TechCrunch |
- TuSimple’s self-driving truck network takes shape with Ryder partnership
- Pittsburgh Google contractors ratify deal with HCL
- Daily Crunch: European privacy regulators fine Amazon $887M over targeted advertising practices
- Argo AI can now offer the public rides in its autonomous vehicles in California
- Deliveroo could leave Spanish market ahead of on-demand labor reclassification
- For tech firms, the risk of not preparing for leadership changes is huge
- Extra Crunch roundup: Livestream e-commerce, growth marketing interviews, CEO for a day
- Kodiak Robotics’ founder says tight focus on autonomous trucks is working
- Growth roundup: Investing in community, targeting developers, new marketer recs
- Yat thinks emoji ‘identities’ can be a thing, and it has $20M in sales to back it up
- Calendly CEO Tope Awotona is joining us at Disrupt 2021
- The best way to grow your tech career? Treat it like an app
- A Tesla Megapack caught fire at the Victorian Big Battery facility in Australia
- Elon Musk calls Apple’s App Store fees ‘a de facto global tax on the Internet’
- US government watchdog rejects Blue Origin’s protest over lunar lander contract
- Design expert Scott Tong outlines 4 concepts founders should consider when designing products
- Robinhood’s CFO says it was ready to go public
- Last day to snag early-bird passes to TechCrunch Disrupt 2021
- White-label SaaS shipping startup Outvio closes $3M round led by Change Ventures
- Gillmor Gang: Social climbing
| TuSimple’s self-driving truck network takes shape with Ryder partnership Posted: 30 Jul 2021 05:15 PM PDT TuSimple, the self-driving truck company that went public earlier this year, has partnered with Ryder as part of its plan to build out a freight network that will support its autonomous trucking operations. Under the deal announced this week, Ryder’s fleet maintenance facilities will act as terminals for TuSimple’s freight network. TuSimple’s so-called AFN, or autonomous freight network, is a collection of shipping routes and terminals designed for autonomous trucking operations that will extend across the United States by 2024. UPS, which took a minority stake in TuSimple before it went public, carrier U.S. Xpress, Penske Truck Leasing and Berkshire Hathaway's grocery and food service supply chain company McLane Inc. were the inaugural partners in the network. TuSimple's AFN involves four pieces that includes its self-driving trucks, digital mapped routes, freight terminals and a system that will let customers monitor autonomous trucking operations and track their shipments in real time. Ryder’s facilities will primarily serve as strategic terminals where TuSimple trucks can receive maintenance and have sensors used in the self-driving system calibrated, if needed. In some cases, the terminals might be used as a transfer hub for a smaller operator that might want to pick up cargo. But this is not meant to be a hub-to-hub system where its customers would come and pick up freight, according to TuSimple President and CEO Cheng Lu. “These trucks need to be serviceable and maintainable and they need to have higher uptime, which is what every carrier cares about regardless of whether it is autonomous or not,” Lu said. Small shippers and carriers might use these terminals to pick up and drop off freight. However, Lu stressed that in most cases, especially for large-scale operators like UPS, TuSimple will take the freight directly to the customer’s distribution centers. The Ryder facilities work as nodes, or stops, on its network to allow TuSimple to reach more customers over a larger geographic area, Lu added. The partnership will start gradually. TuSimple has 50 autonomous trucks in its fleet that — along with a human safety operator behind the wheel — transport freight for customers in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. The partnership will initially use Ryder’s facilities in these areas and eventually expand to the company’s 500 maintenance facilities in the United States. TuSimple said it expects to expand operations to the East Coast, carrying freight between Phoenix and Orlando later this year. TuSimple has about 25 new trucks on order, which will be added to the fleet once they become available.  |
| Pittsburgh Google contractors ratify deal with HCL Posted: 30 Jul 2021 04:13 PM PDT Nearly two years ago, contractors for Google's Pittsburgh operations voted to join the United Steelworkers union in a bid to secure more labor rights representation. It was an early example of a building union movement for tech workers across the spectrum. But as other hard-fought battles have been waged among blue and white collar workers alike, both sides have continued hashing out negotiations. This week, those have finally resulted in something more concrete. The contract workers held out for what they believed to be similar treatment as others in the tech industry. At the time, it seemed Google was hoping to stay out of the fray with HCL Technologies, the consulting company that staffed the workers. "We work with lots of partners, many of which have unionized workforces, and many of which don't," Google said following the initial union vote. "As with all our partners, whether HCL's employees unionize or not is between them and their employer. We'll continue to partner with HCL." According to the USW, the 65 Pittsburgh-based workers have ratified the contract with HCL. It's a three-year-deal that covers working conditions, job security and wages, per a note from the union. “After close to two years of hard work, patience and solidarity from our members at HCL, we are proud of what we achieved in this agreement,” USW President Tom Conway said in a release tied to the news. “More than ever, our struggle with HCL shows that all workers deserve the protections and benefits of a union contract.” Last week, with the deal nearing completion, HCL said in a statement provided to The Verge, "Throughout this process, HCL has been actively engaged in meaningful and fair discussions with the USW in good faith. We have been steadfast in our commitment to respect our employees' right to pursue unionization should they choose to do so." In a release issued by USW, however, bargaining committee member Renata Nelson notes some clear tension in the process. "After ignoring our concerns, HCL tried to prevent us from forming a union, and when it failed, the company dragged out the negotiating process while sending our jobs overseas in retaliation," Parks said in the release. "Now, with a strong union and contract in place, we're confident that our voices will be heard." We've reached out to Google for comment.  |
| Daily Crunch: European privacy regulators fine Amazon $887M over targeted advertising practices Posted: 30 Jul 2021 03:10 PM PDT To get a roundup of TechCrunch's biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for July 30, 2021. What a week, my friends. It was packed full of IPOs and earnings and startup news and new venture funds. And today was no exception. Before we get into it, however, I am happy to report that Calendly CEO Tope Awotona is coming to Disrupt. It's also the last day for early-bird passes, which are cheap. See you there! — Alex The TechCrunch Top 3
Startups/VC
The best way to grow your tech career? Treat it like an appMany technical workers aren’t extremely career focused; on average, they’re paid more than other startup employees, and the most talented often get to work on projects that interest them personally. But the increasing demand for talent is offset by an ongoing shortage: Companies can’t hire developers and engineers fast enough, even though many still don’t see themselves as in-demand workers. “To put it bluntly, many developers and engineers stink at managing their own careers,” says Raj Yavatkar, CTO of Juniper Networks. Breaking away from traditional tech culture can be challenging, so Yavatkar recommends that developers and engineers “treat career advancement as you would a software project.” (Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.) Big Tech Inc.Fires, the moon and a European fine? We have it all for you today in our big technology watchlist:
TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL (opens in a new window) / Getty Images We're reaching out to startup founders to tell us who they turn to when they want the most up-to-date growth marketing practices. Fill out the survey here. Read one of the testimonials we've received below! Marketer: Ascendant Recommended by: Robyn Weatherley, Thirdfort Limited Testimonial: "Beyond their knowledge and experience (which is in abundance!), they have a deep understanding and appreciation for the unique challenges early-stage businesses have. They are in tune with the particular hurdles at various stages of growth and are able to adapt their working style dependent on those. They haven’t just helped us execute vital growth tactics, but they’ve helped us set up the framework to keep executing on those whether we are 5, 50 or 500 people. This is incredibly important as we scale and to demonstrate to future investors. They are also exceptional mentors and are able to offer real-world advice and work flexibly to suit the ever-changing nature of a high-growth early-stage business."  |
| Argo AI can now offer the public rides in its autonomous vehicles in California Posted: 30 Jul 2021 02:56 PM PDT Argo AI, the autonomous vehicle technology startup backed by Ford and VW, has landed a permit in California that will allow the company to give people free rides in its self-driving vehicles on the state’s public roads. The California Public Utilities Commission issued the so-called Drivered AV pilot permit earlier this month, according to the approved application. It was posted on its website Friday, a little more than a week after Argo and Ford announced plans to launch at least 1,000 self-driving vehicles on Lyft’s ride-hailing network in a number of cities over the next five years, starting with Miami and Austin. The permit, which is part of the state’s Autonomous Vehicle Passenger Service pilot, puts Argo in small and growing group of companies seeking to expand beyond traditional AV testing — a signal that the industry, or at least some companies, are preparing for commercial operations. Argo has been testing its autonomous vehicle technology in Ford vehicles around Palo Alto since 2019. Today, the company’s test fleet is about one dozen self-driving test vehicles. Aurora, AutoX, Cruise, Deeproute, Pony.ai, Voyage, Zoox and Waymo have all received permits to participate in the CPUC’s Drivered Autonomous Vehicle Passenger Service Pilot program, which requires a human safety operator to be behind the wheel. Companies with this permit cannot charge for rides. Cruise is the only company to have secured a driverless permit from the CPUC, which allows it to shuttle passengers in its test vehicles without a human safety operator behind the wheel. Snagging the CPUC’s Drivered permit is just part of the journey to commercialization in California. The state requires companies to navigate a series of regulatory hurdles from the CPUC and the California Department of Motor Vehicles — each agency with its own tiered system of permits — before it can charge for rides in robotaxis without a human safety operator behind the wheel. The DMV regulates and issues permits for testing autonomous vehicles on public roads. There are three levels of permits issued by the DMW, starting with one that allows companies to test AVs on public roads with a safety operator behind the wheel. More than 60 companies have this basic testing permit. The next permit allows for driverless testing, followed by a deployment permit for commercial operations. Driverless testing permits, in which a human operator is not behind the wheel, have become the new milestone and a required step for companies that want to launch a commercial robotaxi or delivery service in the state. AutoX, Baidu, Cruise, Nuro, Pony.ai, Waymo, WeRide and Zoox have driverless permits with the DMV. The final step with the DMV, which only Nuro has achieved, is a deployment permit. This permit allows Nuro to deploy at a commercial scale. Nuro’s vehicles can’t hold passengers, just cargo, which allows the company to bypass the CPUC permitting process. Meanwhile, the CPUC authorized in May 2018 two pilot programs for transporting passengers in autonomous vehicles. The Drivered Autonomous Vehicle Passenger Service Pilot program, which is what Argo just secured, allows companies to operate a ride-hailing service using autonomous vehicles as long as they follow specific rules. Companies are not allowed to charge for rides, a human safety driver must be behind the wheel and certain data must be reported quarterly. The second CPUC pilot allows for driverless passenger service, which Cruise secured in June 2021. It’s important to note that to reach the holy grail of commercial robotaxis requires the companies to secure all of these permits from the DMV and CPUC.  |
| Deliveroo could leave Spanish market ahead of on-demand labor reclassification Posted: 30 Jul 2021 01:53 PM PDT Deliveroo announced today that it is considering leaving the Spanish market, citing limited market share and a long road of investment with “highly uncertain long-term potential returns” on the horizon. The company, an on-demand outfit based in the U.K., went public earlier in 2021. Its shares initially sagged, drawing concern about both the value of on-demand companies and tech concerns listing in London more broadly. However, shares of Deliveroo have since recovered, and the company’s second-quarter earnings report saw it raise its expected gross order volume growth expectations “from between 30% to 40% to between 50% to 60%.” Given its rising growth expectations and improving public-market valuation, you may be surprised that Deliveroo is willing to leave any of the 12 markets in which it currently operates. In the case of Spain, it appears that Deliveroo is concerned that changes to local labor laws will make its operations more expensive in the country, which, given its modest market share, is not palatable. Recall that Spain adopted a law in May — a law generally agreed to in March — requiring on-demand companies to hire their couriers. This is the sort of arrangement that on-demand companies in food delivery and ride-hailing have long fought; many on-demand companies are unprofitable without hiring couriers, and doing so could raise their costs. The possibility of worsened economics makes such changes to labor laws in any market a worry for startups and public companies alike that lean on freelance delivery workers. Let’s parse the Deliveroo statement to better understand the company’s perspective. Here’s the introductory paragraph:
Translation: We’re probably leaving Spain. Most of our order volume comes from markets where we are in a leading position (the company competes with Uber Eats, Glovo and Just Eat in different markets). We are not in a leading position in Spain.
Translation: Spain is a very small market for Deliveroo. To gain lots of market share in Spain would be very costly, and the company isn’t sure about the long-term profitability of the country’s business. This is where labor issues like this come into play — investing to gain market share in a country where your business is less profitable is hard to pencil out. And according to El Pais, the decision by Deliveroo comes as it was up against a deadline regarding worker reclassification. That may have contributed to the timing of the announcement. From this juncture, Deliveroo spends three paragraphs discussing how it will support workers in case it does leave the Spanish market. It closes with the following:
Fair enough. On-demand companies have made arguments over the years that changes to labor laws that would push more costs onto their plates in the form of hiring couriers — or simply paying them more — would make certain markets uneconomic and drive them away. Here, Deliveroo can follow through with an exit at essentially no cost, given how small its order volume is compared to its other 11 markets.  |
| For tech firms, the risk of not preparing for leadership changes is huge Posted: 30 Jul 2021 01:42 PM PDT Every week over the past three and a half years, an average of three CEOs have exited tech companies in the U.S. That tally is higher — in good times and bad — than in any of the other 26 for-profit sectors tracked by executive search firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. You’d think tech companies should be the paradigm of how to prep for leadership transitions, since they operate in such a constant state of flux. They're far from it. A change of command is one of the most delicate moments in the life cycle of any organization. If mishandled, the transition from one CEO to the next can result in a loss of market valuation, momentum and focus, as well as key personnel, customers and partners. It may even become that turning point when an organization begins to slide toward irrelevance. With so much at stake, 84% of tech execs agree that succession planning is more important than ever because of today's fast-changing business environment, according to our new survey of corporate America's leaders. Seven out of 10 survey respondents agreed that tech companies face more scrutiny than other multinationals during a transition.
