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TC Early Stage will dive deep on how to fundraise for your startup

Published March 29, 2021

Despite the fact that capital is abundant and dozens of startups get funding every day, the process of raising institutional capital is anything but simple.

From getting an investor’s attention to nailing your virtual pitch meeting to the legal aspects of your term sheet, there is plenty to navigate.

Luckily, TechCrunch Early Stage is bringing together some of the biggest VCs to share how to manage the process proactively and successfully secure capital from the right VCs.

Just take a look at the fundraising sessions going down at TC Early Stage, which takes place later this week on April 1 – 2.

How to Get an Investor’s Attention – Marlon Nichols, MaC Venture Capital

Marlon Nichols is an expert in early-stage investments, having invested in countless successful ventures such as Gimlet Media, MongoDB, Thrive Market, PlayVS, Fair, Wonderschool and Finesse. Right now, there is more seed-stage fundraising than ever before, and Marlon will speak on how to get noticed by investors, how to grow your business and how to survive in the crowded, competitive space of tech startups. He will provide insights on how to network, craft a great pitch and target the best investors for your success.

How to Nail Your Virtual Pitch Meeting – Melissa Bradley, Ureeka

The rules of the pitch meeting have changed. Instead of traveling across the country, wasting time in planes, trains and automobiles, founders can take upwards of 30 meetings in a day from the comfort of their home. Entrepreneur and VC Melissa Bradley will outline how to make the most of that half hour on Zoom and lock in the next one.

How to Kick the 10 Worst Startup Habits – Leah Solivan, Fuel Capital

With voices across the internet giving their two-cents on how to run a great business, Fuel Capital’s Leah Solivan will share a list of things that a founder should NOT do. Avoid the pitfalls that could break your momentum, or worst case, your company, and ask Solivan your own questions.

Bootstrapping and the Power of Product-Led Growth – Tope Awotona, Calendly and Blake Bartlett, OpenView

Building a bootstrapped company forces you to be creative. For Calendly, it pointed the company toward a product-led growth model built on virality. Hear from Calendly’s Tope Awotona and OpenView’s Blake Bartlett as they cover pro tips on bootstrapping, PLG and when a profitable company should consider raising capital.

Four Things to Think About Before Raising a Series A – Bucky Moore, Kleiner Perkins

Founders looking to raise Series A capital know that it’s an entirely different ball game than seed-stage funding. Hear Kleiner Perkins partner Bucky Moore outline the most important ways to mentally prepare for heading into Series A fundraising.

Fundraising Terms That Affect Your Business – Dawn Belt, Fenwick & West

With each funding round, there is an exciting opportunity for growth, but it’s important to fully understand the implications of those terms. Fenwick partner Dawn Belt will discuss the key legal terms to focus on in your seed and Series A rounds and how they affect the control and operational freedom of your company.

TC Early Stage takes place on April 1 – 2 and is jam-packed with breakout sessions led by tech leaders, from VCs to operators. Each session will include audience Q&A so founders can get answers to their specific questions. On Day 2, we’ll be holding a pitch-off with some fantastic companies.

Announcing the TC Early Stage Pitch-Off startups

All in all, it’ll be a fantastic event. You should def come hang out! Get a ticket here.

How startups can go passwordless, thanks to zero trust

Published March 29, 2021

“There is no doubt that over time, people are going to rely less and less on passwords… they just don’t meet the challenge for anything you really want to secure,” said Bill Gates.

That was 17 years ago. Although passwords have lost some of their charm, they have so far survived many attempts to kill them for good.

The perception of high cost and tricky implementations has stalled some smaller businesses from ditching passwords. But alternatives to passwords are affordable, easy to implement and safer, show industry insights gathered by Extra Crunch. The move to zero trust systems is acting as a catalyst.

First, a primer. Zero trust focuses on who you are, not where you are. Zero trust models require companies to never trust any attempt to access its network, and must verify every single time — even from logins from inside the network. Passwordless tech is a key part of zero trust models.

There are several alternatives for passwords, including:

Biometric authentication: widely used as fingerprint readers in smartphones and physical verification points at buildings;
Social media authentication: where you use your Google or Facebook IDs to authenticate you with a third-party service;
Multi-factor authentication: where more layers of authentication are added using devices or services, such as token authentication using a trusted device;
Grid authentication cards: which provide access while using a combination PIN;
Push notifications: which are usually sent to the user’s smartphones or encrypted devices;
Digital certificates: cryptographic files stored locally on the machine or device.

Wolt, a Finnish food-delivery site, is just one example of going passwordless.

“The user registers by entering their email address or a phone number. Login to the app takes place by clicking the temporary link in the user’s inbox. The app on the user’s mobile phone places an authentication cookie, which enables the user to continue from that device without having to go through any further authentication,” said Erka Koivunen, CISO at F-Secure.

