designed to address the needs of creatives today. Today, two of those players are combining. Dribbble, an online community for designers that lets them post their work and look for work, is acquiring Creative Market, a marketplace for ready-to-use fonts, icons, illustrations, photos and other design assets.

Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed, Dribbble’s CEO Zack Onisko said in an interview. Prior to this, bootstrapped Dribbble was profitable — revenues come from its job boards, advertising and member subscriptions, kind of like a LinkedIn aimed at the design community — and it had 6 million monthly active users, with 3.5 million registered users. Adding in Creative Market will bring the total number of monthly active users across the two sites to 12 million.

The acquisition is happening at a time when we’re seeing some big growth among startups that speaks to how the balance of power is shifting in the world of software aimed at designers.

Just today, Figma announced a $50 million raise at a $2 billion valuation, money that it plans to use for its own spate of acquisitions and investments in more design tools. Canva last year raised funding at a $3.2 billion valuation. Smaller, younger startups like Frontify (which helps companies manage their design assets) have also been raising and Dyndrite have also been raising. Meanwhile, Adobe continues to work on ways to keep its legacy products, like the 30-year old Photoshop (look, it’s a millennial!) relevant.

Indeed, even the concept of who the target audience even is has shifted.

“We talk about designers but really it’s creatives,” Onisko said. “A lot of creatives are multi-skilled and they work in all sorts of different mediums. The historic focus is product and web design but we’ve seen it slide into motion graphics or 3D or photography.”

This is actually the second time Creative Market has been acquired. The startup was first purchased by Autodesk in 2014, at a time when the latter was looking to widen its range of products both to take on Adobe more squarely, and to target more casual and prosumer users as well as to address the wider needs of its core designer community.

That ultimately didn’t work out, and Creative Market was spun out as a startup again in 2017, with $7 million in funding led by Accomplice.

More than two years on from that, it seems that Creative Market saw the logic in coming together with another company for better economies of scale.

And perhaps this time, the acquirer is a better cultural fit. Both companies are pretty distributed and decentralised (making for a very easy transition to working under stay-at-home orders in recent weeks). And it might have helped, too, that Onisko had once previously been Creative Market’s chief growth officer before taking on the role as Dribbble’s CEO.

The plan will be to keep both companies’ brands and teams separate, with Chris Winn continuing to lead Creative Market as its CEO. Creative Market will continue to build out its marketplace of design assets, and Dribbble will continue to position itself as a place for those designers to set out their profiles and connect with those looking to hire them, as well as each other.

“We’re able to do our own thing and beat our own drums,” said Onisko, with the plan being to keep “marching on our own roadmaps.”

Over time, when the time is right, Onisko said there might be an opportunity to integrate the businesses, but that will be in the future.

One area where the two will be coming together right away is in cross-pollinating membership. Up to now, people joined Dribbble by invitation from previous members, which Onisko said was a good way of keeping growth in check and applying a kind of peer-reviewed quality control layer. Now, the idea will be that Dribbble will open up to all new users, and those who are already registered on Creative Market can automatically become members on the sister site.

“The big opportunity is that we can do in 2-3 years what we would have done in 3-5 years as separate companies,” Onisko added.

“We’re so excited to bring together two fully-distributed teams who work everyday to serve the design community,” said Winn, in a statement. “The opportunity for both companies is that much larger thanks to this partnership and I’m so excited to join forces.”

For its part, Onisko said that Dribbble has no intention of changing from its growth course when it comes to finances. The company has always been bootstrapped — that is, surviving with no outside investors — and is profitable. And there are no plans to use this moment to seek outside funding, he added. The company has been approached by interested parties — “all the usual suspects,” he said — for acquisition, Onisko said, but for now that’s also not been something the company has wanted to explore.

“We feel that we’re very much in our infancy,” Onisko said. “We have pretty big ambitions and want to march forward. We’ve talked to all the usual suspects, and we are on friendly terms and keep all the conversations going, but we will continue to stay independent and operate in our contrarian way.”



https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Dribbble, a bootstrapped ‘LinkedIn’ for designers, acquires Creative Market, grows to 12M users https://ift.tt/2SmvMJC

Facebook now allows users in the U.S. & Canada to export photos and videos to Google Photos

Facebook is today rolling out a tool that will allow users in the U.S. and Canada to export their Facebook photos and videos to Google Photos. This data portability tool was first introduced in Ireland in December, and has since been made available to other international markets.

To use the feature, Facebook users will need to click on “Settings,” followed by”Your Facebook Information,” then “Transfer a Copy of Your Photos and Videos.” Facebook will ask you to verify your password to confirm your identity in order to proceed. On the next screen, you’ll be able to choose “Google Photos” as the destination from the “Choose Destination” drop-down box that appears. You’ll also need your Google account information to authenticate with its service before the transfer begins.

The tool’s release comes about by way of Facebook’s participation in the Data Transfer Project, a collaborative effort with other tech giants including Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter, which focuses on a building out common ways for people to transfer their data between online services.

Of course, it also serves as a way for the major tech companies to fend off potential regulation as they’ll be able to point to tools like this as a way to prove they’re not holding their users hostage — if people are unhappy, they can just take their data and leave!

Facebook’s Director of Privacy and Public Policy Steve Satterfield, in an interview with Reuters on Thursday, essentially confirmed the tool is less about Facebook being in service to its users, and more about catering to policymakers’ and regulators’ demands.

“…It really is an important part of the response to the kinds of concerns that drive antitrust regulation or competition regulation,” Satterfield told the news outlet.

The launch also arrives conveniently ahead of a Federal Trade Commission hearing on September 22 that will be focused on data portability. Facebook said it would participate in that hearing, if approached, the report noted.