84% of tech execs agree that succession planning is more important than ever because of today's fast-changing business environment. Yet we found that tech execs appear just as unprepared for C-suite transitions as their peers in other sectors. Three out of five respondents said their companies don't have a documented plan to handle a leadership change, even though, by that same ratio, they acknowledge that a documented plan is the biggest determinant in seamless transitions. The findings may not be troubling if these respondents were millennial startup founders, years from leaving their companies. The executives we polled, however, hail from 160 companies that have been in business for a minimum of 15 years — 35 are tech companies, the largest industry cohort in the survey. The smallest companies have at least 1,500 employees and $500 million in annual revenue, while the largest have head counts of over 500,000 and revenue upward of $100 billion. They have been around long enough to understand — and put into place — risk management and crisis planning, including what happens should their leaders fall victim to the proverbial milk truck. Tech execs should be more rigorous about succession planning for one important reason: institutional memory. Tech firms generally are younger than other companies of a similar size, which partly explains why the median age of S&P 500 companies plunged to 33 years in 2018 from 85 years in 2000, according to McKinsey & Co. These enterprises clearly have accomplished a lot in their short lives, but in their haste, most have not captured their history, unlike their longer-lived peers in other sectors. Less than half of these tech firms, in fact, have formally recorded their leader's story for posterity. That puts them at a disadvantage when, inevitably, they will be required to onboard newcomers to their C-suites. It's best to record this history well before the intense swirl of a leadership transition begins. Crucially, it will help the incoming and future generations of leadership understand critical aspects of its track record, the lessons learned, culture and identity. It also explains why the organization has evolved as it has, what binds people together and what may trigger resistance based on previous experience. It's as much about moving forward as looking back. Most execs in our poll get it, with 85% saying a company's history can be a playbook for new executives to learn and prepare for upcoming challenges and opportunities. "History is the mother of innovation for any type of company," one respondent said. "History,” writes another, "includes the roadmap to failures as well as successes." But this documented history cannot be a hagiography of the departing CEO. Too often, outgoing execs spend their last years in office constructing their own trophy cases. Even as they conceded their own flat-footedness on transition planning, the majority of execs said they have already taken steps to create and reinforce their personal legacies — two-thirds said they have already completed their own formal legacy planning, many with the blessing of their boards. It's ironic, then, that three out of five also said that the legacy of a CEO or founder often overshadows the skill set and experience a successor brings. Two-thirds of tech execs believed that the longer a leader has been in office, the more it complicates a transition. Tech leaders can do this right and have done so. Asked which five big-name CEO transitions was most successful, respondents' No. 1 was Apple's handoff from Steve Jobs to Tim Cook (38%), followed by Microsoft's page-turn from Steve Ballmer to Satya Nadella (28%). The others, at General Electric, General Motors and Goldman Sachs, each netted no more than 13% of votes. Apple’s apparent predominance in this survey might contradict the advice to play down the aggrandizement of an exiting CEO and highlight the compilation and transfer of an organization's history to the next chief executive. Jobs, after all, painstakingly managed his legacy until the end. But even as he continued to take center-stage, he also made sure to pass along Apple's institutional knowledge and ethos to Cook over the 13 years they shared space on Apple's executive floor. Sooner or later, everyone in the C-suite today — including startup founders — will depart. For the sake of everyone they'll leave behind, they should begin prepping for that day now.  |
| Extra Crunch roundup: Livestream e-commerce, growth marketing interviews, CEO for a day Posted: 30 Jul 2021 01:40 PM PDT This year, livestream viewers in China are projected to spend more than $60 billion on digital shopping experiences that let them interact with influencers in real time. Promoting everything from cosmetics to food, social media stars use Taobao, TikTok and other platforms to livestream products and take questions from the audience. On Taobao’s Singles Day in 2020, livestreams racked up $6 billion in sales, twice as much revenue as the year prior. Sensing a trend, Western startups are getting in on the action, with companies like Whatnot and PopShop.Live raising rounds to build out their infrastructure. Looking forward, Alanna Gregory, senior global director at Afterpay, says she foresees four major trends:
“For brands, SaaS streaming tools will be the most impactful way to take advantage of livestream commerce trends,” Gregory writes in an Extra Crunch guest post. “All of this will be incredibly transformative.” To help entrepreneurs take on the most fundamental challenge facing early-stage startups, our team is speaking to growth marketers to learn more about the advice they’re offering clients these days. This week, Miranda Halpern and Anna Heim interviewed experts on growth marketing:
Growth is an existential issue, so these stories are free to read and share. If you’ve worked with an individual or an agency who helped your startup find and keep new users, please let us know. Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch this week; have a great weekend. Walter Thompson Senior Editor, TechCrunch Why Latin American venture capital is breaking records this year Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window) Alex Wilhelm and Anna Heim's global exploration of Q2 venture capital data wrapped up this week with an in-depth look at Latin America. One investor told them that today's LatAm startup market "is a story about talent, not about capital." "The union of talent and money is what startup markets need to thrive," they write. "But there are other reasons why Latin American startups are so frequently in the news today, including structural factors, such as strong digital penetration and quick e-commerce growth." Dear Sophie: Should we sponsor international hires for H-1B transfers and green cards? Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch Dear Sophie, My startup is desperately recruiting, and we see a lot of engineering candidates on H-1Bs. They're looking for H-1B transfers and green cards. What should we do? — Baffled in the Bay Area Why I make everyone in my company be the CEO for a day Image Credits: Blake Little (opens in a new window) / Getty Images In the reality TV series “Undercover Boss,” high-powered executives disguise themselves so they can work alongside everyday employees, ostensibly to learn from them. Flipping that script, software company Vincit USA has a "CEO of the Day" program where staffers move into a metaphorical corner office for 24 hours and receive a very real unlimited budget. There’s just one requirement. “The CEO must make one lasting decision that will help improve the working experience of Vincit employees,” said Ville Houttu, Vincit’s founder and CEO. Since instituting the program, Vincit USA has received multiple awards for its workplace culture and sees reduced staff turnover. “Though it may seem crazy, the initiative has paid off tenfold,” said Houttu. What I've learned after 5 years of buying common stock in startups Image Credits: Tim Robberts (opens in a new window) / Getty Images Instead of giving founders standard term sheets, Boston-based seed-stage venture capital firm Pillar VC offers to buy common stock. “There are many terms and conditions in a preferred term sheet that can misalign investors and founders,” says founding partner Jamie Goldstein. “As with any experiment, we have learned a few things that have surprised us and faced challenges we've had to overcome.” China's regulatory crackdown is good news for startups aligned with CCP goals Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window) Alex Wilhelm takes stock of the wall of news out of China over the past week to see if there's a silver lining for startups in the country as the Chinese Communist Party cracks down on everything from edtech companies to streaming platforms. His take? "The result may be concentrated effort and capital in sectors that Beijing favors and reduced capital and focus from entrepreneurs in sectors that have been deemed fit for strict control," he writes. "Simply: Central planning is going to tilt business more toward centrally planned goals." Duolingo's IPO pricing is great news for edtech startups Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window) The Pittsburgh-based language-learning unicorn initially aimed for an $85 to $95 per share IPO price range, then bumped that up to $95 to $100 before it began to trade. It ultimately entered the public markets at $102 per share. Alex