Startups Weekly: What education do you need to build a great tech company?

Editor’s note: Get this free weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use by email every Saturday morning (7am PT). Subscribe here. The easy startup ideas have all been done — the ones that just required some homebrew hardware hacking or PHP dorm-room coding to get off the ground. These days, you might need multiple advanced technical degrees to accomplish something significant. At least that’s what Danny Crichton muses grimly this week, in an essay entitled “The two PhD problem of startups today.” Here’s one newsy example: Take...

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The TechCrunch Exchange: What’s an IPO to a SPAC?

The TechCrunch Exchange newsletter launched this morning. Starting next week, only a partial version will hit the site, so sign up to get the full issue. Welcome to The TechCrunch Exchange! I’m incredibly excited that this newsletter is finally in your hands. There’s so much to chat about, dissect and grok. We’re going to be very busy. What will we do each Saturday? First, we’ll expand on the themes that The Exchange covers for Extra Crunch on weekdays. We’ll also run through key startup-related news from the public and private markets....

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Snoop Dogg’s Casa Verde gets into the sleep space, backing NY-based Proper

Helping Americans get their 40 winks has never been more necessary as the country faces what some health experts have called a sleep epidemic, and Snoop Dogg’s cannabis-focused firm Casa Verde Capital wants to help. The firm is leading a $9.5 million investment into a company called Proper, which is launching with a combination of sleep coaching and supplements, pitching a “holistic” sleep health solution. One-third of U.S. adults don’t get enough sleep according to Proper’s estimates, and the company’s chief executive, Nancy Ramamurthi, says that...

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Building your startup’s customer advisory board

A customer advisory board (CAB) can be an invaluable resource for startups, but many founders struggle with putting together the right group of advisors and how to incentivize them. At our TechCrunch Early Stage event, Saam Motamedi, a general partner at Greylock Partners, talked about how he thinks about putting together the right CAB. “We encourage all of our early-stage companies to put this in place,” Motamedi said. The goal here is to speed up the process to get to product/market fit since your CAB will provide you with regular feedback. “The...

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SaaS startup Swoop raises $3.2M to modernize mom-and-pop transportation companies

Chauffeured group transportation — the vehicles used for corporate outings, special events and even weddings — is a fragmented industry, with hundreds of small operators that rely on analog systems to book customers. Now in this era of COVID-19, these operators are being squeezed as travel and tourism have dwindled and companies have opted to have employees work from home. One Los Angeles-based transportation booking startup called Swoop aims to bring these small, local operators into the digital age with a new software-as-a-service platform that...

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Neo’s Ali Partovi on best practices for hiring early-stage startup engineers

On day one of TechCrunch’s Early Stage virtual conference, Ali Partovi joined us to discuss best practices for startups looking to hire engineers. It’s a subject that’s near and dear to his heart: Partovi is co-founder and CEO of Neo, a venture aimed at including young engineers in a community alongside seasoned industry vets. The fund includes top executives from a slew of different industry titans, including Amazon, Airbnb, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Stripe. Partovi is probably best known in the Valley for co-founding Code.org with...

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Watch the first TechCrunch Early Stage ‘Pitch Deck Teardown’

Have you ever taken something apart, like a clock or a motor? The method is particularly useful when it comes to learning how things work — or how they don’t, in some cases. During TechCrunch’s Early Stage event, two venture capitalists took pitch decks and evaluated them with a critical eye on content, presentation and overall messaging. If you missed it the first time through, watch it below in its entirety. The session was a blast. This was the first time we’ve hosted this event, but we’re working on bringing this session to TechCrunch’s main...

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Early-bird savings for Disrupt 2020 ends next week

Whether you’re an early-stage startup founder, investor, enthusiast or another integral member of the community, you can’t afford to miss Disrupt 2020 — THE tech conference at the epicenter of the startup ecosystem. Here’s something else you can’t afford to miss — early bird pricing. Buy your pass before July 31 at 11:59 p.m. PT and you’ll save up to $300. The all-virtual Disrupt, which takes place September 14 -18, may look and feel a bit different, but there’s nothing virtual about the programming quality, opportunities for growth and essential...

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Revolut extends Series D round to $580 million with $80 million in new funding

Fintech startup Revolut just announced that it has raised $80 million as part of its Series D round that it announced in February. The new influx of funding comes from TSG Consumer Partners. In February, Revolut raised a $500 million led by TCV at a $5.5 billion valuation. Today’s new funding extends that funding round to $580 million — the company says the valuation remains the same. If you’re not familiar with Revolut, the company is building a financial service to replace traditional bank accounts. You can open an account from an app in just...

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Investments in bioproducts surge as Geltor nabs new money

The manufacturer of a vegan collagen, Geltor, has raised a new round of financing — $90 million, according to people familiar with the company. It’s another sign of the newfound viability of sustainability and cell-based, vegetarian replacements for animal products. Sustainable bio-products, whether plant-based, genetically modified or cell-cultured, are having a big year. In the month of July alone, companies developing sustainable alternatives to animal agriculture and the industry’s byproducts have announced or closed on investments totaling...

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Entri raises $3.1M to build a vernacular language ‘Udemy for India’

Scores of online learning startups have emerged in India in recent years to serve school-age students. More than 250 million students are enrolled across schools in urban and rural parts of the country. Whether one is in kindergarten, or preparing to join a college to pursue an undergraduate course, there are several startups offering a plethora of courses at affordable price points to help these students get there. Byju’s, Unacademy and Vedantu among other local startups today help tens of millions of students each year gain access to high-profile...

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Are insurtech startups undervalued?

On the heels of Hippo’s funding round and our exploration of how the private markets appear to be more conservative than public investors at the moment, we’re asking a new question: are a bunch of insurtech startups undervalued? Hippo — an insurtech startup focused on home insurance — put together a $150 million round at a $1.5 billion post-money valuation after growing its gross written premium to $270 million “in the past 12 months.” At that valuation, and at pre-adjustment premium scale, Hippo is super-cheap compared to Lemonade, another...

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The 3% gap in no-code

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Up top the crew this week was the regular contingent: Danny Crichton, Natasha Mascarenhas, and myself. As a tiny programming note, we’re going back to posting some videos on YouTube in a few weeks, so make sure to peep the TechCrunch channel if that’s your jam. And we did a special episode on the SPAC boom, if you are into financial arcana. For more on SPAC’s –> here The Equity crew tried something...

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The Not Company, a maker of plant-based meat and dairy substitutes in Chile, will soon be worth $250M

The Not Company, Latin America’s leading contender in the plant-based meat and dairy substitute market, is about to close on an $85 million round of funding that would value it at $250 million, according to sources familiar with the company’s plans. The latest round of funding comes on the heels of a series of successes for the Santiago-based business. In the two years since NotCo launched on the global stage, the company has expanded beyond its mayonnaise product into milk, ice cream and hamburgers. Other products, including a chicken meat substitute,...

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Hear how three startups are approaching quantum computing differently at TC Disrupt 2020

Quantum computing is at an interesting point. It’s at the cusp of being mature enough to solve real problems. But like in the early days of personal computers, there are lots of different companies trying different approaches to solving the fundamental physics problems that underly the technology, all while another set of startups is looking ahead and thinking about how to integrate these machines with classical computers — and how to write software for them. At Disrupt 2020 on September 14-18, we will have a panel with D-Wave CEO Alan Baratz,...

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