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Saturday, June 26, 2021

Equity Extras: Q&A from the live show

Hey Equity fam, we have a small clip of extra for you today. After our live show — listen to the recording here, it was good fun — we got to take a few questions from the audience, audio that was not included in the main episode as we didn’t have the time. But we’ve cut it out, given it a short polish, and have it for you today.

If you wanted even more Equity, here you go!

As a small note from the team, we know that this week’s Wednesday episode didn’t have the best audio quality. And to do a Twitter Spaces experiment the same week as a live show might have felt like a lot of change. Don’t worry, it just worked out that way. Equity will keep tinkering and having fun, but we’re back to normal next week.

Enjoy the Q&A, and we’ll see you at our next live show!

— Grace, Chris, Natasha, Danny, and Alex



https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Equity Extras: Q&A from the live show https://ift.tt/3wZpvWB

Startup leaders need to learn how to build companies ready for crisis

It’s been a tough year for business. From ransomware attacks and power outages to cloud downtime and supply-chain disruptions, it’s never been more important to communicate to customers and stakeholders about what’s going wrong and why. Yet, with partial data and misinformation often spreading faster than official word, it’s also never been harder to deliver accurate and timely messages.

Given the complexities of this environment, I wanted to convene a group of specialists to talk about what the future of crisis comms holds for startups, technology companies, and business more broadly. We had a great set of three folks discuss how to build resilient orgs, handle the decentralization going on in tech today, and how to prioritize crisis management over the mundane tasks every day.

Joining us were:

  • Admiral Thad Allen, who as commandant of the Coast Guard and during his career, was commander of the Atlantic coast during 9/11, and led federal responses during Hurricane Katrina, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and the 2010 Haiti earthquake.
  • Ana Visneski, who worked with Allen on building out the Coast Guard’s first digital presence as an officer and chief of media, is now senior director of communications and community at H20.ai and was formerly global principal of disaster communications for Amazon Web Services.
  • John Visneski is the chief information security officer (CISO) at Accolade, and was formerly director of information security at The Pokémon Company. He served 10 years in the U.S. Air Force, where he served as chief of executive communications, and yes, is Ana’s brother.

This discussion has been edited and condensed for clarity

Prepping an organization for catastrophe

Danny Crichton: You’ve all been in disaster communications, in some cases for decades. What are some of the top-level lessons you’ve learned about the field?

Admiral Thad Allen: Great communications and great communications people can’t save a dysfunctional organization. There’s only so much you can do with what you’ve got. I want to say that as a proviso because I’ve seen a lot of people try to communicate their way out of a problem.

The big difference between Katrina in 2005 and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 was Katrina was before Twitter and Facebook and Deepwater was after it. In the old days, you went out and did your job. There might be an after-action report, but it was pretty much done within your organizational structure.

I’m going to really date myself. We sent forces into Somalia [around 1993]. It was the first time in history that CNN watched the people come to shore from the amphibious vehicles and I knew life had changed dramatically. There is no operation that takes place these days where the public is not part of the operation, part of the environment, part of the outcomes that are generated. If you fail to realize that, you’re going to fail right away. Anybody who’s got a cell phone enters your world of work.

So the question is, how do you think about that? That’s resulted in a significant Black Lives Matter movement with George Floyd and somebody happened to be there with a cell phone, and if that had not happened, that situation probably would not have turned out the way it did. So the question is what are we to make of that loop?

John Visneski: Generally speaking, your organizational hierarchies are not designed to be optimized for a crisis. They’re designed to build consensus. They’re designed to understand budgets. They’re designed for long-term planning. It’s the same in the military and it’s even worse in the private sector. And so there’s no concept of situational leadership. There’s no concept of who’s actually in charge during a particular crisis.

In recent attacks, the folks that were in my position, didn’t do a good enough job of explaining the technical aspects of what was going on in such a way that their organization could channel that into something that could then be translated to the public.

Ana Visneski: That’s actually called the theory of excellence in crisis communications, which is basically you have to have this transparency and this well-organized system before something goes wrong. And almost everyone doesn’t.

A good example is in 2017, when S3 broke for AWS, which is how I ended up doing crisis comms for them. I looked around and I said, “Well, why don’t we use our crisis comms plan?” And my boss said, “Our what?” And so I ended up building the critical event protocol and I built it based off the Incident Command System (ICS) that is used by federal agencies during a disaster. And essentially it was a big red button that says “Stop! Everyone get on a call, figure out who’s in charge of responding” that just unifies everyone.

Admiral Thad Allen: I’ll give you a classic antidote because I’ve written about it quite a bit. When I was going to the Sloan School at MIT, in December of ’88, we went down to New York and visited a bunch of CEO’s, and one of the days we went across the river to see the CEO at Exxon, a guy named [Lawrence G. Rawl]. During the discussion, I asked, “Bhopal was the biggest industrial accident in the history of the world today. As a CEO running a big corporation, have you thought about what happened if you had a similar Bhopal-type situation?” He spent 20 minutes going over their extremely well-thought-out communications plan and four months later, the Exxon Valdez ran underground and they actually failed at everything.

A Lockheed C-130 plane sprays dispersant over the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound, Alaska, USA. Image Credits: Natalie Fobes via Getty Images.

John Visneski: Your plan that you write down on paper is only as good as how much you practice it. Right? One of the things that the military typically is pretty good at is practicing before you play. Doing mock drills, doing tabletop exercises, having a red team that throws things at you that you might not expect.