Wilhelm notes that based on Duolingo's expected Q2 revenues, the company has a run-rate multiple of nearly 16x. Compare that to the median multiple for public SaaS companies of 14x. "Duolingo, a consumer edtech company, is now more valuable per revenue dollar than the median public enterprise SaaS business," Alex writes. Financial firms should leverage machine learning to make anomaly detection easier Image Credits: GOCMEN (opens in a new window) / Getty Images "Anomaly detection is one of the more difficult and underserved operational areas in the asset-servicing sector of financial institutions," EZOPS CEO Bikram Singh writes in a guest column. But it's critical to detect these anomalies amid a sea of data. That's where unsupervised learning can offer a solution. "With all eyes on data, it's crucial that financial institutions find solutions to detect anomalies upfront, thereby preventing bad data from infecting downstream processes," Singh writes. "Machine learning can be applied to detect the data anomalies as well as identify the reasons for them, effectively reducing the time spent researching and rectifying executions." African startups join global funding boom as fintech shines Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window) Alex Wilhelm and Anna Heim continued their global tour of Q2 2021 venture capital data, this week focusing on Africa. "Early data indicates that Africa is set to trounce historical records in terms of venture capital raised in the year and that the first half of 2021 saw roughly twice the funds raised by African startups as was recorded in the first half of 2020," they write. "Startups across Africa have never had more access to capital than they do right now." True 'shift left and extend right' security requires empowered developers Image Credits: kuritafsheen (opens in a new window) / Getty Images The intention of DevSecOps is to wedge security and compliance into DevOps. But that's easier said than done, says Apiiro founder and CEO Idan Plotnik. "Shifting left and extending right doesn't mean that a scanning tool or security architect should detect a security risk earlier in the process — it means that a developer should have all the context to prevent the vulnerability before it even happens," he writes. 4 key areas SaaS startups must address to scale infrastructure for the enterprise Image Credits: Stewart Sutton (opens in a new window) / Getty Images Asana's head of engineering, Prashant Pandey, rounds up four tips for SaaS startups looking to build up their infrastructure to meet customers’ growing needs. "Startups and SMBs are usually the first to adopt many SaaS products. But as these customers grow in size and complexity — and as you rope in larger organizations — scaling your infrastructure for the enterprise becomes critical for success," he writes. He offers four areas to focus on:
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| Kodiak Robotics’ founder says tight focus on autonomous trucks is working Posted: 30 Jul 2021 01:01 PM PDT Kodiak Robotics is one of the last private autonomous vehicles companies focused on trucking that is still standing. Nearly all the rest have been wooed by the public marketplace and the capital it can provide. But co-founder and CEO Don Burnette says the three-year-old company’s strategy of staying focused and small(er) is paying off. It will be able to deploy a commercial-scale operation for about $500 million in funding, he says in the interview below. To put those go-to-market costs in perspective, that’s 10% of what Waymo has raised in external fundraising and less than 25% of newly publicly traded company TuSimple’s total fundraise. Kodiak’s strategy is to take a specialized, hyperfocused approach to autonomous trucking that outsources a lot of tech, like data labeling, lidar, radar and mapping, to existing companies. Burnette, who was one of four founders of the self-driving truck startup Otto that Uber acquired, thinks this is a faster, cheaper and more efficient path to commercialization versus building out your own systems and teams. The company is moving freight for commercial customers, dipping its toes in the market by working with technology partners within the existing ecosystem. Burnette says Kodiak’s Driver technology has achieved a level of maturity where it can handle anything the highway throws at it. In December, the startup achieved "disengagement-free deliveries" between Dallas and Houston, meaning the autonomous system didn't have to be switched off for safety reasons. The following interview, part of an ongoing series with founders who are building transportation companies, has been edited for length and clarity. You previously told me that Kodiak would need about $500 million in total funding to get to commercial driverless. You also said you've had some undisclosed funding rounds, but publicly, you've only raised $40 million. Can you still execute on your vision this far off? Absolutely. We are always, as startups are, in fundraising mode. We’re always talking to investors. And there’s a lot of great things happening behind the scenes currently that we haven’t yet announced. We are growing, we’re hiring, if you can look to that as an indicator of the health of a company. Our tech and our plan is really sound, and we are building up our commercialization efforts in a way that I think is going to be very exciting to the overall industry and to the market. We will need to raise more money, as you pointed out, that’s certainly no secret, but I think that we have multiple options to do that.
“Kodiak is one of the only remaining serious AV trucking companies still in the private sector, and so I think that gives us some advantages in a lot of ways.” How do you intend to close that gap? Are you looking at venture capital, or maybe going for an IPO or SPAC? We’re considering all of the above. It’s a constant conversation internally on what is the best path for Kodiak, what is the appetite of the various forms of investors and strategic relationships. Nothing is excluded. The stock market is obviously very attractive and exciting. I think TuSimple has demonstrated that an IPO with the right set of metrics and the right set of momentum and partners is possible and can be successful. I think there’s also lots of opportunity within the VCs and the private markets. Kodiak is one of the only remaining serious AV trucking companies still in the private sector, and so I think that gives us some advantages in a lot of ways. What’s your sense of the venture funding environment right now in autonomous? Is it harder now than it was, say, four years ago? The appetite has changed. In particular, investors are more skeptical of timelines and promises. There is not this sense of Wild West excitement like there was four or five years ago, and that was the Golden Age of raising capital, certainly for earlier stage companies. Kodiak was at the tail end of that age, and now the goalposts have changed, and the target investors have changed. It’s no longer the early-stage VCs that companies like Kodiak and others are talking to. It’s more of the growth-stage funds, and growth-stage funds look for different types of metrics. They look for commercial traction, product-market fit, users, efficiencies, etc.  |
| Growth roundup: Investing in community, targeting developers, new marketer recs Posted: 30 Jul 2021 01:00 PM PDT “The best thing a startup can do, and I'm seeing it happen more and more, is investing in community early on,” growth marketing expert Max van den Ingh of Unmuted tells us. “When I was leading growth at MisterGreen, we created a community for the first thousand Tesla Model 3 owners in the Netherlands. Everyone wanted to be a part of this founding tribe, learn from each other, get insights and so on.” “This group turned out to be our most effective marketing tool,” he explains in an interview we published this week. “Word-of-mouth went through the roof. We had all of these people talking about our community at birthday parties, in their office, you name it. This is a great example of investing in marketing you can't really measure, but which you do strongly believe in.” Elsewhere in this week's growth marketing recap, you'll find TechCrunch's coverage of growth marketing, and related topics, from the past week. You'll also find a few recommendations for growth marketers. If you'd like to recommend a great one you’ve worked with, please fill out our survey. Marketer: Scott Graham Marketer: Ascendant Marketer: Ferdinand Goetzen Marketer: Adriana Ivascu, HoneyPot Dgtl Marketer: Mariska Vroegindeweij, Growth & confetti
