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Tesla wants to make every home a distributed power plant

Published April 26, 2021

Tesla CEO Elon Musk wants to turn every home into a distributed power plant that would generate, store and even deliver energy back into the electricity grid, all using the company’s products.

While the company has been selling solar and energy storage products for years, a new company policy to only sell solar coupled with the energy storage products, along with Musk’s comments Monday, reveal a strategy that aims to scale these businesses by appealing to utilities.

“This is a prosperous future both for Tesla and for the utilities,” he said. “If this is not done, the utilities will fail to serve their customers. They won’t be able to do it,” Musk said during an investor call, noting the rolling blackouts in California last summer and the more recent grid failure in Texas as evidence that grid reliability has become a bigger concern.

Last week, the company changed its website to prevent customers from only buying solar or its Powerwall energy storage product and instead required purchasing a system. Musk later announced the move in a tweet, stating “solar power will feed exclusively to Powerwall” and that “Powerwall will interface only between utility meter and house main breaker panel, enabling super simple install and seamless whole house backup during utility dropouts.”

Musk’s pitch is that the grid would need more power lines, more power plants and larger substations to fully decarbonize using renewables plus storage. Distributed residential systems — of course using Tesla products — would provide a better path, in Musk’s view. His claim has been backed up in part by recent studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which found that the U.S. can reach a zero-carbon grid by more than doubling its transmission capacity, and another from Princeton University showing that the country may need to triple its transmission systems by 2050 to reach net-zero emissions.

Tesla’s decision to scrap its PR department could create a PR nightmare

Musk is imagining a radically different electricity grid system than the one we have today, which is centrally controlled and run by grid operators, independent organizations such as the California Independent System Operator or the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. It’s a vision that is riddled with bureaucratic and logistical challenges. Utilities and regulatory policy would need to solve how to handle a large influx of so-called “distributed energy resources,” such as solar panels on residential roofs, which may run contrary to utilities’ long-established business models.

It’s important to note that whether renewables-plus-storage will be alone sufficient to decarbonize the energy grid is a contentious question. Many experts believing that the land use demands, storage requirements and intermittency issues of renewables may make their role as the country’s primary electricity generator a pipe dream. But Musk has long been bullish on the renewables-plus-storage model, tweeting last July that “physics favors electric transport, batteries for stationary storage & solar/wind for energy generation.”

Daily Crunch: iOS 14.5 brings privacy changes and more

Published April 26, 2021

Apple’s latest software upgrade brings a big change, Roku accuses Google of anti-competitive behavior and Brex raises a big funding round. This is your Daily Crunch for April 26, 2021.

The big story: iOS 14.5 brings privacy changes and more

Apple released the latest version of its mobile operating system today, which includes the much-discussed App Tracking Transparency feature, allowing users to control which apps are sharing their data with third parties for ad-targeting purposes.

Other new features include Watch unlocking (which could help users avoid the annoying “I can’t unlock my phone with my masked face!” phenomenon), new emojis and more.

The tech giants

Roku alleges Google is using its monopoly power in YouTube TV carriage negotiations — Roku is alerting its customers that they may lose access to the YouTube TV channel on its platform after negotiations with Google went south.

Lyft sells self-driving unit to Toyota’s Woven Planet for $550M — Under the acquisition agreement, Lyft’s so-called Level 5 division will be folded into Woven Planet Holdings.

Apple commits to 20,000 US jobs, new North Carolina campus — Apple this morning announced a sweeping plan to invest north of $430 billion over the next five years.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Brex raises $425M at a $7.4B valuation, as the corporate spend war rages on — The company has also put together a new service called Brex Premium that costs $49 per month.

Founded by Australia’s national science agency, Main Sequence launches $250M AUD deep tech fund — Main Sequence’s second fund will look at issues including healthcare accessibility, increasing the world’s food supply, industrial productivity and space.

Mighty Networks raises $50M to build a creator economy for the masses — The company is led by Gina Bianchini, the co-founder and former CEO of Ning.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Founders who don’t properly vet VCs set up both parties for failure — Due diligence isn’t a one-way street, and founders must do their homework to make sure they’re not jumping into deals with VCs who are only paying lip service to their value-add.

How Brex more than doubled its valuation in a year — An interview with CEO Henrique Dubugras about that giant funding round.

There is no cybersecurity skills gap, but CISOs must think creatively — Netskope’s Lamont Orange doesn’t buy the idea that millions of cybersecurity jobs are going unfilled because there aren’t enough qualified candidates.

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

Everything else

How one founder partnered with NASA to make tires puncture-proof and more sustainable — This week’s episode of Found features The SMART Tire Company co-founder and CEO Earl Cole.

What the MasterClass effect means for edtech — MasterClass copycats are raising plenty of funding.