Admiral Thad Allen: Yeah. I’ve dealt with a couple of large firms that have had very big problems. The default setting, if you haven’t thought about this ahead of time, is they go to a subject matter expert and hold them accountable for what the organization should do. That is not the way to do it. You need a designated person to create unity of effort. It’s got to involve the C-suite, and it’s got to involve not only your clients and your stakeholders, but your supply chain.

Ana Visneski: We keep talking about training, but just having a plan in the first place is critical. With some of these big companies, they’re so siloed that when something like this happens, everyone’s trying to do the right thing and running into each other. If you don’t have redundancies built in and backups for your backups, you’re going to go down hard.

You’ve got a plan for what happens if your main spokesperson was the incident? Or what happens if there was an earthquake and, all of a sudden, you don’t have your C-suite to talk? And John can talk a lot about this, but the last mile is another problem with crisis comms. If it’s a big disaster, you’ve got to plan around your tech, how are you going to get the information from the field back to where you can actually broadcast it out to people?

Admiral Thad Allen: When I got called to go to Katrina, I was on my way to the airport and the last thing I did was I sent my son along to a Best Buy to get me a mobile handheld and a SiriusXM receiver, so I could have awareness of what was being done. As far as the communications, a thing like that was the smartest thing I did.

Thad Allen (center) in the disaster aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, September 2005. Image Credits: Justin Sullivan

John Visneski: One of the biggest challenges is this all needs to be resourced, right? Your company needs to actually dedicate resources to that prior planning. To being able to build out the infrastructure, to being able to have hot-swap data centers and locations and things like that. And sometimes whether it’s your board or whether it’s your CFO or whoever’s holding the purse strings for your organization, it’s really hard to justify the return on investment that a lot of folks see as sort of a rainy day fund.

So it’s incumbent upon the leadership of the organization, particularly the leadership that is going to be involved in some sort of a disaster response to get ahead of those conversations and understand how disaster response can do things to protect revenue.

Ana Visneski: Because of the pandemic, we’ve had almost two years of shit hitting the fan. So we’re seeing a lot more C-suite leaders going, “We need to know how to be prepared for what happens next.”

Communicating in a decentralized and flat world

Danny Crichton: If you think about the last 20 years, particularly in the private sector, we went from a model of headquarters buildings, large leadership structures all in one place, oftentimes a fairly hierarchical model of how to operate a company, etc. Today, we’re seeing decentralization, and a sort of horizontalness in a lot of companies. How does this new culture affect disaster communications?

Ana Visneski: Well, now that there is this decentralization, it’s incredibly difficult to wrangle all of your people and get everyone on the same page. And you have to think about what happens if Slack goes down. It goes back to redundancies — you have to have multiple ways of contacting your people.

Along that line, I am not a fan of companies saying is, “You can’t post on social media or you shouldn’t do this or that.” Because all that does is sows distrust. Instead, I am a big fan of training your people to do it right. Of course, you have to have company policy that if someone during a crisis is posting secure information or lies, or is just being a racist jerk, obviously there are consequences, but training your people to use the tool right, helps with transparency.

Admiral Thad Allen: My motto when I was commandant was transparency of information breeds self-correcting behavior. If you put enough information out and everybody holds it, organizational intent becomes embedded into how people see the environment they’re in. They’re going to understand what’s going on and you won’t have to give them a direct order to do the right thing. They’ll understand that. And I think that’s really important.

In the military, we have something called a “common operating picture,” and it’s basically a display where everybody’s at, what they’re doing at any one time. It’s not an order. It’s not hierarchical. Instead, it provides context and provides a window into what you’re doing.

So I think there’s a difference between creating a common operating picture and what actually constitutes authority. If you can separate those, the more you put into the former, the less of the latter you’re going to have to do.

John Visneski: I’m based in Seattle. We have an office in Philadelphia, an office in Houston, an office in San Francisco, and an office in Prague. There’s people in all those offices who are critical for our business. The advantage we have is the advantage that a lot of tech organizations take for granted, which is we were already going through a digital transformation, or we were already on the backside of digital transformation. Cloud focus, Software as a Service, Slack, email, Signal on my phone, a million different ways for me to communicate with my team, communicate with leadership and things like that.

What we take for granted is, there are a lot of organizations in the United States and worldwide that have not gone through that digital transformation. No offense to the military, but when I was at the Pentagon, if email went down, you might as well play hockey in the hallways because no work was going to get done.

Admiral Thad Allen: You can add losing GPS as well.

John Visneski: Exactly. So a lot of organizations have had to come to terms with how do they communicate when they’re distributed like that? The answer isn’t one-size-fits-all. It might be different for an Accolade, different from a Facebook, different from a Twitter, different from a Bank of America or a Bank of New York Mellon. Just based on what their architecture looked like pre-pandemic, what their architecture looks now, and what sort of investments they’ve made to future-proof themselves, should something this ever happen again.

Ana Visneski: I was on a Twitter Space recently, and I was talking that in the United States, especially those of us who are in the tech industry, we tend to take for granted all of this stuff. There are all of these assumptions that are made. In reality, not only do you have to deal with the last mile if a disaster happens, but you also have to deal with the fact that not everyone has one of these super computers in their pockets all over the world.

Residents walk past a downed cell network tower in Polangui, Albay province on December 26, 2016.
Image Credits: CHARISM SAYAT/AFP via Getty Images

Talking about technological arrogance, but people forget radio. People forget that there are these older technologies that in a disaster are still where you’re going to go. John makes fun of me all the time, because I’m trying the new thing every time it comes out, but you can’t forget the stuff that works like radio in the morning.

