Palantir and the great revenue mystery

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. You can subscribe to the newsletter here if you haven’t yet.

Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors.

Palantir and the great revenue mystery

As I write to you on Friday afternoon, the Palantir S-1 has yet to drop, but TechCrunch did break some news regarding the impending filing and just how big the company actually is. Please forgive the block quote, but here’s our reporting:

In screenshots of a draft S-1 statement dated yesterday (August 20), Palantir is listed as generating revenues of roughly $742 million in 2019 (Palantir’s fiscal year is a calendar year). That revenue was up from $595 million in 2018, a gain of roughly 25%. […] Palantir lists a net loss of roughly $580 million for 2019, which is almost identical to its loss in 2018. The company listed a net loss percentage of 97% for 2018, improving to a loss of 78% for last year.

A few notes from this. First, those losses are flat icky. Palantir was founded in 2003 or 2004 depending on who you read, which means that it’s an old company. And it was running an effective -100% net margin in 2018? Yowza.

Second, what the flocking frack is that revenue number? Did you expect to see Palantir come in with revenues of less than $1 billion? If you did, well done. After a deluge of articles over the years discussing just how big Palantir had become, I was anticipating a bit more (more here for context). Here are two examples:

• Reporting from TechCrunch that Palantir expected “more than $1 billion in contracts” in 2014
• Reporting from Bloomberg that Palantir had “booked deals totaling $1.7 billion in 2015”

Notably, Palantir’s real revenue result, or one very close to it, made it into Business Insider this April. The reporting makes the company’s S-1 less of a climax and more of a denouement. But, hey, we’re still glad to have the filing.

The Exchange will have a full breakdown of Palantir’s numbers Monday morning, but I think what Palantir coverage over the years shows is that when companies decline to share specific revenue figures that are clear, just presume that what they do share is misleading. (ARR is fine, trailing revenue is fine, “contract” metrics are useless.)

Market Notes

The Exchange spent a lot of time digging into e-commerce venture capital results this week, including notes from some VCs about why e-commerce-focused startups aren’t raising as much as we might have guessed.

Overstock!

We got a chance to fire a question over to the CEO of Overstock.com on the matter, adding to what we learned from private investors on the same topic. So here’s the online retailer’s CEO Jonathan Johnson, answering our question on how many smaller vendors are signing up to sell on its platform during today’s e-comm boom:

We have had increased demand to sell on Overstock and we are adding new partners daily. To protect the customer experience, we have become more selective and have increased the requirements to become a selling partner on our site. Our customers’ experience is critical to our long-term success and if partners cannot perform to our operational standards, we do not allow them to sell on our site.

We care because Shopify and BigCommerce are stacking up new rev, and we were curious how widely the e-commerce step-change from major platforms extended. Seems like all of them are eating.

How today’s evolving economic landscape isn’t working out better for e-commerce-focused startups is still a surprise. Normally when the world changes rapidly, startups do well. This time it seems that Amazon and a few now-public unicorns are snagging most of the gains.

Airbnb!

Anyhoo, onto the Airbnb world; we have a few data points to share this week. According to Edison Trends data that was shared with us, here’s how Airbnb is doing lately:

• Per Edison Trends, “Airbnb July spend was 22% higher than it had been in 2019” in the United States.
• From the same source, Airbnb has seen U.S. spend rise around 10% week-over-week “increase in customer spending” since April 27th.

This explains why the company is prepping to go public sooner rather than later: The second-half of Q2 was a ramp back to normal for the company, and July was pretty good by the looks of it. If Airbnb is worth what it once was is not clear, but the company is certainly doing better than we might have expected it to. (More on the comeback here.)

For more on the big unicorn IPOs, I wrote a digest on Friday that should help ground you. I can say that with some confidence, as I wrote it to ground myself!

Various and Sundry

Finally some loose ends and other notes like an after-dinner amuse-bouche:

• A PE deal caught our eye, namely that the Williams Formula 1 team has been sold to Dorilton Capital. We had two thoughts: First, who is that. And second, it’s all good so long as they make the car faster but still slower than Haas F1, the official team of this newsletter, I’ve just decided. (Note to F1 lawyers: I am kidding, please don’t sue.)
• The folks at Sensor Tower sent over some fintech data this week that we tucked into our pocket for this newsletter. According to the data and analytics firm, “the five largest mobile payment apps saw their average monthly active users grow 41.5% year-over-year in 1H20 when compared to 1H19” for “Cash App, Venmo, PayPal, Zelle, and Google Pay.”
• Now, we’ve covered fintech often on The Exchange because it matters. But we’ve mostly been covering the startup/unicorn side of things. The above growth rates for some of the incumbent-led apps was a surprise, with faster growth than we would have guessed.
• If momentum from the majors is good or bad for startups, we leave to you to decide.
• Robinhood raised more money on the back of its huge revenue gains.
• Until the Palantir brouhaha, the lead story of our missive today was going to be about BlockFi, which we’re still working to understand. The crypto outfit just raised more money, so we got curious. I wound up chatting with the CEO on Twitter about, you know, what BlockFi is. Turns out it’s like a credit union, but in the crypto space. That seems fair enough. Credit unions work! Maybe this will, too! We have some questions into the company, the answers to which we might post if they are interesting. (The company has detractors, as well.)
• I made a bad bet.
• The Exchange chatted with a number of VC firms this week, including Tribeca Venture Partners for the first time. We caught up with Brian Hirsch from the firm, who told us a bit about the SaaS market (doing better than anticipated pre-COVID thanks to “rocket fuel” from the accelerating digital transformation) and the future of New York and cities in general (going to be fine long-term). We’ll cut out the best bits from the chat for next week if we have time.

And we’ll wrap with a tiny note from Greg Warnock, managing director at Mercato via email about the late-stage venture capital market. We asked for “notes on current valuation trends, in particular re: ARR/run rate multiples.” Here’s what we heard back:

I think valuations are correlated with economic activity and certainly something like COVID would qualify, but it’s very much a lagging indicator. It takes a while for entrepreneurs’ expectations to shift. Once they feel like the economy has moved in a permanent way, they begin to rethink. The first thing that they experience a little bit more urgency. They start from a belief that they can raise money any time they want, from anyone they want. Soon they realize there are fewer investors in market, that those opportunities appear less frequently, and each one should be managed more carefully. From there they go to thinking about terms. They might have to be flexible around some terms or some construct. Finally, they go to just fundamentally thinking about valuation in terms of multiples.

Going back to my first comment about economic factors being a lagging indicator, COVID related shocks haven’t moved through the system yet. It will take something more like a year for all the expectations to shift. My experience is that a shift in the economy from an investor standpoint creates a flight to quality. Companies with lackluster performance are first to feel lack of options in fundraising and exits. High performing businesses are the last ones to experience a change in valuation multiples. It disproportionately affects average businesses more quickly and more dramatically than high quality businesses which may feel no significant effects.

Hugs, fist bumps and good vibes,

Alex

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Startups Weekly: Will future unicorns go public sooner?

The public markets are staying receptive to tech IPOs, and tech unicorns are trying to recover from pandemic damage, polish up their financials, and head back towards the starting gates. This week, it’s Airbnb and Palantir, finally. Both have been startup icons of the past decade, and literally helped define the term “unicorn.” Now, both are illustrating the challenges that can come from sticking to private funding for years when going public was feasible.

