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Harry Stebbings is leaving Stride, the VC firm he founded with Fred Destin

Published February 7, 2021

Harry Stebbings, the podcaster-turned-VC, is stepping down as a partner of Stride.VC, the London-based venture capital firm he co-founded with Fred Destin, formerly of Accel.

In a series of tweets, Destin said that Stebbings won’t be involved in Stride’s second fund (though he’ll remain a partner in fund one), and will instead be focusing on his podcast franchise “The Twenty Minute VC” and running his own micro fund, the aptly titled “20VC”.

“Harry’s 20VC podcast has remained his passion and been flying high, creating opportunities that are hard to ignore. My bud wants to lean even harder into the 20VC platform,” tweeted Destin.

From Twenty Minute VC to 20VC, Harry Stebbings launches a micro VC off the back of his popular podcast

In the same Twitter thread, Destin said he remains “fully committed to Stride and what the team is building”. That team, however, has now seen a plethora of personnel changes since the VC firm was officially unveiled in late 2018. Most recently, Paris-based partner Pia d’Iribarne departed and has since co-founded New Wave. Stride also lost operating partner Arj Soysa about a year earlier. He’s now a finance director at Mubadala Capital in Europe.

Alongside Destin, Stride’s current team members include investor Pietro Invernizzi, finance and operations partner Ross W., and executive assistant Georgina Gallagher, according to LinkedIn.

Both Stebbings and Destin declined to comment further, pointing me to Destin’s tweets.

Stride.VC loses partner Pia d’Iribarne

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What are these rich people doing pumping crappy assets?

Published February 6, 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. Want it in your inbox every Saturday morning? Sign up here. 

Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors.

It’s been a bizarre few weeks, with Robinhood raising a torrent of new funds to keep its zero-cost trading model afloat during turbulent market conditions, other neo-trading houses changing up their business model and more. But amidst all the moves in startup-land, something has been itching in the back of my head: Why are several rich people pumping crappy assets?

It’s fine for a retail investor to share trading ideas amongst themselves; it has happened, will happen, and will always happen. But we’ve seen folks like Elon Musk and Chamath Palihapitiya use their broad market imprint to encourage regular folks — directly and indirectly — to buy into some pretty silly trades that could lose the retail crowd lots of money that they may not be able to afford.

Think of Elon coming back to Twitter to pump Doge, a joke of a cryptocurrency that is highly volatile and mostly useless. Or Chamath putting money into GameStop publicly, a move that he is better equipped than most to get into and out of. Which he did. And made money. Most folks that played the GameStop casino have not been as lucky, and many have lost more than they can afford.

Caveat emptor and all that, but I do not love folks with savvy and capital leading regular people into risky trades or into assets that are not backed by long-term fundamentals, but instead a small shot at near-term returns. Yoof.

Finally, keeping up the theme of general annoyance, Senator Hawley is back in the news this week with an attention-focused announcement of an idea to block big tech companies from buying smaller companies. As you would expect from the insurrection-friendly Senator, it’s not an incredibly serious proposal, and it’s written so vaguely as to be nearly humorous.

But as I wrote here on my personal blog about all of this, what does matter out of the generally irksome pol is that there is bipartisan interest in limiting the ability of big tech companies to buy smaller companies. For startups, that is not good news; M&A exits are critical liquidity events for startups, and big companies have the most money.

It’s no sauté of my onions if startup valuations fall, but I think there’s been plenty of attention noting that some Democrats and some Republicans in the U.S want to undercut top-down tech M&A, and not nearly enough notice concerning what the effort might do to startup valuations and funding. And if those metrics dip, there could be fewer upstarts in the market actually working to take on the giants.

Food for thought.