The crisis of crises and how to handle the infinite range of disasters today

Danny Crichton: The next subject I want to get to is the range and diversity of crises that are hitting organizations today. The Admiral had brought up Exxon and ’89. Okay, you’re an oil company, you have an oil spill — I wouldn’t call it predictable, but you can certainly create a plan. You can say, “Here’s how we need to communicate. Here’s how we handle this.”

But look at the range of stuff we’ve had to deal with in the last year. Everything from a pandemic to Texas power outages, wildfires in California, TSMC is dealing with a drought in Taiwan, you’ve got internal employee hostile workplace protests, external protests, ransomware attacks, bitcoin heists, and on and on.

Ultimately does the same toolbox work no matter what the crisis is? Or do different types of crises demand different kinds of responses? And how would you know the difference?

Admiral Thad Allen: I taught crisis leadership in large complex organizations for four years at George Washington University. In the last class, I told my students to write down the worst catastrophe they could ever think would happen that you have to go and wake up the president in the middle of the night. They all wrote it down on a piece of paper, folded it up and put it in a ball cap. I shook it up and pulled one of the pieces out.

I said to the class, “Just listen to what I’m about to say. Thanks for getting up and coming in early to the White House Press Corps office this morning. I want you to know the president was notified at 4:30 this morning about what happened. He and the First Lady were overwhelmed with grief for the loss of life and the impact on the community. We’ve set up a schedule where we’re going to brief the president every four hours and a meeting following the brief to the president. There’ll be a brief to the press 30 minutes after that. The cabinet’s been advised.” And I went on and on and on.

I finished and I said, “What do you think about that?” And James Carville, who was visiting, said, “It’s great” and he asked, “Well, what was the event?” And I said, “I never opened the paper.” So to your point there’s some things that are just a goddammed no-brainer.

Ana Visneski: I took the ICS [Incident Command System] structure and rebuilt it basically to work in the corporate setting. And the reason that’s so effective is it’s built to be flexible. You have someone who’s in charge overall, you have someone who’s in charge of communications. You have someone who’s in charge of logistics. You have someone who’s in charge of security, and it flexes up or down. And so no one can necessarily predict a “black swan” event. But you can build a core response system that is as close to all hazards as possible.

Admiral Thad Allen: Predict complexity.

Ana Visneski: Yes. And you predict that it will be complex and that nothing goes to plan. We’ve made a lot of jokes that nothing prepared me for a wedding during COVID like having been a first responder. Well, my brother got married last year too. And I did a little bit of help there with my background, but for my wedding, nothing was the same. And it’s the same thing during a disaster. Katrina is different from Gustaf. Gustaf was different from Sandy, but they’re all hurricanes at their core.

Admiral Thad Allen: I just spent an hour with a bunch of government employees earlier today on the same topic. What happens in a “complex” situation is that existing standard operating procedures, legal theories, frameworks, and governance break down and do not work, and they have to be replaced with some other way to deal with it.

ICS allows you to do, and with the right standard doctrine, you can get pretty close to a 50-60% solution that will get you headed in the right direction while you figure out the rest of it.

John Visneski: I’ll say at least from the tech side of things is those plans need to abstract technology almost entirely. Take it up to a level where it doesn’t matter what your communications method is from a technological standpoint. Don’t assume that you’re going to have the bits and bytes flowing the way that we do now. Don’t assume cell towers, don’t assume power, don’t assume any of those sorts of things, because the second that you predicate your plan on those assumptions is the second that the complexity is going to come in and tell you you’re wrong. The 40% that is not planned for is going to become what outweighs the 60%.

Ana Visneski: I think one of the things the tech industry kind of runs into is we are so reliant on the technology now that we can’t imagine what we’d do without it. At the end of the day, good crisis comms relies on good people, and good crisis and disaster response relies on the people doing it.

So you have to build your plan around the people and the structure there, and then use the technology at hand during the event to augment what plans you already have for people. Because by the time I’d write a crisis plan for something. If I included Twitter and blah, blah, blah, well, one like John just said, it’s going to break. Or by the time we have the crisis, the technology has changed and we’re using something else. So you got to write it from a perspective of people first and tech is the tool.

Prioritizing crisis management over the day-to-day metrics of a business

Four business people used ropes to tighten their money bags, economic austerity, reduced income, economic crisis

Image Credits: VectorInspiration via Getty Images

Danny Crichton: Okay, so obviously we should all spend more time figuring out how to communicate better during crises. But everyone is busy, and every person is trying to hit whatever metric they need for the quarter. How do you get a low-risk but hugh-impact issue like crisis management on the priority list?

John Visneski: For a B2B organization or a B2C organization or really anybody that’s selling a particular service, typically you need to lean on compliance requirements first. So customer contracts are going to say, from a security perspective, your data security addendum, your privacy addendums, and things that are generally going to have some language that centers around having a business continuity plan, a disaster response plan, an incident response plan, a cyber incident response plan, and then the really good contracts are the ones that actually specify you’ll do it no less than two times a year. So the first thing to lean on is those compliance requirements, because those will actually directly tie to revenue.

Then the secret sauce and what a lot of us in the cyber community are trying to get better at is how do you take that next step? We know that compliance does not necessarily mean security. We know that just because we have a written business continuity plan and that we say we exercise it, we present a report that says we exercise it, doesn’t necessarily mean we’re going that next mile to make sure that we train our employees. The education piece of it is really what we need to advocate to get additional resources for.