The MKT1 interview: Growth marketing in 2021, hiring versus outsourcing and more: We hosted a Twitter Spaces with strategic marketing firm MKT1 recently, following a popular interview we published with them a few weeks ago. "The skill sets of growth marketers are in high demand,” co-founder Kathleen Estreich told host Danny Crichton during the event. “They always have been, but it feels pretty acute right now. Given that a lot of the companies are raising money earlier and starting to try and build that traction faster to grow into the valuations, we're starting to see a huge need." If you're curious to see what skills are needed in growth marketing positions right now, take a look at the job board curated by MKT1. Draft.dev CEO Karl Hughes on the importance of using experts in developer marketing: Anna Heim interviewed Karl Hughes, founder of Daft.dev, which works with a large number of developer tool companies. Hughes’ insights come from personal experience, "I've been a software developer, and then most recently was a CTO at a startup in Chicago, so I knew that there were lots of companies trying to reach developers [ … ] and that a lot of them were doing a poor job of it." In this interview, Hughes addresses the mistakes made when targeting marketing toward developers, the steps that Draft.dev takes to mitigate them and more. Unmuted founder Max van den Ingh on success beyond the metrics: "At Unmuted, when we start working with a new client, we perform a series of exercises together,” he told us in the interview. “This helps us get a clear picture of where the client is now and where they could be when we've optimized marketing. Next, instead of fixed numbers, like a specific amount of new customers in a given period, we focus on growth levers, like month-over-month growth in certain conversion or activation areas. Focusing on growth levers makes our work more actionable.” Read the interview with him for more about Unmuted's "modern" marketing approach, setting realistic goals and trends seen in growth marketing during the pandemic. Dan Olsen leads a product-market fit masterclass for the Startup Alley+ cohort: As part of Startup Alley+, TC Disrupt 2021 is offering a VIP experience where Dan Olsen will be holding a product-market fit masterclass. Olsen's roster of clients includes Google, Facebook and Amazon. Is there a startup growth marketing expert that you want us to know about? Let us know by filling out our survey.  |
| Yat thinks emoji ‘identities’ can be a thing, and it has $20M in sales to back it up Posted: 30 Jul 2021 12:38 PM PDT I learned about Yat in April, when a friend sent our group chat a link to a story about how the key emoji sold as an “internet identity” for $425,000. “I hate the universe,” she texted. Sure, the universe would be better if people with a spare $425,000 spent it on mutual aid or something, but minutes later, we were trying to figure out what this whole Yat thing was all about. And few more minutes later, I spent $5 (in U.S. dollars, not crypto) to buy  Kesha’s Yat URL on Twitter On the surface, Yat is a platform that lets you buy a URL with emojis in it — even Kesha (y.at/ This convenience, however, comes at a premium. Yat uses an algorithm to determine your Yat’s “rhythm score,” its metric for determining how to price your emoji combo based on its rarity. Yats with one or two emojis are so expensive that you have to contact the company directly to buy them, but you can easily find a four- or five-emoji identity that’ll only put you out $4. Beyond that, CEO Naveen Jain — a Y Combinator alumnus, founder of digital marketing company Sparkart and angel investor — thinks that Yat is ultimately an internet privacy product. Jain wants people to be able to use their Yats in any way they’re able to use an online identity now, whether that’s to make payments, send messages, host a website or log in to a platform. “Objectively, it’s a strange norm. You go on the internet, you register accounts with ad-supported platforms, and your username isn’t universal. You have many accounts, many usernames,” Jain said. “And you don’t control them. If an account wants to shut you down, they shut you down. How many stories are there of people trying to email some social network, and they don’t respond because they don’t have to?”  Image Credits: Yat (opens in a new window) Yat doesn’t plan to fuel itself with ad money, since users pay for the product when they purchase their Yat, whether they get it for $4 or $400,000. In the long run, Yat’s CEO says the company plans to use blockchain technology as a way to become self-sovereign. Yats would become assets issued on decentralized, distributed databases. Today, there are several projects working to create a decentralized alternative to the current domain name system (DNS), which is managed by internet regulatory authority ICANN. DNS is how you find things on the internet, but uses a centralized, hierarchical system. A blockchain domain name system would have no central authority, and some believe this could be the foundation of a next-gen web, or “Web 3.0.” Today, words like “blockchain” and “cryptocurrency” don’t appear on the Yat website. Jain doesn’t think that’s compelling to average consumers — he believes in progressive decentralization, which explains why Yats are currently purchased with dollars, not ethereum. “Something we think is really funny about the cryptocurrency world is that anyone who’s a part of it spends a lot of time talking about databases,” Jain said. “People don’t care about databases. When’s the last time you went to a website and it said ‘powered by MySQL’?” Y.at, however, was registered at a traditional internet registrar, not on the blockchain. “This is laying the foundation — there are certain elements of the vision that are certainly more of a social contract than actual implementation at this point in time,” says Jain. “But this is the vision that we’ve set forth, and we’re working continuously towards that goal.” Still, until Yat becomes more decentralized, it can’t yet give users the complete control it aspires to. At present, the Terms & Conditions give Yat the authority to terminate or suspend users at its discretion, but the company claims it hasn’t yet booted anyone from the system. “As Yat becomes more decentralized, our terms and conditions won’t be important,” Jain said. “This is the nature of pursuing a progressive decentralization strategy.” In its “generation zero” phase (an open beta), Yat claims to have sold almost $20 million worth of emoji identities. Now, as the waitlist to get a Yat ends, Yat is posting some rare emoji identities on OpenSea, the NFT marketplace that recently reached a valuation of $1.5 billion.  A still image of a Yat visualizer creation “For the first time ever, we’re going to be auctioning some Yats on OpenSea, and we’re going to be launching minting of Yats on Ethereum,” Jain said. Before minting Yats as NFTs, users can create a digital art landscape for their Yats through a Visualizer. These features, as well as new emojis in the Yat emoji set, will launch this evening at a virtual event called Yat Horizon. “Yat Creators will now have more rights,” Jain said about the new ability to mint Yats as NFTs. “We are going to continue to pursue progressive decentralization until we achieve our ultimate goal: making Yat the best self-directed, self-sovereign identity system for all.” Consumers have a demonstrated interest in retaining greater privacy on the internet — data shows that in iOS 14.5, 96% of users opted out of ad tracking. But the decentralization movement hasn’t yet been able to market its privacy advantages to the mainstream. Yat helps solve this problem because even if you don’t understand what blockchain means, you understand that having a personal string of emojis is pretty fun. But, before you spend $425,000 on a single-emoji username, keep in mind that Yat’s vision will only completely materialize with the advent of Web 3.0, and we don’t yet know when or if that will happen.  |
| Calendly CEO Tope Awotona is joining us at Disrupt 2021 Posted: 30 Jul 2021 11:45 AM PDT It all seems so simple. Instead of the dreaded back-and-forth on email, what if there was a solution that helped two parties (or multiple parties) schedule a call or a hangout? Calendly was born out of that question. Today, the company is worth more than $3 billion, according to reports, and has more than 10 million users. The growth of the product is insane, with more than 1,000% growth from last year. But that kind of success doesn’t come without hard work and dedication. To hear more about the journey from bootstrapped to billions, Calendly founder and CEO Tope Awotona will join us at Disrupt this September. P.S. Early Bird Tickets to Disrupt end today, Friday, July 30. Book your tickets now! Awotona put his entire life savings into Calendly and managed to bootstrap it for years before taking a $350 million funding round led by OpenView and Iconiq. We’ll chat with Awotona about the early days of Calendly, how he navigated the hypergrowth phase, what made him choose to finally take institutional funding, his thoughts on pricing and packaging, and much more. Awotona joins an incredible roster of speakers, including Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, Mirror’s Brynn Putnam, Chamath Palihapitiya, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield and more. Plus, Disrupt features the legendary Startup Battlefield competition, where startups from across the globe compete for $100,000 and eternal glory. Disrupt's virtual format provides plenty of opportunity for questions, so come prepared to ask the experts about the issues that keep you up at night. One post can't possibly contain all of Disrupt’s events. Don't miss the epic Startup Battlefield competition, hundreds of early-stage startups exhibiting in the Startup Alley expo area, special breakout sessions — like the Pitch Deck Teardown — and so much more. TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 offers tons of opportunities. Don't miss out on the first one — buy your Disrupt pass today, July 30, by 11:59 p.m. (PDT) for less than $100. It's a sweet deal! Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2021? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.