In this case, the service provider is in full control of the authentication, allowing it to set expiration time, revoke service and detect fraud. The service provider does not need to count on the user’s commitment to keep track of their passwords.

Axis Security raises $32M to help companies stay secure while working from home

Passwordless tech is not inherently costly but may take some adjustment, explained Ryan Weeks, CISO at managed service provider Datto.

“It is not necessarily costly in terms of monetary investment, because there are a lot of easily accessible open-source alternatives for multi-factor authentication that don’t require any sort of investment,” said Weeks. But some companies believe passwordless tech may cause friction to their employees’ productivity.

Koivunen also dismissed that zero trust models are unaffordable for startups.

“Zero trust recognises the futility of forcing users to authenticate themselves by presenting something they should keep as secret. Instead, it prefers to establish the user’s identity using some context-aware method,” he said.

Zero trust goes further than authenticating users; it also includes the device and the user.

“From a zero trust perspective, there is an idea that there is a continuous authentication or revalidation of trust occurring. Therefore, passwordless in a zero trust model is potentially easier for the user and more secure as the combination of the ‘something you have’ and ‘something you are’ factors are more difficult to attack,” said Datto’s Weeks.

Larger companies, like Microsoft and Google, already offer zero trust technologies. But investors are also eyeing smaller companies that offer zero trust for growing companies.

Axis Security, a zero trust provider that allows remote employees to access their company’s network, raised $32 million last year. Beyond Identity raised $75 million in funding in December. And Israel identity validation startup Identiq raised $47 million in Series A funding in March.

Use ‘productive paranoia’ to build cybersecurity culture at your startup

Early Stage is the premier “how-to” event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear firsthand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, product-market fit, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built-in — there’s ample time included for audience questions and discussion. Use code “TCARTICLE” at checkout to get 20% off tickets right here.

Singular is a new Paris-based VC firm with $265 million

Published March 29, 2021

Meet Singular, a new VC firm based in Paris that just finished raising its initial fund. The firm was founded by two former Alven partners — Raffi Kamber and Jérémy Uzan. They have some ambitious goals and an interesting investment model that could help them remain involved even during late-stage rounds. Overall, the firm raised €225 million, or $265 million at today’s exchange rate.

If you browse Singular’s website, you’re not going to find a lot of information. Here’s what it looked like last week before the team added a list of portfolio companies:

Image Credits: Singular

The Singular team doesn’t want to be secretive. But they don’t like talking about themselves. That’s why you may have seen Singular’s name in a few articles I wrote over the past few months. But now it’s time to talk a bit about what the firm has in mind when it comes to startup investment.

Jérémy Uzan and Raffi Kamber spent 11 and eight years at Alven, respectively. They’ve been behind some of the firm’s most successful investments, such as Dataiku (with Nicolas Celier, who sourced the deal then handed over Alven’s board seat to Raffi Kamber) and OpenClassrooms. “But every time you raise another fund, you sign up for a long time,” Uzan told me.

The duo left Alven quite naturally as they felt it was time in their careers to take their destiny in their own hands. There’s no hard feeling with their previous fund.

It was the right timing personally, but also the right timing for the tech ecosystem. While Singular is based in Paris, the firm plans to build a true European VC firm with its headquarters in Paris. Singular doesn’t think London should be the center of gravity for European tech investment.

Singular started fundraising in late 2019 and early 2020. Kamber and Uzan didn’t know anything about raising a fund and didn’t work with an external financial firm to handle the fundraising effort.

When asked about the coronavirus pandemic and the impact on the process, they both said the lockdown actually helped, as everyone was stuck at home. Around two-thirds of the limited partners that invested in Singular are based outside of France.

Does your VC have an investment thesis or a hypothesis?

“These are historic VC investors. They really believe in tech — and Europe too. They have seen that Europe has been taking off for the past two or three years,” Kamber told me.

Just like a startup, Singular wanted to be backed by some well-known investors. And some of those investors are injecting money in a French VC fund for the first time. Limited partners include a mix of pension funds, funds of funds, sovereign funds and family offices.

Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, Bpifrance, Vintage Investment Partners, Axa Venture Partners, Sofina, MACSF and Mubadala Capital are some of Singular’s backers. Unless you’ve raised a VC fund in the past, you may discover some of those names for the first time. And yet, these investors are significant. For instance, while you might not be familiar with the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, they have over $200 billion in net assets.