Admiral Thad Allen: My pitch to these big companies is if you’ve got a regulatory requirement, you have a plan that’s required. Why would you fund that and not take the opportunity to add just a little bit of incremental effort and resources to take advantage of the natural cycle that you’re required to do anyway?

Ana Visneski: Hit them where the money is, because a good crisis plan can range in price. Let’s say you spend $200,000 getting your system set up. If you’re looking at these companies, a disaster or a crisis could tank your company. Or it could cost you millions and millions of dollars if you’re not prepared. So at the end of the day, the ROI is huge.

And like I said before, with COVID having just happened, I think more of leadership is aware that, “Hey, we’re not crisis proof just because we’re a gaming company or just because we’re whatever.” No, one’s crisis proof. So at the end of the day, you’re going to save money. If you just do it in the first place, because then you just have to update it every year, and you just have to do a little bit of training. The biggest cost is on the front end and then just maintaining it after that and updating it.

John Visneski: Everyone knows that if something bad happens, if you don’t have plans in place, you’re going to lose a shit load of money. But let’s think about it from a consumer standpoint. Generally speaking, your average consumer is becoming much more conversant when it comes to privacy.

Moving forward, it isn’t enough just to say, “If we don’t have this, things can go really bad.” It’s also to say, “We can leverage this if we do this really well. And if we can advertise to our customers, whether it’s another business or whether it’s the consumer that not only do we protect your data, but also we have all these plans in place in order to react to complex situations.” You can actually use that as something that separates you from your near-peer competitors in the business world.

Ana Visneski: At the end of the day, if the trust isn’t there in the tech and the trust isn’t there that you’re doing the right things, it doesn’t matter what you do when a crisis hits. You’re already in the trashcan.



from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/3h7SAs5 Startup leaders need to learn how to build companies ready for crisis Danny Crichton https://ift.tt/3A1gYUZ
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8 founders, leaders highlight fintech and deep tech as Bristol’s top sectors

The U.K. is gaining in popularity as a great place to start a tech firm. The country is quickly catching up to China on the tech investment front, with VC investments reaching a record of $15 billion in 2020, according to TechNation. A global health crisis notwithstanding, London remained a favorite for investors. U.K. cities made up a fifth of the top 20 European cities, with names such as Oxford, Dublin, Edinburgh and Cambridge rising to the fore in 2020.

Bristol proved especially popular among tech investors last year — local businesses raked in an impressive $414 million in 2020, making it the third-largest U.K. city for tech investment. The city also has the most fintech startups per head in the U.K. outside London, according to Whitecap’s 2019-2020 Ecosystem Report.

Efforts by the city’s private and public sectors to modernize the city have helped it rank among the top smart cities in the U.K., attracting a bevy of tech entrepreneurs. Its proximity to London has meant that it is a good alternative for founders looking for a more affordable stay while letting them tap the capital’s financial resources. The University of Bristol also has the largest robotics department in Europe.


Use discount code HARBOURSIDE to save 25% off an annual or two-year Extra Crunch membership.
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Bristol is also home to an important startup accelerator, SETsquared. A collaborative effort by the five universities of Bath, Bristol, Exeter, Southampton and Surrey, the accelerator has supported over 4,000 entrepreneurs and helped their startups raise a total of £1.8 billion. Other startup support players include the new Science Creates VC fund, set up by entrepreneur Harry Destecroix, and TechSPARK Engine Shed.

Key emerging startups from Bristol include Graphcore, Open Bionics, Ultraleap, Immersive Labs and Five AI.

To get a better idea of the state of the tech ecosystem and the investor outlook for this city, we surveyed founders, leaders and executives involved in nurturing Bristol’s startup ecosystem.

The survey revealed that the city has a robust renewable, zero-carbon and fintech startup landscape. Robotics, VR, bio, quantum, digital and deep tech are also areas showing promise. As for the investing scene, although Bristol has a healthy angel network, the city lacks institutional VC, but with London only a drive or train ride away, this has not proved a significant problem.

We surveyed:


Coralie Hassanaly, innovation consultant, DRIAD

Which sectors is Bristol’s tech ecosystem strong in? What are you most excited by? What does it lack?
Bristol is strong in renewable and zero-carbon innovation, fintech and robotics. It’s weak in industry 4.0.

Which are the most interesting startups in Bristol?
Graphcore, LettUs Grow, Open Bionics, Ultraleap and YellowDog.

What are the tech investors like in Bristol? What’s their focus?
A lot of focus on fintech, I think.

With the shift to remote working, do you think people will stay in Bristol or will they move out? Will others move in?
Bristol is a great middle ground between a large dynamic city (plus it’s not far from London) and access to nice countryside area. With remote working we can expect it will attract new residents in the next few years.

Who are the key startup people in the city (e.g., investors, founders, lawyers, designers)?
Aimee Skinner, Abigail Frear and Stuart Harrison.

Where do you think the city’s tech scene will be in five years?
Second major city in U.K. innovation.

Pete Read, CEO and founder, Persona Education

Which sectors is Bristol’s tech ecosystem strong in? What are you most excited by? What does it lack?
Bristol is strong in media/animation, edtech, social impact, health and science. I’m most excited by edtech and the possibility to reach and positively impact millions of students via online learning. It’s weaker in hardware and fintech.

Which are the most interesting startups in Bristol?
Kaedim, Persona Education and One Big Circle.