Market Notes

The Exchange caught up once again with Unity CFO Kim Jabal. We did so not merely to make jokes with her about games that we like or don’t like, but to keep tabs on how Jabal thinks as the financial head of a company that was private when she joined, and public now. A few observations:

  • GAAP v. Non-GAAP: I asked about Unity’s recent Q4 net income, measured using generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP. It was impacted by some share-based comp numbers. Jabal was clear that her team and investors are more focused on non-GAAP numbers. Why? They strip out non-cash charges like share-based comp and provide a different perspective into corporate performance. This is standard startup practice, but her comment shows how if your company is growing quickly post-IPO, you can stick to adjusted metrics and have no issue. If growth slows, I bet that changes.
  • COVID: Will the COVID bump to gaming stick? Per Jabal, when her company has seen a bump in engagement historically, results don’t tend to fall back to prior plateaus. I wonder if this will be the case for all COVID-boosted parts of the startup and big-tech landscape. If so, it’s very good news.
  • Know your metrics: Jabal said that her key metrics are non-GAAP operating margin and free cash flow — apart from growth, I’d add. That’s super clear and easy to grok. Startup CEOs, please have a similar distillation ready when we chat about your latest round.

And speaking of startups, let’s talk about a company that I’ve had my eye on that recently raised more capital: Deepgram. I covered the company’s Series A, a $12 million round in March 2020. Now it has raised $25 million more, led by Tiger, so this is a fun case of big money investing early-stage, I think. Regardless, Deepgram was a bet on a particular model for speech recognition, and, then, its market. its new investment implies that both wagers came out the right way up.

And I was chatting with the CEO of Databricks recently (more here on its latest megaround), who mentioned the huge gains made in AI, and more specifically around generative adversarial networks (GANs) NLP, and more. Our read is that we should expect to see more Deepgram-ish rounds in the future as AI and similar methods of approaching data make their way into workflows.

And fintech player Payoneer is going public. Via a SPAC. You can read the investor presentation here. Payoneer is not a pre-revenue firm going out via a blank check; it did an expected $346 million in 2020 rev. I’m bringing it to you for two reasons. One, read the deck, and then ask yourself why all SPAC decks are so ugly. I don’t get it. And then ask yourself why isn’t it pursuing a traditional IPO? Numbers are on pages 32 and 40. I can’t figure it out. Let me know if you have a take. Best response gets Elon’s dogecoin.

Various and Sundry

Wrapping up this week, TechCrunch has a new newsletter coming out on apps that is going to rule. Sarah Perez is writing it. You can sign up here, it’s free!

And if you need a new tune, you could do worse than this one. Have a great weekend!

Alex

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Minneapolis police used geofence warrant at George Floyd protests

Published February 6, 2021

Police in Minneapolis obtained a search warrant ordering Google to turn over sets of account data on vandals accused of sparking violence in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd last year, TechCrunch has learned.

The death of Floyd, a Black man killed by a white police officer in May 2020, prompted thousands to peacefully protest across the city. But violence soon erupted, which police say began with a masked man seen in a viral video using an umbrella to smash windows of an auto-parts store in south Minneapolis. The AutoZone store was the first among dozens of buildings across the city set on fire in the days following.

The search warrant compelled Google to provide police with the account data on anyone who was “within the geographical region” of the AutoZone store when the violence began on May 27, two days after Floyd’s death.

These so-called geofence warrants — or reverse-location warrants — are frequently directed at Google in large part because the search and advertising giant collects and stores vast databases of geolocation data on billions of account holders who have “location history” turned on. Geofence warrants allow police to cast a digital dragnet over a crime scene and ask tech companies for records on anyone who entered a geographic area at a particular time. But critics say these warrants are unconstitutional as they also gather the account information on innocent passers-by.

TechCrunch learned of the search warrant from Minneapolis resident Said Abdullahi, who received an email from Google stating that his account information was subject to the warrant, and would be given to the police.

But Abdullahi said he had no part in the violence and was only in the area to video the protests when the violence began at the AutoZone store.