Singular started closing investment deals around October 2020. So far, the company has invested in six different startups:

A Series B round in Gtmhub, an OKR management service
A Series B round in Indy, an accounting automation software suite
A Series A round in Soda, an enterprise-grade data monitoring platform
A seed round in Moka.care, a mental health solution for employees
A seed round in Resilience, a full-stack software approach to improve cancer treatment
Another undisclosed Series A round

It’s hard to find some common trends around this list of investments, but I’m going to help you. First, let’s start with the average check size.

“We are mostly focused on Series A/B because we think there’s a lot of room to grow at that stage,” Kamber said. And Singular can invest as much as €20 million in a single round ($23.6 million at today’s exchange rate).

When it comes to verticals, Singular openly says that it doesn’t want to focus on a specific area in particular. “We are a generalist fund and we are quite opportunistic,” Uzan said. Singular doesn’t want to choose between B2B and consumer, between AI and e-commerce, etc.

Where Singular stands out is that it has a unique approach to late-stage rounds. When a portfolio company reaches the Series C or Series D stage, Singular might not have enough money under management for infinite follow-on investments.

The VC firm didn’t want to raise its own late-stage fund. So Singular will be able to structure special-purpose investment vehicles with its limited partners. A few limited partners could put some money in this investment vehicle directly and the startup could accept to raise a new round with this new investment vehicle instead of a late-stage fund.

This way, Singular remains very much involved with the portfolio company in question. It could keep a board seat and have a say when it comes to the startup’s next phases.

It’s still too early to see how it would work in real life and it’s going to happen on a case-by-case basis. But the fact that Singular can offer that kind of investment is significant — it could be appealing for some entrepreneurs. You don’t have to accept it and you’re not tied with Singular forever, but the offer is on the table.

So that’s Singular — Eva Mayoud, Alexandre Flamant and Sonia Pélisson also joined the team. It’s not that often that a French VC firm starts from zero and raises a €225 million fund in a year. It’s going to be interesting to track the firm’s upcoming investments. In the meantime, here’s some TechCrunch coverage of Singular’s past deals:

OKR-focused Gtmhub raises $30M Series B after growing 3x in 2020

Accounting automation startup Georges raises $42.4 million and rebrands to Indy

Moka.care is a European mental healthcare solution for employees

Resilience is an ambitious bet to improve cancer treatment

A Supreme Court ruling affirming Canada’s carbon tax opens the door for a startup explosion

Published March 29, 2021

Last week the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that the national government’s plan to tax carbon emissions was legal in a decision that could have significant implications for the nation’s climate-focused startup companies.

The ruling put an end to roughly two years of legal challenges and could set the stage for a boom in funding and commercial support for Canadian startup companies developing technologies to curb greenhouse gas emissions, according to investors and entrepreneurs representing some of the world’s largest utilities and petrochemical companies.

“The high price on carbon has the potential to make Canada a powerhouse for scaling up breakthrough decarbonization technologies and for deploying solutions like carbon capture, industrial electrification, and hydrogen electrolysis,” said one investor who works with a fund that backs startups on behalf of large energy businesses.

This 2018 Greenhouse Gas Pricing Act is the cornerstone of the Canadian climate policy pushed through by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. It establishes minimum pricing standards that all provinces have to meet but gives the provinces the ability to set higher prices. So far, seven of the nation’s 13 provinces are currently paying the “backstop” rate set by the national government.

That price is C$30 per tonne of carbon dioxide released, but is set to rise to C$170 per tonne by 2030. That figure is just a bit higher than the current prices that Californians are charged under the state’s carbon pricing plan and roughly four times the price on carbon set by the Northeastern Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

Image Credits: Gencho Petkov (opens in a new window) / Shutterstock (opens in a new window)

Under the plan, much of the money raised through the tax levied by the Canadian government would be used to support projects and technologies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions or create more sustainable approaches to industry.

“Climate change is real. It is caused by greenhouse gas emissions resulting from human activities, and it poses a grave threat to humanity’s future,” Chief Justice Richard Wagner wrote, on behalf of the majority, in the Supreme Court ruling.

Three provinces — Alberta, Ontario and Saskatchewan challenged the legality of the greenhouse gas policy, and Alberta’s challenge was allowed to proceed to the high court — holding up the national implementation of the pricing scheme.

With the roadblocks removed, entrepreneurs and investors around the world expect the carbon scheme to quickly boost the prospects of Canadian startups.

“This represents underlying government support and a huge pot of money. If you wanted macro support for an underlying shift in sectoral developments that could substantiate and support tech companies working on climate change mitigation what better then when the government has told you that we care about this and money is free?” said BeZero Carbon founder, Tommy Ricketts. “There couldn’t be a better condition for startups in Canada.”

