Tech companies predict the (economic) future

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. Want it in your inbox every Saturday morning? Sign up here.

Earnings season is coming to a close, with public tech companies wrapping up their Q4 and 2020 disclosures. We don’t care too much about the bigger players’ results here at TechCrunch, but smaller tech companies we knew when they were wee startups can provide startup-related data points worth digesting. So, each quarter The Exchange spends time chatting with a host of CEOs and CFOs, trying to figure what’s going on so that we can relay the information to private companies.

Sometimes it’s useful, as our chat with recent fintech IPO Upstart proved after we got to noodle with the company about rising acceptance of AI in the conservative banking industry.

This week we caught up with Yext CEO Howard Lerman and Smartsheet CEO Mark Mader. Yext builds data products for small businesses, and is betting its future on search products. Smartsheet is a software company that works in the collaboration, no-code and future-of-work spaces.

They are pretty different companies, really. But what they did share this time ’round the earnings cycle were macro notes, or details regarding their forward financial guidance and what economic conditions they anticipate. As a macro-nerd, it piqued my interest.

Yext cited a number of macroeconomic headwinds when it reported its Q4 results. And tying its future results somewhat to an uncertain macro picture, the company said that it is “basing [its] guidance on the business conditions [it sees for itself] and [its] customers currently, with the macro economy, which remains sluggish, and customers who remain cautious,” per a transcript.

Lerman told The Exchange that it was not clear when the world would open — something that matters for Yext’s location-focused products — so the company was guiding for the year as if nothing would change. Wall Street didn’t love it, but if the economy improves Yext won’t have high hurdles to jump over. This is one tack that a company can take when it talks guidance.

Smartsheet took a slightly different approach, saying in its earnings call that its “fiscal year ’22 guidance contemplates a gradual improvement in the macro environment in the second half of the year.” Mader said in an interview that his company wasn’t hiring economists, but was instead simply listening to what others were saying.

He also said that the macro climate matters more in saturated markets, which he doesn’t think that Smartsheet is in; so, its results should be more impacted by things more like “the secular shift to the cloud and digital transformation,” to quote its earnings call.

AI fintech products are operating at scale and investor interest is maturing

What the economy will do this year matters quite a lot for startups. An improving economy could boost interest rates, making money a bit more expensive and bonds more attractive. Valuations could see modest downward pressure in that case. And venture capital could slow fractionally. But with Yext forecasting as if it was facing a flat road and Smartsheet only expecting things to pick up pace from Q3 on, it’s likely that what we have now is mostly what we’ll get.

And things are pretty damn good for startups and late-stage liquidity at the moment. So, smooth sailing ahead for startup-land? At least as far as our current perspective can discern.

We still have a grip of notes from Splunk CEO Douglas Merritt on how to take an old-school software company and turn it into a cloud-first company, and Jamf CEO Dean Hager about packaging discrete software products. More to come from them in fits.

Various and sundry

There were rounds big and small this week. Companies like Squarespace raised $300 million, while Airtable raised $277 million. On the smaller-end of the spectrum, my favorite round of the week was a modest $2.9 million raise from Copy.ai.

But there were other rounds that TechCrunch didn’t get to that are still worth our time. So, here are a few more for you to dig into this weekend:

• A so-called pre-Series A round for Lilli, a U.K.-based startup that uses sensors and other tech to track the well-being of folks who might need help to live on their own. Using tech to take care of folks is always good by me. The deal was worth £4.5 million, per UKTN.
• An IPO for Tuya, a Chinese software company that raised $915 million in its American debut. Chinese IPOs on American indices were once a big deal. They are less frequent now. Surprised that I missed this one, but, hey, there’s been a lot going on.
• And the Republic round, worth $36 million, that is banking on the recently-expanded American crowdfunding regulations. Some startups have seen success with the approach, including Juked.gg.

Forget medicine, in the future you might get prescribed apps

Upcoming attractions

Next week is Y Combinator Demo Day week, so expect a lot of early-stage coverage on the blog. Here’s a preview. From The Exchange we’re looking back into insurtech (with data from WeFox and Insurify), and talking about Austin-based software startup AlertMedia’s decision to sell itself to private-equity instead of raising more traditional capital.

And to leave you with some reading material, make sure you’ve picked through our look at the valuations of free-trading apps, the issues with dual-class shares, the recent IPO win for the New York scene and how unequal the global venture capital market really is.

