Startups Weekly: The George Floyd protests come home to the tech industry

The tech industry has generally wished that structural discrimination would go away, while pretending that it already has. But technology can be used by anyone for anything. And so, the world has watched video after video of police brutality against Black people in a real-time stream that plays through the closing days of quarantine, culminating in the death of George Floyd and ongoing protests. As employees have left their remote offices to hit the streets, even executives at the largest tech companies —who would usually avoid such complications — have expressed their support officially, online.

What can we expect to change now? After all, diversity and inclusion programs have been getting cut during the pandemic, and stats on employee diversity and VC partner/portfolio demographics have not seemed to be improving quickly over the past decade, at least in aggregate.

First up, a group of Black tech leaders in the Bay Area, including TechCrunch’s Megan Rose Dickey, has put forward a widely-signed petition that specifies five goals including local support and accountability, and commitment to hiring and investing in Black employees and founders.

On the ground in the startup world, a considerable range of investors say they are setting aside dedicated time and resources for Black founders.

Specific proposals for changes to the status quo strike at the heart of of tech as we know it.

To address existing systemic bias, algorithmic and otherwise, contributor Will Walker writes that tech companies like Amazon, Yelp and Grubhub should find ways to feature and favor Black-owned businesses — even if that means re-writing the recommendation algorithms.

And to address systemic bias in who gets funding, Connie Loizos writes that legislation could be the best answer:

Consider that already, most VCs today sign away their rights to invest in firearms or alcohol or tobacco when managing capital on behalf of the pension funds, universities and hospital systems that fund them. What if they also had to agree to invest a certain percentage of that capital to founding teams with members from underrepresented groups? We aren’t talking about targets anymore, but actual mandates. Put another way, rather than wait for venture firms to organically develop into less homogeneous organizations — or to invest in fewer founders who share their gender and race and educational background — alter their limited partner agreements.

Perhaps tech leaders are responding so strongly today because they realize what’s at stake for them if change does not happen faster?

The future of work, according to the people trying to invest in it

Meanwhile, the very nature of work as we know it is being re-evaluated. Megan caught up with top investors in a very popular investor survey for Extra Crunch this week, to better understand the problems and solutions. Here’s what Ann Muira-Ko of Floodgate Capital thinks will create unicorns, as a sample:

• How do you enable solopreneurs to build businesses that are fully tech-enabled? We think of this as the ironman suit for the solopreneur. What financial products and software products can solopreneurs use to provide consumers or their customers with the tech-enabled experiences they have come to expect?
• How does reputation follow someone? A resume or LinkedIn profile measures where you’ve worked and for how long. With people working more jobs at varied locales, measuring expertise will become a new challenge.
• How does an organization maintain knowledge? If a company is reliant on its people to share its history and knowledge base, how can that be disseminated without relying on internal experts (who are on the decline)?
• How should productivity tools (calendars & communication) and enterprise systems (CRM, HR, Finance, etc.) adapt to a multi-modal (work from anywhere) work environment? HR is perhaps the most out-of-date, but every tool will require better integration.

If you’re more interested in the cybersecurity aspects of remote work, you will want to check out security editor Zack Whittaker’s set of investor surveys this week, including this industry overview and this pandemic-focused one.

Data shows investors are in fact busy looking for deals

Are VCs actually open for business during the pandemic? Docsend, a key inside data source, has a new report out this week that shows investor interest has boomed in April. Here’s CEO Russ Heddleston on TechCrunch, talking about the activity on its document management platform:

After the initial decline in March, founders and VCs both bounced back fairly quickly. In fact, the next week VC interest increased 10% while the number of Founder Links Created increased by 12%. However, for the following few weeks the number of links created by founders either stayed flat or dropped. But that isn’t the case for VCs. Demand for pitch decks rose steadily all the way through the week of April 20th, which was 25% up year-over-year. In fact, seven of the top 10 best days for Pitch Deck Interest in 2020 were in the month of April.

The fundraising inactivity has been on the part of the founders! Meanwhile, in a separate article for Extra Crunch, he shares that investors are spreading themselves broadly.

In the recent weeks, as we’ve had higher than average supply and demand, we’ve watched as the average time spent reviewing a deal has declined. In fact, we’re at nearly a two-year low. The only other period when time spent dropped below where it is now was in early 2018 (which not coincidentally was also when demand was at its highest). Twice in 2018 we saw time spent go below three minutes and we’re currently at 3 minutes and 7 seconds.

How a growth marketer helped his high school brother win at TikTok

In a fascinating oral history of sorts for Extra Crunch, Adam Guild explains how he helped his young brother Topper get more than 10 million followers in under five months. Here’s a free excerpt:

At first, figuring out which content would go viral seemed random. There was no correlation between likes, comments, shares or engagement rate.

What made the difference in his successful content? Topper needed to find out to maximize growth, so he went through his TikTok analytics insights and noticed a trend: his most popular videos weren’t the ones with the highest engagement rates. They were the ones with the highest average view durations.

“I wanted to test if this guess was right,” said Topper, “so I posted a few videos with a longer length and teased people in the captions to watch until the end.”

It worked; his videos started getting more views, but it wasn’t a perfect correlation. Some videos with high view durations weren’t taking off.

When Topper asked me for advice, I suggested that the key metric to nail was actually average session duration. That’s what YouTube optimizes for, so it would make sense that TikTok would do the same. This metric measures how long people actually stay on the platform — not on the video — and it can be increased by single videos.

He posted another video to test: one that encouraged viewers to rewatch repeatedly because it had a cliffhanger ending — Topper poured hundreds of Mentos into a massive container of Coke before cutting out the ending.

That video was his most viewed yet, scoring more than 175,000,000 views. He decided to use that lesson in future videos by creating content that helped get viewers addicted to TikTok while also being fun to watch.