First up, the travel rental company filed confidentially on Wednesday for a public offering, which means we’ll probably get a look at the numbers after Q3 is accounted for, as Alex Wilhelm has been covering. It had eventually decided to go public this year, then the pandemic reshaped its business and forced a down-round and mass layoffs. Now, it says its business has been booming again, and at the expense of some incumbents. The cost-savings plus the fresh growth potential could prove an exciting combo to public markets.

Palantir, meanwhile, appears headed to an IPO soonish judging by the S-1 screenshots that Danny Crichton scooped yesterday. However, the oldest unicorn (17 years) is still losing hundreds of millions every year, it still has a concentrated group of customers for its data and consultancy products, and its commercial business is still relatively smaller than government. The more positive financial news it has to offer? Government revenue lines have been up this year, apparently related to more pandemic demand, and the commercial side had been growing since before then. It is also working to manage its stock price, Danny hears, by doing a direct listing that unusually comes with a lock-up period for employees.

There were many reasons for unicorns to stay private this past decade, including huge checks, exciting growth, often-friendly terms and a general lack of scrutiny. Almost nobody actually thought a pandemic would affect everything like this. And without the pandemic, maybe the easy hindsight would be that the slow pace to IPO was the right one? Instead, each company is having to make decisions that damage its precious pool of talented employees and carefully nurtured culture.

In this scary new decade, founders who aspire to succeed on the scale of Airbnb and Palantir may see public markets as a less risky way to reward shareholders and fund future growth?

Or maybe more startups will be less interested in big equity rounds in the first place? Danny talked to one founder for Extra Crunch who has gone this route successfully with SaaS securitization.

Finally, check out Alex’s overview of what other companies are on the IPO track now over on Extra Crunch. These include: Asana, Qualtrics, ThredUp, Ant Financial, Affirm and once you get past this calendar year, many many more. 

(Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)

Farewell to The Creamery

In another sign of the changing times, a prominent local coffee shop for startups in San Francisco has closed up. Yes, The Creamery is done, sooner or later to be bulldozed for a development that has been years in the works. My former TechCrunch colleague Ryan Lawler came back to write a guest requiem for us. Here’s the start, but I suggest reading to the end to fully experience throat-lumping nostalgia about a certain time you didn’t know you were going to miss:

I don’t remember the first time I went to The Creamery,  probably sometime in early 2012.

I don’t remember the last time, either, although undoubtedly it was sometime last year, on a day when I had an extra five minutes to spare before boarding the Caltrain for my morning commute.

And I barely remember any of the other hundreds of times I stopped in to grab a coffee, have lunch with a friend or meet a possible source during my years at TechCrunch, which conveniently had an office just over a block away.

The Creamery was not a place you went for the memories. It was located firmly at the apex of convenience and comfort — which is why, for a certain period of about five years from the early to mid-teens of the third millennium, it was the perfect place for the SF technorati to see and be seen.

It’s also why, after 12 years of operating from one global recession to another, it’s shutting its doors for good….

Image Credits: Dennis Lane / Getty Images

Five investors talk about the real no-code opportunities

In our latest Extra Crunch investor survey, Alex teamed up with Lucas Matney to find where no-code concepts are actually having a big impact (versus just sounding exciting, which they do already). Here’s Laela Sturdy with CapitalG:

I don’t think it’s over-hyped, but I believe it’s often misunderstood. No code/low code has been around for a long time. Many of us have been using Microsoft Excel as a low-code tool for decades, but the market has caught fire recently due to an increase in applicable use cases and a ton of innovation in the capabilities of these new low-code/no-code platforms, specifically around their ease of use, the level and type of abstractions they can perform and their extensibility/connectivity into other parts of a company’s tech stack. On the demand side, the need for digital transformation is at an all-time high and cannot be met with incumbent tech platforms, especially given the shortage of technical workers. Low-code/no-code tools have stepped in to fill this void by enabling knowledge workers — who are 10x more populous than technical workers — to configure software without having to code. This has the potential to save significant time and money and to enable end-to-end digital experiences inside of enterprises faster….

If you look at large businesses today, IT departments and business units are perpetually out of alignment because IT teams are resource constrained and unable to address core business needs quickly enough. There just isn’t enough IT talent out there to meet demand, and issues like security and maintenance take up most of the IT department’s time. If business users want to create new systems, they have to wait months or in most cases years to see their needs met. No-code changes the equation because it empowers business users to take change into their own hands and to accomplish goals themselves. The rapid state of digital transformation — which has only been expedited by the pandemic — requires more business logic to be encoded into automations and applications. No code is making this transition possible for many enterprises.

(Photo by Michael Kovac/Getty Images for Vanity Fair)

Chamath Palihapitiya’s latest act is a tech holding company empire

After being early to the modern SPAC trend, long-time investor and former Facebook executive Palihapitiya has an additional master plan in the works. It is sort of like the SPAC plan but with even fewer other investors to disagree with. Natasha Mascarenhas has the details:

Hustle is Social Capital’s third acquisition in the past three years. In 2018, Social Capital bought a healthcare business that has a repository of data around human physiology. Last year, the firm scooped up a mental health startup that’s centered around software-based treatments and tracks how users progress. Palihapitiya declined to disclose the names of either investment, citing competitive advantages in keeping them out of the press for now.

“I like businesses that build non-obvious data links,” he said, noting that it is unlike AI, machine learning and other futuristic technologies. Although his SPAC returns could fuel acquisitions, he says that his deals have been funded through personal capital.

Palihapitiya’s long-term strategy for Hustle is to create an empire around it. He plans to acquire auxiliary businesses that see $5 to $15 million in ARR, consolidate them, and “now all of a sudden, you can see us getting to hundreds of millions of ARR.”

The Hustle deal closed in about a week. He says that investing out of a permanent balance sheet of his own capital lets him underwrite decisions faster than a traditional venture capital firm, which lines up with the investor’s general anti-VC sentiment. He pointed to Credit Karma and Intuit’s merger that is yet to close. “We’re still waiting for that deal,” Palihapitiya said. “You know, I couldn’t write an $8.8 billion acquisition myself. But I could write a $5 billion one.”

(Nhat V. Meyer/Bay Area News Group)

Caryn Marooney explains how to get people caring about your startup

The problem is not new, of course, but Lucas got fresh insights from former Facebook PR leader Caryn Marooney about the right strategies to solve the problem, and put together an explainer for Extra Crunch. Here’s an excerpt:

Getting someone to care first depends on proving your relevance. When founders are forming their messaging to address this, they should ask themselves three questions about their strategy, she recommends:

• Why should anyone care?
• Is there a purchase order existing for this?
• Who loses if you win?

These questions get to the root of what you’re providing, whether there’s a customer and who you’re up against. From there they can also help companies identify how to broaden their relevance in the face of new developments in the market.

“As a startup you start with no relevance,” she says. “So your relevance comes from: you’re a founder people know, you’ve come from a company people care about or you’re in a space that’s already relevant and people want to know about, or you’re about to kill a competitor that people really care about, or you have customers where you sort of get the relevance from the customers.”