What are the tech investors like in Bristol? What’s their focus?
There are several very active tech investment networks coming from several angles, e.g., university-led, groups of private angels and tech incubators. The great thing is they all collaborate and share resources, ideas and expertise in initiatives such as The Engine Shed and Silicon Gorge.

With the shift to remote working, do you think people will stay in Bristol or will they move out? Will others move in?
More people are moving in, as Bristol has a great urban lifestyle with easy access to the countryside and Southwest/Wales holiday spots, and an international airport 20 minutes from the center.

Who are the key startup people in the city (e.g., investors, founders, lawyers, designers)?
Jerry Barnes at Bristol PE Club; Abby Frear at TechSPARK; Briony Phillips at Rocketmakers; Jack Jordan-Connelly at SETsquared.

Where do you think the city’s tech scene will be in five years?
It’s developing rapidly with lots of support, so it will be bigger, attracting more investment and definitely more on the international scene five years from now.

Kiran Krishnamurthy, CEO, AI Labs

Which sectors is Bristol’s tech ecosystem strong in? What are you most excited by? What does it lack?
Our tech ecosystem is strong in the aerospace and defense sector. We are excited by the scope and scale of digital transformation opportunities with AI available in this sector. The main weakness in this sector is the slow pace of transformation, especially now due to the pandemic.

Which are the most interesting startups in Bristol?
Graphcore and YellowDog.

What are the tech investors like in Bristol? What’s their focus?
Compared to the U.K. tech sector average, Bristol has a very low proportion of established companies (4% versus 8%), a higher proportion of seed stage companies (42% versus 37%), and a higher death rate (21% versus 17%). It’s a particularly young ecosystem.

With the shift to remote working, do you think people will stay in Bristol or will they move out? Will others move in?
It is possible that people moving out of London will come into Bristol due to the transport links, strong ecosystem and beautiful nature of the city.

Where do you think the city’s tech scene will be in five years?
I wouldn’t be surprised if Bristol turns out to be San Francisco of Europe!

Simon Hall, director, Airway Medical

Which sectors is Bristol’s tech ecosystem strong in? What does it lack?
Bristol is strong in the medtech, veterinary, industrial sectors.

With the shift to remote working, do you think people will stay in Bristol or will they move out? Will others move in?
Others have moved in.

Who are the key startup people in the city (e.g., investors, founders, lawyers, designers)?
SETsquared.

Where do you think the city’s tech scene will be in five years?
We will see massive growth in five years.

Ben Miles, CEO, Spin Up Science

Which sectors is Bristol’s tech ecosystem strong in? What are you most excited by? What does it lack?
Our sector is weak in entrepreneurial ambition among researchers, and so suffers from low rates of deep tech spinout activity from leading universities. We are most excited by the step change in activity we have seen in the past two years and culture shift towards innovation.

Which are the most interesting startups in Bristol?
Rosa Biotech, Albotherm and CytoSeek.

What are the tech investors like in Bristol? What’s their focus?
Medium strength in shallow tech; currently weak in deep tech.

With the shift to remote working, do you think people will stay in Bristol or will they move out? Will others move in?
People are moving in.

Who are the key startup people in the city (e.g., investors, founders, lawyers, designers)?
Spin Up Science, Science Creates and Science Angel Syndicate.

Where do you think the city’s tech scene will be in five years?
Very strong in deep tech with an invested local community of entrepreneurs, incubators and investors.

Rupert Baines, ex-CEO, UltraSoC

Which sectors is Bristol’s tech ecosystem strong in? What are you most excited by? What does it lack?
Bristol is strong in wireless (5G, 60 GHz, etc.), semiconductors (especially processors, AI/ML and parallel architectures), robotics and other hard tech/deep tech.

Which are the most interesting startups in Bristol?
Graphcore, Ultraleap, Blu Wireless and Five AI.

What are the tech investors like in Bristol? What’s their focus?
It’s limited. There are some angels, but few locally focused funds.

With the shift to remote working, do you think people will stay in Bristol or will they move out? Will others move in?
Much the same: People choose to live in Bristol/Bath for quality of life. Much of the work is already external — commuting to London.

Who are the key startup people in the city (e.g., investors, founders, lawyers, designers)?
Nigel Toon, Simon Knowles, Stan Boland, David May and Nick Sturge.

Where do you think the city’s tech scene will be in five years?
Much stronger, with more processor and hardware activity.

Mathieu Johnsson, CEO and co-founder, Marble

Which sectors is Bristol’s tech ecosystem strong in? What are you most excited by? What does it lack?
Bristol has a strong robotics, aerospace and renewables scene. I’m most excited to see how the legacy in aerospace in Bristol will translate to future industry-defining companies. The ecosystem is weak on the investor side, though London VCs are less than a two-hour train journey away.

Which are the most interesting startups in Bristol?
Graphcore, Ultraleap and Open Bionics.

With the shift to remote working, do you think people will stay in Bristol or will they move out? Will others move in?
I believe Bristol will become more attractive.

Who are the key startup people in the city (e.g., investors, founders, lawyers, designers)?
Tom Carter at Ultraleap, and Joel Gibbard at Open Bionics.

Where do you think the city’s tech scene will be in five years?
Getting closer to London and Cambridge.

Chris Erven, CEO, KETS Quantum Security

Which sectors is Bristol’s tech ecosystem strong in? What are you most excited by? What does it lack?
Bristol has a strong biotech, quantum, digital, science-based/deep tech ecosystem. I’m excited by this eclectic city with exciting people that think differently.