Around TechCrunch

Join us to watch five startups pitch off at Pitchers and Pitches on June 10th

Join Eventbrite CEO Julia Hartz for a live Q&A: June 11 at 3 pm EST/Noon PDT/7 pm GMT

Across the week

TechCrunch:

LinkedIn introduces new retargeting tools

The coronavirus has hastened the post-human era

Zynga acquires Turkey’s Peak Games for $1.8B, after buying its card games studio for $100M in 2017

Huawei’s terrible week

Extra Crunch:

Is Zoom the next Android or the next BlackBerry?

The IPO window is open (again)

Unpacking ZoomInfo’s IPO as the firm starts to trade

SaaS earnings rise as pandemic pushes companies more rapidly to the cloud

What grocery startup Weee! learned from China’s tech giants

#EquityPod

From Alex Wilhelm:

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week, however, the Equity crew (Danny, Natasha, Chris, and Alex) agreed it felt silly to drum up false enthusiasm for funding rounds and startups. Instead, we talked about a more critical topic: systemic racism in the United States. Venture firms and tech executives across the country are pledging to be better following the brutal murder of George Floyd and police brutality.

Better is long overdue.

What follows are the resources we mentioned — and a few more — on the show itself. We’ll be back. Now is the time for sustained momentum and change.

Donations

• The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund
• Black Visions Collective
• The Anti Police-Terror Project
• Committee to Protect Journalists
• The Marshall Project
• Official George Floyd Memorial Fund

How to be a better ally

• More resources on how to support Black Lives Matter
• How to make this moment the turning point for real change
• For those who can’t protest, here are ways to support the movement
• Understand the model minority myth
• The social contract
• Resources fo Non-black individuals and people of color

Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

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This Week in Apps: Protests impact app stores, FTC fines app developer, kids’ app trends

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all.

The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019. People are now spending three hours and 40 minutes per day using apps, rivaling TV. Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus.

In this Extra Crunch series, we help you keep up with the latest news from the world of apps, delivered on a weekly basis.

This week, we’re taking a look at how the civil unrest and George Floyd protests played out across the app stores. The events led some apps — including private messaging apps, police scanners and alerting apps, and other social communication apps — to surge, and even break records. Google decided to delay the launch of Android 11 beta 1 in light of the recent events.

We’re also keeping up with COVID-19 apps and how the pandemic is changing app usage and consumer behavior. Plus, the FTC fined an app developer over privacy violations in a warning shot for the app industry; Zoom faced criticism for its encryption plans; Apple launched an open-source resource for password managers; and more.

How the George Floyd protests impacted the app stores

Protests drive downloads of police scanners 

Downloads of police scanner apps, tools for private communication and mobile safety apps hit record numbers last weekend in the U.S., amid the nationwide protests over the police killing of George Floyd, as well as the systemic problems of racial prejudice that plague the American justice system. According to data from app store intelligence firm Apptopia, top U.S. police scanner apps were downloaded a combined 213,000 times last weekend, including Friday — a 125% increase from the weekend prior and a record number for this group of apps.

The group of top apps included those with similar, if somewhat generic, titles, such as Scanner Radio – Fire and Police Scanner, Police Scanner, 5-0 Radio Police Scanner, Police Scanner Radio & Fire and Police Scanner +.

Citizen, Signal and others spike during protests

In addition to tracking police movements with scanners, protestors organized and communicated on secure messaging app Signal. Meanwhile, community safety app Citizen, which sends out police alerts, also saw a jump in usage.

According to Apptopia, Citizen and Signal both set daily download records, Vox noted earlier this week.

Citizen

Citizen’s app lets users see “incidents,” based on radio communications with 911 dispatchers, police, fire departments and other emergency responders. The app uses high-powered scanners to tune into public radio channels, then digitizes and transcribes the audio, and turns those into incidents placed on the map. But the app is popular because it’s more than a police scanner; it includes a social networking layer where users can react and comment. 

Based on more recent data provided to TechCrunch by Sensor Tower, Citizen was installed around 620,000 times by first-time users in the U.S. during the past week, an increase of about 916% compared to the week prior. First-time installs reached a record 150,000 on June 2, nearly 12x the app’s average of 13,000 daily first-time installs during May. On average, the app was downloaded close to 86,000 times per day, or 6.6x larger than May’s daily average. The app grew to be as high as No. 4 on Tuesday, June 2 on the U.S. App Store, and is now No. 32 Overall on the top free charts.

Signal

Image Credits: Signal

The firm also estimated that Signal had been installed by approximately 135,000 first-time users in the U.S. during the past week across the app stores. This figure represented growth of 165% from the preceding seven days, or about 2.6x that total of approximately 51,000 new installs. Signal averaged about 19,000 installs per day over the past seven days.

For comparison’s sake, Signal was downloaded around 269,000 times in all of May and its average daily number of installs was 9,000. That makes the average for the past week about 2x higher.

Signal is currently ranked at No. 137 among the top free iPhone apps on the U.S. App Store. Earlier, it was ranked at No. 107 on Tuesday, June 2.

This week, Signal also added built-in face blurring for photos, to help better secure the sharing of sensitive information across its network.

Nextdoor and Neighbors by Ring

The civil unrest also impacted neighborhood networking app installs, as communities looked to share information about the protests with one another. Social networking app for neighbors Nextdoor was installed by 185,000 first-time users in the U.S. over the past week, an increase of 26% from 147,000 installs in the week prior. The app also jumped up nearly 50 places in the U.S. App Store rankings, moving from No. 2,014 to No. 156 in the top free iPhone apps chart.

Amazon-owned Neighbors by Ring, where neighbors share alerts, including security camera footage, was installed by 36,000 first-time users in the past week, an increase of 89% from its approximately 19,000 installs the week prior.

Twitter has a record-breaking week as users looked for news of protests and COVID-19

Civil unrest due to the nationwide George Floyd protests drove Twitter to see a record number of new installs this week, according to data from two app store intelligence firms, Apptopia and Sensor Tower. While the firms’ exact findings differed in terms of the total number of new downloads or when records were broken, the firms agreed that Twitter’s app had its largest-ever week, globally.