Companies that stand to directly benefit from a carbon tax in Canada include businesses like Kanin Energy, which develops decarbonization projects, including waste heat to power; CERT, which is currently competing in the carbon Xprize and is working on a way to convert carbon dioxide to ethylene; and SeeO2, a company also working on carbon dioxide conversion technologies.

Corporate sustainability initiatives may open doors for carbon offset startups

Geothermal technologies like Quaise and Eavor could also see a boost, as will companies that focus on the electrification of the transportation industry in Canada.

Farther afield are the companies like Planetary Hydrogen, which combines hydrogen production and carbon capture in a way that also contributes to ocean de-acidification.

“Think about the gas at the pump. That is going to get charged extra,” said one investor who works for the venture arm of one of the largest oil and gas companies in the world, who was not authorized to speak to the press. “For cleaner energy the price will definitely be reduced. And think about where this tax is going. Most of the tax is going to go to government funding into cleantech or climate-tech companies. So you have a double boost for startups in the carbon footprint reduction area.”

Jeff Bezos’ investment fund is backing a startup hoping to be the AWS for SMB accounting

Published March 27, 2021

One of the biggest pain points for startups and small businesses is keeping up with back office tasks such as bookkeeping and managing taxes.

QuickBooks, it seems, just doesn’t always cut it.

Three-time co-founders Waseem Daher, Jeff Arnold, and Jessica McKellar formed Pilot with the mission of affordably providing back office services to startups and SMBs. With over 1,000 customers, it has gained serious traction over the years. And Pilot has now also received validation from some big-name investors. On Friday, the company announced a $100 million Series C that doubles the company’s valuation to $1.2 billion.

Bezos Expeditions — Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ personal investment fund — and Whale Rock Capital (a $10 billion hedge fund) co-led the round, which also included participation from Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, Authentic Ventures and others.

Stripe and Index Ventures co-led Pilot’s $40 million Series B in April 2019. The latest financing brings the company’s total funding raised to over $158 million since its 2017 inception.

The founding team certainly has an impressive track record, having founded and sold two previous companies: Ksplice (to Oracle) and Zupli (to Dropbox).

Pilot’s pitch is about more than just software. The company combines its software with accountants to do things such as provide “CFO Services” to SMBs without a full-stack finance team. It also provides monthly variance analysis for all its bookkeeping customers, essentially serving as a controller for those companies, so they can make better budgeting and spending decisions.

It also helps companies access small business tax credits they may not have otherwise known about.

Last year, Pilot completed more than $3 billion in bookkeeping transactions for its customers, which range from pre-revenue startups to larger companies with more than $30M of revenue a year. Customers include Bolt, r2c and Pathrise, among others.

Pilot has also inked a number of co-marketing partnerships with companies such as American Express, Bill.com, Brex, Carta, Gusto, Rippling, Stripe, SVB, and Techstars.

Ironically, Pilot says it aspires to the “AWS of SMB backoffice.” (In fact, co-founder Waseem Daher started his career as an intern at Amazon). Put simply, Pilot wants to take care of all those back office tasks so companies can focus more on growth and winning business.

Pilot strives to offer an “exceptional customer experience,” which is reflected in the fact that over 80% of the company’s business is driven by customer referrals and organic interest, according to Daher.

Whale Rock Partner Kristov Paulus said that white-glove customer service experience and Pilot’s “carefully-engineered” software make a powerful combination.

“We look forward to supporting Pilot in their vision to make back office services as easy-to-use, scalable, and ubiquitous as AWS has with the cloud,” he said.

Pilot’s model reminds me a lot of that of ScaleFactor’s, an Austin-based startup that raised $100 million in a year before it crashed and burned. But the difference in this case is that Pilot seems to have satisfied customers.

CEO Manish Chandra and investor Navin Chaddha explain why Poshmark’s Series A deck sings

Published March 27, 2021

Mayfield partner Navin Chaddha and Poshmark founder and CEO Manish Chandra met all the way back in 2003, well before Poshmark was even a glimmer in his eye. They stayed connected over the years, through Chandra’s sale of his startup Kaboodle to Hearst and after he left.

At a breakfast one morning, Chandra told Chaddha he was going to try to do everything from his iPhone for the next six months.

Over the course of that time, the idea for Poshmark started to percolate into something more concrete. Chandra, following Kaboodle, knew he wanted to do several things differently. The first was create an engagement and revenue model that was symbiotic, rather than starting with engagement and having to build out a business model later. He also knew he wanted to start with people first, and build a founding team that had deep DNA in the fashion world to pair with his technical background.

He met Tracy Sun, brought her on, and got to work.

This was back in 2011, and Chandra was absolutely adamant that he wanted Poshmark to be an app, not a website. So adamant, in fact, that during beta he actually provided 100 users with video iPods. (He recalled that he only got 20% of them back.)