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| The best way to grow your tech career? Treat it like an app Posted: 30 Jul 2021 11:34 AM PDT Software developers and engineers have rarely been in higher demand. Organizations' need for technical talent is skyrocketing, but the supply is quite limited. As a result, software professionals have the luxury of being very choosy about where they work and usually command big salaries. In 2020, the U.S. had nearly 1.5 million full-time developers, who earned a median salary of around $110,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Over the next 10 years, the federal agency estimates, developer jobs will grow by 22% to 316,000. But what happens after a developer or engineer lands that sweet gig? Are they able to harness their skills and grow in interesting and challenging new directions? Do they understand what it takes to move up the ladder? Are they merely doing a job or cultivating a rewarding professional life?
To put it bluntly, many developers and engineers stink at managing their own careers. These are the kinds of questions that have gnawed at me throughout my 25 years in the tech industry. I've long noticed that, to put it bluntly, many developers and engineers stink at managing their own careers. It's simply not a priority for some. By nature, developers delight in solving complex technical challenges and working hard toward their company's digital objectives. Care for their own careers may feel unattractively self-promotional or political — even though it's in fact neither. Charting a career path may feel awkward or they just don't know how to go about it. Companies owe it to developers and engineers, and to themselves, to give these key people the tools to understand what it takes to be the best they can be. How else can developers and engineers be assured of continually great experiences while constantly expanding their contributions to their organizations?
Developers delight in solving complex challenges and working hard toward their company's objectives. Care for their own careers may feel unattractively self-promotional or political — even though it's in fact neither. Coaching and mentoring can help, but I think a more formal management system is necessary to get the wind behind the sails of a companywide commitment to making developers and engineers believe that, as the late Andy Grove said, "Your career is your business and you are its CEO." That's why I created a career development model for developers and engineers when I was an Intel Fellow at Intel between 2003 and 2013. This framework has since been put into practice at the three subsequent companies I worked at — Google, VMWare, and, now, Juniper Networks — through training sessions and HR processes. The model is based on a principle that every developer can relate to: Treat career advancement as you would a software project. That's right, by thinking of career development in stages like those used in app production, developers and engineers can gain a holistic view of where they are in their professional lives, where they want to go and the gaps they need to fill. Step 1: Functional specificationIn software development, a team can't get started until it has a functional specification that describes the app's requirements and how it is supposed to perform and behave. Why should a career be any different? In my model, folks begin by assessing the "functionality" expected of someone at their next career level and how they're demonstrating them (or not). Typically, a person gets promoted to a higher level only when they already demonstrate that they are operating at that level.  |
| A Tesla Megapack caught fire at the Victorian Big Battery facility in Australia Posted: 30 Jul 2021 11:27 AM PDT A 13-tonne Tesla Megapack caught fire on Friday morning at a battery storage facility in south-east Australia. The blaze occurred during testing at between 10 and 10.15am local time, according to Victorian Big Battery. The regional fire service said a specialist fire crew had been dispatched to the site in Geelong, Victoria. Firefighters were using a hazmat appliance designed for hazardous chemical spills and specialist drones to conduct atmospheric monitoring, according to Fire Rescue Victoria. The site was evacuated and there were no injuries, Victorian Big Battery said in a statement. It added that the site had been disconnected from the power grid and that there will be no impact to the electric supply. French energy company Neoen, which operates the facility, and contractor Tesla are working with emergency services to manage the situation. As a result of the fire, a warning for toxic smoke has been issued in the nearby Batesford, Bell Post Hill, Lovely Banks and Moorabool areas, reports The Sydney Morning Herald. Residents were warned to move indoors, close windows, vents and fireplace flues and bring their pets inside. The Victorian Big Battery site, a 300 MW/450 MWh battery storage facility, is viewed as key to the Victorian government’s 50 percent renewable energy target by 2030. It follows the success of Neoen and Tesla’s 100 MW/129 MWh battery farm in Hornsdale in South Australia, which was completed ahead of schedule and has resulted in multi-million dollar savings for market players and consumers. Both sites essentially provide a regional power backup for when renewable energy is not available, effectively filling the gap when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. In February, Neoen announced that the Victorian Big Battery would utliize Tesla’s megapacks — utility-sized batteries produced at the company’s Gigafactory — and Autobidder software to sell power to the grid. Victorian Big Battery has a contract with the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO). As part of the pact, the site will provide energy stability by unlocking an additional 250 MW of peak capacity on the existing Victoria to New South Wales Interconnector over the next decade of Australian summers. Editor's note: This post originally appeared on Engadget.  |
| Elon Musk calls Apple’s App Store fees ‘a de facto global tax on the Internet’ Posted: 30 Jul 2021 10:17 AM PDT Elon Musk is siding with Epic Games in the App Store monopoly case, with the Tesla CEO firing off a tweet Friday morning that called Apple’s Store fees “a de facto global tax on the Internet,” also adding that “Epic is right.” Epic Games legal battle with Apple is sure to last years and the Fortnite maker has hardly been secretive about its aims to win the battle for popular opinion as well. Musk’s vote of confidence could hold sway with consumers who have yet to develop a clear opinion on the topic. Apple has argued publicly that dissatisfied developers can take their products to Android or mobile web on iOS, but Epic Games and others have argued that Apple’s stranglehold on apps is nothing short of a monopoly. What’s less clear is why Musk is taking up this issue right now. While Musk is rarely one to pass up offering an outside opinion on a contentious issue that doesn’t involve him, none of Musk’s current companies seem to be deeply affected by the fees from the App Store, though there certainly could be action happening behind the scenes.  |