Hear about building AVs under Amazon from Zoox CTO Jesse Levinson at TC Sessions: Mobility 2021 — We’ll hear more about Zoox’s mission to develop and deploy autonomous passenger vehicles.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

Founders who don’t properly vet VCs set up both parties for failure

Published April 26, 2021

Andrés Dancausa
Contributor

Andrés Dancausa is fund partner, EMEA for operator-led international investors TheVentureCity. Before entering the world of VC, he was the CEO of a Spanish fintech company and launched his own startup in the edtech space.

There’s a disconnect between reality and the added value investors are promising entrepreneurs. Three in five founders who were promised added value by their VCs felt duped by their negative experience.

While this feels like a letdown by investors, in reality, it shows fault on both sides. Due diligence isn’t a one-way street, and founders must do their homework to make sure they’re not jumping into deals with VCs who are only paying lip service to their value-add.

Looking into an investor’s past, reputation and connections isn’t about finding the perfect VC, it’s about knowing what shaking certain hands will entail — and either being ready for it or walking away.

Entrepreneurs are increasingly demanding more than a blank check: They want mentorship, product understanding and emotional support, as well as industry connections and expertise. If VCs can’t bring that value, founders now have plenty of other funding routes to choose from, like crowdfunding, angel syndicates, tokenization and SPACs.

To stay competitive, VCs have to at least advertise that they have more than deep pockets. But what if it stops there? Founders have to know exactly what they’re looking for in a VC, which means looking past the front page and vetting their investors.

The ideal investor for modern startups is an operator VC — someone who was a founder or operator at a company before becoming an investor. But even then, ticking boxes isn’t enough to ensure the investor won’t come with their own challenges, like being too hands-on or less strategically minded.

Looking into an investor’s past, reputation and connections isn’t about finding the perfect VC, it’s about knowing what shaking certain hands will entail — and either being ready for it or walking away. There is no single solution to this issue, but here are my recommendations to founders seeking a successful investor relationship in 2021.

Have a guiding framework

No founder-investor relationship can survive misalignment. Because you share responsibility on so many processes, both parties have to be on the same page. So before you even start fundraising, nail down the expectations you need your future investor to meet. What do you need the most? What does your dream investor look like?

Dating app S’More bets on celebrity content with S’More TV

Published April 26, 2021

Dating startup S’More has launched a new feature called S’More TV, which CEO Adam Cohen-Aslatei said could give users new ways to talk to each other. It also bringing the startup closer to his goal of becoming not just a dating app, but “a lifestyle brand.”

The videos on S’More TV may be familiar to people who follow the company on Instagram, where Cohen-Aslatei has hosted dating-related interviews with celebrities like WWE stars Chelsea Green and Leah Van Dale, models Nichole Holmes and Sarah Miller and Mary Fitzgerald of “Selling Sunset.” Now, however, these videos are getting a home in the S’More app itself.

Cohen-Aslatei said this wasn’t the initial plan when he started filming videos for S’More Live, but eventually he and his team decided to do more with their “nearly 50 hours of exclusive celebrity content,” seeing them as “the first organic way to have content not related to a dating profile” in the app. He suggested that this isn’t just giving users another reason to open the app, but also a crucial conversation starter.

After all, anyone who’s had to start a conversation in a dating app will probably remember moments when you’ve struggled to come up with something better than “Hey” or “How’s it going?” — and S’More presents unique challenges on that front, since the app blurs all user photos until you’ve had some real interaction. So Cohen-Aslatei said these videos can spur a more natural conversation, allowing users to “really talk about topics that they care about.”

Image Credits: S’More

The S’More app now includes prompts directing users to watch S’More TV, where anyone can watch and comment on the videos. If you post a particularly scintillating comment, that may help to attract potential matches, and it will give them an easy starting point for the conversation.

In fact, Cohen-Aslatei claimed that since releasing S’More TV in beta testing, the app has seen Day One retention (the number of users who open the app one day after installation) increase by 15% to the “mid-60s,” while time in the app has doubled.

He also said S’More Live is quickly approaching its 100th episode, but you won’t see all of those episodes on the app right away. Instead, the company will be adding 15 new videos to the S’More app each month.

In addition, S’More has launched a new feature called cover photos. This is basically the one exception to the blurred photos rule (although it sounds like even this photo is subtly warped), allowing users to showcase a single image of their friends, their life or their personality even before they start a conversation.

Extra Crunch members get unlimited access to 12M stock images for $99 per year

‘Anti-superficial’ dating app S’More raises $2.1M

Apple’s App Tracking Transparency feature has arrived — here’s what you need to know

Published April 26, 2021

The latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system — iOS 14.5 — is launching today, and with it comes a much-discussed new privacy feature called App Tracking Transparency.

The feature was first announced nearly a year ago, although the company delayed the launch to give developers more time to prepare. Since then, support for the feature has already gone live in iOS and some apps have already adopted it (for example, I’ve seen tracking requests from Duolingo and Venmo), but now Apple says it will actually start enforcing the new rules.