Around TechCrunch

Cloudflare’s Michelle Zatlyn to discuss building a company with a bold idea at TechCrunch Disrupt

Submit your pitch deck to Disrupt 2020’s Pitch Deck Teardown

The founders of Blavity and The Shade Room are coming to Disrupt 2020

Sign up to interview with accelerators before Disrupt 2020

Students get 60% off passes to Disrupt 2020

Get a free annual Extra Crunch membership when you buy a Disrupt 2020 pass

Announcing the all new, virtual agenda for TC Sessions: Mobility

Investors Reilly Brennan, Amy Gu and Olaf Sakkers coming to TC Sessions: Mobility 2020

CrunchMatch supercharges virtual networking at TC Sessions: Mobility 2020

Join Twilio’s Jeff Lawson for a live Q&A August 25 at 2:30 pm EDT/11:30 am PDT

Across the week

TechCrunch

Private space industrialization is here

China is building a GitHub alternative called Gitee

There’s no frontrunner to be found among the TikTok alternatives

If Oracle buys TikTok I’ll go to Danny’s house and eat his annoying Stanford sweatshirt

Here are four areas the $311 billion CPPIB investment fund thinks will be impacted by COVID-19

Extra Crunch

Founders can raise funding before launching a product

Max Levchin is looking ahead to fintech’s next big opportunities

How tech can build more resilient supply chains

Dear Sophie: How can I transfer my H-1B to my startup?

PopSugar co-founder says pandemic will create ‘a huge windfall’ for digital mediate

#EquityPod

From Alex:

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

What happens when the entire podcast crew is a bit tired from, you know, everything, and does its very best? This episode, apparently. A big thanks to Chris Gates for helping us trim the fat and make something good for you.

Before we get into the topics of the week, don’t forget that Equity is not back on YouTube  most weeks, so if you wanted to see us do the talking with some fun extra from the production team, you can do so here. More to come once I get my new external camera to work.

That done, here’s what Natasha and Danny and I got into this week:

• The public markets are afire these days with Apple reaching $2 trillion in market cap, and Tesla’s stock doing all sorts of odd things. In short, stocks have only gone up for a while and that means there’s warm, nigh-stuffy temperatures around assets of all types.
• This is leading to a surge in liquidity, unsurprisingly, as asset managers of all types look to take advantage of the times. So, Asana is prepping a direct listing, Airbnb has filed privately and ThredUp is eyeing an early-2021 IPO. Around the same time as Coinbase, we’d reckon.
• Airbnb banned parties as well, which wound up being the title of the show.
• And SPACs are still happening in rapid-fire fashion. The Equity crew is not super impressed about the whole affair, but I’ll say that with Paul “Fucking” Ryan involved, it’s probably a sign of the top of the market.
• And capping the liquidity chat, Natasha ran us through what Chamath is up to now, and Danny rabbited on about Kabbage.
• Funding rounds! Welcome raised a $1.4 million check that I covered, Labster raised $9 million that Natasha wrote about, Carrot Fertility picked up $24 million that we all thought was pretty smart and our friends at Crunchbase News wrote about PadSplit, which is honestly neat but we ran low on time after spending too much time on SPACs. Check them out here.

Whew! We’re doing a lot over at TechCrunch.com, so, stay tuned and know that if we were a bit frazzled this week it’s because we’re working our backends off to bring you neat things. You will dig ’em.

OK, chat Monday, a show that we’re already planning. Stay cool!

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PT and Friday at 6:00 a.m. PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

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Five proven ways to attract and hire more diverse talent

Mikaela Kiner Contributor

Mikaela Kiner is an executive coach and author of "Female Firebrands: Stories and Techniques to Ignite Change, Take Control, and Succeed in the Workplace."

A few years ago, I came to the realization that my company, an HR consulting firm, was not as diverse as I wanted it to be. I value diversity because I know it makes teams better — more creative, more productive and more nimble. It helps my firm represent our community and serve our clients.

Though I tried to be inclusive in the language and the images I used on my website, in social media and when posting job openings, clearly something wasn’t working. I’m fortunate to know many talented diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) experts. I asked them what I needed to do differently to attract a broader and more diverse pool of candidates. Here’s what they told me.

Define what diversity means to you

This may seem obvious, but it’s actually something many companies don’t do. When we talk about diversity, people tend to think only of race and gender. Our definition of diversity can be narrow, and we fail not only to include physical ability, gender identity and a host of other underestimated groups, but to recognize that even within a company, who is well represented versus underrepresented can vary by team or department.

I noticed a lack of diversity among my team of coaches; it was all women, but there were few women of color. The gender imbalance is not a surprise; according to the International Coaching Federation (ICF), approximately two-thirds of coaches are women. It would have been all too easy to throw up my hands and say “Well, there just aren’t enough qualified male coaches.” But blaming the pipeline is not a valid excuse and doesn’t fix the problem.

If I told people, “I’m trying to increase diversity on my team,” they would not have known what I meant; they would have been left to assume. Instead, I reached out to a small group of coaches who I know and trust, and told them “I’m looking for more coaches. Specifically, I would like to add women of color and I’d also like to have more men on the team.”

In the U.S., where we’ve been taught for so long not to talk about race or gender while hiring, this felt awkward. I had to push past that, and I’m thankful I did. The result was that I was not only able to add a number of experienced coaches to my team, I also built a whole new network of talented, diverse coaches from whom I continue to learn.

Write more inclusive job descriptions

When you want to appeal to the most diverse candidates, language matters. It is (hopefully) obvious that terms like rock star, stud and ninja, which have been used all too frequently in job descriptions, are exclusive and off-putting to many candidates. But other words and phrases to use or avoid aren’t always common sense. The most appealing language can vary by job level, title and even geography.

Using a tool like Textio will help you create a job description that welcomes the most candidates to apply. Textio uses machine learning and algorithms from millions of job descriptions to help you spot and remove language that can unintentionally narrow your pool. Pop in your job description and you’ll get recommendations about the optimal length of your JD, word choices that skew masculine or feminine, sentence length and even whether your job suggests a fixed or growth mindset.

Personalize your equal opportunity hiring statement

We’ve all seen the old equal employment opportunity (EEO) statement at the end of a job posting, which reads: “We’re an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status.” It sounds like it came right off the government website, which it probably did. And that’s exactly how it comes across to candidates — like a canned message that you’ve added just to make sure you’re in compliance.

Did you know that you can customize your EEO statement? People do read it, and sticking with the legal jargon can be off-putting. A generic statement doesn’t say anything positive about your brand, and it doesn’t demonstrate a true commitment to diversity. If you haven’t already, now is the perfect time to update your statement, making it more reflective of your culture and values. For example:

“SurveyMonkey is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.”

Is it worth the effort? According to FairyGodboss, these personalized EEO statements “…communicate an employer’s dedication to unbiased recruiting, hiring and employment practices, which may encourage traditionally marginalized groups to seek employment within the organization.”

Conduct blind resume reviews

Most people are familiar with unconscious bias, and how it can negatively impact every step of the hiring process. Even as early as the resume review, bias causes recruiters and hiring managers to favor resumes of candidates who are in the majority. Bias can result from information ranging from a candidate’s name to which college they attended or which sports they played.