The app saw at least 677,000 installs at its highest point, Apptopia said. Sensor Tower said it topped 1 million. Twitter also broke a record for daily active users on Twitter in the U.S., when some 40 million people in the U.S. logged into the app on June 3, Apptopia noted. For comparison’s sake, Twitter reported its app had 31 million “monetizable” daily active users (mDAUs) in the U.S. in Q4 2019, which grew to 33 million in Q1 2020.

The spike in installs was attributed to the protests, which were being watched by a global audience, and COVID-19, which continued to spread in worldwide markets.

Apps turn their icons black in support of George Floyd protests 

A small handful of apps did the equivalent of the Instagram black square by turning their icons black this week as a gesture of support toward the protests and civil rights. Participating apps included Reddit, Joss & Main and Shop Avani, for instance. Moves like this can be criticized as being merely performative, but one of the companies involved — Reddit — later followed up with real action. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanion on Friday announced he was resigning as a member of the Reddit board, and is now urging them to fill his seat with a black candidate. He also said he would use his future gains from Reddit stock to serve the black community, starting with a $1 million pledge to Colin Kaepernick’s Know Your Rights Camp.

COVID-19 app updates and news

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This Week in Apps: Protests impact app stores, FTC fines app developer, kids’ app trends

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Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all.

The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019. People are now spending three hours and 40 minutes per day using apps, rivaling TV. Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus.

In this Extra Crunch series, we help you keep up with the latest news from the world of apps, delivered on a weekly basis.

This week, we’re taking a look at how the civil unrest and George Floyd protests played out across the app stores. The events led some apps — including private messaging apps, police scanners and alerting apps, and other social communication apps — to surge, and even break records. Google decided to delay the launch of Android 11 beta 1 in light of the recent events.

We’re also keeping up with COVID-19 apps and how the pandemic is changing app usage and consumer behavior. Plus, the FTC fined an app developer over privacy violations in a warning shot for the app industry; Zoom faced criticism for its encryption plans; Apple launched an open-source resource for password managers; and more.

How the George Floyd protests impacted the app stores

Protests drive downloads of police scanners 

Downloads of police scanner apps, tools for private communication and mobile safety apps hit record numbers last weekend in the U.S., amid the nationwide protests over the police killing of George Floyd, as well as the systemic problems of racial prejudice that plague the American justice system. According to data from app store intelligence firm Apptopia, top U.S. police scanner apps were downloaded a combined 213,000 times last weekend, including Friday — a 125% increase from the weekend prior and a record number for this group of apps.

The group of top apps included those with similar, if somewhat generic, titles, such as Scanner Radio – Fire and Police Scanner, Police Scanner, 5-0 Radio Police Scanner, Police Scanner Radio & Fire and Police Scanner +.

Citizen, Signal and others spike during protests

In addition to tracking police movements with scanners, protestors organized and communicated on secure messaging app Signal. Meanwhile, community safety app Citizen, which sends out police alerts, also saw a jump in usage.

According to Apptopia, Citizen and Signal both set daily download records, Vox noted earlier this week.

Citizen

Citizen’s app lets users see “incidents,” based on radio communications with 911 dispatchers, police, fire departments and other emergency responders. The app uses high-powered scanners to tune into public radio channels, then digitizes and transcribes the audio, and turns those into incidents placed on the map. But the app is popular because it’s more than a police scanner; it includes a social networking layer where users can react and comment. 

Based on more recent data provided to TechCrunch by Sensor Tower, Citizen was installed around 620,000 times by first-time users in the U.S. during the past week, an increase of about 916% compared to the week prior. First-time installs reached a record 150,000 on June 2, nearly 12x the app’s average of 13,000 daily first-time installs during May. On average, the app was downloaded close to 86,000 times per day, or 6.6x larger than May’s daily average. The app grew to be as high as No. 4 on Tuesday, June 2 on the U.S. App Store, and is now No. 32 Overall on the top free charts.

Signal

Image Credits: Signal

The firm also estimated that Signal had been installed by approximately 135,000 first-time users in the U.S. during the past week across the app stores. This figure represented growth of 165% from the preceding seven days, or about 2.6x that total of approximately 51,000 new installs. Signal averaged about 19,000 installs per day over the past seven days.

For comparison’s sake, Signal was downloaded around 269,000 times in all of May and its average daily number of installs was 9,000. That makes the average for the past week about 2x higher.

Signal is currently ranked at No. 137 among the top free iPhone apps on the U.S. App Store. Earlier, it was ranked at No. 107 on Tuesday, June 2.

This week, Signal also added built-in face blurring for photos, to help better secure the sharing of sensitive information across its network.

Nextdoor and Neighbors by Ring

The civil unrest also impacted neighborhood networking app installs, as communities looked to share information about the protests with one another. Social networking app for neighbors Nextdoor was installed by 185,000 first-time users in the U.S. over the past week, an increase of 26% from 147,000 installs in the week prior. The app also jumped up nearly 50 places in the U.S. App Store rankings, moving from No. 2,014 to No. 156 in the top free iPhone apps chart.

Amazon-owned Neighbors by Ring, where neighbors share alerts, including security camera footage, was installed by 36,000 first-time users in the past week, an increase of 89% from its approximately 19,000 installs the week prior.

Twitter has a record-breaking week as users looked for news of protests and COVID-19

Civil unrest due to the nationwide George Floyd protests drove Twitter to see a record number of new installs this week, according to data from two app store intelligence firms, Apptopia and Sensor Tower. While the firms’ exact findings differed in terms of the total number of new downloads or when records were broken, the firms agreed that Twitter’s app had its largest-ever week, globally.

The app saw at least 677,000 installs at its highest point, Apptopia said. Sensor Tower said it topped 1 million. Twitter also broke a record for daily active users on Twitter in the U.S., when some 40 million people in the U.S. logged into the app on June 3, Apptopia noted. For comparison’s sake, Twitter reported its app had 31 million “monetizable” daily active users (mDAUs) in the U.S. in Q4 2019, which grew to 33 million in Q1 2020.

The spike in installs was attributed to the protests, which were being watched by a global audience, and COVID-19, which continued to spread in worldwide markets.