The global inequity in venture financing is staggering

Closing, this BigTechnology piece was good, as was this Not Boring essay. Hugs, and have a lovely respite,

Alex

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Startups, Supreme, and soft-circling your way to an investment

In an Extra Crunch Live this past week, Cleo Capital founding partner Sarah Kunst broke down what founders can learn from Supreme, a sought-after streetwear brand. She argued that founders, similar to Supreme, should build a brand around themselves that is so well-respected and has clout that whenever they start something new, investors will line up.

“A Supreme shirt that costs $100 bucks in the store will cost $1,000 online so, as an investor, I am just a kid on the street corner flipping sportswear,” Kunst mentioned. “Who do I think is going to be an investment with such velocity that getting in early is going to be more than worth it as they grow.”

I think this is the best framing I’ve seen about how to drum up excitement for a startup as a founder. FOMO isn’t a strategy, it’s a tactic. What really works, as Kunst alluded to, is when founders can point to key insights they’ve had throughout their career beyond the context of a fundraising process. In other words, anyone can create a nice t-shirt and slap a logo on it. Which founder in this sector is going to give it meaning? It might be the one with the big former exit, the one that was the first Black woman to ever build a unicorn, or the one that was on the ground facing the pain point they now want to solve.

We get into how to build a fundraising process, the concept of soft-circling an investor and what Kunst says is one of her biggest pet-peeves in a pitch deck on the site, but I wanted to give you that sneak peek for now.

• Pregame Y Combinator Demo Day with Equity
• The lightning-fast Series A (that was 3 years in the making)
• Hear how Poshmark went from Series A to the public markets with Manish Chandra and Mayfield’s Navin Chaddha

Saying ‘yes, please’ to no code

This week, Airtable was valued at $5.77 billion from a fresh Series E fundraise.

Here’s what to know: As we discussed on Equity, Airtable is far more than a savvy Excel sheet with bells and whistles. It is one of the leaders in the no-code movement, and founder Howie Liu recently opened up its API to promote developer innovation atop its platform.

• 3 steps to ease the transition to a no-code company
• Okay, the GPT-3 hype seems pretty reasonable
• AI fintech products are operating at scale and investor interest is maturing

Okay, the GPT-3 hype seems pretty reasonable

Image Credits: Cadalpe (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

A seedy asset class

Per Climate Editor Jonathan Shieber, farmland could become the next big asset class modernized by marketplace startups.

Here’s what to know: One startup, AcreTrader, is trying to create a Robinhood for buying farmland, which I think is indicative of how lucrative some view a patch of land. CEO Carter Malloy thinks that while private equity often gets press for being in the land game, most land is owned by smaller ownership through families.

“Over the last few months, we’ve consistently seen our offering sizes grow while our funding windows shrink, showcasing the fast-growing desire surrounding this resilient asset class,” he said.

• Shell’s Gamechanger Accelerator selects three companies for its energy transition accelerator
• New markets emerge for carbon accounting businesses as cities like LA push proposals

More places for investors to throw their money reminds me of two other stories for you to check out:

• Gumroad wants to make equity crowdfunding mainstream
• Crowdfunding limits are poised to change next week, but most VCs aren’t paying attention — yet

A green row celery field in the Salinas Valley, California USA. Image Credits: Pgiam (opens in a new window)/ Getty Images

Around TechCrunch

Consider these upcoming notes as the coupon section for your early-stage founder and investor dreams.

First up, I’m tossing you a discount code to our TechCrunch Early Stage conference, our two-day virtual event for founders, investors and operators. Use code “TCARTICLE” to get 20% off your ticket so you can attend super cool events like how to bootstrap with Calendly’s Tope Awotona and OpenView’s Blake Bartlett, how to pitch your Series A fundraise with Kleiner Perkins’ Bucky Moore, and finance for founders with Alexa von Tobel.

Secondly, we are already well into planning TechCrunch Disrupt 2021! Grab super early-bird passes for less than $100, to attend our all-virtual event.

Thirdly, thank you for all the support. DM me any questions you might have, and I really hope to see your lovely faces there.

Across the week

Seen on TC

Uber under pressure over facial recognition checks for drivers

5 trends in the boardrooms of high-growth private companies 

Forget medicine, in the future you might get prescribed apps

Tech companies should oppose the new wave of anti-LGBTQ legislation

Seen on EC 

Social+ payments: Why fintechs need social features

Snowflake gave up its dual-class shares, should you?

MaaS transit: The business of mobility as a service

Survey: Share feedback on Extra Crunch

Talk next week,

N

Survey: Share feedback on Extra Crunch

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Now approved in LA, Abodu’s backyard homes can now go from contract to completion in as little as 30 days

Abodu, one of a slew of startup companies pitching backyard homes and office spaces to Californians in an effort to help address the state’s housing shortage, has instituted a new “Quickship” program that can take an order from contract to construction and installation in about 30 days.