| US government watchdog rejects Blue Origin’s protest over lunar lander contract Posted: 30 Jul 2021 10:08 AM PDT Blue Origin’s protest to a U.S. governmental watchdog over NASA's decision to award SpaceX a multi-billion dollar contract to develop a lunar lander was rejected. The Government Accountability Office said Friday that it was denying both Blue Origin's protest and a separate challenge filed by Dynetics, a defense contractor that also submitted a proposal for the contract. GAO concluded that NASA did not violate any laws or regulations when granting the sole award to SpaceX. "As a result, GAO denied the protest arguments that NASA acted improperly in making a single award to SpaceX," the agency said in a statement. The formal protest was over NASA's decision to award the contract for the Human Landing System Program, which aims to return humans to the moon for the first time since Apollo, solely to SpaceX — and not to two companies, as was originally intended. SpaceX's proposal for the Human Landing System Program came in at $2.9 billion, around half of Blue Origin's $5.99 billion proposal. Earlier this week, Bezos penned an open letter to NASA Administrator Bill Nelson offering to knock $2 billion off that price to solve the "near-term budgetary issues" that caused NASA to select just one company for the contract. NASA's decision to give just one company the award did veer from historical standard, but GAO maintained that "the [contract] announcement reserved the right to make multiple awards, a single award, or no award at all." Blue Origin maintains that it was not given time to revise its bid after NASA concluded it did not have sufficient funding for two awards. "Blue Origin was plainly prejudiced by the Agency's failure to communicate this change in requirements," the company said in the protest. "Blue Origin could have and would have taken several actions to revise its proposed approach, reduce its price to more closely align with funding available to the Agency, and/or propose schedule alternatives." Blue Origin and Dynetics submitted their separate protests in April. Update: In response to the decision, a Blue Origin spokesperson told TechCrunch: "We stand firm in our belief that there were fundamental issues with NASA's decision, but the GAO wasn't able to address them due to their limited jurisdiction. We'll continue to advocate for two immediate providers as we believe it is the right solution.” The spokesperson noted that the company was encouraged by lawmakers adding a provision to a bill in Senate that would require NASA to select two providers for the HLS program. Elon Musk, meanwhile, had this to say about the decision…
TechCrunch has reached out to Dynetics for comment. We will update the story if they respond.  |
| Design expert Scott Tong outlines 4 concepts founders should consider when designing products Posted: 30 Jul 2021 09:55 AM PDT In the last decade, high-quality design has become a necessity in the software space. Great design is a commodity, not a luxury, and yet, designing beautiful products and finding great designers continues to be a struggle for many entrepreneurs. At Early Stage 2021, design expert Scott Tong walked us through some of the ways founders should think about design. Tong was involved in product and brand design at some of the biggest brands in tech, including IDEO, IFTTT, Pinterest and more. He’s now a partner at Design Fund. Tong explained how to think about brand as more than a logo or a social media presence, what design means and the steps that come before focusing on the pixels, and gave guidance on when entrepreneurs should hire third-party design agencies or bring on full-time talent.
Reputation“The purest treasure mortal times afford is spotless reputation,” wrote Shakespeare. Though we often think of a brand as a logo or a social media persona, a brand is the equivalent of a person’s reputation. It signifies what the company and products stand for, and it has an element of being memorable for something, whether it’s prestige, like for Chanel, or terrible customer service, like for Comcast.
Existing versus preferredTong outlined what design is truly about. There are many different schools of thought on design methodology and there are many different types of design. You may be thinking about product design and logo design and brand design all at the same time, and the only way to successfully hire for those tasks and complete them is to understand what design is, at its core.  |
| Robinhood’s CFO says it was ready to go public Posted: 30 Jul 2021 08:45 AM PDT Robinhood priced at $38 per share this week, opened flat and closed its first day’s trading yesterday worth $34.82 per share, or a bit more than 8% underwater. The company posted a mixed picture today, falling early before recovering to breakeven in late-morning trading. It wasn’t the debut that some expected Robinhood to have. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday. To close out the week, we’re not going to noodle on banned Chinese IPOs or do a full-week mega-round discussion. Instead, let’s parse some notes from a chat The Exchange had with Robinhood’s CFO about his company’s IPO and go over a few reasonable guesses as to why we’re not wondering how much money Robinhood left on the table by pricing its public offering lower than it closed on its first day.
Why Robinhood went public when it didChatting with Robinhood CFO Jason Warnick earlier this week, we wanted to know why this was the right time for Robinhood to go public. Now, no public company CEO or CFO will come out and directly say that they are going public because they think that they can defend — or extend — their most recent private valuation thanks to current market conditions. Instead, execs on IPO day tend to deflect the question, pivoting to a well-oiled bon mot about how their public offering is a mere milestone on their company’s long-term trajectory. For some reason in our capitalist society, during an arch-capitalist event, by a for-profit company, leaders find it critical to downplay their IPO’s importance.1 With that in mind, Warnick did not say Robinhood went public because the IPO market has recently rewarded big-brand consumer tech companies like Airbnb and DoorDash with strong debuts. And he didn’t say that with tech shares near all-time highs and a taste for high-growth concerns, the company was likely set to enter a market that would be willing to price it at a valuation that it found attractive.  |
| Last day to snag early-bird passes to TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 Posted: 30 Jul 2021 08:45 AM PDT Don't miss your chance to experience TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 — the startup world's must-attend event of the season — for less than $100. Why not get the best ROI of your time while simultaneously learning about the latest industry trends and mining for opportunities that can take your startup to new levels of success? Disrupt takes place on September 21-23, but the early-bird deal expires today, July 30 at 11:59 p.m. (PDT). Buy your Disrupt 2021 pass now and save. Let's talk about what you'll experience at Disrupt. Over on the Disrupt Stage you'll find one-on-one interviews with icons and interactive, expert-led, presentations from across the tech, investing and policy sectors. Folks like Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn and Mirror CEO Brynn Putnam. And that's just the tip of the tech iceberg. You can check out all the speakers here. You'll find plenty of actionable advice and how-to tips and strategies on the Extra Crunch Stage. Take a gander at just two of the topics we have scheduled there and explore the full Disrupt agenda here. Crafting a Pitch Deck that Can't Be Ignored: Investors may be chasing after the hottest deals, but for founders selling their startup's vision, it's never been more important to communicate it in the clearest way possible. Pitch deck experts Mercedes Bent (partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners), Mar Hershenson (co-founder and managing partner, Pear VC) and Saba Karim (Techstars' head of accelerator pipeline) dig into what's essential, what's unnecessary and what could just make all the difference in your next deck. How Do You Select the Right Tech Stack: From day zero, startups have to make dozens of trade-offs when it comes to the infinite variety of tech stacks available to today's engineers. Choose the wrong combination or direction, and a startup could be left with years of refactoring to fix the legacy damage. What are the best practices for assessing potential stacks, and how can you minimize the risk of a painful mistake? Preeti Somal (executive vice president of engineering, HashiCorp) and Jill Wetzler (head of engineering, Pilot) will discuss strategies for improving engineering right from the beginning and at every stage of a startup's journey. Disrupt's virtual format provides plenty of opportunity for questions, so come prepared to ask the experts about the issues that keep you up at night. One post can’t possibly contain all the events and opportunities of Disrupt. Don't miss the epic Startup Battlefield competition, hundreds of early-stage startups exhibiting in the Startup Alley expo area, special breakout sessions — like the Pitch Deck Teardown — and so much more. TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 offers tons of opportunity. Don't miss out on the first one — buy your Disrupt pass today, July 30, by 11:59 p.m. (PDT) for less than $100. It's a sweet deal! Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2021? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.