Apps turn their icons black in support of George Floyd protests 

A small handful of apps did the equivalent of the Instagram black square by turning their icons black this week as a gesture of support toward the protests and civil rights. Participating apps included Reddit, Joss & Main and Shop Avani, for instance. Moves like this can be criticized as being merely performative, but one of the companies involved — Reddit — later followed up with real action. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanion on Friday announced he was resigning as a member of the Reddit board, and is now urging them to fill his seat with a black candidate. He also said he would use his future gains from Reddit stock to serve the black community, starting with a $1 million pledge to Colin Kaepernick’s Know Your Rights Camp.

COVID-19 app updates and news

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The accelerating digital transformation, redux

Earlier this week, TechCrunch covered a grip of earnings reports showing that some companies helping other businesses move to modern software solutions are seeing accelerated growth. Inside the Software as a Service (SaaS) world, this is known as the digital transformation. Based on how many software companies are talking about it, the pace of change is only picking up.

But since we published that first entry, a number of SaaS companies that have posted financial results seemed to disappoint investors. Seeing some companies in the high-flying sector struggle made us sit back and think. What was going on?

Today we’re going to explore how the digital transformation’s acceleration seems real enough, but how it’s not landing equally. We’ll start by going over a short run of earnings results, talk to Yext CEO Howard Lerman about what his B2B SaaS company is seeing, and wrap with notes on what could be coming next from software shops.

A quick word on digital transformation

We all hear about digital transformation, but it’s hard to define. Generally, it’s a broad area that includes digitization of manual processes, modern software development practices like continuous delivery and containerization and a general way of moving faster via technology — especially in the cloud.

Speaking last month on Extra Crunch Live, Box CEO Aaron Levie defined the term as he sees it. “The way that we think about digital transformation is that much of the world has a whole bunch of processes and ways of working — ways of communicating and ways of collaborating where if those business processes or that way we worked were able to be done in digital forms or in the cloud, you’d actually be more productive, more secure and you’d be able to serve your customers better. You’d be able to automate more business processes.” he said.

What we’re seeing now is that the pandemic has accelerated the rate of change much faster than many had anticipated. Efforts to slow the spread of COVID-19 and its related workplace disruptions have accelerated what would have been a normal timetable. But on its own, that doesn’t mean the market is seeing equal results across every company and industry that might be part of that trend.

Earnings results

Lots of SaaS companies reported earnings this week, but two sets of returns stuck out as we reviewed the results, those from Slack and Smartsheet.

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TaxProper raises $2M to automate getting your property taxes lowered

If you own your home, how much do you pay for property taxes? Too much? Sounds about right.

If you disagree with how much you’re paying in property taxes, you can appeal the assessment. Most people don’t, though — perhaps because they are unaware they can, or because they just don’t have the time to deal with the lawyers and paperwork.

TaxProper, a company out of Y Combinators Summer 2019 batch, has raised $2M to simplify the process. The round was led by Khosla Ventures, backed by Global Founders Capital, Clocktower Ventures, and a handful of angel investors.

Once you’ve punched in your address, TaxProper’s algorithm looks at the assessments of similar homes in your surrounding area, looking at things like size, number of rooms, construction materials, etc.

If the algorithm determines that you’re paying more than your share, they generate the required paperwork and send it off to the county. The company estimates that their part of the process takes 3-5 minutes (after which you’re waiting on the county’s response, which they say takes 6-8 weeks.)

They’re offering up two different pricing models, charging either a $149 up-front fee or 30% of total first year tax savings. If their algorithm says your taxes can’t be lowered, you don’t pay — nor do you pay if the appeal gets denied. The company tells me they’re currently seeing an average per customer savings of around $700.

TaxProper’s two co-founders have a good bit of experience in the space of taxes and government. Geoff Segal was previously an Actuarial Statistician and Research Analyst for State Farm, while Thomas Dowling was a Municipal Finance Advisor for Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot. 

One thing to note: TaxProper is only up and running in select areas right now, as the company tests different strategies and makes sure they’re doing everything right region-by-region. It’s currently available in Chicago and the surrounding Cook County area, with plans to roll out “in the coming months” in New York and Texas.

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Portobel turns food producers into direct-to-consumer businesses

A startup called Portobel is working to help food producers shift their businesses so they can support direct-to-consumer deliveries.

Portobel is backed by Heroic Ventures and led by Ranjith Kumaran, founder or co-founder of file-sharing company Hightail (acquired by OpenText) and loyalty startup PunchTab (acquired by Walmart Labs).

Kumaran told me that he and his co-founders Ted Everson and Itai Maron started out with the goal of improving the delivery process by using low-cost, internet-connected devices to track each order. As they began testing this out — primarily with dairy companies and other producers of perishable goods — customers started to ask them, “Hey, you can monitor these things, can you actually deliver these things, too?”

So last year, the company started making deliveries of its own, which involved managing its own warehouses and hiring its own drivers. Kumaran said the resulting process is “a machine that turns wholesale pallets into direct-to-consumer deliveries.”

He also emphasized that the company is taking safety precautions during the pandemic, ensuring that all of its warehouse workers and drivers have masks and other protective equipment, and that the drivers use hand sanitizer between deliveries.

Image Credits: Portobel

Portobel currently operates in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles/Orange County. Kumaran said the COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated the demand for the startup’s services, with the number of households it serves tripling since April.

That might sound a little surprising, since supermarkets were basically the one store that customers are still visiting regularly. Plus, there are a range of grocery delivery options.

However, Kumaran suggested that the D2C model is better for both producers and consumers. Producers get recurring orders for larger packages of food. And for consumers, “If you buy straight from the wholesale producer … everything’s in stock.”

As for delivery, he said that when you buy your groceries online, things are being packed and dispatched at your local store.”

“All those things about selection and availability, put those aside — the modern grocery store is not set up for efficient e-commerce delivery,” he added. “They need to block the aisles to pick up product, there’s no dedicated place to dispatch deliveries. That’s kind of why, if you’ve tried [grocery delivery], there are unpredictable delivery windows. It’s a challenge for these guys to scale online.”