For instance, those with white-sounding names receive preference. The National Bureau of Economic Research found that “Job applicants with white names needed to send about 10 resumes to get one callback; those with African-American names needed to send around 15 resumes to get one callback.” I have a friend from India who received similar treatment. Even though she had worked with well-known companies, including Google and Deloitte, she had difficulty landing a job when she first came to the U.S. When she was ready to change employers, she adopted an American nickname on her resume and LinkedIn profile, and promptly got five callbacks.

In a blind resume review, identity cues that indicate race or gender are hidden. Tools like TalVista do this automatically, or your team can do it manually by hiding the information. While this helps increase the number of diverse candidates who make it to the next step, it does not address bias that occurs during interviews or later in your hiring process. That’s going to require training.

Assemble diverse interview panels

People from underestimated groups are all too familiar with the phrase “you have to see it to be it.” If I can’t see myself as someone who will be welcome and included in your company, I’m far less likely to join it. Yet too often even when a candidate meets with multiple interviewers, none of those interviewers reflect the candidate’s race or gender.

Imagine a woman of color spending the better part of a day meeting with a potential employer. Over the course of several hours, she meets a number of leaders but she doesn’t meet a single woman of color. She might think there are no women of color in the company, or wonder why they are not included in important decisions like interviewing and hiring.

When Karenga Ross interviewed at Intel after meeting them at a National Society of Black Engineers conference, she was pleasantly surprised to meet two African American women on the interview panel — these were women who looked like her. “It’s nice to be able to look across that table and see someone whom I can aspire to be. I can see someone who looks like me. It was refreshing. It was inspiring.”

One question I get from small companies is how to assemble a diverse interview panel if they don’t yet have diversity within their organization. I encourage them to cast a wide net. Think about who’s affiliated with your company, even if they’re not employees. If you have diverse advisors, investors or board members who are willing to help, invite them to join your panel. It will improve the candidate experience and help eliminate bias from your decision making.

Increasing diversity is an important investment that takes commitment, and a willingness to learn and experiment. You’ll have to try out some new things, and perhaps have conversations that make you uncomfortable. Remember to take one step at a time, and measure your progress and results.

Diverse hiring is one important step toward increasing diversity in your organization. Retention, however, depends on all employees feeling a sense of belonging. Remember to review your internal practices and policies to make sure they too meet the test of inclusion.

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Five VCs discuss how no-code is going horizontal across the world’s industries

Few topics garner cheers and groans quite as quickly as the no-code software explosion.

While investors seem uniformly bullish on toolsets that streamline and automate processes that once required a decent amount of technical know-how, not everyone seems to think that the product class is much of a new phenomenon.

On one hand, basic tools like Microsoft Excel have long given non-technical users a path toward carrying out complex tasks. (There’s historical precedent for the perspective.) On the other, a recent bout of low-code/no-code startups reaching huge valuations is too noteworthy to ignore, spanning apps like Notion, Airtable and Coda.

The TechCrunch team was interested in digging in to what defines the latest iteration of no-code and which industries might be the next target for entrepreneurs in the space. To get an answer on what is driving investor enthusiasm behind no-code, we reached out to a handful of investors who have explored the space:

• Laela Sturdy, general partner at CapitalG
• Raviraj Jain, partner at Lightspeed
• Darian Shirazi, general partner at Gradient Ventures
• S. Somasegar, managing director at Madrona Venture Group
• And, closing notes from an interview with Rajeev Batra from Mayfield

As usual, we’re going to pull out some of the key trends and themes we identified from the group’s collected answers, after which we’ll share their responses at length, edited lightly for clarity and formatting.

Trends, themes

Our investor participants agreed that low-code/no-code apps haven’t reached their peak potential, but there was some disagreement in how universal their appeal will prove to various industries. “Every trend is overhyped in some way. Low-code/no-code apps hold a lot of promise in some areas but not all,” Lightspeed’s Raviraj Jain told us.

Meanwhile, Gradient’s Darian Shirazi said “any and all” industries could benefit from increased no-code/low-code toolsets. We can see it either way, frankly.

CapitalG’s Laela Sturdy says the breadth of appeal boils down to finding which industries face the biggest supply constraints of technical talent.

“There just isn’t enough IT talent out there to meet demand, and issues like security and maintenance take up most of the IT department’s time. If business users want to create new systems, they have to wait months or in most cases, years, to see their needs met,” she wrote. “No-code changes the equation because it empowers business users to take change into their own hands and to accomplish goals themselves.”

Mayfield’s Rajeev Batra agreed, saying it would be cool “to see not twenty million developers [building] really cool software but two, three hundred million people developing really cool, interesting software.” If that winds up being the case, the sheer number of monthly-actives in the no and low-code spaces would imply a huge revenue base for the startup category.

That makes a wager on platforms in the space somewhat obvious.

And those bets are being placed. On the topic of valuations and developer interest, our collected interviewees were largely bullish on startup prices (competitive) and VC demand (strong) when it comes to no-code fundraising today.

Sturdy added that the number of early-stage companies in the category “are being funded at an accelerating pace,” noting that her firm is “excitedly watching this young cohort of emerging no-code companies and intend to invest in the trend for years to come.” So, we’re not about to run short of fodder for more Series A and B rounds in the space.

Taken as a whole, like it or not, the no and low-code startup trend appears firm from both a market-fit perspective and from the perspective of investor interest. Now, the rest of the notes.

---

Laela Sturdy, general partner, CapitalG

We’ve seen some skepticism in the market that the low-code/no-code trend has earned its current hype, or product category. Do you agree that the product trend is overhyped, or misclassified? 

I don’t think it’s over-hyped, but I believe it’s often misunderstood. No code/low code has been around for a long time. Many of us have been using Microsoft Excel as a low-code tool for decades, but the market has caught fire recently due to an increase in applicable use cases and a ton of innovation in the capabilities of these new low-code/no-code platforms, specifically around their ease of use, the level and type of abstractions they can perform and their extensibility/connectivity into other parts of a company’s tech stack. On the demand side, the need for digital transformation is at an all-time high and cannot be met with incumbent tech platforms, especially given the shortage of technical workers. Low-code/no-code tools have stepped in to fill this void by enabling knowledge workers — who are 10x more populous than technical workers — to configure software without having to code. This has the potential to save significant time and money and to enable end-to-end digital experiences inside of enterprises faster.

What other opportunities does the proliferation of low-code/no-code programs open up when it comes to technical and non-technical folks working more closely together?

This is where things get exciting. If you look at large businesses today, IT departments and business units are perpetually out of alignment because IT teams are resource constrained and unable to address core business needs quickly enough. There just isn’t enough IT talent out there to meet demand, and issues like security and maintenance take up most of the IT department’s time. If business users want to create new systems, they have to wait months or in most cases years to see their needs met. No-code changes the equation because it empowers business users to take change into their own hands and to accomplish goals themselves. The rapid state of digital transformation — which has only been expedited by the pandemic — requires more business logic to be encoded into automations and applications. No code is making this transition possible for many enterprises.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Five VCs discuss how no-code is going horizontal across the world’s industries https://ift.tt/32dGBlf

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Almost everything you need to know about SPACs

Feeling as if you should better understand special purpose acquisition vehicles – or SPACs — than you do? You aren’t alone.