Behind the quick turnaround time is a pre-approval process that was first rolled out in Santa Fe and came to Los Angeles in recent weeks.

Abodu began installing homes through a pre-approval process back in 2019, when the city of San Jose created a program that allowed developers of alternative dwelling units to submit plans for pre-approval to cut the time for homeowners.

That approval process means that ADU developers like Abodu can be permitted in one hour. Other ADU developers pre-approved in San Jose, California include Acton ADU, the venture-backed Connect Homes, J. Kretschmer Architect, Mayberry Workshop, Open Remodel and prefabADU. In Los Angeles, La Mas, IT House, Design, Bitches, Connect Homes, Welcome Projects and First Office have all had homes pre-approved for construction.

Beyond the cities where Adobu’s ADUs have received pre-approval, the company has built across California in cities ranging from, Palo Alto, Millbrae, Orange County, LA and Oakland. Units in the Bay Area cost roughly $189,000 as a starting price, compared to the $650,000 to $850,000 it takes to build units in a mid-rise apartment building, or $1 million per unit in a steel-reinforced highrise, according to the company.

Construction tech startups are poised to shake up a $1.3-trillion-dollar industry

“Our Quickship program is the fastest way to add housing,” said John Geary, CEO at Abodu. “Homeowners with immediate needs, be it family situations or those looking for investment income, can now complete an ADU project in as little as four weeks. A key mission for Abodu is to make a serious dent in our state’s housing deficit while providing people and municipalities the necessary blueprint to enact real change.”

For Initialized partner (and former TechCrunch writer) Kim-Mai Cutler, who serves on the Abodu board of directors, the achievement of a 30-day construction milestone is almost a dream come true. Cutler wrote the book (or the equivalent of a book) on the housing crisis and its impact on the Bay Area and California broadly.

That piece led Cutler to work in public service “on boards and commissions overseeing the spending of federal dollars on homelessness and the proceeds of municipal bonds directed at financing affordable housing (because yes, for some segments of residents, you do have to explicitly subsidize housing at the local level),” as she noted in a blog post about her investment in Abodu.

The interior of an Abodu home. Photo via Abodu.

Cutler backed the company because of her deep knowledge of the issues associated with housing.

“The reason this is a big deal is because Northern California has been the most expensive and unpredictable place to build new housing in the world. Projects typically take several years because of uncertainty with entitlements and materials,” Cutler wrote. “Over the past year, Abodu co-founders John Geary and Eric McInerney have put homes in the backyards of parents bringing kids home from college, a mother-and-son pair that each bought one for their homes in Millbrae, a couple looking to eventually house a grandmother in San Jose and on and on.”

The key inspiration that Abodu’s founders hit on was their concentration on granny flats, casitas and backyard dwellings. “While deliberations over mid-rise density were stalling in Sacramento, the state legislature (and legislatures up north in the Pacific Northwest) were passing bill after bill, including Phil Ting’s AB 68 and Bob Wieckowski’s SB 1069, to make it really easy to add backyard units,” Cutler wrote. “This is the kind of change that suburban America wants, is comfortable with and can politically pass and implement easily.”

To Cutler’s thinking, Adobu’s 30-day construction schedule will change consumer behavior, thanks to the fact that the home can be craned in and installed in less than a day on a foundation constructed in less than two weeks. Its incredibly low cost will enable a lot of opportunities to develop new inventory and the simple fact is that inventory remains a scarce commodity. As Cutler noted, only half as many homes are trading across the United States as were available a year ago, which is happening at the same time as when millennials are entering prime family formation years. 

How Burrowing Owls Lead To Vomiting Anarchists (Or SF’s Housing Crisis Explained)

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Daily Crunch: Facebook shows off a wrist-based interface

Facebook develops a new way to interact with AR, Uber’s facial recognition policy faces scrutiny and SpaceX’s Starship rocket booster hits a major milestone. This is your Daily Crunch for March 19, 2021.

The big story: Facebook shows off wrist-based interface

This project comes out of Facebook Reality Labs and is supposed to present an alternative computer interface on your wrist, with electromyography sensors to interpret motor nerve signals.

In a blog post, Facebook said a wrist-based device “could reasonably fit into everyday life and social contexts,” while allowing the company to “bring the rich control capabilities of your hands into AR, enabling intuitive, powerful and satisfying interaction.”