Which are the most interesting startups in Bristol?
Any QTEC, SETsquared, or UnitDX members and alumni.

What are the tech investors like in Bristol? What’s their focus?
Very early/nascent, mostly angels.

With the shift to remote working, do you think people will stay in Bristol or will they move out? Will others move in?
Probably move in! Beautiful green spaces around, lots of interesting, independent shops. And (just about) commutable from London.

Who are the key startup people in the city (e.g., investors, founders, lawyers, designers)?
The incubators — QTEC, QTIC, SETsquared and UnitDX; Bristol Private Equity Club; Harry Destecroix.

Where do you think the city’s tech scene will be in five years?
Buzzing. More great startups and VCs moving in.



https://ift.tt/eA8V8J 8 founders, leaders highlight fintech and deep tech as Bristol’s top sectors https://ift.tt/3xTBvZJ

Friday, June 25, 2021

On TikTok, Black creators’ dance strike calls out creative exploitation

There’s a new Megan Thee Stallion music video out in time for triple digit temperatures. But instead of launching a fresh viral TikTok dance for summer, the single inspired an informal protest among Black creators tired of thanklessly launching trends into the social media stratosphere.

With the release of the video for “Thot Shit,” some Black TikTok creators began calling attention to that exploitation this week, inspiring others to refuse to choreograph a dance to the hit song. The idea behind the movement is that Black artists on the platform create a disproportionate amount of content and culture — much of which is re-packaged and monetized by popular white creators and culture at large.

The song choice probably isn’t a coincidence. The Megan Thee Stallion video is both a playful but important paean to essential workers — twerking grocery, food service and sanitation workers, in this case — and a biting commentary on the wealthy white establishment that exploits their labor without thinking twice.

The “strike” doesn’t have creators leaving the platform or even staying off of the app. Instead, Black creators who might normally contribute dances for the hot new song are sitting back and pointing to what happens when they’re not around. (Predictably: not a lot.)

On the sound’s page, some videos tease choreography but pivot into a statement about how Black creators don’t get their due on the app. In other videos, Black creators watch on in horror at awkward dance attempts failing to fill the void or laugh about how the song’s lyrics are instructional but non-Black TikTok still can’t figure it out. The eminently danceable “Thot shit” could build into Megan Thee Stallion’s biggest hit yet, but just looking on TikTok you wouldn’t know it.

When reached for comment on the phenomenon, TikTok praised Black creators as a “critical and vibrant” part of the community. “We care deeply about the experience of Black creators on our platform and we continue to work every day to create a supportive environment for our community while also instilling a culture where honoring and crediting creators for their creative contributions is the norm,” a TikTok spokesperson said.

Many TikTok accounts participating in the strike cite a recent explosion of white TikTokkers lip-syncing obliviously to a clip of Nicki Minaj’s 2016 song “Black Barbies” that specifically praises Black bodies (“I’m a fucking Black Barbie/Pretty face, perfect body…”). White TikTok inexplicably flocked to the sound, boosting its popularity and crowding out Black creators.

The episode is the latest beat in the ongoing conversation over who gets to cash in on the wellspring of creativity that pours out of a platform like TikTok. More broadly, some creators believe that TikTok’s economics are stacked against them, even compared to other major platforms like YouTube. Across social media sites, creators, particularly creators of color, are turning to collective action and even unionizing to assert their power.

Black dancers on TikTok have long been left in the cold when their original moves explode and are picked up by non-Black creators, who also pick up the credit along the way. For Black creators tired of seeing their work appropriated, collectively refusing to gift the world a hot new TikTok dance is certainly one way to show just how vital they are to the online ecosystem — something even a quick glance at the desolate “Thot Shit” sound makes abundantly clear.



from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/3oJXEW6 On TikTok, Black creators’ dance strike calls out creative exploitation Taylor Hatmaker https://ift.tt/2T5jGrK
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Extra Crunch roundup: Unpacking BuzzFeed’s SPAC, curb your meeting enthusiasm, more

Meetings should have a clear purpose, but instead, they’ve become a way to measure status and reinforce what is colloquially referred to as CYA culture.

There’s a kernel of truth in every joke, so whenever someone quips, “This meeting could have been an email!” you can bet that some small part of them meant it sincerely.

Few people know how to run meetings effectively and keep conversations on track. Making matters worse, attendees often don’t bother to prepare, which makes a boring session even less productive.

And then there’s the complication of workplace politics: How secure do you feel declining an invitation from a co-worker — or a manager?

“Every time a recurring meeting is added to a calendar, a kitten dies,” says Chuck Phillips, co-founder of MeetWell. “Very few employees decline meetings, even when it’s obvious that the meeting is going to be a doozy.”


Full Extra Crunch articles are only available to members.
Use discount code ECFriday to save 20% off a one- or two-year subscription.


Changing your meeting culture is difficult, but given that 26% of workers plan to look for a new job when the pandemic ends, startups need to do all they can to retain talent.

Aimed at managers, this post offers several testable strategies that will help you boost productivity and say goodbye to poorly run, lazily planned meetings.

“Declining a bad meeting should never be taboo, and you should reiterate your trust in the team and challenge them to spend their and others’ time with more intention,” Phillips says. “Help them feel empowered to decline a bad meeting.”

Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch, and have a great weekend.

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

Why Amazon should pay attention to Shein

Image Credits: Shein

In the last year, online apparel shopping app Shein grew active daily users by 130%, reports Apptopia.