“Lead with love, and the money comes.” It’s one of the cornerstone values at Poshmark. The company practiced that early on by holding IRL, and then virtual, parties, allowing users to show each other their wares and create an engagement cycle that offered instant gratification. The user base grew from 100 to 150 to 1,000 and so on.

“We still to this day use a similar kind of strategy in a much more compressed timeframe as we go to different countries,” said Chandra. “We focus on building the community first and then scale that community.”

Chaddha and Mayfield led the company’s Series A deal a decade ago. On the latest episode of Extra Crunch Live, Chandra and Chaddha sat down with us and walked us through that original Series A pitch deck (which you can check out below). They also participated in the Pitch Deck Teardown, giving their expert feedback on decks submitted by the audience. If you’d like your deck to be featured on a future episode of Extra Crunch Live, hit up this link.

Poshmark’s Series A Deck

Time stamp — 11:00

Poshmark was built on a couple fundamental premises. The first was that the iPhone would transform the way we do just about everything. The second was more pointed: That fashion, at the time underserved by technology, was a discovery process over a direct search process. A decade ago, Chandra envisioned a fashion marketplace that mimicked shopping in the real world — walk into a shop and let natural attraction do its thing — without holding any inventory.

Extra Crunch roundup: Clubhouse UX teardown, YC Demo Day favorites, proptech VC survey, more

Published March 26, 2021

Since the pandemic began, I have been pushing the limits of my imagination to try to picture what cities will look and feel like in the coming years.

If your town looks like San Francisco, where I live, it’s a pressing question: Our once-bustling financial district is a ghost town, but even in outer neighborhoods, the number of vacant storefronts is unsettling. People are starting to emerge after sheltering in place for a year, but we are a long way from fully restoring our shared spaces.

What’s going to happen to those semi-vacant office towers, some of which are still under construction? There’s been renewed talk of converting some skyscrapers into residential housing, but there are real economic/logistic hurdles to clear before that can be broadly applied. Scores of restaurants have closed in recent months; who will take over those spaces? I spend a lot of time walking around, and it’s been a long time since I’ve noticed a “Grand Opening” sign.

Seeking answers, Managing Editor Eric Eldon interviewed 10 VCs who are active in proptech and found that most were generally “optimistic.”

Several expressed genuine uncertainty about the future of offices, but most were bullish about prospects for remote work, the rebirth of physical retail and the emergence of “third spaces” that will fill the gap between work and home.

In a companion article on TechCrunch, Eric explores these broader shifts, concluding, “you can start to see a world emerging that sounds a lot more like the fantasies of a New Urbanist than the world before the pandemic.”

Here’s who he interviewed:

Clelia Warburg Peters, venture partner, Bain Capital Ventures
Christopher Yip, partner and managing director, RET Ventures
Zach Aarons, co-founder and general partner, MetaProp
Casey Berman, general partner, Camber Creek
Vik Chawla, partner, Fifth Wall
Adam Demuyakor, co-founder and managing partner, Wilshire Lane Partners
Robin Godenrath and Julian Roeoes, partners, Picus Capital
Stonly Baptiste, founding partner, and Shaun Abrahamson, managing partner, Urban Us
Andrew Ackerman, managing director, Dreamit

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

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

10 proptech investors see better era for residential and retail after pandemic

The return of neighborhood retail and other surprising real estate trends

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

It’s time to abandon business intelligence tools

Image Credits: Jon Feingersh Photography Inc / Getty Images

Ideally, BI transforms raw data into actionable information, but according to Charles Caldwell, VP of product management at Logi Analytics, “a gap exists between the functionalities provided by current BI and data discovery tools and what users want and need.”

Few BI tools actually integrate with existing workflows and most offer clunky user experiences, “leaving many individuals feeling like they need an advanced computer science degree to actually be able to pull insights out.”

Instead of requiring workers to abandon workflow applications to access data, embedded analytics are more efficient and easier to use, says Caldwell.

In short, “it’s time to abandon BI — at least as we currently know it.”

It’s time to abandon business intelligence tools

Pre-seed round funding is under scrutiny: Is VC pandemic posturing here to stay?

Image Credits: nadia_bormotova / Getty Images

Amid the pandemic, investors became laser-focused on sections of the pitch deck that address monetization and business viability — signs that founders need to come to the table with better-defined businesses in order to succeed.

Investors’ heightened expectations for monetization potential and a company’s positioning within its competitive landscape are unlikely to lessen in the years to come, even in a post-COVID economy.

Pre-seed round funding is under scrutiny: Is VC pandemic posturing here to stay?

Clubhouse UX teardown: A closer look at homepage curation, follow hooks and other features

In this photo illustration, the Clubhouse app seen displayed

Image Credits: Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Clubhouse’s hockey-stick growth is something most startups would kill for.