Facebook identifies this as a research prototype, so don’t expect it to turn into a commercial product anytime soon. But it’s still suggestive, particularly given the company’s sometimes-surprising hardware strategy and rumors that it might be working on an Apple Watch competitor.

The tech giants

India asks court to block WhatsApp’s policy update, says new change violates laws — The Indian government alleged on Friday that WhatsApp’s planned privacy update violates local laws on several counts.

Uber under pressure over facial recognition checks for drivers — Uber’s use of facial recognition technology for a driver identity system is being challenged in the U.K.

Instagram and WhatsApp hit by outage — The outage began around 1:40 p.m. ET and lasted for more than half an hour.

Startups, funding and venture capital

SpaceX nears final assembly of its first massive testing rocket booster for Starship — SpaceX has completed what’s known as the “stacking” of its first Super Heavy prototype.

Brazilian startup Tractian gets the Y Combinator seal of approval for its equipment monitoring tech — Throughout their lives, the founders had heard their parents complain about the sorry state of maintenance and heavy equipment in their factories.

Superpedestrian positions itself as the go-to partner for cities with new e-scooter safety upgrades — Superpedestrian is considered an up-and-coming player in the micromobility world because of how it handles safety issues.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

It’s time to abandon business intelligence tools — Organizations spend ungodly amounts of money on business intelligence tools, but adoption rates are still below 30%.

The lightning-fast Series A (that was 3 years in the making) — Sounding Board’s Christine Tao discusses raising her Series A on the How I Raised It podcast.

Survey: Share feedback on Extra Crunch — Tell us what you think about Extra Crunch!

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

Cloud infrastructure spending passed on-prem data centers in 2020 — That’s according to new research from Sydney Research Group.

Five trends in the boardrooms of high-growth private companies — Just as countless aspects of corporate life have been reshaped over the course of the last year, boards of directors are undergoing significant and lasting transformation.

Attend Disrupt 2021 for less than $100 — If three jam-packed days of TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 wasn’t enough to get your startup motor running, listen up.

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 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

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Extra Crunch roundup: AI eats fintech, fundraising visas, no-code transition tips, more

Most American retail banks are designed the same way: Customers must pass several desks set aside for loan and mortgage officers before they can talk to a customer representative.

I only step inside a bank a few times each year, but even pre-pandemic, I can’t remember the last time I saw someone sitting at one of those desks. Everyone I know who’s obtained a home or business loan in the recent past started with an online application process.

For this morning’s column, Alex Wilhelm interviewed Dave Girouard, CEO of Upstart, an AI-powered fintech lender that expects to see growth increase 114% this year.

A forecast like that suggests that retail banks have gotten comfortable with using automated tools to calculate risk, which may help explain all the empty desks at my local branch.

“If Upstart hits its 2021 numbers, we will be able to read into them broader adoption of AI among old-guard firms,” says Alex.

According to PitchBook, investors are also more bullish on AI: Q4 2020 saw record funding for AI and ML startups, and exit totals are increasing as well.

I wouldn’t mind adding a gently used desk to my home office; perhaps I should call my bank and see if they have one to spare.

Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch. Have a great weekend!

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

AI fintech products are operating at scale and investor interest is maturing

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A crypto company’s journey to Data 3.0

Image Credits: dowell (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Data is a gold mine for a company. If managed well, it provides the clarity and insights that lead to better decision-making at scale, in addition to an important tool to hold everyone accountable.

However, most companies are stuck in Data 1.0.

A crypto company’s journey to Data 3.0

Dear Sophie: What type of visa should we get to fundraise in Silicon Valley?

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

Dear Sophie:

A friend and I founded a tech startup last year. Like a lot of other startups, we’re looking for funding.

Should we come to Silicon Valley to meet with venture capitalists?

How should we begin that process? What type of visa should we get and how easy is it to get?

—Logical in Lagos

Dear Sophie: What type of visa should we get to fundraise in Silicon Valley?

To solve all the small things, look to everyday Little AI

Image Credits: Yuichiro Chino / Getty Images

Why are developers still solving everyday pain points with manual, archaic processes, as opposed to employing “Little AI”?

There are millions of everyday use cases for AI, where technology is empowered to learn and decide on a course of action that offers the best outcome for consumers and companies alike.

To solve all the small things, look to everyday Little AI

How to recruit data scientists without paying top dollar

Image Credits: Thomas Barwick (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

The increasing demand for AI and data science experts, driven in part by the pandemic’s economic impact, is showing no sign of abating.

Many employers are failing to identify viable job candidates, much less interviewing or hiring them. What’s holding them back?

Often, it’s a poorly drafted job posting.