That means iPhone owners will start seeing many more privacy prompts as they continue using their regular apps, each one asking for permission to “track your activity across other companies’ apps and websites.” Every app that requests tracking permission will also show up in a Tracking menu within your broader iOS Privacy settings, allowing you to toggle tracking on and off any time — for individual apps, or for all of them.

What does turning tracking on or off actually do? If you say no to tracking, the app will no longer be able to use Apple’s IDFA identifier to share data about your activity with data brokers and other third parties for ad-targeting purposes. It also means the app can no longer use other identifiers (like hashed email addresses) to track you, although it may be more challenging for Apple to actually enforce that part of the policy.

Image Credits: Apple

There’s been intense debate around App Tracking Transparency in the lead up to its launch. The pro-ATT side is pretty easy to explain: There’s a tremendous amount of personal information and activity that’s being collected about consumers without their consent (as Apple outlined in a report called A Day in the Life of Your Data), and this gives us a simple way to control that sharing.

However, Facebook has argued that by dealing a serious blow to ad targeting, Apple is also hurting small businesses that depend on targeting to affordable, effective ad campaigns.

Decrypted: Apple and Facebook’s privacy feud, Twitter hires Mudge, mysterious zero-days

The social network even took out ads in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post declaring that it’s “standing up to Apple for small businesses everywhere.” (The Electronic Frontier Foundation dismissed the campaign as “a laughable attempt from Facebook to distract you from its poor track record of anticompetitive behavior and privacy issues as it tries to derail pro-privacy changes from Apple that are bad for Facebook’s business.”)

Others have suggested that these changes could do “existential” damage to some developers and advertisers, while also benefiting Apple’s bottom line.

The full impact will depend, in part, on how many people choose to opt out of tracking. It’s hard to imagine many normal iPhone owners saying yes when these prompts start to appear — especially since developers are not allowed to restrict any features based on who opts into or out of tracking. However, mobile attribution company AppsFlyer says that early data suggests that opt-in rates could be as high as 39%.

Apple shares more details about its imminent App Tracking Transparency feature

n8n raises $12M for its ‘fair code’ approach to low-code workflow automation

Published April 26, 2021

As businesses continue to look for better ways to work more efficiently, a pioneer in the space of low-code tools to help automate how apps work together is announcing a round of funding on the back of impressive early traction.

Berlin-based n8n — which provides a framework for both technical and non-technical people to synchronize and integrate data and workflows — has raised $12 million in a Series A round of funding.

The startup plans to use the money to continue expanding its team, which now numbers 60 people, and to expand its platform and the services it provides to users.

Currently, n8n can help link up and integrate data and functions between more than 200 established applications, as well as any custom apps or services that you might be using in your specific organization. And since launching in October 2019, the startup has picked up an impressive 16,000 users — including both developers and “citizen developers” (those whose jobs might be described as non-technical but they are not afraid to be more hands-on in trying to build in ways to work better).

Now it wants to make the service easier for more of the latter group to get stuck in with using it.

“We are still seen as a technical product and less of one for citizen developers,” founder and CEO Jan Oberhauser said in an interview. “Our plan is to make n8n simpler to use, so that it’s much easier to adopt. We want to give everyone technical superpowers, whether it’s the marketing team or the IT department.” That means for example building not just chatbots but more intelligent ones, or creating new ways of visualizing data in Slack or something else altogether. And n8n’s platform can also be used to build automation within products, for example to monitor performance and flag when something might need maintenance.

The round is being led by Felicis Ventures, with Sequoia Capital, firstminute Capital and Harpoon Ventures also participating. Sequoia and firstminute co-led n8n’s seed round about a year ago, which also included participation from Eventbrite’s Kevin Hartz, Supercell’s Ilkka Paananen and unnamed early employees of Google and Zendesk, among others. The startup has now raised around $14 million and is not disclosing valuation.

There are a number of low-code and no-code startups on the market today and many of them have been seeing a surge of in interest in the last year. It’s a trend I suspect was brought about in no small part by the arrival of COVID-19.

n8n, a ‘fair code’ workflow automation platform, raises seed from Sequoia as VC firm steps up in Europe

The pandemic not only led to more people working remotely and relying on apps and other cloud-based services to get what they needed to do done, but in many cases it led organizations to refocus on how they were working, and what could be improved. In some cases, it also has meant a severe tightening of belts, and so companies are needing to do more with less human power, another factor leading to more proactive efforts to use software to get more out of… software.

That’s meant more strain on IT teams, and that too has led to more people within departments themselves getting proactive in improving their own workflows.

Other startups in the space include Bryter (which raised a $66 million Series B earlier this month) and Genesis (which raised $45 million in March), along with Zapier, Airtable, Rows, Gyana, Ushur, Creatio, EasySend and CapivateIQ, some of which are coming to the market with a variety of solutions targeting a set of generic tools, while others are building solutions for more narrow use cases.