However, it also means that UX problems can only be addressed while in “full flight” — and that changes to the user experience will be felt at scale rather under the cover of a small, loyal and (usually) forgiving user base.

Clubhouse UX teardown: A closer look at homepage curation, follow hooks and other features

Our favorite companies from Y Combinator’s W21 Demo Day

We’re not investors, so we’re not pretending to sort the unicorns from the goats.

But TechCrunch reporters spend a lot of time talking with startups, hearing pitches and telling their stories; if you’re curious about which companies stood out from Y Combinator’s W21 Demo Day, read on.

Our favorite companies from Y Combinator’s W21 Demo Day: Part 1

Our favorite companies from Y Combinator’s W21 Demo Day: Part 2

A look at 4 IPO updates and 2 late-stage funding rounds

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

There’s a lot going on: The venture capital market is redlining its engines while public markets remain sympathetic to growing, unprofitable companies.

Let’s round up IPO news from DigitalOcean, Kaltura, Robinhood and Zymergen, and big rounds for Lattice and goPuff.

A look at 4 IPO updates and 2 late-stage funding rounds

Dear Sophie: When can I finally come to Silicon Valley?

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

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

Dear Sophie:

I’m a startup founder looking to expand in the U.S. I was originally looking at opening an office in Silicon Valley to be close to software engineers and investors, but then … COVID-19 🙂

A lot has changed over the last year — can I still come?

— Hopeful in Hungary

Dear Sophie: When can I finally come to Silicon Valley?

Staying ahead of the curve on Google’s Core Web Vitals

Image Credits: Aleksei Naumov / Getty Images

Aside from improved SEO, small business websites optimizing for Google’s new Core Web Vitals will reap the rewards of an improved user experience for their site visitors.

While many are looking at the Core Web Vitals as a big hoop to jump through to please the search powers that be, others are seeing — and seizing — the opportunities that come along with this change.

Staying ahead of the curve on Google’s Core Web Vitals

Steady’s Adam Roseman and investor Emmalyn Shaw outline what worked (and what was missing) in the Series A deck

Image Credits: Steady

When it comes to Steady — the platform that helps hourly workers manage and maximize their income and access deals on things like benefits and financial services — the strengths of the business are clear.

But it took time for founder and CEO Adam Roseman to clearly define and communicate each of them in his quest for fundraising.

Steady’s Adam Roseman and investor Emmalyn Shaw outline what worked (and what was missing) in the Series A deck

Discord’s reported $10B exit; Compass and Intermedia Cloud Communications set IPO price ranges

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

Alex Wilhelm dug into Discord’s possible $10 billion exit to Microsoft and explored IPO price ranges for real estate tech company Compass and Intermedia Cloud Communications, a unified-communications-as-a-service company.

“It’s a lot,” he noted, “but if we don’t get through it all now, we’ll fall behind and feel silly later.”

Discord’s reported $10B exit; Compass and Intermedia Cloud Communications set IPO price ranges

Will fading YOLO sentiment impact Robinhood, Coinbase and other trading platforms?

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

The consumer trading frenzy could be slowing.

What would happen to Robinhood and its cohorts if the apparent cooling in consumer trading demand continues?

Will fading YOLO sentiment impact Robinhood, Coinbase and other trading platforms?

How VC and private equity funds can launch portfolio-acceleration platforms

Image Credits: Miguel Navarro (opens in a new window) / Getty Images (Image has been modified)

Almost every private equity and venture capital investor now advertises that they have a platform to support their portfolio companies, “however, most of us don’t have the budget of an Andreessen Horowitz to support almost every major need” for each startup they’ve bet on, says Versatile VC founder David Teten.

If you’re prioritizing a platform buildout for your firm, consider using the framework he’s outlined.

How VC and private equity funds can launch portfolio-acceleration platforms

Automakers, suppliers and startups see growing market for in-vehicle AR/VR applications

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin

Despite all of the pomp and promises about the potential for AR and VR, there isn’t a clear understanding of market demand for bringing the technology to cars, trucks and passenger vans.

Estimates of the global market range from $14 billion by 2027 to as much as $673 billion by 2025, showing just how nascent the market currently is and how much opportunity is present.

Automakers, suppliers and startups see growing market for in-vehicle AR/VR applications

Amid pandemic, Middle East adtech startups play essential role in business growth

Image Credits: phototechno / Getty Images

The Middle East is a promising region with growing digital advertising solutions despite locals’ attachment to traditional means of advertising.

In recent years, there has been a shift to the active use of social media and online shopping, meaning the Middle East embodies great potential for adtech startups.