How to recruit data scientists without paying top dollar

3 steps to aid the transition to becoming a no-code company

Image Credits: Korrawin / Getty Images

No-code is changing how organizations build and maintain applications.

It democratizes application development by creating “citizen developers” who can quickly build out apps that meet their business-facing needs in real time, realigning IT and business objectives by bringing them closer together.

How can your company get ahead of the trend?

3 steps to ease the transition to a no-code company

No taxation without innovation: The rise of tax startups

Image Credits: jokerpro / Getty Images

The idiosyncrasies of sales taxes are a burden on small- and medium-sized businesses, but a new legion of startups is emerging to help companies manage the intricacies of cross-jurisdictional taxes.

No taxation without innovation: The rise of tax startups

Snowflake gave up its dual-class shares: Should you?

Image Credits: VectorInspiration / Getty Images

Some founders and investors argue that these preferred shares protect them from the whims of the market, but the perspective isn’t universally accepted.

Dual-class shares are a controversial governance structure, and some wonder if they are setting up an unfair playing field by allowing a cabal to wield outsized power.

So why would Snowflake give up such a powerful tool?

Snowflake gave up its dual-class shares. Should you?

MaaS transit: The business of mobility as a service

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin

As transit agencies seek to win back riders, a flurry of platforms — some backed by giants like Uber, Intel and BMW — are offering new technology partnerships.

Whether it’s bundling bookings, payments or just trip planning, startups are selling these mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) offerings as a lifeline to make transit agencies the backbone of urban mobility.

MaaS transit: The business of mobility as a service

What eToro’s investor presentation and $10B valuation tells us about Robinhood

Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)

Israeli consumer stock-trading service eToro is going public in the United States via a SPAC. One thing that points to?

Trading platforms are being valued like high-margin video games.

What eToro’s investor presentation and $10B valuation tells us about Robinhood

The global inequity in venture backing is staggering

Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)

I knew African founders lacked the same access to capital as entrepreneurs based in Europe or the United States, but the numbers are far less favorable than I thought.

According to Dauda Barry, CEO of Adaplay Esports, African startups have raised $500 million so far in 2021. If that trend continues, he estimates that the region’s tech companies will exceed the $1.4 billion they raised in 2020.

For perspective: “Stripe raised more yesterday than Barry had reported for the entire African continent this year,” Alex Wilhelm noted in today’s column.

Digging deeper, he pulled numbers from Crunchbase and PitchBook to track VC activity in Africa over the last three months. Once he filtered private equity funding from nonequity investments, the numbers were “staggering.”

“I am surprised that more VCs aren’t investing in Africa,” says Alex. “It smells like investing arbitrage.”

The global inequity in venture financing is staggering

Farmland could be the next big asset class modernized by marketplace startups

Image Credits: Pgiam (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Companies that help farmers raise money for agricultural development projects are revolutionizing the way farm and forestland are acquired, developed and commercialized across the United States.

While private equity has gotten a lot of press for expanding the size of their farmland investments, those investments are still dwarfed by the size of the potential farm industry in the U.S., meaning there’s still plenty of opportunity for investors to provide additional capital.

Farmland could be the next big asset class modernized by marketplace startups

The NFT market is just getting started, but where is it headed?

Image Credits: Beeple (opens in a new window) under a CC BY 4.0 (opens in a new window) license.

The crypto art craze might seem silly and expensive, but it could empower artists from emerging economies and underrepresented groups to access the global art market in ways that they couldn’t before.

Can it outlive the hype?

The NFT market is just getting started, but where is it headed?

Olo raises IPO range as DigitalOcean sees possible $5B debut valuation

Image Credits: jayk7 (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

That Olo raised its IPO price is not a huge surprise, given the software company’s rapid growth and profits. In the case of DigitalOcean, we have more work to do as its approach to growth is a bit different.

Olo raises IPO range as DigitalOcean sees possible $5B debut valuation

Stripe’s epic new valuation and the value-capture gap between public and private markets

Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)

Stripe’s $600 million round values the payments and banking software company at $95 billion, near the top end of the valuation range at which the company was said to be raising funds back in November 2020.

Sadly, Stripe is still being coy with growth metrics. The Exchange digs in, no matter how vague.

Stripe’s epic new valuation and the value-capture gap between public and private markets

Julia Collins and Sarah Kunst outline how to build a fundraising process

Julia Collins, the first Black woman to co-found a venture-backed unicorn, and investor Sarah Kunst offer fundraising pointers on Extra Crunch Live.