The warrant said police sought “anonymized” account data from Google on any phone or device that was close to the AutoZone store and the parking lot between 5:20pm and 5:40pm (CST) on May 27, where dozens of the people in the area had gathered.

When reached, Minneapolis police spokesperson John Elder, citing an ongoing investigation, would not answer specific questions about the warrant, including for what reason the warrant was issued.

According to a police affidavit, police said the protests had been relatively peaceful until the afternoon of May 27, when a masked umbrella-wielding man began smashing the windows of the AutoZone store, located across the street from a Minneapolis police precinct where hundreds of protesters had gathered. Several videos show protesters confronting the masked man.

Police said they spent significant resources on trying to identify the so-called “Umbrella Man,” who they say was the catalyst for widespread violence across the city.

“This was the first fire that set off a string of fires and looting throughout the precinct and the rest of the city,” the affidavit read. At least two people were killed in the unrest. (Erika Christensen, a Minneapolis police investigator who filed the affidavit, was not made available for an interview.)

Police accuse the Umbrella Man of creating an “atmosphere of hostility and tension” whose sole aim was to “incite violence.” (TechCrunch is not linking to the affidavit as the police would not say if the suspect had been charged with a crime.) The affidavit also links the suspect to a white supremacist group called the Aryan Cowboys, and to an incident weeks later where a Muslim woman was harassed.

Multiple videos of the protests around the time listed on the warrant appear to line up with the window-smashing incident. Other videos of the scene at the time of the warrant show hundreds of other people in the vicinity. Police were positioned on rooftops and used tear gas and rubber bullets to control the crowds.

Law enforcement across the U.S. are increasingly relying on geofence warrants to solve crimes where a suspect is not known. Police have defended the use of these warrants because they can help identify potential suspects who entered a certain geographic region where a crime was committed. The warrants typically ask for “anonymized information,” but allow police to go back and narrow their requests on potential suspects of interest.

When allowed by law, Google notifies account holders of when law enforcement demands access to the user’s data. According to a court filing in 2019, Google said the number of geofence warrants it received went up by 1,500% between 2017 and 2018, and more than 500% between 2018 and 2019, but has yet to provide a specific number of warrants

Google reportedly received over 180 geofence warrants in a single week in 2019. When asked about more recent figures, a Google spokesperson declined to comment on the record.

Read more on TechCrunch

Civil liberties groups have criticized the use of dragnet search warrants. The American Civil Liberties Union said that geofence warrants “circumvent constitutional checks on police surveillance.” One district court in Virginia said geofence warrants violated the constitution because the majority of individuals whose data is collected will have “nothing whatsoever” to do with the crimes under investigation.

Reports in the past year have implicated people whose only connection to a crime is simply being nearby.

NBC News reported the case of one Gainesville, Fla. resident, who was told by Google that his account information would be given to police investigating a burglary. But the resident was able to prove that he had no connection to the burglary, thanks to an app on his phone that tracked his activity.

In 2019, Google gave federal agents investigating several arson attacks in Milwaukee, Wis. close to 1,500 user records in response to geofence warrant, thought to be one of the largest grabs of account data to date.

But lawmakers are beginning to push back. New York state lawmakers introduced a bill last year that would, if passed, ban geofence warrants across the state, citing the risk of police targeting protesters. Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-ND) grilled Google chief executive Sundar Pichai at a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing last year. “People would be terrified to know that law enforcement could grab general warrants and get everyone’s information everywhere,” said Armstrong.

Abdullahi told TechCrunch that he had several videos documenting the protests on the day and that he has retained a lawyer to try to prevent Google from giving his account information to Minneapolis police.

“Police assumed everybody in that area that day is guilty,” he said. “If one person did something criminal, [the police] should not go after the whole block of people,” he said.

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A look at how proptech startup Knotel went from a $1.6B valuation to filing for bankruptcy

Published February 5, 2021

This week, flexible workspace operator (and one-time unicorn) Knotel announced it had filed for bankruptcy and that its assets were being acquired by investor and commercial real estate brokerage Newmark for a reported $70 million.