Amid pandemic, Middle East adtech startups play essential role in business growth

Social+ payments: Why fintechs need social features

Image Credits: Getty Images

Social+ products are seeing mass adoption because they marry community with functionality.

This applies even to fintech companies as taboos around money fall away.

Social+ payments: Why fintechs need social features

The lightning-fast Series A that was 3 years in the making

Image Credits: Mironov Konstantin / Getty Images

It took Christine Tao, founder of Sounding Board, just over three years to recognize the value of executive coaching and get her company to a Series A.

Here’s how she did it.

The lightning-fast Series A (that was 3 years in the making)

NFTs could bridge video games and the fashion industry

Image Credits: Amber J. Dickinson (opens in a new window)

Music companies, celebrities and fashion brands are some of the latest entities to dip a toe into the burgeoning NFT market.

In part two of a three-part series, we take a look at why NFTs are “the next chapter of digital art history.”

NFTs could bridge video games and the fashion industry

Where is the e-commerce app ecosystem headed in 2021?

woman in cafe with tablet and holding credit card because you know she's about to buy something

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

The pandemic-induced growth of e-commerce is, by now, well documented.

What is happening in the app ecosystem that supports e-commerce? Is it growing, or are we more likely to see consolidations and IPOs?

Let’s explore.

Where is the e-commerce app ecosystem headed in 2021?

ironSource is going public via a SPAC and its numbers are pretty good

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

You’ll want to pay attention to this one: Israel’s ironSource, an app-monetization startup, is going public via a SPAC.

It’s the second SPAC-led debut from an Israeli company in recent weeks worth more than $10 billion, and ironSource is actually a pretty darn interesting company from a financial perspective.

ironSource is going public via a SPAC and its numbers are pretty good

Coursera set to roughly double its private valuation in impending IPO

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

The market views Coursera’s edtech business warmly ahead of its impending public offering.

Coursera is being valued as a software company, likely a breathe-easy moment for still-private edtech companies, since the debut could be an industry bellwether.

Coursera set to roughly double its private valuation in impending IPO

How our SaaS startup improved net revenue retention by more than 30 points in two quarters

Published March 26, 2021

Tim Kopp
Contributor

Tim Kopp is the chairman and CEO of Terminus, an ABM platform that powers high-performing go-to-market teams.

There’s certainly no shortage of SaaS performance metrics leaders focus on. While all SaaS companies do, and must, home in on acquisition metrics, there’s also massive revenue potential within your current customer base.

I think NRR (net revenue retention) is without question the most underrated metric out there. NRR is simply total revenue minus any revenue churn plus any revenue expansion from upgrades, cross-sells or upsells. The greater the NRR, the quicker companies can scale. Simply put: the power of compound math!

One of the biggest and most impactful changes we made was to move new business, retention and account management all under our chief revenue officer.

Over the course of two quarters, Terminus grew its NRR by more than 30 points, opening up incredible new levels of growth opportunities.

To boost our NRR for the better, I focused on three core pillars within our organization.

People

We took a holistic look at the organization and our org structure. One of the biggest and most impactful changes we made was to move new business, retention and account management all under our chief revenue officer. At the end of the day, it just makes a ton of sense to have acquisition and retention living under the same roof — why bother acquiring new customers if you can’t retain them?

We also rolled out a surround-sound team (around three or four people per customer) who onboard and help customers with their account from day one. In total, we have about a quarter of our company dedicated to this 24/7 support and hands-on guidance to ensure we’re enabling customers immediately.

Process

Slack wants to be more than a text-based messaging platform

Published March 26, 2021

Last October as Slack was preparing for its virtual Frontiers conference, the company began thinking about different ways people could communicate on the platform. While it had built its name on being able to integrate a lot of services in a single place to alleviate the dreaded task-switching phenomenon, it has been largely text-based up until now.

More recently, Slack has started developing a few new features that could bring different ways of interacting to the platform. CEO Stewart Butterfield discussed them on Thursday with former TechCrunch reporter Josh Constine, now a SignalFire investor, in a Clubhouse interview.

The talk was about the future of work, and Slack believes these new ways of communicating could help employees better connect online as we shift to a hybrid work world — one which has been hastened by the pandemic over the last year. There is a general consensus that many companies will continue to work in a hybrid fashion, even when the pandemic is over.

For starters, Slack aims to add a way to communicate by video. But instead of trying to compete with Zoom or Microsoft Teams, Slack is envisioning an experience that’s more like Instagram Stories.

Think about the CEO sharing an important announcement with the company, or the kind of information that might have gone out in a companywide email. Instead, you can skip the inbox and deliver the message directly by video. It’s taking a page from the consumer approach to social and trying to move it into the enterprise.