Portobel’s customers include San Francisco-based grocery company Moo Cow Market. In a statement, Moo Cow founder Alexandra Mysoor said, “The pandemic has propelled retail as we knew it into a new wave, blending and merging all past and current forms of commerce. That’s where companies like Moo Cow Market enter and can scale and grow thanks to services like Portobel.”

Where top VCs are investing in D2C

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Alexis Ohanian steps down from Reddit board, asks for his seat to go to a black board member

Alexis Ohanian, the founder and former CEO of Reddit, stepped down from his position on the company’s board Friday as the U.S. roils with nationwide protests against police brutality after Minneapolis police killed George Floyd, an unarmed black man.

Ohanian is calling on the company he founded to fill his position with a black board member, a high-profile step for a company with its own rocky track record around issues of race.

I've resigned as a member of the reddit board, I have urged them to fill my seat with a black candidate, + I will use future gains on my Reddit stock to serve the black community, chiefly to curb racial hate, and I’m starting with a pledge of $1M to @kaepernick7’s @yourrightscamp

— Alexis Ohanian Sr. (@alexisohanian) June 5, 2020

Many leaders within tech are calling for the industry to have its own reckoning with entrenched racism — an effort Ohanian’s decision may amplify. With the decision, Ohanian also announced that future gains of his company stock would be invested in the black community, “chiefly to curb racial hate.” That amount could total to around $50 million, according to reliable sources. His first move will be to give $1 million to Know Your Rights Camp, an organization founded by Colin Kaepernick that focuses on self-empowerment and safety for black and brown communities.

“I co-founded @reddit 15 years ago to help people find community and a sense of belonging. It is long overdue to do the right thing. I’m doing this for me, for my family, and for my country” Ohanian wrote on Twitter. “I’m saying this as a father who needs to be able to answer his black daughter when she asks: ‘What did you do?’ ”

Ohanian stepped away from his daily duties at Reddit in 2018 but kept a seat on the board at the time. His transition to being more hands-off at the company he founded has been gradual over the last few years as he spent more time on Initialized Capital, an early-stage venture fund he co-founded. In recent years, Ohanian has also become a more outspoken advocate for policies like paid family leave, calling for more equitable, flexible leave policies and citing his own experience as a father. In 2017, Ohanian had a daughter with his wife, tennis legend Serena Williams.

Reddit is still in turmoil

Reddit occupies a unique place among social media platforms. It has largely avoided the spotlight of platforms like Facebook and Twitter, but not for lack of its own systemic problems. Though it hasn’t been as high-profile, the platform has faced its own reckoning around harmful content in recent years for hosting virulently racist content on subcommunities like r/blackpeoplehate, r/The_Donald and others. Reddit has taken action against those communities over time, either banning them outright or placing them in a state of “quarantine” where they are not surfaced in search or recommendations and require a user to click through to view them.

The company’s history with diversifying its leadership has been spotty. In 2015, internal turmoil at the company and a backlash from its users led to the resignation of the company’s interim CEO, Ellen Pao. As we reported in 2016, more than a dozen senior Reddit employees, many of them women and people of color, left the company in the resulting tumult. As it continued its overdue campaign to crack down on violence and hate speech, Reddit brought in its first female board member, Porter Gale, last year.

“I believe resignation can actually be an act of leadership from people in power right now,” Ohanian said in his announcement. “To everyone fighting to fix our broken nation: do not stop.”

Black tech leaders issue call to action to fight racial injustice in the Bay Area

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Join Eventbrite CEO Julia Hartz for a live Q&A: June 11 at 3 pm EST/Noon PDT/7 pm GMT

One of the earliest disruptions created by the novel coronavirus manifested in the form of event cancellations. Some of the world’s biggest tech conferences, like F8 and Google NEXT, got postponed and others turned to digital options to still connect. Even Disrupt is going digital this year.

It is an unprecedented time for the events world, so we are bringing someone right in the center of it to our Extra Crunch Live stage: Eventbrite CEO Julia Hartz. In fact, Extra Crunch members can ask their own questions directly to the CEO and are encouraged to do so live on the call.

Hartz is leading the publicly traded company as it grows more popular than ever with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. At the same time, the global slowdown of in-person event ticketing due to COVID-19 has had a material impact on Eventbrite’s business. What does that mean for employee morale? Collaboration with other companies? And overall culture at the business?

Eventbrite has swiftly transitioned to virtual events, with thousands of listings across categories like professional events, classes, health and wellness, science and tech, community and culture and more. Hartz also told Billboard that the company remains committed to serving independent music venues, which have been hit hard by the global health crisis, and hinted that Eventbrite may shift to a self-service ticket model.

The company reported that, since enhancing its online events service in 2019, and in the midst of social distancing, Eventbrite users are posting nearly 20k online events every day, with a 2,000+ percent year-over-year increase of online events taking place in April 2020 compared to April 2019. This announcement came after Eventbrite said it would cut $100 million in costs, which included layoffs.

We’ll talk with Hartz about how she is leading her company through a crisis and what the future holds for bringing people together. We’ll also discuss how widespread layoffs may impact the future of diversity in our workforces.

Hartz will also be asked to weigh in on advice for other founders hoping to emerge from COVID-19 from fundraising to strategy. As always, EC subscribers are invited to log onto the call to ask questions live.

Details are below for Extra Crunch subscribers; if you need a pass, get a cheap trial here.

Chat with you all in a week!

When, where, Zoom

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Daily Crunch: Twitter has a record week

Twitter sees record downloads, Signal adds a new face-blurring feature and Facebook rethinks its approach to government-backed media.

Here’s your Daily Crunch for June 5, 2020.

1. Twitter has a record-breaking week as users looked for news of protests and COVID-19

Civil unrest due to the nationwide George Floyd protests drove Twitter to a record number of new installs this week, according to data from two app store intelligence firms, Apptopia and Sensor Tower. While the firms’ exact findings differed in terms of the total number of new downloads or when records were broken, the firms agreed that Twitter’s app had its largest-ever week, globally.