Knotel designed, built and ran custom headquarters for companies. It then managed the spaces with “flexible” terms. In March 2020, it was reportedly valued at $1.6 billion.

At first glance, one might think that the WeWork rival, which had raised about $560 million since its 2016 inception, was another casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

But New York-based Knotel was reportedly in trouble — facing a number of lawsuits and evictions — before the pandemic had even hit, according to multiple reports, such as this one in The Real Deal.

Jonathan Pasternak, a partner in the bankruptcy, restructuring and creditor rights group at New York-based Davidoff Hutcher & Citron, believes the company’s Chapter 11 filing was inevitable despite it reaching unicorn status after raising $400 million in Series C funding in August 2019.

Workspace provider Knotel secures $400M, putting it in WeWork’s rear-view mirror

“In addition to being grossly overvalued on the market, the company overextended itself with long term leases and lavish build-outs, leaving the company in significant debt while failing to ever turn a profit,” Pasternak wrote via email. “The pandemic exacerbated their vacancy situation, resulting in more than 35% vacancies in their 2.4 million square-foot NYC portfolio. The company overextended and likely ran out of cash.”

Newmark’s purchase of Knotel’s assets is an effort to recoup some of its investment, according to Pasternak.

Anytime a company that has raised more than half a billion dollars basically implodes, it’s worth taking a look at the roller coaster ride it was on before it got to that point.

2016

Virgin Mobile co-founder Amol Sarva and former VC Edward Shenderovich founded Knotel, essentially reversing the WeWork model. There’s hype around the company in its early days.

2017

Knotel raised a Series A round of $25 million in February from investors such as Peak State Ventures, Invest AG, Bloomberg Beta and 500 startups. It marketed its offering as “headquarters as a service” — or a flexible office space that could be customized for each tenant while also growing or shrinking as needed. 

Knotel raises $25M to expand its “headquarters as a service” approach to office space

2018

In April, Knotel announced the close of a $70 million Series B financing led by Newmark Knight Frank and The Sapir Organization. In August, the company told me that it was operating over 1 million square feet across 60 locations in New York, London, San Francisco and Berlin, and that it was on track to reach 2.5 million square feet and $100 million in revenue by year’s end. Revenue growth had increased by 300% year over year, according to the company. Customers and users and clients ranged from VC-backed startups Stash and HotelTonight to enterprise customers such as The Body Shop. 

“What they’re doing is different,” said Barry Gosin, CEO of Newmark Knight Frank, in a press release, at the time of the round. “It’s a new category the industry hasn’t seen and is rapidly adopting. We’ve watched their ascent from a distance and are now thrilled to join them on the journey. It marks a shift in how owners and tenants are coming together.”

2019

In August, Knotel announced the completion of a $400 million financing, led by Wafra, an investment arm of the Sovereign Wealth Fund of Kuwait. With the round, the company had achieved unicorn status and was being touted as a formidable WeWork competitor. At the time, Knotel said it operated more than 4 million square feet across more than 200 locations in New York, San Francisco, London, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Paris, Berlin, Toronto, Boston, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. 

Workspace provider Knotel secures $400M, putting it in WeWork’s rear-view mirror

In a statement at the time, CEO Sarva said: “Knotel is building the future of the workplace, and we are excited to welcome a group of investors who believe passionately in our product, vision and ability to execute. Wafra will help us continue our rapid global expansion and solidify our position as the leader in a fast-growing, trillion-dollar flexible office market.”

2020

In late March, Forbes reported that Knotel had laid off 30% of its workforce and furloughed another 20%, due to the impact of the coronavirus. At the time, it was valued at about $1.6 billion. 

The company had started the year with about 500 employees. By the third week of March, it had a headcount of 400. With the cuts, about 200 employees remained with the other 200 having either lost their jobs or on unpaid leave, according to Forbes. 