In the case of n8n, the company might be considered a “pioneer” in the space not just because of its focus on the growing area of low-code tools, but because of how it views the world of software.

The basic approach n8n is taking is around the idea of “fair code.” This is somewhat similar to open-source, and is analogous to a freemium-style model for the concept. The code is available in a public repository and the idea is that this will never disappear (one issue many enterprises face on the bleeding edge of tech: companies and their services sometimes shut down). However, n8n itself limits how much it can be used for free, before users start to pay to use it so that n8n can monetize its work, which it does in the form of consulting and integration services. (In the case of n8n, that limit looks to be up to a limit of $30,000 in support services revenues.)

Oberhauser was an early proponent of the concept of n8n and he runs a site dedicated to spreading the word. (You can also read about the different approaches to fair code, and some of what led to the creation of the concept, here.)

While basic and limited access to the code will remain free, and even as a company like n8n aims to make it easier and easier for non-developers to build integrations, there will be areas that need attention to make those services accessible to the people within an organization. For starters, there is the issue of setting up the basic integration connectors, especially in cases where the software a company is using is proprietary or customized.

There is also another issue that is likely to become more prominent as low-code and no-code tools continue to grow in popularity, and that is security. While IT departments may not have oversight of every single integration, neither will the security teams, which means that new data vulnerabilities might well become more commonplace, too. For all of these reasons, n8n is betting that there will still be some integration and consulting involved in implementation.

“Almost every company needs help connecting outside and internal systems, to make it easier for people to get started,” Oberhauser said.

As low-code startups continue to attract VC interest, what’s driving customer demand?

Aydin Senkut, founder and managing partner of Felicis Ventures, who led the round, said that what attracted him to n8n was the extensibility of the platform — that it could be applied not just for app integration and workflow automation in those apps but a much wider set of use cases — and the very early traction of 16,000 users that it’s picked up with very little fanfare, a sign that the service has some stickiness and usefulness to it.

And the fact that it lets developers — “citizen” or otherwise — play with so many options is also a key part of it.

“We feel that data is the new oil, and one of the special things here is not just low or no-code per se, but how n8n is making it seamless and easy to connect tens or even hundreds of apps.” Senkut said that it reminded him a little of Felicis’ early investment in Plaid. “Essentially, the more data and APIs you have the more valuable the company can be. I think to measure the potential of a company, look at the APIs. If you can connect disparate things together, that is key.”

Crusoe Energy is tackling energy use for cryptocurrencies and data centers and greenhouse gas emissions

Published April 26, 2021

The two founders of Crusoe Energy think they may have a solution to two of the largest problems facing the planet today — the increasing energy footprint of the tech industry and the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the natural gas industry.

Crusoe, which uses excess natural gas from energy operations to power data centers and cryptocurrency mining operations, has just raised $128 million in new financing from some of the top names in the venture capital industry to build out its operations — and the timing couldn’t be better.

Methane emissions are emerging as a new area of focus for researchers and policymakers focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and keeping global warming within the 1.5 degree target set under the Paris Agreement. And those emissions are just what Crusoe Energy is capturing to power its data centers and bitcoin mining operations.

The reason why addressing methane emissions is so critical in the short term is because these greenhouse gases trap more heat than their carbon dioxide counterparts and also dissipate more quickly. So dramatic reductions in methane emissions can do more in the short term to alleviate the global warming pressures that human industry is putting on the environment.

And the biggest source of methane emissions is the oil and gas industry. In the U.S. alone roughly 1.4 billion cubic feet of natural gas is flared daily, said Chase Lochmiller, a co-founder of Crusoe Energy. About two-thirds of that is flared in Texas, with another 500 million cubic feet flared in North Dakota, where Crusoe has focused its operations to date.

For Lochmiller, a former quant trader at some of the top American financial services institutions, and Cully Cavness, a third generation oil and gas scion, the ability to capture natural gas and harness it for computing operations is a natural combination of the two men’s interests in financial engineering and environmental preservation.

NEW TOWN, ND – AUGUST 13: View of three oil wells and flaring of natural gas on The Fort Berthold Indian Reservation near New Town, ND on August 13, 2014. About 100 million dollars’ worth of natural gas burns off per month because a pipeline system isn’t in place yet to capture and safely transport it. The Three Affiliated Tribes on Fort Berthold represent Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nations. It’s also at the epicenter of the fracking and oil boom that has brought oil royalties to a large number of Native Americans living there. (Photo by Linda Davidson / The Washington Post via Getty Images)

The two Denver natives met in prep-school and remained friends. When Lochmiller left for MIT and Cavness headed off to Middlebury they didn’t know that they’d eventually be launching a business together. But through Lochmiller’s exposure to large-scale computing and the financial services industry, and Cavness’ assumption of the family business, they came to the conclusion that there had to be a better way to address the massive waste associated with natural gas.

Conversation around Crusoe Energy began in 2018 when Lochmiller and Cavness went climbing in the Rockies to talk about Lochmiller’s trip to Mt. Everest.