In Facebook’s original announcement about the tool’s launch last year, it said it would expand the service to include more than just Google Photos in the “near future.”

The transfer tool is not the only way to get your data out of Facebook. The company has offered Download Your Information since 2010. But once you have your data, there isn’t much else you can do with it — Facebook hasn’t had any large-scale rivals since older social networks like MySpace, FriendFeed (RIP!), and Friendster died and Google+ failed.

In addition to the U.S. and Canada, the photo transfer tool has been launched in several other markets, including Europe and Latin America.

 



from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2zLkPLd Facebook now allows users in the U.S. & Canada to export photos and videos to Google Photos Sarah Perez https://ift.tt/2WbPetI
via IFTTT

Early stage investor The Fund expands beyond NYC with new partners in LA and London

The Fund, an early-stage investment firm with a memorably straightforward name, is looking beyond New York City as it starts investing its second fund.

Founders Jenny Fielding (who’s also managing director at Techstars New York) and Scott Hartley (also co-founder and partner at Two Culture Capital) told me that in the past two years, they’ve already backed 52 New York City startups.

“The seed funds in New York have all gone upstream,” Fielding argued, making it harder for founders to get the smaller checks they need when they’re getting started. So The Fund is aiming to participate in those “first check” rounds of between $500,000 and $1.2 million.

To find those investments, Fielding and Hartley said rely on a “crowdsourced” approach, taking recommendations from the startup founders that they’ve recruited as limited partners in The Fund — a group that includes names like General Assembly founder Matthew Brimer, One Medical founder Tom Lee, Handy co-founder Oisin Hanrahan, SoundCloud founder Alex Ljung and ClassPass co-founder Sanjiv Sanghavi.

At the same time, rather than relying on a “voting and consensus” process, the decisions are ultimately made by the investment committee, a smaller group that initially included Brimer, Fielding, Hartley and Katie Hunt.

The firm is targeting $9 million for the second fund, with one-third deployed in New York, another third in Los Angeles and the final third in London.

Hartley said The Fund is taking a “modular approach” to this expansion, with an independent investment committee in each city: In New York, it will be Josh Hix, Katie Shea and Becky Yang, along with Fielding and Hartley; in Los Angeles, the committee includes Raina Kumra, Josh Jones, Anna Barber and Austin Murray; and in London, it’s Carmen Alfonso Rico, Eamonn Carey and Marina Gorey.

“The big vision is, we’ve literally written the playbook,” Fielding said. “Fund one was an experiment, and now fund two is an experiment: Does this scale? After we have about a year’s worth of data about deals under our belt, we want to take it to the next level. Why shouldn’t The Funds be popping up in every city?”

And even though COVID-19 has brought a halt to large sectors of the global and domestic economy, Hartley said the firm has continued to write checks at the same pace.

“We had such conviction in the [founding] teams that it hasn’t really slowed down the cadence of our investing,” he said. “We take a long-term approach with pre-seed investing. We see this as a multi-year journey.”

Fielding added that it’s been “inspiring” and “phenomenal” to see how their existing portfolio companies have adapted to this new reality. As an example, she pointed to how rowing class startup CityRow has shifted to virtual classes.

And if you’re wondering about that name, Fielding said they were perfectly aware that calling themselves The Fund could prompt some  “Who’s on first?”-style confusion.

“We wanted to make fun of ourselves a little bit,” she said. And besides, most of the good tree names were taken.



https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Early stage investor The Fund expands beyond NYC with new partners in LA and London https://ift.tt/3aRkhAr

Freada Kapor Klein warns of ‘vulture capitalists’ during pandemic

The tech industry experienced turmoil before during the dot-com bust and again during the 2008 economic downturn. But this time it’s a bit different, according to Kapor Capital founding partners Freada Kapor Klein and Mitch Kapor.

“What’s different this time is that it is society-wide,” Kapor Klein said during an Extra Crunch Live appearance this week. “It’s not just the dot-com bust or its not just financial services. It is much more widespread. But again, as you point out, tech is in a much better position because tech is related to the things that are thriving.”

For Kapor, formerly a partner at a Sand Hill Road VC firm during the dot-com bust, said it’s similar in that it’s an “enormous disruption with great uncertainty about what will be on the other side of it.”

The details, however, are very different. Assuming there will eventually be a vaccine, Kapor said he believes things will be able to get back to some sort of normal, “notwithstanding the irrecoverable disruptions of permanently-closed small businesses.”

In the two previous downturns, there was something inherently wrong with the economy, but that’s not the case right now, he added.

“The good news is that, to the extent to which the pandemic gets under control, the economy should restart,” said Kapor. “The question, though, is on what basis and do we use this as an opportunity to rethink some fundamentals. Are we actually serious about treating essential workers better, really having a safety net and paid sick leave and universal health benefits and childcare — where we can see and feel now the absence of that is hurting the people we depend on four our lives. But it is not a certainty. This is the other thing about these great disruptions. We have some agency about what happens next. And so it’s almost a cliché now, but it’s terrible to waste, you know, a crisis. Our hope is that coming out of this, as a society, we make some different decisions about how we allocate resources and what we think the baseline is that everybody is entitled to.”

But while we’re all still knee-deep in the pandemic, there are ways to ensure employers treat workers fairly and VC firms treat founders with respect and don’t take advantage of them during these vulnerable times.

Below you’ll find some more stellar insights from the duo that touch on making tough decisions to layoff or furlough employees and how to do it in an equitable way, as well as the rise of what Kapor Klein refers to as “vulture capitalists.”

Equitable layoffs



https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Freada Kapor Klein warns of ‘vulture capitalists’ during pandemic https://ift.tt/3aQt99d

blogger better Headline Animator