“Business as usual is over,” Amol Sarva, Knotel’s CEO and co-founder, said in a statement to Forbes. “Knotel has decided to take sharp action to prepare for the worst case — a long health and economic crisis.”

In the second quarter, Knotel’s revenue slipped by about 20% to about $59 million compared to the first quarter, reported Forbes. Multiple landlords had filed lawsuits against the company.

By July, Forbes had reported that Knotel was attempting to raise as much as $100 million, according to various sources “familiar with the matter.”

2021

Knotel files for bankruptcy, agrees to sell assets to investor Newmark for a reported $70 million after being valued at $1.6 billion less than one year prior.

“Newmark’s commitment offers a path forward amidst this challenging climate,” CEO Sarva said in a statement. “We are optimistic that, through a successful restructuring, we can refocus on our mission of providing state-of-the-art, tailored flex space in key U.S. and international markets.”

To facilitate the transaction under Section 363 of the United States Bankruptcy Code, an affiliate of Newmark agreed to provide Knotel with about $20 million in cash as DIP financing to support Knotel through the bankruptcy process.

Just as the startup and VC world watched as WeWork lost a significant amount of value over the past two years, we’re paying attention to the demise of Knotel and wondering what this means for the flexible workspace sector. As much of the world continues to work from home and office buildings remain mostly vacant as this pandemic rages, our guess is that things will only get worse before they get better.

 

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Why these co-founders turned their sustainability podcast into a VC-backed business

Published February 5, 2021

When Laura Wittig and Liza Moiseeva met as guests on a podcast about sustainable fashion, they jibed so well together that they began one of their own: Good Together. Their show’s goal was to provide listeners with a place to learn how to be eco-conscious consumers, but with baby steps.

Wittig thinks the non-judgmental environment (one that doesn’t knock on a consumer for not being zero-waste overnight) is the show’s biggest differentiator. “Then, people were emailing us and asking how they can be on our journey beyond being a listener,” Wittig said. Now, over a year after launching the show, the co-hosts are turning validation from listeners into the blueprint for a standalone business: Brightly.

Brightly is a curated platform that sells vetted eco-friendly goods and shares tips about conscious consumerism. While the startup is launching with more than 200 products from eco-friendly brands, such as Sheets & Giggles and Juice Beauty, the long-term vision is to start their own commerce brand of Brightly-branded products. The starting lineup will include two to four products in the home space.

To get those products out by the holiday season, Brightly tells TechCrunch that it has raised $1 million in venture funding from investors, including Tacoma Venture Fund, Keeler Investments, Odile Roujol (a FAB Ventures backer and former L’Oréal CEO) and Female Founder’s Alliance.

The funding caps off a busy 12 months for Brightly. The startup has gone through Snap’s Yellow accelerator, an in-house effort from the social media company that began in 2018. As part of the program Snap invests $150,000 in each Yellow startup for an equity stake. The company also did Ready Set Raise, an equity-free accelerator put on by Female Founders Alliance, in the fall.

Ready Set Raise, an accelerator for women built by women, announces third class

With new funding, Brightly is seeking to take a Glossier-style approach to become the next big brand in commerce: gather a community by recommending great products, then turn the strategy on its head and make your superfans buy in-house products under the same brand.

“We have access to a community of women who are beating our door down to shop directly with us and have exclusive products made for them,” Wittig said.

Brightly wants to be more than a “boring storefront” one could quickly whip up on Shopify or Amazon, Wittig says.

The company’s curation process, which every product goes through before being listed on the platform, is extensive. The startup makes sure that every product is created with sustainable and ethical supply chain processes and sustainable material. The team also interviews every brand’s founders to understand the genesis of any product that lives on the Brightly platform. The co-founders also weigh the durability and longevity of products, adopting what Wittig sees as a “Wirecutter approach.”