When the two men started building their business, the initial focus was on finding an environmentally friendly way to deal with the energy footprint of bitcoin mining operations. It was this pitch that brought the company to the attention of investors at Polychain, the investment firm started by Olaf Carlson-Wee (and Lochmiller’s former employer), and investors like Bain Capital Ventures and new investor Valor Equity Partners.

(This was also the pitch that Lochmiller made to me to cover the company’s seed round. At the time I was skeptical of the company’s premise and was worried that the business would just be another way to prolong the use of hydrocarbons while propping up a cryptocurrency that had limited actual utility beyond a speculative hedge against governmental collapse. I was wrong on at least one of those assessments.)

“Regarding questions about sustainability, Crusoe has a clear standard of only pursuing projects that are net reducers of emissions. Generally the wells that Crusoe works with are already flaring and would continue to do so in the absence of Crusoe’s solution. The company has turned down numerous projects where they would be a buyer of low-cost gas from a traditional pipeline because they explicitly do not want to be net adders of demand and emissions,” wrote a spokesman for Valor Equity in an email. “In addition, mining is increasingly moving to renewables and Crusoe’s approach to stranded energy can enable better economics for stranded or marginalized renewables, ultimately bringing more renewables into the mix. Mining can provide an interruptible base load demand that can be cut back when grid demand increases, so overall the effect to incentivize the addition of more renewable energy sources to the grid.”

Other investors have since piled on, including: Lowercarbon Capital, DRW Ventures, Founders Fund, Coinbase Ventures, KCK Group, Upper90, Winklevoss Capital, Zigg Capital and Tesla co-founder JB Straubel.

The company now operates 40 modular data centers powered by otherwise wasted and flared natural gas throughout North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming and Colorado. Next year that number should expand to 100 units as Crusoe enters new markets such as Texas and New Mexico. Since launching in 2018, Crusoe has emerged as a scalable solution to reduce flaring through energy intensive computing, such as bitcoin mining, graphical rendering, artificial intelligence model training and even protein folding simulations for COVID-19 therapeutic research.

Crusoe boasts 99.9% combustion efficiency for its methane, and is also bringing additional benefits in the form of new networking buildout at its data center and mining sites. Eventually, this networking capacity could lead to increased connectivity for rural communities surrounding the Crusoe sites.

Currently, 80% of the company’s operations are being used for bitcoin mining, but there’s increasing demand for use in data center operations, and some universities, including Lochmiller’s alma mater of MIT, are looking at the company’s offerings for their own computing needs.

“That’s very much in an incubated phase right now,” said Lochmiller. “A private alpha where we have a few test customers… we’ll make that available for public use later this year.”

Corporate sustainability initiatives may open doors for carbon offset startups

Crusoe Energy Systems should have the lowest data center operating costs in the world, according to Lochmiller and while the company will spend money to support the infrastructure buildout necessary to get the data to customers, those costs are negligible when compared to energy consumption, Lochmiller said.

The same holds true for bitcoin mining, where the company can offer an alternative to coal-powered mining operations in China and the construction of new renewable capacity that wouldn’t be used to service the grid. As cryptocurrencies look for a way to blunt criticism about the energy usage involved in their creation and distribution, Crusoe becomes an elegant solution.

Institutional and regulatory tailwinds are also propelling the company forward. Recently New Mexico passed new laws limiting flaring and venting to no more than 2% of an operator’s production by April of next year, and North Dakota is pushing for incentives to support on-site flare capture systems while Wyoming signed a law creating incentives for flare gas reduction applied to bitcoin mining. The world’s largest financial services firms are also taking a stand against flare gas with BlackRock calling for an end to routine flaring by 2025.

“Where we view our power consumption, we draw a very clear line in our project evaluation stage where we’re reducing emissions for an oil and gas projects,” Lochmiller said.

Facebook introduces a new miniplayer that streams Spotify from the Facebook app

Published April 26, 2021

Facebook announced last week an expanded partnership with streaming music service Spotify that would bring a new way to listen to music or podcasts directly within Facebook’s app, which it called Project Boombox. Today, the companies are rolling out this integration via a new “miniplayer” experience that will allow Facebook users to stream from Spotify through the Facebook app on iOS or Android. The feature will be available to both free Spotify users and Premium subscribers.

The miniplayer itself is an extension of the social sharing option already supported within Spotify’s app. Now, when Spotify users are listening to content they want to share to Facebook, they’ll be able to tap the existing “Share” menu (the three-dot menu at the upper right of the screen) and then tap either “Facebook” or “Facebook News Feed.”

When a user posts an individual track or podcast episode to Facebook through this sharing feature, the post will now display in a new miniplayer that allows other people who come across their post to also play the content as they continue to scroll, or reshare it. (Cue MySpace vibes!)