Kunst says good design is critical, but:

If you’re not a graphic designer, then any incremental minute that you’re spending on trying to make your deck pretty is a waste of time. You need to be focusing on content. Hire somebody, pay them a tiny bit of money to be able to do a nice graphics pass on your deck, and it’s going to make it a lot easier for people to to get the information that you need them to know.

Julia Collins and Sarah Kunst outline how to build a fundraising process

How nontechnical talent can break into deep tech

Image Credits: Getty Images

Startup hiring processes can be opaque, and breaking into the deep tech world as a nontechnical person seems daunting. This column offers tactical advice for finding, reaching out to, cultivating relationships with and working at deep tech companies as a nontechnical candidate.

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It’s time to abandon business intelligence tools

Charles Caldwell Contributor

Charles Caldwell is VP of product management at Logi Analytics, which empowers the world’s software teams with intuitive, developer-grade embedded analytics solutions. He has more than 20 years’ experience in the analytics market, including 10+ years of direct customer implementation experience.

Organizations spend ungodly amounts of money — millions of dollars — on business intelligence (BI) tools. Yet, adoption rates are still below 30%. Why is this the case? Because BI has failed businesses.

Logi Analytics’ 2021 State of Analytics: Why Users Demand Better survey showed that knowledge workers spend more than five hours a day in analytics, and more than 99% consider analytics very to extremely valuable when making critical decisions. Unfortunately, many are dissatisfied with their current tools due to the loss of productivity, multiple “sources of truth,” and the lack of integration with their current tools and systems.

A gap exists between the functionalities provided by current BI and data discovery tools and what users want and need.

Throughout my career, I’ve spoken with many executives who wonder why BI continues to fail them, especially when data discovery tools like Qlik and Tableau have gained such momentum. The reality is, these tools are great for a very limited set of use cases among a limited audience of users — and the adoption rates reflect that reality.

Data discovery applications allow analysts to link with data sources and perform self-service analysis, but still come with major pitfalls. Lack of self-service customization, the inability to integrate into workflows with other applications, and an overall lack of flexibility seriously impacts the ability for most users (who aren’t data analysts) to derive meaningful information from these tools.

BI platforms and data discovery applications are supposed to launch insight into action, informing decisions at every level of the organization. But many are instead left with costly investments that actually create inefficiencies, hinder workflows and exclude the vast majority of employees who could benefit from those operational insights. Now that’s what I like to call a lack of ROI.

Business leaders across a variety of industries — including “legacy” sectors like manufacturing, healthcare and financial services — are demanding better and, in my opinion, they should have gotten it long ago.

It’s time to abandon BI — at least as we currently know it.

Here’s what I’ve learned over the years about why traditional BI platforms and newer tools like data discovery applications fail and what I’ve gathered from companies that moved away from them.

The inefficiency breakdown is killing your company

Traditional BI platforms and data discovery applications require users to exit their workflow to attempt data collection. And, as you can guess, stalling teams in the middle of their workflow creates massive inefficiencies. Instead of having the data you need to make a decision readily available to you, instead, you have to exit the application, enter another application, secure the data and then reenter the original application.

According to the 2021 State of Analytics report, 99% of knowledge workers had to spend additional time searching for information they couldn’t easily locate in their analytics solution.

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Facebook showcases wrist-worn AR interface concept

Facebook’s hardware strategy often looks pretty opaque from the outside. The company has done fairly well with Oculus sales amid pandemic demand. Even its Echo Show competitor Portal has seen a bump as people have been forced to socially distance. The company’s smartphone partnership with HTC, meanwhile, fell flat eight or so years back.

Earlier this year, reports surfaced that the company was working on its own Apple Watch competitor. The smartwatch was said to have a health focus, running on an open-source version of Android. That, of course, would mark an interesting alternative from Google’s chosen wearOS.

This week, the company highlighted another wrist-based wearable. The specifics of the project don’t line up super closely with earlier reports, which could well mean two separate projects. Facebook is a big company, after all.

This particular project out of Facebook Reality Labs is more focused on providing an alternative computer interface. Specifically, it seems in line with the company’s augmented reality efforts.

Per yesterday’s blog post:

A separate device you could store in your pocket like a phone or a game controller adds a layer of friction between you and your environment. As we explored the possibilities, placing an input device at the wrist became the clear answer. The wrist is a traditional place to wear a watch, meaning it could reasonably fit into everyday life and social contexts. It’s a comfortable location for all-day wear. It’s located right next to the primary instruments you use to interact with the world — your hands. This proximity would allow us to bring the rich control capabilities of your hands into AR, enabling intuitive, powerful and satisfying interaction.