“It’s more like, ‘why would we pick an ethically produced leather handbag over something that might be made not from leather but wouldn’t last too long necessarily,’ ” she said. “These are the conversations we have with our audience, because the term eco-friendly is very much our grayscale.”

Image Credits: Brightly

More than 250,000 people come to Brightly, either through their app or website, every day, according to Wittig. The startup monetizes largely through brand partnerships and getting those users in front of paid products.

Image Credits: Brightly

The monetization strategy is similar to what you might find a podcast use: affiliate links or product placement mid-episode. But while the co-founders are relying on this strategy right now, they see the opportunity to create their own e-commerce company as larger and more lucrative.

“The billion-dollar opportunity is not with that,” Wittig said. “The value will be going direct commerce and selling our picks of ethical sustainable goods.”

Marking the transition from podcasting about eco-friendly goods to creating them in-house is a strong pivot. The co-founders consider creating a distribution commerce channel to be a larger opportunity and likely more lucrative than the podcasting business.

Beyond creating a line of their own products, Brightly is thinking about how to partner with white-label sustainable products. Another option, Wittig said, is to partner with big corporations to get products on their shelves with colors and customization for Brightly. An example of an ideal partnership would be Reformation’s recent partnership with Blueland.

Wittig declined to share more details on how they plan to win, but likened the strategy to that of Goop or Glossier, two companies that started with content arms and drew their community into a commerce platform.

“It’s not going to be a Thrive Market where there are hundreds and thousands of sustainable goods on there. It’s going to be much more curated,” she said.

COVID-19 has helped the startup further validate the need for a platform that unites a conscious consumer community.

“We are all so aware of the purchasing power we have,” she said. “As consumers we go out and support small businesses by getting coffee on the go. But before, we did not think twice about getting everything from Amazon.”

The conversation with investors hasn’t been as simple, the co-founder said. Investors continue to be “hands off” about community-based platforms because they are unsure it will work. Wittig says that many bearish investors have placed bets on singular direct-to-consumer brands, such as Away or Blueland.

“Those investors know the rising costs of customer acquisition, and see what happens when you don’t have a community that surrounds our business,” she said.

Brightly is betting that the future of commerce brands has to start with a go-to-market, and then bring in the end-product, instead of the other way. The end goal here for Brightly is attracting, and generating excitement from, Gen Z and millennial shoppers. To do so, Wittig says that Brightly is experimenting with ways to implement socialization aspects into the shopping experience.

Leslie Feinzaig, the founder of Female Founders Alliance, said that what’s special about Brightly is that it “demonstrated demand before building for it.”

“I think a lot of people today could build software to connect people and sell things, but very few people could get thousands of fanatical followers to actually engage with each other and make that software useful,” Feinzaig said. “Brightly built that community with matchsticks and tape.”

Snap’s Yellow accelerator debuts its third batch of investments

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BeGreatTV to offer MasterClass-like courses taught by Black and brown innovators

Published February 5, 2021

BeGreatTV, an online education platform featuring Black and brown instructors, recently closed a $450K pre-seed round from Stand Together Ventures Lab, Arlan Hamilton, Tiffany Haddish and others.

The goal with BeGreatTV is to enable anyone to learn from talented Black and brown innovators and leaders, founder and CEO Cortney Woodruff told TechCrunch.

“When you think of being a Black or brown person or individual who wants to learn from a Black or brown person, there’s nothing that really exists that gives you a glossary of every business vertical and where you see representation at every level in a well put together way,” Woodruff said. “That alone makes our market a lot larger because there are just so many verticals where no one has really invested in or shown before.”

The courses are designed to teach folks how to execute and succeed in a particular industry, and enable people to better understand the business aspect of industries while also teaching “you how to deal with the socioeconomic and racial injustices that come with being the only one in the room. Whether you are a Black man or woman who wants to get into the makeup industry, there will always be a lot of biases in the world.”