Spotify’s paid subscribers will be able to access full playback, the company says. Free users, meanwhile, will be able to hear the full shared track, not a clip. But afterwards, they’ll continue to listen to ad-supported content on Shuffle mode, just as they would in Spotify’s own app.

One important thing to note here about how all this works is that the integration allows the music or podcast content to actually play from within the Spotify app. When a user presses play on the miniplayer, an app switch takes place so the user can log into Spotify. The miniplayer activates and controls the launch and playback in the Spotify app — which is how the playback is able continue even as the user scrolls on Facebook or if they minimize the Facebook app altogether.

Facebook invests in audio with short-form Soundbites feature, podcast support and a Clubhouse clone

This setup means users will need to have the Spotify mobile app installed on their phone and a Spotify account for the miniplayer to work. For first-time Spotify users, they’ll have to sign up for a free account in order to listen to the music shared via the miniplayer.

Spotify notes that it’s not possible to sign up for a paid account through the mini-player experience itself, so there’s no revenue share with Facebook on new subscriptions. (Users have to download the Spotify app and sign up for Paid accounts from there if they want to upgrade.)

The partnership allows Spotify to leverage Facebook’s reach to gain distribution and to drive both sign-ups and repeat usage of its app just as the COVID bump to subscriber growth may be wearing off. However, it’s still responsible for the royalties paid on streams, just as it was before, the company told TechCrunch, because its app is the one actually doing the streaming. It’s also fully in charge of the music catalog and audio ads that play alongside the content.

For Facebook, this deal means it now has a valuable tool to keep users spending time on its site — a metric that has been declining over the years, reports have indicated.

Spotify and Facebook have a long history of working together on music efforts. Facebook back in 2011 had been planning an update that would allow music subscription users to engage with music directly on Facebook, much like this. But those plans were later dialed back, possibly over music rights’ or technical issues. Spotify had also been one of the first media partners on Facebook’s ticker, which would show you in real time what friends were up to on Facebook and other services. And Spotify had once offered Facebook Login as the default for its mobile app. Today, as it has for years, Spotify users on the desktop can see what their Facebook friends are streaming on its app, thanks to social networking integrations.

Spotify Group Session UX teardown: The fails and their fixes

The timing for this renewed and extended partnership is interesting. Now, both Facebook and Spotify have a mutual enemy with Apple, whose privacy-focused changes are impacting Facebook’s ad business and whose investments in Apple Music and Podcasts are a threat to Spotify. As Facebook’s own music efforts in more recent years have shifted toward partnership efforts — like music video integrations enabled by music label agreements — it makes sense that it would turn to a partner like Spotify to power a new streaming feature that supports Facebook’s broader efforts around monetizable tools and services aimed at the creator economy.

The miniplayer feature had been tested in non-U.S. markets, Mexico and Thailand, ahead of its broader global launch today.

In addition to the U.S., the integration is fully rolling out to users in Argentina, Australia, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, South Africa, Thailand and Uruguay.

Building a creator-focused OS

Published April 24, 2021

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading.

A week ago TechCrunch covered Pico’s $6.5 million funding round and described it as “a New York startup that helps online creators and media companies make money and manage their customer data.” The Exchange has also covered Pico before, most recently during a mid-2020 dive into the world of indie pubs and subscription media.

While our own Anthony Ha did an inimitable job covering the Pico round, I got on a Zoom call with the company, as well, as their new capital came with a relaunch of sorts that I wanted to better understand.

European VC soars in Q1

The Pico team walked me through what’s changed at their business by describing the historical progress of creative digital tooling. They said earlier eras in the space focused on content hosting and distribution. In the startup’s view, a new generation of creative-focused tooling will bring the market to an era in which content management systems, or CMSs — say, Substack or WordPress — will not own the center of tooling. Instead, monetization will.

That’s Pico’s bet, and so it’s building what it considers to be an operating system for the creator market. My gut read is that a creative digital world that centers around monetization sounds like one that is more lucrative than what preceding eras brought us.

Pico’s view is that regardless of where someone first builds their audience, they eventually go multi-SKU — or multi-platform, perhaps — so keeping a single, centralized register of customer data may prove critical.

The startup’s revamped service is a bit of a monetization tool, as before, along with a creator-focused CRM that sits atop your CMS or other digital output on any particular platform. So far customer growth at the company looks good, growing by about 5x in the last year. Let’s see how far Pico can ride its vision, and if it can help build out a middle class in the creator economy.

The grocery revolution will be IRL

Somewhat lost in our circles amid the hype regarding Instacart’s epic COVID period is the fact that most folks still go to stores to buy their fruit and veg, as our friends in the UK might say.

Grocers did not forget the fact. But their historically thin margins and rising competition for customer ownership in the Instacart era hasn’t left them too secure. How can they pursue a more digitally enabled strategy without outsourcing their customer relationship to a third party?

Swiftly might be part of the answer. The startup is building technology that may help grocery chains of all sizes go digital, take advantage of modern mobile technology, and generate more incomes via ads, while offering consumers more shopping options. Neat, yeah?