For example, according to Sensor Tower, Twitter saw just over 1 million installs on Monday, making it the day with the most single-day installs since the firm began tracking app store data on January 1, 2014.

2. Signal now has built-in face blurring for photos

This is supposed to make it easy to protect someone’s identity without leaving any trace on other, less secure apps. After noting Signal’s support of the protests against police brutality, founder Moxie Marlinspike wrote in a blog post, “We’ve also been working to figure out additional ways we can support everyone in the street right now. One immediate thing seems clear: 2020 is a pretty good year to cover your face.”

3. Facebook adds labels identifying state-controlled media

Facebook will soon add labels to news outlets owned or otherwise controlled by a government — that doesn’t necessarily mean the information is false or unreliable, but at least it’s worth considering the source. Those outlets will also be banned from buying ads starting this summer.

4. OTTO Motors raises $29M to fill factories with autonomous delivery robots

The OTTO Motors division of Clearpath Robotics launched in 2015. It’s landed a number of contracts to bring its autonomous mobile robot platform into factories, with customers including GE, Toyota, Nestlé and Berry Global.

5. How to get the most from your corporate VC after you get the check

Scott Orn of Kruze Consulting looks at the factors that founders need to keep in mind if they want the best chance at a productive and successful relationship with their corporate VC. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. Google says Iranian, Chinese hackers targeted Trump, Biden campaigns

Shane Huntley, director for Google’s Threat Analysis Group, tweeted that hackers backed by China and Iran recently targeted the Trump and Biden campaigns using malicious phishing emails. But, Huntley said, there are “no signs of compromise,” and both campaigns were alerted.

7. PhotoRoom automagically removes background from your photo

The concept is extremely simple: After selecting a photo, PhotoRoom removes the background from that photo and lets you select another background. When you’re done tweaking, you can save the photo and open it in another app.

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.

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Join Eventbrite CEO Julia Hartz for a live Q&A: June 11 at 3 pm EST/Noon PDT/7 pm GMT

One of the earliest disruptions created by the novel coronavirus manifested in the form of event cancellations. Some of the world’s biggest tech conferences, like F8 and Google NEXT, got postponed and others turned to digital options to still connect. Even Disrupt is going digital this year.

It is an unprecedented time for the events world, so we are bringing someone right in the center of it to our Extra Crunch Live stage: Eventbrite CEO Julia Hartz. In fact, Extra Crunch members can ask their own questions directly to the CEO and are encouraged to do so live on the call.

Hartz is leading the publicly traded company as it grows more popular than ever with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. At the same time, the global slowdown of in-person event ticketing due to COVID-19 has had a material impact on Eventbrite’s business. What does that mean for employee morale? Collaboration with other companies? And overall culture at the business?

Eventbrite has swiftly transitioned to virtual events, with thousands of listings across categories like professional events, classes, health and wellness, science and tech, community and culture and more. Hartz also told Billboard that the company remains committed to serving independent music venues, which have been hit hard by the global health crisis, and hinted that Eventbrite may shift to a self-service ticket model.

The company reported that, since enhancing its online events service in 2019, and in the midst of social distancing, Eventbrite users are posting nearly 20k online events every day, with a 2,000+ percent year-over-year increase of online events taking place in April 2020 compared to April 2019. This announcement came after Eventbrite said it would cut $100 million in costs, which included layoffs.

We’ll talk with Hartz about how she is leading her company through a crisis and what the future holds for bringing people together. We’ll also discuss how widespread layoffs may impact the future of diversity in our workforces.

Hartz will also be asked to weigh in on advice for other founders hoping to emerge from COVID-19 from fundraising to strategy. As always, EC subscribers are invited to log onto the call to ask questions live.

Details are below for Extra Crunch subscribers; if you need a pass, get a cheap trial here.

Chat with you all in a week!

When, where, Zoom

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What grocery startup Weee! learned from China’s tech giants

When Larry Liu moved to the U.S. in 2003, one of the first challenges he experienced was the lack of Chinese ingredients available in local groceries. A native of Hubei, a Chinese province famous for its freshwater fish and lotus-inspired dishes, Liu got by with a limited supply found at local Asian groceries in the Bay Area.

His yearning for home food eventually prompted him to quit a stable financial management role at microcontroller company Atmel and go on to launch Weee!, an online market selling Asian produce, snacks and skincare products.

Like other players in grocery e-commerce, the five-year-old startup has seen exponential growth since the coronavirus outbreak as millions are confined to cooking and eating at home. Nearly a quarter of Americans purchased groceries online to avoid offline shopping during the pandemic, according to Statista data. Online grocery giants Instacart and Walmart Grocery boomed, both hitting record downloads.

In a Zoom call with TechCrunch, Liu, who’s now chief executive of Weee!, said that COVID-19 played a “very important role” in his company’s recent growth, and paved its way to profitability.

“It happened a lot faster than we expected, but we were growing rapidly with even more ambitious plans for expansion prior to COVID-19,” he said. “People are buying more because restaurants are closed. Many are first-time users of grocery delivery.”

The startup’s revenue is up 700% year-over-year and is estimated to generate an annual revenue in the lower hundreds of millions of dollars.

Online grocery, the WeChat way

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How to get the most from your corporate VC after you get the check

Scott Orn Contributor

Scott runs operations at Kruze Consulting, a fast-growing startup CFO consulting firm. Kruze is based in San Francisco with clients in the Bay Area, Los Angeles and New York.

More posts by this contributor

• 15 things founders should know before accepting funding from a corporate VC
• What should startup founders know before negotiating with corporate VCs?

Bill Growney Contributor

Bill Growney, a partner in Goodwin’s Technology & Life Sciences group, focuses his practice on advising technology and other startup companies through their full corporate life-cycle.

More posts by this contributor

• 15 things founders should know before accepting funding from a corporate VC
• What should startup founders know before negotiating with corporate VCs?

Raising capital from a corporate VC can bring many benefits beyond just money. Strategic CVCs, who measure ROI based on the strength of the strategic partnership with their portfolio companies as well as the financial return, will typically seek to maximize their relationships with startups for a long time after the investment is made.