I will say that, based on the information presented, this seems more conceptual. As in, this could be the key to offering more seamless control for some future augmented reality system. And even still, it’s presented as a step on the way to a more deeply integrated human-computer solution. How deeply you want Facebook to integrate with your neurons is apparently a question we’re all going to have to ask ourselves in the not too distant future.

This interface specifically is designed to use electromyography (EMG) sensors to interpret motor nerve signals and interact with the interface accordingly. The subject interestingly came up during a Clubhouse event featuring Mark Zuckerberg last night. After Pebble founder/YC partner Eric Migicovsky discussed experiences dealing with Apple for his own smartwatch startup, the Facebook CEO said the following:

If you’re trying to build a watch, which we’re exploring as we talked about the wrist thing and I don’t want to call it a watch, but it’s the basic neural interfaces work that our Facebook reality labs team demoed some of our research about today. With the neural interface on the wrist, if you want that to integrate with the phone in any way, it’s just so much easier on Android than iOS. My guess is that this is an area where there probably should be a lot more focus. And I do think the private APIs are just something that makes it really difficult to have a healthy ecosystem.

“Exploring” seems like an operative word here. But it’s always cool/fascinating to see these projects in their early stages. Even if the promises might still seem a tad…overzealous.

EMG will eventually progress to richer controls. In AR, you’ll be able to actually touch and move virtual UIs and objects, as you can see in this demo video. You’ll also be able to control virtual objects at a distance. It’s sort of like having a superpower like the Force.

Will Apple, Facebook or Microsoft be the future of augmented reality?

Week in Review: Facebook hardware finds pandemic market fit

 

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Sidekick Browser wants to be a productivity-honed ‘work OS’ on Chromium

The paradox of connected computing is how much information is made available to us in just a few clicks or taps — but also how this ocean of available data can overwhelm and lap over a particular bit of intel the moment we need to lay our fingers back on it.

Fire up a web browser and it’s hard to deny it’s the best of times for knowledge work. Yet working across multiple browser tabs and windows can feel like the friction-filled, frustrating worst.

This is the problem Sidekick Browser is taking aim at by adding a productivity-focused layer atop Chromium that it bills as a “work OS”.

Multiple tab hell? Sidekick’s answer is to let you work from inside apps that live in the browser, rather than scattered across multiple windows and tabs.

Apps like Slack and Skype and WhatsApp can be pinned in the sidebar in a vertical stack where you can easily find and switch between them. It also has support for multiple logins, granular notification controls and the ability to search across all these third party apps (it offers “hundreds” currently but says users can add custom adds “which would function just like a bookmark”) right from the browser.

And for all those tabs you open up every time you go down an Internet browsing rabbit hole Sidekick offers a Sessions feature that lets you save them as a collective bundle for easy filing away — with ofc the ability to reopen and revisit again at a later click.

The built in search also spans these Sessions so there’s no need to manually scroll back through the browser’s search history to try to track down where exactly it was you saw that reference to that randomly relevant bit of intel you breezed across one online day.

Browsers are interesting again

“Search across all your apps, tabs, and workspaces in seconds,” is Sidekick’s alternative fix.

It’s also tackling productivity on the technical side — taking aim at browser-based lag with an “AI based tab suspension” feature that’s designed to improve on how Google’s Chrome browser hogs RAM by predicting which tabs the user is not going to use and dumping them from memory.

“Sidekick is the fastest browser built especially for work,” is its elevator pitchy promise.

Collaboration is another core focus with features intended to help knowledge working teams be more productive as a unit; offering stuff like team role provisioning and custom workspaces to support different Session, app Sidebar and tabs set-ups, such as for a project or client.

There’s also remote configuration tools for device security; a baked in password manager for collaborative convenience to supports teams needing to share passwords; and an embedded video chat platform so you can do team chats right from the exact same browser-based workspace you’re all using.

Sidekick comes with its own ad blocker and anti-fingerprinting tech too — for a stated privacy purpose but also for an extra speed bump (i.e. via better page load times).

Also on privacy the startup’s very public promise is “we’ll never sell your data” (and it further specifies this includes “searches, browsing history, or any personal information”).

The business model is SaaS and b2c for now but Sidekick has designs on b2b — touting a pipeline of business-friendly features coming down the line.

And — yes, before you ask — Chrome extensions are supported.

Sidekick is announcing $2M in seed funding led by KPCB — along with Remote First Capital and other angel investors.

Founder Dmitry Pushkarev has played and won at the startup game before, in some very different areas — having founded a DNA sequencing company (Moleculo) back in 2011 which was quickly acquired by Illumina.