When BeGreatTV launches in a couple of months (the plan is to launch in April), the platform will feature at least 10 courses — each with around 15 episodes — focused on arts, entertainment, beauty and more. At launch, courses will be available from Sir John, a celebrity makeup artist for L’Oréal and Beyoncé’s personal makeup artist, BeGreatTV co-founder Cortez Bryant, who was also Lil Wayne and Drake’s manager, as well as Law Roach, Zendaya’s stylist.

Hamilton and Haddish will also teach their own respective courses on business and entertainment, Woodruff said. So far, BeGreatTV has produced more than 40 episodes that range anywhere from three to 15 minutes each.

Image Credits: BeGreatTV

Each course will cost $64.99, and the plan is to eventually offer an all-access subscription model once BeGreatTV beefs up its offerings a bit more. For instructors, BeGreatTV shares royalties with them.

“Ultimately, the platform can include a more diverse casting of instructors that aren’t just Black and brown,” Woodruff said. But for now, he said, the idea is to “reverse the course of ‘Now this is our first Black instructor’ but ‘now this is the first white instructor’ ” on the platform.

BeGreatTV’s team consists of just 15 people, but includes heavy hitters like Cortez Bryant and actor Jesse Williams. Currently, BeGreatTV is working on closing its seed round and anticipates a six-figure user base by the end the year.

MasterClass is perhaps BeGreatTV’s biggest competitor. With classes taught by the likes of Gordon Ramsay, Shonda Rhimes and David Sedaris, it’s no wonder why MasterClass has become worth more than $800 million. The company’s $180 annual subscription fee accounts for all of its revenue.

“If you benchmark [BeGreatTV] to MasterClass, we are finding individuals that are not only the best at what they do in the world, but often times these individuals have broken barriers because often times they were the first to do it,” Woodruff said. “And do it without having people who look like them.”

MasterClass just raised $100 million for celebrity-fueled content

 

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Lightspeed’s Gaurav Gupta and Grafana’s Raj Dutt discuss pitch decks, pricing and how to nail the narrative

Published February 5, 2021

Before he was a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, Gaurav Gupta had his eye on Grafana Labs, the company that supports open-source analytics platform Grafana. But Raj Dutt, Grafana’s co-founder and CEO, played hard to get.

This week on Extra Crunch Live, the duo explained how they came together for Grafana’s Series A — and eventually, its Series B. They also walked us through Grafana’s original Series A pitch deck before Gupta shared the aspects that stood out to him and how he communicated those points to the broader partnership at Lightspeed.

Gupta and Dutt also offered feedback on pitch decks submitted by audience members and shared their thoughts about what makes a great founder presentation, pulling back the curtain on how VCs actually consume pitch decks.

We’ve included highlights below as well as the full video of our conversation.

We record new episodes of Extra Crunch Live each Wednesday at 12 p.m. PST/3 p.m. EST/8 p.m. GMT. Check out the February schedule here.

Episode breakdown:

  • How they met — 2:20
  • Grafana’s early pitch deck — 12:25
  • The enterprise ecosystem — 26:00
  • The pitch deck teardown — 33:00

How they met

As soon as Gupta joined Lightspeed in June 2019, he began pursuing Dutt and Grafana Labs. He texted, called and emailed, but he got little to no response. Eventually, he made plans to go meet the team in Stockholm but, even then, Dutt wasn’t super responsive.

The pair told the story with smiles on their faces. Dutt said that not only was he disorganized and not entirely sure of his own travel plans to see his co-founder in Stockholm, Grafana wasn’t even raising. Still, Gupta persisted and eventually sent a stern email.

“At one point, I was like ‘Raj, forget it. This isn’t working’,” recalled Gupta. “And suddenly he woke up.” Gupta added that he got mad, which “usually does not work for VCs, by the way, but in this case, it kind of worked.”

When they finally met, they got along. Dutt said they were able to talk shop due to Gupta’s experience inside organizations like Splunk and Elastic. Gupta described the trip as a whirlwind, where time just flew by.