Like most casual observers, you’re probably already aware that Paul Ryan now has a SPAC, as does baseball executive Billy Beane and Silicon Valley stalwart Kevin Hartz. You probably know, too, that brash entrepreneur Chamath Palihapitiya seemed to kick off the craze around SPACs — blank-check companies that are formed for the purpose of merging or acquiring other companies — in 2017 when he raised $600 million for a SPAC. Called Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings, it was ultimately used to take a 49% stake in the British spaceflight company Virgin Galactic.

But how do SPACs come together in the first place, how they work exactly, and should you be thinking of launching one? We talked this week with a number of people who are right now focused on almost nothing but SPACs to get our questions — and maybe yours, too — answered.

First, why are these things suddenly spreading like weeds?

Kevin Hartz — who we spoke with after his $200 million blank-check company made its stock market debut on Tuesday — said their popularity ties in part to “Sarbanes Oxley and the difficulty in taking a company public the traditional route.”

Troy Steckenrider, an operator who has partnered with Hartz on his newly public company, said the growing popularity of SPACs also ties to a “shift in the quality of the sponsor teams,” meaning that more people like Hartz are shepherding these vehicles versus “people who might not be able to raise a traditional fund historically.”

Indeed, according to the investment bank Jefferies, 76% of last year’s SPACs were sponsored by industry executives who “typically have public company experience or have sold their prior business and are seeking new opportunities,” up from 65% in 2018 and 32% in 2017.

Don’t forget, too, that there are whole lot of companies that have raised tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital and whose IPO plans may have been derailed or slowed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Some need a relatively frictionless way to get out the door, and there are plenty of investors who would like to give them that push.

How does one start the process of creating a SPAC?

The process is really no different than a traditional IPO, explains Chris Weekes, a managing director in the capital markets group at the investment bank Cowen. “There’s a roadshow that will incorporate one-on-one meetings between institutional investors and the SPAC’s management team” to drum up interest in the offering.

At the end of it, institutional investors like mutual funds, private equity funds, and family offices buy into the offering, along with a smaller percentage of retail investors.

Who can form a SPAC?

Anyone who can persuade shareholders to buy its shares.

These SPACs all seem to sell their shares at $10 apiece. Why?

Easier accounting? Tradition? It’s not entirely clear, though Weekes says $10 has “always been the unit price” for SPACs and continues to be with the very occasional exception, such as with Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square Capital Management. (Last month it launched a $4 billion SPAC that sold units for $20 each.)

Have SPACs changed structurally over the years?

Funny you should ask! This gets a little more technical, but when buying a unit of a SPAC, institutional investors typically get a share of common stock and a warrant or a fraction of a warrant, which is a security that entitles the holder to buy the underlying stock of the issuing company at a fixed price at a later date.

Years back, when a SPAC announced the company it planned to buy to institutional investors in the SPAC, they would either vote yes to the deal if they wanted to keep their money in, and no to the deal if they wanted to redeem their shares and get out. But sometimes investors would team up and threaten to torpedo a deal if they weren’t given founder shares or other preferential treatment. (“There was a bit of bullying in the marketplace,” says Weekes.)

Regulators have since separated the right to vote and the right to redeem one’s shares, meaning investors today can vote ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and still redeem their capital, making the voting process more perfunctory and enabling most deals to go through as planned.

Does that mean SPACs are more safe? They haven’t had the best reputation historically.

They’ve “already gone through their junk phase,” suspects Albert Vanderlaan, an attorney in the tech companies group of Orrick, the global law firm. “In the ’90s, these were considered a pretty junky situation,” he says. “They were abused by foreign investors. In the early 2000s, they were still pretty disfavored.” Things could turn on a dime again, he suggests, but over the last couple of years, the players have changed for the better, which is making a big difference.

How much of the money raised does a management team like Hartz and Steckenrider keep?

The rough rule of thumb is 2% of the SPAC value, plus $2 million, says Steckenrider. The 2% roughly covers the initial underwriting fee; the $2 million then covers the operating expenses of the SPAC, from the initial cost to launch it, to legal preparation, accounting, and NYSE or NASDAQ filing fees. It’s also “provides the reserves for the ongoing due diligence process,” he says.

Is this money like the carry that VCs receive, and do a SPAC’s managers receive it no matter how the SPAC performs?

Yes and yes.

Here’s how Hartz explains it: “On a $200 million SPAC, there’s a $50 million ‘promote’ that is earned at $10 a share if the transaction consummates at $10 a share,” which, again, is always the traditional size of a SPAC. “But if that company doesn’t perform and, say, drops in half over a year or 18-month period, then the shares are still worth $25 million.”

Hartz calls “egregious,” though he and Steckenrider formed their SPAC in exactly the same way rather than structure it differently.  

Says Steckrider, “We ultimately decided to go with a plain-vanilla structure [because] as a first-time spec sponsor, we wanted to make sure that the investment community had as as easy as a time as possible understanding our SPAC. We do expect to renegotiate these economics when we go and do the [merger] transaction with the partner company,” he adds.

From a mechanics standpoint, what happens right after SPAC has raised its capital?

The money is moved into a blind trust until the management team decides which company or companies it wants to acquire. Share prices don’t really move much during this period as no investors know (or should know, at least) what the target company will be yet.

Does a $200 million SPAC look to acquire a company that’s valued at around the same amount?

No. According to law firm Vinson & Elkins, there’s no maximum size of a target company — only a minimum size (roughly 80% of the funds in the SPAC trust).

In fact, it’s typical for a SPAC to combine with a company that’s two to four times its IPO proceeds in order to reduce the dilutive impact of the founder shares and warrants.

In the case of Hartz’s and Steckenrider’s SPAC (it’s called One), they are looking to find a company “that’s approximately four to six times the size of our vehicle of $200 million,” says Harzt, “so that puts us around in the billion dollar range.”

Where does the rest of the money come from if the partner company is many times larger than the SPAC itself?

It comes from PIPE deals, which, like SPACs, have been around forever and come into and out of fashion. These are literally “private investments in public equities” and they get tacked onto SPACs once management has decided on the company with which it wants to merge.

It’s here that institutional investors get different treatment than retail investors, which is why some industry observers are wary of SPACs.

Specifically, a SPAC’s institutional investors — along with maybe new institutional investors that aren’t part of the SPAC — are told before the rest of the world what the acquisition target is under confidentiality agreements so that they can decide if they want to provide further financing for the deal via a PIPE transaction.

The information asymmetry seems unfair. Then again, they’re restricted not only from sharing information but also from trading the shares for a minimum of four months from the time that the initial business combination is made public. Retail investors, who’ve been left in the dark, can trade their shares any time.

How long does a SPAC have to get all of this done?

It varies, but the standard seems to be around two years.

What do you call that phase of the deal after the partner company has been identified and agrees to merge, but before the actual combination?

That’s called De-SPACing and during this stage of things, the SPAC has to obtain shareholder approval through that vote we talked about, followed by a review and commenting by the SEC.

Toward the end of this stretch — which can take 12 to 18 weeks — bankers aretaking out the new operating team and, in the style of a traditional roadshow, getting the story out to analysts who cover the segment so when the combined new company is revealed, it receives the kind of support that keeps public shareholders interested in a company.

Will we see more people from the venture world like Palihapitiya and Hartz start SPACs?