Slack introduces new features to ease messaging between business partners

Writing in a company blog post earlier this week, Slack chief product officer Tamar Yehoshua was clear this was going to be an asynchronous approach, rather than a meeting kind of experience.

“To help with this, we are piloting ways to shift meetings toward an asynchronous video experience that feels native in Slack. It allows us to express nuance and enthusiasm without a meeting,” she wrote.

While it was at it, Slack decided to create a way of just chatting by voice. As Butterfield told Constine in his Clubhouse interview, this is essentially Clubhouse (or Twitter Spaces) being built for Slack.

Yeah, I’ve always believed the ‘good artists copy, great artists steal’ thing, so we’re just building Clubhouse into Slack, essentially. Like that idea that you can drop in, the conversation’s happening whether you’re there or not, you can enter and leave when you want, as opposed to a call that starts and stops, is an amazing model for encouraging that spontaneity and that serendipity and conversations that only need to be three minutes, but the only option for you to schedule them is 30 minutes. So look out for Clubhouse built into Slack.

Again, it’s taking a consumer social idea and applying it to a business setting with the idea of finding other ways to keep you in Slack when you could be using other tools to achieve the same thing, whether it be Zoom meetings, email or your phone.

Butterfield also hinted that another feature — asynchronous audio, allowing you to leave the equivalent of a voicemail — could be coming some time in the future. A Slack spokesperson confirmed that it was in the works, but wasn’t ready to share details yet.

It’s impossible to look at these features without thinking about them in the context of the $27 billion Salesforce acquisition of Slack at the end of last year. When you put them all together, you have this set of tools that let you communicate in whatever way makes the most sense to you.

When you combine that Slack Connect DM, a new feature to communicate outside the organization that was released this week to some controversy, as people wanted assurances that they could control spam and harassment, it takes the concept one step further — outside the organization itself.

As part of a larger entity like Salesforce, these tools could be useful across sales, service and even marketing as a way to communicate in a variety of ways inside and outside the organization. And they greatly expand the value prop of Slack as it becomes part of Salesforce sometime later this year.

While it began talking about the new audio and video features last fall, the company has been piloting them since the beginning of this year. So far Slack is not saying when the new features will be generally available.

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

Salesforce buys Slack in a $27.7B megadeal

Y Combinator-backed Vue Storefront aims to be the ‘glue’ for e-commerce

Published March 26, 2021

“Headless commerce” is a phrase that gets thrown around lot (I’ve typed it several times today already), but Vue Storefront CEO Patrick Friday has an especially vivid way of using the concept to illustrate his startup’s place in the broader ecosystem.

“Vue Storefront is the bodiless front end,” Friday said. “We are the walking head.”

In other words, while most headless commerce companies are focused on creating back-end infrastructure, Vue powers the front end, namely the progressive web applications with which consumers actually interact. The company describes itself as “the lightning-fast front-end platform for headless commerce.”

Friday said that he and CTO Filip Rakowski created the Vue Storefront technology as an open-source project while working at e-commerce agency Divante, before eventually spinning it out into a separate startup last year. The company was also part of the latest class at accelerator Y Combinator, and it recently raised $1.5 million in seed funding led by SMOK Ventures and Movens VC.

Where is the e-commerce app ecosystem headed in 2021?

“We had to set up a new entity in the middle of COVID, we had to raise in the middle of COVID and we had to convince the agency to get rid of the product in the middle of COVID,” Friday said. He even recalled signing papers with an investor one morning in early December and doing an interview with Y Combinator that evening.

As they’ve created a business around the core open-source technology, Friday and his team have realized that Vue has more to offer than just building web apps, because it connects e-commerce platforms like Magento and Shopify with headless content management systems like Contentstack and Contentful, payments systems like PayPal and Stripe and other third-party services.

Image Credits: Vue Storefront

In fact, Friday said customers have been telling them, “You are like the glue. Headless was so complex to me, and then I got this Vue Storefront thing to come in on top everything else and be the glue connecting things.”

The platform has been used to create more than 300 stores worldwide. Friday said adoption has accelerated as the pandemic and resulting growth in e-commerce have driven businesses to realize they’re using “this legacy platform, using outdated frameworks and technologies from a good four or five years ago.”

Rakowski added, “We also see that many customers actually come to us deciding that Vue Storefront can be the first step of migration to another platform. We can quickly migrate the front end and write back-end agnostic code.”

Because it had just raised funding, the Vue Storefront team did not participate in the recent YC Demo Day, and it will be presenting at the next Demo Day instead. In the meantime, the company will be holding its own virtual Vue Storefront Summit on April 20.

US e-commerce on track for its first $1 trillion year by 2022, due to lasting pandemic impacts