The startup has raised a little over $15 million to date, per Crunchbase data, but came back into our minds thanks to the launch of a deal with the Dollar Tree company, a consumer retailer that has around one zillion stores in America.

How are VCs handling diligence in a world where deals open and close in days, not months?

I’ve been aware of Swiftly for ages, having met its co-founder Henry Kim back when he was building Sneakpeeq, which later became Symphony Commerce. The latter company was eventually bought by Quantum Retail. But during my chats with Kim over the years in and around San Francisco, he consistently brought up the grocery market, a space he’d had experience in before building Symphony Commerce.

After hearing Kim hype up the possibilities for grocery and digital for a half decade or so, to see the company that came out of his hopes and planning land a major partner is fun.

Swiftly provides two main products, a retail system and a media service. The retail side of its business provides checkout services, loyalty programs, personalized offers and the like for mobile shoppers. And the media side allows IRL grocers to snag a bit of the consumer packaged goods (CPG) ad spend that they often miss out on, while looping in analytics to provide better attribution to the impact of ads sold.

I expect that Swiftly will raise more capital in the next few quarters now that it has a big, public deal out. More when we have it.

UiPath, SPACs, and a neat venture capital round

Over the past two weeks The Exchange has written quite a lot about the UiPath IPO. Probably too much. But to catch you up just in case, the company’s first IPO pricing range looked like a warning for late-stage investors as the resulting valuations were a bit lower than anticipated. Next the company raised that range, ameliorating if not eliminating our earlier concern. Then the company priced above its raised range, though still at a discount to its final private round. Then it gained ground after starting to trade, and its CFO was like, we did good.

To dig even more into the company’s private-public valuation saga, The Exchange asked B2B investor Dharmesh Thakker, a general partner at Battery Ventures, about his take on the company’s final private round in the context of it landing a bit higher than where the company eventually priced its IPO. Here’s what he had to say:

[T]here was smart money involved in that round. These are people who understand that material value creation happens 3-5 years post IPO, as we have seen with Twilio, Atlassian, MongoDB, Okta, and Crowdstrike who have increased value 5-10x post IPO.

Right now, UIPath has only 1% penetration at $608M revenue in a $60B automation market, and the urgency around intelligent process automation for repetitive tasks is only increasing post-COVID. Companies need help managing their costs with automation. So, as the company penetrates its target market and grows over time, UIPath will drive ongoing value, which pre-IPO and IPO stage investors realize. They will be patient.”

He’s bullish, in other words. A more acerbic take on the UiPath IPO came in from PitchBook analyst Brendan Burke. Here’s what he had to say about the company and its market:

RPA has scaled rapidly due to the demand for automation yet remains a limited solution that may lack durable value. Due to its reliance on custom scripts, we view RPA as a bridge technology to cloud-native AI automation that faces competitive risk from AI-native challengers. The future of enterprise automation is for front-line users to deploy cloud-native machine learning models that can adapt to dynamic data streams and make accurate decisions. UiPath’s implementations are not cloud-native and require third party integrations with around 75 AI model vendors for intelligent decision-making. Additionally, the company lists the ability to recruit AI engineers as a risk factor for the business. UiPath’s ability to expand across the AI value chain will be critical for its long-term prospects.

I include that remark as it can be, at times, hard to get actual negative commentary out of the broader analyst world, as people are so terrified of being rude.

Insurtech startups are leveraging rapid growth to raise big money

Scooting along, there’s a new SPAC deal out this week that I wanted to flag for you: SmartRent is merging with Fifth Wall Acquisition Corp. I. SmartRent raised more than $100 million while private, according to Crunchbase data, from RET Ventures, Spark Capital and Bain Capital Ventures, among others.

So this particular SPAC deal, which puts a $2.2 billion equity valuation on SmartRent, is a material venture-backed exit. You can check its investor deck here. We care about the company as it appears to work in a similar space to Latch, which is also going out via a SPAC. Dueling OS companies for rental units? This should be fun. (More on Latch’s SPAC deal here.)

Finally for our main work today, HYPR raised $35 million this week. Among all the venture capital rounds that I wish I could have written about this week but didn’t get to, HYPR is up there because it promises a password-free future. And having just raised a Series C, it may have a shot at pulling it off. Please god, let it happen.

Various and sundry

I got to cover a few rounds raised by recent Y Combinator graduates this week, including Queenly and Albedo’s recent funding events. Check ‘em out.

Oh, and Afterpay’s recent earnings show that the buy-now-pay-later market is still growing like all hell,

Alex

What the MasterClass effect means for edtech

Published April 24, 2021

MasterClass, which sells a subscription to celebrity-taught classes, sits on the cusp of entertainment and education. It offers virtual, yet aspirational learning: an online tennis class with Serena Williams, a cooking session with Gordon Ramsay. While there’s the off chance that an instructor might actually talk to you — it has happened before — the platform mostly just offers paywalled documentary-style content.