So far, says Weekes, he’s seeing less interest from VCs in sponsoring SPACs and more interest from them in selling their portfolio companies to a SPAC. As he notes, “Most venture firms are typically a little earlier stage investors and are private market investors, but there’s an uptick of interest across the board, from PE firms, hedge funds, long-only mutual funds.”

That might change if Hartz has anything to do with it. “We’re actually out in the Valley, speaking with all the funds and just looking to educate the venture funds,” he says. “We’ve had a lot of requests in. We think we’re going to convert [famed VC] Bill Gurley from being a direct listings champion to the SPAC champion very soon.”

In the meantime, Hartz says his SPAC doesn’t have a specific target in mind yet. But he does takes issue with the word “target,” preferring instead “partner” company.

“A target sounds like we’re trying to assassinate somebody.”

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Almost everything you need to know about SPACs https://ift.tt/31j2hgJ

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Submit your pitch deck to Disrupt 2020’s Pitch Deck Teardown

Disrupt 2020 is a few weeks away and we’re looking for founders to submit their pitch decks. In the Pitch Deck Teardown, top venture capitalists and entrepreneurs will evaluate and suggest fixes for Disrupt 2020 attendees’ pitch decks.

First impressions are everything, and pitch decks are often the first glimpse of companies by investors and business partners. It’s critical that these decks accurately present and illustrate the company’s goals and potential, concisely and effectively.

We’ve enlisted the help of some of the best venture capitalists. During these sessions, VCs will step through each slide, talking about what works, what doesn’t work and what needs to be changed to make the most impact. Along the way, expect to hear valuable insight on how investors evaluate pitch decks and the red flags that can shut down a potential investment.

What’s more, we’re looking for pitch decks to feature in these sessions. We want to showcase real pitch decks from actual companies. Anyone can submit their deck, though we’re looking for decks from early-stage companies. Submit your pitch deck here.

Some guidelines:

• When submitting, please use the email you used when you registered for Disrupt 2020
• Only pitch decks of registered Disrupt attendees will be selected
• Early-stage companies are more likely to be selected for this session
• If selected, you’ll be notified and told in which session your deck will be featured

Here are the investors signed up for the Pitch Deck Teardown:

• Aileen Lee (Cowboy Ventures)
• Charles Hudson (Venture Forward)
• Niko Bonatsos (General Catalyst)
• Megan Quinn (Spark Capital)
• Cyan Banister (Long Journey Ventures)
• Roelof Botha (Sequoia)
• Susan Lyne (BBG)

Pitch Deck Teardown is part of a much larger event focused on all aspects of building technology companies. For the first time, TechCrunch’s big yearly event, Disrupt, is going fully virtual in 2020, allowing more people to attend and interact with speakers, investors and founders. And Disrupt will stretch over five days — September 14-18 — in order to make it easier for everyone to take in all the amazing programming. Prices increase soon, so get your pass now and then submit your pitch deck for invaluable feedback from our panel of VCs.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Submit your pitch deck to Disrupt 2020’s Pitch Deck Teardown https://ift.tt/34nownI

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OpenUnit aims to be Shopify for self-storage facilities

So you’re looking for a storage unit to put some stuff in for a few months. Maybe you’re moving and your new place isn’t ready yet — or maybe you’re just looking to declutter and want to tuck some stuff away for a while and see if you’re really ready to part with it.

As you may find, the process of finding a storage unit can be… not great. While there are a few big storage chains in the market, a huge chunk of the self-storage industry is made up of independent/mom-and-pop shops that don’t necessarily have the time/budget to keep up as tech has evolved. It can involve a lot of poking around out-of-date websites, a lot of phone calls and a lot of paperwork.

OpenUnit, a startup out of Toronto, wants to fix that. They’re aiming to be Shopify for the self-storage industry, with an all-in-one solution that provides a modern interface to help customers make reservations on the front end, and gives facility managers everything they need to keep things running on the back end.

Their management tool provides things like:

• A white-labeled site for making reservations
• Unit inventory management
• Expense tracking
• Group chats/DMs to give employees and managers a place to keep in touch
• Pricing/revenue analytics
• Digital lease signing
• A CRM for managing leads and existing relationships

The company isn’t charging facility managers a monthly fee; instead, they’re handling credit card payment processing and taking a cut of 2.9% (+ 30 cents) per transaction.

Co-founders Taylor Cooney and Lucas Playford found their way into self-storage when Taylor’s landlords came to him with an offer: they wanted to sell the place he was renting, and they’d give him a stack of cash if he could be out within just a few days. Pulling that off meant finding a place to keep all of his stuff while he looked for a new home, which is when he realized how antiquated the self-storage process could be.

The two initially set their sites on something a bit different: a Hotwire-style search system that would find deals on local storage units, negotiating the monthly cost on a customer’s behalf for a small one-time fee. The more they worked with facility managers, the more gaps they found in the tools and systems on the market, so they shifted focus to this facility management suite.

OpenUnit was part of the Winter 2020 Y Combinator class which ended back in March, but the team opted to defer their demo day debut until YC’s Summer 2020 event next week. As March came to an end and the severity of the pandemic was becoming more clear, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called upon any citizens abroad to return home sooner than later. Launching a company while rushing to get back home is hardly ideal, so the two chose to hold off their launch until now.

After a few weeks of private testing, OpenUnit is now starting to bring more storage facilities on board. Run a storage company and want to give it a look? They’ve got a waiting list here.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J OpenUnit aims to be Shopify for self-storage facilities https://ift.tt/3hkpmFp

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Apple contends Epic’s ban was a ‘self-inflicted’ prelude to gaming the App Store

{rss:content:encoded} Apple contends Epic’s ban was a ‘self-inflicted’ prelude to gaming the App Store https://ift.tt/2QaxEDQ https://ift.tt/32i0KqB August 21, 2020 at 09:31PM

Apple has filed legal documents opposing Epic’s attempt to have itself reinstated in the iOS App Store, after having been kicked out last week for flouting its rules. Apple characterizes the entire thing as a “carefully orchestrated, multi-faceted campaign” aimed at circumventing — perhaps permanently — the 30 percent cut it demands for the privilege of doing business on iOS.

Epic last week slyly introduced a way to make in-app purchases in its popular game Fortnite without going through Apple. This is plainly against the rules, and Apple soon kicked the game, and the company’s other accounts, off the App Store. Obviously having anticipated this, Epic then published a parody of Apple’s famous 1984 ad, filed a lawsuit, and began executing what Apple describes quite accurately as “a carefully orchestrated, multi-faceted campaign.”

Epic files motion for injunction against Apple over threat to revoke all developer access

In fact, as Apple notes in its challenge, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney emailed ahead of time to let Apple know what his company had planned. From Apple’s filing:

Around 2am on August 13, Mr. Sweeney of Epic wrote to Apple stating its intent to breach Epic’s agreements:
“Epic will no longer adhere to Apple’s payment processing restrictions.”

This was after months of attempts at negotiations in which, according to declarations from Apple’s Phil Schiller, Epic attempted to coax a “side letter” from Apple granting Epic special dispensation. This contradicts claims by Sweeney that Epic never asked for a special deal. From Schiller’s declaration:

Specifically, on June 30, 2020, Epic’s CEO Tim Sweeney wrote my colleagues and me an email asking for a “side letter” from Apple that would create a special deal for only Epic that would fundamentally change the way in which Epic offers apps on Apple’s iOS platform.