“One of the reasons that I liked Gaurav is that he was a new VC,” explained Dutt. “So to me, he seemed like one of the most non-VC VCs I’d ever met. And that was actually quite attractive.”

To this day, Gupta and Dutt don’t have weekly standing meetings. Instead, they speak several times a week, conversing organically about industry news, Grafana’s products and the company’s overall trajectory.

Grafana’s early pitch deck

Dutt shared Grafana’s pre-Series A pitch deck — which he actually sent to Gupta and Lightspeed before they met — with the Extra Crunch Live audience. But as we know now, it was the conversations that Dutt and Gupta had (eventually) that provided the spark for that deal.

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Daily Crunch: Microsoft rethinks corporate intranet

Published February 4, 2021

Microsoft tries to improve corporate intranet, Google will offer new smartphone health measurements and 23andMe is going public via SPAC. This is your Daily Crunch for February 4, 2021.

The big story: Microsoft rethinks corporate intranet

Microsoft launched what it’s calling a new “employee experience platform,” designed to reinvent those corporate intranet sites that large companies use to share content with their employees.

What makes this new platform, called Viva, any different? Well, it integrates with Microsoft’s other collaboration tools like SharePoint and Yammer, along with LinkedIn Learning and other training services, and it also includes team analytics.

In a pre-recorded video, CEO Satya Nadella said Microsoft is launching this because, “We have participated in the largest at-scale remote work experiment the world has seen and it has had a dramatic impact on the employee experience. As the world recovers, there is no going back. Flexibility in when, where and how we work will be key.”

The tech giants

Venmo to gain crypto, budgeting, savings and Honey integrations this year — The Venmo mobile payments app is going to look very different in 2021 as it inches closer to neobank territory.

Google to offer heart and respiratory rate measurements using just your smartphone’s camera — Google is introducing features that will allow users to take vital health measurements using just the camera they already have on their smartphone.

HubSpot acquires media startup The Hustle — HubSpot says content is an increasingly important part of its business, with customers finding its products through things like YouTube videos and HubSpot Academy.

Startups, funding and venture capital

23andMe set to go public via a Virgin Group SPAC merger — The transaction is expected to result in 23andMe having around $984 million in cash available at close.

Accel backs Mexican startup Flink’s effort to bring consumer investing to Latin America — Since launching its first brokerage product in July of 2020, Flink has surpassed 1 million users and 800,000 active brokerage accounts.

Tovala, the smart oven and meal kit service, heats up with $30M more in funding — This is the second round of funding for the startup in the space of six months.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Four strategies for deep tech founders who are fundraising — Step one: Use storytelling to highlight your big vision.

Why one Databricks investor thinks the company may be undervalued — The recent Databricks funding round, a $1 billion investment at a $28 billion valuation, was one of the year’s most notable private investments so far.

Extra Crunch is now hiring for reporter, editor and project manager positions — Extra Crunch is about to turn two years old and we now have a lot of demanding subscribers. (We love them, of course.)

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

Everything else

A growing number of startups are creating APIs to assess and offset corporate carbon emissions — It was only a matter of time before application programming interfaces came for the carbon credit offsets.

The cloud infrastructure market hit $129B in 2020 — That’s up from around $97 billion in 2019, according to data from Synergy Research Group.

China’s national blockchain network embraces global developers — Last year, an ambitious, government-backed blockchain infrastructure network launched in China.

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

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A lake house architect, a Miami VC and a homeowner walk into a wine bar

Published February 4, 2021

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace were all here to chat through the week’s biggest tech happenings. The good news is that we managed to fit it all into a single episode this week. The bad news is that that means the show is pretty long. Sorry about that!

So, what took us so much time to get through? All of this:

And somehow we still have another entire day before the week is up! So much for 2021 calming down after 2020’s storms.

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

SoftBank earmarks $100 million for Miami-based startups

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