Specifically, a CVC investor can offer the following to an entrepreneur:

1. Resources and product feedback. CVC parent companies often have deep institutional expertise and teams of subject-matter experts who can advise startups on product development and guide them through issues.

2. Partnerships. CVCs can leverage their supply chain and operations to build new partnerships that otherwise may have taken months or years for startups to create.

3. Distribution. Strategic CVCs can become a distribution channel for a startup, connect that startup with their suppliers, or even use the startup to become a channel for the parent company.

4. Branding halo. If a large company is willing to invest in your startup, it’s a strong signal that your product is good and that your business has a bright future.

5. Acquisition. Many CVCs invest in startups that they may want to acquire down the line. A CVC may also endorse an exit-seeking portfolio company to their partner companies or suppliers.

Granted, seeing results from these benefits takes time, and even the best of intentions during a capital raise process may not always yield an optimal strategic relationship.

Here’s a list of factors to keep in mind for founders who want the best chances of a productive and successful relationship with their CVC.

Know which type of CVC you’re dealing with from the outset. In our previous posts, we outlined the three types of CVCs — experienced institutional investors, industry-specific strategics, and beginner or “tourist” CVCs. As we’ve discussed, be sure to spend time interviewing and building relationships with CVCs to determine which type they are, what kinds of benefits and resources they can offer and what their history looks like in terms of successfully partnering with startups over time. When in doubt, ask other founders who have done deals with them!

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15 things founders should know before accepting funding from a corporate VC

Scott Orn Contributor

Scott runs operations at Kruze Consulting, a fast-growing startup CFO consulting firm. Kruze is based in San Francisco with clients in the Bay Area, Los Angeles and New York.

More posts by this contributor

• 15 things founders should know before accepting funding from a corporate VC
• What should startup founders know before negotiating with corporate VCs?

Bill Growney Contributor

Bill Growney, a partner in Goodwin’s Technology & Life Sciences group, focuses his practice on advising technology and other startup companies through their full corporate life-cycle.

More posts by this contributor

• 15 things founders should know before accepting funding from a corporate VC
• What should startup founders know before negotiating with corporate VCs?

More than $50 billion of corporate venture capital (CVC) was deployed in 2018 and new data indicates that nearly half of all venture rounds will include a corporate investor. The CVC trend is heating up and the need for founders and startup executives to stay informed is higher than ever.

We’ve covered the basics in this series, including how to approach CVCs and what to know before the investment, what to look out for when negotiating, and getting the most out of a CVC partnership after the investment.

A great CVC investor can be the best of both worlds — a strong corporate champion who provides insights and connections to help your startup succeed and a committed financial partner who provides the capital you need to grow. But CVCs aren’t just VCs with different business cards. Finding the right CVC requires the right approach and strategy, and getting the right CVC on your cap table can bring unique and lasting value to your startup.

To wind down this series, here’s a list of the top 15 things every founder should know before signing a term sheet with a CVC.

1. CVCs come in three major types. The type of CVC you’re dealing with will determine a great deal about the potential for the partnership, the professionalism of the investing process, the resources you’ll have available once the investment is made and much more.
   

   Image credits: Orn/Growney

2. Different CVCs have different investing strategies. Some CVCs view deals through the lens of, “I’m looking for a great team, huge market and a chance to bring in funding and connections to make a business as strong as it can be.” Others see their investment like, “I’m looking for a solution/product/platform that I can bring into my company or use to expose my company to a brand new marketplace or technology.” As a founder, it’s best to know which type you’re dealing with before the pitch.
3. CVCs can offer benefits beyond capital. Choose one who can offer money AND … . As Rick Prostko, Managing Partner at Comcast Ventures, says, “Look for someone who will understand your business, meet with you and decide that there’s something beyond just capital that will form the basis for that relationship. In today’s venture market, founders want money AND value. Seek out a CVC who has valuable experience to provide, and look for someone who’s been an operator in this segment previously or who has valuable insight and experience to offer.”
4. Some CVCs are a better fit for your company than others. As with all investors, some will forge a better relationship with you and the exec team. But with strategic CVCs, the need for a strong bond at the outset is even higher since you’ll be embarking on a strategic partnership with the CVC’s parent company.
5. Do your own diligence, just as they do theirs. The best way to find out what type of CVC you’re dealing with, what to expect in the investment process and whether your chances are strong for a post-investment partnership is to ask around. Talk to other companies within the CVC’s portfolio, or founders who’ve pitched the CVC in the past. Ask for their feedback on how it went and what to expect. You’ll never regret having more information.
6. Come into the relationship with ideas for how the CVC can help your company. Do you see possibilities for product feedback loops? New distribution channels? A potential future acquisition by the parent company? Don’t be afraid to share your vision with the CVC during the pitch, and discuss how and whether that vision can be realized.
7. Expect deeper product and technical diligence. CVCs have technical, product and market experts at their disposal, so their level of product diligence is typically more rigorous than traditional VCs. Be prepared for some grilling by subject matter experts. On the flip side, this diligence process provides you with exposure to potential customers and partners inside the corporation, so use this time to your advantage.
8. Stay aware of what information you reveal during the diligence process. Remember that you’re sharing confidential info with a large company. If you stay thoughtful and strategic with what you share, and determine whether the CVC is truly interested in doing a deal before you offer financial, technical and competitive information, you’ll usually be fine. Don’t rely exclusively on NDAs — they only provide so much protection.
9. Ask questions during negotiations. Do they want to lead your round? Do they want a board seat? Do they understand your future fundraising strategy? Will they be using experienced lawyers to do the deal? These are all important touch points during the negotiation process, and the answers will be revealing.
10. . Set clear rules on ownership percentages ahead of time. As a rule, don’t let any single CVC own more than 19.9% of your company. If they own more than that, the CVC’s parent company will likely need to consolidate your financials into their annual and quarterly reports. If that happens, you’ll be required to get an expensive audit done, meet strict reporting deadlines and invest in financial planning and projections, all of which can hinder your bottom line.
11. . Be sure to get the CVC to waive audit requirements. We mean it! Do everything you can to avoid any audit obligations. Audits are notoriously time consuming and expensive — we’ve seen audits by Big Four firms cost startups over $30,000. While many investor rights agreements “require” an audit, traditional VCs usually waive this requirement to avoid wasting a founder’s time and money. You want a CVC investor to do the same.
12. . Never give a CVC a Right of First Refusal. Under no circumstances should you let a CVC get a ROFR, which would give the parent corporation the right to “beat” any other potential acquirer if and when you try to sell your startup. In practice, a ROFR means that no smart competitor to the parent organization will try to purchase your company because they know the CVC’s corporate arm will be able to swoop in and steal the deal.
13. . Be aware that you run a risk of regime change. Staff turnover is a reality that CVCs face as much as any other large corporate operation. Ask the CVC leading your investment: Who will support the company if he or she leaves? What will happen to the CVC if the person leading the venture arm departs? Will the company still do their pro rata if personnel changes happen? What about commercial relationships that come from the relationship? You have a right to know as much as possible at the beginning, though the future can always change.
14. . You may have to tackle regulatory issues. If the CVC’s parent company is in a certain area, it may be subject to government regulation. For instance, banks must adhere to a variety of regulations very different from those that apply to large tech companies. Navigating these laws can be costly and time consuming, so be aware of what you’re getting into before you sign the dotted line and discuss how you and the CVC can avoid hitting any regulatory roadblocks.
15. . Know that you may face challenges in the relationship over time. While startups thrive on renouncing hierarchy, chasing innovation and pivoting on a dime, larger corporations operate at a different pace and under a different paradigm. Change comes slower, decisions often involve more parties and some business units have different priorities than others. As a founder, you’ll be in charge of navigating the CVC’s parent company in order to maximize the partnership value.