In this email, Mr. Sweeney expressly acknowledged that his proposed changes would be in direct breach of multiple terms of the agreements between Epic and Apple. Mr. Sweeney acknowledged that Epic could not implement its proposal unless the agreements between Epic and Apple were modified.

One prong of Epic’s assault was a request for courts to grant a “temporary restraining order,” or TRO, a legal procedure for use in emergencies where a party’s actions are unlawful, a suit to show their illegality is pending and likely to succeed, and those actions should be proactively reversed because they will cause “irreparable harm.”

If Epic’s request were to be successful, Apple would be forced to reinstate Fortnite and allow its in-game store to operate outside of the App Store’s rules. As you might imagine, this would be disastrous for Apple — not only would its rules have been deliberately ignored, but a court would have placed its imprimatur on the idea that those rules may even be illegal. So it is essential that Apple slap down this particular legal challenge quickly and comprehensively.

Apple’s filing challenges the TRO request on several grounds. First, it contends that there is no real “emergency” or “irreparable harm” because the entire situation was concocted and voluntarily initiated by Epic:

Having decided that it would rather enjoy the benefits of the App Store without paying for them, Epic has breached its contracts with Apple, using its own customers and Apple’s users as leverage.

But the “emergency” is entirely of Epic’s own making…it knew full well what would happen and, in so doing, has knowingly and purposefully created the harm to game players and developers it now asks the Court to step in and remedy.

Epic’s complaint that Apple banned its Unreal Engine accounts as well as Fortnite related ones, Apple notes, is not unusual considering the accounts share tax IDs, emails, and so on. It’s the same “user,” for their purposes. Apple also says it gave Epic ample warning and opportunity to correct its actions before a ban took place. (Apple, after all, makes a great deal of money from the app as well.)

Apple also questions the likelihood of Epic’s main lawsuit (independent of the TRO request) succeeding on its merits — namely that Apple is exercising monopoly power in its rent-collecting on the App Store.

[Epic’s] logic would make monopolies of Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo, just to name a few.

Epic’s antitrust theories, like its orchestrated campaign, are a transparent veneer for its effort to co-opt for itself the benefits of the App Store without paying or complying with important requirements that are critical to protect user safety, security,
and privacy.

Lastly Apple notes that there is no benefit to the public interest to providing the TRO — unlike if, for example, Apple’s actions had prevented emergency calls from working or the like, and there was a serious safety concern:

All of that alleged injury for which Epic improperly seeks emergency relief could disappear tomorrow if Epic cured its breach…All of this can happen without any intervention of the Court or expenditure of judicial resources. And Epic would be free to pursue its primary lawsuit.

Although Apple eschews speculating further in its filings, one source close to the matter suggested that it is of paramount importance to that company to avoid the possibility of Epic or anyone else establishing their own independent app stores on iOS. A legal precedent would go a long way towards clearing the way for such a thing, so this is potentially an existential threat for Apple’s long-toothed but extremely profitable business model.

The conflict with Epic is only the latest in a series going back years in which companies challenged Apple’s right to control and profit from what amounts to a totally separate marketplace.

Apple goes to war with the gaming industry

Most recently Microsoft’s xCloud app was denied entry to the App Store because it amounted to a marketplace for games that Apple could not feasibly vet individually. Given this kind of functionality is very much the type of things consumers want these days, the decision was not popular. Other developers, industries, and platforms have challenged Apple on various fronts as well, to the point where the company has promised to create a formal process for challenging its rules.

But of course, even the rule-challenging process is bound by Apple’s rules.

You can read the full Apple filing below:

Epic v. Apple 4:20-cv-05640… by TechCrunch on Scribd

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How to raise your first VC fund

Charles Yu Contributor

Charles is a principal at Bling Capital and manages his own angel investment vehicle. Prior, he was an investor at TI Platform Management and Manhattan Venture Partners. He has quarterbacked investments in nine unicorns over the course of his career.

As a founding member of TI Platform Management, I have quarterbacked more than $200 million in investments into first-time fund managers around the world. That portfolio includes being one of the first institutional checks into Atomic Labs ($170+ million, SaaStr ($160+ million) and Entrepreneur First ($140+ million), among many others.

Having seen successful returns as a fund manager and an early-stage VC (as well as recently raising my own angel fund), I’ve formulated several best practices and strategies for investing in fund managers. If you want to raise your first fund, here’s how.

Understand the mentality of an LP

Just as VCs bucket startup founders into categories, limited partners (the investors in your venture fund, also known as “LPs”) have an unwritten way of categorizing venture managers. The vast majority fit one of three archetypes:

• Former founder/operator turned VC
• Spin-off manager from a mega fund
• Angel investor with a strong track record

Here’s how each is perceived by institutional LPs and the unique blockers they have to overcome:

Former founder/operator turned VC

Having been through the journey of starting a company, former founders/operators often have strong intuition in identifying founders and an empathy/rapport that raises their win-rate on deals. Additionally, having built an innovative company, they can bring special insights in where the market is headed. Building a company, however, requires different skills from founding a fund.

If you’re a former founder/operator turned VC, expect LPs to ask questions that suss out:

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This subscription social network is happy to be an Albatross in a pandemic

In discussions of ethically dubious social networks Facebook is the usual reference choice. But spare a thought for subscribers of InterNations, a Munich-based social networking community for expats, who have found themselves unable to obtain refunds for full-year payments charged in the middle of the coronavirus crisis.

InterNations has operated an expat networking experience since 2007, offering a free ‘Basic’ tier of membership that gives users some access to site content and community-organized events (if they pay an entry fee); or a premium tier which requires shelling out for a year’s subscription up front to get free/reduced price entry to networking events, plus access to some additional site features.

The German company appears to be a fan of nominative determinism — having named the subscription tier of membership ‘Albatross‘, given how difficult it is for users to exit once they upgrade from Basic to paying, perpetually renewing contract.

Several former members told us their memberships were auto-renewed for a full year without any warning in the middle of the pandemic. When they contacted InterNations to request a refund they were point-blank refused — with the company saying they were bound by the terms of the contract they’d entered into when they paid to upgrade the year before.

In emails we’ve reviewed between users and InterNations’ staff the company repeatedly ignores requests for refunds.

One UK-based user, who told us she had signed up to use the service to attend networking events in London and Paris, where she travelled regularly for work, found herself put on furlough in March when the UK went into lockdown. She only noticed the InterNations subscription had autorenewed when she saw a charge as she was checking her bank statement.

She contacted InterNations to request a refund — pointing out there were now no physical events near her, nor would she be able to attend in-person networking events for the foreseeable future due to shielding as a result of personal vulnerability to the health risk posed by COVID-19. But InterNations still refused to refund her subscription.

Instead it offered to put the year’s ‘Albatross’ membership on hold until 2022 — suggesting she might be able to make use of the services she’d just been billed for in two years’ time.

“Many of the people complaining feel aggrieved by InterNation because the entire event offering is very much voluntary and community based. It relies on people stepping forward to organise groups of people to attend events, walks, screening etc. Most of them do not make financial gain out of it,” she told us.

“So for this organisation not to be looking after its very own community feels like a slap on our faces.”