The vision has received attention. MasterClass is raising funding that would value it at $2.5 billion, as scooped by Axios and confirmed independently by a source to TechCrunch. But while MasterClass has found a sweet spot, can the success be replicated?

Investors certainly think so. Outlier, founded by MasterClass’ co-founder, closed a $30 million Series C this week, for affordable, digital college courses. The similarities between Outlier and its founder’s alma mater aren’t subtle: It’s literally trying to apply MasterClass’ high-quality videography to college classes. This comes a week after I wrote about a “MasterClass for Chess lovers” platform launched by former Chess World Champion Garry Kasparov.

Two back-to-back MasterClass copycats raising millions in venture capital makes me think about if the model can truly be verticalized and focused down into specific niches. After 2020 and the rise of Zoom University, we know edtech needs to be more engaging, but we don’t know the exact way to get there. Is it by creating micro-learning communities around shared loves? Is it about gamification? Aspirational learning has different incentives than for-credit learning. In order to be successful, Outlier needs to prove to universities it can use MasterClass magic for true outcomes that rival in-person lectures. It’s a harder, and more ambtious promise.

My riff aside, I turned to two edtech founders to understand how they see the MasterClass effect panning out, and to cross-check my gut reaction.

Taylor Nieman, the founder of language learning startup Toucan:

Although I do love how these models try to lean into this theme of “invisible learning” like we leverage with Toucan, it faces the same issues as so many other consumer products that try to steal time out of people’s very busy days. Constantly competing for time leads to terrible engagement metrics and very high churn. That leads me to question what true learning outcomes could occur from little to no usage of the product itself.

Amanda DoAmaral, the founder of Fiveable, a learning platform for high school students:

Masterclass is important for showing us why educational content should be treated more like entertainment. All of our bars for content quality is much higher now than it ever was before and I’m excited to see how that affects learning across the board.

For students, it’s about creating environments that support them holistically and giving them space to collaborate openly. It feels so obvious that these spaces should exist for young people, but we’ve lost sight of what students actually need. At my school, we built policies that assumed the worst in students. I want to flip that. Assume the best, be proactive to keep them safe, and create ways to react when we need to.

Anyways, that’s just some nuance to chew on during this fine day. In the rest of this newsletter, we will focus a lot on tactical advice for founders, from the money they raise to the peacock dance they might want to do one day. Make sure to follow me on Twitter @nmasc_ so we can talk during the week, too!

Garry Kasparov launches a community-first chess platform

The peacock dance

You know when male peacocks fan their feathers to court a lover? That, but for startups trying to get acquired. As one of our many rabbit holes on Equity this week, we talk about Discord walking away from a Microsoft deal, and if that deal ever existed in the first place or if it was just a way to drum up investor excitement in the audio gaming platform.

Here’s what to know: Discord is reportedly pursuing an IPO after walking away from talks with multiple companies that were looking to acquire the audio gaming giant.

Discord aside, the consolidation environment continues to be hot for some sectors.

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

Image Credits: VectorInspiration / Getty Images

Even venture capital knows that the future isn’t simply venture capital

Clearbanc, a Toronto-based fintech startup that gives non-dilutive financing to businesses, has rebranded alongside a $100 million financing that valued it at $2 billion. Now rebranded as Clearco, the startup wants to be more than just a capital provider, but a services provider, too.

Here’s what to know: The startup has been on a tear of product development for the past year, launching services such as valuation calculators or runway tools. It’s a step away from what Clearbanc originally flexed: the 20-minute term sheet and rapid-fire investment. I talk about some of the levers at play in my piece:

Many of Clearco’s newest products are still in their infancy, but the potential success of the startup could nearly be tied to the general growth of startups looking for alternatives to venture capital when financing their startups. Similar to how AngelList’s growth is neatly tied to the growth of emerging fund managers, Clearco’s growth is cleanly related to the growth of founders who see financing as beyond a seed check from Y Combinator.

Abstract human brain made out of dollar bills isolated on white background. Image Credits: Iaremenko / Getty Images

Don’t market your opportunity away

Keeping on the theme of tactical advice for founders, let’s move onto talking about marketing. Tim Parkin, president of Parkin Consulting, explained how startup founders can use marketing as a tool to stand out in the noisy environment. Differentiation has never been harder, but also more imperative.

Here’s what to know: Parkin outlines four ways that martech will shift in 2021, strapped with anecdotes and a nod to the importance of investing in influencers.

Red ball on curved light blue paper, blue background. Image Credits: PM Images / Getty Images

Around TechCrunch

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European VC soars in Q1

Image Credits: TechCrunch

Thanks for reading along today and everyday. Sending love to my readers in India and everyone around the world that is facing yet another deadly surge of this horrible disease. I’m rooting for you.

How to pivot your startup, save cash and maintain trust with investors and customers