Each day, thousands of new products arrive on the app’s virtual shelves. Items are rapidly designed and prototyped before Shein’s contractors put them into production in Guangzhou factories — two weeks later, those SKUs arrive in fulfillment centers around the globe.

TechCrunch reporter Rita Liao examined how the company’s agile supply chain has become hot talk among e-commerce experts, but beyond a strong logistics game and data-driven product development, Shein’s close relationships with suppliers are integral to its success.

She also tried to answer a question many are asking: Is Shein a Chinese company?

“It’s hard to pin down where Shein is from,” answered Richard Xu from Grand View Capital, a Chinese venture capital firm.

“It’s a company with operations and supply chains in China targeting the global market, with nearly no business in China.”

Inside GM’s startup incubator strategy

General Motors Chief Engineer Hybrid and Electric Powertrain Engineering Pam Fletcher with the 2014 Spark EV Tuesday, November 27, 2012 at a Chevrolet event on the eve of the Los Angeles International Auto Show in Los Angeles, California. When it goes on sale next summer, the Spark EV is expected to have among the best EV battery range in its segment and will be priced under $25,000 with tax incentives. (Chevrolet News Photo)

Image Credits: Chevrolet

GM Vice President of Innovation Pam Fletcher is in charge of the company’s startups that tackle “electrification, connectivity and even insurance — all part of the automaker’s aim to find value (and profits) beyond its traditional business of making, selling and financing vehicles,” Kirsten Korosec writes.

Fletcher joined TechCrunch at a virtual TC Sessions: Mobility 2021 event to discuss what it’s like to launch a slew of startups under the umbrella of a 113-year-old automaker.

Investor Marlon Nichols and Wonderschool’s Chris Bennett on getting to the point with a pitch deck

Image Credits: MaC Venture Capital / Wonderschool

MaC Venture Capital founding managing partner Marlon Nichols and Wonderschool CEO Chris Bennett joined Extra Crunch Live to tear down the company’s early deck.

“The first thing that jumped out at all of us was just how bare-bones the presentation is: white text on a blue background, largely made up of bullet points,” Brian Heater writes before noting the CEO admitted that “not much changed aesthetically between that first pitch and the Series A deck.”

“It aligned with what we were valuing at the time,” Bennett says. “We were really focused on getting the product-market fit and really trying to understand what our customers needed. And we’re really focused on building the team.”

Dear Sophie: What options would allow me to start something on my own?

lone figure at entrance to maze hedge that has an American flag at the center

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

Dear Sophie,

I’ve been working on an H-1B in the U.S. for nearly two years.

While I’m grateful to have made it through the H-1B lottery and to be working, I’m feeling unhappy and frustrated with my job.

I really want to start something of my own and work on my own terms in the United States. Are there any immigration options that would allow me to do that?

— Seeking Satisfaction

Investors’ thirst for growth could bode well for SentinelOne’s IPO

Alex Wilhelm calls SentinelOne’s looming debut “fascinating.”

“Why? Because the company sports a combination of rapid growth and expanding losses that make it a good heat check for the IPO market,” he writes. “Its debut will allow us to answer whether public investors still value growth above all else.”

Alex delves into an early dataset from SentinelOne and why public market investors still appear to value growth above anything else.

Before an exit, founders must get their employment law ducks in a row

Rubber ducks in a line

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

Guest columnist Rob Hudock, a litigator who focuses on helping companies recruit the best talent available while avoiding distracting workplace issues or lawsuits, lays out the importance of putting out any employment-related fires before an exit.

“Inattention to employment issues can have a significant impact on deals — from preventing closings and reducing the deal value to altering the deal terms or significantly limiting the pool of potential buyers,” he writes.

“Fortunately, such issues typically can be resolved well in advance with a little forethought and legal guidance.”

Practice agile, iterative change to refine products and build company culture

Building an excellent product and a standout company culture require the same process, Heap CEO Ken Fine writes in a guest column.

“At Heap, the analytics solution provider I lead, a defining principle is that good ideas should not be lost to top-down dictates and overrigid hierarchies,” he writes. “The best results come when you approach leadership like you would create a great product — you hypothesize, you test and iterate, and once you get it right, you grow it.”

Here, he lays out his method that argues in favor of iterative change, not “one-and-done decrees.”

a16z’s new $2.2B fund won’t just bet on the crypto future, it will defend it

The big news on Thursday was the announcement of Andreessen Horowitz’s new cryptocurrency-focused fund. Most focused on the eye-popping $2.2 billion figure, but Alex Wilhelm dug a bit deeper into the announcement to note that a16z isn’t just pumping a ton of money into the crypto space, it’s putting on gloves to fight for it.

Alex writes that “a16z intends to run defense for crypto in the American, and perhaps global, market. Crypto-focused startups are likely unable to tackle the regulation of their market on their own because they’re more focused on product work in a particular region of the larger crypto economy. The wealthy and connected investment firm that backs them will take on the task for its chosen champions.”

5 takeaways from BuzzFeed’s SPAC deck

Image Credits: Nicholas Kamm / AFP / Getty Images

Alex Wilhelm dives headfirst into BuzzFeed’s announcement that it plans to go public via a blank check company.

He looked at its historical and anticipated revenue growth (the latter is very sunny, which is not atypical for SPAC presentations), what makes up that revenue (more “commerce” as time goes on), its long-term profitability projections, as well as fun stuff, like the Pulitzer Prize-winning BuzzFeed News.

Admit it. You’re curious.