“My local gym froze my membership from April 2020 without any of its members having to request it. They informed us by email, they would do this. I was able to cancel in July without any question asked,” she added. “If my small gym is able to do this, how come InterNations is not stopping the auto-renewal of the membership at such a time?

“When everyone almost worldwide is worrying about their health, their livelihood, their relatives, we are not remembering to cancel or to stop memberships.”

Another user, who signed up to the service after moving from the US to Singapore, told us he was sent repeated payment demands in the middle of the coronavirus crisis after his on-file credit card had expired — which meant InterNations couldn’t auto collect his payment.

He told it he wanted to cancel the subscription but it told him he would only able to delete his account if he paid up for a full second year. Eventually he said he felt he had no choice but to pay the demand for around $100 in order that he could downgrade from ‘Albatross’ to ‘Basic’ and have his account deleted.

“I was (and still am) a paid subscriber and during the height of the pandemic I never received an offer of ‘free months’ of membership,” he said. “Instead, all I got was a deluge of threatening emails about how they couldn’t process my credit card information. Nothing even remotely about whether I was sick or even still alive. They just wanted my credit card details.”

A third user, who signed up for the service after moving to Hanoi, summed up her experience as “not the best”. She pointed us to a blog post in which she recounts a similar story — finding herself charged for a renewal in the middle of the coronavirus without any advance warning and having forgotten to cancel the subscription herself.

“I didn’t realise I’d been charged until a notification from PayPal arrived in my inbox,” she writes. “Say, what? Where was the email reminder? Where was the ‘now due’ invoice that is the hallmark of good business? Turns out InterNations don’t send them.”

This user was finally able to obtain a refund — but only via disputing the charge through PayPal. She got no joy asking for her money back from InterNations itself.

A deluge of similar complaints about the company can be seen on Trustpilot — where InterNations has an 81% ‘bad’ rating at the time of writing.

“An annual membership was taken from my account, and refund was refused. A year on and I am being threatened with non payment of a new invoice,” writes one reviewer.

“I cancelled my membership the past two years and every year it shows that I didn’t and their records conveniently show no record of my cancellation. Then they will refuse refunds,” recounts another.

“InterNations contacted me via automated email about my membership payment being due. When I responded, asking to cancel membership since I haven’t logged in in months and can’t afford membership during these times, they refused to help,” says another irate reviewer. “They make it impossible to do this simple task. They’re greedily unable to help with anything other than take your money. No empathy. All they have to do is cancel the membership.”

“They don’t even send a reminder for end of membership. Some people have seen their credit card debited, without any reminder. And if your credit card you registered has expired, they keep harassing you and threaten you,” runs another despairing former user.

In emails to users who are requesting a refund which we’ve seen InterNations simply points them to German law — which does appear to be the legal sticking point here. As a number of expat blogs warn, service contracts in Germany can be a lot harder to get out of than into.

Though, of course, it’s unlikely to have been immediately clear to people signing up to a global social network in cities like Hanoi and Singapore that they needed to understand German contract law before hitting ‘subscribe’.

BEUC, the European consumer rights group, told us there’s no pan-EU requirement for a notification to be actively sent to users ahead of an auto-renewal of a services contract — and the lack of such a notification ahead of the InterNations subscription renewal is one of the key recurring complaints.

“EU law only requires the consumer to be informed of the final price and the contractual conditions,” a spokesperson said, noting that consumer rights can vary substantially from member state to member state as the area isn’t harmonised at EU level.

So, while BEUC noted that, for example, Belgium law does have a specific provision which allows the consumer to terminate a contract at no cost after its tacit renewal — Germany, self evidently, does not. Although domestic pressure appears to be growing for reform of its one-sided contract rules.

When we put the various complaints we’d heard about refunds and cancelations (and indeed dark patterns) to InterNations, its founder and co-CEO, Malte Zeeck, said the company does not breach consumer law — and further claimed it “clearly communicates” subscription renewals to users.

“InterNations is operating on a standard subscription model like many other businesses, which is at no point in breach of consumer protection laws,” he said. “Subscriptions are renewed automatically, which is clearly communicated at the beginning of each subscription period, in each invoice, and in every user’s membership and account settings. This is also where a subscription can be cancelled at any time, without a notice period that has to be observed.

“Our members have a continual visual reminder of their membership status through the Albatross symbol found on their profile picture. They can also always see their current membership status by visiting their membership page.”

And while he conceded that InterNations had had to cancel in-person events “during the height of the pandemic” he said it substituted this reduction in service by offering “additional free months of membership” and “working very hard to respond to the situation and find ways for our members to still meet and spend time together online”.

“After only a few weeks, we already offered over 500 online activities worldwide to help expats and global minds connect and share experiences — more online events were being added every day,” he added. “In addition, our users continued to benefit from other online networking and information features our premium membership offers. Since restrictions on in-person events are being lifted around the world, we have started to offer many opportunities for our members again to meet in person.”

EU consumer protection rules do bake in requirements that contract terms be fair — with provisions intended to protect against things like one-sided changes to a service without a valid reason. But it’s pretty clear that InterNations could argue a pandemic is a valid reason for canceling in person events and replacing them with online networking. So angry users are unlikely to find much solace there.

Still, maintaining such an inflexible and user hostile attitude during a pandemic does look risky for InterNations and its reputation, given new users are likely to be far less easy for it to net now the coronavirus has settled like a dead calm on so much foreign travel.

So while it might be legally entitled to sit and claw in revenue from people who — living through a pandemic and worried about things like their jobs, health and loved ones — forgot to cancel a subscription that only comes round once a year, it’s hardly a recipe for long-term customer loyalty.

Indeed, we’ve seen these kind of auto-renewing subscription gigs crop up in the ecommerce space in years past. And none of those dubious tactics went the distance.

Tricking consumers into recurring payments is never a good long term business strategy and it certainly isn’t now that reputational damage can scale all over social media in seconds. (To wit: Irate InterNations users have been organizing via Twitter and have set up a website to amplify negative reviews where they urge people to boycott the service.)

None of the people who’ve been stung by InterNations’ auto-renewing subscription are likely to forget to cancel a second time so won’t be a source of recurring revenue in future. And treating users like so much chum when the company also relies upon their community spirit to power its service looks like a rotten business model long past its sell-by-date. (However many members InterNations claims have contacted it “to say how much our online events have helped them to stay in touch with people and also stay positive during a period of self-isolation”, a minority of satisfied customers are being drowned out by all the angry online views.)

In the meanwhile, it’s certainly curious to encounter a niche social network that’s happy operating with as little regard for users’ wishes as some of the far more maligned giants of the category. To the point where its website displays information regarding the European Commission’s “online dispute resolution” platform in small print right on the contacts page. Er, perhaps Facebook should take note.

On unhappy users, Zeeck only had this to say: “We are sorry that some of our former members perceive this differently and were not happy with the benefits our membership offered them. We are always taking our users’ feedback seriously and are working hard to provide a great experience for them. At the same time, we are aware that it is hard to have the perfect solution for everybody, and there will always be detractors.”

But perhaps he’s been taking cues from Mark Zuckerberg’s neverending apology tours.

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/eA8V8J This subscription social network is happy to be an Albatross in a pandemic Natasha Lomas https://ift.tt/2FG782Z
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