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| White-label SaaS shipping startup Outvio closes $3M round led by Change Ventures Posted: 30 Jul 2021 08:40 AM PDT Outvio, an Estonian startup that provides a white-label SaaS fulfillment solution for medium-sized and large online retailers in Spain and Estonia, has closed a $3 million early-stage financing round led by Change Ventures. Also participating were TMT Investments (London), Fresco Capital (San Francisco) and Lemonade Stand (Tallinn). Several angels also joined the round, including James Berdigans (Printify) and Kristjan Vilosius (Katana MRP). This is the startup’s first institutional round of funding after bootstrapping since 2018. Online retailers usually have to use a number of different tools or hire expensive developers to create in-house shipping solutions. Outvio offers online stores of any size a post-purchase shipping setup, which seeks to replicate an Amazon-style experience where customers can also return packages. Among others, it competes with ShippyPro, which runs out of Italy and has raised $5 million to date. “We can give any online store all the tools needed to offer a superior post-sale customer experience,” Juan Borras, co-founder and CEO of Outvio, said. “We can integrate at different points in their fulfillment process, and for large merchants, save them hundreds of thousands in development costs alone." "What happens after the purchase is more important than most shops realize,” he added. “More than 88% of consumers say it is very important for them that retailers proactively communicate every fulfillment and delivery stage. Not doing so, especially if there are problems, often results in losing that client. Our mission is to help online stores streamline everything that happens after the sale, fueling repeat business and brand-loyal customers with the help of a fantastic post-purchase experience." "While online retailing has a long way to go, the expectations of consumers are increasing when it comes to delivery time and standards,” Rait Ojasaar, investment partner at lead investor Change Ventures, said. “The same can be said about the online shop operators who increasingly look for more advanced solutions with consumer-like user experience. The Outvio team has understood exactly what the gap in the market is and has done a tremendous job of finding product-market fit with their modern fulfillment SaaS platform."  |
| Posted: 30 Jul 2021 08:32 AM PDT Fear is back with the deadly combination of pandemic politics and a vicious variant. The good news is that if enough people took the shots we could cut the damage to something manageable. The other good news is progress on the twin issues of Trump and social media. In both cases some semblance of balanced rationality is seeping in to the public discourse. First is the former president, who has already done about as much damage as he can. Joe Biden is doing a good job of wrestling Congress into some degree of productivity. As the Gang talks about this and the next episode, it appears increasingly likely there will be a bipartisan infrastructure bill. Republicans and particularly Mitch McConnell can still shut the whole thing down, but Democrats hold the budget reconciliation process as a hole card to prompt a semi-partisan bill across the two parties. The Biden strategy is to not only force the right to accommodate some center victory but forestall a significant cave by the centrist Democrat Joe Manchin on the filibuster. This may have some value if Congress puts its foot down on voting rights or the effort to destroy them. Something similar may be playing out on the social side. Facebook and Twitter seem to be circling each other as Congress forces some antitrust positioning. With the courts giving Facebook a little running room on the operational description of what a monopoly is, Twitter reported strong numbers that beat the Street and make Jack Dorsey’s feint toward bitcoin and the creator economy easier to swallow when the smoke clears. The newsletterization of media is giving social media some street cred as Congress tries to force Facebook to grow up. Block an MGM deal here and a Section 530 carveout there seems possible although more likely just the beginning of negotiations. The big battle is over the shape of post-COVID work and lifestyle negotiations. Vaccination reluctance is a five-alarm fire, but the 2022 midterms may well be fought over the intersection of climate change and the speed of recovery led by the accelerated digital economy. I don’t believe that it’s a coincidence that back to work and a manageable ecology are deeply related. Silicon Valley can talk all it wants about inventing the future, but desperate consumers are looking for real answers from tech leaders who understand the future to come in a constantly unstable weather crisis that turns a burning West Coast into a choking rest of the country. Vaccine mandates are a fierce predictor of what’s to come. In a country under constant threat of a constitutional crisis over voter fraud by one of the two major parties, the federal response may be constrained but not the rules at the workforce level. These are serious issues of privacy and human rights, but in the short term the moves toward practical mandates will be swift at the state and company level, and supported by healthy polling. Do you think some version of work from anywhere will be tied to double vaccination? As a mandate, it’s not a done deal; as a choice it seems like a popular way of reducing the crisis from the current 35% to something approaching a too-high but winter-ready time frame of 15% where hospitals and state economies need help, red or blue. And those numbers may become the difference between major crisis and economy-crushing lockdowns if an even more egregious variant emerges. This is also where social and safety meet at a crossroads. Are we willing to cede a Facebook unimpeded from fueling the misinformation plague, or are we going to look for help from the creator economy to bypass the fallow mainstream media stuck in their controversy-fueled business model rather than a fact-based scientific approach to breaking the back of this turgid political cycle? We can see the outline of newsletter-framed social media courage, coupled with stakeholder-aware ethical values and economic leverage. Less obvious is the path for Clubhouse and its competitors. The Andreessen-Horowitz-backed mobile app came out of invite-only beta and added an internal instant messaging layer to manage moderators, speakers, listener questions, room onboarding and feedback. But the big problem remains why does this mere feature of a livestreaming podcast app buttress the high valuation of the startup. And this from Michael Markman:
Yeah, that would do it. But the bigger problem is the refusal to allow recording as a feature of the UI. Twitter Spaces won’t do it, Facebook is really a winner-take-all newsletter subscriber model (Substack) grafted on, and Spotify already has recording enabled on Anchor, its podcasting tool. Building one app is probably where Spotify will go, but then they have the problem that podcasting is considered only an audio product. So then what? Add video multiplatform streaming like ReStream to the hybrid social audio/podcast/recorder/newsletter and we got something. What’s the holdup? No recording started as a nod to privacy, a differentiator between the creators and the listeners. The idea was to create a unique quality of serendipity, discovery and credibility. It’s reminiscent of the theater’s fourth wall, where characters step out of their circumstances to talk directly to the audience. It’s exhilarating to experience, a hybrid between writing and improvisation that is largely an illusion. Illusions are no less valuable just because they elegantly transcend their apparent boundaries. Clubhouse spoke directly to our sense that we had lost our way in the insidious virus of both science and truth. In the decay of the Clubhouse model, we sense that the creator economy is all hat and not enough cowboy. Brent Leary:
Recording and a calendar page will make a difference if only to bring a vote to the floor. Is this something to look forward to, a social version of Andrea Mitchell or Nicolle Wallace on MSNBC, a system of record for issues that matter in the anywhere, creator, or thought leader economies. Markman’s question about Clubhouse viability is a broader hedge against the tendency of social media to add to the problems rather than alleviate them. Recording is really a time-shifting tool for user control, and a driver for leaderboard metadata to annotate a calendar either live or personally maintained. In theory Clubhouse should work, but in practice without recording it could be labeled another do-nothing congress. from the Gillmor Gang Newsletter __________________ The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, July 16, 2021. Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor @fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang Subscribe to the new Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the backchannel here on Telegram. The Gillmor Gang on Facebook … and here's our sister show G3 on Facebook.
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