Then in 2013 he left to found another business, ClusterK — focused on optimizing cloud computing resources across multiple cloud providers — which was acquired by Amazon in 2016, where Pushkarev stayed for a couple of years before getting the founder itch again.

A stint as entrepreneur in residence (EIR) at Kleiner Perkins investigating the future of work was where the germ of the idea for Sidekick was born.

The tool grabbed some early eyeballs a few months ago via Product Hunt — where Chris Messina was among its early fans, lauding the team for shaking up the browser space by combining “so many components that are essential to finding productivity as a modern knowledge worker!”.

Though Pushkarev was careful to course-correct Messina that it’s not building a full-fat browser to challenge Chrome itself (or any other Internet browser).

“We do not intend to compete with browsers, they are a great choice for browsing,” he wrote. “Our goal is improve the browsing experience for work and productivity — something that, regretfully, browsers cannot do.”

The San Francisco-based startup says it’s now being used by teams at companies including Microsoft, Dropbox, Slack and Lyft. It has around 30,000 users at this point a few months after its November 2020 launch, per Pushkarev, who says the team is mostly focused on product (“activation, retention, virality”) at this early stage.

“The typical user is a knowledge worker — product managers, engineers, marketers, a fair number of students. Basically, prosumers who don’t just browse online, but do productive work and utilize communication tools,” he tells TechCrunch.

“During my EIR at KPCB, we thought a lot about the future of work, and one striking aspect of it is that today knowledge workers spend most of their time working in Browsers — a tool designed for Browsing,” he goes on, explaining the genesis of the idea for Sidekick.

“There are some important differences between how we browse and how we work, in particular — knowledge workers, spend more time working in web applications, with documents, using communications tools, accessing multiple accounts, and having to navigate a vast array of documents and projects. Unlike browsing — which is mostly search-based consumption of information.

“Clearly, these are very different use cases, but companies who make browsers today have no ability to invest in making browser better for work due to their business model — they are paid by Google or Microsoft for searches, and any complication of the UX would mean that millions of users would turn to simpler browsers and they will lose search revenue.

“We thought that it’s an unprecedented situation, where 200M professionals don’t have access to professional tools, and that the industry is so heavily disincentivized to build those. As a result, we decided to change this and invent a new category of software — Browser for Work, or how we call it internally — a Work OS.”

So what type of work/worker is Sidekick made for? “Online work with Web applications, lots of documents, communication apps, multiple accounts, and different work streams. It’s designer for prosumers and wouldn’t be the best choice for just browsing — something that would be better served by other browsers,” he says.

While the laser focus is work and productivity, Sidekick users can create multiple environments within the software — so could make other spaces more geared towards chilling out/downtime, or other purposes than work too, for use at other times.

While browsers do offer a variety of features like shortcuts and other elements aimed at increasing convenience, Pushkarev argues they simple can’t go as far as Sidekick intends to in honing a great work environment because their business model is too focused on search ads (in the case of Google Chrome) — or just because they need to be a more generalist tool for web browsing. Sidekick is therefore very much a “standalone business” not just a nice set of enhancements any existing browser could make, in his view.

“Unfortunately, extending other browsers is not a viable path here, one has to go deep inside Chrome codebase and re-think performance, memory optimization, security, support for multiple accounts, and privacy to build a comprehensive solution,” he says.

One example of going above and beyond what a browser could or would do itself is the support it’s built for “hundreds” of third party apps. “The reason we built this support is for better integrations — being able to display and control badges and notifications, integrate with our search, support multiple accounts and add helpful extensions,” he explains.

He also points to the New Tab Page (shown in the feature image at the top of this post), which is due to launch for all users by the end of the month and which displays “all documents that work with organized according to type, with human-readable titles, and instant search across it”.

“Without deep integration with these apps we wouldn’t be able to provide this experience and display barely-usable browser history instead,” he notes.

On the business model front, Pushkarev is confident that SaaS can work — and that Sidekick doesn’t have to monetize like other browsers do (i.e. “through data and searches”) — arguing: “We are making a tool that saves hours to potentially millions of knowledge workers.”

“Another piece of the story is our B2B business, which we are building as we speak, but it’s still in early beta. In B2B, product browsers become a sort of company-provisioned remote workstations, that can be remotely configured and secured according to a role,” he adds.

“This is where the majority of our revenue comes from at the moment, but we are launching our first attempts at B2C monetization in March, by offering a subscription.”

Everyone has an opinion on the $27.7B Slack acquisition

Kleiner Perkins has already blown through much of the $600 million it raised last year

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