3 issues to resolve before switching to a subscription business model

Three issues leaders need to address before switching to a subscription business model

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

Moving from a pay-as-you-go model to a subscription service is more than just putting a monthly or yearly price tag on a product, CloudBlue’s Jess Warrington writes in a guest column.

“Executives cannot just layer a subscription model on top of an existing business,” Warrington writes. “They need to change the entire operation process, onboard all stakeholders, recalibrate their strategy and create a subscription culture.”

Warrington says that in his role at CloudBlue, companies often approach him for “help with solving technology challenges while shifting to a subscription business model, only to realize that they have not taken crucial organizational steps necessary to ensure a successful transition.”

Here’s how to avoid that situation.

Veo CEO Candice Xie has a plan for building a sustainable scooter company, and it’s working

An illustration of Veo founder Candie Xie

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin

Rebecca Bellan interviewed Veo CEO Candice Xie about the micromobility startup’s “old-fashioned way” of doing business.

“I understand people are eager to prove their unit economics, their scalability and also improve their matrix to the VC to raise another round,” Xie says. “I would say that’s OK in the consumer industry, like consumer electronics or SaaS.

“But we are in transportation. It is a different business, and transportation takes years of collaboration and building between private and public partners. … So I don’t see it happening from day one, turning over a billion-dollar company, while simultaneously having it all make sense for the cities and users.”

5 companies doing growth marketing right

Image of five round wooden balls moving up steps to represent growth.

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

All companies want more or less the same thing: growth. But how do you accomplish it?

Ideally, don’t start from scratch.

The race to grow faster is more pressing than ever before. … “[F]orward-thinking entrepreneurs and growth marketers simply must make time to study their competition, learn best practices and apply them to their own business growth,” Mark Spera, the head of growth marketing at Minted, writes in a guest column.

“Of course, you should still run your own experiments, but it’s just more capital-efficient to emulate than to trial-and-error from scratch. Here are five companies with growth strategies worth emulating — including the most important lessons you can begin applying to your business today.”

Musculoskeletal medical startups race to enter personalized health tech market

Human anatomy, hand, arm,muscular system on plain studio background.

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

With more than 50 million Americans suffering from chronic pain and musculoskeletal (MSK) medical problems, a number of startups are offering patients new products “that don’t resemble the cookie-cutter status quo,” reports Natasha Mascarenhas.

Startups hoping to enter this space have an uphill climb. Setting aside regulations that cover aspects like product packaging and marketing, they must compete with well-entrenched competition from Big Pharma as they try to partner with health insurance companies.

Natasha profiles three companies that are each taking a different approach to personalized health: Clear, Hinge Health and PeerWell.

Like the US, a two-tier venture capital market is emerging in Latin America

In the second part of an Exchange series looking at the global early-stage venture capital market, Alex Wilhelm and Anna Heim unpacked the scene in Latin America, discovering it looked a lot like the situation in the United States: slow Series A rounds, fast B rounds.

“Mega-rounds are no longer an exception in Latin America; in fact, they have become a trend, with ever-larger rounds being announced over the last few months,” they write.

Despite that, the funds aren’t being equitably distributed, and the region still lags behind its peers: Brazil has the most $1 billion startups in Latin America, with 12. The U.S., meanwhile, has 369, and China has 159.

But the Latin American market remains hot, if not quite as scorching as the U.S. and China.



https://ift.tt/3gW97R1 Extra Crunch roundup: Unpacking BuzzFeed’s SPAC, curb your meeting enthusiasm, more https://ift.tt/3ha2ido

Why is Didi worth so much less than Uber?

Years ago, U.S. ride-hailing giant Uber and its Chinese rival Didi were locked in an expensive rivalry in the Asian nation. After a financially bruising competition, Uber sold its China-based business to Didi, focusing instead on other markets.

The two companies are coming head-to-head again, however, as Didi looks to list in the United States. The company’s IPO filing was big news for the SoftBank Vision Fund, Tencent and Uber, thanks to its stake in Didi from its earlier transaction.

Uber is more diversified both geographically and in terms of its revenue mix. Didi is larger, more profitable and more concentrated.

But Didi appears set to be valued at a discount to Uber. By several tens of billions of dollars, it turns out. And we can’t quite figure out why.

This week, Didi indicated that it will target a $13 to $14 per-share IPO price, with each share on the U.S. markets worth one-fourth of a Class A share in the company. In more technical language, each ADR is 25% of a Class A ordinary share in Didi, if you prefer it put like that.

With 288 million shares to be sold in its U.S. IPO, Didi could raise as much as $4.03 billion, a huge sum.

What’s Didi worth at $13 to $14 per ADR? Using a nondiluted share count, Didi is valued between $62.3 billion and $67.1 billion. Inclusive of shares that may be issued thanks to vested options and the like, Didi could be worth as much as $70 billion; Renaissance Capital calculates the company’s midpoint valuation using a fully diluted share count at $67.5 billion.

Regardless of which number you prefer, Didi is not set to challenge Uber’s own valuation. Yahoo Finance pegged Uber at $95.2 billion as of this morning.

Why is the Chinese company worth less than its erstwhile rival? Let’s dig around in their numbers and find out.

Didi versus Uber

As a reminder, Uber’s Q1 2021 included adjusted revenues of $3.5 billion, a gain of 8% compared to the year-ago quarter. Uber’s adjusted EBITDA came in for the period at -$359 million.



https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Why is Didi worth so much less than Uber? https://ift.tt/3j9KHFg

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