There are plenty of benefits to taking CVC investments. Many CVC investments lead to acquisitions, and even if the discussions with a CVC fall apart, your meeting can result in valuable introductions that yield new business relationships. The rising CVC trend offers a brave new world for entrepreneurs. If you know the ropes of CVC investing, you could be in for a partnership that benefits you both.

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The IPO window is open (again)

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

ZoomInfo went public yesterday. After pricing its IPO $1 ahead of its proposed range at $21 per share, the company closed its first day’s trading worth $34.00, up 61.9%, according to Yahoo Finance. Then the company gained another 5.2% in after-hours trading.

Whether or not you feel that this SaaS player was worth the revenue multiple its original, $8 billion valuation dictated — let alone that same multiple times 1.6x — the message from the offering was clear: the IPO window is open.

This is not news to a few companies looking to take advantage of today’s strong equity prices.

Used-car marketplace Vroom is looking to get its shares public before its Q2 numbers come out, despite a history of slim gross profit generation. The company hopes to go public for as much as $1.9 billion, a modest uptick from its final private valuations.

We’ll get another dose of data when Vroom does price — how much investors are willing to pay for slim-margin revenue will tell us a bit more than what we learned from ZoomInfo, which has far superior gross margins. Investors have already signaled that they are content to value high-margin software-ish revenues richly; Vroom is more of a question, but if it does price strongly we’ll know public investors are looking for any piece of growth they can find.

This brings us to the latest news: Amwell has confidentially filed to go public. Formerly known as American Well, CNBC reports that the venture-backed telehealth company has dramatically expanded its customer base:

Telemedicine has seen an uptick in recent months, as people in need of health services turned to phone calls and video chats so they could avoid exposure to Covid-19. The company told CNBC last month that it’s seen a 1,000% increase in visits due to coronavirus, and closer to 3,000% to 4,000% in some places.

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PhotoRoom automagically removes background from your photo

Meet PhotoRoom, a French startup that has been working on a utility photography mobile app. The concept is extremely simple, which is probably the reason why it has attracted a ton of downloads over the past few months.

After selecting a photo, PhotoRoom removes the background from that photo and lets you select another background. When you’re done tweaking your photo, you can save the photo and open it in another app.

“My original vision comes from my time when I was working at GoPro,” co-founder and CEO Matthieu Rouif told me. “I often had to remove the background from images and when the designer was out of office, I would spend a ton of time doing it manually.”

And it turns out many people have been looking for a simple app that lets them go in and out as quickly as possible with an edited photo in their camera roll.

For instance, people selling clothes and other items on peer-to-peer e-commerce platforms have been using PhotoRoom to improve their photos. PhotoRoom is often recommended in online discussions or YouTube tutorials about optimizing your Poshmark or Depop listings.

Downloads really started to take off around February. PhotoRoom now has 300,000 monthly active users. The app is only available on iOS for now. And if you’re a professional using it regularly, you can pay for a subscription ($9.49 per month or $46.99 per year) to remove the watermark and unlock more features.

“Subscriptions are what works best on mobile for photo and video apps,” Rouif said.

Behind the scene, PhotoRoom uses machine learning models to identify objects on a photo. And the vision goes beyond removing backgrounds.

Photoshop, the clear leader in photo editing, has been designed decades ago. There’s a steep learning curve if you want to use it professionally. It’s hard to understand layers, layer masks, channels, etc.

PhotoRoom wants to build a mobile-first photo-editing app that doesn’t lazily borrow Photoshop’s metaphors and interface elements. “What would be Photoshop if you could understand what’s on the photo,” Rouif said.

While the app relies heavily on templates, you can tweak your images by adding objects, moving them around, adding some shadow and editing elements individually. Image composition is 100% up to the user.

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Like VSCO, Darkroom, PicsArt, Filmic Pro and Halide, PhotoRoom belongs to a group of prosumer apps that are tackling photo and video editing from different ways. A generation of users who grew up using visual social networks are now pushing the limits of those apps — they look simple when you first use them, but they offer a ton of depth when you learn what you can do with them. And they prove that smartphones can be great computers, beyond content consumption.

Rouif was the head of product at Stupeflix, a powerful video editing app that was acquired by GoPro back in 2016. PhotoRoom is just getting started as there are only four people working on the app, including two interns.

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